{i}

{ii}

OPINIONS

BOOKS BY CLAUDE WASHBURN

PAGES FROM THE BOOK OF PARIS
GERALD NORTHROP
ORDER
THE LONELY WARRIOR
THE PRINCE AND THE PRINCESS
THE GREEN ARCH
{iii}

OPINIONS

by

CLAUDE WASHBURN


NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
{iv}

First published 1926


Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. Constable Ltd.
at the University Press, Edinburgh
{v}

TO

T. R. YBARRA

{vi} 

{vii} 

PREFACE

Opinions are 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 write Wayfarers? 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, {x}like clogging sediment in a water-pipe; they will be 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. There is one 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 shadowy{xi} memory, Mrs. Mackarness’s a total blank, but for ever and ever, on rainy afternoons, in dingy German or Italian pensions, elderly English spinsters will, in default of anything else to do, read tattered Tauchnitz copies of Cometh Up as a Flower and A 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.

{xii} 

{xiii} 

CONTENTS

{xiv} 

{1} 

ON LIVING ABROAD

This is 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 Ameri{2}cans 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 the {3}life 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 to each of 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 indi{4}vidualism, 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 any beneath the surface in his own country—recognized unshirked duties. The greatest of these is the{5} accepted 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,{6} 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 to{7} be 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 done{8} by 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.{9} 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. How can I 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.{10} 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, in Main 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 feel{11} impatient 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.

{12}

. . . . . . .

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 things{13} that 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 children{14} in 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 existence{15} of 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,{16} 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.{17}

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 that{18} study 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 and{19} almost 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.{20} 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 know{21}ledge, 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. They liked living 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 ex{22}asperate 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 he{23} is 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,{24} 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.{25}

ZENITH

If Mr. 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 in Main Street for 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 typify{26} it, 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,{27} 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 they were Zenith. They gave the city its tone; you felt them in{28} looking 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’s Cytherea, nor like those in Margaret Banning’s Country 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 one{29} another’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,{30} 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 in La 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;{31} 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 amusing savoir-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 were{32} among 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 and{33} soul 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 at{34} the 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 wome{35}n’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!{36}’

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, that{37} it 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 golf{38} and 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.

They were intelligent, 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 of{39} what? 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.{40}

DISILLUSIONMENT

We can hardly fail to perceive that we are living to-day in a period of profound disillusionment. There is nothing strange about that. Every great war has brought disillusionment in its wake. What is of interest is to examine the nature of the disillusionment and estimate its probable results.

In the first year or two after the Armistice it was a bitter and passionate thing, almost as sharply felt among civilians as among the returned soldiers. Life appeared barren and profitless, religion a mockery, civilization a myth. The young cursed the old for creating such a mess; the old, though not conscious of having deliberately created anything of the sort, were broken-hearted at the spectacle of what some one must have done—and who, then, if not they? Governments were a mirthless laughing-stock. Moral laws were thrown overboard; for if all that moral laws had resulted in was this, of what possible value were they? Marriage all but went to smash in favour of a cheap promiscuity. No one believed in anything, no one trusted any one else; life resolved itself into three elemental desires—for food and drink, excitement and the gratification of sex. With{41} all of which unrestraint, there was far less happiness in the world than before. People were ‘fed up’—‘fed up’ even in the midst of their most reckless adventures in gaiety.

This summary of the state of mind in the year of grace 1919 is, of course, exaggerated, but such was undoubtedly the impression one received in any country that had seen the worst of the war.

The reason for the impression and also the reason why it was only a fractionally true impression was that the hubbub was being raised by the articulate minority. As some one has already pointed out, a considerable majority of the world’s inhabitants were not disillusioned by the war, having had no illusions to shed. Life had been hostile to them; they had always been forced to give a great deal to get a very little; they had never had the slightest faith in governments or in human goodness; knowing marriage stripped to its bare essentials, they had always seen it as a fact like any other, never as something sacred and beautiful; they had always been as promiscuous as possible; they had never had the opportunity to dress life up and worship it. Times were either a little harder now or maybe not quite so hard. There was no occasion for all this fuss, though, naturally, they took advantage of it to get as much more for themselves as they could.

No, it was the articulate minority that was upset. But this, though distinctly a minority, is very large. It does not consist of any one class in a rigid social sense, but simply of all the{42} people for whom existence is relatively easy. I do not mean the people who have no worries, are never hard-up, never in danger of bankruptcy, nor even altogether people who do not work with their hands; I mean those whose daily life is not among the hard primitive facts, who have not suffered actual griping hunger, whose mental existence follows some sort of order, whose work is not the deadening physical labour of mines, steel-plants or the most squalid factories, and whose homes, however imperfect, offer something better than the horrible promiscuity of one or two crowded rooms. This class, if you can call it such, sees life altogether differently than the majority beneath sees it, and it is almost solely from this class that come the interpreters of life—the thinkers, the writers, the artists, the journalists. Also the two classes never really touch. The minds of each are alien to the minds of the other. There are to-day many individuals among the minority who are trying to get at and understand the minds of the majority; but they cannot, because the majority live among facts, they among ideas about facts. The attempt is as impossible as for a painted figure to step down from its picture and walk the earth—or vice versa, since I do not in the least mean that ideas about facts are necessarily less real than the facts themselves. In short, one half not only does not but cannot know how the other half lives. This is so true that when sometimes, rarely, a writer of genius, such as Gorki, has struggled up from that great,{43} incoherently muttering sea, the account he gives of life there is to us of the minority, even while it moves us, as strange as though it were indeed an account of life in another element.

It was this minority that was disillusioned by the war, and, frankly, I think we deserved to be—though perhaps somewhat less rudely. Not because we had ideas about life, but because we had such ideas—so smooth, so smug, so unrelated to the facts, so inconsistent with what, if we had only looked honestly, we might have seen in ourselves. For example, individually none of us was more than spasmodically happy, none contented; cowardice alone or, at best, habit and lack of initiative restrained each of us from committing the most dastardly acts; selfishness lay at the bottom of our behaviour; honest introspection would have revealed to any one of us a handful of impulsive good deeds to show against a lifetime of petty greedy actions the motives for which had been painstakingly disguised: yet, by and large, we believed, really did believe, that the world was growing steadily better, that there was more good than evil in human nature (by which, if we had been honest and intelligent, each of us could only have meant in the nature of every one save himself), that certain things (of which every one of us was capable) simply were not done by decent people, and that, given the high state of moral progress in the world, wars were unthinkable.

The shock of the awakening (which did not come at its fullest during the war, when thought{44} was suspended, but afterward) was tremendous and painful. And the pain and anger were all the worse for being, even if we recognized it but dimly, directed against ourselves. That was the secret of the wretchedness, the disillusionment, that the reason for feeling ‘fed up.’ We blamed it on civilization or governments or God; at heart we knew it was ourselves who were to blame. Beginning with the hurt recognition that the world was not as we had pictured it, we went on logically to the gloomier recognition that we were not what we had fancied ourselves. This was inevitable. A man who distrusts the honesty of others is a man who secretly does not believe in his own honesty; a man who is afraid to leave his wife and his friend alone together is a man with whom his friend’s wife would not be safe.

The disillusionment, then, was potentially salutary. Stripping men of false ideas and ideals, it forced them to look into their own hearts.

Only potentially salutary, however. In its first results it was sheerly destructive; and this, too, was logical. The great Chicago fire of 1871 was doubtless a good thing in that it wiped out a sordid and ugly city, but the first reaction to it of the inhabitants must have been despair. Despair, at any rate, was the prevailing emotion in the hearts of most thinking members of the minority during the chaotic period that followed the Armistice. All these centuries to work with, and we had achieved—this!

But there are two very noble traits in men,{45} or in the best of them: a fundamental love of truth and a refusal to accept defeat. So presently such men began to shake off despair and to look about them clear-sightedly, like Noah and his companions after they had emerged from the Ark. And their love of truth, burning more clearly now that the lamp was less encrusted with illusions, showed them some very heartening facts: that the thirty centuries of recorded human life were not as barren a waste as all that; that always, as far back as eye could see, even in the midst of war, pestilence and external chaos, some men had laboured patiently, and for no other reward than the satisfaction of their love of truth, to guard and, bee-like, add a few drops to the small store of knowledge transmitted to them; that explorers had charted the earth and its seas, and astronomers mapped the movements of the stars; that to have worked up from nothing more than a few primitive sounds to the indescribable beauty of a Mozart symphony was an achievement beyond all praise. True, men were also beasts. Nothing could justify this war or ever excuse it. It was unmitigatedly evil, a crime without a reason, for which not one or two or a dozen, but all men, were responsible. But there, too, was that other side of men, that grazed divinity. All was not lost, though ten million human lives were. Civilization, many said gravely, might come to an end. Sad, if true, but, at bottom, what of it? It would only be one civilization. Another would follow. For what goes on{46} indestructibly is the steady soul of man, loving truth and never defeated. So I conceive such men as meditating for a little while before going back to their patient work.

These, whether they knew it or not, were themselves among the lonely guarders of the flame. But others besides them, many others among the rest of us, have profited by our disillusionment. Indeed, we have profited more than they, since their lives had always a noble directive never entirely obscured, ours none.

One thing that we have gained is the spirit of wholesome mockery for grandiloquent twaddle. This bubbled up to us perhaps from that great mass beneath, which has moments when it is not inarticulate. In Italy, some time about the weary middle of the war, when, as always, generals, politicians, journalists, and diplomats at banquets never opened their mouths or lifted their pens save to speak or write of ‘the Cause of Liberty, Justice and Civilization’ and all the rest of it, a ribald soldiers’ song suddenly swept the country and set it rocking with tonic mirth, though how the song got about so universally is a mystery, since it could not be sung in public. It had many verses, all equally scurrilous, but it will suffice to quote one, the best known:

(General Cadorna wrote to the Queen: ‘If you want to see Trieste, buy a picture postcard.’ Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!)

The music fitted the words outrageously, and the mocking insolence of those six ‘Ah’s,’ each accented, at the end of every stanza, was ineffable (do, mi, re; si, re, do). They were so utterly final—a funeral march for rhetoric.

For obvious reasons there was all too little of this spirit awake during the war; now, since the war, it blows freely through the air and is one of the healthiest results of disillusionment. It makes men read their newspapers sceptically and glance back to see where a dispatch came from before accepting it as truth; it causes them to look with an ironic eye on politicians, governments, philanthropists, institutions of learning, and all other institutions, on everything and every one professionally noble; it supplies readers for such irreverent publications as the American Mercury, and makes satirical novels, like Babbitt, actually popular. It reveals the grosser forms of credulity as precisely that. Held to be something dreadful, the Ku Klux Klan would wax in strength, but people find it ridiculous; it is doomed. Even before the ‘Protocols’ were exposed as forgeries an amazingly large number of people were unable to swallow them; they were too silly. The Saturday Evening Post, the Red Book and the others go on their tawdrily romantic way, but I doubt extremely that the millions who read the stories they contain accept these as anything save sheer senseless relaxation,{48} since the same millions read and take to their hearts the comic strips—Mr. and Mrs., The Gumps, etc.—which are so sordid, so blowzy, so disillusioned, in both drawing and captions, as to make Babbitt appear by comparison a lilting romance and Mr. H. L. Mencken a blood-brother of Mr. Harold Bell Wright. In short, though it is still possible to ‘get away with’ a good deal of nonsense, it is not possible, even in America, the most sentimental nation under the sun, to ‘get away with’ anywhere near as much as once upon a time.

But there is more behind all this than a mere spirit of sceptical mockery; clean and salty as it is, that spirit is only a part of something bigger. The truth is, I think, that people have grown up—part way up, at least. The incredible childishness of a decade ago is gone—I trust, forever. It is not only that we accept less than before, but that we are more level-headed both in accepting and rejecting. A questioning coolness is abroad. Perhaps we expect less of life; certainly we are less enthusiastic over it. That crass optimism about everything, not openly to share which used to make an American taboo, no longer soars and screams. It still lives, but with a broken wing, fluttering clumsily like a hen. A good thing! There was nothing noble in it. At bottom it represented only a desire not to be troubled, and was popular for the same reason that the man is popular who, in response to an inquiry as to his health, grins and shouts: ‘Fine! Fine! Never better!{49}’

What a load of sentimentality has gone overboard with our illusions!—sentimental notions about happiness, about country, about life, about love. That amazing convicton, for example, that the only thing of real importance in a woman was her chastity. Overboard. Drowned a mile deep, as it deserved to be for the cheap and insulting notion it was. In its long day it must have righteously infuriated thousands of women—possibly more those who happened to be chaste than those who happened not to be. Its loss signifies not more accent on the sex-relation, but less, helping to put the relation where it belongs, as merely one of a number of facts. An immense step has been taken toward an honester, decenter understanding between men and women. And a score of other sentimental notions are gone, too, or tottering. The visualizing of the United States as a benevolent disinterested Uncle Sam, a bit homely, a bit awkward, but strong and infinitely kind, like the hero of a Cape Cod melodrama; and of France as a Jeanne d’Arc in glittering armour, eyes shining, face aglow, shedding her life-blood for Liberty—hum ...! Mr. E. M. Forster has recently written a very remarkable novel in which he punctures, dispassionately, but once for all, the Kipling legend of the English in India as public school demi-gods; yet in both England and America the book has sold by tens of thousands and met with almost unanimous praise.

Quite possibly a little that was fine and true has gone overboard with the rubbish, but most{50} of the destruction was salutary. And it has served, it seems to me, to bring those two classes, the dumb majority and the articulate minority, closer together than ever before. In a sense it is not a real closeness; for, as I have said, the two can never touch, one living among facts, the other in a picture of facts. But at least the picture now bears some relation to the facts, is by way of becoming what it must become to be of any value—an interpretation of them. This, surely, is something to the credit of our disillusioned period.

It is a puzzling period to study, and would still be so, I think, even were we not in the midst of it. It questions everything, all once accepted premises. Yet it is not like other great periods of change—the Reformation or the Romantic Revival, for instance. They were, in one way or another, periods of revolution, when men brushed aside the past, sure that they had found something better—sure because they felt young and fresh. The present period is not young and fresh; it is very, very tired. And so, despite the obvious and extensive social changes that it has already witnessed, it is not in spirit revolutionary. It questions everything—governments, nationality, economics, religion, human nature, life itself—but it is not young enough or fresh enough to discard recklessly. People question and wonder, yet vote overwhelmingly for the Republicans in America and the Conservatives in England.

