OPINIONS
BOOKS BY CLAUDE WASHBURN
PAGES FROM THE BOOK OF PARIS
GERALD NORTHROP
ORDER
THE LONELY WARRIOR
THE PRINCE AND THE PRINCESS
THE GREEN ARCH
OPINIONS
_by_
CLAUDE WASHBURN
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
_First published 1926_
Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. CONSTABLE LTD.
at the University Press, Edinburgh
TO
T. R. YBARRA
Of the following essays, ‘Zenith’ and ‘Black-and-White’ originally
appeared in _The Freeman_, ‘Sophistication’ and ‘The French’ in
_The Nineteenth Century and After_. My thanks are due to the
editors of both publications for permission to reprint those essays
here.
C. C. W.
PREFACE
_Which should by all means be read, being quite as much an essay as any
one of those that follow, and, if not the best, at any rate the
shortest; so that it affords a swift and almost painless means of
determining whether it is worth while to borrow the book._
Opinions are troublesome things, especially to a writer of novels.
Members of the latter, not very lovable tribe frequently assert that the
characters they create acquire a life of their own, take the bit in
their teeth, and become altogether unmanageable. This is as it may be.
Novelists are not among the most veracious of people, and are apt to
state as true, if in a whimsical deprecatory manner, things about their
work that they only wish were true. ‘How did I come to write
_Wayfarers_? Really I can hardly say. Once begun, the book seemed to
write itself.’
What is much more certain is that opinions have a life of their own.
They form gradually in one’s mind and must be got rid of ever so often,
like clogging sediment in a water-pipe; they _will_ be expressed. And
the reason that they trouble especially the writer of novels is that he
will again and again find himself putting them in the mouths of
characters who would never have held them.
For it is a curious fact that a writer cannot rid himself of opinions
(or of anything else) save by writing them down in a book. He may unload
them repeatedly on conversation, he may shout them to the
house-tops--all to no avail. But once he has embalmed them in print he
is released from them, perhaps does not even believe in them any longer,
and sets involuntarily about collecting other different opinions.
Why this should be so is a mystery. Unless the writer is even more than
usually vain, or unless he is one of the very few whose books are in
every home and whose opinions therefore presumably sway thousands (only
I don’t believe they do), he must in his heart be aware that nothing he
has written has had the slightest effect on any one, that nothing any
one has written has had much effect, and that immortality is a myth. No,
there he and I are wrong. There _is_ one way to literary immortality, a
small immortality but assured: to have a book printed in the Tauchnitz
Edition. Miss Rhoda Broughton’s name may be to the world at large but a
shadowy memory, Mrs. Mackarness’s a total blank, but for ever and ever,
on rainy afternoons, in dingy German or Italian _pensions_, elderly
English spinsters will, in default of anything else to do, read tattered
Tauchnitz copies of _Cometh Up as a Flower_ and _A Peerless Wife_. They
will be bored--but they will read them.
At any rate, your writer of novels, if he is to go on writing novels
that at all satisfy him for the moment (though why he should, God
knows!), must occasionally get rid of his opinions by means of a volume
of essays; which does him good and does no one else any harm.
And that is what I have set out to do here.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE ix
ON LIVING ABROAD 1
ZENITH 25
DISILLUSIONMENT 40
SOPHISTICATION 53
MEDITATIONS ABOUT WOMEN 69
LEGEND 85
TRUTH AND FICTION IN ITALY 97
LUIGI PIRANDELLO 116
THE FRENCH 139
PORNOGRAPHY 152
SUCCESS 166
BLACK-AND-WHITE 180
ON LIVING ABROAD
This is not an essay in defence of living abroad nor yet a plea to
others to choose such a life. Rather, it is in the nature of a
dispassionate explanation intended respectfully for those who wonder why
a good many Americans who are neither loafers nor sentimentalists
endeavouring to escape backward into what they fancy to have been the
Utopian life of the twelfth century (or was it the thirteenth?) do
prefer living abroad to living at home.
