or on the land; the cities can’t absorb all of them, nor even half of
them. They thus confront the problem of making life bearable out of
their own meagre resources. The devices that they adopt--political,
religious and social--are familiar to all of us, and account fully, it
seems to me, for some of the phenomena of American life that are most
puzzling to foreign observers. The hoop-la Methodist revival with its
psychopathological basis; the violent bitterness of rural politics; the
prosperity of the Ku Klux Klan and all the other clownish fraternal
orders; the persistent popularity of lynching, tarring and feathering,
barbarities of a dozen other varieties--all these things are no more
than manifestations of the poor hind’s pathetic effort to raise himself
out of his wallow, to justify and dignify his existence, to escape
from the sordid realities that daily confront him. To snort and froth
at a revival makes him conspicuous, prominent, a man of mark; it is
therefore easy to induce him to do it. To hold a petty county office
is eminence; hence he struggles for it frantically. To belong to the
Ku Klux gives him a mysterious and sinister dignity, and fills him
with a sense of power and consequence; he falls for it as quickly as
a city intellectual falls for the _Légion d’honneur_ or an LL.D. To
take a hand in a concrete tarring or lynching--this instantly makes
him feel that he has played an heroic rôle in the world, that he has
accomplished something large and memorable--above all, that he has
had a gaudy good time. In brief, all these things make him forget,
transiently or permanently, that he is a miserable worm, and of little
more actual importance on earth than his own hogs.
Long ago, I suggested that a good way to diminish lynching in the South
would be to establish brass bands in all the country towns. The bad
music, I argued, would engage and enchant both the blackamoors and
the poor white trash, and so discourage the former from crime and the
latter from seeking a savage satisfaction in its punishment. I now
improve and embellish that suggestion. That is to say, I propose that
the band scheme be shelved, and that bull-fighting be established as a
substitute. Why not, indeed? Cattle have to be killed, and the Southern
poor white is admittedly a savage. Why not combine the necessary
slaughter of horned quadrupeds with a show that will give that savage
a thrill and take his mind from his lowly lot, and so turn him from
seeking escape in politics, murder and voodoo theology? Bull-fights in
the South would not only diminish lynchings; they would also undermine
Prohibition. A happy peasantry would have no reason to divert itself
with homicide, and neither would it have any reason to belabor the rest
of us with the ethical and political manias of its Baptist dervishes.
The Ku Klux, it seems to me, is a good influence in the South rather
than a bad one, for it tends to regulate and formalize the normal
sports of the people, and so restrains excess. The trouble with
lynching before the Klan took charge of it was that men of the darker
races were often hanged and burned purely arbitrarily, simply because
the yokels of some Christian county could not stand boredom any longer.
But now rules are laid down and a sort of jurisprudence gets into it.
I have heard all kinds of wild charges against the Invisible Empire,
but I have never heard anyone allege that its responsible officers have
ever countenanced the execution of its laws upon anyone not obviously
guilty. This is an improvement. Life is safer and happier in Georgia
today that it was before the Rev. Dr. Simmons heard the voice. But it
would be even safer and even happier if the pure Anglo-Saxons down
there could work off their steam by going weekly to a _plaza de toros_,
and there see official _picadores_, _banderilleros_, and _matadors_,
all of them good Democrats and baptized men, lynch and burn (or even
merely geld) a reluctant and protesting male of _Bos taurus_.
3
_The Art Eternal_
One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian necromancy is
the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and
inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid
blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes
off behind him. At its worst, indeed, this necessity takes on a
downright pathological character, and is thus as innocent as sciatica
or albuminuria. It is part of the morbid baggage of hysterics and
neurasthenics: their lying is simply a symptom of their compulsive
effort to adjust themselves to an environment which bears upon them too
harshly for endurance. The rest of us are not quite so hard pushed,
but pushed we all are. In us the thing works through the inferiority
complex, which no man can escape. He who lacks it entirely is actually
reckoned insane by the fact: his satisfaction with his situation in
the world is indistinguishable from a delusion of grandeur. The great
majority of us--all, in brief, who are normal--pass through life in
constant revolt against our limitations, objective and subjective.