Phenomena such as these and others more{51} distressing are frequently cited as evidence that ours is a period of discouraging reaction. I do not agree. The bitter intolerance displayed by such movements as Fascismo—or, for that matter, Fundamentalism—is, to my thinking, a good sign, rather than a bad. It means that violent intolerance is to-day forced back where it belongs—to the outskirts, to the extreme Right or the extreme Left. It is violent and domineering because it dares not be otherwise; it represents only an inconsiderable fraction of the whole, and is afraid. At the moment when I write this, Fascismo still governs Italy, but it has against it probably eighty per cent. of the population, and governs by force alone, suppressing its most dangerous enemies, muzzling the press, forbidding political gatherings, dissolving societies, outraging the constitutional rights of individuals. Such tyranny signifies fear—fear based on the certain knowledge of the Fascisti that they and their policies do not represent the country.

Yet people have not risen up en masse and turned them out. No, and this, too, is characteristic of the period. It lacks the ardent juvenile faith in Utopias essential to drive multitudes to action. Instead, people ask coolly: ‘What have you got, to put in place of what we so unsatisfactorily have?’ But it is also a rather mature, almost wise period, saying: ‘Let the Fascisti rave. Whom the Gods would destroy....’

The Republicans and the Conservatives must{52} watch their step closely. In neither case was the large majority obtained a loving endorsement. A tired period but an extremely clear-eyed one, as periods go, with less belief than usual in miraculous panaceas, but with still less in all things being for the best. It is not a romantic period, though it is full of superficially romantic events; there is no youth in it and small enthusiasm. But it is a period out of which more of permanent value may come than if it were.{53}

SOPHISTICATION

My text is from Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat (iv. i. 116) and from Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not ... (II. i. 196; ii. i. 215).

And my subject is—what else with such a text?—Sophistication.

Not sophistication in the original unencrusted meaning of the word, but in the overlaid current understanding of it—an emotional rather than an intellectual condition. It is a condition very hard to define, since it is emotional, yet sufficiently easy to recognize—and admire. To be sophisticated you must be blasé; you must be witty; you must not take anything, especially vice, very hard; you must be gay and casual about problems that unsophisticated people are earnest about, though you may (here you are reaching rarefied heights of sophistication) be as earnest as you like about things that average people consider trivial. You must show familiarity{55} with the world of High Society, but also amused disdain for it; you must know, and prove that you know, everything about ordering a dinner in such places as Ciro’s (Monte Carlo), the Ritz (Paris), and the Café de Paris (Biarritz). You should also be able to let fall—now and then, very carelessly, merely because you cannot at the moment think of the English word—a French or an Italian or even a German word or phrase; but it is not excessively important that you should do this correctly or even appropriately; the effect will be the same anyway. Among contemporary writers Carl Van Vechten and Ronald Firbank are sophisticated; and so is Michael Arlen, and so is Ford Madox Ford (né Hueffer).

There is one small drawback to sophistication: it is impossible without an audience. One cannot pleasurably, perhaps not possibly, be sophisticated all alone by oneself. One cannot think of a man getting into an unshared bed as sophisticated—I mean to say, of course, after his valet has left him. Fiction is full of people marooned on desert islands; but only one writer, M. Jean Giraudoux, has ever thought of thus marooning a sophisticated character. It was a delicious and fantastic idea, which made Suzanne et le Pacifique an irresistibly funny book.

This disadvantage, however, is not grave, since sophisticated people are rarely alone, even at night, and in public are sure of an admiring audience. We all admire sophistication in real life, and we admire it still more in novels. This{56} is partly because it is never quite so perfect and finished in the former as in the latter, but chiefly because there is a touch of envy in our admiration for sophistication in life, whereas we share flatteringly in that displayed in a novel. We, too, love Iris Storm fastidiously and consider Sylvia Tietjens’ complicated vices with tolerant weariness. We, too, are of the haut monde and are very offhand about it. We, too, have lived very, very hard and exhausted everything and have come to look with a mellow amusement on all intensities. It is delightful.

Unluckily for me, I do not know any sophisticated people in real life. I have jealously seen them about, in restaurants and places, but I do not know them—or perhaps I should say that they do not know me. But I know sophistication in novels, none better. The sophisticated novelist must be very sophisticated indeed to satisfy my fine trained taste. Any momentary lapse into ingenuousness, and I am on him like a wolf. Thus, among the writers I have mentioned, and among others whom I have not, I salute most especially Mr. Michael Arlen; and this because, more perfectly than the others, he knows how a sophisticated novel should be written: to wit, in a baroque and decorative prose. Mr. Firbank and Mr. Van Vechten may also know this; but they lag far behind Mr. Arlen in turning their knowledge into achievement. They do not discover such felicities as: ‘ ... and over the breast of her dark dress five small red elephants were marching towards an unknown{57} destination’; or, ‘The stormy brittle sunlight, eager to play with the pearls and diamonds of Van Cleef, Lacloche and Cartier, aye, and of Tecla also, chided away the fat white clouds, and now the sun would play with one window of the Rue de la Paix, now with another, mortifying one, teasing another, but all in a very handsome way.’ There you have the authentic manner for sophisticated prose.

The reason why the authentic manner is baroque, even rococo, heavily encrusted with ornament, is a melancholy reason. (‘That was a gloomy reason,’ Mr. Arlen would say). It is that there is a certain lack of body in sophistication. To eschew the passions—or perhaps not to eschew them, but to smile at them—to be polished, suave and unobtrusively superior, is delightful, but limits one a bit. Emerson’s assertion that the exclusive man excludes no one but himself is doubtless an exaggeration; but it is certainly true that the exclusive man does also exclude himself. The technique of sophistication in literature is even more exacting than the technique of the drama. Let no one fancy it easy to write sophisticatedly. It is extremely difficult. A considerable proportion of the writers in two continents is attempting it; yet one can count the successes on the fingers of two hands. There is no mistaking the genuine article in sophistication, for the very simple reason that the false is always ludicrous, sometimes violently so, sometimes faintly. English, French and American bookshops, and once a{58} week the Saturday Evening Post, are half full of hilarious attempts at sophistication. It would be a mistake to deplore them; they add to the gaiety of nations. If you care for clear laughter with no malice beneath it, and must give up one book or the other, which would you sacrifice, Alice in Wonderland or The Rosary?

Sophistication in literature, then, as (I presume) sophistication in real life, is immensely difficult of attainment; it demands a special skillful technique, a wary sense of humour and a narrow selection of material. Therefore, as I have already suggested, its manner becomes of great importance. To avoid a lurking sense of impoverishment you must be provided with decorative flowers to pluck by the wayside. The luxuriously appointed cruise around the world on the Arabic (22,000 tons) is not enough; you need those side-excursions to Capri, the Balearic Islands and the foot-hills of Java. Once again I salute Mr. Michael Arlen. His is the manner. One can be sophisticated without it—Mr. Ford is, and M. Paul Morand—but how much better to have it!

Let us turn now to the two novels from which I have taken, almost at random, my text. The novels themselves I selected with considerable care; for, while their sophisticated qualities of course overlap, there are certain examples of sophistication in The Green Hat that are wanting in Some Do Not ... and a few in the latter book that one will not find in the former. Moreover, the two books are done in very different manners.{59}

What, except any one of a score of others from the same book, could give a more admirable condensed example of sophistication than the passage I have quoted from The Green Hat? The narrator introduces you to two ladies—for no reason at all except your amusement and his own. One lady has a title, the other has not. Excellent! He—I have to call him ‘he’ because I do not remember that his name is once mentioned in the book—pokes good-humoured fun at both, but more especially at the one with a title, and then goes on innocently (innocently!) to reveal the fact that he comes from the lower classes and does not know how to ride. You will go far to find a rarer expression of sophistication. For—do you not see?—the narrator, at his ease in the homes of the great, is smiling at class, is actually smiling at riding. This is, by consummate inversion, raising snobbishness to a fine art. And all in such high spirits.

You do not get the high spirits in the two passages I have quoted from a rather long marital conversation in Some Do Not ... (you will look for them in vain in that novel); but you are given a very pretty example of sophistication nevertheless. Sylvia Tietjens is of a most awfully good family, and her husband of an even better one. People in society are not, by plebeians, supposed to throw things at one another. Sylvia does throw something—a plate of food—at her husband. Good! Moreover, it hits him. But observe! He does not upset the dining-room{60} table and hit her back. He remains perfectly calm. And as for Sylvia, she drifts slowly towards the enormous mirror over the fireplace (good touch, that!) and remarks that she is bored! bored! Here, too, you are high in the scale of sophistication. For it is obvious that to commit a breach of manners, to do something that simply is not done, and then only to feel bored, is far more sophisticated than to break one of the ten commandments, usually the seventh, in the same spirit. Also I call your attention in passing to the contents of the plate that Sylvia threw—two cold cutlets in aspic and a few leaves of salad. At once elegant and efficient.

The second passage, too, is admirable. The words ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ are not popularly supposed to be addressed by a gentleman to his wife; nor is the wish that she may rot in hell. Yet when Sylvia suggests to her husband that, to ensure their mutual happiness, he ought to have addressed her in this manner, he says reasonably: ‘That’s, of course, true.’ Which is all the more to his credit in that for twenty pages his uniform has been dripping with oil from the salad that hit his shoulder.

Here, too, you perceive, you get inversion. These characters outrage, and thereby show themselves above, the conventions. They always react to stimuli in the opposite way from which average people react. They are violent when we should expect them to be well-bred, and serene when we expect them to be violent.{61} Another example: to ingenuous people the disease called syphilis is a shameful thing, to be considered with horror and never to be mentioned aloud; to average people it is an aesthetically disgusting malady and therefore not an available subject for conversation. But the characters in sophisticated novels talk about syphilis as carelessly as though they were talking of a family-tree.

But is there not in this, you may by now inquire, just a little monotony? Once the trick is apparent, is it not almost as wearisome to watch a man invariably do the unexpected thing as to watch him do the expected? There is. Oh, it is! It is more wearisome. Because when the expected thing is done for any reason more emotional than mere habit it is significant of something other than individual dullness; it has roots that penetrate down into the dark earthy past of a whole race. Whereas to do invariably the unexpected thing, in order to show oneself superior and startle an audience, is significant of nothing at all; beneath such behaviour is emptiness.

Emptiness, indeed, yawns beneath the literature of sophistication. There is no probing of truth below the glitter. There cannot be, since the glitter is achieved through a superior disregard for truth. One would not mind this if the literature of sophistication set out only to be elegant amusing nonsense. (And I ought, in justice, to say here that if Mr. Ronald Firbank were somewhat more amusing, his contribution{62} to such literature might fulfil that requirement). But too often it pretends to be investigating truth. And this pretence, even though in some cases it signify only a crowning sophisticated inversion, is impertinent and annoying.

The Green Hat lies open before me at the page of press comments which the publisher has seen fit to append. I read: ‘The Green Hat is the novel of the year.’ ... ‘The most memorable novel I have read during the past year.’ ... ‘I call it the finest novel of the last five years.’ ... ‘Heavens! what a lot that man knows about men and women—especially women.’

If after this broadside one feels slightly giddy one should not hold it against Mr. Arlen, who of course is not responsible and who distinctly calls The Green Hat a romance; but one would have thought that even reviewers might have had a little more insight than this into what they had pleasurably read.

For, leaving on one side the delightful manner of the book, consider the material of which it is cleverly built. What and whom have we got here? The identical material of those interminable melodramas which the French (probably in an impotent attack on the tyrants of their national life) call ‘literature for concierges,’ and which in England was dear to the hearts of Ouida’s public. A glossy world of high society; some one (just as in Under Two Flags, and in how many other long-forgotten romances) assuming, for quite inadequate reasons, some one else’s sin and suffering bravely as an outcast until a third{63} person blurts out the truth (the original touch being that in The Green Hat the victim is the heroine instead of the hero, that she suffers from a husband’s syphilis instead of from a brother’s embezzlement, and that she dies at the end of the book); the cruel father separating youthful lovers who never, never forget one another (though, for the sake of modernity, during their separation the heroine, not the hero, leads a scandalous life—which, mind you, is never described, since its reality would have been squalid) and come together at last, when, in a final triumphant burst of renunciation, the heroine surrenders her lover to his wife and commits suicide. Sheer melodrama, as false, as quite properly false, as Scènes de la Vie de Bohème or Scaramouche—precisely that sort of thing, in fact. And the characters: can you see Hilary, or Guy, or Napier, or Venice? Have they three dimensions? Can you walk around them? Of course not. You’re not (I give Mr. Arlen credit for intending) supposed to be able to. And Iris, the radiant, the well-beloved, what is Iris? What but a very young man’s dream of a woman—experience plus innocence, a prostitute with the soul of a virgin? Go back a generation and you will find her in Mr. Le Gallienne’s The Quest of the Golden Girl.

Well and good. I have no objection to any of this. I enjoyed the book immensely. But, please, let us not take it for something else than it is.

I know almost nothing about Mr. Arlen, I{64} have never even seen his photograph; yet I feel a pleasant personal liking for him. He provided me with an amusing book couched in a delightful style; and I do not for a moment believe that he himself takes it more earnestly than I do or considers it anything other than an agreeably up-to-date fairy-tale. If I have pointed out that the material of which it is constructed appears to me melodrama, not drama, sentimentality, not sentiment, artifice, not life, it is only because I wished to express my opinion that this is true of all the literature of sophistication, which—not here, but elsewhere—frequently presents itself as something more significant.

A reading of Some Do Not ... does not leave me with a similar affection for its author. I cannot escape the feeling that Mr. Ford takes that book hard! hard! and that in it he set out to write a masterpiece.

To begin with, there is the style. We have often been told that Mr. Ford is a master of style; and so, in truth, he is. But of what use is style all alone by itself? The style of Some Do Not ... is the grand style, simple, sonorous, purged of affectation, well suited to such a novel as War and Peace; but it is not the right style for Some Do Not.... Indeed, in my opinion, no style is the right style for that novel. Some Do Not ... has for me all the defects of the literature of sophistication, with none of its virtues. It is false and pretends to be true; it is artificial without being witty; it is romance without glamour; it is essentially literary; it is without{65} any more sense of humour than that required to keep it from becoming ridiculous; it has not a touch of spontaneity; it is as dreary as it is well done.

