Wagner--achievements so colossal that only a small minority of men,
specially trained, can even comprehend and appreciate them--one often
finds one’s self wondering how much further he would have gone had
he not been harassed by his two wives. His first wife, Minna Planer,
was frankly and implacably opposed to his life-work, and made
deliberate efforts to dissuade him from it. She regarded “Lohengrin” as
nonsensical and “Tannhäuser” as downright indecent. It was her constant
hope, until Wagner finally kicked her out, that he would give over such
stuff, and consecrate himself to the composition of respectable operas
in the manner of Rossini, her favorite composer. The only composition
of his that genuinely pleased her was a set of variations for the
_cornet à piston_ that he wrote in Paris. She was a singer, and had the
brains of one. It must be plain that the presence of such a woman--and
Wagner lived with her for twenty years--must have put a fearful burden
upon the man’s creative genius. No man can be absolutely indifferent to
the prejudices and opinions of his wife. She has too many opportunities
to shove them down his throat. If she can’t make him listen to them
by howling and bawling, she can make him listen by snuffling. To say
that he can carry on his work without paying any heed to her is equal
to saying that he can carry on his work without paying any heed to his
toothache, his conscience, or the boiler-factory next door. In spite of
Minna, Wagner composed a number of very fine music dramas. But if he
had poisoned her at the beginning of his career it is very likely that
he would have composed more of them, and perhaps even better ones.
His second wife, the celebrated Cosima Liszt-von Bülow, had far more
intelligence than Minna, and so we may assume that her presence in his
music factory was less of a handicap upon the composer. Nevertheless,
the chances are that she, too, did him far more harm than good. To
begin with, she was extremely plain in face--and nothing is more
damaging to the creative faculty than the constant presence of
ugliness. Cosima, in fact, looked not unlike a modern woman politician;
even Nietzsche, a very romantic young fellow, had to go crazy before
he could fall in love with her. In the second place, there is good
reason to believe that Cosima, until after Wagner’s death, secretly
believed that her father, Papa Liszt, was a far better musician. Men’s
wives almost invariably make some such mistake; to find one who can
separate the man of genius from the mere husband, and then estimate
the former accurately and fairly, is surely very rare. A woman usually
respects her father, but her view of her husband is mingled with
contempt, for she is of course privy to the transparent devices by
which she snared him. It is difficult for her, being so acutely aware
of the shallowness of the man, to give due weight to the dignity
of the artist. Moreover, Cosima had shoddy tastes, and they played
destructively upon poor Wagner. There are parts of “Parsifal” that
suggest her very strongly--more strongly, in fact, than they suggest
the author of “Die Götterdammerung.” I do not here decry Wagner; on
the contrary, I praise him, and perhaps excessively. It is staggering
to think of the work he did, with Minna and Cosima shrilling into his
ears. What interests me is the question as to how much further he might
have gone had he escaped the passionate affection of the two of them
and of their various volunteer assistants. The thought fascinates,
and almost alarms. There is a limit beyond which sheer beauty becomes
unseemly. In “Tristan und Isolde,” in the Ring, and even in parts of
“Parsifal,” Wagner pushes his music very near that limit. A bit beyond
lies the fourth dimension of tone--and madness. Both Beethoven and
Brahms, I believe, more than once edged over the line. Two bachelors.
Had Beethoven married in 1802, as he seems to have been tempted to do
by some scheming wench, it is doubtful that the world would ever have
heard the Eroica. In the Eroica there is everything that startles and
dismays a loving wife: brilliant novelty, vast complexity thunderous
turmoil, great bursts of undiluted genius. Even Beethoven never wrote
anything more astounding than its first movement; the first movement of
the C Minor is relatively elemental beside it. Nor is there anything so
revolutionary in the Ninth.
