PREJUDICES
FIFTH SERIES
By H. L. MENCKEN
[Illustration]
PUBLISHED AT THE BORZOI · NEW YORK · BY
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
I FOUR MORAL CAUSES, 9
1. Birth Control, 9
2. Comstockery, 15
3. Capital Punishment, 21
4. War, 27
II FOUR MAKERS OF TALES, 34
1. Conrad, 34
2. Hergesheimer, 42
3. Lardner, 49
4. Masters, 56
III IN MEMORIAM: W. J. B., 64
IV THE HILLS OF ZION, 75
V BEETHOVEN, 87
VI RONDO ON AN ANCIENT THEME, 95
VII PROTESTANTISM IN THE REPUBLIC, 104
VIII FROM THE FILES OF A BOOK REVIEWER, 120
1. Counter-Offensive, 120
2. Heretics, 127
3. The Grove of Academe, 133
4. The Schoolma’m’s Goal, 141
5. The Heroic Age, 146
6. The Woes of a 100% American, 152
7. Yazoo’s Favorite, 159
8. The Father of Service, 164
9. A Modern Masterpiece, 169
10. Sweet Stuff, 172
IX THE FRINGES OF LOVELY LETTERS, 175
1. Authorship as a Trade, 175
2. Authors as Persons, 180
3. Birth Pangs, 185
4. Want Ad, 190
5. Literature and the Schoolma’m, 196
6. The Critic and His Job, 202
7. Painting and Its Critics, 208
8. Greenwich Village, 214
X ESSAY IN PEDAGOGY, 218
XI ON LIVING IN BALTIMORE, 237
XII THE LAST NEW ENGLANDER, 244
XIII THE NATION, 255
XIV OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN, 263
XV GOLDEN AGE, 270
XVI EDGAR SALTUS, 277
XVII MISCELLANEOUS NOTES, 283
1. Martyrs, 283
2. The Ancients, 283
3. Jack Ketch as Eugenist, 284
4. Heroes, 286
5. An Historic Blunder, 291
6. On Cynicism, 292
7. Music and Sin, 293
8. The Champion, 296
9. Honor in America, 300
10. Note in the Margin of a Treatise
on Psychology, 302
11. Definition, 302
XVIII CATECHISM, 304
INDEX, 305
PREJUDICES
FIFTH SERIES
PREJUDICES: FIFTH SERIES
I. FOUR MORAL CAUSES
1
_Birth Control_
The grotesque failure of the campaign to put down propaganda for birth
control in the Republic has a lesson in it for those romantic optimists
who believe that in the long run, by some mysterious hook or crook
and perhaps with divine help, Prohibition will be enforced. They will
not heed that lesson, but it is there nevertheless. Church and state
combine to baffle and exterminate the birth controllers. They are
threatened with penal servitude and their customers are threatened with
hell-fire. Yet it must be obvious that they are making progress in the
land, for the national birth-rate continues to slide downhill, steadily
and rapidly.
Incidentally, it is amusing and instructive to observe that it
diminishes with greatest celerity among the educated and highly
respectable classes, which is to say, among those who are ordinarily
most law-abiding. The same thing is to be noted when one turns to
Prohibition. The majority of professional criminals, now as in the old
days of sin, are teetotalers, but when one comes to the good citizens
who scorn them and demand incessantly that the _Polizei_ butcher them
and so have done with them, one comes at once upon a high density of
scofflaws. I know many Americans of easy means, some of them greatly
respected and even eminent. Not two per cent make any pretense of
obeying the Volstead Act. And not two per cent of their wives are
innocent of birth control. The reason is not far to seek. Both the
Volstead Act and the statute aimed at birth control invade the sanctity
of the domestic hearth. They take the roof off a man’s house, and
invite the world to look in. Obviously, that looking in is unpleasant
in proportion as the man himself is dignified. If he is a low fellow,
he doesn’t care much, for he is used to such snooping by his low
neighbors. But if he is one who has a high opinion of himself, and is
accustomed to seeing it ratified by others, then he is outraged. And if
he has any natural bellicosity in him and resistance seems reasonably
safe, he resists with great diligence and vigor.
Here, perhaps, we come upon an explanation of the fact that Prohibition
and all other such devices for making men good by force are far less
opposed in the country than they are in the cities. The yokel is
trained from infancy to suffer espionage. He has scarcely any privacy
at all. His neighbors know everything that is to be known about him,
including what he eats and what he feeds his quadrupedal colleagues.
His religious ideas are matters of public discussion; if he is recusant
the village pastor prays for him by name. When his wife begins the
sublime biological process of giving him an heir, the news flies
around. If he inherits $200 from an uncle in Idaho everyone knows it
instantly. If he skins his shin, or buys a new plow, or sees a ghost,
or takes a bath it is a public event. Thus living like a goldfish in
a glass globe, he acquires a large tolerance of snoutery, for if he
resisted it his neighbors would set him down as an enemy of their
happiness, and probably burn his barn. When an official spy or two
are added to the volunteer pack he scarcely notices it. It seems
natural and inevitable to him that everyone outside his house should
be interested in what goes on inside, and that this interest should
be accompanied by definite notions as to what is nice and what is not
nice, supported by pressure. So he submits to governmental tyranny as
he submits to the village inquisition, and when he hears that city men
resist, it only confirms his general feeling that they are scoundrels.
