The motion picture is still in its infancy,--
They are the boys who keep it there.
If the film shows a party of clubmen tossing off ginger ale,
Or a young bride dreaming over tiny garments,
Or Douglas Fairbanks kissing Mary Pickford's hand,
They cut out the scene
And burn it in the public square.
They fix up all the historical events
So that their own mothers wouldn't know them.
They make Du Barry Mrs. Louis Fifteenth,
And show that Anthony and Cleopatra were like brother and sister,
And announce Salome's engagement to John the Baptist,
So that the audiences won't go and get ideas in their heads.
They insist that Sherlock Holmes is made to say,
"Quick, Watson, the crochet needle!"
And the state pays them for it.
They say they are going to take the sin out of cinema
If they perish in the attempt,--
I wish to God they would!
And then there are the All-American Crabs;
The Brave Little Band that is Against Everything.
They have got up the idea
That things are not what they were when Grandma was a girl.
They say that they don't know what we're coming to,
As if they had just written the line.
They are always running a temperature
Over the modern dances,
Or the new skirts,
Or the goings-on of the younger set.
They can barely hold themselves in
When they think of the menace of the drama;
They seem to be going ahead under the idea
That everything but the Passion Play
Was written by Avery Hopwood.
They will never feel really themselves
Until every theatre in the country is razed.
They are forever signing petitions
Urging that cigarette-smokers should be deported,
And that all places of amusement should be closed on Sunday
And kept closed all week.
They take everything personally;
They go about shaking their heads,
And sighing, "It's all wrong, it's all wrong,"--
They said it.
I hate Reformers;
They raise my blood pressure.
PROHIBITION
[Illustration: Frank Swinnerton contemplating, from the Tight Little
Isle, the two classes of prigs developed by Prohibition; those who
accept it and those who rebel.]
FRANK SWINNERTON
I shall never forget the shock I received when an American woman,
newly arrived in England, gave me her impressions of London. She was
distinctly pleased with the town, and when I rather foolishly asked if
she had been terrified by our celebrated policemen, she said, "Why,
no. I was in a taxicab yesterday, and the driver went right on past the
policeman's hand, stealing round where he'd no business to go. And the
policeman just said, 'Here, where you going? D'you want the whole of
England?' Why, in New York, if he'd done that, he'd have been in prison
inside of five minutes!"
I wonder if it will be understood how terrible disillusion on such a
scale can be. I had been thinking of the United States for so long as
the home of the free and the easy that it was hard to bring myself to
the belief that the police there were both peremptory and severe. I had
thought them all Irishmen of the humorous, or "darlint" type. It seems
I was mistaken. The little--I am now afraid misleading--paragraphs which
from time to time appear in the English papers, saying that there has
been a hold-up on Fifth Avenue, or that the Chief of Police in some
great city has been found to be the head of a gang of international
assassins, that things called Tammany and graft and saloons flourish
there without let or hindrance, had attracted me to the United States.
I wanted to live in such a country. Here, I said, is a place where every
man's hand is for himself, where the revolver plays its true part, and
where, with the aid of a humorous Irish policeman, who will find me
stunned by a sandbag and take me to his little home in 244th Street and
reveal the fact that he is descended from Cuchulain, I can be happy.
At first I thought that my friend must be exaggerating. Not lightly was
I prepared to let my dream go. But I am afraid that my confidence in
America as the home of freedom needs a tonic. She may have been right,
although it seems unbelievable. When I thought the problem out clearly
I came to the conclusion that there was a sinister sound about that
comment upon our policemen. Were they losing control of us? Apparently
not. I had trouble on the road with a policeman over the rear light of
my car. There is no doubt that England is efficiently policed. And so
my mind stole back to America with a new uneasiness. I recollected tales
which I had heard about sumptuary laws regulating the dress of
American women, both in and out of the water. I saw the police invading
restaurants and snatching cigarettes from the mouths of women. I saw
drink being driven underground by Prohibition. I began to question
whether I should really like to live in the United States after all. I
asked those of my friends who had been to America.
