essence of Civil Service Reform was the notion that the job-holder, in
return for his high prerogatives and immunities, should be compelled
to do an honest day’s work--that he should fit himself for it by hard
effort, as a barber fits himself for cutting hair. Led by such men of
Vision as E. L. Godkin, Charles J. Bonaparte and Theodore Roosevelt
(that, of course, was before Roosevelt deserted the flag and became
himself the archetypical job-holder), the reformers proceeded grimly
toward the dreadful purpose of making the job-holder a mere slave,
like a bookkeeper in a wholesale house. His pay and emoluments were
cut down and his labors were increased. Once the proudest and most
envied citizen of the Republic, free to oppress all other citizens to
the limit of their endurance, he became at one stroke a serf groaning
in a pen, with a pistol pointed at his head. If, despite the bars and
artillery surrounding him, his thrift enabled him to make a show of
decent prosperity, he was clapped into prison _ipso facto_, and almost
without a trial. A few short years saw his fall from the dizziest
height of ease to the lowest abyss of misery.
This, of course, could not go on, else politics would have tumbled into
chaos and government would have lost its basic character; nay, its very
life. What is more, it did _not_ go on, for human ingenuity, despite
the troubles of the time, was still functioning, and presently it found
a remedy for the disease--a remedy so perfect, indeed, that the patient
did not know he was taking it. That remedy was achieved by the simple
process of making two slight changes in the ideal of Civil Service
Reform itself. First the word Reform was lopped off, and then the word
Civil. There remained, then, only Service. This Service saved the day
for the job-holder; it gave him a new lease upon his job; it diverted
public suspicion from him; it converted him from a criminal into a sort
of philanthropist. It remains with us today, the heir and assign of
the old spoils system, as the bootlegger is the heir and assign of the
saloon-keeper.
3
The chief achievement of Service is that it has sucked reform into the
governmental orbit, and so made it official and impeccable--more,
highly profitable. The old-time reformer was one who got nothing
for his psychic corn-cures and shin-plasters--who gave them away
freely to all comers, seeking only righteousness himself--who often,
indeed, took a beating into the bargain. The new reformer, safe in a
government job, with a drastic and complex law behind him, is one who
is paid in legal tender, unfailingly proffered, for his passionate
but usually unintelligible services to humanity--a prophet of the new
enlightenment, a priest at a glittering and immense shrine. He is the
fellow who enforces the Volstead Act, the Mann Act, all the endless
laws for putting down sin. He is the bright evangelist who tours the
country teaching mothers how to have babies, spreading the latest
inventions in pedagogy, road-making, the export trade, hog-raising and
vegetable-canning, waging an eternal war upon illiteracy, hookworm,
the white slave trade, patent medicines, the foot and mouth disease,
cholera infantum, adultery, rum. He is, quite as often as not, female;
he is a lady Ph.D., cocksure, bellicose, very well paid. Male or
female, he represents the new governmental tyranny; he is Vision, vice
the spoils system, retired. The old-time job-holder, penned in the cage
of the Civil Service, is now only a peon, a brother to the ox. He has
to work quite as hard as if he labored for Judge Gary or Henry Ford,
and he is very much worse paid. The high prerogatives and usufructs
of government have slipped out of his hands. They are exercised and
enjoyed today by the apostles of Service, a horde growing daily, vastly
and irresistibly, in numbers, impudence, power and pay.
Few of the groaning taxpayers of These States, indeed, realize how
far this public merchandizing of buncombe has dispatched the old
spoils system, or how much it is costing them every year. During the
Civil War an army contractor who went to Washington looking for loot
announced frankly what he was after; as a result, he was constantly
under suspicion, and was lucky if he got away with as much as $100,000;
only a few Vanderbilts and Morgans actually stole more. During the late
war he called himself a dollar-a-year-man, put on a major’s uniform,
took oath to die if need be for the cause of democracy--and went home
with a million, at least. The job-holder has undergone a similar
metamorphosis; maybe apotheosis would be a better aimed word. In the
days of the spoils system he was, at best, an amateurish and inept
performer. The only reason he ever offered for demanding a place at
the public trough was that he deserved it--that he had done his share
to elect the ticket. The easy answer to him was that he was an obvious
loafer and scoundrel, and deserved nothing. But what answer is to be
made to his heir and assign, the evangelist of Service, the prophet of
Vision? He doesn’t start off with a bald demand for a job; he starts
off with a Message. He has discovered the long-sought sure cure for
all the sorrows of the world; he has the infallible scheme for putting
down injustice, misery, ignorance, suffering, sin; his appeal is not
to the rules of a sinister and discreditable game, but to the bursting
heart of humanity, the noblest and loftiest sentiments of man. His job
is never in the foreground; it is concealed in his Vision. To get at
the former one must first dispose of the latter. Well, who is to do it?
