secret of the continued vogue of Shaw. He has a large and extremely
uncommon capacity for provocative utterance; he knows how to get a touch
of bellicosity into the most banal of doctrines; he is forever on
tiptoe, forever challenging, forever _sforzando_. His matter may be from
the public store, even from the public junk-shop, but his manner is
always all his own. The tune is old, but the words are new. Consider,
for example, his discussion of the personality of Jesus. The idea is
simple and obvious: Jesus was not a long-faced prophet of evil, like
John the Baptist, nor was He an ascetic, or a mystic. But here is the
Shaw way of saying it: “He was ... what we call an artist and a Bohemian
in His manner of life.” The fact remains unchanged, but in the
extravagant statement of it there is a shock for those who have been
confusing the sour donkey they hear of a Sunday with the tolerant,
likable Man they profess to worship—and perhaps there is even a genial
snicker in it for their betters. So with his treatment of the Atonement.
His objections to it are time-worn, but suddenly he gets the effect of
novelty by pointing out the quite manifest fact that acceptance of it is
apt to make for weakness, that the man who rejects it is thrown back
upon his own courage and circumspection, and is hence stimulated to
augment them. The first argument—that Jesus was of free and easy
habits—is so commonplace that I have heard it voiced by a bishop. The
second suggests itself so naturally that I myself once employed it
against a chance Christian encountered in a Pullman smoking-room. This
Christian was at first shocked as he might have been by reading Shaw,
but in half an hour he was confessing that he had long ago thought of
the objection himself, and put it away as immoral. I well remember his
fascinated interest as I showed him how my inability to accept the
doctrine put a heavy burden of moral responsibility upon me, and forced
me to be more watchful of my conduct than the elect of God, and so
robbed me of many pleasant advantages in finance, the dialectic and
amour....
A double jest conceals itself in the Shaw legend. The first half of it I
have already disclosed. The second half has to do with the fact that
Shaw is not at all the wholesale agnostic his fascinated victims see
him, but an orthodox Scotch Presbyterian of the most cocksure and
bilious sort—in fact, almost the archetype of the blue-nose. In the
theory that he is Irish I take little stock. His very name is as Scotch
as haggis, and the part of Ireland from which he springs is peopled
almost exclusively by Scots. The true Irishman is a romantic. He senses
life as a mystery, a thing of wonder, an experience of passion and
beauty. In politics he is not logical, but emotional. In religion his
interest centers, not in the commandments, but in the sacraments. The
Scot, on the contrary, is almost devoid of romanticism. He is a
materialist, a logician, a utilitarian. Life to him is not a poem, but a
series of police regulations. God is not an indulgent father, but a
hanging judge. There are no saints, but only devils. Beauty is a
lewdness, redeemable only in the service of morality. It is more
important to get on in the world than to be brushed by angels’ wings.
Here Shaw runs exactly true to type. Read his critical writings from end
to end, and you will not find the slightest hint that objects of art
were passing before him as he wrote. He founded, in England, the
superstition that Ibsen was no more than a tin-pot evangelist—a sort of
brother to General Booth, Mrs. Pankhurst and the syndics of the Sex
Hygiene Society. He turned Shakespeare into a bird of evil, croaking
dismally in a rain-barrel. He even injected a moral content (by dint of
herculean straining) into the music dramas of Richard Wagner—surely the
most colossal sacrifices of moral ideas ever made on the altar of
beauty! Always the ethical obsession, the hall-mark of the Scotch
Puritan, is visible in him. His politics is mere moral indignation. His
æsthetic theory is cannibalism upon æsthetics. And in his general
writing he is forever discovering an atrocity in what was hitherto
passed as no more than a human weakness; he is forever inventing new
sins, and demanding their punishment; he always sees his opponent, not
only as wrong, but also as a scoundrel. I have called him a
Presbyterian. Need I add that he flirts with predestination under the
quasi-scientific _nom de guerre_ of determinism—that he seems to be
convinced that, while men may not be responsible for their virtues, they
are undoubtedly responsible for their offendings, and deserve to be
clubbed therefor?...
And this is Shaw the revolutionist, the heretic! Next, perhaps, we shall
be hearing of Benedict XV, the atheist....