They told me that if I visited America I should be regaled privately
with champagne from the huge reserves of private wine-cellars, but that
as a resident I should be forbidden to drink anything that enlivened me.
It was a great shock. I am not yet recovered from it. I see that I shall
after all have to live quietly in England with my pipe and my abstemious
bottle of beer. And yet I should like to visit America, for it has
suddenly become in my imagining an enormous country of "Don't!" and I
want to know what it is like to have "Don't" said by somebody who is not
a woman.
I have always hated the word "Don't." I hated it as a child, and I hate
it still. It is a nasty word, a chilling word, associated with feelings
of resentment, of discipline, of prohibition. Yes, that is it, of
course, Prohibition. I find that it is Prohibition which makes my throat
so dry. I thought it was a human characteristic, when anybody said,
"You're not to do that!" to do it at once in case there should be any
misunderstanding. I should be frightened to say "Don't!" to anybody,
because I feel sure it would precipitate unpleasantness. Is America so
different from the rest of the world that it likes having "Don't!" said
to it? I cannot think that. What occurs to me is that America has not
yet worked out of its system the strain that the English Puritan fathers
brought with them. It is a melancholy thought to me that it is really
ancient English repression that is responsible for the present state
of affairs. I feel very guilty, particularly as I have seen an article
about myself in an English newspaper headed "A Modern Puritan." It
is really I, and people like me, who have caused the great drink
restrictions in the United States. I bow my head.
The truth is, I suppose, that people in the United States take life more
seriously than we do in England. If you read any of the books which
have been written in this country during the ages to show what sort of
community is the ideal--I refer to such works as "Utopia" and "News from
Nowhere"--there is never any difference between them on one point. All
the dwellers in these ideal states appear to be thoroughly idle. They
have practically no work to do at all. All their time is spent in talk
and sylvan wandering, with music and dancing round maypoles. There is no
mistaking the fact that the Englishman's idea of life is confirmed and
justifiable laziness. He wants what he calls leisure. Charles Lamb, a
typically English author, wrote a poem beginning "Who first invented
work?" He came to the conclusion that it must have been the Devil.
The inference is clear. Observation confirms my view. It is not to be
doubted that the average Englishman spends his life in scheming to make
somebody else do the work that lies nearest to his hand.
Americans must be different. I believe they really like work. And I
will give the Prohibitionists this handsome admission. I also work much
better without stimulants. I mean, much harder. But on the other hand, I
am less happy. Does an American feel happy in his work? Does the act of
work give him a satisfaction which is not felt by an Englishman? I
think that must be the explanation. But on the other hand there is this
question of Puritanism. We tried it in England, and we had a severe
reaction to libertinism. We maintain Puritanism only in our suburban
districts, where there is exceedingly close scrutiny of all matters
pertaining to conduct; and in our theatres. In the suburbs it does not
much matter, although it rather cramps our suburban style; but in the
theatre it drives some of us to distraction. I will explain why.
Supposing a man wants to write a play, he at once thinks of getting it
produced. An unproduced play is like an unpublished novel: practically
speaking it does not exist. The author can read it, of course, and his
wife can assure him that it is a great deal better than anything she has
seen or read for years; but the author and his wife are both haunted
by the fact that there is a masterpiece which is lying--not fallow, but
unused and sterile. They grow dissatisfied. The savour of life is lost
for them. They develop persecution mania, grow very conceited, and
finally come to believe that only they of all the men and women alive
truly grasp the essentials of life. They say, if this were the silly
muck that most authors write, it would be produced, and then we should
have our car and our servants and diamonds and titles and all the
paraphernalia of happiness. As it is, we are doomed to silence and
poverty, simply because George is too much of an artist to lower himself
by writing what the public wants, and what the censor will pass. For
I have not been outlining the diseased state of mind of the merely
incompetent man who writes something that nobody will look at. I have
been giving details of one of those men who have a moral message, and
who desire greatly to spread it by means of the stage. He has written,
let us say, a play in which the name of God appears, or a play wherein
a young woman has a baby and does not wish to have a husband. The censor
says that there must be no mention of God in plays performed on the
public stage, and that young women who have babies must either have
husbands or come to early graves of their own seeking. Very well, what
happens? I have described the state of mind of a husband and wife who
have a pet child--a play--which is lying heavy on their minds and hearts
and hands. They are ripe for any temptation of the devil. And it comes.