What true-born American will volunteer for the cynical office? Half are
too idiotic and the rest are too cowardly. It takes courage to flaunt
and make a mock of Vision--and where is courage?
Certainly not in this imperial commonwealth of natural kneebenders
and marchers in parades. Nowhere else in Christendom, save only in
France, is government more extravagant, nonsensical, unintelligent
and corrupt than here, and nowhere else is it so secure. It becomes
a sort of crime even to protest against its villainies; all the late
investigations of waste and corruption in Washington were attacked and
brought to wreck in the name of duty, decorum, patriotism. The citizen
objecting to felony by the agents of the sovereign state, acting in
its name, found himself posted as an anarchist! There was, of course,
some logic in this imbecility, as there is in everything insane. It
was felt that too violent an onslaught upon the disease might do gross
damage to the patient, that the attempt to extirpate what was foul and
excrescent might imperil what was useful and necessary. Is government,
then, useful and necessary? So is a doctor. But suppose the dear
fellow claimed the right, every time he was called in to prescribe for
a bellyache or a ringing in the ears, to raid the family silver, use
the family tooth-brushes, and execute the _droit de seigneur_ upon
the housemaid? Is it simply a coincidence that the only necessary
functionaries who actually perform any comparable brigandage are the
lawyers--the very men who, under democracy, chiefly determined the
form, policies and acts of the government?
This great pox of civilization, alas, I believe to be incurable, and
so I propose no new quackery for its treatment. I am against dosing
it, and I am against killing it. All I presume to argue is that
something would be accomplished by viewing it more realistically--by
ceasing to let its necessary and perhaps useful functions blind us
to its ever-increasing crimes against the ordinary rights of the
free citizen and the common decencies of the world. The fact that it
is generally respected--that it possesses effective machinery for
propagating and safeguarding that respect--is the main shield of
the rogues and vagabonds who use it to exploit the great masses of
diligent and credulous men. Whenever you hear anyone bawling for more
respect for the laws, whether it be a Coolidge on his imperial throne
or an humble county judge in his hedge court, you have before you one
who is trying to use them to his private advantage; whenever you hear
of new legislation for putting down dissent and rebellion you may be
sure that it is promoted by scoundrels. The extortions and oppressions
of government will go on so long as such bare fraudulence deceives
and disarms the victims--so long as they are ready to swallow the
immemorial official theory that protesting against the stealings of
the archbishop’s secretary’s nephew’s mistress’ illegitimate son is a
sin against the Holy Ghost. They will come to an end when the victims
begin to differentiate clearly between government as a necessary
device for maintaining order in the world and government as a device
for maintaining the authority and prosperity of predatory rascals and
swindlers. In other words, they will come to an end on the Tuesday
following the first Monday of November preceding the Resurrection Morn.