Our conscious thought is largely devoted to plans and specifications
for cutting a better figure in human society, and in our unconscious
the business goes on much more steadily and powerfully. No healthy
man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. Even the late
Woodrow, during his dizzy term as the peer of Lincoln and Washington,
was obviously tantalized by the reflection that, in earlier ages, there
had been Martin Luther, St. Ignatius Loyola and Paul of Tarsus. We
are tortured by such dreams and images as a child is tortured by the
thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy-store
and have two stomachs. The more we try to put the obscene apparition
away, the more it haunts and badgers us.
Lying is the product of the unconscious yearning to realize such
visions, and if the policeman, conscience, prevents the lie being put
into plain words, then it is at least put into more or less plausible
acts. We all play parts when we face our fellow-men, as even poets have
noticed. No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and,
above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true
meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife.
Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment
a man considers himself, even _in petto_, he tries to gild and fresco
himself. Thus a man’s wife, however realistic her view of him, always
flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably
better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there. What
she sees, even at times of the most appalling domestic revelation and
confidence, is not the authentic man at all, but a compound made up
in part of the authentic man and in part of his projection of a gaudy
ideal. The man who is most respected by his wife is the one who makes
this projection most vivid--that is, the one who is the most daring and
ingratiating liar. He can never, of course, deceive her utterly, but if
he is skillful he may at least deceive her enough to make her happy.
_Omnis homo mendax_: thus the Psalmist. So far the Freudians merely
parrot him. What is new in their gospel is the doctrine that lying is
instinctive, normal, and unavoidable--that a man is forced into it by
his very will-to-live. This doctrine purges the business of certain
ancient embarrassments, and restores innocence to the heart. Think of
a lie as a compulsion neurose, and you think of it more kindly. I need
not add, I hope, that this transfer of it from the department of free
will to that of determinism by no means disposes of the penalty that
traditionally pursues it, supposing it to be detected and resented.
The proponents of free will always make the mistake of assuming that
the determinists are simply evil fellows looking for a way to escape
the just consequences of their transgressing. No sense is in that
assumption. If I lie on the witness-stand and am detected by the
judge, I am jailed for perjury forthwith, regardless of my helplessness
under compulsion. Here justice refuses absolutely to distinguish
between a misfortune and a tort: the overt act is all it is concerned
with. But as jurisprudence grows more intelligent and more civilized
it may change its tune, to the benefit of liars, which is to say,
to the benefit of humanity. Science is unflinchingly deterministic,
and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. We no longer
flog a child afflicted with nocturnal enuresis; we have substituted
concepts of mental aberration for concepts of crime in a whole series
of cases: kleptomania-shoplifting, pyromania-arson, etc.; and, in the
United States at least, the old savage punishment of murderers is now
ameliorated by considerations of psychiatry and even of honor. On some
shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that
perjury is simply a compulsion neurose, like beating time with the foot
at a concert or counting the lamp-posts along the highway.
