I am sorry now not to have treasured every word that came from my poet.
At the moment I disliked to play Boswell; I thought it beneath my
dignity. But artists like Arnold Bennett who ply the notebook are not
ashamed to be the Boswells of mediocrity. Why should I have hesitated to
take notes of William Butler Yeats?
In the Pennsylvania station I had met him, as his host agreed, and I
intruded on him as far as Philadelphia. I say intruded: his forehead
wrinkled in tolerant endurance too often for me to feel that I was
welcome. And yet, once we were settled, he was not unwilling to speak.
His dark eyes, oblique and set far into his head, gave him a cryptic and
remote suggestion. His pursed lips closed as on a secret. He opened them
for utterance almost as in a dream. As if he were spokesman of some
sacred book spread in front of him but raptly remembered, he pronounced
his opinions seriously, occasionally raising his hands to fend his
words. He was, I think, inwardly satisfied that I was attentive. I was
indeed attentive. I had never listened to more distinguished
conversation. Or, rather, monologue--for when I talked he suspended his
animation, like a singer waiting for the accompanist to run down.
It was on the eve of The New Republic. I asked him if he'd write for it,
and he answered characteristically. He said that journalism was action
and that nothing except the last stage of exasperation could make him
want to write for a journal as he had written about Blanco Posnet or The
Playboy. The word "journalism" he uttered as a nun might utter
"vaudeville." He was reminded, he said, of an offer that was made to
Oscar Wilde of the editorship of a fashion paper, to include court
gossip. Wouldn't it interest Wilde? "Ah, yes," responded Wilde, "I am
deeply interested in a court scandal at present." The journalist
(devourer of carrion, of course) was immediately eager. "Yes," said
Wilde, "the scandal of the Persian court in the year 400 B. C."
It was telling. It made me ashamed for my profession. I could not
forget, however, pillars of the _Ladies' World_ edited by Oscar Wilde
which I used to store in an out-house. Wilde had condescended in the
end.
Yeats's mind was bemused by his recollection of his fellow-Irishman.
Once he completed his lectures he would go home, and a "fury of
preoccupation" would keep him from being caught in those activities that
lead to occasional writing. His lectures would not go into essays but
into dialogues, "of a man wandering through the antique city of Fez." In
the cavern blackness of those eyes I could feel that there was a
mysterious gaze fixed on the passing crowd of the moment, the gaze of a
stranger to fashion who might as well write of Persia, a dreamer beyond
space and time.
"And humanitarian writing," he concluded, with a weary limp motion of
his hand, "the writing of reformers, 'uplifters,' with a narrow view of
democracy I find dull. The Webbs are dull. And truistic."
I spoke of the Irish John Mitchel's narrow antidemocracy and belief in
the non-existence of progress, such as he had argued in Virginia during
the Civil War. Mitchel, he protested, was a passionate nature. The
progress he denied was a progress wrongly conceived by Macaulay and the
early Victorians. It was founded on "truisms" not really true. Whether
Carlyle or Mitchel was the first to repudiate these ideas he didn't
know: possibly Mitchel was.
Yeats's one political interest at that time, before the war, was the
Irish question. He believed in home rule. He believed the British
democracy was then definitely making the question its own, and "this is
fortunate." I spoke of Jung's belief in England's national complex. He
was greatly interested. Ulster opposition to home rule he regretted.
"The Scarlet Woman is of course a great inspiration," he said, "and
Carson has stimulated this. His one desire is to wreck home rule, and so
there cannot be arrangement by consent. I agree with Redmond that Carson
has gone ahead on a military conspiracy. Personally, I do not say so for
a party reason. I am neither radical nor tory. I think Asquith is a
better man than Lloyd George--less inflated. He is a moderate, not
puffed up with big phrases. He meets the issue that arises when it
arises.... I object to the uplifter who makes other people's sins his
business, and forgets his chief business, his own sins. Jane Addams? Ah,
that is different."
His lectures he would not discuss but he spoke a good deal of audiences.
In his own audiences he found no one more eager, no one who knows more,
than an occasional old man, a man of sixty. He was surprised and
somewhat disappointed to find prosperity go hand in hand with culture in
this country. In the city where the hotel is bad there is likely to be a
poor audience. Where it is good, the audience is good. In his own
country the happiest woman he could name was a woman living in a Dublin
slum whose mind is full of beautiful imaginings and fantasies. Is
poverty an evil? We should desire a condition of life which would
satisfy the need for food and shelter, and, for the rest, be rich in
imagination. The merchant builds himself a palace only for
auto-suggestion. The poor woman is as rich as the merchant. I said yes,
but that a brute or a Bismarck comes in and overrides the imagination.
He agreed. "Life is the warring of forces and these forces seem to be
irreconcilable."
It could cost an artist too much to escape poverty. I spoke of the
deadness of so much of the work done by William Sharp and Grant Allen.