XIV. TOWARD A REALISTIC ÆSTHETIC
1
_The Nature of Art_
The dominating purpose of man in the world is to conquer Nature,
which is to say, to defeat the plain intent of God. God and man are
the eternal antagonists. Man makes progress every time he wins a new
victory; if he can hold his gains his progress is real. Poetry is one
device for defeating God. Its aim is to escape some of the pains of
reality by denying boldly that they exist--by saying, in some form or
other, that “I am the captain of my soul” and “all’s well with the
world.” This denial gives some comfort to human hearts, particularly
to the more romantic sort; it is a poor substitute, perhaps, for
the actual conquest of the harsh facts, but it is nevertheless a
substitute. Religion operates in precisely the same way; its primary
purpose is to read an intelligible and even laudable motive into the
inscrutable assaults of God. Poetry, of course, is a cut higher than
religion, logically speaking. It denies the facts, but it denies
them more or less speciously and sometimes almost convincingly; it
seldom, if ever, has to enounce the thumping and obvious absurdities
that religion relies upon. But it is nevertheless a denial of reality,
and hence very deficient as an agent of progress. Science is far more
effective. It does not deny the imbecilities and horrors of Nature;
it sets about actually modifying them, and even abolishing them.
When science conquers it is usually a conquest that is permanent. We
have got rid of wolves, ghosts and yellow fever finally and almost
completely; they no longer bother civilized men. In the same way we
have got rid of some of the horrors that religion raised--horrors worse
than those it sought to lay. Science is not only effective against
Nature; it is also effective against the dangerous remedies formerly
employed against Nature.
Religion and the arts are thus only second-rate means of achieving
man’s chief purpose in the world. They give him a lot of comfort,
but they expose him to the dangers which always follow the denial of
reality. The man who believes that God is personally interested in him
and will save him from harm is in a far more perilous situation than
the man who knows better; so, also, with the man who believes that what
poetry says is true. The other arts, having less ideational content,
are a good deal less menacing. The statements that architecture makes,
for example, are not against the plain facts but in accord with the
plain facts--for example, that St. Thomas’ Church is more beautiful
than the Jersey marshes or its own rector. So with music, and, to some
extent, with painting, though painting is hampered by its function of
representing Nature--that is, of reproducing Nature without comment,
or with very feeble and ineffective comment. Painting will become a
genuinely valuable art when it finally abandons representation. The
portrait of an ugly woman, even though the artist tries to ameliorate
her ugliness a bit, remains almost as horrible as the ugly woman
herself. That is to say, the artist simply multiplies and reinforces
the horror already concocted by God.
The arts that avoid representation are like science in this: that they
actually improve upon Nature, and so add permanently to man’s comfort
and happiness in the world. The Parthenon is not a mere idle denial
of the facts of life, like poetry; it is a positive improvement upon
the facts of life; it makes a Greek hilltop appreciably more beautiful
than it was as God made it, and so mitigates the horror of life to
man. Music achieves the same thing, and even more effectively. The
nine Beethoven symphonies do not deny any palpable fact; they merely
create new facts that are more agreeable than those previously
existing. There are no sounds in Nature comparable to the lovely
sounds that Beethoven evokes. Here man shows himself definitely the
superior of God. Poetry, of course, also achieves a measure of genuine
and permanent beauty. But it can do so only in its character as a
form of music. The blank verse of Shakespeare, as music, is as noble
a creation as the symphonies of Beethoven. But all poetry, even the
best, is corrupted by its logical content. It almost invariably _says_
something, and that something is almost always untrue. When man speaks
or believes an untruth he certainly makes no progress with his conquest
of Nature. On the contrary, he plainly gives up the battle, at least
for the moment. Instead of fighting resolutely and effectively, and so
improving his state, he simply buries his head in the sand.
2
_The One-Legged Art_
To me, at all events, painting seems to be half an alien among the fine
arts. Its credentials, of course, are sounder than those of acting,
but they are surely not as sound as those of music, poetry, drama,
sculpture and architecture. The trouble with painting is that it lacks
movement, which is to say, the chief function of life. The best a
painter can hope to accomplish is to fix the mood of an instant, the
momentary aspect of something. If he suggests actual movement he must
do it by palpable tricks, all of which belong to craftsmanship rather
than to art. The work that he produces is comparable to a single chord
in music, without preparation or resolution. It may be beautiful, but
its beauty plainly does not belong to the highest order. The senses
soon tire of such beauty. If a man stands before a given painting for
more than five or ten minutes, it is usually a sign of affectation: he
is trying to convince himself that he has more delicate perceptions
than the general. Or he is a painter himself and thus engrossed by
the technical aspects of it, as a plumber might be engrossed by the
technical aspects of a bathroom. Or he is enchanted by the story
that the picture tells, which is to say, by the literature that it
illustrates. True enough, he may go back to a painting over and over
again, just as a music-lover may strike and re-strike a chord that
pleases him, but it can’t hold him for long at one session--it can’t
move his feelings so powerfully that he forgets the real world he lives
in.