However, I have but small faith in millenniums, and do not formally
predict this one. Nor do I pronounce any moral judgment, pro or con:
moral judgments, as old Friedrich used to say, are foreign to my
nature. But let us not forget that lying, _per se_, is not forbidden
by the moral code of Christendom. Holy Writ dismisses it cynically,
and the statutes of all civilized states are silent about it. Only
the Chinese, indeed, make it a penal offense. Perjury, of course, is
prohibited everywhere, and also any mendacity which amounts to fraud
and deprives a fellow-man of his property, but that far more common
form of truth-stretching which has only the lesser aim of augmenting
the liar’s personal dignity and consequence--this is looked upon with
a very charitable eye. So is that form which has the aim of helping
another person in the same way. In the latter direction lying may
even take on the stature of a positive virtue. The late King Edward
VII, when Prince of Wales, attained to great popularity throughout
Christendom by venturing into downright perjury. Summoned into a court
of law to give expert testimony regarding some act of adultery, he lied
like a gentleman, as the phrase goes, to protect a woman. The lie, to
be sure, was intrinsically useless; no one believed that the lady was
innocent. Nevertheless, every decent Christian applauded the perjurer
for his good intentions, including even the judge on the bench, sworn
to combat false witness by every resource of forensics. All of us,
worms that we are, occasionally face the alternatives that confronted
Edward. On the one hand, we may tell the truth, regardless of
consequences, and on the other hand we may mellow it and sophisticate
it to make it humane and tolerable. It is universally held that the
man who chooses the first course is despicable. He may be highly moral,
but he is nevertheless a cad--as highly moral men have so curious a way
of being. But if he lies boldly, then he is held to be a man of honor,
and is respected as such by all other men of honor.
For the habitual truth-teller and truth-seeker, indeed, the world has
very little liking. He is always unpopular, and not infrequently his
unpopularity is so excessive that it endangers his life. Run your
eye back over the list of martyrs, lay and clerical: nine-tenths
of them, you will find, stood accused of nothing worse than honest
efforts to find out and announce the truth. Even today, with the
scientific passion become familiar in the world, the general view of
such fellows is highly unfavorable. The typical scientist, the typical
critic of institutions, the typical truth-seeker in every field is
held under suspicion by the great majority of men, and variously
beset by posses of relentless foes. If he tries to find out the
truth about arterio-sclerosis, or surgical shock, or cancer, he is
denounced as a scoundrel by the Christian Scientists, the osteopaths
and the anti-vivisectionists. If he tries to tell the truth about the
government, its agents seek to silence him and punish him. If he turns
to fiction and endeavors to depict his fellow-men accurately, he has
the Comstocks on his hands. In no field can he count upon a friendly
audience, and freedom from assault. Especially in the United States
is his whole enterprise viewed with bilious eye. The men the American
people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men
they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. A
Galileo could no more be elected President of the United States than
he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men
favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter
facts of life in bandages of soft illusion.
Behind this almost unanimous distrust of the truth-teller there is a
sound and sure instinct, as there is behind every other manifestation
of crowd feeling. What it shows is simply this: that the truth is
something too harsh and devastating for the majority of men to bear.
In their secret hearts they know themselves, and they can suffer the
thought of themselves only by idealizing the facts. The more trivial,
loathsome and degraded the reality, the more powerful and relentless
must be the idealization. An Aristotle, I daresay, may be able
occasionally to regard himself searchingly and dispassionately--but
certainly not an ordinary man. Here we come back to what we began with:
the inferiority complex. The truth-seeker forgets it, and so comes to
grief. He forgets that the ordinary man, at bottom, is always afraid
of himself, as of some horrible monster. He refuses to sanction the
lie whereby the ordinary man maintains his self-respect, just as the
bounder, put upon the stand, refuses to support the lie whereby a woman
maintains the necessary theory of her chastity. Thus he is unpopular,
and deserves to be.
Then why does he go on? Why does he kick up such a bother and suffer
such barbarous contumely, all to no end--for the majority of so-called
truths, it must be evident, perish as soon as they are born: no one
will believe them. The answer probably is that the truth-seeker is
moved by the same obscure inner necessity (in Joseph Conrad’s phrase)
that animates the artist. Something within him, something entirely
beyond his volition, forces him to pursue his fanatical and useless
quest--some impulse as blind as that which moves a puppy to chase its
tail. Again the compulsion neurose! But this one differs materially
from that of the liar. The latter is hygienic; it makes for peace,
health, happiness. The former makes only for strife and discontent.
