shares the indignation I have spoken of--that is, for one who believes
that politicians can be made good, and cherishes a fond scheme for
making them so. I believe nothing of the sort. On the contrary, I am
convinced that the art and mystery they practise is essentially and
incurably anti-social--that they must remain irreconcilable enemies of
the common weal until the end of time. But I maintain that this fact,
in itself, is not a bar to their employment. There are, under Christian
civilization, many necessary offices that demand the possession of
anti-social talents. A professional soldier, regarded realistically,
is much worse than a professional politician, for he is a professional
murderer and kidnaper, whereas the politician is only a professional
sharper and sneak-thief. A clergyman, too, begins to shrink and
shrivel on analysis; the work he does in the world is basically almost
indistinguishable from that of an astrologer, a witch-doctor or a
fortune-teller. He pretends falsely that he can get sinners out of
hell, and collects money from them on that promise, tacit or express.
If he had to go before a jury with that pretension it would probably go
hard with him. But we do not send him before a jury; we grant him his
hocus-pocus on the ground that it is necessary to his office, and that
his office is necessary to civilization, so-called. I pass over the
journalist delicately; the time has not come to turn State’s evidence.
Suffice it to say that he, too, would probably wither under a stiff
cross-examination. If he is no murderer, like the soldier, then he is
at least a sharper and swindler, like the politician.
What I plead for, if I may borrow a term in disrepute, is simply
_Realpolitik_, _i. e._, realism in politics. I can imagine a political
campaign purged of all the current false assumptions and false
pretenses--a campaign in which, on election day, the voters went
to the polls clearly informed that the choice between them was not
between an angel and a devil, a good man and a bad man, an altruist
and a go-getter, but between two frank go-getters, the one, perhaps,
excelling at beautiful and nonsensical words and the other at silent
and prehensile deeds--the one a chautauqua orator and the other a
porch-climber. There would be, in that choice, something candid, free
and exhilarating. Buncombe would be adjourned. The voter would make
his selection in the full knowledge of all the facts, as he makes
his selection between two heads of cabbage, or two evening papers,
or two brands of chewing tobacco. Today he chooses his rulers as he
buys bootleg whiskey, never knowing precisely what he is getting, only
certain that it is not what it pretends to be. The Scotch may turn out
to be wood alcohol or it may turn out to be gasoline; in either case
it is not Scotch. How much better if it were plainly labelled, for
wood alcohol and gasoline both have their uses--higher uses, indeed,
than Scotch. The danger is that the swindled and poisoned consumer,
despairing of ever avoiding them when he doesn’t want them, may
prohibit them even when he does want them, and actually enforce his own
prohibition. The danger is that the hopeless voter, forever victimized
by his false assumption about politicians, may in the end gather such
ferocious indignation that he will abolish them teetotally and at one
insane swoop, and so cause government by the people, for the people and
with the people to perish from this earth.
VII. FROM A CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
1
_Progress_
The most important change that has come over American literature in
my time is this: that American satire, which once aimed all of its
shafts at the relatively civilized minority, now aims most of them at
the imbecile majority. If a satirist of today undertook to poke fun at
the paintings of Titian and the music of Richard Wagner, he would be
dismissed at once as a clown strayed in from the barber-shop weeklies
and the chautauquas. Yet Mark Twain did both, and to great applause. To
Mark, for all his humor, there was little that was ridiculous in such
American go-getters as George F. Babbitt. He looked upon one of them,
Henry H. Rogers, as his best friend, and he made another the hero of
“A Connecticut Yankee.” What amused Mark most profoundly was precisely
whatever was most worthy of sober admiration--sound art, good manners,
the aristocratic ideal. And he was typical of his age. The satirists
of the present age, though they may be less accomplished workmen, are
at all events more civilized men. What they make fun of is not what is
dignified, or noble, or beautiful, but what is shoddy, and ignoble, and
ugly.
