The Project Gutenberg eBook of Opinions, by Claude Washburn
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Title: Opinions
Author: Claude Washburn
Release Date: April 5, 2023 [eBook #70465]
Language: English
Produced by: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OPINIONS ***
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
OPINIONS
_by_
CLAUDE WASHBURN
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
_First published 1926_
Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. CONSTABLE LTD.
at the University Press, Edinburgh
TO
T. R. YBARRA
Of the following essays, ‘Zenith’ and ‘Black-and-White’ originally
appeared in _The Freeman_, ‘Sophistication’ and ‘The French’ in
_The Nineteenth Century and After_. My thanks are due to the
editors of both publications for permission to reprint those essays
here.
C. C. W.
PREFACE
_Which should by all means be read, being quite as much an essay as any
one of those that follow, and, if not the best, at any rate the
shortest; so that it affords a swift and almost painless means of
determining whether it is worth while to borrow the book._
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,
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 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.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE ix
ON LIVING ABROAD 1
ZENITH 25
DISILLUSIONMENT 40
SOPHISTICATION 53
MEDITATIONS ABOUT WOMEN 69
LEGEND 85
TRUTH AND FICTION IN ITALY 97
LUIGI PIRANDELLO 116
THE FRENCH 139
PORNOGRAPHY 152
SUCCESS 166
BLACK-AND-WHITE 180
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
Americans live at maturity in the house or even in the town where they
were born that those who do are made the subject of quaint, rather
emasculated, dialect stories in our more expensive monthly magazines.
There is an appearance of national life because so many thousands are
doing the same thing at the same time--reading the same advertisements,
wearing the same kind of clothes, going to the same movies; but they are
not consciously performing the same duties. In existence we are a
gregarious nation, but existence is nothing; in real life we are
intensely lonely, isolated individuals--as much so as if we lived in
Europe. Perhaps this would be as it should be, a foundation for
individual achievement, if we would recognize it and rejoice in it. But
no nation in the world is so wistfully desirous of a unity that, despite
appearances, it has not got. All sorts of judgments, mostly idiotic,
have been passed on Americans by Europeans, but there is at least one
which is profoundly true: that Americans want pathetically to be liked.
This is at once a sign of weakness in us and a proof of frustration; it
reveals the fact that we have not the unity we crave. We huddle together
for comfort, but, because we are doing childish insignificant things, we
get no closer for that. It is true that individuals can never get very
close to one another. Still, two men even at opposite ends of the earth
may exchange a few lines of writing that can profoundly influence the
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 individualism, less herd spirit,
greater divergence of opinion. Individuals appear less like one another,
and eccentricities that would almost ostracize men from their
disapproving fellows in America are in France and Italy accepted with a
smile. The sensitive American, especially if he is one of the many who
have suffered bitterly at school and college and dully afterward from
the intolerable oppression of herd standards, breathes in this relative
freedom deeply with a sense of sudden release. It is true that after a
while, if he is observant, he perceives that the liberty is not, as
perhaps he first thought it, something deep affecting the fundamentals
of life, but, rather, a freedom from unnecessary rules for existence. He
may even come to explain it as the result of a number of very
superficial things--the comparative absence of standardizing
advertisements, for example, the lack of universally read magazines, the
smaller size of newspapers, the greater localism of feeling--though
whether such things are cause or result remains a question to him. At
any rate, even when estimated at only its proper importance, the sense
of freedom still remains as something gracious.
Curiously enough, as our expatriate learns to understand better this
delightful surface freedom, he begins to discern beneath it, in things
that have to do not with existence but with life, some very rigid
laws--more rigid than any _beneath_ the surface in his own
country--recognized unshirked duties. The greatest of these is the
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,
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 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 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. 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. 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 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.
* * * * *
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 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 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 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, New Jersey, or in Superior, Wisconsin, something of
tremendous importance would seem to me to have disappeared from my life,
and a background of serenity that enables me happily to do the little
that I can do as well as is possible for me would become a background to
be at any moment consciously subdued before I should be able to achieve
anything at all.
‘But all these things.’ a quite justifiably impatient reader might by
now object, ‘are no better than theories. You, who are by way of being a
writer, like and are able to live abroad, and it amuses you to depict
this as advantageous. But is it really? Let us have facts. Discarding
those degenerate rose-garden Americans, are there others to whom living
abroad has been of actual benefit?’