The Eroica, indeed, was written precisely at the moment when Beethoven
became fully conscious of his extraordinary powers--more accurately,
of his singular and unchallengeable _superiority_. It is the work, not
only of a man who is absolute master of his materials, but also of a
man who disdains his materials, and his customers with them. In the
first movement he simply spits into the face of the cosmos. Scarcely
ten measures have been played before one suddenly realizes that one
is in the presence of something entirely new in music--not merely new
in degree, but new in kind. It differs as much from anything written
before it, even by Beethoven, as a picture by Cézanne differs from a
picture by an English Academician. This first movement has never been
sufficiently studied and appraised: it is unutterably stupendous. In
the funeral march, I believe, Beethoven descends to some rather cheap
tricks, and in the scherzo he is often obvious. But in the first
movement, and to a slightly less degree in the last, he takes leave
of earth and disports himself among the gods. It is the composition
of a colossus. And a bachelor. No normal woman could have watched its
genesis without some effort to make it more seemly, more decorous
and connubial, more respectable. A faithful wife, present at its
first performance, would have blushed, shivered and sworn. Women hate
revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and
well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.
XV. CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE STUDY OF VULGAR PSYCHOLOGY
1
_The Downfall of the Navy_
Few phenomena offer more refined and instructive entertainment to the
psychic pathologist than the American navy’s decline in popularity
during the past twenty-five years. At the time of the Spanish-American
War, as everyone sentient in those days will recall, it was easily
the premier service in the popular regard, and in even the least of
its exploits the great masses of the plain people took a violent and
vociferous pride. They were proud, too, of the army, and its heroic
efforts against the Hunnish hordes of Spain, and one of the great
captains of that army was made President for his stupendous feats of
blood and blather in the field; but it was the navy that they cherished
most, and the popular heroes that it produced were more numerous than
those of the army, and in the main they were far more fondly cherished.
Even the immortal Roosevelt, it will be remembered, was half a navy
man, and what got him into the White House, I believe, was less his
colossal butcheries in the land battles of the war, important though
they were to the cause of human liberty, than his long antecedent
struggles to free the navy from the politicians, and make it fit to
fight. The navy, indeed, was popular before the war began, or even
threatened. The army could tackle and massacre a whole tribe of Indians
without causing half the public thrill that followed the bombardment of
a Venezuelan coast village by the White Squadron, with a total loss of
but one blind cripple crippled in the other leg. This White Squadron,
I more than suspect, was the actual cause of the war itself. From the
day it first put to sea the plain people watched it with glowing pride,
and longed for a sight of it in action. If it had not been so handily
cruising in Latin-American waters, glittering truculently in the
sunshine, there would have been a great deal less public indignation
over the wrongs of the Cubeens. So superb a fighting arm was surely
not designed by God to rust in the scabbard. Thus the fashion arose
of drawing it out and poking it into Caribbean and South Atlantic
rat-holes. During the half dozen years before the laying of the Spanish
dragon was formally undertaken, such heroes as Schley and Fighting Bob
Evans carried the White Squadron into half the ports to the southward,
and knocked over a few church steeples in most of them. In the end, it
was just such an enterprise that took the _Maine_ into Havana harbor,
and provided the legal excuse for the war itself.
This was more than a quarter of a century ago. Today, it must be
obvious that there is very little public pride in the navy, and almost
no public interest. I doubt that one American schoolboy out of ten
thousand could name its present ranking officer; between 1890 and 1900
every schoolboy knew all the admirals by face and by name, and most
of the captains, and the patriotic epigrams of the more articulate of
them were chalked upon every schoolyard fence in the land. I was myself
a boy in those days, and remember even today such forgotten heroes
of the time as Admiral Gherardi, who commanded the White Squadron in
1893 and 1894, and was retired before the Spanish War; his portrait
was on the cigarette cards, along with those of Fighting Bob Evans and
Lillian Russell. Later on, having grown more reflective and critical,
I specialized in the Sampson-Schley controversy, and was a bitter
partisan of Schley, a native of my own Maryland Free State. Dewey,
Clark, Evans, Ridley, Hobson (God save us!), Ensign Bagley, Yoeman
Ellis, Sigsbee, Wainright--all these eminent tars were as real to the
boys of that era as John L. Sullivan or Amos Rusie. Turn now to today.