In a negative way the thing is perfect—ever and ever so careful. Mr. Ford introduces an incredible Irish priest by saying that he ‘had a brogue such as is seldom heard outside old-fashioned English novels of Irish life’—thereby protecting himself from the start; he would have been incapable of writing ‘across the breast of her dark dress’; and it goes without saying that in his creditably meagre use of foreign words he adopts none of the original spellings that star Mr. Arlen’s romance (aristocracie, giggolo, and the like). Mr. Ford’s prose is compact, sober, and restrained. But, since this is true, it becomes the more important to discover what it is all about.

I am unable at present to obtain a copy of If Winter Comes (one of the advantages that I neglected to chronicle in the essay on Living Abroad); but I am struck by the similarity between the plot of Mr. Hutchinson’s novel, as I remember it, and that of Some Do Not ... Mark Something-or-Other was a man whom the world in general regarded with indifference as a failure, and for whose excellent work somebody else was always getting the credit, but whom a few really fine spirits reverenced. So was Christopher Tietjens. Each was unhappily married, though (If Winter Comes not being a sophisticated novel) Mark’s wife was merely stodgy and in{66}sensitive to her husband’s whimsical sweetness (bless her heart! she had all my sympathy), while Christopher’s Sylvia was—oh, dear me! Each hero loved another lady, really appreciative and good, who was eager to sacrifice, in Mark’s case her husband (unappreciative devil he was, too!), in Christopher’s her virginity. Each hero refused the gift. (‘Some do not’ ... do that kind of thing). In neither case did the hero’s wife—or any one else except those few fine spirits—believe in the refusal. Each, instead of getting himself profitably embusqué, slipped off unassumingly to the war and was badly hurt. Each slipped back home again to take up modestly and wearily the old round—a good deal hampered in this by all those embusqués who had pushed ahead in the meantime. Each, for no obvious reason, became a social pariah, was slandered and fairly hounded by the world in general—but not, of course, in the sophisticated novel, to the point of general hysterics reached in If Winter Comes. The endings, naturally, are different. Mark’s wife divorces him, the other lady’s husband is conveniently killed in France, and the lovers are felicitously united; Christopher Tietjens’ wife does not divorce him, he will not become Valentine’s clandestine lover, and he slips off again, even more unassumingly than before, to the war—presumably to be killed.

Here, as unmistakably as in The Green Hat, we have the artificial stuff of melodrama. Hardly, since Richardson’s Pamela, has such {67}feverish importance as in Some Do Not ... been attached to the question of whether a man and a woman will or will not have sexual relations. The last two hundred pages of the book are virtually devoted to this problem, and to its answer—‘Some do not.’ Personally, I didn’t care in the least. Let them, if they wanted to, or not, only, for heaven’s sake, let them and every one else stop talking about it! What possible difference could it make to me?

I am aware that I have written about Mr. Ford’s novel in an insufficiently cool manner; but the truth is (as you may have guessed) that the book exasperates me. All this cheap sensationalism masquerading as a serious study of life! If Winter Comes was atrocious, but it was too silly to be excessively annoying. By the time one reached the piled-up anguish of the court-room scene one was in the best of spirits. But Some Do Not ... is too carefully done to be silly. Its material is that of any ten-twenty-thirty melodrama; but its style is that of Madame Bovary. It arouses the same distaste as in the fairy-tale the vulgar servant wench who had dressed herself up as the princess.

Even so, I have perhaps not accounted adequately for my conviction that Some Do Not ... is fundamentally false. The stuff of melodrama sometimes is the stuff of life, as it is sufficient to read the daily press to discover; and occasionally a great genius builds up truth out of just such material. He does this, of course, by creating real characters. Once a character comes alive, the most improbable things{68} may happen to him, and no one cares—or doubts them. But Mr. Ford is not a genius, and his characters are not real. He describes them neatly and pungently; he even visualises them for us, until they stand out as sharply as the waxwork figures at Madame Tussaud’s. But that is the end of it. They will not come to life. And even if Mr. Ford were the genius that he is not, they could not come to life in that stifling atmosphere of sophistication, where effect is everything and one eye is always on an audience. But then, if Mr. Ford were a genius he would not give us that atmosphere; he would have something too important to say to trouble with anything so small, superficial and glittering as sophistication.

The truth about the literature of sophistication is, I think, that, since it is at bottom a form of showing off, it can have no dealings with truth. In his choice of material the sophisticated writer selects what is false—not, like that occasional genius, for some other reason than its falsity, or for no reason at all, but precisely because it is false, and therefore sure of an easy effect. There is tawdriness in this, of course. I wonder whether there is not a trace of still another quality. Children especially delight in showing off. Can it be that there is something a little ingenuous in sophistication?{69}

MEDITATIONS ABOUT WOMEN

It is doubtless wrong for any except the very young to make generalizations, because nobody else believes in them—least of all in the ones he himself makes. But it is great fun, and, paradoxically, the fun increases in direct proportion to the maker’s disbelief, I suppose because his generalizations thus tend more and more to become light-hearted taunts flung, dustwise, in the face of a chaotic universe. Byron enjoyed defying God, which indicated that he had a God to defy; your modern sceptic thumbs his nose at emptiness, which is at least as brave of him. And of all generalizations that such a man can make those about women are the most entertaining to him. For, having by his time of life discovered that, save for a small matter of physical formation, women are almost precisely like men, it becomes for him the more amusing to unearth or invent differences explaining that ‘almost,’ and to magnify them and build them up into something artistic that would be a beautiful explanation of life—if life were only like that. Thus, I do not believe in any of the generalizations that follow, but I think it would be quite pleasant if they were true.{70}

Why do Men generalize especially about Women?

But that is so simple. Because of their overweening vanity that will not allow them to admit that a subject on which they spend ninetenths of their thoughts can in itself be other than a rich subject full of mystery and significance. Having briefly settled this, I now go on to my own instructive considerations on women, which begin with an inquiry into

Their Untruthfulness.

Men are to be found who frequently tell the truth on principle, and those are quite common who habitually tell the truth because, though they would prefer to lie when lying would be advantageous, something prevents them from doing so, they stammer, grow red, and are forced back on truth in spite of themselves. Women only tell the truth when lying is unprofitable, and never on principle. This is because women have not got principles. Men, not they, are idealists; they only pretend to be idealists in eras when that is what men want them to be. They live among facts, and are bored or amused by abstractions, the making of which they tolerantly consider only one more of the childish games, like curling or pinochle, men delight to play at; which, indeed, it is. Men generalize incessantly about women, but women do not generalize about men. They take men individually as they come—if they do. Also they never experience any difficulty in telling a lie; on the contrary, they look more candid{71} then than at other times. This is, again, because they do not see why truth should be any more important than falsehood, because almost their chief preoccupation is to keep men quiet and happy, and because they believe in doing everything as well as it can be done.

Their Courage.

Every one says that women are braver than men, and perhaps they are, but this is due to their lack of imagination. Suffering to them means simply suffering, whereas to men it means suffering plus the agonized preliminary picture of suffering. A dentist, in whose clutches a woman is notoriously brave, a man a shuddering coward, does not really hurt one a tenth as much as a man beforehand fancies he is going to hurt and at the moment fancies he is hurting. Too much awe is felt (by men) for what women go through at child-birth. Child-bearing is doubtless unpleasant for a woman, but it is infinitely worse for her husband, who sits in an atrocious hospital parlour and conjures up horrors. Women can have six children in six successive years and suffer detriment only to their figure; after the same experience their husbands are grey-haired tottering wrecks.

But let us be thorough. Let us make no assertion about women that we do not investigate. I have mentioned and therefore must consider

Their Lack of Imagination.

This is akin to their inaptitude for abstractions, but, whereas they despise abstractions, they admire{72} imagination and would like to possess it. But they do not possess it. A woman can readily take a fact and, with her gift of untruthfulness, develop it into another different fact or even into a firework-shower of facts; she cannot, as occasionally a man can do, place it and other facts together and build a cathedral. Women are far better observers than men, but they are never first-rate creative artists, hardly creative artists at all, either in cooking or in dressmaking, in painting or in literature, and (with the exception of Emily Brontë, who was a miracle) those who have come closest to being so were very mannish women. George Sand wore trousers, and Lewes’s unprintable physiological remark about George Eliot is well known. The excuse women give for this—that they have always been held back by men and have only recently begun to come into their own—is, and they know it to be, absurd. Women, at least in western countries, have always done whatever they wished with men. For two centuries they directed the political conduct and even the wars of the leading nation in Europe—and a pretty mess they made of it.

I repeat: women can report but not create. A man’s best work in art is almost always based on what he has imagined rather than experienced (witness, among the great and the near-great, Tolstoy and Stephen Crane); a woman’s, never. Women, since they have a love of facts and an appreciation of form, make quite creditable artists when they stick to what they have observed;{73} when they essay to do more than this they fall heavily to earth. Thus, when Miss Willa Cather confines herself to describing that section of America which she knows at first-hand, we read her with interest; when, in the last part of One of Ours, she attempts to throw herself imaginatively into something she has not experienced, the result is so poor and false as to be not ludicrous but painful; the reader actually blushes. Miss Katherine Mansfield, Miss Dorothy Richardson, Miss Stella Benson, Mrs. Edith Wharton, all observe acutely—and do nothing more, and all are quite creditable artists. It is not very important to be a quite creditable artist.

On the other hand, one could almost wish that all critics of literature were women. The criticisms of even stupid women are worth attention, while those of intelligent women are admirable and suggestive. They have a way of going directly to the heart of the matter. Their preoccupation with facts makes them unerring judges of the truth or falsity of a situation, and their wistful respect for imagination makes them at once aware of even its shadowy presence. Nowhere do they display more clearly than in the criticism of a book

Their Intuition.

Much nonsense has been written about this by men, who have chosen to consider it something miraculous, outside the laws of nature. It is, of course, nothing of the sort and would not be half so interesting if it were. The gift{74} of intuition is merely the ability to think so swiftly that one’s thought barely grazes the intermediate steps in the process and appears to an outsider, and often even to oneself, to leap immediately from the initial fact to the final conclusion. Far from being contrary to logic, intuition is the most perfect example of logic. The flying thought must keep straight as an arrow to its course, disregarding instantly all irrelevancies. And the fact that women probably do possess the gift more commonly than men is the clearest disproof of the silly accusation that they are illogical. They are, it is true, illogical in argument, but that is because they do not care for or respect argument for its own sake (another silly game) but only as a practical means to an end, so that when it is going against them they shift their ground shamelessly and thereby infuriate or delight their masculine antagonists according to the latter’s emotional attitude toward them.

There are several excellent reasons why women should be more intuitive than men. One is that they are not led astray by imagination or fancy, another that they are more pragmatic, a third that those occupying so-called subordinate business positions (such as stenographers, among whom intuition is amazingly common) have better trained minds than their employers. It is largely a matter of concentration.

Their Morals.

This is a delicate subject that I would avoid but for its extreme importance.{75}

Men are essentially moral beings. That is, when they behave badly, as they generally do, they always feel that this is not the way to behave—in short, that there is a way to behave. Women have no such conviction. A great number of them, possibly a majority, always behave ‘well’ because they have been trained to do so and have never experienced an emotion strong enough to compel them to break the habit, but there is no personally felt principle behind such virtue. Accordingly, they are at heart neither moral nor immoral, but a-moral. Husbands certainly ‘deceive’ their wives more frequently than wives their husbands, because a man’s opportunities are greater, his risk of detection is smaller, and his punishment, when he is detected, less, but an erring husband has always a sense of guilt that is absent from an erring wife. Marauding lovers themselves are often shocked by their mistresses’ insouciance and total lack of remorse. They would have a woman do wrong for their sake, but they would also have her conscious of wrong-doing. Perhaps this ridiculous desire is in part due to men’s vanity, which would have the sacrifice made for their sake as great as possible. In any case, the desire is disappointed. The one sacrifice that women do not make for men is a moral sacrifice. They have heard much talk about evil, just as a person born deaf may have read much about music, but they have no more real understanding of evil than he has of music. A wicked act is simply one which the doer feels to be wicked. Accordingly,{76} women can, and often do, pass unscathed, unstained and fresh through experiences that would brand men’s faces as evil.

A Reservation.

It will by this time have become clear that when I write of women I do not usually mean the great sheep-like multitude of women who live their lives through more or less according to the rules taught them in childhood, but cultivated civilized women. This I feel to be not only justifiable but essential. How would it be possible to write of the capacities of women, and then spend one’s time on those in whom such capacities remain latent and unrealized? Not Babbitt but Roosevelt is called the typical American, because in Roosevelt, however rare an example he may have been, one perceives the complete development of characteristics that are innate, but remain undeveloped, in most Americans.

However, it is necessary to bear this reservation (if you can call it that) in mind when reflecting on the foregoing section of this essay; otherwise the reader might be puzzled by the seemingly contradictory existence of numerous noisy ladies engaged in combating Vice. Let them go. Poor things, they are rotten with complexes! thwarted souls, chafing (even though they do not know it) over their own inability to expand, and hating the whole world for their discomfort, as a child hates the table against which he has bumped his head! An excellent subject for a{77} novel, they must be summarily dismissed from a brief essay.

Their Fastidiousness.

If women are not inhibited by moral law from what men deem wrong-doing, they often are by their fastidiousness—namely, when wrong-doing is at the same time gross and ugly (which is not nearly always the case). They have a genuine and profound appreciation of fineness, suavity and perfection. Neither is this, as men often assume, equivalent to the mere love of luxury. An indigent girl yields to a wealthy Don Juan not because he surrounds her with the comforts of riches but because he surrounds her with smoothness. She obtains a quite different and much finer satisfaction than he from his spacious silent motor car and from the polished restaurants to which he takes her. There is something hypnotic to her in the charm of elegance. The setting means a great deal to women, far more than men recognize. For while it does not matter so very much to them what they do, it matters tremendously how they do it. In this love of perfect setting they are undoubtedly right and centuries in advance of men. An act in itself—any act—is a bare and meagre thing; done fittingly, at the proper time, in a perfectly right setting, it draws upon the richness of a thousand seemly associations. Man’s world is the barren childish world of an African savage; it is hard to understand how women, who are civilized and grown-up, can endure it.{78}

Their Maturity.

It is banal to say that men never grow up, but one should not be afraid to make a banal remark if it also happens to be true, and this, alas, is true without qualification. Men are hopeless babies. Not only do they delight in primitive things, but their whole attitude toward life is immature and absurd. They expect a great deal from life, and are hurt when they do not get it. You see them looking out at life with wide pained eyes, in precisely the same way a child looks out of the window at the rain that is spoiling his holiday.