Sculpture is in measurably better case. The spectator, viewing a fine
statue, does not see something dead, embalmed and fixed in a frame;
he sees something that moves as he moves. A fine statue, in other
words, is not one statue, but hundreds, perhaps even thousands. The
transformation from one to another is infinitely pleasing; one gets
out of it the same satisfying stimulation that one gets out of the
unrolling of a string quartette, or out of such a poem as “Atalanta in
Calydon,” “Heart of Darkness” or “Faust.” So with architecture. It not
only revolves; it also moves vertically, as the spectator approaches
it. When one walks up a street past a beautiful building one certainly
gets an effect beyond that of a mere chord; it is the effect of a whole
procession of beautiful chords, like that at the beginning of the slow
movement of the “New World” symphony or that in the well-known and
much-battered Chopin prélude. If it were a painting it would soon grow
tedious. No one, after a few days, would give it a glance.
This intrinsic hollowness of painting has its effects even upon those
who most vigorously defend it as the queen of all the fine arts.
One hears of such persons “haunting the galleries,” but one always
discovers, on inquiry, that it is the show-rooms that they actually
haunt. In other words, they get their chief pleasure by looking at
an endless succession of _new_ paintings: the multitude of chords
produces, in the end, a sort of confused satisfaction. One never hears
of them going to a public gallery regularly, to look at this or that
masterpiece. Even the Louvre seldom attracts them more than a dozen or
so times in a life-time. The other arts make a far more powerful and
permanent appeal. I have read “Huckleberry Finn” at least twenty times
and “Typhoon” probably ten times, and yet both pleased me as much (nay,
more) the last time as they did the first time. I have heard each of
the first eight symphonies of Beethoven more than fifty times, and most
of Mozart’s, Haydn’s, Schubert’s and Schumann’s quite as often. Yet if
Beethoven’s C Minor were announced for performance tonight, I’d surely
go to hear it. More, I’d enjoy every instant of it. Even second-rate
music has this lasting quality. Some time ago I heard Johann Strauss’
waltz, “Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald,” for the first time in a long
while. I knew it well in my goatish days; every note of it was still
familiar. Nevertheless, it gave me exquisite delight. Imagine a man
getting exquisite delight out of a painting of corresponding calibre--a
painting already so familiar to him that he could reproduce it from
memory!
Painters, like barbers and cigarmakers, are able to talk while they are
at work, and so they commonly gabble about their art a great deal more
than other artists, and the world, in consequence, has come to assume
that it is very complex, and full of subtleties. This is not true. Most
of its so-called subtleties are manufactured by painters who cannot
paint. The genuinely first-rate painters of the world have little
to say about the technique of their art, and seem to be unaware that
it is difficult. Go back to Leonardo’s notes and sketches: you will
find him a great deal more interested in anatomy than in painting. In
fact, painting was a sort of afterthought with him; he was primarily
an engineer, and the engineering that fascinated him most was that of
the human body. Come down, then, to Cézanne. He painted in the way that
seemed most natural to him, and was greatly astonished when a group of
bad painters, seeking to imitate him, began crediting him with a long
string of more or less mystical theories, by the Boul’ Mich’ out of the
article on optics in the Encyclopædia Britannica.