When the newspapers, a year or two ago, announced that a gentleman
named Admiral Sims had denied that the German U-boat commanders
committed the atrocities credited to them during the late war, how many
American boys recognized his name? I myself, though I am a historian by
profession, boggled him at first glance, mistaking him for a British
officer. For the life of me, I could not tell you the name of another
American naval officer.... Second thought: there was Admiral Benson.
But what he did in the war, save involve himself in some controversy
that has been forgotten, I can’t tell you. No other name occurs to me,
though I scratch my head and try various mnemonic dodges. Try me on the
names of the commanders who fought the celebrated Creel battle with the
U-boats, and I’ll have to slide down among the morons. If there was a
Hobson in that war, I can’t recall him. I remember many English and
German commanders--von Tirpitz, von Scheer, Jellicoe, Müller of the
Emden, König, and so on--but not a single American.
The fact is, of course, that the part the American navy played in
the war, though it was unquestionably important, was quite devoid
of the more spectacular varieties of gallantry, and so it failed to
make heroes. The battles fought were fought mainly by government
press-agents, not by the navy itself; the rest was dangerous but dull
policing, with some uninspiring running of ferry-boats. The navy, as
everyone knows, became a funk-hole for draft-dodgers. This may account,
in some measure, for the present public apathy regarding it; it is not
brilliant, and hence it is not charming. But its decay in popularity,
I believe, really antedated the war by several years; it was in the
shadows long before Admiral Sims transferred his swivel-chair from
Washington to London. What caused the change? Is it that the American
people have lost their old taste for the sea, and, in particular, their
old delight in the sort of heroes that it produces? Or is it that the
navy itself has actually lost some of its old romance and color? I
incline to think that the latter explanation explains more than the
former. My hazard is that the man who made the American navy unpopular
was the Hon. Josephus Daniels, and that he did it by trying to convert
every battleship into a chautauqua and Sunday-school. In the days when
the arrival of a naval vessel in port was the signal for hot times
ashore, with the saloons packed to the doors, and all the town’s wicked
women out _en masse_, and the streets made picturesquely perilous
by squads of drunken and roaring gobs--in those days every poor but
ambitious boy, when the job of tying up packages and running errands
began to palsy him, let his fancy turn toward thoughts of stealing off
to foreign parts, the Republic’s quarter in his pocket and riotous and
attractive company all about him. The sailor of that era was an obscene
but highly charming fellow. A great spaciousness was in him. He bore
the scars of the constabulary espantoons of distant and romantic lands.
He was a wholesale lover, a three-bottle man, a well of astounding
profanity. He held the admiration of every adventurous youth. He was
romance in baggy breeches, hell-bent down the mysterious by-ways of the
world.
Josephus changed all that. A Christian of tender conscience and a
firm believer in hell for the sinful, it appalled him to observe that
nine-tenths of the young men under his official charge were obviously
headed for the fire. When he got his secret reports of their doings in
Port Said, Callao, Singapore, Odessa, Smyrna, Vera Cruz, Norfolk, Va.,
and other such seaboard stews--when these lurid documents began pouring
in upon him from missionaries, Y. M. C. A. secretaries and other godly
men, he staggered under the horror, and was unfit for business for
days afterward. Having recourse to prayer, he was presently given
counsel by a voice from the burning bush. To hear was to act. First,
he abolished rum from the navy, and forced even the oldest admirals,
some of whom had been pickled for years and years, to go upon the
dubious water of far-flung and zymotic ports. Secondly, he forbade
the enlistment of young men who were fugitives from justice for
dog-stealing, moonshining, window-smashing and other such felonies--the
mainstays of the navy in the old days. Thirdly, he set up night schools
on every battleship, in charge of Christian men like himself, and then
day schools, and then schools running both day and night, and to the
customary instruction in the three R’s he added the whole curriculum
of the Y. M. C. A., from double-entry bookkeeping to public speaking,
and from show-card writing to venereal prophylaxis. Today a young man
goes into the navy from his native farm with nothing in his head save
a vast yearning to get away from the smell of cows--and comes out
in three years an accomplished paperhanger, with some knowledge of
the saxophone, electric wiring and first aid to the injured. The old
enlistment posters used to show a gob in a rickshaw with a Japanese
cutie; the new ones show him practising as a house and sign painter.