Well, if by ‘benefit’ is meant actual benefit to achievement, I honestly
cannot say. I know, or know of, a number of American writers and
painters who live in France or Italy, and I cannot truthfully claim that
I think any of their work as good as the best that is being done by some
in America itself. But that, unfortunately, proves nothing. Their
number, of course, is very small compared with the number of those at
home, and among these last only a handful are achieving work of
consequence. The significant question (which it is quite impossible to
answer) is whether these transplanted Americans are painting better
pictures or writing better books than, given the limitations of their
talent, they would have been able to write or paint had they stayed at
home.
If, on the other hand, the word ‘benefit’ is to be taken in a wider
sense than simply that of creative achievement, I can at once answer the
question in the affirmative, without (thank heaven!) having to confine
myself to artists and authors. One does not come readily to know these
expatriates of the best sort. They are isolated individuals who value
their isolation. (It is the rose-garden people who at first acquaintance
press you, with a pathetic wistfulness, to come to tea or dinner at
their villas). But some, to my good fortune, I do know, and I hear quiet
rumours of others--individuals scattered here and there, not all of them
by any means writers, painters or composers, but solitary absorbed
students of this or that period or local fragment of a period, or even
only (_only?_) of the intense modern life about them. Useless? I do not
think so. Being, necessarily, of independent means (though it is
astounding on how slender an income they are often content to live), it
is not essential for them to go on making money. Yet that, if they had
remained in America, is probably what the force of public opinion would
have compelled them to do. Instead of studying the development of the
Commedia dell’ Arte or the annals of the Medici or the history of the
Risorgimento or the development of co-operatives in pre-Fascista Italy,
they would have been selling bonds or juggling with real estate. It is
not probable that one would have found them useful members of more
serious professions, since it was precisely for that 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 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. To tell the truth, I do not care in the least which they are. By
all American Standards Etheredge would, I suppose, be accounted a
failure, since he can hardly ever sell his pictures, and then for a
wretched price. And for that, too, I do not care in the least. It is in
his personality that Etheredge seems to me really important.
Even fourteen years ago, at thirty, he had an arresting personality.
There was something at once quiet and eager about him, as though he were
questioning everything without quarrelling with anything, which struck
me as rare. But I should not at that time have set him down as a
success. He had not yet found himself. He was not yet sufficient to
himself. Now, after fourteen years, he is. I know no one else who is so
completely rounded a personality, who accepts so simply the external
world and is so little troubled by it. He has built around himself a
wall not of indifference but of acceptance, against which waves break
unavailingly, within which he lives with his whole self, serenely,
gently and richly.
All this that I feel about Etheredge I express badly. I cannot
successfully put it into words. I make him sound smug and even selfish,
whereas he has come very near to abolishing self--and thus has grown the
more. The best I can do is to give up the attempt at portrayal and fall
back on a few tangible results. Thus, I am not alone in my estimate of
Etheredge. Quiet and unassuming though he is, people of distinction
gravitate toward him. He has, to my knowledge, exerted a profound
influence on three creative artists of international fame and upon a
number of other individuals of even greater sensitiveness and fineness
of character if of less effective talent. Again, if financial disaster
were to overtake me to-morrow, Etheredge would, I know, share with me
whatever he has. But it is not that which is of importance (he was
always generous), but the fact that, though his income is very small,
this would honestly seem to him now no hardship, of no importance. Yet
again, neither he nor his wife has ever made a single sacrifice to
comfort. They continue to live in one after another of the most
inaccessible places in all Italy--places with no water, places with no
light, places with toilet facilities straight out of the Stone Age. To
plan a Tour of Discomfort I could hardly do better than enumerate the
villages where they have lived. If this were ever for them an act of
heroism, if they ever gave an impression of struggling bravely against
heavy odds for the sake of the Higher Life, I should consider such
behaviour with distaste. But they never do. They simply ignore the
discomfort. All that mattered to them was that each of these places was
a place of singular beauty and interest. 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 exasperate me at times. I cannot,
for instance, understand both his and his wife’s failure to learn the
language. Their Italian is distressing. Now Italian shopkeepers and
servants are no worse than those or other countries--if anything, I
think, a little better, being capable of extraordinary acts of
generosity toward suddenly impoverished clients--but undoubtedly their
dominant thought in the presence of strange and presumably wealthy
foreigners living, heaven knows why, in their midst, and with difficulty
stammering mistakenly a few phrases of the language, is that the Lord
has delivered these into their hands. Accordingly, Etheredge and his
wife have been the victims of a long series of minor frauds and
peculations. I do not know why this should annoy me, but it does. It
does not annoy them; they disregard it.