The first and very natural objection of such readers would probably be:
‘You are cut off from the life to which you belong.’ But is this really
true? It would be true of, say, an Italian coming to America. He is
indeed cut off, and unless he has a very strong personality his
character suffers for it. A certain looseness comes. But it is not
equally true of an American who emigrates to Italy. The Italian has
strong bonds, roots that go down and down and link him to an
incalculable past. (Which is both valuable and harmful). The American
lives like some drifting rootless water-plant. Family for him is
something to get away from; at least it does not postulate the
obligations it does abroad. And he has seldom ties of place. So few
Americans live at maturity in the house or even in the town where they
were born that those who do are made the subject of quaint, rather
emasculated, dialect stories in our more expensive monthly magazines.
There is an appearance of national life because so many thousands are
doing the same thing at the same time--reading the same advertisements,
wearing the same kind of clothes, going to the same movies; but they are
not consciously performing the same duties. In existence we are a
gregarious nation, but existence is nothing; in real life we are
intensely lonely, isolated individuals--as much so as if we lived in
Europe. Perhaps this would be as it should be, a foundation for
individual achievement, if we would recognize it and rejoice in it. But
no nation in the world is so wistfully desirous of a unity that, despite
appearances, it has not got. All sorts of judgments, mostly idiotic,
have been passed on Americans by Europeans, but there is at least one
which is profoundly true: that Americans want pathetically to be liked.
This is at once a sign of weakness in us and a proof of frustration; it
reveals the fact that we have not the unity we crave. We huddle together
for comfort, but, because we are doing childish insignificant things, we
get no closer for that. It is true that individuals can never get very
close to one another. Still, two men even at opposite ends of the earth
may exchange a few lines of writing that can profoundly influence the
life of each. But two men side by side, brushing their teeth ...?
So, leaving all this, one is not really leaving a life-in-common. If I
go to see a baseball game, what is it to me that ten thousand others are
also there watching it? The real question is: of how much value to me
and to _each_ of the ten thousand is the baseball game? Also, leaving
all this, one is thrown frankly upon himself. Living among people who
speak a different language and have different customs, he can no longer
be supported by that illusory sense of companionship. If he has any
strength of character he presently finds this an immense relief and
becomes aware that at home his time was recklessly wasted on a thousand
things that meant nothing to him--that did not touch his mind or his
heart. To take the most trivial example, the telephone system in Italy
or France is so bad that there he will almost never use a telephone;
which at once frees him from something very like tyranny.
This sense of freedom is not the least of the advantages of living
abroad. In large part, no doubt, it comes from one’s not really
belonging to the life about one, since however well one gets to know a
foreign country it always remains foreign, and though one acquire
fluency in the language it must always, unless learned in childhood, be
spoken more consciously--and conscientiously--than one’s own. But this
is not the whole story. One is, too, aware of a greater freedom
surrounding him in European--at least in Latin European--countries than
in his own America. There is stronger individualism, less herd spirit,
greater divergence of opinion. Individuals appear less like one another,
and eccentricities that would almost ostracize men from their
disapproving fellows in America are in France and Italy accepted with a
smile. The sensitive American, especially if he is one of the many who
have suffered bitterly at school and college and dully afterward from
the intolerable oppression of herd standards, breathes in this relative
freedom deeply with a sense of sudden release. It is true that after a
while, if he is observant, he perceives that the liberty is not, as
perhaps he first thought it, something deep affecting the fundamentals
of life, but, rather, a freedom from unnecessary rules for existence. He
may even come to explain it as the result of a number of very
superficial things--the comparative absence of standardizing
advertisements, for example, the lack of universally read magazines, the
smaller size of newspapers, the greater localism of feeling--though
whether such things are cause or result remains a question to him. At
any rate, even when estimated at only its proper importance, the sense
of freedom still remains as something gracious.
