OTHER REFORMS
When books of the quality of “Jurgen” can be suppressed--happily this
romance of James Branch Cabell has been restored to the libraries
and book-stalls of the land--we are facing a dangerous precedent.
“Casanova’s Homecoming” was likewise censored. But the Vice Society
might be about better business. I could name a dozen volumes which they
have stupidly imagined should be withdrawn from circulation, but it
would be merely an idle repetition. The principle remains the same.
Publishers and authors have become frightened. If the realm of art is
to be invaded by reformers who fail to distinguish between beauty and
filth, it is self-evident that there will be precious little art in
America in the next hundred years. The pictures that we hang upon our
walls may be torn down next, and the passion for dreariness may cause
the entire United States to become one sad Sahara of utilitarianism,
with no gleam of loveliness. The mania for standardizing us is growing;
it is strange that the authorities do not pounce upon a play like
“R. U. R.,” lest it put false notions into the minds of the simple
people. There is a tremendous lesson in that drama. Crush us too
much, make too many automatons, and one day the lifeless, bloodless,
unimaginative host may rise in sudden might and defeat the very purpose
of their masters.
The easy triumph of Prohibition gives the reformer little to do--save
to seek other avenues of sadistic expression. If we are to be dictated
to as to which books we shall read, we will find a way to discover
smut--and nothing but smut--just as we have found synthetic gin. And
if the lifting of an elbow--a necessary gesture when one takes an
old-fashioned drink--got on a Puritan’s nerves, I cannot think that the
smoke curling from your cigarette and mine gives him anything but pain
and genuine anguish of mind. Tobacco companies are worried, and some
of them have been spending vast sums to offset the crusade against the
weed. Meanwhile, the easy-going American says, “Well, of course, they
did put Prohibition over on us, but--oh, they would not dare rob us of
our cheroots. We simply wouldn’t stand for _that_.”
But I am afraid that we are as spineless as ever. When meetings
are organized to protest against the reformers, they are often ill
attended. A dash of rain dampens the ardor of the lackadaisical citizen
who prefers his own fireside to speeches that hit hard at this and that
false cause. The trouble is that the fanatics have not made things
quite hard enough for us. If there were a real lack of liquor; if
complete drouth settled down over the land, we might rise in a great
body and speak what we inwardly feel. But most of us are too lazy to
fight back. Meanwhile, the organized minority gird on their armor,
devising ways and means to torture us further. And in slippered comfort
we sip our home brew or our dearly bought bootleg toddies, and decide
that the effort required to get together is too great. We will let
things drift. There must come a change; and after all, so long as
Prohibition hasn’t really succeeded, what’s the use of worrying?
The reformer knows this characteristic lethargy of the American people,
and he smiles, assembles his cohorts, calls us, in the vernacular of
the day, “easy marks,” and proceeds with his reforming.
The return of Blue Laws is not improbable. A few towns have already
adopted them, and in these movies are not tolerated on the Sabbath,
newspapers are not allowed to be sold, even the trolley cars are
stopped. A man may be arrested for painting his roof on Sunday; and
as for a game of baseball on that day--it is unthinkable in many a
community. One may not walk--except to church. The Puritan spirit is
not dead. It lives in many a hamlet, dreary enough under the best
conditions. The American people have come to a point where it is a
matter of living or existing.
For my own part, I am perfectly willing for the _Babbitts_ of this
country to do as they please; all I ask is that they let me alone
as I certainly shall let them alone. I have said elsewhere that I
firmly believe in local option. That is because, perhaps, I think
that contrast is the greatest thing in art and in life. I have never
cared for regions of perpetual sunshine, just as I have never cared
for localities where it rains, seemingly, forever. Give me a little of
each. The Gopher Prairieite must feel an impulse to see a metropolis
now and then; just as we who live in tremendous cities feel the urge
every so often to seek the stillness of the woods.
It so happens that a few people--nay, a great many--prefer to hive in
cities, because there they find a certain amount of culture. They like
the opera, and good plays, well acted--the sparkle which city life
gives to them. They like dining out in restaurants, and they happen to
care for the jeweled beauty of, say, Fifth Avenue or Michigan Avenue on
a winter evening. The monotony of the life of a Kansas farmer does not
appeal to them. They can scarcely understand that passion for seclusion
which he craves. But they find no fault with his mode of living. They
even look with a sort of amused tolerance upon those curious beings
who sneer at women who smoke cigarettes. They know perfectly well
that there are many virtuous women who smoke cigarettes, and it is
difficult to understand why everyone cannot be possessed of the same
knowledge. But they do not seek to impose their beliefs upon others.