Women expect a great deal less from life—once they have passed their spoiled girlhood, when they expect to receive everything and give nothing. They become disillusioned very early—as soon, in fact, as they have recognized men’s essential blundering stupidity and weakness. How else could it be with them, who know that they depend on men, yet know what men are? How can a woman look up to some one who, instead, looks up to her in the most infantile manner? The cave-man ideal is a very young girl’s ideal; the cave-man at home must be as helpless a baby as any other man. If a man has a canker on his tongue he fancies it a cancer; if he has catarrh from over-smoking he fancies it tuberculosis; if some little thing goes wrong with his house it appears to him an international catastrophe. Respect creatures of this sort? Lean on them? Broken reeds! Be kind to them, indulge them, pet them back into equanimity, yes; lean on them, no.{79}

However, the disillusionment induced by a perception of men’s sorry nature is not sufficient to account for women’s mature attitude toward life. Indeed, one would expect it to result in their becoming embittered, soured, exasperated; whereas all civilized women are mellow, amazingly tolerant and—oh, just grown-up! I think this is because they do not start with ideals, see them go smash, and try wretchedly to build up other ideals from the fragments; because they do not believe in abstractions but only in facts. A man rejects the innumerable facts that will not fit into his abstractions; a woman rejects no facts at all. This makes her world far richer than his. And if it is not glorified, neither is it falsified, by the radiance of an ideal. A woman, in short, since she accepts everything, comes to know a vast deal more about life than a man. At the same time she is calmer about it. She does not credit this mass of material with any hidden meaning, and therefore does not worry herself irascible by trying helplessly to find one. Some scraps of the material are pleasant, some disagreeable, and it is all very interesting, so the more of it the better—only there is nothing to get excited about. I confess to admiring this attitude extremely. Theoretically it may be less noble than the masculine attitude, but it gets far better results, even on character, since it cultivates kindliness, tolerance and sympathy, grown-up virtues rare to find among idealists.

This matter (now, I trust, clear) of the respective{80} youth and maturity of the sexes reveals a number of gross popular misconceptions. For example: a good many elderly women are attracted to young men, and all elderly men are attracted to young girls (though some of them conceal it). The former phenomenon is popularly considered ludicrous and pathetic, the latter something satyr-like, disgusting and corrupt. As a matter of fact, the two judgments should be reversed. There is, if just as much, no more sensuality in an elderly man’s feeling for a young girl than in a young man’s. He simply feels what he has always felt. He is still the callow sentimentalist that he was at twenty; he has not grown up. On the other hand, an elderly woman’s feeling for a young man is a thrilling incestuous combination of sensuality and motherliness.

The Unanswerable Riddle.

It has always pleased men, who are simply incorrigible, to find women (of whom they are apt to speak as ‘woman’) mysterious. I once knew a man who asserted that there was nothing more mysterious about women than about men (and God knew there was nothing mysterious about them!) except that every once in a while they went temporarily mad, at which moments no sensible man would pay any attention to them, insanity being without interest. There is something to be said for this simple estimate; still, women do seem to me to have one profound secret of which no explanation appears. Puzzled, I return to it again and again. How, in heave{81}n’s name, can they put up with men—and why do they?

They do not need to. By now, vast multitudes of women have demonstrated that even in an economic world organized exclusively by men they can hold their own with the latter, and they have stripped from the puerile business of making money much of the silly hieratic pretence of importance with which men surrounded it. Almost any competent stenographer is dispassionately aware that she could run her employer’s business quite as well as he runs it, frequently better. And yet women continue to marry. Why do they? Any one who has tried both, knows that it is far easier, as well as more agreeable, to go to a nice, clean, quiet office for the day than to run a house, even with the supposed assistance of a servant or two; while, as for having a home, a woman could have one quite as well without a man, since she must make it in any case.

There is no difficulty in understanding why a man marries. He gets a great deal for his money—a home, a housekeeper, some smoothness, a little fineness, the convenient inexpensive satisfaction of his sexual desires, a kind mature companion to spoil him and protect him against the harsh buffets of a world eternally different than he childishly and sentimentally fancies it.

But a woman? What does she get in return for marriage? Nothing, so far as I can see, save the satisfaction (at moments not of her choosing) of her sexual desires. Surely it cannot be for{82} this alone that women marry. That would be like buying a whole house for the sake of one picture in it. In fact, in this matter women have, potentially, an immense advantage over men. Men, the childish dreamers, will (everywhere save in pure America) follow unknown attractive women about the streets of a city for hours, murmuring compliments from time to time, hoping against hope for some response. It is pathetic. But think of the field that would be open to women if they chose to behave in this manner! Even venal professionals are not without some success. The entire male sex would be at the service of a really ‘nice’ woman; for who ever heard of a man rejecting any woman’s advances, however indifferent he might be to her? His vanity would not let him. A man can have only an inconsiderable fraction of the women he desires; a woman could have any or all of the men who pleased her—and with the minimum of effort. She could select a lover at just the moment when she desired a lover. Equally, if she desired a child she could select a promising father for the child, and, supposing the combination not to work out so well as she hoped, could next time select another. True, at present such behaviour might be looked at askance by the most meticulous; but women could alter this attitude to a sensible one at any time they pleased.

Instead, they elect to marry. Oscar Wilde was wrong to call ‘woman’ ‘a sphinx without a secret.’ Women have their secret, and this is it.{83}

Ministering Angels.

Well, marry they do and will probably continue to do despite my advice. It offers a field for useless but entertaining conjecture. Do they marry because they like to try everything? Or because they are sorry for men? Or because it requires more energy to repel a man’s repeated advances than is worth devoting to anything, either good or bad? At any rate, one thing is certain: unless they marry very, very young, it can hardly be because they expect much of marriage. They cannot fail to know that they must give a great deal and receive very little.

What they do give is amazing. It makes me feel almost as reverently toward them as Charles Dickens in his emotional moments. They are so very kind to men. They habitually smooth out all those difficulties, such as servant troubles, baby troubles, household difficulties, difficulties of the kitchen, which men fatuously call ‘the little problems of existence,’ not seeing that they are gigantic as compared with their own meagre business troubles. They are extraordinarily gentle with their husbands in illness or even in fancied illness, rarely showing any resentment at the impatience with which they were treated when they were ill. They put up with a turbulence, grossness and lack of all sense of what is seemly, that outrages their fastidiousness; they put up with men’s bragging, with men’s vanity, with their ridiculous assumption of gravity and importance (precisely like that of children dressed up in their parents’ clothes). In company they{84} listen to their husbands relate the same, same, same jokes, and, instead of shrieking, smile, as though that were the first time they, too, had heard those jokes. They cajole and caress men out of infantile bad tempers, the logical cure for which would be a spanking. Themselves liking to eat little and delicately, they allow—nay, assist—men to eat much and grossly, and they watch the creatures’ mood change, in the process, from irascibility to mellow tenderness, and merely smile pleasantly, with scarcely perceptible irony. Have I really said that they are not artists? They are consummate artists to endeavour to work in such a hostile medium, to work with such material. But, no, they are not artists; for they do not do anything with the material, not really, not anything permanent. Still, that is not their fault, either. No one could, not even God.

Ah, well, it is not possible that women endure all this, do all this (both so unnecessarily), out of altruism, sheer self-sacrifice. Earth is not heaven. They must have some obscure, if probably simple, reason. In the meantime men flourish and grow fat.{85}

LEGEND

Under the influence of that gentle optimism which once upon a time suffused the world with a warm twilight glow, I used to believe that in the very long run truth would out, and that accordingly history was an exact science. Conceding cheerfully that a veracious history of our own period or of other periods close behind it was impossible, I yet took it for granted that, given time enough, falsehoods and misconceptions would be weeded out and documented objective truth established. This condition, I assumed, had already been perfectly achieved in the history of the various western nations up to about the period of the French Revolution, which still lay in a sort of gradually clearing penumbra.

Now that the attractive twilight glow has given place to a bleak grey light (whether or not of dawn I have no idea, but, if so, of a singularly unpleasant November dawn), I have begun to question, among other things, that comfortable belief. And, questioned, it seems to me to reveal at once certain lacunae and incongruities that make it appear extremely dubious and lead me to wonder that I ever accepted it so unthinkingly.{86}

For example, while, judging from the past, anything like a definitive history of the late war will probably not be written for two hundred years or so, from tendencies apparent even to-day it is already possible to predict that such a history will deal with the struggle coolly as the result of clear-cut national rivalries, largely economic. Thus history has explained earlier wars, and thus it is, as yet gropingly, preparing to explain this one.

Now any man who at maturity lived through the period from 1914 to 1918 must be aware that such an explanation, however fully documented, will not be a complete and truthful explanation of the war. In retrospect the war will seem, from its results, to have been an inevitable, coldly logical affair; but the fact remains that it was not that, as we who witnessed it know. To begin with, many hundreds of thousands of young men went willingly into the war, though aware that they were going to almost certain death. That is simply not done in behalf of an economic conflict. A considerable proportion of those young men went to war because they believed with all their heart that they were to fight for an ideal. That final history will doubtless ignore their emotional attitude. To-day, when it is not yet possible to ignore the attitude, the tendency among interpreters of the war is to discount it as of no importance, to brush all these dead thousands aside as deluded—mere tools of the real forces that brought on the war. But unless one is to adopt the absurd belief that{87} economic laws, nationalistic rivalries and so forth, are objective things with a life of their own, instead of what they obviously are—expressions of the minds of men assembled in groups, it is clear that if these thousands of young men were deluded they must have been deluded by some person or group of persons.

But if one thing should be apparent by now to any one who lived through those four trying years, it is that the war had no villain or villains responsible for it. There were, indeed, fierce economic and other rivalries between the groups of men called nations, but no one, literally no one, intended or devised that catastrophe. The peoples blundered into war. It was a vast, senseless, chaotic mêlée. History may, and doubtless will, write it down as something clear and logical; in truth it was neither one nor the other. People rather fortuitously but none the less rigidly assembled in groups were at odds with people assembled in other similar groups, about trade, world markets, the congestion of population, and the like; but they were far less clearly so than history is going to give them credit for being, and their being so was only half the story. The other half was emotion. Neither, given the bewilderment over the war, when it came, of positively every one save the regular army officer (whose mind, if you can call it that, is not subject to bewilderment), can I believe that within each comprehensive national group smaller groups of people pulled strings and, callously exploiting the majority, deliberately{88} brought on the war for their own advantage. The result may prove to be the same as though they had done that, but they simply did not. They were as bewildered and upset and emotional as the others. History, I begin to perceive, cares really only for results—with, perhaps, neat, post-factum causes; and that is why I grow sceptical of it, since a result without its causes—all of them—is not truth and lacks significance.

Presumably, then (still judging by the past), what we are going to have a couple of centuries hence is a cold, neat, logical, definitive history of the World War, with, running along beside it, a body of literature patriotically chronicling, exalting and deforming its episodes of heroism. And never the twain shall meet, any more than East and West, Highbrow and Lowbrow, mind and matter. And which of the two will be the falser it is hard to say. The former will not explain truly why people made the war, and the latter will not tell what they truly felt. Each will fail even in its own chosen province. A novel like War and Peace may be written that will come amazingly close to the real truth, but the historians will sniff at it because some of its facts are inaccurate and because it is a novel, and the addicts of the patriotic literature will detest and condemn it because it does not picture their ancestors as heroes, but as bewildered mediocre individuals like themselves.

It is only of late that I have begun to distrust history, but this patriotic literature I have, ever since I was old enough to think, disliked and{89} found depressing. Depressing because it is so sweet, wide-eyed and simple, giving always somehow the effect of being written in words of one syllable; because it attributes to the men whose deeds it recounts the minds of children—not real children, at that; and because it would reduce the obscurely motivated happenings of this rich, confused, infinitely interesting world to the insipid level of a Sunday-School story or a play by Schiller. However, it is not very important. Despite its use of real names, people can hardly accept it as real—that is, as in any way related to their own lives. And I should not have devoted even a paragraph to it but for one thing that it does, from which comes its only strength and in which lies its only danger. This is: to attempt to exploit legend.

A legend, like a gigantic shadow with blurred edges, forms about every man who has been of great importance in his day. For that matter, a legend forms about every significant period in history, too. There is a Greek legend and an Italian Renaissance legend, just as there is a Socrates legend and a Leonardo legend. But the personal legend is the less vague and the more important. When a man’s influence on his fellows is impressive, and often when it is not, a legend grows up about him, even during his lifetime. There was certainly a Roosevelt legend long before Roosevelt’s death, and there is already a Coolidge legend to-day. For the most part these legends eventually fade, flicker and go out (there was even a Blaine legend once{90} upon a time), but when a man’s existence has modified that of millions and left an impress on events, his legend grows and solidifies, rather than diminishes, as the years pass. Until finally it becomes so strong that it alone has life; you cannot possibly get at the vanished individual for the impenetrable legend surrounding his memory.

‘Surrounding his memory’ is perfectly accurate; for the legend is not equivalent to the memory. It is, indeed, something quite different, as some of those who knew the dead hero intimately often struggle in vain to show us. Yet in their struggle there is a kind of perplexity; even these intimates become submerged by the legend, and get it all mixed up with their personal memories, so strong it is. The best example of which is to be found in the reminiscences of old men who actually knew Lincoln, since rarely about any one so recently dead has a permanent legend formed so compactly. It is as impossible to know what Lincoln truly was as to know what Washington or Napoleon was. No amount of newly unearthed documents can alter the legend or shake it.

For this is the strength of legend: that it is not thought, but feeling. When I know a man well I do not think of him as having dark hair, a straight nose, rather small eyes, and a stoop. His presence or the mention of his name produces in me a certain sensation that, so far as I am concerned, is the man. My like or dislike for him, my opinion of his character, may be{91} affected by what others tell me about him; but that sensation nothing can alter. It is of precisely the same kind as the sensation given me by a certain odour or a certain melody. It is unmistakable.

Something like this, legend gives. One says Lincoln, and a feeling, a sensation, springs up in the mind.

This emotion, this legend, the patriotic Sunday-Schoolish brand of literature attempts to exploit, and history attempts to ignore.

The former effort is, I have suggested, not without danger. (To what? Oh, I suppose, to truth, to sanity of mind). It would employ a strong, universally felt emotion for the purposes of a chronicle as falsely innocent as a fairy-tale. One might compare the effect of such exploitation to that of a moving-picture in colours. The colour values are all wrong, not thus do grass and a red gown look in sunlight; but there the grass actually is, waving, and through it in her false red gown actually walks the heroine. It is confusing. Even so, I do not think the danger very serious for any one with enough of a mind to be worth saving. The point of all this twaddle, plausible as the stuff may at first appear, is too naïve, too utterly unlike any conceivable expression of the reader’s own psychology.