Curiously enough, as our expatriate learns to understand better this
delightful surface freedom, he begins to discern beneath it, in things
that have to do not with existence but with life, some very rigid
laws--more rigid than any _beneath_ the surface in his own
country--recognized unshirked duties. The greatest of these is the
accepted burden of the family. In America children early shake
themselves free from their parents. More often than not, a grown man’s
life is completely cut off from that of his father and mother,
especially after his marriage; he frequently lives in another city than
that where they live; the whole adventure of bearing and rearing him
becomes to them as well as to him almost as though it had not been; not
uncommonly he evades the responsibility of giving them a home when they
are in need of one in their old age. As for uncles, aunts, and cousins,
the average American avoids them with distaste. In Italy and France you
get the opposite extreme. Except in the detached, irresponsible and less
national aristocracy, family ties are tremendously strong. A family is
always closely bound together, even in its obscure ramifications of
cousinship. However much its individual members may dislike one another
they accept unquestioningly the family duties. Grave financial
sacrifices are assumed as a matter of course. In many years of living in
Italy I have never yet had servants who did not send the greater part of
their wages to their parents, or known a single individual of the
bourgeoisie or the provincial aristocracy who would not as a matter of
course give up something he really wanted to do with a friend for the
sake of something he ought to do for a relation. As for the peasants, no
matter how poor, they will support ailing brothers or cousins, and even
the wives and children of these, in perpetuity; for among the peasants,
who are the most truly Italian of all Italians, the family is law--the
only law.
This undoubtedly has its defects. The better an American comes to know
Italy or France (where the influence of the family is almost equally
strong) the more he feels the often disastrous tyranny of this universal
obligation. Yet it is more admirable than harmful; for in a world only
too full of greed and selfishness it supplies a bed-rock of
self-sacrifice, an anchor in something solid and permanent for the
individual, and it creates a strong national life, which we Americans,
for all our standardization of existence, are without. You have, in
short, in Italy and France, the exact opposite to life in America. In
the latter country there is unanimity, all but identity, of behaviour in
superficial things, with, beneath, no convictions, no obligations, a
chaotic emptiness; in the former countries below a surface freedom
approximating licence there is a life founded on stern unquestioned
laws.
One of the dangers (and they are many) for Americans who live abroad is
that, not sharing the real life of the country, they get all the surface
freedom without any of the underlying obligations. Trivial as the
American’s obligations at home were--obligations to speak, dress, and
behave like his fellows--they at least bound him to something, even if
it was a silly something; and it is safer to be bound by some duties,
though they are only to do a ‘daily dozen’ or to support
Americanization, than to be bound by none at all. For those Americans
who do not look beneath the surface, or, looking, do not care, or whose
character is weakened rather than strengthened by sudden freedom, the
Latin countries of Europe are a dangerous place of residence. I have
seen many such. They become very petty, very selfish, and so lazy that
they do not even take the trouble to learn decently the language of the
country in which they live, but play, instead, with other expatriates
like themselves. Since at home their standards were imposed from the
outside, instead of evolved from within, and are now at one stroke
abolished, they grow limp and flaccid in character and pick up any
tawdry vice that appeals to their standardless weakness. Frequently the
men go in for homo-sexuality, since somehow this seems to harmonize with
living futilely and prettily with nothing to do but to look after the
rose gardens about their villas. They are quite mad--in a mild suave
way. Their only care in life is that they are occasionally blackmailed.
Also they are gently fuddled most of the time. But their rose gardens
are very pretty.
However, this is by the way. What denationalized Americans of this sort
do is of no conceivable importance to any one, and the fact that they
might have failed to do it had they remained at home is of little
greater moment. They drift above life like soap-bubbles on a gentle
breeze, and when they burst no one even cares. The real question is:
what can be done by an American of a little more character with the
freedom that such as these misuse?
A great deal, I think. For a writer or a painter it is invaluable. It
gives him a blessed feeling of space around himself that becomes more
precious to him than all the soft comforts of America, that becomes
indeed the one superlative comfort. At last he has elbow-room--and peace
to think down to the bottom of his thoughts. Let him but guard his gift
of freedom jealously and he can have evening after evening of solitude.