They do no proselytizing. They are not anxious to convert people to a
way of thinking and reasoning that seems to them simple and natural.
They understand that what is one man’s meat is another man’s poison;
but they do resent being told that what they consume as meat should be
labeled poison--by someone who has never tasted it.
The Eighteenth Amendment tells us, practically, that it is wrong to
drink. You and I know that it is not wrong to drink. But we do know
full well, without being told, that it is very wrong to get drunk.
In Kansas, the people are told that it is wrong to smoke; whereas
anyone at all knows that it is in no wise wrong to smoke; but it is
exceedingly wrong to over-smoke until one’s nerves become shattered and
one’s hands tremble.
The reformer, seeing only the ill effects upon those who overdo
anything, and refusing to note the normal lives of those of us who
never overdo anything, cannot differentiate. Hence the hullabaloo, the
trouble, the mess the world is in today.
Reformers, you see, lack discrimination. One might as well deplore
Niagara Falls because a few fools plunge into its roaring torrents;
cease to enjoy its beauty because suicides have taken advantage of
its power and height to hurl themselves into eternity. One might as
well say that no more skyscrapers are to be built, simply because now
and then a man leaps from the top of one, and makes a ghastly mess of
himself on the pavement below.
Robert Louis Stevenson used to say that the little superfluities of
life were what made it lovely--yes, and bearable. Living does not
consist in a mere drab drudgery from day to day, proving oneself
“efficient,” turning out, in orderly fashion, so many mechanical
instruments, with no release from humdrum. Life must contain zest and
ardor and variety. That zest and ardor and variety we human beings
ourselves give or bring to it. There must be a garnishing of the
dish of existence once in a while. We cannot have our days served up
monotonously on a dull platter, see them flung upon the banquet table
without a surrounding decoration of loveliness. Ugliness must be
hidden; and sane fun must play its part in the scheme of things.
Now it is obvious that drunkenness is a form of bestial ugliness, and
should never be encouraged. Even we who are not professional reformers
recognize that. But the right kind of mild drinking--the drinking of
wines, which helps digestion by giving the proper spur to the gastric
juices--is a salutary habit, and does no one any harm. In France I
have never seen anyone intoxicated--except a visiting American; and I
fear, with Prohibition, that more than ever will the cafés and streets
of Paris be littered with shameful and shameless fellow countrymen
of mine. The French learn from childhood how to drink; and a picture
in a recent Parisian journal showed a group of three generations of
wine-growers chosen at hazard from among many others. I never looked
upon sturdier representatives of what some of our forlorn know-nothings
would doubtless call a “decadent” people.
Alcoholism is practically unknown among the Latin races. To go over
the border into a sodden state of imbecility is well-nigh unthinkable
to them. France got rid of absinthe when she realized the danger of
that fiery liquid. She did not have to close up and seal and nail down
every café in every city and hamlet just because a handful of ribald
artists thought it smart to sit all afternoon and dream dreams of pink
elephants. And, the instant absinthe became unlawful, the French obeyed
the edict, accepted the truth that a menace had been removed, and went
on consuming an occasional aperitif and light wines--never cocktails
and highballs.
But the American people, through their reformers, always have to go to
extremes. We could not see the wisdom of cutting out or controlling
hard drinking. We had to slam every door of every saloon; and,
not content with that, we had to “mop up” the entire country--or
ridiculously try to do so--until there should be no drop of beer, even,
on anybody’s premises. Then, the moment we had done that, we forthwith
craved a little liquor--because we couldn’t get it. Humanly enough,
we were sorry that we had been so rash. True, we had rid ourselves of
one of the most abhorrent evidences of our so-called civilization--the
saloon with the swinging-door; but in doing so we had destroyed, or
attempted to destroy, the harmless pleasure of men and women who had
never entered a saloon. We punished everybody, in order to punish a few.
This was not the right process. The folly of our reformers is working
incalculable harm to the entire country. And the end is not yet.