is reckoned in America, and most of them have been married. I can’t
recall one whose wife appeared to view his achievements with perfect
ease of mind. In every case the lady was full of a palpable fear--the
product of feminine intuition, _i. e._, of hard realism and common
sense--that his rise shook her hold upon him, that he became a worse
husband in proportion as he became a better man. In the logic I can
discern no flaw. The ideal husband is surely not a man of active and
daring mind; he is the man of placid and conforming mind. Here the good
business man obviously beats the artist and adventurer. His rewards are
all easily translated into domestic comfort and happiness. He is not
wobbled by the admiration of other women, none of whom, however much
they may esteem his virtues as a husband, are under any illusion as
to his virtues as a lover. Above all, his mind is not analytical, and
hence he is not likely to attempt any anatomizing of his marriage--the
starting point for the worst sort of domestic infelicity. No man,
examining his marriage intelligently, can fail to observe that it is
compounded, at least in part, of slavery, and that he is the slave.
Happy the woman whose husband is so stupid that he never launches into
that coroner’s inquest!
8
_The Mime_
The fundamental objection to actors, stripping the business of all mere
sophistry and snobbery, is that they give away the idiotic vanity of
the whole male sex. An actor is simply a man who, by word and strut,
says aloud of _him_self what all normal men think of _them_selves.
Thus he exposes, in a highly indiscreet and disconcerting manner, the
full force of masculine vanity. But I doubt that he exaggerates it.
No healthy male is ever actually modest. No healthy male ever really
thinks or talks of anything save himself. His conversation is one
endless boast--often covert, but always undiluted. His politics is a
mere sneering at what he conceives to be inferiors; his philosophy
is simply an exposure of asses; he cannot imagine himself save as
superior, dominating, the center of situations. Even his theology is
seldom more than a stealthy comparison of himself and God, to the
disadvantage of God.... The youngest flapper knows all this. Feminine
strategy, in the duel of sex, consists almost wholly of an adroit
feeding of this vanity. Man makes love by braggadocia. Woman makes love
by listening.... Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence
she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go
on listening without snickering.
9
_Cavia Cobaya_
I find the following in Theodore Dreiser’s “Hey-Rub-a-Dub-Dub”;
Does the average strong, successful man confine himself to one woman?
Has he ever?
The first question sets an insoluble problem. How are we, in such
intimate matters, to say what is the average and what is not the
average? But the second question is easily answered, and the answer
is, He has. Here Dreiser’s curious sexual obsession simply leads him
into absurdity. His view of the traffic of the sexes remains the naïve
one of an ex-Baptist nymph in Greenwich Village. Does he argue that
Otto von Bismarck was not a “strong, successful man”? If not, then
let him remember that Bismarck was a strict monogamist--a man full
of sin, but always faithful to his Johanna. Again, there was Thomas
Henry Huxley. Again, there was William Ewart Gladstone. Again, there
was Robert Edward Lee. Yet again, there were Robert Schumann, Felix
Mendelssohn, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Jackson,
Louis Pasteur, Martin Luther, Helmuth von Moltke, Stonewall Jackson,
Lyof Tolstoi, Robert Browning, Henrik Ibsen, William T. Sherman, Carl
Schurz, old Sam Adams, ... I could extend the list to pages.... Perhaps
I am unfair to Dreiser. His notion of a “strong, successful man” may
be, not such a genuinely superior fellow as Bismarck or Bach, but such
a mere brigand as Shonts, Yerkes or Jim Fisk. If so, he is still wrong.
If so, he still runs aground on John D. Rockefeller.
10
_The Survivor_
Around every bachelor of more than thirty-five legends tend to
congregate, chiefly about the causes of his celibacy. If it is not
whispered that he is damaged goods, and hence debarred from marriage by
a lofty concept of Service to the unborn, it is told under the breath
that he was insanely in love at the age of twenty-six with a beautiful
creature who jilted him for an insurance underwriter and so broke
his heart beyond repair. Such tales are nearly always moonshine. The
reason why the average bachelor of thirty-five remains a bachelor is
really very simple. It is, in brief, that no ordinarily attractive and
intelligent woman has ever made a serious and undivided effort to marry
him.
