incapable of rational thought. One is not surprised to hear of Bismarck,
a thorough royalist, discussing democracy with calm and fairness, but it
would be unimaginable for the American people, or for any other
democratic people, to discuss royalism in the same manner: it would take
a cataclysm to bring them to any such violation of their mental habits.
When such a cataclysm occurs, they embrace the new ideas that are its
fruits with the same adamantine firmness. One year before the French
Revolution, disobedience to the king was unthinkable to the average
Frenchman; only a few daringly immoral men cherished the notion. But one
year _after_ the fall of the Bastile, obedience to the king was equally
unthinkable. The Russian Bolsheviki, whose doings have furnished a great
deal of immensely interesting material to the student of popular
psychology, put the principle into plain words. Once they were in the
saddle, they decreed the abolition of the old imperial censorship and
announced that speech would be free henceforth—but only so long as it
kept within the bounds of the Bolshevist revelation! In other words, any
citizen was free to think and speak whatever he pleased—but only so long
as it did not violate certain fundamental ideas. This is precisely the
sort of freedom that has prevailed in the United States since the first
days. It is the only sort of freedom comprehensible to the average man.
It accurately reveals his constitutional inability to shake himself free
from the illogical and often quite unintelligible prejudices, instincts
and mental vices that condition ninety per cent. of all his thinking....
But here I wander into political speculation and no doubt stand in
contumacy of some statute of Congress. Dr. Parsons avoids politics in
her very interesting book. She confines herself to the purely social
relations, e. g., between man and woman, parent and child, host and
guest, master and servant. The facts she offers are vastly interesting,
and their discovery and coördination reveal a tremendous industry, but
of even greater interest are the facts that lie over the margin of her
inquiry. Here is a golden opportunity for other investigators: I often
wonder that the field is so little explored. Perhaps the Freudians, once
they get rid of their sexual obsession, will enter it and chart it. No
doubt the inferiority complex described by Prof. Dr. Alfred Adler will
one day provide an intelligible explanation of many of the puzzling
phenomena of mob thinking. In the work of Prof. Dr. Freud himself there
is, perhaps, a clew to the origin and anatomy of Puritanism, that worst
of intellectual nephritises. I live in hope that the Freudians will fall
upon the business without much further delay. Why do otherwise sane men
believe in spirits? What is the genesis of the American axiom that the
fine arts are unmanly? What is the precise machinery of the process
called falling in love? Why do people believe newspapers?... Let there
be light!
XIII. THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE
It is astonishing, considering the enormous influence of the popular
magazine upon American literature, such as it is, that there is but one
book in type upon magazine history in the republic. That lone volume is
“The Magazine in America,” by Prof. Dr. Algernon Tassin, a learned
birch-man of the great university of Columbia, and it is so badly
written that the interest of its matter is almost concealed—almost, but
fortunately not quite. The professor, in fact, puts English to paper
with all the traditional dullness of his flatulent order, and, as usual,
he is most horribly dull when he is trying most kittenishly to be
lively. I spare you examples of his writing; if you know the lady
essayists of the United States, and their academic imitators in
pantaloons, you know the sort of arch and whimsical jocosity he ladles
out. But, as I have hinted, there is something worth attending to in his
story, for all the defects of its presentation, and so his book is not
to be sniffed at. He has, at all events, brought together a great mass
of scattered and concealed facts, and arranged them conveniently for
whoever deals with them next. The job was plainly a long and laborious
one, and rasping to the higher cerebral centers. The historian had to
make his mole-like way through the endless files of old and stupid
magazines; he had to read the insipid biographies and autobiographies of
dead and forgotten editors, many of them college professors, preachers
out of work, pre-historic uplifters and bad poets; he had to sort out
the facts from the fancies of such incurable liars as Griswold; he had
to hack and blast a path across a virgin wilderness. The thing was worth
doing, and, as I say, it has been done with commendable pertinacity.
Considering the noisiness of the American magazines of to-day, it is
rather instructive to glance back at the timorous and bloodless quality
of their progenitors. All of the early ones, when they were not simply
monthly newspapers or almanacs, were depressingly “literary” in tone,
and dealt chiefly in stupid poetry, silly essays and artificial fiction.
