that all art is primarily representative--this notion is as unsound as
the theory that Friday is an unlucky day, and is dying as hard. One even
finds some trace of it in Anatole France, surely a man who should know
better. The true function of art is to criticise, embellish and edit
nature--particularly to edit it, and so make it coherent and lovely. The
artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue-pencilling the
_lapsus calami_ of God. The sounds in a Beethoven symphony, even the
Pastoral, are infinitely more orderly, varied and beautiful than those
of the woods. The worst flute is never as bad as the worst soprano. The
best violoncello is immeasurably better than the best tenor.
All first-rate music suffers by the fact that it has to be performed by
human beings--that is, that nature must be permitted to corrupt it. The
performance one hears in a concert hall or opera house is no more than a
baroque parody upon the thing the composer imagined. In an orchestra of
eighty men there is inevitably at least one man with a sore thumb, or
bad kidneys, or a brutal wife, or _katzenjammer_--and one is enough.
Some day the natural clumsiness and imperfection of fingers, lips and
larynxes will be overcome by mechanical devices, and we shall have
Beethoven and Mozart and Schubert in such wonderful and perfect beauty
that it will be almost unbearable. If half as much ingenuity had been
lavished upon music machines as has been lavished upon the telephone and
the steam engine, we would have had mechanical orchestras long ago.
Mechanical pianos are already here. Piano-players, bound to put some
value on the tortures of Czerny, affect to laugh at all such
contrivances, but that is no more than a pale phosphorescence of an
outraged _wille zur macht_. Setting aside half a dozen--perhaps a
dozen--great masters of a moribund craft, who will say that the average
mechanical piano is not as competent as the average pianist?
When the human performer of music goes the way of the galley-slave, the
charm of personality, of course, will be pumped out of the performance
of music. But the charm of personality does not help music; it hinders
it. It is not a reinforcement to music; it is a rival. When a beautiful
singer comes upon the stage, two shows, as it were, go on at once: first
the music show, and then the arms, shoulders, neck, nose, ankles, eyes,
hips, calves and ruby lips--in brief, the sex-show. The second of these
shows, to the majority of persons present, is more interesting than the
first--to the men because of the sex interest, and to the women because
of the professional or technical interest--and so music is forced into
the background. What it becomes, indeed, is no more than a half-heard
accompaniment to an imagined anecdote, just as color, line and mass
become mere accomplishments to an anecdote in a picture by an English
academician, or by a sentimental German of the Boecklin school.
The purified and dephlogisticated music of the future, to be sure, will
never appeal to the mob, which will keep on demanding its chance to
gloat over gaudy, voluptuous women, and fat, scandalous tenors. The mob,
even disregarding its insatiable appetite for the improper, is a natural
hero worshiper. It loves, not the beautiful, but the strange, the
unprecedented, the astounding; it suffers from an incurable
_héliogabalisme_. A soprano who can gargle her way up to G sharp in
altissimo interests it almost as much as a contralto who has slept
publicly with a grand duke. If it cannot get the tenor who receives
$3,000 a night, it will take the tenor who fought the manager with
bung-starters last Tuesday. But this is merely saying that the tastes
and desires of the mob have nothing to do with music as an art. For its
ears, as for its eyes, it demands anecdotes--on the one hand the Suicide
symphony, "The Forge in the Forest," and the general run of Italian
opera, and on the other hand such things as "The Angelus," "Playing
Grandpa" and the so-called "Mona Lisa." It cannot imagine art as devoid
of moral content, as beauty pure and simple. It always demands
something to edify it, or, failing that, to shock it.
