MRS. PRESTONIA ORDERS PLUMBING
When I was a young man, groping my way into Socialism, I discovered that
the movement in and about New York had a patroness. Mrs. Prestonia
Martin was her name, and she had a beautiful home in the suburbs, and
another up in the Adirondacks. An assortment of well-bred radicals would
gather, and wait on themselves at table, and do their own laundry, and
scratch a bit in the garden, and feel they were on the front door-step
of the Co-operative Commonwealth. John Martin had been a member of the
Fabian Society in London, so we knew we were under the best possible
auspices, doing the exactly correct advanced things.
But time committed its ravages upon the minds of my friends Prestonia
and John. They lost their vision of the Co-operative Commonwealth, and
when you went to the beautiful “camp” overlooking Keene Valley, you no
longer met young radicals, and no longer helped with the laundry; you
met sedate philosophers, and listened to Prestonia expounding the
mournful conclusion that humanity had never made any advance. The couple
took up a new crusade--to avert from womankind the horrors of politics.
The last time I met John, just before the war, he was an entirely
respectable member of the New York school board and smiled at me a
patronizing smile when I ventured to prophesy that inside of ten years
women would be voting in New York state. “You will never live to see
that!” said the prophet John.
The psalmist expresses the wish that “mine enemy would write a book”;
and in this case mine enemy’s wife committed the indiscretion. I have
before me a scholarly-looking volume, published in 1910, entitled “Is
Mankind Advancing?” by Mrs. John Martin. I cite it as an outstanding
example of one variety of culture superstition; it reduces to absurdity
the arguments of one group of tradition worshipers. My old friend
Prestonia has discovered that the Greeks achieved a higher civilization
than has ever since existed on earth, and her demonstration that mankind
is not advancing is based on the exaltation of Greek civilization over
everything that has since come along.
Mrs. Prestonia does not really know very much about Greek civilization;
I can state that, because I had many discussions with her at the time
she was writing this book. What she has done is to take a history of
Greece and list the leading names, higgledy-piggledy, regardless of
their ideas, or of the parts they played, regardless of the fact that
they fought and even killed one another, regardless of the fact that
their doctrines contradict and cancel one another. They were Greeks, and
therefore they were great. Two or three hundred are listed, all men of
genius; and what names can you put against them?
I ventured to suggest a number of names to my friend Prestonia; but you
see, my men were modern men, vulgar, common fellows who wore trousers,
and ate pie, and worked for dollars! Think of comparing Edison with
Archimedes--could anything be more absurd? Think of comparing Pasteur
with Hippocrates! “But, my dear lady,” I would argue, “Hippocrates
believed that disease was caused by ‘humors’; he believed that crises in
disease followed numerical systems.” Maybe that was true, said
Prestonia, but nevertheless, Hippocrates was the greatest physician that
ever lived. And she would have Socrates listed as one of the glories of
Athenian civilization--in spite of the fact that Athenian civilization
had compelled him to drink the hemlock! In her queer hall of fame the
imperialist Pericles, who led his country to ruin, and was convicted of
the theft of public money, takes rank as the greatest statesman in all
history, outranking Lincoln, who saved the American Union, and freed
several million slaves. A dissolute young despot, Alexander, who sighed
for new worlds to conquer, outranks George Washington, who founded a
nation of free men, and then retired to his plantation.
After running over the list of all the achievements of modern literature
and art, politics and philosophy, science and industry, I was able at
last to find one thing which my friend Prestonia was unwilling to get
along without. She wanted to live in ancient Athens--but to have her
modern plumbing! And never once had it occurred to her that plumbing
means lead and copper and steel and brass and nickel and porcelain and
paint! Also mills in which these things are produced, railroads or
motor trucks on which they are transported, factories in which the cars
and trucks are made! Also telegraph and telephone and electric light,
and bookkeeping systems and credit systems, and capital and labor, and
the Republican party and the Socialist movement!
All this is preliminary to a study of the literature and art of ancient
Greece; to help us clear our minds of cant, and persuade us to face the
question: how much do we really admire Greek literature and Greek art,
and how much do we just pretend to admire it? How much is the
superiority of Greek civilization a reality, and how much is it a
superstition maintained by gentlemen who have acquired honorific
university degrees, which represent to them a meal ticket for the
balance of their sojourns on earth?