filmland. But in the usual studio there are a number of men pawing over
the platitudes of the human race in the deliberate effort to concoct
from them a pattern which the public will pay for. Chaplin, too, is a
child of the theatre. And there is no theatre without a “box” in front.
But in the studio of Chaplin there is, most really of all, a man of the
people—a cockney, a gypsy, a music-hall fellow—who looks into the eyes
of the world as into a mirror, in order to see _himself_ more
objectively and sharply. So it is that, coming to Chaplin’s public, we
return to the man. By means of this reflection we can see at last, in
clarity, how he manages his escape and what it is which, behind the mask
of “funny-legs,” goes its immortal journey into the heart of the world.
Chaplin looks upon the world of today. He sees failure: poverty, agony,
disease, chaos, fear, pitiful passion, pitiful love. He sees success:
deceit, garishness, tinsel, boast, disillusion. He sees his own past in
London—his mother in the drab uniform of the poorhouse. He sees his own
victorious present. He sees and feels too much. He is afraid of being
lost in this world. There is a kernel of him that is neither this
success nor this failure: a core in the man that can dance its own life
if only it may remain alone. That is why he must escape; why he must
look on all the invading world as an enemy and must hate it. Chaplin is
a hard and princely fellow: his brow is strong, and his jaw and his
mouth. But the modeling about his temples is girlishly tender, and the
deepest spirit in his eyes is a retreating terror. He is afraid for that
core in him of grace and loveliness and youthful dance. To protect it,
he will fight—he will employ all his skill, all his hardness.
Now consider Chaplin’s public, which is the modern world. In each breast
live grace and loveliness and wistful dream. But in the common man that
personal treasure of each heart cannot remain intact. Family, business,
law and war invade it. All civilization becomes a foe, trampling on this
secret heart, dispersing its dream, bruising and breaking its love.
Chaplin, who has striven to keep it whole for himself, has made his
fight for the world. Here, in his films, the grace and beauty of the
human “atom” are visible once more. Behind the mask of Chaplin—behind
the swinging cane, the ambling, painful feet, the tight drawn coat, the
cocky derby hat—marches the common loveliness of man—marches and
journeys as it must through a hated modern world—dissociate from social
forms, shabby, despised, pitiful, poor; yet miraculously intact and
miraculously triumphant.
Rousseau, I suppose, perfected this tragicomedy of the modern world,
with its dualistic conflict between beauty and civilization, between
love and man’s habitual life. Marvelously gifted, he gave to the world
its rationale for the impulse to creep back into a mythic childhood, to
worship the self at the expense of the towering forms about it. As Mr.
Lardner might say: “Jean Jacques started something.” Charles Chaplin has
finished it. (Even the cut of his comic coat recalls the romantic
century—the age of Alfred de Musset.) The cult of loveliness at war with
the sobrieties of life could beget no greater art than this journey of
Chaplin carrying beauty untouched through an atmosphere of heavy
institutions, of brickbats and policemen. French intellectual, London
clerk, Chinese coolie, Mexican peon, Park Avenue child, in the common
distress of their submission to a world too full of money to leave room
for singing and for dancing, can gaze together at this secret triumph
which Chaplin has enacted for them. His song explodes their oppressive
world. His primitive refusal to “grow up” in the “respectable way”
becomes the modern spirit of revolution.[1]
d.
In the old days Charles Chaplin worked not less meticulously, but a good
deal faster. His theme has always been the exact transcription of the
mood of his life. But when his life was simpler, the bridge to his work
was more immediate. It was easier for the man to remain impervious,
intact, virginally himself. The instinctive operation of his will had
found no invasion too bruising or too tiring for him to repel. But he
has had to pay the toll of his way; and that toll has grown great. It is
hard to sustain one’s solitude when one is so full of eagerness as
Chaplin; and when, precisely because the world loved his aloneness, the
world has done everything to destroy it. His recent struggles, not so
much against the clamor of the public as against his own human need for
that peace and love which can be gained only by some union with another,
have made him conscious of himself. Consciousness and weariness have
stood between him and his journey—slowing him and slowing his work,
which is the expression of that journey. His hair has turned grey, and
his beautiful face is lined.
“The Circus” marks the crisis. The terrible year[2] that separated its
first-made scenes from the last brought a new somberness into his art.
The picture on which he is at work at present is the most meditative,
the most complex, the darkest story he has ever imagined. A progress
like that which distinguishes the end of “Don Quixote” from its
rollicking outset is manifest in his work. Chaplin is still alone; still
intact. But the fight he has had to wage in order to remain so has worn
him. It is the natural destiny of so passionate a man to lose himself.