They are scoundrels because they have a better time than he has--the
sempiternal human reason. The city man is differently trained. He is
used to being let alone. Save when he lives in the slums, his neighbors
show no interest in him. He would regard it as outrageous for them to
have opinions about what goes on within the four walls of his house.
If they offered him advice he would invite them to go to hell; if they
tried force he would bawl for the police. So he is doubly affronted
when the police themselves stalk in. And he resists them with every
means at his command, and believes it is his high duty to do so, that
liberty may not perish from the earth.
The birth control fanatics profit by this elemental fact. It is their
great good fortune that their enemies have tried to put them down,
not by refuting their ideas, but by seeking to shove them into jail.
What they argue for, at bottom, remains very dubious, and multitudes
of quite honest and intelligent persons are against it. They have by
no means proved that a high birth-rate is dangerous, and they have
certainly not shown that they know of any sure and safe way to reduce
it--that is, any way not already known to every corner druggist. But
when an attempt is made to put them down by law, the question whether
they are wise falls into the background, and the question whether their
rights are invaded comes forward. At once the crowd on their side is
immensely reinforced. It now includes not only all the persons who
believe in birth control, but also all the persons who believe in free
ideas and free speech, and this second group, it quickly appears, is
far larger than the first one, and far more formidable. So the birth
controllers suddenly find themselves supported by heavy battalions,
and that support is sufficient to make them almost invulnerable.
Personally, I am inclined to be against them. I believe that the
ignorant should be permitted to spawn _ad libitum_, that there may be
a steady supply of slaves, and that those of us who are more prudent
and sanitary may be relieved of unpleasant work. If the debate were
open and fair, I’d oppose the birth controllers with all the subtlest
devices of rhetoric, including bogus statistics and billingsgate. But
so long as they are denied their plain rights--and, in particular,
so long as those rights are denied them by an evil combination of
theologians and politicians,--I am for them, and shall remain so until
the last galoot’s ashore. They have got many more allies on the same
terms. And I believe that they are winning.
The law which forbids them to send their brummagem tracts through the
mails is obviously disingenuous and oppressive. It is a part of the
notorious Postal Act, put on the books by Comstock himself, executed by
bureaucratic numskulls, and supported by every variety of witch-burner.
I know of no intelligent man or woman who is in favor of the principal
of such grotesque legislation; even the worst enemies of the birth
controllers would not venture to argue that it should be applied
generally. The way to dispose of such laws is to flout them and make a
mock of them. The theory that they can be got rid of by enforcing them
is nonsense. Enforcing them simply inspires the sadists who advocate
them to fresh excesses. Worse, it accustoms the people to oppression,
and so tends to make them bear it uncomplainingly. Wherever, in
the United States, there has been any sincere effort to enforce
Prohibition, the anti-evolutionists are already on the warpath, and the
Lord’s Day Alliance is drumming up recruits. No, the way to deal with
such laws is to defy them, and thus make them ridiculous. This is being
done in the case of the Volstead Act by millions of patriots, clerical
and lay. It is being done in the case of the Comstock Act by a small
band, but one full of praiseworthy resolution.
Thus I deliver myself of a whoop for the birth controllers, and pass
on to pleasanter concerns. Their specific Great Cause, it seems to me,
is full of holes. They draw extremely questionable conclusions from a
highly dubious body of so-called facts. But they are profoundly right
at bottom. They are right when they argue that anyone who tries to
silence them by force is the common enemy of all of us. And they are
right when they hold that the best way to get rid of such opposition is
to thumb the nose at it.
2
_Comstockery_
In 1873, when the late Anthony Comstock began his great Christian work,
the American flapper, or, as she was then called, the young lady, read
_Godey’s Ladies’ Book_. To-day she reads--but if you want to find out
what she reads simply take a look at the cheap fiction magazines which
rise mountain-high from every news-stand. It is an amusing and at the
same time highly instructive commentary upon the effectiveness of moral
legislation. The net result of fifty years of Comstockery is complete
and ignominious failure. All its gaudy raids and alarms have simply
gone for naught.
Comstock, of course, was an imbecile; his sayings and doings were of
such sort that they inevitably excited the public mirth, and so injured
the cause he labored for. But it would be inaccurate, I believe, to
put all the blame for its failure upon his imbecility. His successor,
in New York, John S. Sumner, is by no means another such unwitting
comedian; on the contrary, he shows discretion and even a certain
wistful dignity. Nevertheless, he has failed just as miserably. When he
took office “Three Weeks” was still regarded as a very salacious book.
The wives of Babbitts read it in the kitchen, with the blinds down; it
was hidden under every pillow in every finishing-school in the land.
To-day “Three Weeks” is dismissed as intolerably banal by school-girls
of thirteen. To make a genuine sensation it is not sufficient that a
new book be naughty; it must be downright pathological.
