I
In European literature from Homer down to Milton and Racine (not to
speak of Oriental literature) pride, wrong pride, is represented as
far and away the chief of human evils. Such is not the case with the
comparatively brief stretch of literature that ensues. Of course there
are sharp exceptions to the rule. But speaking by and large recent
literature--if that of the past two hundred years may so be termed in
view of the long eras behind it--has not held up pride as the towering
villain of the human drama. That villain has become more and more
shrunken and shadowy. The _hubris_ of the Greeks, the proud presumption
against the high gods that constituted for ancient writers the crown of
human errors, seems now an old, unhappy, far-off thing, quite hopeless
for literary purposes in the opening twentieth century. Even more
hopeless seems the lineal successor to _hubris_, the Pride that led
the seven deadly sins in mediæval pageantry, and doomed the heroes of
humane tragedy in the Renaissance.
The surface reason for the fading of pride on our literary scene is
obvious enough. Pride used to be considered not only the most immoral
but also the most dramatic quality of human life. But recently life,
or our imaginative way with life, has assumed a non-dramatic air.
The interminable series of the falls of proud heroes and princes,
historical or legendary, that runs through the bulk of the world’s
literature--well, this series seems now to have terminated.
Democracy’s interest in such personages is lackadaisical. I heard
a bright American undergraduate refer to them as “those old guys
that used to get bumped off quick.” And one must bear in mind that
America, if still a bright undergraduate, is widely representative of
modern civilisation. Yesterday a remote collection of insignificant
states, she is now becoming an international state of mind and, more
significantly, of imagination. In this state of imagination the old
proud-falling potentate cuts a small figure. Recently, to be sure, many
princes have fallen, in fact the majority of them; but they have fallen
softly. The downfall of a business corporation is far more noisy and
generally disturbing; but a corporation is impersonal and undramatic.
As for pride, doubtless some American presidents have shown promising
tragic signs of it, but of course these had to be nipped in the bud.
A prince, even so powerful and autocratic a prince as the American
president, cannot fall proudly and dramatically when he has to fall
regularly every four years.
Pride is not popular with democracy either as a vice or as a virtue.
Even a just pride in oneself is publicly regarded as not justifiable.
Self-esteem must be submerged in party loyalty; and party loyalty, in
turn, must whitewash its rising arrogance with humanitarian sentiment,
with eloquent devotion to the welfare of men in general. To be sure,
intelligent persons dislike the blatancy of this sentiment. Most of
them nevertheless are actually in accord with the very heart of it.
They wince and shrug at the slogan trumpet of “Service to Mankind,”
but they quietly salute the flag. They bow in spirit to the reigning
standard of “Social Value.” Tacitly accepting it as prime motive they
deprecate their own self-esteem. They abet the general feeling that
pride as the ruler of this world, good and evil pride alike, has
modernly been deposed: it is a thing of the past.
This feeling, more than any other feature of modernity, constitutes our
break with the past. It has inspired the general conviction that the
modern age, so far from being merely one phase, even the most important
phase, of human history, has brought about a permanent alteration in
the basic conditions of human history. And here again the majority
of the leaders of opinion, while disavowing the popular view in its
blatant extreme, have been moulded in spirit by the accumulating
pressure of it. At the same time our knowledge of the _facts_ of the
past has continued to increase. Popular biographies and surveys have
circulated through a vast reading public. Hence has arisen what may be
termed the modern historical paradox. The opening twentieth century has
a wider speaking acquaintance with the past, and a fainter grip of its
essential reality, than was ever the case before. The past is quite
vivid to us, and quite unreal. Its main motif, its pride, is a dramatic
ghost.