It always comes.
The devil dresses himself up in the guise of a Sunday play-producing
society. The play is surreptitiously performed in a theatre to which
admission can be obtained only by members banded together for just such
emergencies. It is very badly acted by actors and actresses who have not
been able to spare sufficient time from their daily work to learn their
parts as well as they should have done. The audience comes full of
a smug self-satisfaction at the thought that it is excessively
intellectual and select, and that it alone can appreciate blasphemy
or the vagaries of neurotic young women. It sits intellectually in the
theatre, and watches the play. The author sits intellectually in his
box, and intellectually accepts the plaudits of the audience. He lives
thereafter in a highly intellectual atmosphere. He is driven to become a
member of the secret play-producing society, and to watch other plays
of a character not suited to the requirements of the censorship. He
is morally a ruined man. He will never any more be a decent member
of society, for he has become an intellectual. He has been taught to
despise ordinary human beings, for they do not want to be wicked or
silly, except in the normal humdrum way, and they have not seen his play
and are not members of his play-producing society. He discovers that the
censored is the only good art. He is driven to the reading of all sorts
of Continental drama. He is made into an anti-English propagandist. He
is like the person in the song, who,
"Praises every century but this, and every country but his own."
He has been lost for human kind, and is wedded to intellectualism and
a sense of superiority to others for the rest of his miserable life. He
institutes a new system of censorship of his own. It takes the form of
sneering at and condemning anything that does not conform to his
own ideas. He sniffs at all sorts of innocently happy people who are
inoffensively pursuing their noisy course through life. He begins to
hate noise. He makes a virtue of his abstention from ordinary pleasures.
He speaks condescendingly of the "hoi polloi." As I said, he is ruined.
He is no longer a man that one can talk to with any comfort, for his
sense of superiority is intolerable.
To me there is nothing more terrible than the sense of superiority to
others. It arises, not from merit or the consciousness of merit, but
from sheer tin-like flimsiness of character. It arises from limited
sympathies. The really great man, and the really sagacious man, is
one to whom nothing is contemptible. To him, even the follies of his
fellow-passengers are manifestations of human nature, revelations of the
material from which scholars and politicians no less than drunkards
and inconstants are gradually in course of time developed. Somebody
described "conceit" to me the other day as egotism in which contempt for
others is involved. It was agreed between us that egotism was normal,
since happiness is not to be attained without a sense of personal
utility to the world, and no objection was urged against it. Vanity was
to be tolerated, because it was definitely social--a recognition of the
existence and value of the good opinion of others; but never sense of
superiority. And the sense of rebellion should be added to this other
sense, as equally to be regretted. A young woman whose incredible acts
of folly had spoiled half-a-dozen lives, including her own, recently
encountered a young man whom she had jilted on the eve of her marriage
to another, whom she had also left. The young man, still smarting under
his ill-treatment, reproached her. He said, "What you want, my dear, is
discipline." "Pooh!" she answered. "I'm _above_ discipline!" The poor
young man retired, unequal to the conversation. But the young woman went
on her way, defiant and self-infatuated, believing that she really was
superior to the opinions of others, the common decencies of conduct, the
inevitable give and take of ordinary life. Driven to folly by lack
of balance, she was learning to justify her folly by the argument for
rebellion. Whether she will ever learn to control her actions I do
not know, but rebelliousness from a fueling that one is too good to be
governed by normal standards is not only arrogant and unsocial. It is
silly. It is, to my mind, a criminal form of silliness. But it is
one very widely accepted by the young and the unimaginative. It must
therefore be recognized and combated.