In America he must have fought rudely to obtain even half-hours of
solitude, since nobody could understand that he wanted it. He builds up
about him now a peace that is not empty but the richest of all mediums.
Any flight, any surrender, any subterfuge, was justifiable to obtain
it--provided he does something with it; and if he does not, the
punishment will be swift and he alone the sufferer, for the full sense
of space will become an aching emptiness and his precious leisure a
burden.
A lesser but quite genuine advantage in living abroad is the wider
variety of one’s surroundings. I have lived in half a dozen different
cities or villages, besides those in which I have merely sojourned for a
short time, and each place had its own special flavour. To respond to
the stern austere beauty of the Syracusan plain and then to the blurred
softness of Taormina, to the dainty toy-like perfection of Lake Orta and
then to the breathless magnificence of Garda, is to draw from every side
of one’s nature. But there is also a wider human variety. One can know
more kinds of people here (I am writing now of Italy, where I have lived
longest) than at home. For example, in America I and all my friends are
barred from even superficial acquaintance with men who work with their
hands. This, no doubt, is chiefly because America has become an
industrial country, and it seems especially hard for members of other
classes to know industrial labourers anywhere. But in Italy, except in a
few large cities such as Milan and Turin, industrial workers do not form
a separate homogeneous class. There is this young man, who is the son of
your or some one else’s gardener, or that, who is cousin to the peasant
family at the foot of your hill. Besides which, Italy is largely an
agricultural country. The peasants are in some ways odd inscrutable
people, yet one does, with reservations, get to know those who live
near-by--as well, perhaps, as in America one gets to know one’s
neighbours, the insurance man, and the banker. (As far as that goes, a
peasant’s mind does not seem to me any more inscrutable than a
banker’s). But there is still another difference. In America manual
labourers are mostly of foreign birth, so that it is doubly hard to get
to know them. How _can_ I get in touch with a Finn? His language, his
antecedents, his manner of thought, all are strange to me. In the small
and delightful town of southern Minnesota where my father lived as a
young man, there appears to have been at that time a very agreeable
community life. The farmers in the country round about were of one
blood with the town-dwellers--chiefly of New England origin,
Anglo-Saxons all, save for a slight mixture of Germans; and the
professions in the town were recruited from among the sons of farmers. I
don’t know whether the townspeople had a feeling of social superiority
to the farmers; probably they had. But there was no gulf between them;
they were of the same race and understood one another. To-day the
townspeople remain principally Anglo-Saxon, but the country round about
is farmed by Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns. The townspeople do not
understand them nor they the townspeople. And you get the condition that
Mr. Sinclair Lewis depicted, if rather too gloomily, in _Main Street_.
In his unconvincing portrayals of a Scandinavian servant and a
Scandinavian labour agitator one felt him straining, unavailingly, for a
comprehension which he lacked the knowledge to attain.
In Italy peasants are of one race with the doctors, lawyers,
land-owners, and provincial aristocracy (as distinguished from that of
the great historic families in, for instance, Rome, which are
cosmopolitan in their way of living, and so mixed in blood through
intermarriage with foreigners that they are by now almost as American,
English, French, or Austrian as Italian). It is perhaps impossible to
know the peasants intimately, but it is not difficult to know them
fairly well; and such knowledge adds greatly to one’s experience. I
think there are times when all of us feel impatient at knowing none but
those who work with their brains and only think about or traffic in the
things that other men have grown or built with their hands. This is a
feeling easily capable of exaggeration. Carried too far it leads to the
foolish belief, not uncommon to-day, that only those who work with their
hands and create the physical wealth of the world are of value in
it--which, of course, would reduce all life to mere existence. But
perpetual contact with the earth does make for sanity and for something
not far removed from wisdom. I esteem the Italian peasants, especially
those of Tuscany, as highly as any class of men with which I am
acquainted. They are calm but alert; they are, I believe, in the main,
kindly; they are tenaciously attached to the land; they work
indefatigably; they have an infinitely deeper and truer culture than,
for example, the supposedly higher class of shopkeepers, and,
especially, a serenity approaching fatalism, that leads them to regard
all governments with indifference and consider wars in much the same way
as they consider earthquake or drought. There is a splendid permanence
about them. Acquaintance with them is the best antidote I have found to
that desperate apprehension of universal meaningless chaos that every
man must so often feel to-day--to what Mr. Bernard Shaw so well
expressed when he said it sometimes seemed to him that this world must
be a place used by the other planets as an insane asylum.