Recently Lytton Strachey’s keen book on Queen Elizabeth and her Essex,
and Francis Hackett’s glowing story of Henry Eighth and his wives, have
made the pageant of the sixteenth century brilliantly alive for us. But
in the end the pageant is more a pageant than ever; the past is more
utterly past. The scene sparkles along before our eyes in sharp and
multitudinous detail. Above all, the persons are amazingly human, as
they loom toward us in vivid “close-ups.” Yet in the end they are human
foreigners. They belong to a remote clime, and our attitude toward them
is ironic and superior even when most sympathetic. In fact they seem
to us _amazingly_ human just because we are surprised that they can be
human at all. For the central motive of their lives, their pride of
spirit, is or seems to us entirely out of date. Their ordinary desires
were the same as ours; we see that more fully every day. But the power
of their pride, which swamped or swept before it all those common
desires, like the gale that ruled their little sailing-ships on the
Atlantic, is obsolete. It appears almost as strange and superstitious,
when we pause to reflect upon it, as the spasmodic fits of humility
that made those proud ghosts grovel at the feet of their kings and
gods. We think we have changed all that.
But so deep-going an alteration in human nature, such a huge
discrepancy between present and past, is disconcerting to the mind.
It must needs be reduced and accounted for. Our emotional conviction
of the obsolescence of pride, like every other strong and persistent
feeling harboured by human beings, must needs be rationalised. And the
rationalisation is now in progress. Pride has seemed to our imagination
very unreal in the present; therefore our reason is demonstrating that
it was also quite unreal in the past. Historical science aided by other
sciences has undermined the pride of the past. It appears now that
proud princes, as well as proud nations and empires, fell of old not by
reason of pride but by reason of economics--or the lack of economics.
Or else there were geographical, ethnological, biological, or
psychological causes. The last-mentioned category is the most effective
of all for eliminating moral factors from human history. For example,
only an old-fashioned reader may still fancy that Henry the Second,
by conquering the violence of his pride, could have refrained from
causing the slaughter of Becket. That, to be sure, was the subsequent
opinion of Henry himself. But, psychologically speaking, Henry and the
old-fashioned reader are mistaken. Henry was subject to certain stimuli
and certain complexes that completely determined, and completely
explain, his extraordinary behaviour before and after the murder of the
archbishop.
Emerson, looking back mildly from Concord upon the greedy and murderous
pride of old days, found human history very tiresome because it was
so very bad. To-day many disillusioned persons are finding it still
more tiresome because it seems to them neither bad nor good. It is
non-moral, and therefore non-dramatic. Never does it hang dramatically
in the fearful balance of the free human will between a false pride and
a right humility. It merely moves back and forth like the waves and
currents of the sea. History, unhappily, just happens.
Perhaps, however, this ultra-modern view of history, in which pride
seems so unreal, is itself the offspring of a very real pride. Modern
pride is not of necessity less real than ancient pride just because, so
far, its way is less conscious and dramatic. After all it takes time
to dramatise ourselves to ourselves; and the modern age, so modernists
say, is not yet in full swing. They say that the modern theatre has
merely made a beginning and that in the future it will do great things.
If so, I would claim that the greatest of those great things must be an
adequate dramatisation of modern pride. But we cannot wait for that.
If we did, it would never come. It cannot come until there is general
recognition of the fact that pride is still the grand protagonist in
the human drama; and that under its drab modern dress it has lost not a
whit of its ancient sinew.
Pride is most virulent, indeed, when it wears plain clothes, when it
hides itself from itself. Self-blindness, not dramatic display, is
and always has been the very heart of it. Precisely when pride is
most insidious is it least dramatic. Recognition of itself, which is
the preliminary step toward cure, is also the preliminary step toward
dramatic manifestation. Pride was very dramatic in old literature
just because it was unearthed from its very _un_dramatic lair in old
human nature. Discovery is the essence of drama. Life is intensely
dramatic as soon as its least discoverable motive is discovered, as
soon as its “last infirmity,” its most hidden pride of spirit, is shown
in action. Therefore if a superficial glance persuades us, as I said
at the beginning, that pride has faded in modern literature because
modern life is non-dramatic, a deeper search informs us that modern
life _seems_ non-dramatic because the meaning of pride has faded in
our thought. We need to rediscover the truth of the truism that pride
is the most insidious and blinding of all human qualities. Then we may
discover the way of modern pride. We must see how utterly non-dramatic
pride can be before our poets may show us how intensely dramatic
modern life is. We cannot envisage the drama of modern life in its
full reality, we cannot touch the very heart of its tragedy, until we
realise the peculiar blindness of modern pride.