It invades the immemorial pruderies of the human race. It breeds
scandals and heart-burnings. It is essentially anti-social, and hence,
by modern theories of criminology, diseased. The truth-seeker thus
becomes a pathological case. The average man is happily free from any
such malaise. He avoids the truth as diligently as he avoids arson,
regicide or piracy on the high seas, and for the same reason: because
he believes that it is dangerous, that no good can come of it, that it
doesn’t pay. The very thought of it is abhorrent to him. This average
man, I believe, must be accepted as the normal man, the natural man,
the healthy and useful man. He presents a character that is general
in the race, and favorable to its security and contentment. The truth
never caresses; it stings--and life is surely too short for sane men to
be stinging themselves unnecessarily. One would regard it as idiotic
even in a flea.
Thus the truth about the truth emerges, and with it the truth about
lying. Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent, and
instinctive; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the
ameliorations that it offers life would become a mere syllogism, and
hence too metallic to be born. The man who lies simply submits himself
sensibly to the grand sweep and ripple of the cosmic process. The man
who seeks and tells the truth is a rebel against the inner nature of
all of us.
XVI. THE AMERICAN NOVEL
1
It is an ancient platitude of historical criticism that great wars and
their sequelæ are inimical to the fine arts, and particularly to the
art of letters. The kernel of truth in it lies in the obvious fact
that a people engaged in a bitter struggle for existence have no time
for such concerns, which demand not only leisure but also a certain
assured feeling of security, well-being and self-sufficiency--in
brief, the thing often called aristocratic (or sometimes intellectual)
detachment. No man ever wrote good poetry with his wife in parturition
in the next room, or the police preparing to raid his house, or his
shirt-tail afire. He needs to be comfortable to do it, and if not
actually comfortable, then at all events safe. Wars tend to make life
uncomfortable and unsafe--but not, it must be observed, inevitably
and necessarily, not always and invariably. A bitter and demoralizing
struggle goes with wars that are lost, and the same struggle goes with
wars that are won only by dint of stupendous and ruinous effort, but
it certainly does not go with wars that are won easily. These last do
not palsy and asphyxiate the artist, as he is palsied and asphyxiated
by cholera morbus, suits for damages or marriage. On the contrary, they
pump him full of ozone, and he is never more alive and lively than
following them.
I point to a few familiar examples. The Civil War, as everyone knows,
bankrupted the South and made a life a harsh and bitter struggle
for its people, and especially for the gentler and more civilized
minority of its people. In consequence, the South became as sterile
artistically, after Lee’s surrender, as Mexico or Portugal, and even
today it lags far behind the North in beautiful letters, and even
further behind in music, painting and architecture. But the war, though
it went on for four years, strained the resources of the North very
little, either in men or in money, and so its conclusion found the
Northerners very rich and cocky, and full of a yearning to astonish the
world, and that yearning, in a few decades, set up a new and extremely
vigorous American literature, created an American architecture of a
revolutionary character, and even laid the first courses of American
schools of music and painting. Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James
and William Dean Howells, all of them draft dodgers in the war itself,
were in a very real sense products of the war, for they emerged as
phenomena of the great outburst of creative energy that followed it,
and all of them, including even James, were as thoroughly American as
Jay Gould, P. T. Barnum or Jim Fisk. The stars of the national letters
in the years before the war had been Americans only by geographical
accident. About Emerson there hung a smell of Königsberg and Weimar;
Irving was simply a New York Englishman; Poe was a citizen of No Man’s
Land; even Hawthorne and Cooper, despite their concern with American
themes, showed not the slightest evidence of an American point of
view. But Mark Twain, Howells and Whitman belonged to the Republic as
palpably as Niagara Falls or Tammany Hall belonged to it, and so did
James, though the thought horrified him and we must look at him through
his brother William to get the proof. Turn now to Europe. France,
harshly used in the war of 1870-71, was sterile for a decade, but the
wounds were not deep, and recovery was in full swing by 1880. Germany,
injured scarcely at all, produced Nietzsche almost before the troops
got home, and was presently offering an asylum and an inspiration
to Ibsen, preparing the way for the reform and modernization of the
theatre, and making contributions of the utmost value to practically
all of the arts and sciences. Spain, after the Armada, gave the world
Cervantes and then expired; England produced Shakespeare and founded a
literature that is not surpassed in history.