The one great fear of their editors seems to have been that of offending
some one; all of the pioneer prospectuses were full of assurances that
nothing would be printed which even “the most fastidious” could object
to. Literature, in those days,—say from 1830 to 1860—was almost
completely cut off from contemporary life. It mirrored, not the struggle
for existence, so fierce and dramatic in the new nation, but the pallid
reflections of poetasters, self-advertising clergymen, sissified
“gentlemen of taste,” and other such donkeys. Poe waded into these
_literati_ and shook them up a bit, but even after the Civil War the
majority of them continued to spin pretty cobwebs. Edmund Clarence
Stedman and Donald G. Mitchell were excellent specimens of the clan; its
last survivor was the lachrymose William Winter. The “literature”
manufactured by these tear-squeezers, though often enough produced in
beer cellars, was frankly aimed at the Young Person. Its main purpose
was to avoid giving offense; it breathed a heavy and oleaginous piety, a
snug niceness, a sickening sweetness. It is as dead to-day as Baalam’s
ass.
The _Atlantic Monthly_ was set up by men in revolt against this reign of
mush, as _Putnam’s_ had been a few years before, but the business of
reform proved to be difficult and hazardous, and it was a long while
before a healthier breed of authors could be developed, and a public for
them found. “There is not much in the _Atlantic_,” wrote Charles Eliot
Norton to Lowell in 1874, “that is likely to be read twice save by its
writers, and this is what the great public likes.... You should hear
Godkin express himself in private on this topic.” _Harper’s Magazine_,
in those days, was made up almost wholly of cribbings from England; the
_North American Review_ had sunk into stodginess and imbecility;
_Putnam’s_ was dead, or dying; the _Atlantic_ had yet to discover Mark
Twain; it was the era of _Godey’s Lady’s Book_. The new note, so long
awaited, was struck at last by _Scribner’s_, now the _Century_ (and not
to be confused with the _Scribner’s_ of to-day). It not only threw all
the old traditions overboard; it established new traditions almost at
once. For the first time a great magazine began to take notice of the
daily life of the American people. It started off with a truly
remarkable series of articles on the Civil War; it plunged into
contemporary politics; it eagerly sought out and encouraged new writers;
it began printing decent pictures instead of the old chromos; it forced
itself, by the sheer originality and enterprise of its editing, upon the
public attention. American literature owes more to the _Century_ than to
any other magazine, and perhaps American thinking owes almost as much.
It was the first “literary” periodical to arrest and interest the really
first-class men of the country. It beat the _Atlantic_ because it wasn’t
burdened with the _Atlantic’s_ decaying cargo of Boston Brahmins. It
beat all the others because it was infinitely and obviously better.
Almost everything that is good in the American magazine of to-day,
almost everything that sets it above the English magazine or the
Continental magazine, stems from the _Century_.
At the moment, of course, it holds no such clear field; perhaps it has
served its function and is ready for a placid old age. The thing that
displaced it was the yellow magazine of the _McClure’s_ type—a variety
of magazine which surpassed it in the race for circulation by
exaggerating and vulgarizing all its merits. Dr. Tassin seems to think,
with William Archer, that S. S. McClure was the inventor of this type,
but the truth is that its real father was the unknown originator of the
Sunday supplement. What McClure—a shrewd literary bagman—did was to
apply the sensational methods of the cheap newspaper to a new and cheap
magazine. Yellow journalism was rising and he went in on the tide. The
satanic Hearst was getting on his legs at the same time, and I daresay
that the muck-raking magazines, even in their palmy days, followed him a
good deal more than they led him. McClure and the imitators of McClure
borrowed his adept thumping of the tom-tom; Munsey and the imitators of
Munsey borrowed his mush. _McClure’s_ and _Everybody’s_, even when they
had the whole nation by the ears, did little save repeat in solemn,
awful tones what Hearst had said before. As for _Munsey’s_, at the
height of its circulation, it was little more than a Sunday “magazine
section” on smooth paper, and with somewhat clearer half-tones than
Hearst could print. Nearly all the genuinely original ideas of these
Yankee Harmsworths of yesterday turned out badly. John Brisben Walker,
with the _Cosmopolitan_, tried to make his magazine a sort of national
university, and it went to pot. Ridgway, of _Everybody’s_, planned a
weekly to be published in a dozen cities simultaneously, and lost a
fortune trying to establish it. McClure, facing a situation to be
described presently, couldn’t manage it, and his magazine got away from
him. As for Munsey, there are many wrecks behind him; he is forever
experimenting boldly and failing gloriously. Even his claim to have
invented the all-fiction magazine is open to caveat; there were probably
plenty of such things, in substance if not in name, before the _Argosy_.