These concepts, of the edifying and the shocking, are closer together in
the psyche than most persons imagine. The one, in fact, depends upon the
other: without some definite notion of the improving it is almost
impossible to conjure up an active notion of the improper. All salacious
art is addressed, not to the damned, but to the consciously saved; it is
Sunday-school superintendents, not bartenders, who chiefly patronize
peep-shows, and know the dirty books, and have a high artistic
admiration for sopranos of superior gluteal development. The man who has
risen above the petty ethical superstitions of Christendom gets little
pleasure out of impropriety, for very few ordinary phenomena seem to him
to be improper. Thus a Frenchman, viewing the undraped statues which
bedizen his native galleries of art, either enjoys them in a purely
aesthetic fashion--which is seldom possible save when he is in
liquor--or confesses frankly that he doesn't like them at all; whereas
the visiting Americano is so powerfully shocked and fascinated by them
that one finds him, the same evening, in places where no respectable man
ought to go. All art, to this fellow, must have a certain bawdiness, or
he cannot abide it. His favorite soprano, in the opera house, is not the
fat and middle-aged lady who can actually sing, but the girl with the
bare back and translucent drawers. Condescending to the concert hall,
he is bored by the posse of enemy aliens in funereal black, and so
demands a vocal soloist--that is, a gaudy creature of such advanced
corsetting that she can make him forget Bach for a while, and turn his
thoughts pleasantly to amorous intrigue.
In all this, of course, there is nothing new. Other and better men have
noted the damage that the personal equation does to music, and some of
them have even sought ways out. For example, Richard Strauss. His
so-called ballet, "Josefs Legend," produced in Paris just before the
war, is an attempt to write an opera without singers. All of the music
is in the orchestra; the folks on the stage merely go through a
pointless pantomime; their main function is to entertain the eye with
shifting colors. Thus, the romantic sentiments of Joseph are announced,
not by some eye-rolling tenor, but by the first, second, third, fourth,
fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth violins (it is a Strauss score!), with
the incidental aid of the wood-wind, the brass, the percussion and the
rest of the strings. And the heroine's reply is made, not by a soprano
with a cold, but by an honest man playing a flute. The next step will be
the substitution of marionettes for actors. The removal of the orchestra
to a sort of trench, out of sight of the audience, is already an
accomplished fact at Munich. The end, perhaps, will be music purged of
its current ptomaines. In brief, music.
XXXVI
ZOOS
I often wonder how much sound and nourishing food is fed to the animals
in the zoological gardens of America every week, and try to figure out
what the public gets in return for the cost thereof. The annual bill
must surely run into millions; one is constantly hearing how much beef a
lion downs at a meal, and how many tons of hay an elephant dispatches in
a month. And to what end? To the end, principally, that a horde of
superintendents and keepers may be kept in easy jobs. To the end,
secondarily, that the least intelligent minority of the population may
have an idiotic show to gape at on Sunday afternoons, and that the young
of the species may be instructed in the methods of amour prevailing
among chimpanzees and become privy to the technic employed by jaguars,
hyenas and polar bears in ridding themselves of lice.
So far as I can make out, after laborious visits to all the chief zoos
of the nation, no other imaginable purpose is served by their existence.
One hears constantly, true enough (mainly from the gentlemen they
support) that they are educational. But how? Just what sort of
instruction do they radiate, and what is its value? I have never been
able to find out. The sober truth is that they are no more educational
than so many firemen's parades or displays of sky-rockets, and that all
they actually offer to the public in return for the taxes wasted upon
them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit
to a penitentiary, or even to Congress or a state legislature in
session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.
Education your grandmother! Show me a schoolboy who has ever learned
anything valuable or important by watching a mangy old lion snoring away
in its cage or a family of monkeys fighting for peanuts. To get any
useful instruction out of such a spectacle is palpably impossible; not
even a college professor is improved by it. The most it can imaginably
impart is that the stripes of a certain sort of tiger run one way and
the stripes of another sort some other way, that hyenas and polecats
smell worse than Greek 'bus boys, that the Latin name of the raccoon
(who was unheard of by the Romans) is _Procyon lotor_. For the
dissemination of such banal knowledge, absurdly emitted and defectively
taken in, the taxpayers of the United States are mulcted in hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year. As well make them pay for teaching
policemen the theory of least squares, or for instructing roosters in
the laying of eggs.