I have been reviewing current American fiction pretty steadily since
1908. The change that I note is immense. When I began, a new novel
dealing frankly with the physiology and pathology of sex was still
something of a novelty. It was, indeed, so rare that I always called
attention to it. To-day it is a commonplace. The surprise now comes
when a new novel turns out to be chemically pure. Try to imagine an
American publisher, in these days, getting alarmed about Dreiser’s
“Sister Carrie” and suppressing it before publication! The oldest and
most dignified houses would print it without question; they print far
worse every day. Yet in 1900 it seemed so lewd and lascivious that the
publisher who put it into type got into a panic of fright, and hid the
whole edition in the cellar. To-day that same publisher is advertising
a new edition of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” with “A Woman Waits
for Me” printed in full!
What ruined the cause of the Comstocks, I believe, was the campaign
of their brethren of sex hygiene. The whole Comstockian case, as
good Anthony himself used to explain frankly, was grounded upon the
doctrine that virtue and ignorance were identical--that the slightest
knowledge of sin was fatal to virtue. Comstock believed and argued that
the only way to keep girls pure was to forbid them to think about sex
at all. He expounded that doctrine often and at great length. No woman,
he was convinced, could be trusted. The instant she was allowed to peek
over the fence she was off to the Bad Lands. This notion he supported
with many texts from Holy Writ, chiefly from the Old Testament. He
was a Puritan of the old school, and had no belief whatever in virtue
_per se_. A good woman, to him, was simply one who was efficiently
policed. Unfortunately for him, there rose up, within the bounds of his
own sect, a school of uplifters who began to merchant quite contrary
ideas. They believed that sin was often caused by ignorance--that many
a virtuous girl was undone simply because she didn’t know what she was
doing. These uplifters held that unchastity was not the product of a
congenital tendency to it in the female, but of the sinister enterprise
of the male, flowing out of his superior knowledge and sophistication.
So they set out to spread the enlightenment. If all girls of sixteen,
they argued not unplausibly, knew as much about the dreadful
consequences of sin as the average police lieutenant or midwife, there
would be no more seductions, and in accordance with that theory, they
began printing books describing the discomforts of parturition and the
terminal symptoms of lues. These books they broadcasted in numerous
and immense editions. Comstock, of course, was bitterly against the
scheme. He had no faith in the solemn warnings; he saw only the new and
startling frankness, and he believed firmly that its one effect would
be to “arouse a libidinous passion ... in the mind of a modest woman.”
But he was spiked and hamstrung by the impeccable respectability of
the sex hygienists. Most of them were Puritans like himself; some were
towering giants of Christian rectitude. One of the most active, the
Rev. Dr. Sylvanus Stall, was a clergyman of the first chop--a sorcerer
who had notoriously saved thousands of immortal souls. To raid such
men, to cast them into jail and denounce them as scoundrels, was
palpably impossible. Comstock fretted and fumed, but the thing got
beyond him. Of Pastor Stall’s books alone, millions were sold. Others
were almost as successful; the country was flooded from coast to coast.
Whether Comstock was right or wrong I don’t know--that is, whether
these sex hygiene books increased or diminished loose living in the
Republic I don’t know. Some say one thing and some another. But this I
_do_ know; they had a quick and tremendous influence upon the content
of American fiction. In the old-time novel what are now called the
Facts of Life were glossed over mellifluously, and no one complained
about it, for the great majority of fiction readers, being young and
female, had no notion of what they were missing. But after they had
read the sex hygiene books they began to observe that what was set out
in novels was very evasive, and that much of it was downright untrue.
So they began to murmur, to snicker, to boo. One by one the old-time
novelists went on the shelf. I could make up a long and melancholy
roll of them. Their sales dropped off; they began to be laughed at.
In place of them rose a new school, and its aim was to tell it all.
With this new school Comstock and his heirs have been wrestling ever
since, and with steadily increasing bad fortune. Every year they make
raids, perform in the newspapers and predict the end of the world, but
every year the average is worse than the worst of the year before.
As a practicing reviewer, I have got so used to lewd and lascivious
books that I no longer notice them. They pour in from all directions.
The most virtuous lady novelists write things that would have made a
bartender blush to death two decades ago. If I open a new novel and
find nothing about Freudian suppressions in it, I suspect at once that
it is simply a reprint of some forgotten novel of 1885, with a new
name. When I began reviewing I used to send my review copies, after
I had sweated through them, to the Y. M. C. A. Now I send them to a
medical college.
The Comstocks labor against this stream gallantly, but, it seems
to me, very ineptly. They can’t, of course, proceed against every
naughty book that comes out, for there are far too many, but they
could at least choose their marks far more sagaciously than they do.
Instead of tackling the books that are frankly pornographic and have
no other excuse for being, they almost always tackle books that have
obvious literary merit, and are thus relatively easily defended. In
consequence, they lose most of their cases. They lost with “Jurgen,”
they lost with “The ‘Genius,’” they lost with “Mlle. de Maupin,” and
they have lost countless other times. And every time they lose they
grow more impotent and absurd. Why do they pick out such books? Simply
because raiding them gets more publicity than raiding more obscure
stuff. The Comstock Society, like all other such pious organizations,
is chronically short of money, and the way to raise it is to make
a noise in the newspapers. A raid on “Night Life in Chicago,” or
“Confessions of an Escaped Nun” would get but a few lines; an attack on
“Jurgen” is first-page stuff for days on end. Christian virtuosi, their
libido aroused, send in their money, and so the society is saved. But
when the trial is called and the case is lost, contributions fall off
again, and another conspicuous victim must be found.