Thus far Chaplin has refused this death. It would mean, indeed, the
death of his old gay art. It might mean the birth of a new tragic
artist.
Meantime the circumstances of his career in Hollywood have conspired to
perfect his solitude. Here was an artist whose theme was an essential
motion: the pantomimic medium of the motion picture was there to express
him. But now the motion-picture industry of Hollywood decides to talk.
Chaplin, whose excellence made him solitary enough, finds himself almost
literally alone.
A little more entirely than he may have dreamed, he is having his way.
He is alone in his great house, alone with his few friends, who love him
but who cannot really reach him. He is alone among his professional
comrades, who, unlike him, have abandoned the silent picture. Chaplin
has reached a goal. A goal is an end. An end can be also a beginning.
_1929._
3. D. H. LAWRENCE
Lawrence lived his entire life in a transition. Hence his painful and
irascible temper: hence also his illuminations, exquisite and unbearable
as direct contact with a nerve.
One world he had left: the world of plural “facts.” He was no dupe of
the parade of detailed separatenesses that clutter mortal eye. He knew
that this world of things, this matter-of-fact and practical world of
commonplace, was false; for he had left it for a truer. But that other
world he never quite attained: the world of unity and wholeness, whereof
all things are momentary foci. He was close enough to this world to be
pulling away from the other: but he was not of it sufficiently to accept
the world of “things” in the transfigured sense that makes things real.
He was close enough to the true to win from it vision and power to
illumine the “things” he fought; close enough to create a vision of them
as an artist. Yet he was not of the true world of organic oneness so
deeply as to incorporate himself within it and thereby to be at peace
with the many.
He was always striving to organize himself in wholeness: and always
failing, and always furious and exacerbated by his failures. These
failures are his life, and are his books. The characters of his stories
are never wholly persons in the sense of either world: the passion of
the writer of his books is never wholly either illumination of his
characters as organic bodies or life within the characters themselves.
Lawrence was exiled from the moderate pace of things that enact their
part in the Whole unconsciously. This blessed naturalization he had left
forever. He could never share the peace of the clod which knows not its
share in the Life it enacts. Nor could he accept the clod, from within
the realm of the conscious Life itself. The ecstasy of knowing himself
part of the Whole was never quite natural for him; he never assimilated
it into the processes of living. To possess that ecstasy, he had to deny
the lineaments of life: he had to seek extraordinary moments. The true
ecstasy of knowing the many common things of the world as the common
features of life’s oneness was never his.
He was imprisoned in transition. And he frantically strove to
incorporate himself entirely in the world of truth by lopping off his
attachments to the separatistic world that dragged him. Thus his
denial of “mind,” of tenderness and pity, of the feminine as
contradistinguished from the female. These were qualities that seemed
to hold him back near the world of “many-ness” which he hated as
false. He was neither strong enough nor clear enough to know that it
was his failure to fuse these qualities into wholeness, rather than
the intrinsic qualities themselves, that thwarted him and kept him
divided.
_1930_
4. HERBERT CROLY
Most men are set and long past growing before they are forty. This is
true of the conspicuous and successful, no less than of the common. They
have contrived, from their first impacts with the world, some attitude,
trick or gesture; it works; they stick to it until they are repetitive
as machines. Herbert Croly was a growing man until he was stricken; and
the rate of his growth kept on accelerating with the years. This rare
capacity, which toward the end transfigured him, was his true genius.
If we analyze the nature of his growth, we come close to the man, and
understand what made him so sound and beautiful a being. And the first
trait upon which we come is his humility. Herbert Croly was
authentically humble. Not humble with the inverted pride of a Franciscan
or of a character of Dostoevski’s—because of raging lusts intolerable to
himself which he had to flay into their opposite lest they drive him
mad. Herbert Croly’s humility came from a true sense of himself in the
world—a sense of true proportion. In the years when I knew him, at
least, he never seemed to be looking upon himself alone: always, he felt
and saw and thought himself within a texture that was the world. From
this proportion came sobriety and humility; and from this organic
contact with life’s sources, a springlike energy that kept him growing.
There was nothing, I suppose, superficially brilliant or arresting about
him. He was in cool fact what Whitman romantically sang: a “divine
average.” By which I mean that he was a man whose pre-eminence came from
the purification and exaltation of those traits that made him most like
others. With the shining talents of the market place he was not lavishly
gifted. The talent he had is rare in any mart: the passion for growth,
the moral, intellectual powers needed for growth, and a courage in
devotion to the life of growth that served him in his long fight as
sudden illumination serves the romantic hero.