Similarly, I am at times annoyed by Etheredge’s indifference to the
social movements that swirl madly around us all. It is, for instance,
impossible for me to watch the progress of Fascismo coolly. I feel
grudging admiration for the machine, resentment at the suppression of
free speech, bitterness at the cynical pretence of constitutionalism. I
cannot, in other words, keep Fascismo out of my life, any more than I
can keep out the problems of international relations, German indemnities
and the war debts. Etheredge can. He scarcely, I believe, thinks about
these things at all; certainly he does not think about them
passionately.
In this, I know at heart, I am wrong and he 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, 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.
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 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, 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
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
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, 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; 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 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 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
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 women’s attitude toward the men
was equally pleasant. But men and women seemed to have nothing in
common. They often did things together, played golf or bridge or tennis
or even went on long canoe-trips, but they did not think together. They
did not even appear to be united by sex-attraction. One simply did not
feel, not ever, the haunting presence of that restless vivifying
emotion. Zenith was uncannily, horribly cool. How in the world, I kept
wondering, did babies get born here? Still, they did, and their mothers,
with quite inadequate help, looked after them admirably. For real
amusement the men liked to get off by themselves, have dinner, drink,
and play poker or bridge. They were continually giving small parties of
this sort in some private dining-room of the Zenith Club. At one which I
attended a discussion of wives arose, the model wife being esteemed the
one who cheerfully let her husband go out any or every evening. On this
same evening a mixed dinner-party was being given in the ladies’
dining-room of the club, and when it was over the young men of that
party drifted into our smaller room for a few minutes. They sniffed up
rather wistfully the doggy atmosphere that pervades a stag-party and
helped themselves to drinks from the bottles on the sideboard. ‘And
where are you going now?’ one of us inquired. ‘Up to Jim’s house to play
bridge.’ ‘Think of it!’ exclaimed my host pityingly, as the victims to
sex filed out. ‘They’re going to Jim’s house--to play bridge--with
women!’
This absence of sex-attraction in Zenith gatherings was only one
expression of a lack that in course of time seemed to me almost
insupportable--the lack of thrill. Everything was too quiet, too even,
too reasonable. Nobody seemed ever to feel or think anything
passionately. The key was low, pulled down, like the decoration of the
houses, which was usually in good taste but so very sober and
restrained. These people, I said to myself, must have some emotional
outlet; what is it?
Well, the young men, no doubt, found an outlet in business. For it must
be remembered that among all these men there was not one professional
idler. It was one of the accepted conventions that a man must work. Some
of them were idlers by nature and worked, I dare say, as little as
possible; most of them worked almost fiercely, though not during such
long hours as had the men of their fathers’ generation. And they drank
hard at their stag-parties. I heard of one or two disreputable
road-houses in the country near-by, so somewhere in Zenith
sex-attraction did exist, but it existed as something outside the magic
circle. So far as I was able to learn, very few of the young men I knew
frequented those places. Their outlet was not women; they seemed
strangely uninterested in women; they did not even talk about them at
the stag-parties.
But what of the women, the younger women, themselves? They appeared so
cool, so reasonable, so sure of themselves, and so gracious, that 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 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 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.
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 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 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,
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 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, 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 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:
_Il General Cadorna_
_Scrisse a la Regina:_
_‘Se vuol veder Trieste_
_Si compri una cartolina.’_
_Ah! Ah! Ah!_
_Ah! Ah! Ah!_
(_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, 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!’
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 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 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 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.
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).