XV. AN UNHEEDED LAW-GIVER
One discerns, in all right-thinking American criticism, the doctrine
that Ralph Waldo Emerson was a great man, but the specifications
supporting that doctrine are seldom displayed with any clarity. Despite
the vast mass of writing about him, he remains to be worked out
critically; practically all the existing criticism of him is marked by
his own mellifluous obscurity. Perhaps a good deal of this obscurity is
due to contradictions inherent in the man’s character. He was dualism
ambulant. What he actually _was_ was seldom identical with what he
represented himself to be or what his admirers thought him to be.
Universally greeted, in his own day, as a revolutionary, he was, in
point of fact, imitative and cautious—an importer of stale German
elixirs, sometimes direct and sometimes through the Carlylean branch
house, who took good care to dilute them with buttermilk before
merchanting them. The theoretical spokesman, all his life long, of bold
and forthright thinking, of the unafraid statement of ideas, he stated
his own so warily and so muggily that they were ratified on the one hand
by Nietzsche and on the other hand by the messiahs of the New Thought,
that lavender buncombe.
What one notices about him chiefly is his lack of influence upon the
main stream of American thought, such as it is. He had admirers and even
worshipers, but no apprentices. Nietzscheism and the New Thought are
alike tremendous violations of orthodox American doctrine. The one makes
a headlong attack upon egalitarianism, the corner-stone of American
politics; the other substitutes mysticism, which is the notion that the
true realities are all concealed, for the prevailing American notion
that the only true realities lie upon the surface, and are easily
discerned by Congressmen, newspaper editorial writers and members of the
Junior Order of United American Mechanics. The Emerson cult, in America,
has been an affectation from the start. Not many of the chautauqua
orators, literary professors, vassarized old maids and other such bogus
_intelligentsia_ who devote themselves to it have any intelligible
understanding of the Transcendentalism at the heart of it, and not one
of them, so far as I can make out, has ever executed Emerson’s command
to “defer never to the popular cry.” On the contrary, it is precisely
within the circle of Emersonian adulation that one finds the greatest
tendency to test all ideas by their respectability, to combat free
thought as something intrinsically vicious, and to yield placidly to
“some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade,
or war, or man.” It is surely not unworthy of notice that the country of
this prophet of Man Thinking is precisely the country in which every
sort of dissent from the current pishposh is combated most ferociously,
and in which there is the most vigorous existing tendency to suppress
free speech altogether.
Thus Emerson, on the side of ideas, has left but faint tracks behind
him. His quest was for “facts amidst appearances,” and his whole
metaphysic revolved around a doctrine of transcendental first causes, a
conception of interior and immutable realities, distinct from and
superior to mere transient phenomena. But the philosophy that actually
prevails among his countrymen—a philosophy put into caressing terms by
William James—teaches an almost exactly contrary doctrine: its central
idea is that whatever satisfies the immediate need is substantially
true, that appearance is the only form of fact worthy the consideration
of a man with money in the bank, and the old flag floating over him, and
hair on his chest. Nor has Emerson had any ponderable influence as a
literary artist in the technical sense, or as the prophet of a
culture—that is, at home. Despite the feeble imitations of campus
critics, his manner has vanished with his matter. There is, in the true
sense, no Emersonian school of American writers. Current American
writing, with its cocksureness, its somewhat hard competence, its air of
selling goods, is utterly at war with his loose, impressionistic method,
his often mystifying groping for ideas, his relentless pursuit of
phrases. In the same way, one searches the country in vain for any
general reaction to the cultural ideal that he set up. When one casts
about for salient men whom he moved profoundly, men who got light from
his torch, one thinks first and last, not of Americans, but of such men
as Nietzsche and Hermann Grimm, the Germans, and Tyndall and Matthew
Arnold, the Englishmen. What remains of him at home, as I have said, is
no more than, on the one hand, a somewhat absurd affectation of
intellectual fastidiousness, now almost extinct even in New England,
and, on the other hand, a debased Transcendentalism rolled into pills
for fat women with vague pains and inattentive husbands—in brief, the
New Thought—in brief, imbecility. This New Thought, a decadent
end-product of American superficiality, now almost monopolizes him. One
hears of him in its preposterous literature and one hears of him in
text-books for the young, but not often elsewhere. Allowing everything,
it would surely be absurd to hold that he has colored and conditioned
the main stream of American thought as Goethe colored and conditioned
the thought of Germany, or Pushkin that of Russia, or Voltaire that of
France....