Hearst, the teacher of them all, now openly holds the place that belongs
to him. He has galvanized the corpse of the old _Cosmopolitan_ into a
great success, he has distanced all rivals with _Hearst’s_, he has
beaten the English on their own ground with _Nash’s_, and he has
rehabilitated various lesser magazines. More, he has forced the other
magazine publishers to imitate him. A glance at _McClure’s_ to-day
offers all the proof that is needed of his influence upon his inferiors.
Dr. Tassin, apparently in fear of making his book too nearly good, halts
his chronicle at its most interesting point, for he says nothing of what
has gone on since 1900—and very much, indeed, has gone on since 1900.
For one thing, the _Saturday Evening Post_ has made its unparalleled
success, created its new type of American literature for department
store buyers and shoe drummers, and bred its school of brisk,
business-like, high-speed authors. For another thing, the _Ladies’ Home
Journal_, once supreme in its field, has seen the rise of a swarm of
imitators, some of them very prosperous. For a third thing, the
all-fiction magazine of Munsey, Robert Bonner and Street & Smith has
degenerated into so dubious a hussy that Munsey, a very moral man, must
blush every time he thinks of it. For a fourth thing, the moving-picture
craze has created an entirely new type of magazine, and it has elbowed
many other types from the stands. And for a fifth thing, to make an end,
the muck-raking magazine has blown up and is no more.
Why this last? Have all the possible candidates for the rake been raked?
Is there no longer any taste for scandal in the popular breast? I have
heard endless discussion of these questions and many ingenious answers,
but all of them fail to answer. In this emergency I offer one of my own.
It is this: that the muck-raking magazine came to grief, not because the
public tired of muck-raking, but because the muck-raking that it began
with succeeded. That is to say, the villains so long belabored by the
Steffenses, the Tarbells and the Phillipses were either driven from the
national scene or forced (at least temporarily) into rectitude. Worse,
their places in public life were largely taken by nominees whose
chemical purity was guaranteed by these same magazines, and so the
latter found their occupation gone and their following with it. The
great masses of the plain people, eager to swallow denunciation in
horse-doctor doses, gagged at the first spoonful of praise. They
chortled and read on when Aldrich, Boss Cox, Gas Addicks, John D.
Rockefeller and the other bugaboos of the time were belabored every
month, but they promptly sickened and went elsewhere when Judge Ben B.
Lindsey, Francis J. Heney, Governor Folk and the rest of the bogus
saints began to be hymned.
The same phenomenon is constantly witnessed upon the lower level of
daily journalism. Let a vociferous “reform” newspaper overthrow the old
gang and elect its own candidates, and at once it is in a perilous
condition. Its stock in trade is gone. It can no longer give a good
show—within the popular meaning of a good show. For what the public
wants eternally—at least the American public—is rough work. It delights
in vituperation. It revels in scandal. It is always on the side of the
man or journal making the charges, no matter how slight the probability
that the accused is guilty. The late Roosevelt, perhaps one of the
greatest rabble-rousers the world has ever seen, was privy to this fact,
and made it the corner-stone of his singularly cynical and effective
politics. He was forever calling names, making accusations, unearthing
and denouncing demons. Dr. Wilson, a performer of scarcely less talent,
has sought to pursue the same plan, with varying fidelity and success.
He was a popular hero so long as he confined himself to reviling men and
things—the Hell Hounds of Plutocracy, the Socialists, the Kaiser, the
Irish, the Senate minority. But the moment he found himself on the side
of the defense, he began to wobble, just as Roosevelt before him had
begun to wobble when he found himself burdened with the intricate
constructive program of the Progressives. Roosevelt shook himself free
by deserting the Progressives, but Wilson found it impossible to get rid
of his League of Nations, and so, for awhile at least, he presented a
quite typical picture of a muck-raker hamstrung by blows from the wrong
end of the rake.