Well, what is the Comstocks’ own remedy for this difficulty? It is
to be found in what they call the Clean Books Bill. The aim of this
bill is to make it impossible for a publisher accused of publishing
an immoral book to make any defense at all. If it ever becomes a
law the Comstocks will be able to pick out a single sentence from a
Dreiser novel of 10,000 pages and base their whole case upon it; the
author and publisher will be forbidden to offer the rest of the book
as evidence that the whole has no pornographic purpose. Under such a
law anyone printing or selling the Bible will run dreadful risks. One
typographical error of a stimulating character will suffice to send
a publisher to jail. But will the law actually achieve its purpose?
I doubt it. Such extravagant and palpably unjust statutes never
accomplish anything. Juries revolt against them; even judges punch
holes in them. The Volstead Act is an excellent specimen. Has it made
the Republic dry?
3
_Capital Punishment_
Having argued against the death penalty with great heat and eloquence
for more than twenty years, I hope I do not go beyond my rights when I
now announce that I have begun to wobble, and feel a strong temptation
to take the other side. My doubts, in all seriousness, I ascribe to the
arguments of the current abolitionists. The more earnestly they set
forth those arguments, the more I am harassed by suspicions that they
are full of folly. A humane and Christian spirit, to be sure, is in
them; but is there any sense? As I hint, I begin to doubt it. Consider
the two that are oftenest heard:
1. That hanging a man (or doing him to death in any other such
coldblooded way) is a dreadful business, degrading to those who have
to do it and revolting to those who have to witness it.
2. That it is useless, for it does not deter others from the same
crime.
The first of these arguments, it seems to me, is plainly too weak to
need serious refutation. All it says, in brief, is that the work of
the hangman is unpleasant. Granted. But suppose it is? It may be quite
necessary to society for all that. There are, indeed, many other jobs
that are unpleasant, and yet no one thinks of abolishing them. I pass
over those connected with surgery, obstetrics, plumbing, military
science, journalism and the sacred office, and point to one which,
like that of the hangman, has to do with the execution of the laws:
to wit, the post of Federal judge under Prohibition. Consider what
a judge executing the Volstead Act must do nearly every day. He must
assume that men whom he esteems and loves, men of his own profession,
even his fellow judges--in brief, the great body of wet and enlightened
Christian men--are all criminals. And he must assume that a pack of
spies and blackmailers whose mere presence, in private life, would gag
him--in brief, the corps of Anti-Saloon League snouters and Prohibition
agents--are truth-seekers and altruists. These assumptions are
obviously hard to make. Not a few judges, unable to make them, resign
from the bench; at least one has committed suicide. But the remaining
judges, so long as they sit, must make them as in duty bound, whatever
the outrage to their feelings. Many grow callous and suffer no more.
So with the hangman, and his even more disagreeable offices. A man of
delicate sensibilities, confronting them, would die of horror, but
there is no evidence that they are revolting to the men who actually
discharge them. I have known hangmen, indeed, who delighted in their
art, and practiced it proudly. I have never heard of one who threw up
his job.
In the second argument of the abolitionists there is more force, but
even here, I believe, the ground under them is very shaky. Their
fundamental error consists in assuming that the whole aim of punishing
criminals is to deter other (potential) criminals--that we hang or
electrocute A simply in order to so alarm B that he will not kill C.
This, I believe, is an assumption almost as inaccurate as those which
must be made by a Federal judge. It confuses a part with the whole.
Deterrence, obviously, is _one_ of the aims of punishment, but it is
surely not the only one. On the contrary, there are at least half a
dozen, and some of them are probably quite as important. At least one
of them, practically considered, is _more_ important. Commonly, it is
described as revenge, but revenge is really not the word for it. I
borrow a better term from the late Aristotle: _katharsis_. _Katharsis_,
so used, means a salubrious discharge of emotions, a healthy letting
off of steam. A schoolboy, disliking his teacher, deposits a tack upon
the pedagogical chair; the teacher jumps and the boy laughs. This is
_katharsis_. A bootlegger, paying off a Prohibition agent, gives him a
counterfeit $10 bill; the agent, dropping it in the collection plate on
Sunday, is arrested and jailed. This is also _katharsis_. A subscriber
to a newspaper, observing his name spelled incorrectly in the report of
a lodge meeting, spreads a report that the editor of the paper did not
buy Liberty Bonds. This again is _katharsis_.