It springs, perhaps, from disordered shame, which makes children
noisily act in defiance of authority, particularly if there are others
present to overhear. No children are worse-behaved than those who are
over-controlled. The word "don't" at the breakfast-table produces
more acts of violent rebellion than any amount of parental weakness.
Unimaginativeness begets unimaginativeness. Rigidity in one person
creates a counter-rigidity in the other. There is a thwarting upon both
sides, a mutual shackle upon sweetness and understanding. A wildness of
action arises, with loss of affection, respect, self-respect. And the
vicious part of it is that children (we are all children, for we never
grew up in human relations), once they are embarked upon an evil
course, are driven by vanity to continue upon that course until they are
exhausted, going from defiance to defiance; and ultimately building up a
whole sophisticated gospel of axioms whereby rebellion is given warrant
and virtue. The gospel of rebellion we know to be specious and without
justification; but it is essential to us, as human beings, to
maintain self-approval for our acts. If we cannot do this socially,
by comparative standards, we do it unsocially, by subversion of those
standards. Rebels are only prigs turned upside down or inside out.
The great defect of prohibition is that when it can be enforced by law
it makes rebels who think there is something inconceivably clever in
doing secretly that which the law forbids. They learn to think there is
some subtle merit in evading the law. They encourage others to break the
law, and so develop cliques and finally new and silly conventions. Or,
prohibition has another effect. It makes a whole class who accept its
rulings, and gradually these people, owing to a peculiarity which all
gregarious animals seem to have, begin to believe that unless all are
of their persuasion and of their number the fault lies with the rebels.
First of all they consider themselves superior to the rebels, and
despise them. Then, when they find that the rebels think that _they_ are
the superior class, in defying the law or the convention, a new set of
notions arises, and this set of notions leads to persecution and to
war. You cannot introduce any restrictive or prohibitive measure without
developing fanatical conceit, narrow-mindedness, and intolerance, both
in those who welcome the measure and in those who seek to ignore and
even to defy its rulings.
The Puritanical attitude is almost wholly repressive, and naturally
invokes force to aid its repressive measures. It did so in England
centuries ago in the matter of the theatre, and we are living among all
the rotten plays which have been written since, and the theatre is
for the most part a place of ignominious diversion. The play-producing
societies have nothing to produce that is worth producing, because
the atmosphere which causes such plays as are written to be produced
privately is not the healthy atmosphere from which masterpieces arise.
It is an atmosphere impregnated with priggishness and a sense of
superiority. It is an atmosphere, if there can be such a thing, of
sterility. The same thing happens in other matters, and I do not feel at
all certain that it may not happen with drink. If you say men are not to
drink you create two new classes. There is of course the existing class
that does not care for drink and is afraid of its effects to the point
of wishing to keep it away from those who do like drink. That class
already flourishes in most communities, and so I do not place it among
any two classes which are created by the prohibition. The two
classes are as follows-the class that submits, and gradually develops
priggishness and self-satisfaction at being in the majority, and
the class that rebels, and gradually develops priggishness and
self-satisfaction at being in the minority. Both classes are
objectionable, and I do not know which is the worse. They are both
inevitable in a world of prohibitions, and if the United States, to
which we are all looking as the real hope for intelligent civilization,
is going to take away our beer and turn us into supporters of
play-producing societies I cannot think what will happen to the world.
Better a wicked world than a virtuous one. Better a world in which we
can hope that there are people worse than ourselves than a world where
we know that there cannot be any better.
A GUESS AT UNWRITTEN HISTORY
[Illustration: H. M. Tomlinson regarding, with not too great enthusiasm,
the Perfect State of the Future.]