The deliberate and persistent attempt of history to ignore legend is another and graver matter.

That the attempt should be made is perhaps natural. Legend is pure feeling, and historians distrust feeling, noting contemptuously how{92} unfounded it usually is and how wide of the mark its conclusions more often than not appear to them, whose business it is to examine facts. Also, their minds being trained to weigh and measure, they are not interested in anything that cannot be weighed and measured.

All the same, they are wrong. Whether or not legend is something we should be better without, it exists. You cannot ignore something that is. And legend exists as solidly as the Battle of Waterloo. You cannot get through it or around it or behind it, and therefore you cannot dismiss it.

I admit that if I were an historian I should probably want to. Not only should I be disdainful (as I am, even without being an historian) of the tawdry foundationless legends spawning all about me, with their cheap slogans (‘Keep Cool with Cal!’), and apt to forget that the death-rate among legends is higher than that among Jews in Poland, but I should feel despairingly that to let oneself in for legend, to concede the necessity of considering feeling, would make the writing of history an enterprise too gigantic to be possible; and so, very likely, it is.

Nevertheless, history written, as it is, without knowledge and due consideration of emotion begins to appear to me a colossal falsehood. Men’s acts are three-fourths the product of emotions, and, no matter how false the emotions may have been, without intimate acquaintance with them you cannot rightly understand men’s behaviour. As for dismissing legend, the attempt{93} would be insolent if it were not so hopeless. Legend has swayed more minds than has fact. Indeed, half the time it is legend that produces facts. The Napoleonic legend has had a hundred times more effect in shaping actual events than ever, for all his greatness, had Napoleon himself (who, moreover, exploited his own legend consummately). Dismiss it? ‘Wake Duncan with thy knocking!’

How legends arise would be a curious and fascinating study, very far from being so simple as one may at first fancy, with his attention focussed on the standardization of thought achieved by the daily press; for legends sprang up equally, and endured, long before printing was invented. But this is a side issue that the unfortunate historian may leave to some one else. Legend itself, once it is firmly established, he has no right to disregard. It is too important—I mean, actually important in its practical results.

To get an idea of how important, observe what happens when a legend blows up. A perfect example of that phenomenon occurred not long since. With the discovery of the semi-official murder of Matteotti in Rome, and the revelations that followed, the Mussolini legend exploded and was gone, utterly. It had to go. Either Signor Mussolini was himself among the criminals or he was helpless against the machinations of a corrupt and evil clique. In either case, the legend of the ‘Duce,’ the super-man, the benevolent tyrant, wisely, righteously and firmly governing{94} Italy for her own good, became untenable. There remained only Mussolini, the man. And, with the collapse of that legend, the whole strength, other than physical, of Fascismo evaporated. Yet it was only a silly little legend that, even left undisturbed, could not have lasted fifteen years.

In the last sentence you may discover an indication that, for my part, I distinguish between the value of ephemeral legends and that of legends which endure. So, in truth, I do. If the Mussolini legend and the Coolidge legend appear to me absurd aberrations that we should have been better without, tried and established legends, like the Lincoln or the Washington legend, seem to me of great value; I am not at all upset by the impossibility of getting through or behind them. They are, I fancy, of more importance than the men about whom they grew up. Not Lincoln himself, but that glowing Lincoln legend, sways multitudes, and sets, above all the cheap facts of actual politics, a standard of what, at his best, a President of the United States may and should be. There really is, incongruously and almost incredibly, a rough fundamental idealism displayed by a good many men in American public life, and, better, demanded of them by the mass of American citizens, that is largely due to the solid permanence of that legend. Not for anything would I see the legend vanish; which is fortunate, since it never will.

If I am right in this, that in the long run it is not a man but his legend that affects events and{95} the natures of other men for good or evil, then it is of no importance that we cannot penetrate through it to the man himself and learn whether or not his legend falsifies his character. Nevertheless, the problem is a fascinating one, partly because it is insoluble, but chiefly, I fancy, because hidden in its depths lies that eternal question: ‘What is truth?’

My own undocumented theory is that an enduring legend does not falsify the individual about whom it has formed. When a man falls in love with a woman he has an exalted perception of her as something rare and wonderful, yet perfectly definite, concrete, individual. From no one else could he receive that particular sensation. When he was in love before, he received one, equally sharp, from another woman; but it was not this sensation. If it were, I should agree with those who consider the poor creature merely deluded. Since it is not, I am inclined to believe that he has obtained a fleeting glimpse of truth. Not the average daily truth about the person worshipped, but an unrealized and unrealizable yet more significant truth—a vision of what that person might become at her best and truest. Presently the emotion fades and is gone, either utterly or to return but faintly for an instant now and then, ever so rarely; but it was surely, in its moment, too sharp and clear a fact to have been without significance. It was actually, I fancy, a sort of intensification of the personality glimpsed, together with a stripping away of everything unessential.{96}

A somewhat similar intensification and stripping away it is at least possible that legend, an enduring legend, gives. Seizing on the individual’s essentially personal dreams, evil or good, divined beneath a few of his inadequate acts, and exaggerating, or perhaps only intensifying, them, legend gives us these as the man. Probably that was not the way the individual appeared to himself. Probably no other individual ever saw him like that, unless, for a moment, his passionate lover or his passionate enemy. Yet that, says legend confidently, is what he was.{97}

TRUTH AND FICTION IN ITALY

There is in most contemporary Italian fiction a limpness, flaccidity—I hardly know what to call it—which at its least offensive expresses a feeble despair, and at its worst becomes a whine. It is not the expression of a rugged pessimism; there is nothing rugged about it. Rather, it reveals a lack of vitality, a thin-bloodedness, the spirit one is accustomed to think of as ‘womanish,’ though, as a matter of fact, the women writers of Italy appear less guilty in this respect than the men. Grazia Deledda and even Annie Vivanti show more virility than most of their confrères, and there is gusto in the slap-stick prose of Matilde Serao, despite its appalling sentimentality. But Marino Moretti, a fine and sensitive writer, is only too clear an exponent of the fault, Panzini himself often succumbs to it, and even the late Federico Tozzi, cut off by early death from what promised to be real achievement, was far from guiltless.

Clear as the fault appears to me, and arousing, as it does, an exasperated distaste, it is difficult for me to make it clear to any one else. This is because it is at bottom the result of an attitude of mind, a conventionally accepted attitude of mind, rather than anything more definite. It{98} is easy to lay an accusing finger on the concomitants, the specifically annoying tricks and habits that go with it (more obviously, of course, in third-rate writers, such as Teresah or Luciano Zuccoli): the tender mournful contemplation of something small and helpless, the employment of pity for its own sweet sake, the abuse of diminutives (‘he took her poor, emaciated, little hand in his’), etc., but the thing itself, the spirit behind all this, remains elusive, and will remain so until we have got at its source.

Whatever this may turn out to be, the characteristic is doubly obnoxious: it is obnoxious not only in itself, but also because it grossly misrepresents Italian life and the Italian spirit. It is true that there is a vast deal of sentimentality loose in Italy, always readily on tap, as it were, but this national sentimentality is a hearty thing, a wasted by-product of exuberant life, like the sticky yellow foam churned up by a tumultuous sea; not thin-blooded, careful, and mauve-coloured, like that of the printed page.

Italy is overflowing with life, perhaps even lawless with it; for the race is too much alive, individual by individual, to permit of successful organization, still less of being standardized either in behaviour or thought. The foreigner who has come to know Italy will have encountered various national traits that displease him as conflicting too much with those of his own country, but nowhere in the whole peninsula will he have found the grey devitalized dullness of Anglo-Saxon suburbia or the poetic musical{99} languor popularly ascribed to the Italian race—why, I have no idea, unless because Neapolitans frequently sing at night and because dolce far niente is the one Italian phrase with which all foreigners are acquainted. Misled in advance by a prolific and incredibly wayward literature, the foreigner, like a reversed Columbus, expects to find Cathay and instead discovers the New World. There are in Italians old, old traits that suddenly crop out at unexpected moments, there are roots that go down into an unfathomable past, but the spirit of the race is young, vivid, almost raw. Foreigners unacquainted with Italy were surprised by the phenomenon of Fascismo. No one with any knowledge of Italy can have been surprised either by Fascismo or by the sturdy opposition to it.

Nothing, in short, can be falser than the conception of Italy as a country of dreamers and idealists. On the contrary, the people, by and large, are matter-of-fact, hard-headed and practical; they like American bathrooms, central heating and the early operas of Verdi; I often wonder that no American business-man has had the acumen to open a branch five-and-ten-cent store in Italy. A full-blooded corkscrew at two lire, a hearty can-opener at one lira, would sell and sell and sell. Italians of my acquaintance fairly pore over the advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post; they would love the Sears-Roebuck catalogue.

Then, in the name of consistency, why this mournful emasculated prose?{100}

Well, it is a long story. I think at bottom it goes back to the schools. At Harvard I went through a number of courses in English composition, in each of which I had to write a one-page theme every day and a three-page theme once a fortnight. It took me years to recover from the discipline, and I have an almost guilty feeling that even now when I have learned to write in my own way a Harvard professor would still cover my pages with red marks; but at least we were urged to write simply. Our rhetorical passages were ruthlessly stricken out; we were held down, even contemptuously, to a positive bareness of expression. ‘Say what you have to say, if anything, in as few words as possible’ was the message (only the word would never have been allowed) dinned into our ears. I still think it an excellent training.

In Italian schools, beginning with the most elementary, training in composition is diametrically the opposite. There is a model (and such a florid model!) for everything. Shall a sunset be described? (‘No!’ they would have said in an American school). Manzoni (who is never forgotten for a moment) has done this in just the right way on page 9007 of I Promessi Sposi. Base your description on his. Never, so far as I can learn, is the child told to describe, as well as he can, exactly and only what he sees. If Manzoni, however, were the only model, imitative Italian prose might be less rhetorical than it is and might contain some reflected vigour; but there are, to mention only two others, Silvio{101} Pellico (who had a love affair in prison with a spider) and De Amicis, who wrote some tolerable books but who also wrote Cuore. Cuore is given to every child as soon as the unfortunate creature is able to read, and as soon as he is able to write he is taught to copy its sentiments and style. There are more, and more nauseating, tears shed in Cuore than in all the Elsie books put together. Compared with it, Immensee, which, I am told, no German can, or anyway could some years ago, read without weeping, is as stony as the dictionary. I know of no other book so obscene as Cuore. No, I withdraw that statement. There is one worse book. It was written by some Englishwoman, is called The Story of Pigling Bland, and is about a dear little pig who fell in love with a dear little girl-pig, and gave her peppermints, and watched over her when she fell asleep; but I do not think that it is used as a text-book in English schools.

There are models even for letters to be written by a child to its parents. These are the sentiments the child should have; this is the way they should be expressed. I know a charming and intelligent woman who has a daughter of eighteen—like most Italian young girls, almost indistinguishable from American girls of her generation: hard, chic, slangy, fast, but without ever losing her head, not an ounce of tenderness in her. ‘See what a delightful letter Elena has written me from her school,’ said the mother proudly to me one day. I read the {102}letter, aghast. ‘Beloved Mamma ... I think of you always, always ... I dream of the hour when we shall be reunited and I can press you again to my heart.’

Given this methodical corruption of minors, it is not strange that the prose style of the average mature Italian and of Italian journalism should be hopelessly verbose and weighted with rhetorical emotional platitudes that do not express the genuine feelings of the writer. For example, boxing matches have become very popular in Italy of late, and there is little perceptible difference between the Italian crowd at one of these and the crowd at an American fight. There is the same doggy masculine smell, the same blue haze of smoke drifting across the glare of the arc-lights above the ring, the same fierce excitement—nothing, in short, that could possibly have come out of Cuore. Such was the audience at a recent match in Milan when Bruno Frattini, the Italian champion, was defeated on points by Ted Lewis. But the newspaper account in the Ambrosiano next day! ‘Could it be that Bruno, our Bruno, was defeated? For a moment we were silent, dazed. Our eyes were full of tears.’ I wish I had kept that reporter’s story. It was worth translating in full—only it would have demanded ten pages.

Here in this absurd instance, perhaps because it is so absurd, we somehow get a flash of insight into the origin of the problem. For even with a comment on school training I did not go deep enough. The real problem is to discover why mature, fairly intelligent Italians permit that{103} kind of training to continue, and approve of its results. This, I think, is the answer: to an Italian life is pragmatic, art academic. The Italian takes life as it comes, with no theories about it, with no belief in its having a meaning; but for the printed word he has hard and fast rules. He does not think of art as an interpretation of life; he thinks of it as something quite separate. (But if you ask me why this should be true, I confess that I am beyond my depth and do not know—unless it is simply that the average Italian is too sceptical and matter-of-fact to believe any interpretation of life possible). Nowhere—not even in the America of ten years ago, where the majority of people struggled, as they must always struggle everywhere, to make a difficult living, but read sunny fairytales by Myrtle Reed and Eleanor Porter—nowhere have life and art been kept so distinct as they are still kept in Italy. It is grateful (especially to a writer) to discover that in Italy more esteem is felt for an author than for a millionaire, but it is saddening to discover, a little more gradually, that this is not because the author is held to know more about life than the millionaire, but that, instead, he is worshipped as the priest of an esoteric cult with a well-established ritual.

Here, however, it becomes necessary to point out a significant contrast between the Italian and the American attitude toward the arts. However far from considering them an interpretation of life, Italians have for the arts neither{104} contempt nor kindly toleration, but a genuine reverent love. Literate Italians are passionately devoted to all the arts, and illiterate Italians to at least one—music. So that, in a sense, the arts do form an important part of virtually every Italian’s life—but a shut-off separate part. From this derives a tyranny over the arts, that could not possibly exist in America or England, where people do not feel strongly enough about them to desire to tyrannize over them. An American or an Englishman will listen timidly to music that he does not understand, or timidly read (or claim to have read) a book that he finds incomprehensible, or timidly and gravely walk through the halls of a picture show which, so far as he can see, reveals only insanity. For ‘people who know’ may presently announce that all these things are works of genius, and then where would he be if he had laughed at them or protested? And, anyway, what does it all matter? The Italian will throw aside the book with a curse, laugh with uproarious contempt at the pictures, and hiss the music into silence. He ‘knows what he likes.’ It is what he was brought up on; and that, and nothing else, is art. And it all matters to him very much indeed.