What I contend is that one of the prime objects of judicial punishments
is to afford this grateful _katharsis_ (a) to the immediate victims
of the criminal punished, and (b) to the general body of moral and
timorous men. These persons, and particularly the first group, are
concerned only indirectly with deterring other criminals. The thing
they crave primarily is the satisfaction of seeing the criminal before
them suffer as he made them suffer. What they want is the peace of mind
that goes with the feeling that accounts are squared. Until they get
that satisfaction they are in a state of emotional tension, and hence
unhappy. The instant they get it they are comfortable. I do not argue
that this yearning is noble; I simply argue that it is almost universal
among human beings. In the face of injuries that are unimportant and
can be borne without damage it may yield to higher impulses; that
is to say, it may yield to what is called Christian charity. But it
never so yields when the injury is serious, and gives substantial
permanent satisfaction to the person inflicting it. Here Christianity
is adjourned, and even saints reach for their sidearms. The better the
Christian, in fact, the more violent his demand for _katharsis_--once
he has unloaded the Beatitudes. At the time of the Leopold-Loeb trial
in Chicago the evangelical pastors of the town bawled for blood
unanimously, and even a Catholic priest joined them. On lower levels,
it is plainly asking too much of human nature to expect it to conquer
so natural an impulse. A keeps a store and has a bookkeeper, B. B
steals $700, invests it in Texas oil stocks, and is cleaned out. What
is A to do? Let B go? If he does so he will be unable to sleep at
night. The sense of injury, of injustice, will keep him awake. So he
turns B over to the police, and they send him to prison. Thereafter
A can sleep. More, he has pleasant dreams. He pictures B chained to
the wall of a dungeon a hundred feet underground, devoured by rats.
It is so agreeable that it makes him forget his $700. He has got his
_katharsis_.
The same thing precisely takes place on a larger scale when there is
a crime which destroys a whole community’s feeling of security. Every
law-abiding citizen feels menaced and frustrated until the criminals
have been struck down--until the communal capacity to get even with
them, and more than even, has been dramatically demonstrated. Here the
business of deterring others is no more than an afterthought. The main
thing is to destroy the scoundrels whose act has alarmed everyone,
and thus made everyone unhappy. Until they are brought to book that
unhappiness continues; when the law has been executed upon them there
is a sigh of relief. In other words, there is _katharsis_.
There is no public demand for the death penalty for ordinary crimes,
even for ordinary homicides. Its infliction, say, for necking, for
playing poker or for bootlegging would shock all men of normal decency
of feeling--that is to say, practically all men save the evangelical
clergy and their lay catchpolls. But for crimes involving the
deliberate and inexcusable taking of human life, by men openly defiant
of all civilized order--for such crimes it seems, to nine men out of
ten, a just and proper punishment. Any lesser punishment leaves them
feeling that the criminal has got the better of society--that he can
add insult to injury by laughing. That feeling is intensely unpleasant,
and no wonder! It can be dissipated only by a recourse to _katharsis_,
the invention of the aforesaid Aristotle. That _katharsis_ is most
effectively and economically achieved, as human nature now is, by
wafting the criminal to realms of bliss.
4
_War_
My mail is flooded with the briefs and broadsides of pacifist
organizations, damning war as a curse and those who make it as
scoundrels. Such literature I always read attentively, for it is full
of racy satire against the military, a class of men inevitably more or
less ludicrous in time of peace. But does it convert me to the pacifist
cause, which, as the pacifists contend, is the cause of God? I can only
report simply that it does not. I read it, enjoy it, pass it on to my
pastor--and go on believing in war myself. War is the only sport, so
far as I know, that is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport that
has any intelligible use.
The arguments that are brought against it are chiefly arguments, not
against the thing itself, but only against its political accompaniments
and consequences, most of them transient and gratuitous. They reached
a high tide of obnoxiousness, revolting to all self-respecting
men, during the last great moral combat. That combat was carried
on, at least from this side of the fence, in a grossly hysterical,
disingenuous, cowardly and sordid manner. The high participating
parties were vastly alarmed by the foe, and insanely eager to keep
business going as usual, and even better than usual. The result was
that the thing began as a sort of Methodist revival and ended as a raid
on a gentleman’s winecellar, with the Prohibition agents fighting among
themselves for the best jugs. The richest of them, once peace came,
began sending the others extortionate bills for the brass-knuckles,
Bibles and jimmies that all had used in common, and the heroes serving
this usurer began demanding tips in cash. But all that swinishness, I
submit, had no necessary connection with war itself. It is perfectly
possible to conduct war in a gallant and honorable manner, and without
using it as a mere cloak to rob noncombatants. More, the thing has
been done, and many times in the history of the world. If it has been
seldom done by democratic nations, then blame democracy, not war. In
democratic nations everything noble and of good account tends to decay
and smell badly.
War itself, in its pure form, is something quite different. It is a
combat of men who believe that a short and adventurous life, full
of changing scenes and high hazards, is better than a safe and dull
one--in other words, that it is better to have lived magnificently than
to have lived long. In this doctrine I am unable to discern anything
properly describable as fallacy. If you argue that, assuming every man
to embrace it, the human race would come to an end, I reply at once
that you assume something wholly impossible. And if you argue that the
life of a warrior is not actually magnificent, then I report that the
warrior should be permitted to judge of that himself. Against all such
arguments lie the plain facts that the great races of the world have
always been more or less warlike, and that war has attracted the talent
and satisfied the aspiration of some of their best men. I do not speak
of antiquity alone; I speak of our own time. The English, the Germans
and the French are all warlike, to-day as always--and if you took away
the English, the Germans and the French _Homo sapiens_ would be shorn
of his stomach, his liver and his ductless glands. If war is immoral,
then these great races are all immoral, and so are their greatest men.