2
_The Iconoclast_
Of a piece with the absurd pedagogical demand for so-called
constructive criticism is the doctrine that an iconoclast is a hollow
and evil fellow unless he can prove his case. Why, indeed, should he
prove it? Doesn’t he prove enough when he proves by his blasphemy
that this or that idol is defectively convincing--that at least _one_
visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts? The fact is enormously
significant; it indicates that instinct has somehow risen superior
to the shallowness of logic, the refuge of fools. The pedant and the
priest have always been the most expert of logicians--and the most
diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse. The liberation of the
human mind has never been furthered by such learned dunderheads; it has
been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and
then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men
that doubt, after all, was safe--that the god in the sanctuary was
finite in his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten
thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly
more intelligent.
3
_The Artists’ Model_
The doctrine that art is an imitation of nature is full of folly.
Nine-tenths of all the art that one encounters in this world is
actually an imitation of other art. Fully a half of it is an imitation
twice, thrice or ten times removed. The artist, in fact, is seldom an
accurate observer of nature; he leaves that gross and often revolting
exploration to geologists, engineers and anatomists. The last thing he
wants to see is a beautiful woman in the bright, pitiless sunlight.
4
_The Good Citizen as Artist_
Again, there is the bad author who defends his manufacture of magazine
serials and movie scenarios on the ground that he has a wife, and is in
honor bound to support her. I have seen a few such wives. I dispute
the obligation.... As for the biological by-products of this fidelity,
I rate them even lower. Show me 100 head of ordinary children who are
worth one “Heart of Darkness,” and I’ll subside. As for “Lord Jim,” I
would not swap it for all the children born in Trenton, N. J., since
the Spanish War.
5
_Definitive Judgments_
The doctrine that every critic worth reading is primarily an
artist--that his fundamental aim is not to ascertain the truth, or
to mete out justice, or to defend the maxims of Aristotle, or the
Ten Commandments, or the statues of the Harvard Corporation, or the
Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act, or the Mann Act--this doctrine seems to
give a great deal of offense to pedagogues, and every time one of them
mentions it he mourns. Always he makes the accusation that it relieves
the critic of his most important duty, to wit, the duty of telling
his readers what the thing he criticizes is, and how far it carries
out its pretension, and how it relates itself to other things in the
same category, or presumably in the same category. The answer here,
of course, is that no such duty exists. Its existence, indeed, is no
more than a delusion of pedagogues, who invariably labor under the
notion that they have said something about this or that when they have
given it a name. That delusion is responsible for all of the so-called
“criticism” that pedagogues write--the heavy, soggy essays upon Matthew
Arnold, Poe as a poet, Browning as a philosopher, the Pre-Raphaelites,
Henley, Schiller, Ibsen, Whitman, Milton, Herrick, Molière--in brief,
all the blowsy efforts to reach “definite judgments” that such tedious
wind-jammers delight in. What is accomplished by such “definitive
judgments”? Absolutely nothing. A hedge Lowell’s elaborate treatise
upon Joaquin Miller will never convince any intelligent man that Miller
was an important writer, nor will the same professor’s effort to fit
Ralph Waldo Emerson into the Methodist æsthetic and gnosiology ever
stop any intelligent man from reading Emerson for himself, and enjoying
him more or less. Such “criticism” invariably fails of its ostensible
purpose. In so far as it has any validity and significance at all, it
is not as jurisprudence but as work of art. In brief, the pedagogue,
when he essays criticism, becomes an artist in spite of himself. As a
moral man, of course, he avoids the sin of being a good artist, but
nevertheless he is, within the limits set by his superstitions, an
artist.