_Lady Pynte liked young men to be Healthy and Normal; Mrs. Ammon
preferred them to be Original. Lady Pynte liked Boys to be Boys;
Mrs. Ammon didn’t mind if they were girls so long as they were
Original. Lady Pynte insisted on Working For the Welfare of the
People at Large and Not just for Our Own Little Class, she played
bridge with a bantering tongue and a Borgia heart, she maintained
that the best place to buy shoes was Fortnum and Mason’s, and if
she saw you innocently taking the air of a sunny morning she would
say: ‘You are not looking at all well, my good young man. Why don’t
you take some Clean, Healthy exercise? You ought to be Riding.’
That was why one maintained a defensive alliance with one’s haddock
rather than do the manly thing and dance with Lady Pynte. She would
say one ought to be riding, and for four years I had hidden from
Lady Pynte the fact that I did not know how to ride. I simply did
not dare to confess to Lady Pynte that I could not ride. I had
already tried to pave the way to that dénouement by confessing that
I came from the lower classes, but she did not appear to think that
any class could be so Low as that._
* * * * *
_Being near Tietjens she lifted her plate, which contained two cold
cutlets in aspic and several leaves of salad; she wavered a little
to one side and, with a circular motion of her hand, let the whole
contents fly at Tietjens’ head. She placed the plate on the table
and drifted slowly towards the immense mirror over the fireplace._
_‘I’m bored,’ she said. ‘Bored! Bored!’_
* * * * *
_‘If,’ Sylvia went on with her denunciation, ‘you had once in our
lives said to me: “You whore! You bitch! You killed my mother. May
you rot in hell for it” ... you might have done something to bring
us together.’_
_Tietjens said:_
_‘That’s, of course, true.’_
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 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 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 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
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.
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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 insensitive 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
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
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?
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.
_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 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 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; 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 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.
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, 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
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.
_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.
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 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 heaven’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 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.
_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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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?
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
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
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 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 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
expression 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, 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. 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 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’ 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.
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 ‘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 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!’
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 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, 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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_.
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 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
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 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 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.
_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 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 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 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 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.
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?
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 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 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 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
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 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
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 Frenchman’s persistent cultivation of his own
garden and refusal to allow himself to be intrigued by the vast variety
of exotic plants to be found elsewhere. He does know his own garden
better than any of the rest of us know ours. And it is true that wide
acquaintance with the varying minds of many different groups often leads
to sterility, a poised inaction.
Often, but not always. Here it seems to me that the French sacrifice a
possible rare greatness to a moderate average of success. One admires
French achievement for being so French, and yet, even while admiring, is
faintly dissatisfied that it is not something other than that, and
greater. One wearies of so much perfection. It does not seem an adequate
interpretation of a chaotic world. French art is noble; yet it has never
produced a Tolstoy, a Wagner, a Shakespeare, or a Michelangelo. It is
not universal enough; it is too French. At an earlier day, when it was
still but half formed, it came perhaps closest to such heroic stature in
Rabelais.
Probably more than any other one factor, it is their language that cuts
the French off from other peoples and renders them so circumscribed. For
it is, when spoken, very different from other languages. The whole
system of voice production is different. A foreigner with no knowledge
of any language save his own might mistake Spanish for Italian or
Italian for Spanish, but he could not possibly mistake either for
French. Its system of prosody 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 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
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, 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.
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 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.
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 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
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 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 mischievous sprites, the malicious
imps who make faces from behind trees then vanish with a burst of clear
laughter.
This gay hide-and-seek elusiveness is the precise spirit of pornography.
It is always saying one thing while pretending to say another. Why the
pretence of something to be something else is art, I don’t profess to
know, and of course it is not great art. But pornography lays no claim
to be anything but one of the minor arts--and that is what the minor
arts all do. In architecture it is no doubt a mistake for a railway
station to look like a cathedral, but in fine cooking it is proper for a
potato to look like a rose. So--perhaps even especially--with
pornography. For it must be remembered that those few facts of sex from
which pornography derives are solid, stern and tragically intense. So
there is all the more reason why pornography, playing delicately above
them, but bound to them none the less, should adopt every possible
artifice to display its iridescent lightness. Almost alone among the
arts, it runs no danger in this--as does poetry or painting; it can
never become thin or empty, since its feet are anchored in those eternal
facts. The Siegfried theme beneath the leaping flickering fire-music.