The pacifists, of course, do not shrink from that absurd argument.
But the more they maintain it the more it becomes evident that, as
logicians, they are on all fours with the Prohibitionists.
War, so conducted by warriors, is a superb business and full of high
uses. It makes for resolution, endurance, enterprise, courage. It puts
down the sordid yearnings of ignoble men. Does it, incidentally, shed
some blood? Does it cost lives? The pacifists, discussing those lives,
always enmesh themselves in the theory that, without war, they would
go on forever. It is, I believe, not so. War, at worst, shortens them
somewhat. But at the same stroke it speeds up their tempo. The net
result is simply a matter of bookkeeping. A man killed at thirty, after
six months of war, has lived far longer than a man dead of a bellyache
at sixty, after forty-five years on an office stool.
But I am not on my legs to-day to sing the charms and glories of war;
my purpose is to argue that, whether glorious or not, it will remain
inevitable on this sad mud-pie so long as the great races of men
retain the view of it that I have described, and to deduce therefrom
the doctrine that pacifism, as a scheme of practical politics, is
thus not only unsound but also very dangerous. All that it could
conceivably accomplish, imagining it to succeed anywhere, would be
to make the nation embracing it highly vulnerable--in brief, a sort
of boozy idealist or unarmored butter-and-egg man, roaming the world
unprotected, and so holding out irresistible temptations to less moral
and more realistic nations.
War, under the sorry scheme that now passes for civilization, has been
degraded--transiently only, I hope and believe--to the uses of robbery.
Whoever has gold must have an army to guard it, or resign himself to
losing it. Especially must he have a guard for it if his public repute
is that of one with a not too fine understanding of the difference
between _meum_ and _tuum_. Such a reputation, it must be manifest, is
precisely that of the United States to-day. The rest of the world is so
passionately convinced that it is a thief that robbing it would take
on the high virtue and dignity of a constabulary act. It is not robbed
because it is strong. It will not be robbed until it grows weak.
But armed strength, argue the pacifists, does not prevent war: it
causes it. Who, reading history, could believe in such transparent
nonsense? Let us turn to the late enemy. What kept the peace in Europe
for forty-four years if it was not the mighty German army? If it
had been weak, France would have struck in 1875, and again in 1882,
and again in 1887, and again every two years thereafter. It took
nearly half a century to roll up a force sufficient to tackle the
colossus, and it took four years to bring it down even then. Our own
history is full of examples to the same effect. In 1867 Napoleon III,
believing that the United States was war weary and its army disbanded,
prepared to move into Mexico and tear the Monroe Doctrine to tatters.
He overlooked the large forces engaged in burning barns, robbing
hen-roosts and raiding cellars in the late Confederacy. When General
Sheridan marched upon the Rio Grande at the head of this army of
heroes, Napoleon changed his mind. Three years later he was disposed of
by the Germans, and the Continent settled down to forty-four years of
peace.
Consider, again, the Venezuela episode. When President Cleveland sent
his message to Congress on December 17, 1895, war with England became
imminent overnight. What prevented it? Was it the fact that the United
States had no army worthy of the name? Or the fact that the United
States had a brand-new, highly effective and immensely pugnacious
navy, notoriously eager to try its guns? Come, now, to 1898. Of all
the nations of Europe, only England sided with us against Spain. The
Germans, at Manila, went to great lengths to show their hostility. Did
they refrain from attacking Dewey because his fleet was smaller and
weaker than theirs, or because it was larger and stronger?
I could multiply instances, but observe the timekeeper reaching for the
gong. So far as I know, there is no record in history of a nation that
ever gained anything valuable by being unable to defend itself. Such
nations, true enough, have sometimes managed to exist for a time--but
at what cost! There is the case of Denmark to-day. It is discussing
disbanding its army on the ground that any probable or even possible
foe could dispose of that army in five days. But what does this mean?
It means that the Danes must reconcile themselves to living by the
sheer grace of their stronger neighbors--that they must be willing,
when the time comes, to see their country made a battle-ground by those
neighbors, and without raising a hand. Here I do not indulge in idle
talk: I am quoting almost literally a member of the Danish cabinet.
I can’t imagine the people of a truly great nation submitting to any
such ignominious destiny. The Danes have been forced into acquiescence
by their weakness. But why should the United States invite the same
fate by putting off its strength?