11
_The Veteran’s Disaster_
The tragedy of experience is that a man no longer believes it when a
woman shows all the orthodox signs of having been flustered by him. In
youth it gives him immense delight to discover that he has made a mash,
but when he gets into the middle years the thing merely annoys him. He
is irritated that yet another female Cagliostro should try to floor him
with the immemorial mumbo-jumbo, and so make a fool of him. The girl he
succumbs to is the one who tells him frankly that her heart is buried
in France, but that she admires him tremendously and would esteem it a
singular honor to be the wife of so meritorious a fellow. This helps to
explain, perhaps, why aging men so often succumb to flappers.
12
_Moral Indignation_
The ill-fame of the Turks in the English-speaking world is not due
to their political medievalism, as is usually alleged, but to their
practise of polygamy. That practise inevitably excites the erotic
imagination of men doomed to monogamy, and particularly of men doomed
to monogamy with despotic, prudish and unappetizing wives, which is to
say, the normal, typical men of England and the United States. They
envy the Turk his larger and more charming joys, and hence hate him.
Every time Reuter reports him dragging a fresh herd of dark-eyed,
voluptuous Georgian or Armenian women into his seraglio, they hate him
the more. The way to arouse a Puritan to his highest pitch of moral
indignation is not to burn down an orphan-asylum; the way to do it is
to grab a pretty girl around the waist and launch with her into the
lascivious measures of a Wiener Walz. Men always hate most what they
envy most.
13
_The Man and His Shadow_
Every man, whatever his actual qualities, is credited with and judged
by certain general qualities that are supposed to appertain to his sex,
particularly by women. Thus man the individual is related to Man the
species, often to his damage and dismay. Consider my own case. I am
by nature one of the most orderly of mortals. I have a place for every
article of my personal property, whether a Bible or a cocktail-shaker,
an undershirt or an eye-dropper, and I always keep it where it belongs.
I never drop cigar-ashes on the floor. I never upset a waste-basket.
I am never late for trains. I never run short of collars. I never go
out with a purple necktie on a blue shirt. I never fail to appear in
time for dinner without telephoning or telegraphing. Yet the women who
are cursed by God with the care of me maintain and cherish the fiction
that I am an extremely careless and even hoggish fellow--that I have
to be elaborately nursed, supervised and policed--that the slightest
relaxation of vigilance over my everyday conduct would reduce me
to a state of helplessness and chaos, with all my clothes mislaid,
half my books in the ash-can, my mail unanswered, my face unshaven,
and my office not unlike an I. W. W. headquarters after a raid by
the _Polizei_. It is their firm theory that, unaided by superior
suggestion, I’d wear one shirt six weeks, and a straw hat until
Christmas. They never speak of my work-room save in terms of horror,
though it is actually the most orderly room in my house. Weekly I am
accused of having lost all my socks and handkerchiefs, though they are
in my clothes-press all the while. At least once a month formal plans
are discussed for reorganizing my whole mode of life, that I may not
sink into irremediable carelessness, inefficiency and barbarism.
I note that many other men lie under the same benign espionage and
misrepresentation--in fact, nearly all men. But it is my firm belief
that very few men are really disorderly. The business of the world is
managed by getting order into it, and the feeling for discipline thus
engendered is carried over into domestic life. I know of very few men
who ever drop ashes on the dining-room rug, or store their collars in
their cigar-box, or put on brown socks with their dress-clothes, or
forget to turn off the water after they have bathed, or neglect to
keep dinner engagements--and most of these few, I am firmly convinced,
do it because their women-folk expect it of them, because it would
cause astonishment and dismay if they refrained. I myself, more than
once, have deliberately hung my hat on an electrolier, or clomped over
the parquetry with muddy shoes, or gone out in a snowstorm without
an overcoat, or come down to dinner in a ragged collar, or filled my
shirt-box with old copies of the _Congressional Record_, or upset a
bottle of green ink, or used Old Dutch Cleanser for shaving, or put
olives into Jack Rose cocktails, or gone without a hair-cut for three
or four weeks, or dropped an expensive beer _Seidel_ upon the hard
concrete of my cellar floor in order to give a certain necessary color
to the superstition of my oafishness. If I failed to do such things now
and then I’d become unpopular, and very justly so, for nothing is more
obnoxious than a human being who is always challenging and correcting
the prevailing view of him. Even now I make no protest; I merely record
the facts. On my death-bed, I daresay, I shall carry on the masquerade.