XVI. THE BLUSHFUL MYSTERY
1
_Sex Hygiene_
The literature of sex hygiene, once so scanty and so timorous, now piles
mountain high. There are at least a dozen formidable series of books of
instruction for inquirers of all ages, beginning with “What Every Child
of Ten Should Know” and ending with “What a Woman of Forty-five Should
Know,” and they all sell amazingly. Scores of diligent authors, some
medical, some clerical and some merely shrewdly chautauqual, grow rich
at the industry of composing them. One of these amateur Havelock Ellises
had the honor, during the last century, of instructing me in the
elements of the sacred sciences. He was then the pastor of a fourth-rate
church in a decaying neighborhood and I was sent to his Sunday-school in
response to some obscure notion that the agony of it would improve me.
Presently he disappeared, and for a long while I heard nothing about
him. Then he came into sudden prominence as the author of such a series
of handbooks and as the chief stockholder, it would seem, in the
publishing house printing them. By the time he died, a few years ago, he
had been so well rewarded by a just God that he was able to leave funds
to establish a missionary college in some remote and heathen land.
This holy man, I believe, was honest, and took his platitudinous
compositions quite seriously. Regarding other contributors to the
literature it may be said without malice that their altruism is
obviously corrupted by a good deal of hocus-pocus. Some of them lecture
in the chautauquas, peddling their books before and after charming the
yokels. Others, being members of the faculty, seem to carry on medical
practice on the side. Yet others are kept in profitable jobs by the
salacious old men who finance vice crusades. It is hard to draw the line
between the mere thrifty enthusiast and the downright fraud. So, too,
with the actual vice crusaders. The books of the latter, like the sex
hygiene books, are often sold, not as wisdom, but as pornography. True
enough, they are always displayed in the show-window of the small-town
Methodist Book Concern—but you will also find them in the back-rooms of
dubious second-hand book-stores, side by side with the familiar
scarlet-backed editions of Rabelais, Margaret of Navarre and Balzac’s
“Droll Tales.” Some time ago, in a book advertisement headed “Snappy
Fiction,” I found announcements of “My Battles With Vice,” by Virginia
Brooks—and “Life of My Heart,” by Victoria Cross. The former was
described by the publisher as a record of “personal experiences in the
fight against the gray wolves and love pirates of modern society.” The
book was offered to all comers by mail. One may easily imagine the
effects of such an offer.
But even the most serious and honest of the sex hygiene volumes are
probably futile, for they are all founded upon a pedagogical error. That
is to say, they are all founded upon an attempt to explain a romantic
mystery in terms of an exact science. Nothing could be more absurd: as
well attempt to interpret Beethoven in terms of mathematical physics—as
many a fatuous contrapuntist, indeed, has tried to do. The mystery of
sex presents itself to the young, not as a scientific problem to be
solved, but as a romantic emotion to be accounted for. The only result
of the current endeavor to explain its phenomena by seeking parallels in
botany is to make botany obscene....
2
_Art and Sex_
One of the favorite notions of the Puritan mullahs who specialize in
this moral pornography is that the sex instinct, if suitably repressed,
may be “sublimated” into the higher sorts of idealism, and especially
into æsthetic idealism. That notion is to be found in all their books;
upon it they ground the theory that the enforcement of chastity by a
huge force of spies, stool pigeons and police would convert the republic
into a nation of incomparable uplifters, forward-lookers and artists.
All this, of course, is simply pious fudge. If the notion were actually
sound, then all the great artists of the world would come from the ranks
of the hermetically repressed, _i. e._, from the ranks of Puritan old
maids, male and female. But the truth is, as every one knows, that the
great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even
ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the Y. M.