II. FOUR MAKERS OF TALES
1
_Conrad_
Some time ago I put in a blue afternoon re-reading Joseph Conrad’s
“Youth.” A _blue_ afternoon? What nonsense! The touch of the man is
like the touch of Schubert. One approaches him in various and unhappy
moods: depressed, dubious, despairing; one leaves him in the clear,
yellow sunshine that Nietzsche found in Bizet’s music. But here again
the phrase is inept. Sunshine suggests the imbecile, barnyard joy of
the human kohlrabi--the official optimism of a steadily delighted and
increasingly insane Republic. What the enigmatical Pole has to offer
is something quite different. If its parallel is to be found in music,
it is not in Schubert, but in Beethoven--perhaps even more accurately
in Johann Sebastian Bach. It is the joy, not of mere satisfaction, but
of understanding--the profound but surely not merry delight which goes
with the comprehension of a fundamental fact--above all, of a fact
that has been coy and elusive. Certainly the order of the world that
Conrad sets forth with such diabolical eloquence and plausibility
is no banal moral order, no childish sequence of virtuous causes and
edifying effects. Rather it has an atheistic and even demoniacal
smack: to the earnest Bible student it must be more than a little
disconcerting. The God he visualizes is no loving papa in a house-coat
and carpet-slippers, inculcating the great principles of Christian
ethics by applying occasional strokes _a posteriori_. What he sees
is something quite different: an extremely ingenious and humorous
Improvisatore and Comedian, with a dab of red on His nose and maybe
somewhat the worse for drink--a furious and far from amiable banjoist
upon the human spine, and rattler of human bones. Kurtz, in “Youth,”
makes a capital banjo for that exalted and cynical talent. And the
music that issues forth--what a superb _Hexentanz_ it is!
One of the curiosities of critical stupidity is the doctrine that
Conrad is without humor. No doubt it flows out of a more general error;
to wit, the assumption that tragedy is always pathetic, that death
itself is inevitably a gloomy business. That error, I suppose, will
persist in the world until some extraordinary astute mime conceives
the plan of playing “King Lear” as a farce--I mean deliberately.
That it _is_ a farce seems to me quite as obvious as the fact that
“Romeo and Juliet” is another, this time lamentably coarse. To adopt
the contrary theory--to view it as a great moral and spiritual
spectacle, capable of purging and uplifting the psyche like marriage
to a red-haired widow or a month in the trenches--to toy with such
notions is to borrow the critical standards of a party of old ladies
weeping over the damnation of the heathen. In point of fact, death,
like love, is intrinsically farcical--a solemn kicking of a brick under
a plug-hat--, and most other human agonies, once they transcend the
physical--_i. e._, the unescapably real--have far more of irony in them
than of pathos. Looking back upon them after they have eased one seldom
shivers: one smiles--perhaps sourly but nevertheless spontaneously.
This, at all events, is the notion that seems to me implicit in every
line of Conrad. I give you “Heart of Darkness” as the archetype of
his whole work and the keystone of his metaphysical system. Here we
have all imaginable human hopes and aspirations reduced to one common
denominator of folly and failure, and here we have a play of humor
that is infinitely mordant and searching. Turn to pages 136 and 137 of
the American edition--the story is in the volume called “Youth”--: the
burial of the helmsman. Turn then to 178-184: Marlow’s last interview
with Kurtz’s intended. The farce mounts by slow stages to dizzy and
breath-taking heights. One hears harsh roars of cosmic laughter, vast
splutterings of transcendental mirth, echoing and reëchoing down the
black corridors of empty space. The curtain descends at last upon a
wild dance in a dissecting-room. The mutilated dead rise up and jig....
It is curious, re-reading a thrice-familiar story, how often one
finds surprises in it. I have been amazed, toward the close of “The
End of the Tether,” to discover that the _Fair Maid_ was wrecked,
not by the deliberate act of Captain Whalley, but by the machination
of the unspeakable Massy. How is one to account for so preposterous
an error? Certainly I thought I knew “The End of the Tether” as well
as I knew anything in this world--and yet there was that incredible
misunderstanding of it, lodged firmly in my mind. Perhaps there is
criticism of a sort in my blunder: it may be a fact that the old
skipper willed the thing himself--that his willing it is visible in all
that goes before--that Conrad, in introducing Massy’s puerile infamy
at the end, made some sacrifice of inner veracity to the exigencies
of what, at bottom, is somewhat too neat and well-made a tale. The
story, in fact, belongs to the author’s earlier manner; I guess that
it was written before “Youth” and surely before “Heart of Darkness.”
But for all that, its proportions remain truly colossal. It is one of
the most magnificent narratives, long or short, old or new, in the
English language, and with “Youth” and “Heart of Darkness” it makes up
what is probably the best book of imaginative writing that the English
literature of the Twentieth Century can yet show. Conrad learned a
great deal after he wrote it, true enough. In “Lord Jim,” in “Victory,”
and, above all, in a “A Personal Record,” there are momentary
illuminations, blinding flashes of brilliance that he was incapable of
in those days of experiment; but no other book of his seems to me to
hold so steadily to so high a general level--none other, as a whole, is
more satisfying and more marvelous. There is in “Heart of Darkness” a
perfection of design which one encounters only rarely and miraculously
in prose fiction: it belongs rather to music. I can’t imagine taking a
single sentence out of that stupendous tale without leaving a visible
gap; it is as thoroughly _durch componiert_ as a fugue. And I can’t
imagine adding anything to it, even so little as a word, without doing
it damage. As it stands it is austerely and beautifully perfect, just
as the slow movement of the Unfinished Symphony is perfect.
I observe of late a tendency to examine the English of Conrad rather
biliously. This folly is cultivated chiefly in England, where, I
suppose, chauvinistic motives enter into the matter. It is the just
boast of great empires that they draw in talents from near and far,
exhausting the little nations to augment their own puissance; it
is their misfortune that these talents often remain defectively
assimilated. Conrad remained the Slav to the end. The people of his
tales, whatever he calls them, are always as much Slavs as he is; the
language in which he describes them retains a sharp, exotic flavor.