But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value. They enable learned men
to study this or that. Again the facts blast the theory. No scientific
discovery of any value whatsoever, even to the animals themselves, has
ever come out of a zoo. The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoology,
and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited, not in the groves of actual
learning, but in the yellow journals. He is to biology what the late
Camille Flammarion was to astronomy, which is to say, its court jester
and reductio ad absurdum. When he leaps into public notice with some new
pearl of knowledge, it commonly turns out to be no more than the news
that Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian lady walrus, has had her teeth
plugged with zinc and is expecting twins. Or that Pishposh, the
man-eating alligator, is down with locomotor ataxia. Or that Damon, the
grizzly, has just finished his brother Pythias in the tenth round,
chewing off his tail, nose and remaining ear.
Science, of course, has its uses for the lower animals. A diligent study
of their livers and lights helps to an understanding of the anatomy and
physiology, and particularly of the pathology, of man. They are
necessary aids in devising and manufacturing many remedial agents, and
in testing the virtues of those already devised; out of the mute agonies
of a rabbit or a calf may come relief for a baby with diphtheria, or
means for an archdeacon to escape the consequences of his youthful
follies. Moreover, something valuable is to be got out of a mere study
of their habits, instincts and ways of mind--knowledge that, by analogy,
may illuminate the parallel doings of the _genus homo_, and so enable us
to comprehend the primitive mental processes of Congressmen, morons and
the rev. clergy.
But it must be obvious that none of these studies can be made in a zoo.
The zoo animals, to begin with, provide no material for the biologist;
he can find out no more about their insides than what he discerns from a
safe distance and through the bars. He is not allowed to try his germs
and specifics upon them; he is not allowed to vivisect them. If he would
find out what goes on in the animal body under this condition or that,
he must turn from the inhabitants of the zoo to the customary guinea
pigs and street dogs, and buy or steal them for himself. Nor does he get
any chance for profitable inquiry when zoo animals die (usually of lack
of exercise or ignorant doctoring), for their carcasses are not handed
to him for autopsy, but at once stuffed with gypsum and excelsior and
placed in some museum.
Least of all do zoos produce any new knowledge about animal behavior.
Such knowledge must be got, not from animals penned up and tortured, but
from animals in a state of nature. A college professor studying the
habits of the giraffe, for example, and confining his observations to
specimens in zoos, would inevitably come to the conclusion that the
giraffe is a sedentary and melancholy beast, standing immovable for
hours at a time and employing an Italian to feed him hay and cabbages.
As well proceed to a study of the psychology of a juris-consult by
first immersing him in Sing Sing, or of a juggler by first cutting off
his hands. Knowledge so gained is inaccurate and imbecile knowledge. Not
even a college professor, if sober, would give it any faith and credit.
There remains, then, the only true utility of a zoo: it is a childish
and pointless show for the unintelligent, in brief, for children,
nursemaids, visiting yokels and the generality of the defective. Should
the taxpayers be forced to sweat millions for such a purpose? I think
not. The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of
monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch
flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be
combatted at the public expense, and not fostered. He is a public
liability and a public menace, and society should seek to improve him.
Instead of that, we spend a lot of money to feed his degrading appetite
and further paralyze his mind. It is precisely as if the community
provided free champagne for dipsomaniacs, or hired lecturers to convert
the army to the doctrines of the Bolsheviki.
Of the abominable cruelties practised in zoos it is unnecessary to make
mention. Even assuming that all the keepers are men of delicate natures
and ardent zoophiles (which is about as safe as assuming that the
keepers of a prison are all sentimentalists, and weep for the sorrows of
their charges), it must be plain that the work they do involves an
endless war upon the native instincts of the animals, and that they
must thus inflict the most abominable tortures every day. What could be
a sadder sight than a tiger in a cage, save it be a forest monkey
climbing dispairingly up a barked stump, or an eagle chained to its
roost? How can man be benefitted and made better by robbing the seal of
its arctic ice, the hippopotamus of its soft wallow, the buffalo of its
open range, the lion of its kingship, the birds of their air?