That is to say, I shall swallow a clinical thermometer or two, upset my
clam-broth over my counterpane, keep an ouija board and a set of dice
under my pillow, and maybe, at the end, fall clumsily out of bed.
14
_The Balance-Sheet_
Marriage, as everyone knows, is chiefly an economic matter. But too
often it is assumed that economics concerns only the wife’s hats; it
also concerns, and perhaps more importantly, the husband’s cigars. No
man is genuinely happy, married, who has to drink worse gin than he
used to drink when he was single.
15
_Yearning_
Ah, that the eugenists would breed a woman as capable of laughter as
the girl of twenty and as adept at knowing when not to laugh as the
woman of thirty-five!
VI. THE POLITICIAN
Half the sorrows of the world, I suppose, are caused by making false
assumptions. If the truth were only easier to ascertain the remedy for
them would consist simply of ascertaining it and accepting it. This
business, alas, is usually impossible, but fortunately not always: now
and then, by some occult process, half rational and half instinctive,
the truth gets itself found out and an ancient false assumption goes
overboard. I point, in the field of the social relations, to one which
afflicted the human race for millenniums: that one, to wit, which
credited the rev. clergy with a mysterious wisdom and awful powers.
Obviously, it has ceased to trouble all the superior varieties of
men. It may survive in those remote marches where human beings go to
bed with the cows, but certainly it has vanished from the cities.
Asphalt and the apostolic succession, indeed, seem to be irreconcilable
enemies. I can think of no clergyman in any great American city today
whose public dignity and influence are much above those of an ordinary
Class I Babbitt. It is hard for even the most diligent and passionate
of the ancient order to get upon the first pages of the newspapers;
he must make a clown-show, discreditable to his fraying cloth, or he
must blush unseen. When bishops begin launching thunderbolts against
heretics, the towns do not tremble; they laugh. When elders denounce
sin, sin only grows more popular. Imagine a city man getting a notice
from the ordinary of his diocese that he had been excommunicated. It
would trouble him far less, I venture, than his morning _Katzenjammer_.
The reason for all this is not hard to find. All the superior varieties
of men--and even the lowest varieties of city workmen are at least
superior to peasants--have simply rid themselves of their old belief
in devils. Hell no longer affrights and palsies them, and so the magic
of those who profess to save them from it no longer impresses them.
That profession, I believe, was bogus, and its acceptance was therefore
a false assumption. Being so, it made men unhappy; getting rid of it
has delivered them. They are no longer susceptible to ecclesiastical
alarms and extortions; _ergo_, they sleep and eat better. Think of
what life must have been under such princes of damnation as Cotton
Mather and Jonathan Edwards, with even bartenders and metaphysicians
believing in them! And then compare it to life under Bishop Manning and
the Rev. Dr. John Roach Straton, with only a few half-wits believing
in them! Or turn to the backwoods of the Republic, where the devil
is still feared, and with him his professional exterminators. In the
country towns the clergy are still almost as influential as they were
in Mather’s day, and there, as everyone knows, they remain public
nuisances, and civilized life is almost impossible. In such Neolithic
regions nothing can go on without their consent, on penalty of anathema
and hell-fire; as a result, nothing goes on that is worth recording.
It is this survival of sacerdotal authority, I begin to believe, and
not hookworm, malaria or the event of April 9, 1865, that is chiefly
responsible for the cultural paralysis of the late Confederate States.