* * * * *
In America, beneath the fevered surface, the jazz, the wild rush hither
and thither, the absence of contemplation, the divorce-fed looseness of
the married relation, there is, I think, a monotony, a dull-eyed
prosiness, against which all those surface things are perhaps but a
reaction. People do not read poetry (as all do in Italy); which is not
an indication of poor literary taste (since in Italy, as elsewhere, the
mass of people prefer bad poetry to good), but of either an inability or
a disinclination to feel vividly. The undergraduates of our great
universities are not, as in France or Italy, uncritical rebels against
all accepted conventions of life and letters, but for the most part as
conservative as their parents, caring little about politics save to
accept indifferently the Republican Party, caring nothing at all about
either old currents or new among the arts. Would students at our
universities ever riot because of the execution of a Francisco Ferrer?
Inconceivable! They become violently excited about sports, as do
students abroad; but that, again, is a surface excitement which does not
affect beliefs about life. Defeat in the annual football game would
hardly impel undergraduates at Harvard or Yale to risk their lives in
passionate protest.
This greyness follows Americans throughout their life and is due, I
think, to our over-complication of and concentration upon the surface
facts of existence. No matter what one does with existence, it remains a
dull thing. Radios, motor cars, telephones, vacuum cleaners--they are
all infinitely dull because they are all surface things that do not
trouble the heart or the brain. Existence is dull, but life, underneath
it, is a wild and thrilling adventure. What one does is nothing; what
one believes and feels is everything. ‘After all,’ said William James,
‘the most important thing about a man is what he thinks about the
universe.’ But if he does not think about it ...? For all its feverish
activity, America does not seem to me to have the fever of living. I
know of nothing more desolate than the exceedingly well done stories in
the most widely read of our magazines, which, to judge from its immense
circulation, must almost literally be ‘in every home.’ They are
virtually all about the facile success in business of handsome young men
with Arrow Collar souls. This tawdry shirking of life is, I believe (and
I wish I did not believe it), the mental attitude of most Americans. Mr.
Van Wyck Brooks has revealed it with a clear, terrible perfection, Mr.
Sinclair Lewis has satirized it tumultuously in terms of itself (and has
thereby, ironically, become popular), and numerous others have revolted
against it with futile bitterness. But there it is. And there, perhaps,
it must remain till some great national disaster sweeps away at one
stroke the glittering surface rubbish and the worship of it, and turns
men’s thoughts inward upon the emotions and desperately evolved
convictions that are real life and thrilling. The potentiality, the
potential life, is there; it must be. We are men and women like other
men and women. Life must be struggling beneath the choking surface.
Women bear children in agony. Men love, toil, suffer hardships. It is
only that our thoughts are directed elsewhere. It may be that if all our
press, all our monthly and weekly magazines, and everything else that
carries advertisements were wiped out for a single month, we should
begin to live. For advertisements are responsible for no small part of
the mischief. They waken our sense of romance or of beauty or of charm
and then try to convince us that these feelings, which belong to life
and have nothing to do with existence, can be thoroughly satisfied by
cake made with a special kind of baking powder or by somebody’s
chocolates or by perfume with an exotic name. Thus belittling the
emotion they conjure up, they make us smile sheepishly at it--and then,
in a half-hope, buy the chocolates or the perfume. They deliberately
confuse our sense of values. They depict beauty as a genial strumpet for
sale to any one at a reasonable price.