I am no sentimentalist, God knows. I am in favor of vivisection
unrestrained, so long as the vivisectionist knows what he is about. I
advocate clubbing a dog that barks unnecessarily, which all dogs do. I
enjoy hangings, particularly of converts to the evangelical faiths. The
crunch of a cockroach is music to my ears. But when the day comes to
turn the prisoners of the zoo out of their cages, if it is only to lead
them to the swifter, kinder knife of the _schochet_, I shall be present
and rejoicing, and if any one present thinks to suggest that it would be
a good plan to celebrate the day by shooting the whole zoo faculty, I
shall have a revolver in my pocket and a sound eye in my head.
XXXVII
ON HEARING MOZART
The only permanent values in the world are truth and beauty, and of
these it is probable that truth is lasting only in so far as it is a
function and manifestation of beauty--a projection of feeling in terms
of idea. The world is a charnel house of dead religions. Where are all
the faiths of the middle ages, so complex and yet so precise? But all
that was essential in the beauty of the middle ages still lives....
This is the heritage of man, but not of men. The great majority of men
are not even aware of it. Their participation in the progress of the
world, and even in the history of the world, is infinitely remote and
trivial. They live and die, at bottom, as animals live and die. The
human race, as a race, is scarcely cognizant of their existence; they
haven't even definite number, but stand grouped together as _x_, the
quantity unknown ... and not worth knowing.
XXXVIII
THE ROAD TO DOUBT
The first effect of what used to be called natural philosophy is to fill
its devotee with wonder at the marvels of God. This explains why the
pursuit of science, so long as it remains superficial, is not
incompatible with the most naif sort of religious faith. But the moment
the student of the sciences passes this stage of childlike amazement and
begins to investigate the inner workings of natural phenomena, he begins
to see how ineptly many of them are managed, and so he tends to pass
from awe of the Creator to criticism of the Creator, and once he has
crossed that bridge he has ceased to be a believer. One finds plenty of
neighborhood physicians, amateur botanists, high-school physics teachers
and other such quasi-scientists in the pews on Sunday, but one never
sees a Huxley there, or a Darwin, or an Ehrlich.
XXXIX
A NEW USE FOR CHURCHES
The argument by design, it may be granted, establishes a reasonable
ground for accepting the existence of God. It makes belief, at all
events, quite as intelligible as unbelief. But when the theologians take
their step from the existence of God to the goodness of God they tread
upon much less firm earth. How can one see any proof of that goodness in
the senseless and intolerable sufferings of man--his helplessness, the
brief and troubled span of his life, the inexplicable disproportion
between his deserts and his rewards, the tragedy of his soaring
aspiration, the worse tragedy of his dumb questioning? Granting the
existence of God, a house dedicated to Him naturally follows. He is
all-important; it is fit that man should take some notice of Him. But
why praise and flatter Him for His unspeakable cruelties? Why forget so
supinely His failures to remedy the easily remediable? Why, indeed,
devote the churches exclusively to worship? Why not give them over, now
and then, to justifiable indignation meetings?
Perhaps men will incline to this idea later on. It is not inconceivable,
indeed, that religion will one day cease to be a poltroonish
acquiescence and become a vigorous and insistent criticism. If God can
hear a petition, what ground is there for holding that He would not hear
a complaint? It might, indeed, please Him to find His creatures grown
so self-reliant and reflective. More, it might even help Him to get
through His infinitely complex and difficult work. Theology has already
moved toward such notions. It has abandoned the primitive doctrine of
God's arbitrariness and indifference, and substituted the doctrine that
He is willing, and even eager, to hear the desires of His creatures--_i.
e._, their private notions, born of experience, as to what would be best
for them. Why assume that those notions would be any the less worth
hearing and heeding if they were cast in the form of criticism, and even
of denunciation? Why hold that the God who can understand and forgive
even treason could not understand and forgive remonstrance?