H. M. TOMLINSON
That fairly violent scuffling during the years 1914-1918, the opening
skirmishes of the war between Organization and Liberty which our
fore-fathers named so strangely the "War to End War," did not appear to
conclude satisfactorily for the victorious nations, especially England.
Actually it was an excellent ground for the founding of that Perfect
State which, in the centuries that followed, arose on the lines laid
largely by chance and the exigencies of that early scramble. Yet it is
possible the victorious statesmen may not have guessed that they had
done really well. The name by which the war of those remote years was
popularly known is enough to show that the difficulties faced by those
men at the end of the war may have obscured the good they had done.
That name is itself clear evidence of the not unpleasing credulity and
ridiculous but innocent desire of the people of that time.
After all, those peoples were not so long out of the Neolithic Age.
Their memory was still strong of the freedom of their earlier wanderings
when they could go where they liked, work at what suited them, eat and
drink what pleased them, choose who should be their chief, and worship
in any Temple which promised most personal benefits. It was, then,
natural for them to make so amusing a mistake in the naming of their
"Great War." They not only certainly imagined they were ending War, but
they imagined, too, they had a right to end it, thinking that not only
War, but every other act of the State, was for their decision. Their
Governors, therefore, judged it wise to allow them this illusion to play
with, so to distract their attention from the reality, which they would
have resented. This illusion was known as Popular Government.
We may laugh at it now, but in those days the directing minds of great
nations found that common illusion no laughing matter. Some who laughed
at it openly discovered they had laughed on the wrong side of the
guillotine. It is usual in this era of science, when control by the Holy
State of the national mass-power, both of body and mind, is complete,
and when national emotion is raised by Press and Pulpit whenever it is
required and put wherever it is wanted, to ridicule the laxity of
the statesmen who directed the nations in that early war. A little
reflection, however, shows us that that laxity is but apparent. Those
statesmen went as far as they dared, and dared a little more with
each success they won. They discovered that control may be gained by
announcing control to be necessary for some quite innocent object,
and then using and retaining the power thus acquired for a real but
undivulged purpose. Sheep, we are aware, never understand they are
securely folded till the completing hurdle of the circuit is in its
place, and then they soon forget it, and begin grazing; for all sheep
want is grass, and perhaps a turnip or two to give content in a limited
pasture.
It would be wrong for us, nevertheless, to blame those early folk for
not understanding, as finely as we do, the true science of government to
be complete and unquestioned mastery. We have learned much since
then. Let us look back to those days for a moment, to get the just
perspective. One of the first significant things we notice is that
those people were free to criticize their politicians--baaing across the
hurdles, as it were. That was why they had to have explained to them
the "Objects of the War." They actually did not want to die. They were
reluctant to go to battle unless they knew why they were going. True,
it was easy enough to find a reason to satisfy them, but it is necessary
for us to remember that they would not submit to mutilation and death
without some reason. Much as their governors may have desired it,
those primitives would not agree willingly to the total surrender of
conscience, individual liberty, and of life, to "politicians," as the
High Priests of the Holy State were then familiarly named. Individual
conscience, therefore, had to be cajoled, had to be bamboozled, had to
be hypnotized; and a man's liberty could not be taken from him unless
he was helpless, or was looking, under clever political finger-pointing,
the other way.
It was this almost intractable matter of personal conscience and liberty
which was the cause of the angry disappointment following the Versailles
Treaty which, illustrating still further the need for subtle tact in
dealing with our hairy forefathers, was called a Peace Treaty.
What a light is thrown upon those distant days and peoples when that
ancient document, the fragmentary relic of which is now treasured in the
museum at Tobolsk, is examined with even the little knowledge we possess
of the events immediately following it! For a time, we must believe,
humanity then was deliriously bereft. One could almost believe the moon
had a greater pull in those years.