The word ‘beauty’ is at a discount to-day. One is wary of employing it.
The trouble is that in the ’nineties of the last century a very
loquacious group of aesthetes made a silly cult of the conception and
thereby so cheapened the word itself that even after thirty years it has
not quite recovered. This sort of thing always happens when an adjective
is turned into a noun. (Not, of course, that this had not happened to
the word ‘beautiful’ long before the eighteen-nineties--only never quite
so hard). As an adjective it modified facts and was thus related to
life; as a noun it is credited with an existence of its own and is thus
divorced from life. ‘A beautiful woman’ or ‘a beautiful landscape’ means
something very real and fairly definite, but ‘beauty’ all alone by
itself means nothing at all, or is at best an abstraction to be used for
convenience’ sake, and very carefully, in the midst of earthy
life-giving facts. Repeatedly employed, it nauseates the hearer and
reveals a lack of genuine feeling in the person who employs it. Where
the quality belongs, that the word too often mars, is in life itself; it
has no god-like existence of its own. There is no occasion to mention it
in a low reverent voice or to turn it into a thin cult. But as just this
has been so frequently done I have needed all this apologetic
introduction before venturing to say that one of the reasons for which I
live in Italy is the varied but almost universal beauty of the landscape
that encircles me in nearly any part of that country. I trust it may be
evidence of my cultless honesty in the matter when I say that I am not
in a perpetual state of thrill about my surroundings (though, to be
quite truthful, there do come rare, brief, and unexpected moments of
lifting delight in some sudden touch of loveliness), but, rather, feel
this quality of beauty in them as something friendly, breathed in with
the air. Often, because of long familiarity with the landscape about me,
I am not consciously aware that it is beautiful. Nevertheless, the fact
that it is so is never quite forgotten. If, though with every possible
advantage of space, leisure and friends, I had suddenly to live in
Patterson, New Jersey, or in Superior, Wisconsin, something of
tremendous importance would seem to me to have disappeared from my life,
and a background of serenity that enables me happily to do the little
that I can do as well as is possible for me would become a background to
be at any moment consciously subdued before I should be able to achieve
anything at all.
‘But all these things.’ a quite justifiably impatient reader might by
now object, ‘are no better than theories. You, who are by way of being a
writer, like and are able to live abroad, and it amuses you to depict
this as advantageous. But is it really? Let us have facts. Discarding
those degenerate rose-garden Americans, are there others to whom living
abroad has been of actual benefit?’
Well, if by ‘benefit’ is meant actual benefit to achievement, I honestly
cannot say. I know, or know of, a number of American writers and
painters who live in France or Italy, and I cannot truthfully claim that
I think any of their work as good as the best that is being done by some
in America itself. But that, unfortunately, proves nothing. Their
number, of course, is very small compared with the number of those at
home, and among these last only a handful are achieving work of
consequence. The significant question (which it is quite impossible to
answer) is whether these transplanted Americans are painting better
pictures or writing better books than, given the limitations of their
talent, they would have been able to write or paint had they stayed at
home.