Now, intelligence averaging no higher in Italy than elsewhere, the result of this condition upon the arts is disastrous. It compels them to retain outworn forms that may be in themselves as good as newer forms, or even better, but that cannot be employed to-day for the fresh expres{105}sion of emotion or thought. A deadly imitative conservatism crushes the arts in Italy. In painting hardly any influence later than that of the French Impressionists is apparent; in music almost none later than Debussy; in stage-setting and lighting none, positively none, later than Belasco. The staging of operas in the remodelled Scala is magnificent; the detail is elaborate and costly; the costumes are impeccable; real stars twinkle in a purple night-sky indistinguishable from that of Rapallo. But of the interesting experiments in non-realistic stage-setting that are being made in Germany, America, and to a lesser extent in France, there is no trace. There daren’t be. Just one such stage-set was attempted at the Scala last season—a timid one, at that; but the public would have none of it. Perhaps it is better for the arts not to have too many people care much about them, and undoubtedly it is better for the artists. Composers like Malipiero or painters like Ferrazzi must either be neglected or attain, and be content with, a reputation abroad; but they may get a wry satisfaction from the knowledge that if their work is good enough to endure until it ‘dates’ as something perfect out of a dead past, their pictures will then (but not until then) be hung in every gallery, and their music performed at every theatre, of their native land.

The tyranny over literature is not quite so great as that over music, for the obvious reason that a book is read in solitude by an individual, not performed before a very articulate audience,{106} and also because the reading public is smaller than the opera public. Nevertheless, if small, it is of the same kind and only a little more alert to new impressions. It, too, knows what it wants and that this is art. The result is to weaken and emasculate literature. Not, of course, that a writer of integrity will deliberately seek to give the public what it wants, but he can hardly avoid being discouraged by the knowledge that it wants only a repetition of something that has already been done. Moreover, the writer is, after all, himself an Italian, with the Italian’s thorough early grounding in verbosity, rhetoric and sentimentality, and with his instinct to keep life and literature separate. He attempts, even desperately, to write about life, but somehow the attempt does not often succeed. The result is thin and tired. Some spark is lacking. The stuff does not ring true. It remains ‘literary.’

But have not writers, and other artists, in all countries had to struggle with difficulties, from which they have emerged more or less triumphantly? Surely English literature has sprung from a milieu hostile to all the arts, and is but the more vigorous for that? True, and so do they struggle in Italy; but it is as though they must start from farther back and overcome elementary handicaps that they should surely be spared. Even to nullify that persistent early training in opulent rhetoric and that in verbosity must demand heroic effort; yet most of them have conquered the former, and some the latter. It is a triumph that they do actually write freshly.{107} But that attitude toward literature as a thing in itself is hard to overcome. And there are other dangers and difficulties.

For example, the literary clique. In Italian life the individual is strong, the organized group weak; which is a splendid and sane condition of affairs. In Italian literature, as in the other arts, the group flourishes disastrously and frequently submerges the individual. Let a man write a few books that reveal talent, and immediately a group forms about him, with a cult of its hero and a critical estimate of his work to which he will thereafter find himself attempting to conform, thus, hedged about by a wall of literary ideas, growing less and less capable of an individual interpretation of life itself. Or perhaps there are three or four men about whom the group forms, either because they resemble one another in thought or in manner of expression, or perhaps only because they happen to live in the same city. Then the result is even more harmful, since the various individual writers also react upon one another. Witness the young Florentine group—Soffici, Palazzeschi, Papini, etc.—all once writers of promise, all fallen into premature decay. Panzini has suffered perceptibly from this kind of thing; lesser writers have suffered even more. When G. A. Borgese was writing his first novel, Rubè, the reverent clique about him heralded the yet unfinished book as a masterpiece, the first genuine synthesis of—I forget what, but the word ‘synthesis’ must certainly have been used. Any{108} one who has read Rubè is aware that it is very far from being a masterpiece. That is not Signor Borgese’s fault. What is his fault, however, and of great detriment to the novel, is his obvious determination throughout to make it a masterpiece.

Ah, well, cults exist in other countries than Italy. One recalls the well-known scene in Victor Hugo’s salon, where the Master sat on a kind of pontifical throne, and uttered occasional maxims to the worshippers grouped about his feet. ‘Je crois en Dieu,’ he announced once, after a long silence. Another and reverent silence followed. Then a woman spoke. ‘Chose étrange!’ she murmured. ‘Un dieu qui croit en Dieu.’

No enumeration of the handicaps under which an Italian writer must struggle would be complete without mention of the prolonged baneful influence on both prose and verse, but especially on prose, of D’Annunzio. D’Annunzio himself is what he is, and I have no intention of discussing here the merits and defects of his own important achievement; I am only glancing at the influence his work has for thirty years exerted on minor writers—an influence bad almost without qualification. It has led scores of writers away from simplicity, away from life (by which I do not mean only away from realism), into a deliberate tortured complexity, beneath which was nothing, a blank emptiness. Even to-day Italian prose has not shaken itself quite free from that appalling influence. It corrupts the work of Virgilio Brocchi oddly, since there is at bottom nothing ‘Dannunziano{109}’ in its spirit, and it pervades that of Antonio Beltramelli, to mention only two contemporary novelists of some talent. It is greatly to the credit of Panzini that there is no trace of it in his work, though he has been subjected to it all his life, being of precisely D’Annunzio’s age.

(One firm exception must be made to all that I have said about the thinness and flaccidity of Italian prose. Side by side with literary prose, there has always existed in Italy a polemical prose which has never lacked vitality. To-day it is stronger than ever. It is, in fact, terrific in its vigour, insolence and scurrility. This is probably because it is not considered a form of art; so that in it people let themselves go, and express with unrestrained violence their fiercely partisan hatreds. At any rate, to find really living, breathing, Italian prose you must turn to-day to the polemical editorials of the press—the bitter stinging attacks on political adversaries that you will find in the Popolo d’Italia, the Giustizia, Cremona Nuova, and the Genoa Lavoro).[1]

Although I have enumerated a good many obstacles to the achievement of anything really significant in contemporary Italian fiction, I am still dissatisfied. Given sufficient strength, sufficient vitality, writers should have surmounted even these difficulties.

Given sufficient strength. Perhaps that is the real point. The men striving are not strong enough.{110}

Poets come from wherever God put them, but, almost without exception, the prose writers of Italy spring from the bourgeoisie. From the ‘popolo,’ none; from the aristocracy, ‘Black’ and provincial (even when residing in Rome itself), occupied only with religion, the retention of its rights and the adequate marriage of its children, or from the cosmopolitan aristocracy, occupied only with diversions, there have come but one or two names. No, the writers come from the bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie, in England far stronger than any other class, is in Italy the weakest, the least full-blooded.

Despite the fact that my own intimate Italian friends and close acquaintances are perforce members of the middle and upper classes, it is of that vast third class, the ‘popolo,’ that I think first when I think of Italy. Pardon the foreign word. ‘The common people’ is too superior, ‘the People’ obscured by demagogic connotation. Also, before continuing, I must beg you to believe that I am not being sentimental, that I have no parlour belief in the Nobility of Labour, but that I base what I have to say on what I personally know (and I wish it might be more) of a great many individuals belonging to this class.

The virtues that make the ‘popolo’ in the main so lovable—cheerfulness, sturdy patience, kindliness, self-sacrifice, great generosity, ready active pity for suffering—are of course released through the difficult laborious existence the{111} ‘popolo’ leads and has always led. Potential vices lie darkly awaiting their chance in the heart of every man. Not class, but only the circumstances of class prevent their unfolding. The second generation of a peasant family that has been promoted (if you can call it that) to the shop-keeping class is apt to be as harsh and greedy as any family of Sicilian absentee landlords. The vices so long crushed down have come into their own with a vengeance. No matter. Greed and selfishness may be less common in the Italian ‘popolo’ than elsewhere merely because there is scant nourishment for them in poverty, but that the virtues I have mentioned are so apparent there is a tribute to the race. Poverty can release them; it cannot create them.

The point is, however, that the virtues I have mentioned as roughly characteristic of the Italian ‘popolo’ are the warm-blooded virtues of life. A generous or a self-sacrificing man is more alive than a greedy or a selfish man. And life really seems to be richer, fuller and more exuberant in this class than in any other. There is nothing stolid or dull about these people. Their passions are strong, but not of the body alone; they flow over into the mind. An Anglo-Saxon day-labourer or a Finn or a Swede has his recurrent moments of terrific passion, sexual or other, but between times appears to relapse into a state of blank mental non-existence. This is, at least, the impression he makes on an outsider. Of course, behind his inarticulateness a broad silent stream of thought may be{112} flowing; but, frankly, I doubt it. Nothing that he says when he does occasionally break his silence justifies the assumption. The Italian of a similar class is, if friendly toward you, immensely communicative; and I submit that if a person is communicative it is because he has something to communicate.

The Italian of the ‘popolo’ surely has a great deal. His mind is alert, his curiosity unbounded, and, best of all, his fancy exuberant. More often than not, he has a strong sense of humour. His mind is as robust as his body. And, though he interlards his conversation with proverbs (his share in the racial curse), it consists otherwise of vivid, unhackneyed, often magnificently ungrammatical turns of phrase, that convey freshly his own direct sensations.

Now this last is characteristic only of the ‘popolo.’ In polite conversation Italians of other classes mostly talk like books. That appalling education of theirs has been too much for them. Oh, not that there is any radical difference between them and the Italians of the ‘popolo’! The education has been too much for the latter also—when it exists. Such letters as I received during the war from slightly educated Italians of the ‘popolo’ at the front! Letters in the style of Manzoni, letters in the style of Cuore, letters whose rhetoric could not possibly bear any relation to the sights and sounds and emotions the writers were experiencing. I felt like crying: ‘Evviva l’analfabetismo!{113}’

But how different it was when these same men talked of what they had experienced! Neither war-correspondence nor imaginative writing has ever given me the illusion of actual presence on the battlefield that I received from their words. They would describe, quite simply, some small homely fact, some unimportant episode, because it was what had struck them, and at once the whole scene would spring into sharp life. Nor was it always merely straight description. Sentiment and even character analysis were hidden underneath. Of the new raw officers rushed without sufficient training to the front after Caporetto, one soldier said kindly: ‘Poveretti! they didn’t even know the difference between the sound of an Austrian shell and an Italian.’ ‘When I shot I never aimed at any one. I didn’t want to kill,’ said another man (who had received the Bronze Medal for going out with two companions and capturing a machine-gun). ‘We didn’t like the shocktroops; they frightened us,’ said the same man. ‘They looked wild. They went out, half drunk, with their long knives in their teeth, and they never took any prisoners.’

My hope for Italian literature is that sooner or later it may come from the ‘popolo,’ and that it may come uncorrupted by the kind of education at present in vogue, and corrupted as little as possible by any education at all save that in life itself, which the ‘popolo’ already possesses. If such a revolution in literature ever does take place, it will be like that in the{114} Middle Ages when writers forsook Latin for the vernacular. Nor does it seem to me improbable. The condition of the labouring class is considerably better than before the war; a little leisure may presently be achieved. And at the same time the old education is weakening, growing decrepit. Professors are dying out, or at any rate becoming scarcer, since their salaries are not high enough to support life in the social condition to which they are condemned. By its stiffening of standards the Riforma Gentile results in cutting down drastically the number of young men who can attend a university. And the salaries of teachers in the elementary schools are so inadequate to the present cost of living that the ranks must be filled from among the ‘popolo.’

Since the war the pace of life itself is swifter and fiercer than ever, while literature grows weaker, more anaemic. Presently the water will rise too high; surplus life will be too strong; with a rush it will flow over and submerge the old literature with a new rich wave.

It would be unfair not to add that for years the desire for such a renovation has been cherished by many Italians. What else but a reaction against the debility of Italian literature was, and still is, the whole Futurist movement? Consciously it was, among other things, a passionate protest against verbosity, rhetoric and sentimentalism; less consciously perhaps, with its demand for velocity, a protest against the separation of literature from life. And,{115} though Futurism has not itself created any work of importance, it has had an important influence on Italian writers, an influence which perhaps did more than any other to overcome that of D’Annunzio. Even to-day Futurism is still to be reckoned with. But it, too, is a conscious movement, and thus tends, as Marinetti himself half admits, to become academic, to crystalline in the forms with which it reacted against other forms.

Once again, it is not to movements, but to individuals that one must look—to individuals who care nothing for groups and less than nothing for tendencies, either to follow or to combat them, but who carve out unaided their own conception of life. Of such was Giovanni Verga, who died a few years ago more than eighty years old, neglected and almost forgotten, but with a magnificent achievement behind him that throws a bleak pitiless light on the tawdriness of his contemporaries and successors. Now that he is dead, appreciation of what he accomplished is growing; people are reading him more. Imitation of Verga will not be Verga; you cannot create a race of giants without giant blood; but it cannot be quite profitless to turn at last to an author who built literature out of life.{116}

LUIGI PIRANDELLO

Pirandello has written a great deal. In addition to the numerous plays by which he is rightly known, there are several novels and a large number of short stories—so large a number, in fact, that he is collecting them in a twenty-four volume edition under the title, Novelle per un anno—one for each day of the year. Five of the twenty-four volumes have been published so far—closely printed books of some three hundred pages each; but I find in them little of the Pirandello who is an important figure in Italian literature to-day. Despite his announcement in the preface that many of the stories are new, that all have been carefully retouched and many rewritten, they bear the brand of journalism. They rarely descend as low as the average American magazine story, but, for all the prolific inventiveness they reveal, they have something of the same monotony, adequate workmanship and lack of distinction. Nor is the significance of the thought or emotion often striking. Now and again one does get a hint of the Pirandello of the plays—in the extraordinary, almost wasteful (and often wasted) power of characterization, for example, or in the preoccupation with death—but these things{117} are obscured by the verbose pedestrian prose, quite without freshness. This lack of distinction is certainly not due to carelessness; rather, the tales seem heavy and laboured. Indeed, from all that I have read of Pirandello I am inclined to believe that it is only conversation, dramatic dialogue, that he can write well and freshly. There would be nothing surprising in this. It is notoriously rare for a good dramatist to be a good novelist or novellista. And I am not even convinced that the monotonous melancholy of the stories (somebody dies in almost every one) has much to do with their author’s predisposition to tragedy. The tragic ending is almost as much a convention in an Italian, as the happy ending in an American, story; and since in only a few of these tales have I felt the note of real poignancy and been even faintly moved, I am the more inclined to class their sadness as conventionality.