C. A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a
symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly
improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman. The
actual effect of repression, lamentable though it may be, is to destroy
idealism altogether. The Puritan, for all his pretensions, is the worst
of materialists. Passed through his sordid and unimaginative mind, even
the stupendous romance of sex is reduced to a disgusting transaction in
physiology. As artist he is thus hopeless; as well expect an auctioneer
to qualify for the Sistine Chapel choir. All he ever achieves, taking
pen or brush in hand, is a feeble burlesque of his betters, all of whom,
by his hog’s theology, are doomed to hell.
3
_A Loss to Romance_
Perhaps the worst thing that this sex hygiene nonsense has accomplished
is the thing mourned by Agnes Repplier in “The Repeal of Reticence.” In
America, at least, innocence has been killed, and romance has been sadly
wounded by the same discharge of smutty artillery. The flapper is no
longer naïve and charming; she goes to the altar of God with a learned
and even cynical glitter in her eye. The veriest school-girl of to-day,
fed upon Forel, Sylvanus Stall, Reginald Wright Kauffman and the Freud
books, knows as much as the midwife of 1885, and spends a good deal more
time discharging and disseminating her information. All this, of course,
is highly embarrassing to the more romantic and ingenuous sort of men,
of whom I have the honor to be one. We are constantly in the position of
General Mitchener in Shaw’s one-acter, “Press Cuttings,” when he begs
Mrs. Farrell, the talkative charwoman, to reserve her confidences for
her medical adviser. One often wonders, indeed, what women now talk of
to doctors....
Please do not misunderstand me here. I do not object to this New Freedom
on moral grounds, but on æsthetic grounds. In the relations between the
sexes all beauty is founded upon romance, all romance is founded upon
mystery, and all mystery is founded upon ignorance, or, failing that,
upon the deliberate denial of the known truth. To be in love is merely
to be in a state of perceptual anæsthesia—to mistake an ordinary young
man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess. But how
can this condition of mind survive the deadly matter-of-factness which
sex hygiene and the new science of eugenics impose? How can a woman
continue to believe in the honor, courage and loving tenderness of a man
after she has learned, perhaps by affidavit, that his hæmoglobin count
is 117%, that he is free from sugar and albumen, that his blood pressure
is 112/79 and that his Wassermann reaction is negative?... Moreover, all
this new-fangled “frankness” tends to dam up, at least for civilized
adults, one of the principal well-springs of art, to wit, impropriety.
What is neither hidden nor forbidden is seldom very charming. If women,
continuing their present tendency to its logical goal, end by going
stark naked, there will be no more poets and painters, but only
dermatologists and photographers....
4
_Sex on the Stage_
The effort to convert the theater into a forum of solemn sex discussion
is another abhorrent by-product of the sex hygiene rumble-bumble.
Fortunately, it seems to be failing. A few years ago, crowds flocked to
see Brieux’s “Les Avariés,” but to-day it is forgotten, and its
successors are all obscure. The movement originated in Germany with the
production of Frank Wedekind’s “Frühlings Erwachen.” The Germans gaped
and twisted in their seats for a season or two, and then abandoned sex
as a horror and went back to sex as a comedy. This last is what it
actually should be, at least in the theater. The theater is no place for
painful speculation; it is a place for diverting representation. Its
best and truest sex plays are not such overstrained shockers as “Le
Mariage d’ Olympe” and “Damaged Goods,” but such penetrating and
excellent comedies as “Much Ado About Nothing” and “The Taming of the
Shrew.” In “Much Ado” we have an accurate and unforgettable picture of
the way in which the normal male of the human species is brought to the
altar—that is, by the way of appealing to his hollow vanity, the way of
capitalizing his native and ineradicable asininity. And in “The Taming
of the Shrew” we have a picture of the way in which the average woman,
having so snared him, is purged of her resultant vainglory and bombast,
and thus reduced to decent discipline and decorum, that the marriage may
go on in solid tranquillity.