What separates good critics from bad ones is simply the fact that the
former are sound enough artists to make the matter they discuss seem
charming. It is by this route that they induce their readers to look
into it further, and so achieve their function. This function is not
to be confused with the pedagogical. It is infinitely more urbane and
expansive. Dryden was surely no schoolmaster, even _in petto_, but
when he set down his views about Shakespeare in his beautiful and
ingratiating prose he interested more readers in the Bard than a whole
herd of pedagogues could have mustered, and so, despite the chill that
often got into his enthusiasm, he probably did more than any other
man to rescue the greatest of English poets from his Restoration days
neglect. What a palpable artist finds interesting is very apt to seem
interesting to all persons of taste and education; what a mere birchman
advocates is apt to arouse their instinctive aversion. They do not want
to be told precisely what to think about the thing discussed; all they
want to be told is that it is worth examining. Every effort to lay down
immutable conclusions, to state impeccable principles, to instruct
them in their moral and æsthetic duties--in other words, every effort
to think for them, as a college tutor thinks for a sophomore, and a
professor for a tutor, and a university president for a professor, and
a board of trustees for a president--is bound to annoy them and chase
them away. Despite all the “definitive judgments” that pedants have
pronounced upon Walt Whitman, almost always unfavorably, he continues
to live and to grow. And despite all their herculean efforts to hold up
Howells, he is dead.
VIII. TOTENTANZ
I can think of no great city of this world (putting aside Rio de
Janeiro, Sydney and San Francisco) that is set amid scenes of greater
natural beauty than New York, by which I mean, of course, Manhattan.
Recall Berlin on its dismal plain, Paris and London on their toy
rivers, Madrid on its desert, Copenhagen on its swamp, Rome on its
ancient sewer and its absurd little hills, and then glance at Manhattan
on its narrow and rock-ribbed island, with deep rivers to either side
and the wide bay before it. No wonder its early visitors, however much
they denounced the Dutch, always paused to praise the scene! Before
it grew up, indeed, New York must have been strangely beautiful. But
it was the beauty of freshness and unsophistication--in brief, of
youth--and now it is no more. The town today, I think, is quite the
ugliest in the world--uglier, even, than Liverpool, Chicago or Berlin.
If it were actually beautiful, as London, say, is beautiful, or Munich,
or Charleston, or Florence, or even parts of Paris and Washington,
then New Yorkers would not be so childishly appreciative of the few
so-called beauty spots that it has--for example, Washington Square,
Gramercy Park, Fifth avenue and Riverside drive. Washington Square,
save for one short row of old houses on the North side, is actually
very shabby and ugly--a blot rather than a beauty spot. The trees,
year in and year out, have a mangy and sclerotic air; the grass is
like stable litter; the tall tower on the South side is ungraceful and
preposterous; the memorial arch is dirty and undignified; the whole
place looks dingy, frowsy and forlorn. Compare it to Mt. Vernon Square
in Baltimore: the difference is that between a charwoman and a grand
lady. As for Gramercy Park, it is celebrated only because it is in
New York; if it were in Washington or London it would not attract a
glance. Fifth avenue, to me, seems to be showy rather than beautiful.
What gives it its distinction is simply its spick and span appearance
of wealth; it is the only New York street that ever looks well-fed and
clean. Riverside drive lacks even so much; it is second-rate from end
to end, and especially where it is gaudiest. What absurd and hideous
houses, with their brummagem Frenchiness, their pathetic effort to look
aristocratic! What bad landscaping! What grotesque monuments! From
its heights the rich look down upon the foul scars of the Palisades,
as the rich of Fifth avenue and Central Park West look down upon the
anemic grass, bare rocks and blowing newspapers of Central Park. Alone
among the great cities of the East, New York has never developed a
domestic architecture of any charm, or, indeed, of any character at
all. There are neighborhoods in Boston, in Philadelphia, in Baltimore
and in many lesser cities that have all the dignity and beauty of
London, but in New York the brownstone mania of the Nineteenth Century
brought down the whole town to one level of depressing ugliness, and
since brownstone has gone out there has been no development whatever of
indigenous design, but only a naïve copying of models--the sky-scraper
from Chicago and the dwelling-house from Paris. Along Fifth avenue,
from the Fifty-ninth street corner to the upper end of Central Park,
there is not a single house that looks reposeful and habitable. Along
Park avenue--but Park avenue, for all its flash of creamy brick, is
surely one of the most hideous streets in all the world!