Those that deal with Pirandello’s own native Sicily have greater warmth, a hint of tenderness. Lontano, the story of a Norwegian sailor left, ill with typhoid, by his ship companions at the little town of Porto Empedocle, nursed by the niece of that absurd, delightful, old character, Don Paranza, a Sicilian ‘Vice Consul for Scandinavia,’ finally marrying her, and settling down to live in that sunburnt country, an eternal stranger to every one, including his wife, is genuinely touching. But the undistinguished prose in which it is too wordily told is like a dry field that should be burned over for{118} the sake of the fresh green grass struggling beneath.

The last stories in this volume (the fifth) are the best, hint more clearly at the Pirandello of the plays, at both his virtues and his defects; so it is just possible that the entire collection is being made chronologically (though nothing is said of any such plan in the preface), in which case, to judge them fairly, one ought, I suppose, to await the publication of the other nineteen volumes.

It would be unfair to blame these stories for lacking profundity of thought, since a story may of course have profound significance without actually expressing any thought at all, were it not that there is a great deal of philosophizing in them, and that often it is made the point of the story. Since this is so, it seems fair to note that the philosophizing is pretty superficial. Take, for instance, the story called Niente (which is far superior to most of the others because it is nearly all in dialogue). A hack doctor is awakened at three in the morning at the pharmacy where he is on duty, to attend a young man who has attempted to commit suicide. But on arrival at the horrible tenement-house in which the tragedy took place, he finds that the victim, dying, has been removed to a hospital. So the whole story is simply conversation—first between the doctor and the annoyed middle-class relative of the suicide, then between the doctor and the wretched inhabitants of the apartment in which the young man had lived.{119} Bit by bit through this dialogue the tragedy and its causes are revealed, with a skill worthy of that displayed in Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore. (Indeed, of this story a striking one-act play might easily be made). One would like the point to be merely the revelation of the obscure tragedy, with no more moral to it than to Kipling’s Without Benefit of Clergy—or with the tremendous moral of its not having one. But what, instead, do we get? The doctor’s philosophizing. The unfortunate young man (he says) had written verses, wanted to be a poet, dreamed of glory—and the daughter of the house was in love with him. Supposing he had lived, what would his dream of glory have come to? A poor useless book of verse. And his dream of love? ‘Your daughter! He’d have married your daughter!’ he cries to the irate dishevelled mistress of the house. ‘Oh, beautiful and adorned with all the virtues, I have no doubt, but still a woman, my dear lady, a woman! And after a little, good God! with children and misery, think what she’d have been! And the world, my dear woman, do you know what the world would have become for him? A house! This house!’ And the doctor goes out, muttering: ‘No books! No women! No house! Nothing!’

Now, despite its vividness, this is thin and superficial and, if taken as the moral, at least as inadequate as any other moral would have been to such a tragedy. It may perhaps be taken as an adequate moral if the point of the story{120} is not the young man’s tragedy, but the character of the doctor; but I fear that, instead, we have here Pirandello himself in a characteristic mood of hatred and disgust for grovelling life. In the last story in the book, La distruzione dell’uomo, you get the mood again, and the moralizing, unrelieved by a really possible, poignant tragedy. Here a young student murders a commonplace woman of forty-seven because she is about to have a child. She has been pregnant year after year before this, but each time has had a miscarriage. This time it is clear that the child will be born. And the student, in disgust for her, her husband, the squalid tenement-house they, and he, live in, and the squalid world beyond, murders the woman with her unborn child, feeling fiercely that he is murdering humanity itself, destroying Man.

A pity! Not only because there are a dozen moods that might be felt in considering that middle-aged couple, that distressing eighth-rate apartment-house, with its dirty dishevelled walls and ragged display of washing and the filthy children swarming in its courtyard, instead of the one, not very perceptive mood of disgust to which we are held; but also because in the expression of even this one mood Pirandello has here, as often elsewhere, overdone himself, so that positively one finishes the story in such a reaction of cheerfulness as almost to agree with dear Pippa’s favourite remark. There you had it all—a masterly picture of the house, of the quarter (that quarter of Rome has certainly{121} changed for the better of late years), and of the heavy elderly couple, she with vast distorted stomach, he with an only less vast one, making laboriously the daily walk prescribed for her by the doctor, out past the church of Sant’ Agnese and back again, out and back again. Why not let it go at that and leave the reader to feel what he pleases? Most readers, I think, would feel pathos in the solemn anxiety of those two to add one more inhabitant to that house and quarter—and world, if you like. But if disgust was all one could feel, that, too, he would surely feel more keenly if left to feel it undirected.

The best known of the novels, Il fu Mattia Pascal, first published some twenty years ago when Pirandello was still a comparatively young man, is better written than the short stories. Or is it? Perhaps it has, rather, a youthful brio that they lack, a kind of gusto that rushes one along through the dry heaps of words. And also it is told in the first person; which gives it an advantage. It is only in this gusto that the book is young, however. Its spirit is not young at all, but cool, rather hard and sophisticated—not in a callow way, but maturely. I like the moralizing in the novel as much as I dislike it in most of the short stories, partly because here it is a natural expression of the characters who indulge in it, partly because it is in itself often very suggestive; indeed, I am inclined to think that the moralizing is the best of the book. On the other hand, the most interesting thing is the plot, because in it one{122} discerns the as yet incoherent beginnings of an idea that, developed, has come to haunt Pirandello—the idea of the reality of illusion, and thus of the manifold nature of personality. In the plays one almost never gets away from some variation on this theme. Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore is hardly less frankly concerned with it than Vestire gli ignudi or Come prima, meglio di prima. But in the novel there is only the foreshadowing of the idea; it is certainly not made clear to the reader, and was almost equally certainly not yet clear to Pirandello himself; and the result is confusion.

Mattia Pascal is believed by his family and friends to have committed suicide. A body supposed to be his is discovered and formally buried. Taking advantage of this, he gives himself a new name, Adriano Meis, invents a past for himself, and sets out to live anew, free. But he finds that he cannot endure the emptiness of liberty any more than he could endure the chains in which he struggled when alive. He is sucked back into life, and eventually falls in love with a girl, Adriana, but cannot marry her because the man as whom she knows him is a fictitious man, with no papers, no stato civile, nothing. He—or, at least, the man he was before he died—has a wife already. So he ‘commits suicide’ a second time, becomes once more Mattia Pascal, and returns to his home—to find his wife long since married to his best friend, and with a baby. As far as I can make it out, what he then does is to live in a state{123} half-way between life and death. He leaves his wife to his friend, and becomes—calls himself—‘the late Mattia Pascal.’

Now this is all very unsatisfactory, not really worked out, and in that single sense ‘young.’ Whatever significance was intended remains obscure, because, I am convinced, it was obscure to the author. There is an abundance, a super-abundance, of ideas—enough, it must be admitted, to justify in part those critics who already twenty years ago found Pirandello ‘too cerebral.’ But my own objection is not that Mattia Pascal reasons about himself exceedingly at every moment, nor even that I cannot discern significance beneath the story, can only feel that it might have held some profound significance. A study of a man who reasons exceedingly is a quite legitimate subject for a novel, and it is not essential that a study of character should pretend to be anything more. My objection is that, even granting the contradictions that go to make up any individual, Mattia Pascal does not hold together. He is shown us at the beginning as an impetuous young man of considerable force of character; yet, when freed from his unpleasant surroundings, and, by a run of luck at Monte Carlo, the possessor of 82,000 lire, he sets out to live frugally on this sum for the rest of his life, doing nothing at all. Would he really have behaved in this way? The explanation, that he could never have a stato civile, is weak. He was not so possessed of love for his own country as to have to live{124} there. He could have gone anywhere else, almost (this being before the war), and have been taken at his word. Indeed, before his stroke of luck, he had seriously thought of emigrating to America. Neither was he a sick soul burdened by life and glad to be free from it. He was merely, quite justifiably, burdened by the conditions of his own personal environment. He might well, being curious and cynical, have done for a short time what he did; but two months of it would have bored into action the Mattia Pascal we had met. Again, he is hard to the point of callousness, if not of brutality; that we see at once. Nevertheless, in his way, he did love the girl he married, and that he was not incapable of intense emotion we see from his grief at the death of his child. Then, allowing for all possible contradictions, is it conceivable that he could have so gaily let his wife imagine him dead and, if not grieve for him, at least remain in misery, while here was he with 82,000 lire in his pocket? He might have done it—but so blithely? Again, we are shown him really in love with the gentle and pathetic Adriana. Yet he can simulate a second suicide and leave her, at any rate, to an agony of grief. Why? Because as Adriano Meis he has no real existence, is but a shadow. He has no stato civile, and can’t marry her; while, if he is Mattia Pascal, he can’t marry her, since he has a wife already. Nonsense! He could have told Adriana the truth, broken the whole tenuous chain of reasoning, and let her decide whether{125} she would escape abroad with him and marry him as Adriano Meis. A hundred to one that she would have done so despite her religion! But if she had not, she would have been infinitely less unhappy than he made her by what he did do. There is a hardness, a cruelty, about all this that is due more to the author than to the protagonists. It is as though he would not let them alone. They are flesh and blood, and he will treat them as marionettes—for the purpose of his thesis. And, to save me, I cannot make out what his thesis really is. It might be: that there is no such thing as freedom, no escape from life; or that liberty is more unbearable than slavery; or that everything is illusion. It does not seem to me to be clearly any one of these things or any other—least of all what Pirandello himself indicates in a short essay written for the new edition of the novel: that people are the marionettes of their own idea of themselves until that idea becomes intolerable and they tear off the mask and reveal their naked faces. This is, in truth, an idea that underlies the plays, and Pirandello, writing to-day, may now read it back into what he wrote twenty years ago, but I challenge any one to discover it in the novel itself. A perplexing, unsatisfactory, frustrated book, but closer than the short stories, in power, to the plays.

There are two of the plays that I have neither seen nor read, but, among all the others, L’uomo, la bestia e la virtù stands by itself. It is true that here you get, and with a vengeance, the idea{126} expressed in that supplementary essay to the novel—about the burattinaio who makes people imitate puppets until at moments of intense feeling they break loose and become natural; but there the resemblance ends. For this play is a wild, magnificent, breathless farce. Yes ...? The exasperating thing in writing about Pirandello is that one must qualify any such definite statement as that. The play is, indeed, a rollicking farce—for the audience; but for the characters it is a desperate drama coming to the sheer edge of tragedy. Now in a typical farce of the French variety (to which, in its exceedingly risky plot, its tricks and unexpected turns, this play might well belong) the spectator feels that the characters are only playing at suffering, in order to heighten for the audience the farcical effect. Here they are in desperate earnest, in anguish. Once grant the absurd situation, which, after all, is conceivably possible, and their agony is not even overdone. They are real people struggling in the midst of a farce situation. And, with this, cruelty is deliberately, maliciously forced upon the spectator by the author. For the more acutely the characters suffer, the more violent becomes the spectator’s mirth. There is something—I don’t know—sadistic about it, and afterward one is left troubled, uncomfortable and a little resentful toward the author. It is as though one had laughed at a man who had fallen down in the street, when really he had been seriously hurt by his fall. And also what is one to think of{127} a farce in which things as profoundly true as the following are said? ‘A real home, with all the sweet painful associations that the word “home” stirs within us, is what others—our fathers and mothers—made for us with their thoughts and their solicitude. And their home was not that one, but the one their parents had made for them.’ ... ‘You look at others from the outside, and they don’t interest you. What are they for you? Nothing! Images passing in front of you! Inside, inside, you must feel them, identifying yourself with them, testing their suffering by making it your own!... Oh, I know! The passions of others, even the saddest, the most poignant, make every one laugh. Of course! You haven’t ever felt them, or else, accustomed to mask them (because you are all stuffed with lies), you no longer recognize them in a poor man like me who can’t hide and control them.’

What a qualification to have to add to the innocent remark that L’uomo, la bestia e la virtù is a roaring farce and unlike the other plays! It is certainly unlike them in a technical way, however. For, after a brief and skilful exposition, it rushes on toward a distant developed conclusion. In this it differs radically from all the other Pirandello plays with which I am acquainted. They move backward, rather than forward. No one has made such an art of exposition as Pirandello. Perhaps no one before him grasped its possibilities. Remove the deceitful robe of cleverness, and the exposition{128} of most plays is revealed as nowise different than in the days when two servants were disclosed, dusting, and conversing about the imminent return of young mistress who had been ... etc. There is always the feeling of haste, that this must be got over with, so that the audience will know where things stand and the play can begin. Now this is totally unlike real life (which is what Pirandello is concerned with), where all that has gone before to create a certain situation is richer and more complicated than the development of that situation in two hours and a half can possibly become. Pirandello throws you into the midst of a situation which you begin to apprehend as interesting (absolutely as things might be in real life if you entered a room full of people you did not know); then, as he digs down beneath it, turning up other and other facts that have gone before, as intensely dramatic; and, finally, as itself almost the climax. (How magnificently this is done in Come prima, meglio di prima!) In fact, in the best of Pirandello’s plays the exposition is all but everything. The initial situation, that looked so simple at first, is revealed at last as only one step this side of the catastrophe. At the end, that one step forward is taken, and the curtain falls. Certainly this is true of the almost unbearably painful Vestire gli ignudi (called, heaven knows why, a comedy!) and of what is perhaps Pirandello’s masterpiece, Enrico IV.

{129}

All of the plays are thesis plays. The ‘this-fable-teaches ...’ is never absent, and there is no doubt that it is with this, the moral, that Pirandello started. Well, many lesser artists than he have started out with a moral, and then, blessedly, thrown it overboard half-way on the voyage. Not Pirandello! He clings to it, worries it, and makes human sacrifice on its altar. Perhaps he would not do this, were it not, as I have already suggested, that his theses are always one thesis, variations on an idea that haunts him. As well as I can make it out (for it is a perplexing elusive thing), the idea is that illusion is essential to life, which last, bare and unadorned, would be unendurable. Vestire gli ignudi—clothe the naked. And that all the varieties of illusion in regard to personality gain, as soon as thought, an objective life of their own. What am I? I am my naked self, but I am, with equal truth, my own very different idea of myself, and the varying ideas that all those who know me have of me. (To say nothing of the different person I was yesterday and of the still different person I shall be to-morrow). Each one of these ideas has an objective life of its own, and gets often in the way of the others; which makes of any individual a fluctuating insecure complexity. Given this terrifying conception and its intensity in Pirandello’s mind, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore is revealed as not in the least a tour de force, but as an allegorical expression of the passionately felt Idea. Pirandello never goes in for tours de force; he is too desperately in earnest.