How differently shrewd he was from the shrewd men with whom he
deliberately consorted, and whom he ruthlessly noted while, for the most
part, they took scant note of him. This world of atomic egos, bursting
with pride and will, and disappearing into the darkness of the mass,
after their brief explosion. And Herbert Croly, beginning in the mass,
groping his obscure way through a sense of brotherhood and life, into
true personality, into wisdom. His first impulse was to accept. And this
alone marked him off from his intellectual generation, and made his
discoveries far more potential. He had a sympathy for the commonplace.
His humility, deriving from his sense of proportion, made him
instinctively, even intellectually, share. Here, his “averageness”
ceased. For what he accepted and shared he weighed with the same quiet
ruthlessness that he brought to bear upon himself. That is why, at the
end, he had won a deeper vision of his world than had any of his
fellows. He had begun by letting himself be part of it, refusing
nothing. From within, he had scrutinized, purified—inexorably judged.
Yet, if in this spirit, temper, method, he was different from the New
York in which he worked, it was because he carried on so purely an
American tradition. It is true, of course, that he did not come of old
American stock, both his parents having been born in Europe. But it is
also true that in the making of Americans lineage is the least factor.
The immigrant is potentially American: that is why he came: he is
brother in spirit, if not in blood, of Roger Williams or of Franklin.
Moreover, the land itself stamps the child more deeply than do his
fathers. Thus, despite the European background of Herbert Croly, there
was much of the Puritan about him, a great deal of the pioneer. He
trekked our continent of the modern spirit “on foot,” slowly and
laboriously blazing his way through the American chaos. He understood
creatively and creatively served it, because he had given himself to it;
and this he had done because—like Emerson, like Whitman, like Thoreau,
like all its deepest critics—he had faith in it.
These homespun traits, almost exactly transposed from the plane of the
American forefathers, reveal the nature of his ideological growth. The
man who, twenty years ago, wrote “The Promise of American Life” had been
essentially one who accepted the intellectual pattern of the hour.
Herbert Croly was thinking in terms, then, of government commissions
with ideals of knight-errantry, of moral agencies somehow working out
through legislative bodies. His way of facing the problem of the good
life at that beginning would have been familiar enough to Gladstone or
to Burke. But, having accepted the pattern, he applied to it a sincerity
of penetration rare in any hour. His book, instead of following, became
the test—and the destroyer—of its own pattern. He was feeling his way;
and all of his career may similarly be termed a feeling of his way.
This trait gives the quality of his style; it lacked charm and ease
because it was a process rather than a conclusion. It never flowered; it
burrowed and made roots: whatever energy it evolved from its growth
turned downward into deeper roots instead of blooming upward. From the
standpoint of English, this is a grave defect. A written style should be
a fruit, not an embryology for some future fruitage. But from the
standpoint of the promise of American life, the style, like the man
himself, was the very substance. His words portrayed the passage of the
author slowly, circuitously through the jungle of half-decayed surmise
which is the heritage of our generation. The ultimate light of what he
wrote was the consequence of that passage. His words might be said to
have ended with light, in contrast to most modern words which begin with
glitter and end in darkness.
This book of 1910 began with a certain premise: America has the
political technique and the human equipment to fulfill itself. The book
studies the equipment—institutional, personal—turns back on its premise,
and rejects it. The book does not conclude; it institutes. While the
author writes, he grows: instead of ending, he changes. At the finale,
he is free of the pattern of his hour, truly free since he has first
accepted it and lived it through.
More than once, he espoused causes that seemed contradictory to the
essence of the man as I later came to know him. Thus his acceptance of
the War, his sponsorship of the Progressivism of Roosevelt, his apparent
dedication to the Pragmatism of John Dewey. But to condemn him for this
was to misjudge him by standards that did not apply. Herbert Croly was
not a prophet; he was an experimental and emergent force within the body
politic—the force that energizes prophecy and must precede it: he
personified the gradual principle of detachment within the process of
his time. He was not espousing these causes that were, indeed, denials
of his essence, so much as living through them, and as growing through
them. By his acceptance of the War, of the noisy and supine
Progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt, of the spiritually prostrate
Pragmatism of John Dewey, he was—in his own way—getting beyond them. And
his humble method is, to me, the only possible promise of our nation,
which, too, having accepted these false positions, with a self-knowledge
and a humility like Herbert Croly’s may also get beyond them.
His ultimate refusal was significant because he had lived through what
he rejected. Herbert Croly went through a gamut of faiths in political
reform; that is why his final doubts about the political method and his
convictions on psychological and religious re-education were important.
He was well versed in the instrumentalisms and technological credos of
his day; that is why his recognition of the nuclear spiritual force
within the person and beyond the reaches of pragmatic methods was
important. He knew the principles and methodologies of modern
engineering; that is why his transposition and application of them to
the problem of the person were important, and why his ultimate religious
interest—emergent from a practical participation in the affairs of our
day—was so convincing and potential.