But the life of the city, it must be confessed, is as interesting as
its physical aspect is dull. It is, even more than London or Paris,
the modern Babylon, and since 1914 it has entered upon a period of
luxuriousness that far surpasses anything seen on earth since the fall
of the Eastern Empire. During many a single week, I daresay, more money
is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice
to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year. All the colossal accumulated
wealth of the United States, the greatest robber nation in history,
tends to force itself at least once a year through the narrow neck
of the Manhattan funnel. To that harsh island come all the thieves
of the Republic with their loot--bankers from the fat lands of the
Middle West, lumbermen from the Northwestern coasts, mine owners from
the mountains, oil speculators from Texas and Oklahoma, cotton-mill
sweaters from the South, steel magnates and manufacturers from the
Black Country, black-legs and exploiters without end--all laden with
cash, all eager to spend it, all easy marks for the town rogues and
panders. The result is a social organization that ought to be far
more attractive to novelists than it is--a society founded upon the
prodigious wealth of Monte Cristo and upon the tastes of sailors home
from a long voyage. At no time and place in modern times has harlotry
reached so delicate and yet so effusive a development; it becomes, in
one form or another, one of the leading industries of the town. New
York, indeed, is the heaven of every variety of man with something
useless and expensive to sell. There come the merchants with their
bales, of Persian prayer-rugs, of silk pajamas, of yellow girls, of
strange jugs and carboys, of hand-painted oil-paintings, of old books,
of gim-cracks and tinsel from all the four corners of the world, and
there they find customers waiting in swarms, their check-books open
and ready. What town in Christendom has ever supported so many houses
of entertainment, so many mines and mountebanks, so many sharpers
and coney-catchers, so many bawds and pimps, so many hat-holders
and door-openers, so many miscellaneous servants to idleness and
debauchery? The bootlegging industry takes on proportions that are
almost unbelievable; there are thousands of New Yorkers, resident
and transient, who pay more for alcohol every year than they pay for
anything else save women. I have heard of a single party at which the
guests drank 100 cases of champagne in an evening--100 cases at $100 a
case--and it was, as entertainments go in New York today, a quiet and
decorous affair. It is astonishing that no Zola has arisen to describe
this engrossing and incomparable dance of death. Upton Sinclair once
attempted it, in “The Metropolis,” but Sinclair, of course, was too
indignant for the job. Moreover, the era he dealt with was mild and
amateurish; today the pursuit of sensation has been brought to a far
higher degree of perfection. One must go back to the oriental capitals
of antiquity to find anything even remotely resembling it. Compared to
the revels that go on in New York every night, the carnalities of the
West End of Berlin are trivial and childish, and those of Paris and the
Côte d’Azure take on the harmless aspect of a Sunday-school picnic.
What will be the end of the carnival? If historical precedent
counts for anything, it will go on to catastrophe. But what sort of
catastrophe? I hesitate to venture upon a prophecy. Manhattan Island,
with deep rivers all around it, seems an almost ideal scene for a great
city revolution, but I doubt very much that there is any revolutionary
spirit in its proletariat. Some mysterious enchantment holds its
workers to their extraordinarily uncomfortable life; they apparently
get a vague sort of delight out of the great spectacle that they are
no part of. The New York workman patronizes fellow workmen from the
provinces even more heavily than the Wall Street magnate patronizes
country mortgage-sharks. He is excessively proud of his citizenship in
the great metropolis, though all it brings him is an upper berth in
a dog kennel. Riding along the elevated on the East Side and gaping
into the windows of the so-called human habitations that stretch on
either hand, I often wonder what process of reasoning impels, say, a
bricklayer or a truckdriver to spend his days in such vile hutches.