Given this foundation (to say nothing of the stupid opposition to the
art), it is amazing what delicacy pornography has, at its best,
achieved. But that is of course the point. The difficulties of working
in such material explain the appeal the art 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 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, 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 Sade’s novels, for all the
complicated aberrations they record, as of Cleland’s puerile story. They
concern themselves solely with the facts, and are still at the stage of
trying to increase the number of these, whereas the aim of civilized
pornographers is to get away from those monotonous facts into a richer
region. A common trick among lesser pornographers is to hint
mysteriously that the facts are more numerous than they really are. For
example, in an absurd novel by Catulle Mendès, the author, after
describing with wearisome detail what the hero and his mistress did
together (which was pretty much all of the little 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 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,
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 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.
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.
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 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, but also in others as fervent as this. The same
splendid intensity of effort pervaded the civilization of the
Renaissance as pervades our own; yet the quality of the former
civilization was incomparably finer than that of ours. Since the energy
is equally admirable in either period, it can only be the nature of the
results striven for that renders one period fine and the other cheap.
Neither do I think that this was because the Renaissance was All for Art
and Art for All (a thesis of which I am profoundly sceptical), whereas
our own is--what it is. No, one cannot dismiss current civilization
loftily by calling it ‘money-getting.’ When did people not desire
money--all the money they could possibly get? Read the letters of great
painters of the Renaissance. Their social status was equivocal, and
their demands were difficult to enforce, but they drove the hardest
bargains they could, and cared every bit as much for money as do modern
realtors. The problem goes deeper than that.
What is this success, for which all are striving with magnificent
energy, to achieve which brings wide acclaim, and to fail of achieving
which relegates one to contemptuous indifference? As I have suggested,
it is not merely money-making. We, too, have our artists, and (a more
important fact) in business itself, to which most men turn perforce,
there are other aims than just that one. To build up a flourishing
business from a decrepit one results of course in money-making, must be
tested by money-making; but it is the building-up, rather than the
financial profit, that is recognized as success.
‘Recognized as success.’ Here we are getting warm. The recognition is
essential. You cannot in our modern American-led civilization be a
success without being recognized as one. And recognized by whom? By
majority opinion. In other words, it is not sufficient that a small
heterogeneous minority, who more or less understand the kind of thing
you are trying to do, should consider you to have succeeded. The
recognition must come from the large homogeneous majority. A man may do
something sensitive and significant in one of a dozen fields, but unless
he obtains this recognition he is set down as a failure.
Here is part of the trouble. For majorities are always wrong--except
when they are right for the wrong reasons. (Not a maxim of my own, but
of Time’s). It is invariably a minority that is right. But there are
many minorities, with as many varying minds, and most of them prove in
the long run as hopelessly wrong as the majority itself. There was once
a minority that considered Oscar Wilde a very great author, and another
that thought Rossetti a very great painter. True, there is always a
minority that turns out to have been right--I mean, what the centuries
simmer down to approximate ‘right’--on whatever subject was in question;
but how to recognize it--the more as it is a heterogeneous minority?
Fortunately, one does not have to. Even a minority is too much. There is
one, and only one, judge of true success: the man who has succeeded--or
failed. He is corrupted by vanity, he may desire avidly the acclaim of
the multitude, he is full of falsities and pretences, but, all alone by
himself, he has moments of clairvoyance when he knows, as no one else
ever can, whether he has succeeded or failed in what he tried to do, and
just how significant his success was, or how wretched his failure.
In this lies the difference between the Renaissance (or any other period
of fine quality--I have no special brief for the Renaissance) and our
own period. Then it was the individual who finally decided what was
worth while. True, in the arts (to which one turns because after so many
centuries they are what chiefly remains to us of the period) there was,
perhaps, an unusually sensitive, intelligent and powerful minority
opinion; but did the artists very much heed that opinion? Not they! It
was not good enough. Throughout all his life Leonardo experimented. What
did he care for the judgment of the minority?
We have come a long way from that point of view to-day. Success is no
longer success without the sanction of the majority. More than that, at
bottom, 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 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.
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. 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 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 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 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
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 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.
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 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.
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 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 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; 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 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 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 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 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
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 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
FOOTNOTES:
[1] No longer true, alas, since the complete suppression by the
Fascista government of all freedom of speech and of the press.
[2] I do not happen to have read anything by Valéry Larbaud, but from
what I read about him I conclude that possibly Monsieur Maurois may
find a little relief from loneliness in his company.
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