That the old appetite for bloody shows is not dead but only sleepeth is
well exhibited by the recent revival of the weekly of opinion. Ten years
ago the weekly seemed to be absolutely extinct; even the _Nation_
survived only as a half-forgotten appendage of the _Evening Post_. Then,
of a sudden, the alliance was broken, the _Evening Post_ succumbed to
Wall Street, the _Nation_ started on an independent course—and
straightway made a great success. And why? Simply because it began
breaking heads—not the old heads of the _McClure’s_ era, of course, but
nevertheless heads salient enough to make excellent targets. For years
it had been moribund; no one read it save a dwindling company of old
men; its influence gradually approached _nil_. But by the elementary
device of switching from mild expostulation to violent and effective
denunciation it made a new public almost overnight, and is now very
widely read, extensively quoted and increasingly heeded.... I often
wonder that so few publishers of periodicals seem aware of the
psychological principle here exposed. It is known to every newspaper
publisher of the slightest professional intelligence; all successful
newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend
any one or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them,
they tackle it by denouncing some one or something else. The plan never
fails. Turn to the moving-picture trade magazines: the most prosperous
of them is given over, in the main, to bitter attacks upon new films.
Come back to daily journalism. The New York _Tribune_, a decaying paper,
well nigh rehabilitated itself by attacking Hearst, the cleverest
muck-raker of them all. For a moment, apparently dismayed, he attempted
a defense of himself—and came near falling into actual disaster. Then,
recovering his old form, he began a whole series of counter attacks and
cover attacks, and in six months he was safe and sound again....
XIV. THE ULSTER POLONIUS
A good half of the humor of the late Mark Twain consisted of admitting
frankly the possession of vices and weaknesses that all of us have and
few of us care to acknowledge. Practically all of the sagacity of George
Bernard Shaw consists of bellowing vociferously what every one knows. I
think I am as well acquainted with his works, both hortatory and
dramatic, as the next man. I wrote the first book ever devoted to a
discussion of them, and I read them pretty steadily, even to-day, and
with endless enjoyment. Yet, so far as I know, I have never found an
original idea in them—never a single statement of fact or opinion that
was not anteriorly familiar, and almost commonplace. Put the thesis of
any of his plays into a plain proposition, and I doubt that you could
find a literate man in Christendom who had not heard it before, or who
would seriously dispute it. The roots of each one of them are in
platitude; the roots of _every_ effective stage-play are in platitude;
that a dramatist is inevitably a platitudinarian is itself a platitude
double damned. But Shaw clings to the obvious even when he is not
hampered by the suffocating conventions of the stage. His Fabian tracts
and his pamphlets on the war are veritable compendiums of the
undeniable; what is seriously stated in them is quite beyond logical
dispute. They have excited a great deal of ire, they have brought down
upon him a great deal of amusing abuse, but I have yet to hear of any
one actually controverting them. As well try to controvert the
Copernican astronomy. They are as bullet-proof in essence as the
multiplication table, and vastly more bullet-proof than the Ten
Commandments or the Constitution of the United States.
Well, then, why does the Ulsterman kick up such a pother? Why is he
regarded as an arch-heretic, almost comparable to Galileo, Nietzsche or
Simon Magnus? For the simplest of reasons. Because he practices with
great zest and skill the fine art of exhibiting the obvious in
unexpected and terrifying lights—because he is a master of the logical
trick of so matching two apparently safe premisses that they yield an
incongruous and inconvenient conclusion—above all, because he is a
fellow of the utmost charm and address, quick-witted, bold,
limber-tongued, persuasive, humorous, iconoclastic, ingratiating—in
brief, an Irishman, and so the exact antithesis of the solemn Sassenachs
who ordinarily instruct and exhort us. Turn to his “Man and Superman,”
and you will see the whole Shaw machine at work. What he starts out with
is the self-evident fact, disputed by no one not idiotic, that a woman
has vastly more to gain by marriage, under Christian monogamy, than a
man. That fact is as old as monogamy itself; it was, I daresay, the
admitted basis of the palace revolution which brought monogamy into the
world. But now comes Shaw with an implication that the sentimentality of
the world chooses to conceal—with a deduction plainly resident in the
original proposition, but kept in safe silence there by a preposterous
and hypocritical taboo—to wit, the deduction that women are well aware
of the profit that marriage yields for them, and that they are thus much
more eager to marry than men are, and ever alert to take the lead in the
business. This second fact, to any man who has passed through the
terrible years between twenty-five and forty, is as plain as the first,
but by a sort of general consent it is not openly stated. Violate that
general consent and you are guilty of _scandalum magnatum_. Shaw is
simply one who is guilty of _scandalum magnatum_ habitually, a
professional criminal in that department. It is his life work to
announce the obvious in terms of the scandalous.