If, on the other hand, the word ‘benefit’ is to be taken in a wider
sense than simply that of creative achievement, I can at once answer the
question in the affirmative, without (thank heaven!) having to confine
myself to artists and authors. One does not come readily to know these
expatriates of the best sort. They are isolated individuals who value
their isolation. (It is the rose-garden people who at first acquaintance
press you, with a pathetic wistfulness, to come to tea or dinner at
their villas). But some, to my good fortune, I do know, and I hear quiet
rumours of others--individuals scattered here and there, not all of them
by any means writers, painters or composers, but solitary absorbed
students of this or that period or local fragment of a period, or even
only (_only?_) of the intense modern life about them. Useless? I do not
think so. Being, necessarily, of independent means (though it is
astounding on how slender an income they are often content to live), it
is not essential for them to go on making money. Yet that, if they had
remained in America, is probably what the force of public opinion would
have compelled them to do. Instead of studying the development of the
Commedia dell’ Arte or the annals of the Medici or the history of the
Risorgimento or the development of co-operatives in pre-Fascista Italy,
they would have been selling bonds or juggling with real estate. It is
not probable that one would have found them useful members of more
serious professions, since it was precisely for that study of the
Commedia dell’ Arte or co-operatives that their minds were really
fitted. And even if the bits of curious knowledge that they dig up are
of no external value, or, though of some small value, are not passed on
to others, individuals of this sort are not without use both to their
adopted country and to the one they have deserted. In their
infinitesimal way they help toward the distant mutual understanding of
two races. They spin one thin spider’s thread across the Atlantic. For
they respect and partly understand the people among whom they live, and
are respected and partly understood by these. Some day, if the world
lasts that long, a vast number of such threads, entwined, will make a
cable that will bind two countries together as no governmental treaties
or commercial agreements or grandiloquent speeches by distinguished
momentary guests will ever bind them. It is not without significance
that on the outbreak of the war Americans living in Germany sided with
the Germans, Americans in France with the French. It indicated that
through daily intercourse such Americans had begun to see into the
hearts of another people, and had found them individuals like
themselves. Given enough of this peaceful interpenetration among all
nations, war would surely become more difficult.
Yet it is not the problematic value to others of the knowledge these
expatriated Americans acquire nor their slight influence upon
international relations that appears to me their real importance, but
what they have, quietly and almost unconsciously, done with themselves.
The few individuals of this sort whom it is my privilege to know seem to
me more fully developed, rounded, and, especially, grown-up than they
could possibly have become except through this way of living. I have
even now more friends, if vastly fewer acquaintances, in America than in
Europe, but not one among them is as mature and mellowed as are these
expatriates. They have, the latter, a tolerance, an illusionless
sympathy for mankind and an insight into human motives. They see men
solely as individuals.
Take, for example, my friend Etheredge (that is not his name). In a way
it is not fair to do this, since, to my mind at least, he is so very
much more of a person than any of the few other expatriates of this sort
whom I know as to be uncharacteristic. Nevertheless, he could not have
become what he seems to me to be without his many years of living
abroad, and also there is something to be said for taking not the
average but the finest exceptional result as a study of a type.
I first met Etheredge fourteen years ago, shortly after he had come to
live in Europe. He happens to be a painter (as also is his wife), but I
am not myself capable of judging as to whether he is a good painter or
not. Some of his pictures (which become increasingly abstract) move me;
some do not. I have heard supposedly competent critics say that they
were very good indeed, and others, equally expert, that they were very
poor. To tell the truth, I do not care in the least which they are. By
all American Standards Etheredge would, I suppose, be accounted a
failure, since he can hardly ever sell his pictures, and then for a
wretched price. And for that, too, I do not care in the least. It is in
his personality that Etheredge seems to me really important.
Even fourteen years ago, at thirty, he had an arresting personality.
There was something at once quiet and eager about him, as though he were
questioning everything without quarrelling with anything, which struck
me as rare. But I should not at that time have set him down as a
success. He had not yet found himself. He was not yet sufficient to
himself. Now, after fourteen years, he is. I know no one else who is so
completely rounded a personality, who accepts so simply the external
world and is so little troubled by it. He has built around himself a
wall not of indifference but of acceptance, against which waves break
unavailingly, within which he lives with his whole self, serenely,
gently and richly.