Now this (I trust I have not done it too much{130} injustice) is extremely interesting, and plays written around it, with puppets working it out, would in any case be more stimulating than those written around, say, Brieux’s thin theses. But the heart-breaking thing is that Pirandello has genuine creative genius, and that genius and a thesis cannot live together any better than youth and crabbed age; sooner or later the former becomes too strong for the latter. He sets out to create characters that shall prove his point, and, lo! the puppets spring into real life, become actual men and women, while he, the burattinaio, continues to flog them onward along the path of the Idea. The result is, in almost every case, an exasperated sense of frustration in the observer, the conviction that an abstract idea has killed something true.

Consider the play called Come prima, meglio di prima. Here, once again, you get the now matured idea of a person who is believed to be dead, but who, living under another name, comes to think of his first self as real, objective, apart from his living self; something to hate, or be sorry for, or jealous of. Fulvia has left her husband and their three-year-old daughter thirteen years since, and gone to the bad. The reasons for this behaviour are only hinted at, but appear adequate. (One never doubts the truth of the beginning of a Pirandello play). The husband, a distinguished surgeon, now discovers Fulvia, who has attempted to commit suicide in an obscure village pension, saves her{131} life by a brilliant operation, and, to atone for his faults and give her back her daughter (who has grown up believing her to be dead), takes her home as his second wife. There, however, she is hated by her own daughter, Livia, as an interloper and an offence to the memory of the dead mother. Also Livia soon divines that this step-mother has been no better than she should be, and, being unable on investigation to find any evidence of marriage, finally concludes that the woman is merely her father’s mistress. A noble and tragic situation; a strange case, if you like, but none the less significant for that, since about it cluster the intensest human emotions. But how does Pirandello use it? For a thesis point! When, outraged by the accusation of her own daughter—all the more that it is an implied insult to the newly-born baby-girl—the wife breaks loose and tells Livia the truth, ‘Ah, now you can’t stay, now that you’re alive!’ cries the husband, in effect. ‘If you live, you can’t stay here; you could only have stayed on condition you remained dead!’ Fulvia admits this, triumphantly, and goes away with her month-old child to live in abject poverty with a casual lover from her old courtesan days, for whom she cares nothing. It is enough to make one cry with rage—not because it is an unhappy ending, but because it is so untrue. Why must she go away, just as before, save (meglio di prima) for her child? Once Livia’s illusions about her mother are shattered, is it any worse for her to live with{132} her mother than without her? There is nothing noxious to the girl in Fulvia. They have lived together for the past ten months. Then why? Because Pirandello will have it so for the sake of his thesis. And would she have gone? Would she have taken her baby into poverty under the protection of a man who is so close to being mad that one is never quite sure on which side of the line he stands? Of course she would not. And her husband is not a bit harder for her to endure than he has been for the past ten months—less hard, really, now that she has her baby.

Oh, well, that is always the way with Pirandello. Hardly a one of his ‘inevitable’ situations that could not be solved by a burly Philistine intrusion of common sense. But at the moment, on the stage, one does not always perceive this, so patiently and skilfully have the strands of the thesis been woven together. The worst of it is that in this play, and in others, not only the final solution is false. (That would be a comparatively small thing to pardon). Like the camel in the tent, falsity has been edging its way in almost since the beginning. The characters reason and subtilize unendurably. Now, in that interesting supplementary essay to Il fu Mattia Pascal, Pirandello replies to the critics who complained that his characters always reasoned too much and so were inhuman, that reason is precisely what is human, what men have over beasts, and that never do men reason so intensely (and whether rightly or wildly, what does it{133} matter?) as when they suffer, because they are trying to get at the cause of their suffering. Profoundly true, without a doubt. So far as I am concerned, I welcome eagerly his characters’ reasoning or raving—so long as it is theirs. But what his critics really feel, I think, is that in such plays as Come prima, meglio di prima, Vestire gli ignudi, La vita che ti diedi, the characters are often constrained to repeat lifelessly Pirandello’s own reasoning. And this is doubly unfortunate, since, curiously, they seem to us to have such an amazing life of their own. For it is an extraordinary fact that, while you feel Pirandello’s presence in his plays as the burattinaio, as a perhaps rather cruel and disdainful personality behind the scenes, you never identify him with any of the characters. Sometimes he talks for them, and then for a little while their life is suspended, or weakened; for they (and this should delight him, as a proof of his thesis) are stronger, more alive, than he. They are terribly alive. Their words (when they are not his words) lay bare atrociously their throbbing painful emotions. They are so real that I think I prefer reading the plays to seeing them acted, splendidly built for the stage though they are, not to have the personalities of the actors trespass upon those of the characters themselves. What have they to do with theses? Yes, people do indeed reason when they suffer; but one recognizes the true note. One knows when it is they who reason, and when it is only pallid he.{134}

Enrico IV, however, I admire without reservation. It seems to me a very great play indeed, this tragic and terrible story of a young man who, costumed as the Emperor Henry IV of Germany, is thrown from his horse during a carnival cavalcade, and suffers a lesion of the brain which makes him lose his mind and thereafter believe himself the mediaeval Emperor as whom he was travestied. So, at least, his friends and relations believe, through the care of one of whom, his nephew, he has been confined, during the twenty years since his accident, in a solitary villa magnificently decorated in simulation of the period in which he fancies himself living, and waited upon by valets in costume and by four servants employed to represent ‘Secret Counsellors’ of Henry IV’s. Hither, at the beginning of the play, with a scheme that they hope may restore his mind, come the woman whom as a young girl he had loved, her daughter who is a picture of what she then was, her lover the Baron Belcredi, her daughter’s fiancé, and a doctor. But the truth, which we learn toward the end of the second act, and the others (save only the ‘Secret Counsellors’) later, is that eight years since, twelve after the accident, ‘Henry IV’ (no other name is given him in the play) recovered his mind. But when he came to understand what had happened—that he himself had grown middle-aged and grey-haired as Henry IV, that there was no place left for him in the life of others, which had gone on without him, that the young{135} girl he had nobly loved had married, coarsened, taken as a lover the odious Belcredi—he resolved not to return to that life (where, even before his accident, his cynical worldly acquaintances contemptuously called him mad because he did not conform to their empty society standards), but to live on in his own fictitious mediaeval life—no madder than the other. Only now, in a spasm of disgust for these people coming before him in costume, for the woman he loved so purely bringing her hateful lover into his presence, for all the lies, lies, lies, with which, far more than his ‘mad’ life, their ‘sane’ lives are filled, does he reveal the truth. At the end, the willed fiction in which he lives is so strong that under its influence he kills Belcredi.

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 Henry IV is 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 the{136} living. 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 Act II.

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 Henry IV say; but it is Henry IV, 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. Their{137} objectivity 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 in Enrico IV, Marco Mauri in Come 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 a{138} life 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: ‘So that is 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.{139}

THE FRENCH

Sometimes I 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?{140}

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, but{141} reasonable 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, a beau 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 become rentiers. No French government either dares or desires to{142} tax 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 a dot she 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 know{143} little, 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 the {144}English 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 you have said 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 or vice 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 are{145} still 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 fetters{146} of 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 in Pinafore—‘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 Frenchma{147}n’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 prosody{148} is 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 and{149} then 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 Bramble occasionally crosses the line into national caricature; but it is at least caricature based on knowledge, not wild unrelated caricature like Abel Hermant’s. As for Ariel, 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 at Ariel. 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 at{150} the 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,{151} 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.{152}

PORNOGRAPHY

The abridged 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’s Dodo it could be faintly discerned, while to-day it shines unmistakably in such books as Compton Mackenzie’s Sylvia Scarlett or 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 going{153} to 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 nothing but their 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.{154}

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 Wind contains some of the daintiest pornography ever written, done in so candid and virginal a way{155} that 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 for Jurgen, its pornographic passages are as fresh and delightful as the Contes Drolatiques themselves. I have no patience (and I dare say Mr. Cabell has none) with those persons who defend Jurgen by 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’s Ferdinand Count Fathom or in Richardson’s nasty Pamela. (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 good{156} pornography 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) and read about 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 he{157} would 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 mis{158}chievous 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 art{159} makes 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, rather{160} than 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,{161} 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’s Justine, or Cleland’s Memoirs 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 Sad{162}e’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 that can be 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 in Zaza), 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, one{163} may 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,{164} 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 it{165} did 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 risky sous-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—but it 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.{166}

SUCCESS

It is 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.{167}

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 as A Message to Garcia is 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 midst{168} of 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,{169} 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-{170}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?{171}

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, success is that sanction.

It is difficult to feel this condition of affairs as other than harmful. For while standardization of dress and behaviour are negligible{172} evils, 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.{173}

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 you buy anything 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.{174} 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 the{175} very 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 are{176} considered 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. There are those 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 a{177} word. 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 of{178} reviews.’ 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 pertness{179} or 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.{180}

BLACK-AND-WHITE

More than 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 exactly IT, but that IT was 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, of{181} malt, 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’s Outline you will immediately know all about history; if you read the Book of Etiquette you 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.{182}

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 ever{183} seen 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 Comes may 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 they{184} have 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;{185} 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 face{186} resembled 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 circle{187} or 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.

Diplomats, the choicest scapegoats to-day, are accused, not without justice, of playing callously with the lives of millions; using them like pawns on a chess-board is, I believe, the accepted figure. But what else, given the power, should we ourselves do, who live equally among abstractions, and are capable of reading the account of an earthquake in Colombia and then turning without emotion to the history of the latest movie scandal in Los Angeles? I do not say that we ought to feel emotion in learning that thousands have been killed in an earthquake. The lack of imagination displayed in our failure to do so is doubtless a necessary protective trait. Without it, to read any newspaper would be anguish; and we should, like those imaginative persons called cowards, die many times before our death. The intensest suffering of Jesus, the Man, must have been not His crucifixion, but His lifelong sympathy for the suffering of others. It is only this lack of imagination, plus the tradition in which{188} they are bred, that makes diplomats what they notoriously are. There has been a good deal of amateur diplomacy of late years; yet one is not aware of any great improvement on the old, either in results or in methods.

Here, suddenly, however roundabout the way may have seemed, we find ourselves back at the subject of self and knowledge of self. We (and by ‘we’ I no longer mean only ‘we Americans,’ whose world, after all, is but a little more crudely black-and-white than that of other peoples)—we lack the imagination to project ourselves into others’ lives chiefly because we know so little about ourselves. We may feel pity, even shed tears, at the sight of a man crushed by a motor car, because we have all felt physical pain; but we remain cold toward the feelings of a man caught in embezzlement, because we are unaware of the latent possibility of embezzlement in ourselves, given sufficiently impelling circumstances.

Yet even were we gifted with imagination, we could learn directly almost nothing of other people. There is a wall that shuts us off. We can know so infinitely little about any of them that it is a wonder we trouble to divide such strangers into friends and enemies; and, indeed, as one grows older he finds his enmities dwindling to indifference, and his friendships fading or congealing into mere habit. In that very imperfect book, L’Enfer, Barbusse’s observer, watching (with a desperate, almost sick desire to get inside other people’s lives), through the{189} hole in his chamber wall, what takes place in the room beyond, perceives only the impenetrable loneliness of the individual—in birth, in death, even in love.

We are always being told that we should go directly to life for real knowledge, not get it at second hand from books. And this is no doubt true enough for certain impressions. What it means to be hungry, for instance, cannot be learned from the printed page; nor can vivid impressions of nature be gained in that way. But I suspect that we can learn more about other men and women from books than from direct intercourse with them. In a book the writer has, presumably, set out to say something long meditated, and has deleted all excrescences in the saying. Such chatter as we indulge in, and listen to, when, instead, we talk directly with our neighbours!—aimless, pointless, its rare bright spots extinguished in a sea of words! Read the court stenographer’s record of any trial, where, at least, the questions and answers are supposed to be held rigidly to a certain subject, and then consider what the dictagraph report of any purposeless conversation would be like! But that is by the way. The important point is that one learns a little about others from books because from any worthwhile book one learns a little about oneself. Just as surely as in a novel, an essay, or a poem the writer reveals himself, so surely do I in reading it reveal myself, weighing the author’s opinions, likening them to or contrasting them{190} with my own, and, to the extent of that self-revelation, perceiving his. Thus, it is better to read difficult books than easy ones, not as puritanism teaches, because whatever is unpleasant is good for us, but because the fact that a book is difficult for me means that in my response to it I am forced down into obscure and unknown regions of myself. On the other hand, there are for every one, I suppose, certain books that he is permanently unable to read, certain authors who remain for him as unknowable as any one met in flesh-and-blood. I, for example, simply cannot read Lavengro or get to know Borrow. Nowhere in me is there any response to his thoughts and emotions. It is true that I feel a vivid distaste for his style, which perhaps ought to be something to start on; but it does not seem to be enough to melt my icy indifference to the man and his work. I can learn nothing of myself from Lavengro, and so I can learn nothing of Borrow. It is a pity. My world might be by just so much the richer, less black-and-white.

Given this profound isolation of the individual, his inability to learn of others except through learning of himself, it is hard at first to understand men’s passion for gregariousness. But if you will listen to almost any conversation you will presently note that each individual in the loquacious group is but asserting his own opinions, the more blatantly the less he knows what they really are. In primitive circles this is done frankly, often with every one talking{191} at once: ‘What I say is——,’ ‘Now my notion is——,’ ‘Well, now, just listen to me——.’ It is as though all were shouting: ‘How black-and-white the world is!’ Among more civilized persons there is greater suavity, a pretence of listening to others’ opinions while awaiting an opportunity to express one’s own. But it is only a pretence. Still, there is something in civilization. For in very, very civilized circles conversation becomes a dainty game. Nothing really felt is ever said, and ideas are played with as amusing toys; which is both sensible and delightful.

But if we would really learn about our fellow-men, and exchange our silly black-and-white world for a subtler, richer, kinder one, we had best go and live alone on mountain tops. Ten years of such solitude would give us a deeper, tenderer and more tolerant understanding of humanity than a lifetime of jostling contacts in the market-place.

THE END