He said it was Allen's own fault. He, or his wife, wanted too many
thousand dollars a year. They had to bring up their children on the same
scale as their friends' children! And he kindled at this folly. "A woman
who marries an artist," he said with much animation, "is either a goose,
or mad, or a hero. If she's a goose, she drives him to earn money. If
she's mad she drives him mad. If she's a hero, they suffer together, and
they come out all right."
Phrases like this were not alone. There was the keen observation that
the Pennsylvania station is "free from the vulgarity of advertisement";
the admission of second hand expression in Irish poetry except in The
Dark Rosaleen and Hussey's Ode; a generalization on Chicago to the
effect that "courts love poetry, plutocracies love tangible art." Not
for a moment did this mind cease to move over the face of realities and
read their legend and interpret its meaning. Meeting him was not like
Hazlitt's meeting Coleridge. I could not say, "my heart, shut up in the
prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find,
a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb
and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to
Coleridge." But the Yeats I met did not meet me. I remained on the
periphery. Yet from what I learned there I can believe in the sesame of
poets. I hope that some one to-day, nearer to him than a journalist, is
wise enough to treasure his words.
"WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE"
Last night I woke up suddenly to the sound of bombardment. A great
detonation tore the silence; an answering explosion shook it; then came
a series of shots in diminishing intensity. My windows look out on a
rank of New York skyscrapers, with a slip of sky to the south. In the
ache of something not unlike fear, I thrust out my head to learn as
quickly as I could what was happening. No result from the explosions was
to be seen. The skyscrapers were gaunt and black, with a square of lost
light in a room or two. The sky was clean-swept and luminous, the stars
unperturbed. Still the shots barked and muttered, insanely active,
beyond the blank buildings, under the serene sky.
I heard hoarse cries from river-craft. Could it be on the river? Could
it be gun practice, or was there really an interchange of gun-fire? A
U-boat? An insurrection? At any rate, it had to be explained and my mind
was singularly lively for three a. m.
Long after your country has gone to war, I told myself, there remains,
if you have sluggish sympathies, what may fairly be called a neutrality
of the imagination. You are aware that there is fighting, bloodshed,
death, but you retain the air of the philosophic. You do not put
yourself in the place of Americans under fire. But if this be really
bombardment, shell-fire in Manhattan? I felt in an instant how Colonel
Roosevelt might come to seem the supreme understander of the situation.
An enemy that could reach so far and hit so hard would run a girdle of
feeling from New York to the remotest fighters in Africa or Mesopotamia.
To protect ourselves against the hysteria of hatred--that would always
be a necessity. But I grimly remembered the phrase, "proud punctilio." I
remembered the President's tender-minded words, "conduct our operations
as belligerents without passion," and his pledge of sincere friendship
to the German people: warfare without "the desire to bring any injury or
disadvantage upon them." Here, with the Germans' shell-fire plowing into
our buildings and into our skins? Here, meeting the animosity of their
guns?
Becoming awake enough to think about the war, I began to reason about
this "bombardment," to move from the hypnoidal state, the Hudson
Maxim-Cleveland Moffett zone. The detonations were continuing, but not
at all sensationally, and soon they began to shape themselves
familiarly, to sound remarkably like the round noises of trains
shunting, from the New York Central, carried on clear dry November air.
Soon, indeed, it became impossible to conceive that these loud
reverberations from the Vanderbilt establishment had ever been so
distorted by a nightmare mind as to seem gun-fire. And my breathless
inspection of the innocent sky!
But that touch of panic, in the interest of our whole present patriotic
cultural attitude, was not to be lost. It is the touch, confessed or
unconfessed, that makes us kin. If we are to retain toward German art
and literature and science an attitude of appreciation and
reciprocation, without disloyalty, it must be in the presence of the
idea of shell-wounds German-inflicted. Any other broad-mindedness is the
illusory broad-mindedness of the smooth and smug. It is Pharisaical. It
comes from that neutrality of the imagination which is another name for
selfish detachment, the temperature of the snake.
A generation less prepared than our own for the mood of warfare it would
be difficult to imagine--less prepared, that is to say, by the situation
of our country or the color of our thought. To declare now that New York
has made no provision for the air-traffic of the future is not to arouse
any sense of delinquency. No greater sense of delinquency was aroused
ten or fifteen years ago by the bass warnings of military men. It is not
too much to say that Lord Roberts and Homer Lea were felt to have an
ugly monomania. In that period Nicholas Murray Butler and Elihu Root and
Andrew Carnegie were thinking in terms of peace palaces. Colonel
Roosevelt had tiny ideas of preparedness, but he was far more busy
enunciating the recall of judges--and he earned the Nobel Prize. Few
men, even two years ago, believed we would be sending great armies to
Europe in 1917. In the first place, men like Homer Lea had said that the
United States could not mobilize half a million soldiers for active
service in less than three years. And in the next place, we still felt
pacifically. We had lived domestic life too long ever to imagine our sky
black and our grass red.