What has thus happened over and over again in the past--and I might
pile up examples for pages--may be in process of repetition today,
and under our very noses. All Europe, plainly enough, is in a state
of exhaustion and depression, and in no department of human activity
is the fact more visible than in that of the arts. Not only are the
defeated nations, Russia, Germany and Austria, producing nothing save
a few extravagant eccentricities; there is also a great lowness of
spirit in the so-called victorious nations, for their victory was
almost as ruinous as defeat. France, as after 1870, is running to a
pretentious and artificial morbidity in letters, and marking time in
music and painting; Italy is producing little save psychopathological
absurdities by such mountebanks as D’Annunzio and Papini; even England
shows all the signs of profound fatigue. The great English writers of
the age before the war are passing. Meredith is gone; Hardy has put
up his shutters; Kipling went to wreck in the war itself; Conrad is
dead; Shaw, once so agile and diverting, becomes a seer and prophet.
Nor is there any sign of sound progress among the younger men. Arnold
Bennett, a star of brilliant promise in 1913, is today a smoking
smudge. Wells has ceased to be an artist and become a prophet in the
Sunday supplements. Masefield has got no further than he was on August
2, 1914. The rest of the novelists are simply chasing their own tails.
The Georgian poets, having emerged gloriously during the war, now
disappear behind their manners. Only a few women, led by May Sinclair,
and a few iconoclastic young men, led by Aldous Huxley, are still
indubitably alive.
It seems to me that, in the face of this dark depression across the
water, the literary spectacle on this side takes on an aspect that is
extremely reassuring, and even a bit exhilarating. For the first time
in history, there begins to show itself the faint shadow of a hope
that, if all goes well, leadership in the arts, and especially in all
the art of letters, may eventually transfer itself from the eastern
shore of the Atlantic to the western shore. Our literature, as I have
more than once pointed out in the past, is still oppressed by various
heavy handicaps, chiefly resident in the failure of the new aristocracy
of money to function as an aristocracy of taste. The artist among
us is still a sort of pariah, beset by public contempt on the one
hand and by academic enmity on the other; he still lacks the public
position that his brothers enjoy in older and more civilized countries.
Nevertheless, it must be obvious to everyone that his condition tends
to improve materially--that, in our own time, it _has_ improved
materially--that though his rewards remain meagre, save in mere money,
his freedom grows steadily greater. And it must be obvious, too, that
he begins to show that that increasing freedom is not wholly wasted
upon him--that he knows how to use it, and is disposed to do so with
some gusto. What all the younger American writers have in common is a
sort of new-found elasticity or goatishness, a somewhat exaggerated
sense of aliveness, a glowing delight in the spectacle before them, a
vigorous and naïve self-consciousness. The schoolmaster critics belabor
them for it, and call it a disrespect for tradition, and try to put it
down by denouncing it as due to corrupt foreign influences. But it is
really a proof of the rise of nationalism--perhaps of the first dawn
of a genuine sense of nationality. No longer imitative and timorous,
as most of their predecessors were, these youngsters are attempting a
first-hand examination of the national scene, and making an effort to
represent it in terms that are wholly American. They are the pioneers
of a literature that, whatever its defects in the abstract, will at
least be a faithful reflection of the national life, that will be more
faithful, indeed, in its defects than in its merits. In England the
novel subsides into formulæ, the drama is submerged in artificialities,
and even poetry, despite occasional revolts, moves toward scholarliness
and emptiness. But in America, since the war, all three show the
artless and superabundant energy of little children. They lack, only
too often, manner and urbanity; it is no wonder that they are often
shocking to pedants. But there is the breath of life in them, and that
life is far nearer its beginning than its end.