True enough, he is paid a few dollars more a week in New York than he
would receive anywhere else, but he gets little more use out of them
than an honest bank teller. In almost any other large American city
he would have a much better house to live in, and better food; in the
smaller towns his advantage would be very considerable. Moreover, his
chance of lifting himself out of slavery to some measure of economic
independence and autonomy would be greater anywhere else; if it is hard
for the American workman everywhere to establish a business of his own,
it is triply hard in New York, where rents are killingly high and so
much capital is required to launch a business that only Jews can raise
it. Nevertheless, the poor idiot hangs on to his coop, dazzled by the
wealth and splendor on display all around him. His susceptibility to
this lure makes me question his capacity for revolution. He is too
stupid and poltroonish for it, and he has too much respect for money.
It is this respect for money in the proletariat, in fact, that chiefly
safeguards and buttresses capitalism in America. It is secure among us
because Americans venerate it too much to attack it.
What will finish New York in the end, I suppose, will be an onslaught
from without, not from within. The city is the least defensible of
great capitals. Give an enemy command of the sea, and he will be able
to take it almost as easily as he could take Copenhagen. It has never
been attacked in the past, indeed, without being taken. The strategists
of the General Staff at Washington seem to be well aware of this fact,
for their preparations to defend the city from a foe afloat have always
been half-hearted and lacking in confidence. Captain Stuart Godfrey, U.
S. A., who contributes the note on the fortifications of the port to
Fremont Rider’s “New York City: A Guide to Travelers,” is at pains to
warn his lay readers that the existing forts protect only the narrow
spaces in front of them--that “they cannot be expected to prevent the
enemy from landing elsewhere,” _e. g_., anywhere along the long reaches
of the Long Island coast. Once such a landing were effected, the fact
that the city stands upon an island, with deep water behind it, would
be a handicap rather than a benefit. If it could not be taken and held,
it could at least be battered to pieces, and so made untenable. The
guns of its own forts, indeed, might be turned upon it, once those
forts were open to attack from the rear. After that, the best the
defenders could do would be to retire to the natural bombproofs in the
cellars of the Union Hill, N. J., breweries, and there wait for God
to deliver them. They might, of course, be able to throw down enough
metal from the Jersey heights to prevent the enemy occupying the city
and reopening its theatres and bordellos, but the more successful they
were in this enterprise the more cruelly Manhattan would be used.
Altogether, an assault from the sea promises to give the New Yorkers
something to think about.
That it will be attempted before many years have come and gone seems to
me to be very likely and I have a sneaking fear that it may succeed. As
a veteran of five wars and a life-long student of homicidal science,
I am often made uneasy, indeed, by the almost universal American
assumption that no conceivable enemy could inflict serious wounds
upon the Republic--that the Atlantic Ocean alone, not to mention the
stupendous prowess of _Homo americanus_, makes it eternally safe
from aggression. This notion has just enough truth in it to make it
dangerous. That the _whole_ country could not be conquered and occupied
I grant you, but no intelligent enemy would think for a moment of
trying to conquer it. All that would be necessary to bring even the
most intransigeant patriots to terms would be to take and hold a small
part of it--say the part lying to the East and North of the general
line of the Potomac river. Early in the late war, when efforts were
under way to scare the American _booboisie_ with the German bugaboo,
one of the Allied propagandists printed a book setting forth plans
alleged to have been made by the German General Staff to land an army
at the Virginia capes, march on Pittsburgh, and so separate the head of
the country from its liver, kidneys, gizzard, heart, spleen, bladder,
lungs and other lights. The plan was persuasive, but I doubt that it
originated in Potsdam; there was a smell of Whitehall upon it. One of
the things most essential to its execution, in fact, was left out as
it was set forth, to wit, a thrust southward from Canada to meet and
support the thrust northwestward. But even this is not necessary. Any
invader who emptied New York and took the line of the Hudson would have
Uncle Sam by the tail, and could enter upon peace negotiations with
every prospect of getting very polite attention. The American people,
of course, could go on living without New York, but they could not go
on living as a great and puissant nation. Steadily, year by year, they
have made New York more and more essential to the orderly functioning
of the American state. If it were cut off from the rest of the country
the United States would be in the hopeless position of a man relieved
of his medulla oblongata--that is to say, of a man without even enough
equipment left to be a father, a patriot and a Christian.