The South lacks big cities; it is run by its country towns--and in
every country town there is some Baptist _mullah_ who rules by scaring
the peasantry. The false assumption that his pretensions are sound,
that he can actually bind and loose, that contumacy to him is a variety
of cursing God--this false assumption is what makes the yokels so
uneasy, so nervous, and hence so unhappy. If they could throw it off
they would burn fewer Aframericans and sing more songs. If they could
be purged of it they would be purged of Ku Kluxry too.
The cities got rid of that false assumption half a century ago,
and have been making cultural progress ever since. Somewhat later
they got rid of its brother, to wit, respect for government, and,
in particular, respect for its visible agents, the police. That
respect--traditional, and hence irrational--had been, for years,
in increasingly unpleasant collision with a great body of obvious
facts. The police, by assumption austere and almost sacrosanct, were
gradually discovered to be, in reality, a pack of rogues and but
little removed, save by superior impudence and enterprise, from the
cut-throats and purse-snatchers they were set to catch. When, a few
decades ago, the American people, at least in the big cities, began to
accept them frankly for what they were--when the old false assumption
of their integrity and public usefulness was quietly abandoned and a
new and more accurate assumption of their roguery was adopted in its
place--when this change was effected there was a measurable increase,
I believe, in the public happiness. It no longer astonished anyone
when policemen were taken in evildoing; indignation therefore abated,
and with it its pains. If, before that time, the corps of Prohibition
enforcement officers--_i. e._, a corps of undisguised scoundrels with
badges--had been launched upon the populace, there would have been a
great roar of wrath, and much anguished gnashing of teeth. People would
have felt themselves put upon, injured, insulted. But with the old
false assumption about policemen removed from their minds, they met the
new onslaught calmly and even smilingly. Today no one is indignant
over the fact that the extortions of these new _Polizei_ increase the
cost of potable alcohol. The false assumption that the police are
altruistic agents of a benevolent state has been replaced by the sound
assumption that they are gentlemen engaged assiduously, like the rest
of us, in finding meat and raiment for their families and in laying up
funds to buy Liberty Bonds in the next war to end war. This is human
progress, for it increases human happiness.
So much for the evidence. The deduction I propose to make from it is
simply this: that a like increase would follow if the American people
could only rid themselves of another and worse false assumption that
still rides them--one that corrupts all their thinking about the
great business of politics, and vastly augments their discontent and
unhappiness--the assumption, that is, that politicians are divided into
two classes, and that one of those classes is made up of good ones.
I need not argue, I hope, that this assumption is almost universally
held among us. Our whole politics, indeed, is based upon it, and has
been based upon it since the earliest days. What is any political
campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who
are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better? The
former assumption, I believe, is always sound; the latter is just as
certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it
teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as
unthinkable as an honest burglar. His very existence, indeed, is a
standing subversion of the public good in every rational sense. He is
not one who serves the common weal; he is simply one who preys upon the
commonwealth. It is to the interest of all the rest of us to hold down
his powers to an irreducible minimum, and to reduce his compensation to
nothing; it is to his interest to augment his powers at all hazards,
and to make his compensation all the traffic will bear. To argue that
these aims are identical is to argue palpable nonsense. The politician,
at his ideal best, never even remotely approximated in practise, is a
necessary evil; at his worst he is an almost intolerable nuisance.
What I contend is simply that he would be measurably less a nuisance
if we got rid of our old false assumption about him, and regarded
him in the cold light of fact. At once, I believe, two-thirds of his
obnoxiousness would vanish. He would remain a nuisance, but he would
cease to be a swindler; the injury of having to pay freight on him
would cease to be complicated by the insult of being rooked. It is the
insult and not the injury that makes the deeper wounds, and causes the
greater permanent damage to the national psyche. All of us have been
trained, since infancy, in putting up with necessary evils, plainly
recognized _as_ evils. We know, for example, that the young of the
human species commonly smell badly; that garbage men, bootblacks and
messenger boys commonly smell worse. These facts are not agreeable, but
they remain tolerable because they are universally assumed--because
there is no sense of having been tricked and cozened in their perennial
discovery. But try to imagine how distressing fatherhood would become
if prospective fathers were all taught that the human infant radiates
an aroma like the rose--if the truth came constantly as a surprise!