What lies under the horror of such blabbing is the deepest and most
widespread of human weaknesses, which is to say, intellectual cowardice,
the craven appetite for mental ease and security, the fear of thinking
things out. All men are afflicted by it more or less; not even the most
courageous and frank of men likes to admit, in specific terms, that his
wife is fat, or that she seduced him to the altar by a transparent
trick, or that their joint progeny resemble her brother or father, and
are thus cads. A few extraordinary heroes of logic and evidence may do
it occasionally, but only occasionally. The average man never does it at
all. He is eternally in fear of what he knows in his heart; his whole
life is made up of efforts to dodge it and conceal it; he is always
running away from what passes for his intelligence and taking refuge in
what pass for his higher feelings, _i. e._, his stupidities, his
delusions, his sentimentalities. Shaw is devoted to the art of hauling
this recreant fellow up. He is one who, for purposes of sensation, often
for the mere joy of outraging the tender-minded, resolutely and
mercilessly thinks things out—sometimes with the utmost ingenuity and
humor, but often, it must be said, in the same muddled way that the
average right-thinker would do it if he ever got up the courage.
Remember this formula, and all of the fellow’s alleged originality
becomes no more than a sort of bad-boy audacity, usually in bad taste.
He drags skeletons from their closet and makes them dance obscenely—but
every one, of course, knew that they were there all the while. He would
produce an excitement of exactly the same kind (though perhaps superior
in intensity) if he should walk down the Strand bared to the waist, and
so remind the shocked Londoners of the unquestioned fact (though
conventionally concealed and forgotten) that he is a mammal, and has an
umbilicus.
Turn to a typical play-and-preface of his later canon, say “Androcles
and the Lion.” Here the complete Shaw formula is exposed. On the one
hand there is a mass of platitudes; on the other hand there is the air
of a peep-show. On the one hand he rehearses facts so stale that even
Methodist clergymen have probably heard of them; on the other hand he
states them so scandalously that the pious get all of the thrills out of
the business that would accompany a view of the rector in liquor in the
pulpit. Here, for example, are some of his contentions:
(a) That the social and economic doctrines preached by Jesus were
indistinguishable from what is now called Socialism.
(b) That the Pauline transcendentalism visible in the Acts and the
Epistles differs enormously from the simple humanitarianism set
forth in the Four Gospels.
(c) That the Christianity on tap to-day would be almost as
abhorrent to Jesus, supposing Him returned to earth, as the
theories of Nietzsche, Hindenburg or Clemenceau, and vastly more
abhorrent than those of Emma Goldman.
(d) That the rejection of the Biblical miracles, and even of the
historical credibility of the Gospels, by no means disposes of
Christ Himself.
(e) That the early Christians were persecuted, not because their
theology was regarded as unsound, but because their public conduct
constituted a nuisance.
It is unnecessary to go on. Could any one imagine a more abject
surrender to the undeniable? Would it be possible to reduce the German
exegesis of a century and a half to a more depressing series of
platitudes? But his discussion of the inconsistencies between the Four
Gospels is even worse; you will find all of its points set forth in any
elemental treatise upon New Testament criticism—even in so childish a
tract as Ramsden Balmforth’s. He actually dishes up, with a heavy air of
profundity, the news that there is a glaring conflict between the
genealogy of Jesus in Matthew i, 1-17, and the direct claim of divine
paternity in Matthew i, 18. More, he breaks out with the astounding
discovery that Jesus was a good Jew, and that Paul’s repudiation of
circumcision (now a cardinal article of the so-called Christian faith)
would have surprised Him and perhaps greatly shocked Him. The whole
preface, running to 114 pages, is made up of just such shop-worn stuff.
Searching it from end to end with eagle eye, I have failed to find a
single fact or argument that was not previously familiar to me, despite
the circumstance that I ordinarily give little attention to the sacred
sciences and thus might have been expected to be surprised by their
veriest commonplaces.