The old navy showed the boys the world, and taught them the difference
between Swedish punch and Javanese arrak; the new navy converts them
into sanitary plumbers and bookkeepers, and teaches them how to lead a
prayer-meeting.
Is it any wonder that it declines in popularity--that the youth of the
land is neglectful of its eminent commanders, and has to be lured into
enlistments by the arts of the grind-shop auctioneer? The Y. M. C. A.
already reigns universally on the dry land of the Republic; only the
remotest yokel in the highest hills can hope to escape its tentacles,
and even he is fetched by its sinister sister, the chautauqua. When
he dreams of the sea, he dreams of a realm that is free from all
this--of a realm still barbarous, unchastened and romantic--a realm
of free cavorting and exhilarating adventure. But when he gets to
the recruiting-office, the first thing he sees is a large lithograph
showing a class of gobs being instructed in algebra, grammar and
Christian doctrine. The master-at-arms who receives him hasn’t got
the old naked Venus tattooed on his arm; he has instead a portrait of
Dwight L. Moody, and in his button-hole is a button testifying that he
has recited 52 successive Golden Texts without an error and brought
20 heathen Danish sailors to the mourners’ bench. Instead of the old
booby-hatch for souses in this recruiting-office, there is now a gospel
hall with a melodeon. The talk is not of the yellow gals in Valparaiso,
the powerful red wines of Naples, the all-night shows of Marseilles,
the police of Liverpool and Kiel, but of the advantages of learning the
trades of tin-roofer, cost accountant and hardwood finisher. The rustic
candidate, his head buzzing with romance, is floored with statistics
and plunged into a bath of bichloride of mercury. No wonder his stomach
turns and his heart is broken! And no wonder the navy, thus purged of
all its old flavors and juices, has ceased to inflame the imagination
of the plain people. Suppose they heard from Hollywood that Charlie
Chaplin had become a hard-shell Baptist and opened a pants-pressing
parlor?
2
_The Mind of the Slave_
One of the forgotten divisions between men and men is that separating
those who enjoy the work they have to do in the world and those who
suffer it only as a necessary evil. The distinction, despite its
neglect by sociologists, is probably very important--certainly far more
important than the current divisions between producers and exploiters,
dolichocephalic Nordic blonds and brachycephalic Mediterraneans,
Darwinians and Christians, Republicans and Democrats, Protestants and
Catholics, wets and drys. A man’s politics, theology and other vices
engage his attention, after all, only in his moments of leisure, and
the shape of his cranium has very little demonstrable influence upon
what habitually goes on within it, but the nature of the work he does
in the world conditions every thought and impulse of his life, and his
general attitude toward it is almost indistinguishable from his general
attitude toward the cosmos.
At the one extreme lies the unmitigated slave--the man who has to spend
his whole life performing tasks that are incurably uninteresting, and
that offer no soothing whatever to his vanity. At the other extreme
is what Beethoven called the free artist--the man who makes a living,
with no boss directly over him, doing things that he enjoys enormously,
and that he would keep on doing gladly, even if all economic pressure
upon him disappeared. To the second category belong all the happiest
men in the world, and hence, perhaps, all the most useful men. For
what is done with joy is always better done, whether it be fashioning
a material object, thinking out a problem or kissing a pretty girl;
and the man who can make the rest of humanity pay him for being happy
is obviously a better man than the general, or, at all odds, a luckier
one. Here luck and superiority are one and the same. The fact that
Joseph Conrad could write better than I, was in a sense, a matter
of pure chance. He was born with his talent; he did not earn it.