These later phases of his growth were clear only to those who personally
knew him. He spoke of two books that he was going to write: a sequel to
“The Promise of American Life” and an intimate record of his own
evolution. I do not know if any part of these works was ever set down.
But I feel that the quality of the man and the form of his spirit were
best revealed to his friends. At night, within the shadows of his
bookshelves, a release came to Herbert Croly. He was morbidly sensitive.
He spoke so low that when one ate with him in a restaurant it was
difficult to hear what he said. Yet to have raised his voice in a public
place, one felt, would have been an outrage to the nature of this man
who was, without doubt, the deepest publicist of his generation. In his
own occult way, Herbert Croly had embraced the world. A kind of dogged
heroism through the years had driven him to accept the crass contacts of
politics and journalism. For that was the method of his philosophy: his
knowing was action. But now, in the stillness of his room, his knowing
became words. What he said had a luminous strength, like wine kept long.
For these were words aged in the cellar of himself. The exquisite
perceptions had grown strong in secret. His eyes glowed, at such times,
with his words. He was relaxed. A flame burned from the hard wood of his
reticence.
Like an old wine, this strength of Herbert Croly’s was not aggressive.
It did not come to you; you had to find the means of taking it. He had
none of the prophet’s and mystic’s need of self-assertion or of
liberation from the trammels of his time. His method was always the same
humble one: to work in the substances of the day, to live his day, and
slowly to go on emerging without separation from the day’s humble
matters.
Some men synthesize the actuality of their time. Such a one was Theodore
Roosevelt, once Croly’s friend. Another kind, more rare and more
precious, synthesize not the day’s actuality, but its promise. Such was
Herbert Croly. But even within this group, he was unique. These men are
likely to be at odds with their hour, and quite aloof. Their method of
revelation is often the prophetic attitude which refuses all
participation with the actuality which they transcend. But Herbert Croly
synthesized American promise by his acceptance of the American fact. He
did not intuit his promise, he distilled it from the facts themselves.
He was very far from the conventional prophet or mystic. His exquisite
nerves grappled with the iron and blood of the twentieth century. What
could come of this embrace of an almost feminine spirit with a body in
which plunged a billion horsepower? The spirit of the man remained
undriven, clear; it became the record of a slow revelation.
If we translate his career into terms of our national destiny, how does
it read? America runs the gamut of political credos. America sets up its
external technologies and worships in them its own infantile power.
America swears by the machine, and patterns from it arts and folkways.
Under high-sounding slogans of pragmatism and instrumentalism, America
submits to the hour—to all the miseries and tyrannies of a caste clad in
the immediacy of the hour. But America will, from its experience, return
unto itself; learn that there is no substitute for the strength and
value that reside secretly in man, and that there is no conduit to
mastery of the world other than mastery of self. America will again hear
the voices of the fathers who came to create a dwelling place, not for
gilded slaves of the machine, but for man—a world made new, not by
mechanical proliferation, but by the growth of the spirit of man and
woman.
Such was the progress of Herbert Croly, who moved through the American
jungle to find himself, and in himself projected what must be the
destiny of his country, if that destiny be salvation. The promise of
American life has had no truer form than this life.
_1930_
5. SIGMUND FREUD
a.
The nineteenth century in Northern Europe was a time of Titans
struggling to create worlds of their own. The medieval Catholic world
had crumbled: simple or timid souls still lived in it, but for several
hundred years the strongest spirits had been engaged in tearing it to
pieces. This destruction was, of course, creative; was, indeed, largely
the cultural work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in
astronomy, geography, physics, economics, mysticism and esthetics. But
it was work of pioneering or analysis, rather than of synthesis. And it
bequeathed to the eighteenth century, not a new world for the whole man
to live in, but a miscellany of abstract, mutually discordant principles
with which to begin to build it. These principles were known as laws:
there were the laws of mathematics, of mechanics, of biology, of the
natural and the economic man. They were all based upon the law of
reason, and this was religiously believed in. The destructive centuries
had not invented the faith in reason; that faith was a legacy of the
Catholic world which reason, by shifting its premise, undermined.
Reason, to be hypostasized, requires an unchallenged premise; in
Catholic theology this premise was the revelation of the Bible; now it
was to be the revelation of the human senses or of the original
rightness and divinity of man. With such instruments, abstract and
confused, the forerunners of the nineteenth century (Kant, Rousseau,
Blake, etc.) strove to create a cosmos of their own to replace the
glorious fertile world of St. Francis, Aquinas, Dante.