Because of this mental unpreparedness for war, this calm enjoyment of an
unearned increment of peace, there was never a greater dislocation of
standards than our recent dislocation, and never a greater problem of
readjustment. For England, at any rate, there was a closeness to the war
that helped to bring about an alignment of sentiment. But here, besides
the discrepancies in the entailment of services, there are enormous
discrepancies in sentiment to start with, and policies still to be
accepted and cemented, and European prejudices to be suppressed or
reconciled. Misunderstanding, under these circumstances, is so much to
be looked for, especially with impetuous patriots demanding a new
password of allegiance every minute, that the wonder is not at how many
outrages there are, but how few.
Most of these outrages fall outside the scope of literary discussion,
naturally. "Let the sailor content himself with talking of the winds;
the herd of his oxen; the soldier of his wounds; the shepherd of his
flocks"; the critic of his books. But there is one kind of outrage that
requires to be discussed, from the point of view of culture, if only
because there is no ultimate value in any culture that has to be
subordinated to the state. That is the outrage, provisionally so-called,
of mutilating everything German; not only sequestering what may be
dangerous or unfriendly and vindictive, but depriving of toleration
everything that has German origin or bears a German name. The quick
transformation of Bismarcks into North Atlantics, of Kaiserhofs into
Cafe New Yorks, is too laughable to be taken seriously. The shudderings
at Germantown, Pa., and Berlin, O., and Bismarck, N. D., are in the same
childlike class. But it is different when an Austrian artist is not
permitted to perform because, while we are not at war with Austria, she
is our enemy's ally. It is different when "the music of all German
composers will be swept from the programmes of scheduled concerts of the
Philadelphia Orchestra in Pittsburgh. 'The Philadelphia Orchestra
Association wishes to announce that it will conform with pleasure to the
request of the Pittsburgh Association. The Philadelphia Orchestra
Association is heartily in accord with any movement directed by
patriotic motives.'" It is this sort of thing, extending intolerance to
culture, that suggests we have been surprised in this whole matter of
culture with our lamps untrimmed.
In a sense we, the laissez faire generation, have been unavoidably
surprised--so much so that our "proud punctilio" has been jogged
considerably loose. So loose, in fact, that we have given up any
pretension to being so punctilious as soldiers used to be. It used to be
possible, even for men whose hands dripped with enemy blood, to sign
magnanimous truces; but science has made another kind of warfare
possible, and the civilian population of the modern State, totally
involved in a catastrophe beyond all reckoning, falls from its
complacency into a depth of panic and everywhere believes that the enemy
is inhuman in this war.
Were such beliefs special to this war, hatred might well go beyond the
fervor of the Inquisition, and the hope of exterminating the Germans as
a people might be universally entertained. But no one who has read
history to any purpose will trust too far to this particular
emotionality of the hour. To say this, in the middle of a righteous war,
may sound unpatriotic. But, if hatred is the test, what could be more
traitorous and seditious than Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: "Both
read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid
against the other.... The prayers of both could not be answered--that of
neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. 'Woe
unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses
come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall
suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the
Providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through
his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that _he gives to both
North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the
offense came_, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine
attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him?
Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war
may speedily pass away. Yet,... so still it must be said, 'The judgments
of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' With malice toward none;
with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see
the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the
nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and
for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a
just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." It is,
perhaps, like quoting the Lord's Prayer. And yet it is the neglected
wisdom of a man who had gleaned it from long meditating fratricidal war.
But, you may say, Prussia has always been outside humanity. We are
engaged in a war foreordained and necessary, a natural war. A war
inescapable, yes, but not inevitable. Let the plain testimony of
hundreds of books speak.... To ask for such discriminations as this is,
however, scarcely possible. It is too much, in the face of
superstitions, anxieties, and apprehensions, to expect the attitude of
culture to be preserved. In peace-time we are allowed to go outside our
own state to enjoy any manifestation of the seven arts; and such violent
nationalism as attacked The Playboy of the Western World in New York is
at once called "rowdy" and "despicable." But in time of war it is part
of its morality, or immorality, that culture must be subordinate to
clamor, and that even national sculpture must become jingoistic, making
railsplitters neatly respectable and idealizing long feet. How far this
supervision of culture goes depends only on the degree of pressure. It
may go so far as to make the domination of political considerations,
state considerations, paramount in everything--precisely the victory
that democracy, hoping with Emerson that "we shall one day learn to
supersede politics by education," has most to fear.
It is in war itself, with its enmity to so much that is free, that one
must seek the opposition to enemy culture, not in the culture that is
opposed. Must one, on this account, think any peace a good peace? To do
so is to show an immunity from the actual which is not to be envied. It
is only necessary to imagine New York bombarded, as many French and
English and Belgian and Russian towns have been bombarded since the
beginning of the war, to realize the rush of resistance that is born in
mankind, expedient for government to recruit and to rally to the end.
But for the man who has partaken of democratic culture this "end"
involves democracy. All character and all spirit cannot be absorbed in
the will to cure the homicidal enemy by his own poison. The only course
open to the man who is still concerned for democratic culture is to
remember the nobility of Lincoln's example--by concentrating on the
offenses rather than the persons that cause the mighty scourge of war,
to avoid the war-panic and war-hatred which will enrage our wounds.