But to say that this flavor constitutes a blemish is to say something
so preposterous that only schoolmasters and their dupes may be thought
of as giving it credit. The truly first-rate writer is not one who
uses the language as such dolts demand that it be used; he is one who
reworks it in spite of their prohibitions. It is his distinction that
he thinks in a manner different from the thinking of ordinary men;
that he is free from that slavery to embalmed ideas which makes them
so respectable and so dull. Obviously, he cannot translate his notions
into terms of everyday without doing violence to their inner integrity;
as well ask a Richard Strauss to funnel all his music into the
chaste jugs of Prof. Dr. Jadassohn. What Conrad brought into English
literature was a new concept of the relations between fact and fact,
idea and idea, and what he contributed to the complex and difficult art
of writing English was a new way of putting words together. His style
now amazes and irritates pedants because it does not roll along in the
old ruts. Well, it is precisely that rolling along in the old ruts that
he tried to avoid--and it was precisely that avoidance which made him
what he is. What lies under most of his alleged sins seems to me to be
simple enough: he views English logically and analytically, and not
through a haze of senseless traditions and arbitrary taboos. No Oxford
mincing is in him. If he cannot find his phrase above the salt, he
seeks it below. His English, in a word, is innocent. And if, at times,
there gets into it a color that is strange and even bizarre, then the
fact is something to rejoice over, for a living language is like a man
suffering incessantly from small internal hemorrhages, and what it
needs above all else is constant transfusions of new blood from other
tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
A very great man, this Mr. Conrad. As yet, I believe decidedly
underestimated, even by many of his post-mortem advocates. Most of
his first acclaimers mistook him for a mere romantic--a talented but
somewhat uncouth follower of the Stevenson tradition, with the orthodox
cutlass exchanged for a Malay _kris_. Later on he began to be heard of
as a linguistic and vocational marvel: it was astonishing that any man
bred to Polish should write English at all, and more astonishing that a
country gentleman from the Ukraine should hold a master’s certificate
in the British merchant marine. Such banal attitudes are now archaic,
but I suspect that they have been largely responsible for the slowness
with which his fame has spread in the world. At all events, he is
vastly less read and esteemed in foreign parts than he ought to be, and
very few Continental Europeans have risen to any genuine comprehension
of his stature. When one reflects that the Nobel Prize was given to
such third-raters as Benavente, Heidenstam, Gjellerup and Tagore,
with Conrad passed over, one begins to grasp the depth and density
of the ignorance prevailing in the world, even among the relatively
enlightened. One “Lord Jim,” as human document and as work of art, is
worth all the works produced by all the Benaventes and Gjellerups since
the time of Rameses II. It is, indeed, an indecency of criticism to
speak of such unlike things in the same breath: as well talk of Brahms
in terms of Mendelssohn. Nor is “Lord Jim” a chance masterpiece, an
isolated peak. On the contrary, it is but one unit in a long series
of extraordinary and almost incomparable works--a series sprung
suddenly and overwhelmingly into full dignity with “Almayer’s Folly.”
I challenge the nobility and gentry of Christendom to point to another
Opus 1 as magnificently planned and turned out as “Almayer’s Folly.”
The more one studies it, the more it seems miraculous. If it is not a
work of absolute genius then no work of absolute genius exists on this
earth.
2
_Hergesheimer_
This gentleman, like Conrad, has been slated very waspishly because
his English is sometimes in contempt of Lindley Murray. Once, a few
years back, a grammarian writing in the _New Republic_ formally
excommunicated him for it. A number of his offending locutions were
cited, all of them, it must be admitted, instantly recognizable as
pathological and against God by any suburban schoolma’m. _Soit!_
The plain truth is that Hergesheimer, when it comes to the ultimate
delicacies of English grammar, is an ignoramus, as he is when it comes
to the niceties of Swedenborgian theology. I doubt that he could
tell a noun in the nominative case from a noun in the objective.
But neither could any other man who writes as well as he does. Such
esoteric knowledge is the exclusive possession of grammarians, whose
pride in it runs in direct ratio to its inaccuracy, unimportance and
imbecility. English grammar as a science thus takes its place with
phrenology and the New Thought: the more a grammarian knows of it, the
less he is worth listening to. Mastering such blowsy nonsense is one
thing, and writing sound English is quite another thing, and the two
achievements seem to be impossible to the same man. As Anatole France
once remarked, nearly all first-rate writers write “bad French”--or
“bad English.” Joseph Conrad did. France himself did. Dreiser does.
Henry James did. Dickens did. Shakespeare did. Thus Hergesheimer need
not repine. He is sinful, but in good company. He writes English
that is “bad,” but also English that is curiously musical, fluent,
chromatic, various and caressing. There is in even the worst of his
_Saturday Evening Post_ novelettes for Main Street a fine feeling for
the inner savor of words--a keen ear for their subtler and more fragile
harmonies. In “Cytherea,” which I like beyond all his works--even
beyond “The Three Black Pennys” and “Java Head”--they are handled in so
adept and ingenious a way, with so much delicacy and originality, that
it is no wonder they offer an intolerable affront to pedagogues.