Each fresh victim of the deception would feel that he had been basely
swindled--that his own child was somehow bogus. Not infrequently, I
suppose, he would be tempted to make away with it in some quiet manner,
and have another--only to be shocked again. That procedure would be
idiotic, admittedly, yet it is exactly the one we follow in politics.
At each election we vote in a new set of politicians, insanely assuming
that they are better than the set turned out. And at each election we
are, as they say in the Motherland, done in.
Of late the fraud has become so gross that the plain people begin
to show a great restlessness under it. Like animals in a cage, they
trot from one corner to another, endlessly seeking a way out. If the
Democrats win one year, it is a pretty sure sign that they will lose
the next year. State after State becomes doubtful, pivotal, skittish;
even the solid South begins to break. In the cities it is still worse.
An evil circle is formed. First the poor taxpayers, robbed by the
politicians of one great party and then by those of the other, turn
to a group of free-lance rogues in the middle ground--non-partisan
candidates, Liberals, reformers or what not: the name is unimportant.
Then, flayed and pillaged by these gentry as they never were by
the old-time professionals, they go back in despair to the latter,
and are flayed and pillaged again. Back to Bach! Back to Tammany!
Tammany reigns in New York because the Mitchel outfit was found to be
intolerable--in other words, because the reformers were found to be
even worse than the professionals. Is the fact surprising? Why should
it be? Reformers and professionals are alike politicians in search of
jobs; both are trying to bilk the taxpayers. Neither ever has any other
motive. If any genuinely honest and altruistic politician had come to
the surface in America in my time I’d have heard of him, for I have
always frequented newspaper offices, and in a newspaper office the
news of such a marvel would cause a dreadful tumult. I can recall no
such tumult. The unanimous opinion of all the journalists that I know,
excluding a few Liberals who are obviously somewhat balmy--they all
believed, for example, that the late war would end war,--is that, since
the days of the national Thors and Wotans, no politician who was not
out for himself, and for himself alone, has ever drawn the breath of
life in the United States.
The gradual disintegration of Liberalism among us, in fact, offers an
excellent proof of the truth of my thesis. The Liberals have come to
grief by fooling their customers, not merely once too often, but a
hundred times too often. Over and over again they have trotted out some
new hero, usually from the great open spaces, only to see him taken in
the immemorial malpractises within ten days. Their graveyard, indeed,
is filled with cracked and upset headstones, many covered with ribald
pencilings. Every time there is a scandal in the grand manner the
Liberals lose almost as many general officers as either the Democrats
or Republicans. Of late, racked beyond endurance by such catastrophes
at home, they have gone abroad for their principal heroes; losing humor
as well as hope, they now ask us to venerate such astounding paladins
as the Hon. Bela Kun, a gentleman who, in any American State, would not
only be in the calaboose, but actually in the death-house. But this
absurdity is only an offshoot of a deeper one. Their primary error lies
in making the false assumption that some politicians are better than
others. This error they share with the whole American people.
I propose that it be renounced, and contend that its renunciation
would greatly rationalize and improve our politics. I do not argue that
there would be any improvement in our politicians; on the contrary, I
believe that they would remain substantially as they are today, and
perhaps grow even worse. But what I do argue is that recognizing them
frankly for what they are would instantly and automatically dissipate
the indignation caused by their present abominations, and that the
disappearance of this indignation would promote the public contentment
and happiness. Under my scheme there would be no more false assumptions
and no more false hopes, and hence no more painful surprises, no more
bitter resentment of fraud, no more despair. Politicians, in so far
as they remained necessary, would be kept at work--but not with any
insane notion that they were arch-angels. Their rascality would be
assumed and discounted, as the rascality of the police is now assumed
and discounted. Machinery would be gradually developed to limit it
and counteract it. In the end, it might be utilized in some publicly
profitable manner, as the insensitiveness to filth of garbage men is
now utilized, as the reverence of the clergy for capitalism is now
utilized. The result, perhaps, would be a world no better than the
present one, but it would at least be a world more intelligent.