XL
THE ROOT OF RELIGION
The idea of literal truth crept into religion relatively late: it is the
invention of lawyers, priests and cheese-mongers. The idea of mystery
long preceded it, and at the heart of that idea of mystery was an idea
of beauty--that is, an idea that this or that view of the celestial and
infernal process presented a satisfying picture of form, rhythm and
organization. Once this view was adopted as satisfying, its professional
interpreters and their dupes sought to reinforce it by declaring it
true. The same flow of reasoning is familiar on lower planes. The
average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is
true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.
XLI
FREE WILL
Free will, it appears, is still a Christian dogma. Without it the
cruelties of God would strain faith to the breaking-point. But outside
the fold it is gradually falling into decay. Such men of science as
George W. Crile and Jacques Loeb have dealt it staggering blows, and
among laymen of inquiring mind it seems to be giving way to an
apologetic sort of determinism--a determinism, one may say, tempered by
defective observation. The late Mark Twain, in his secret heart, was
such a determinist. In his "What Is Man?" you will find him at his
farewells to libertarianism. The vast majority of our acts, he argues,
are determined, but there remains a residuum of free choices. Here we
stand free of compulsion and face a pair or more of alternatives, and
are free to go this way or that.
A pillow for free will to fall upon--but one loaded with disconcerting
brickbats. Where the occupants of this last trench of libertarianism err
is in their assumption that the pulls of their antagonistic impulses are
exactly equal--that the individual is absolutely free to choose which
one he will yield to. Such freedom, in practise, is never encountered.
When an individual confronts alternatives, it is not alone his volition
that chooses between them, but also his environment, his inherited
prejudices, his race, his color, his condition of servitude. I may kiss
a girl or I may not kiss her, but surely it would be absurd to say that
I am, in any true sense, a free agent in the matter. The world has even
put my helplessness into a proverb. It says that my decision and act
depend upon the time, the place--and even to some extent, upon the girl.
Examples might be multiplied _ad infinitum_. I can scarcely remember
performing a wholly voluntary act. My whole life, as I look back upon
it, seems to be a long series of inexplicable accidents, not only quite
unavoidable, but even quite unintelligible. Its history is the history
of the reactions of my personality to my environment, of my behavior
before external stimuli. I have been no more responsible for that
personality than I have been for that environment. To say that I can
change the former by a voluntary effort is as ridiculous as to say that
I can modify the curvature of the lenses of my eyes. I know, because I
have often tried to change it, and always failed. Nevertheless, it has
changed. I am not the same man I was in the last century. But the
gratifying improvements so plainly visible are surely not to be credited
to me. All of them came from without--or from unplumbable and
uncontrollable depths within.
The more the matter is examined the more the residuum of free will
shrinks and shrinks, until in the end it is almost impossible to find
it. A great many men, of course, looking at themselves, see it as
something very large; they slap their chests and call themselves free
agents, and demand that God reward them for their virtue. But these
fellows are simply idiotic egoists, devoid of a critical sense. They
mistake the acts of God for their own acts. Of such sort are the
coxcombs who boast about wooing and winning their wives. They are
brothers to the fox who boasted that he had made the hounds run....
The throwing overboard of free will is commonly denounced on the ground
that it subverts morality and makes of religion a mocking. Such pious
objections, of course, are foreign to logic, but nevertheless it may be
well to give a glance to this one. It is based upon the fallacious
hypothesis that the determinist escapes, or hopes to escape, the
consequences of his acts. Nothing could be more untrue. Consequences
follow acts just as relentlessly if the latter be involuntary as if they
be voluntary. If I rob a bank of my free choice or in response to some
unfathomable inner necessity, it is all one; I will go to the same jail.
Conscripts in war are killed just as often as volunteers. Men who are
tracked down and shanghaied by their wives have just as hard a time of
it as men who walk fatuously into the trap by formally proposing.