The earliest Paleolithic men were already accomplished painters
and sculptors. H. G. Wells, in his “Outline of History,” says that
“they drew astonishingly well.” “Paint,” he goes on, “was a big fact
in their lives. They were inveterate painters.” These savages were
so low that they had not even invented bows and arrows, usury, the
gallows or the notion of baptism by total immersion, and yet they were
already accomplished draftsmen. Some of their drawings on the walls
of their caves, indeed, remain a great deal more competent that the
average magazine illustration of today. They also carved in stone and
modelled in clay, and no doubt they were accomplished poets, as are
the lowest Zuñi Indians of our own time. Moreover, they soon began to
move out of their caves into artificial houses, and the principles of
architectural design that they devised at the very dawn of history
have been unchanged ever since, and are poll-parroted docilely every
time a sky-scraper thrusts its snout among the cherubim. True enough,
they could not draw as accurately as a photographic lens, but they
could certainly draw as accurately as, say, Matisse or Gauguin. It
remained for modern physicists, _i. e._, men disdainful of drawing,
to improve it. All the progress that has been made in the art during
the past fifty or sixty years has been based upon quiet filches from
the camera, just as all the progress that has been made in painting
has been based upon filches from the spectroscope. When one finds a
painter who professes to disdain these scientific aids, one always
beholds a painter who is actually unable to draw or paint, and who
seeks to conceal his incompetence by clothing it in hocus-pocus. This
is the origin of the new art that regales us with legs eight feet long,
complexions of olive green, and human heads related to the soap-box
rather than to the Edam cheese. This is the origin of all the gabble
one hears in ratty and unheated studios about cubism, vortism, futurism
and other such childish follies.
I regard any human being who, with proper instruction, cannot learn to
draw reasonably well as, to all intents and purposes, a moron. He is
in a stage of culture actually anterior to that of the Crô-Magnons. As
for a human being incapable of writing passable verse, he simply does
not exist. It is done, as everyone knows, by children--and sometimes so
well that their poems are printed in books and quite solemnly reviewed.
But good music is never written by children--and I am not forgetting
Mozart, Schubert and Mendelssohn. Music belongs to the very latest
stage of culture; to compose it in the grand manner requires long and
painful training, and the highest sort of natural skill. It is complex,
delicate, difficult. A miraculous youth may show talent for it, but he
never reaches anything properly describable as mastery of it until he
is thoroughly mature. The music that all of us think of when we think
of the best was written by men a bit bent by experience; it is quite
beyond the comprehension of the general. And so with prose. Prose has
no stage scenery to hide behind, as poetry has. It cannot use masks
and wigs. It is not naïve, but infinitely sophisticated. It is not
spontaneous, but must be fabricated by thought and painstaking. Prose
is the ultimate flower of the art of words. Next to music, it is the
finest of all the fine arts.
To return to music, it must be plain that it is enormously handicapped
as an art by the mere fact that its technique is so frightfully
difficult. I do not refer, of course, to the technique of the musical
executant, but to that of the composer. Any literate man can master
the technique of poetry in ten days, and that of the drama--despite
all the solemn hocus-pocus of the professors who presume to teach
it--in three weeks, but not even the greatest genius could do sound
work in the sonata form without years of preparation. To write a good
string quartette is not merely an act of creation, like writing a
love song; it is also an act of applied science, like cutting out a
set of tonsils. I know of no other art that demands so elaborate a
professional training. Perhaps the one which comes nearest to it is
architecture--that is, modern architecture. As the Greeks practised it,
it was relatively simple, for they used simple materials and avoided
all delicate problems of stress and strain; and they were thus able to
keep their whole attention upon pure design. But the modern architect,
with his complex mathematical and mechanical problems, must be an
engineer before he is an artist, and the sort of engineering that he
must master bristles with technical snares and conundrums. The serious
musician is in even worse case. Before he may write at all he must
take in and coördinate a body of technical knowledge that is almost as
great as the outfit of an astronomer. I say that all this constitutes a
handicap on the art of music. What I mean is that it scares off many
men who have sound musical ideas and would make good composers, but
who have no natural talent or taste for the technical groundwork. For
one Schubert who overcomes the handicap by sheer genius there must be
dozens who are repelled and discouraged. There is another, and perhaps
even worse disadvantage. The potential Schuberts flee in alarm, but
the Professor Sawdusts march in bravely. That is to say, music is hard
for musicians, but easy for pedants, grinds and examination-passers.
Its constant invasion by a hollow formalism is the result. It offers
an inviting playground to the bombastic jackass whose delight it is to
astonish the bourgeoisie with insane feats of virtuosity.
3
_Symbiosis and the Artist_