OGI, ANGLOMANIAC
Says Mrs. Ogi: “This is getting to be quite a respectable literary book:
the very thing for club ladies here in Southern California, who hire
somebody to read books for them, and tell them what the books are about.
Here you’ve read thousands of books for them!”
Says Ogi: “They’ll get all the culture of the ages in a lecture lasting
three-quarters of an hour. I remember your telling how the Negro mammies
chew up the babies’ food for them, and then feed it back into the
babies’ mouths.”
“Yes, but don’t you tell that!” cries Mrs. Ogi.
“A little too Renaissancy?” laughs her husband.
“With reasonable care,” persists the other, “you can break into literary
society with this book. I understand you’re leading up to English
literature; and that is where respectability begins and ends.”
“You forget my Russian and German readers. Also, I’m sorry to report, we
have to have another chapter of economics and politics.”
“What’s happened now?”
“Free institutions have got a new start, and we have to understand the
process. We have to make an appraisal of the parliamentary system; and
if we make one that is just, we shall displease all parties to the
controversy. You remember how during the war this Ogi family used to
argue until three o’clock in the morning. The most difficult question in
all history had to be decided, and kept decided for four years. Was
there really a choice between British capitalism and German autocracy?
Was there any real life left in the parliamentary system, anything worth
saving in political democracy; or must we go over to working class
dictatorship? We listened to the partisans of each side as they stormed
at us; there were millions of separate facts, and we had to appraise
them and strike a balance. And just when we thought we had it, some
Irishman or Hindoo would come along with fresh examples of British
governmental imbecility.”
“But what’s that got to do with the book?” demands Mrs. Ogi.
“We have to make the same decision in our study of world culture. Here
is Elizabethan England, and we have to appraise it, and appraise
Shakespeare. Are we going to agree with Bernard Shaw and scold him
because he isn’t a Socialist? Are we going to agree with Tolstoy and
scrap him because he isn’t a saint? Evidently I’m expected to do those
things. Here’s a letter from George Sterling, who disapproves most
strenuously of my thesis, but who says, ‘From your point of view
Shakespeare is your biggest and most vulnerable game.’”
“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “what’s Shakespeare to you, or you to
Shakespeare?”
“For one thing, he’s an old friend. For another, he’s a whole universe
in himself--”
“Surely a respectable opinion!”
“I’m sorry to be respectable, but I want to be just. It is easy to name
great and important qualities that Shakespeare lacked, and damn him for
that lack. On the other hand, one can think of hideous qualities he
lacked--and honor him for their absence. Most important of all, he
wasn’t a medieval bigot. If he doesn’t ascend to the heights of moral
idealism, at least he avoids wallowing in what Sterling calls ‘the
liquid manure of superstition.’ He is a modern man, who looks at life
with clear eyes, and judges it on its own merits. Coming from Catholic
Europe to Elizabethan England is like coming out of a morgue, and
standing on a headland where the wind blows from the sea. Shakespeare
knew that, and all the men of his time knew it; they were defending
themselves from the Inquisition, they were saving the race-mind.
“The future world poet was twenty-four years old when the Spanish Armada
was harried down the English channel by the little ships of Drake and
Frobisher. He had already come up to London, and perhaps he heard the
guns. Anyhow, all England knew that the pope had by formal decree turned
over their country to be a vassal of Spain; they knew that King Philip
was preparing against them the most powerful fleet in history. They
waited, in just such an agony of suspense as we knew during the long
struggle in France. And just as Æschylus was inspired by the battle of
Marathon to write Greek patriotic propaganda, so Shakespeare was
inspired by the defeat of the Armada to write English patriotic
propaganda. Now, in weighing the value of that propaganda, we have to
judge the society in which Shakespeare lived, the balance of democratic
and aristocratic forces, of progress and reaction it contained. We can’t
do that without a theory of political evolution--”
“I’ll tell you what you do,” says Mrs. Ogi. “You start in and tell us
some facts about Shakespeare’s plays, and what’s in them, and work in
your theory of political evolution as you go along. Then, as I go along,
I’ll take a pencil and mark most of it out!”