Nevertheless, it was just as real as if he had got it by Christian
endeavor, and his superiority to me was thus perfectly genuine.
The slave is always conscious of his slavery, and makes constant and
often desperate efforts to mitigate it or to get rid of it altogether.
Sometimes he seeks that mitigation in outside activities that promise
to give him the sense of dignity and importance that his daily labor
denies him; sometimes he tries to give a false appearance of dignity
to his work itself. The last phenomenon must be familiar to every
American; it is responsible for various absurd devices to pump up
lowly trades by giving them new and high-sounding names. I point,
for example, to those of the real-estate agent and the undertaker.
Neither trade, it must be obvious, offers any stimulation to men of
genuine superiority. One could not imagine a Beethoven, a Lincoln
or even a Coolidge getting any joy out of squeezing apartment-house
tenants or pickling Odd Fellows. Both jobs, indeed, fail to satisfy the
more imaginative sort of men among those compelled to practise them.
Hence these men try to dignify them with hocus-pocus. The real-estate
agent, seeking to conceal his real purpose in life, lets it be known
grandly that he is an important semi-public functionary, that he has
consecrated himself to Service and is a man of Vision--and to prove
it he immerses himself in a private office with a secretary to insult
his customers, joins a Rotary Club, and begins to call himself a
realtor, a word as idiotic as flu, pep or gent. The ambitious washer
of the dead--until very lately a sort of pariah in all civilized
societies, like the hangman, the surgeon and the dog-catcher--proceeds
magnificently along the same route. At regular intervals I receive
impressive literature from a trade-union of undertakers calling
themselves the Selected Morticians. By this literature it appears
that the members thereof are professional men of a rank and dignity
comparable to judges or archbishops, and they are hot for the subtlest
and most onerous kind of Service, and even eager to offer their advice
to the national government. In brief, the realtor complex all over
again. I do not laugh at these soaring embalmers; I merely point out
that their nonsense proves how little the mere planting of martyred
lodge brothers satisfies their interior urge to be important and
distinguished--an urge that is in all of us.
But most of the trades pursued by slaves, of course, offer no such
opportunities for self-deceptive flummery. The clerk working in the
lime and cement warehouse of some remote town of the foreign missions
belt cannot conceivably convince himself that his profession is noble;
worse, he cannot convince anyone else. And so with millions of other
men in this great Republic, both urban and rural--millions of poor
fellows doomed their life long to dull, stupid and tedious crafts--the
lower sort of clerks, workmen, wagon-drivers, farmers, farm-laborers,
petty officials, grabbers of odd jobs. They must be downright idiots
to get any satisfaction out of their work. Happiness, the feeling that
they too are somebody, the sense of being genuinely alive, must be
sought in some other direction. In the big cities, that need is easily
met. Here there is a vast and complex machinery for taking the slave’s
mind off his desolateness of spirit--moving pictures to transport him
into a land of romance, where men (whom he always identifies with
himself) are brave, rich and handsome, and women (whom he identifies
with his wife--or perchance with her younger sister) are clean,
well-dressed and beautiful; newspapers to delight and instruct him
with their sports pages, their comic strips and their eloquent appeals
to his liberality, public spirit and patriotism; public bands and the
radio to play the latest jazz for him; circuses and parades; baseball,
races, gambling, harlotry and games in arenas; a thousand devices to
make him forget his woes. It is this colossal opportunity to escape
from life that brings yokels swarming to the cities, not any mere lust
for money. The yokel is actually far more comfortable on his native
soil; the city crowds and exploits him, and nine times out of ten he
remains desperately poor. But the city at least teaches him how to
forget his poverty; it amuses him and thrills him while it is devouring
him. I once knew an old colored woman, born in Southern Maryland, who
lived miserably in one room of a shack in an alley in Baltimore. When
asked why she did not go back to her village, where she would have
at least had better food and more air, she replied very simply that
there were never any parades in the country. It was a profound and
intelligent saying.