The whole drama of sex, in real life, as well as on the stage, revolves
around these two enterprises. One-half of it consists of pitting the
native intelligence of women against the native sentimentality of men,
and the other half consists of bringing women into a reasonable order,
that their superiority may not be too horribly obvious. To the first
division belong the dramas of courtship, and a good many of those of
marital conflict. In each case the essential drama is not a tragedy but
a comedy—nay, a farce. In each case the conflict is not between
imperishable verities but between mere vanities and pretensions. This is
the essence of the comic: the unmasking of fraud, its destruction by
worse fraud. Marriage, as we know it in Christendom, though its utility
is obvious and its necessity is at least arguable, is just such a series
of frauds. It begins with the fraud that the impulse to it is lofty,
unearthly and disinterested. It proceeds to the fraud that both parties
are equally eager for it and equally benefited by it—which actually
happens only when two Mondays come together. And it rests thereafter
upon the fraud that what is once agreeable (or tolerable) remains
agreeable ever thereafter—that I shall be exactly the same man in 1938
that I am to-day, and that my wife will be the same woman, and intrigued
by the merits of the same man. This last assumption is so outrageous
that, on purely evidential and logical grounds, not even the most
sentimental person would support it. It thus becomes necessary to
reënforce it by attaching to it the concept of honor. That is to say, it
is held up, not on the ground that it is actually true, but on the
ground that a recognition of its truth is part of the bargain made at
the altar, and that a repudiation of this bargain would be dishonorable.
Here we have honor, which is based upon a sense of the deepest and most
inviolable truth, brought in to support something admittedly not true.
Here, in other words, we have a situation in comedy, almost exactly
parallel to that in which a colored bishop whoops “Onward, Christian
Soldiers!” like a calliope in order to drown out the crowing of the
rooster concealed beneath his chasuble.
In all plays of the sort that are regarded as “strong” and “significant”
in Greenwich Village, in the finishing schools and by the newspaper
critics, connubial infidelity is the chief theme. Smith, having a wife,
Mrs. Smith, betrays her love and trust by running off with Miss
Rabinowitz, his stenographer. Or Mrs. Brown, detecting her husband, Mr.
Brown, in lamentable proceedings with a neighbor, the grass widow Kraus,
forgives him and continues to be true to him in consideration of her
children, Fred, Pansy and Little Fern. Both situations produce a great
deal of eye-rolling and snuffing among the softies aforesaid. Yet
neither contains the slightest touch of tragedy, and neither at bottom
is even honest. Both, on the contrary, are based upon an assumption that
is unsound and ridiculous—the assumption, to wit, that the position of
the injured wife is grounded upon the highest idealism—that the injury
she suffers is directed at her lofty and impeccable spirit—that it
leaves her standing in an heroic attitude. All this, soberly examined,
is found to be untrue. The fact is that her moving impulse is simply a
desire to cut a good figure before her world—in brief, that plain vanity
is what animates her.
This public expectation that she will endure and renounce is itself
hollow and sentimental, and so much so that it can seldom stand much
strain. If, for example, her heroism goes beyond a certain modest
point—if she carries it to the extent of complete abnegation and
self-sacrifice—her reward is not that she is thought heroic, but that
she is thought weak and foolish. And if, by any chance, the external
pressure upon her is removed and she is left to go on with her alleged
idealism alone—if, say, her recreant husband dies and some new suitor
enters to dispute the theory of her deathless fidelity—then it is
regarded as downright insane for her to continue playing her artificial
part.
In frank comedy we see the situation more accurately dealt with and
hence more honestly and more instructively. Instead of depicting one
party as revolting against the assumption of eternal fidelity
melodramatically and the other as facing the revolt heroically and
tragically, we have both criticizing it by a good-humored flouting of
it—not necessarily by act, but by attitude. This attitude is normal and
sensible. It rests upon genuine human traits and tendencies. It is
sound, natural and honest. It gives the comedy of the stage a high
validity that the bombastic fustian of the stage can never show, all the
sophomores to the contrary notwithstanding.
When I speak of infidelity, of course, I do not mean only the gross
infidelity of “strong” sex plays and the divorce courts, but that
lighter infidelity which relieves and makes bearable the burdens of
theoretical fidelity—in brief, the natural reaction of human nature
against an artificial and preposterous assumption. The assumption is
that a sexual choice, once made, is irrevocable—more, that all desire to
revoke it, even transiently, disappears. The fact is that no human
choice can ever be of that irrevocable character, and that the very
existence of such an assumption is a constant provocation to challenge
it and rebel against it.