All this that I feel about Etheredge I express badly. I cannot
successfully put it into words. I make him sound smug and even selfish,
whereas he has come very near to abolishing self--and thus has grown the
more. The best I can do is to give up the attempt at portrayal and fall
back on a few tangible results. Thus, I am not alone in my estimate of
Etheredge. Quiet and unassuming though he is, people of distinction
gravitate toward him. He has, to my knowledge, exerted a profound
influence on three creative artists of international fame and upon a
number of other individuals of even greater sensitiveness and fineness
of character if of less effective talent. Again, if financial disaster
were to overtake me to-morrow, Etheredge would, I know, share with me
whatever he has. But it is not that which is of importance (he was
always generous), but the fact that, though his income is very small,
this would honestly seem to him now no hardship, of no importance. Yet
again, neither he nor his wife has ever made a single sacrifice to
comfort. They continue to live in one after another of the most
inaccessible places in all Italy--places with no water, places with no
light, places with toilet facilities straight out of the Stone Age. To
plan a Tour of Discomfort I could hardly do better than enumerate the
villages where they have lived. If this were ever for them an act of
heroism, if they ever gave an impression of struggling bravely against
heavy odds for the sake of the Higher Life, I should consider such
behaviour with distaste. But they never do. They simply ignore the
discomfort. All that mattered to them was that each of these places was
a place of singular beauty and interest. They _liked_ living in them.
And, whether I have made you feel Etheredge as important or have failed
to do so, it must, with this, surely be apparent that his kind of
development would be all but impossible in America.
There are things about Etheredge that exasperate me at times. I cannot,
for instance, understand both his and his wife’s failure to learn the
language. Their Italian is distressing. Now Italian shopkeepers and
servants are no worse than those or other countries--if anything, I
think, a little better, being capable of extraordinary acts of
generosity toward suddenly impoverished clients--but undoubtedly their
dominant thought in the presence of strange and presumably wealthy
foreigners living, heaven knows why, in their midst, and with difficulty
stammering mistakenly a few phrases of the language, is that the Lord
has delivered these into their hands. Accordingly, Etheredge and his
wife have been the victims of a long series of minor frauds and
peculations. I do not know why this should annoy me, but it does. It
does not annoy them; they disregard it.
Similarly, I am at times annoyed by Etheredge’s indifference to the
social movements that swirl madly around us all. It is, for instance,
impossible for me to watch the progress of Fascismo coolly. I feel
grudging admiration for the machine, resentment at the suppression of
free speech, bitterness at the cynical pretence of constitutionalism. I
cannot, in other words, keep Fascismo out of my life, any more than I
can keep out the problems of international relations, German indemnities
and the war debts. Etheredge can. He scarcely, I believe, thinks about
these things at all; certainly he does not think about them
passionately.
In this, I know at heart, I am wrong and he is profoundly right. For it
is on my part, and would be on his, a waste of energy to puzzle and
think and fume over these questions. Neither he nor I is fitted to cope
with them; neither of us can have the faintest influence upon them. And,
indeed, gigantic though they loom above the world to-day, they are but
ephemeral phenomena. Beneath, far beneath, lies the only truth--the
perplexed, troubled, struggling, human soul. Only contact with
individuals can have significance, either to them or to oneself. To such
relationships and to the beliefs and questions arising from them
Etheredge devotes his fine unwasted strength.
The influence he exerts is deep but not wide, and its necessarily narrow
range is, in my saner moments, the only thing I hold against him. Here,
I think, is a man of rare sympathy, insight and character. Must his
influence be exerted only upon the small number of individuals whom he
can personally know? Well, of course, there are his pictures, at which
he works with intense and persistent energy. They must to some extent
express his personality, and if the critics who call them good are in
the right they will doubtless some day reach a wider circle than that of
personal acquaintanceship. But, even so, comparatively few will see
them, and of these only a small proportion be able to understand clearly
the fine spirit they express. Another insoluble problem.
But, as I meditate upon it, I have a sudden happy suspicion that here,
too, I am in the wrong, still believing despite myself in widespread
movements, organization and the like. Perhaps, after all, the finest and
most hopeful thing about an apparently sorry world is that over its
surface are sparsely strewn men and women of matured developed charm or
intelligence or perception, who exert unconsciously the influence of
their personality on those in immediate touch with them. Why expect or
ask for more than this? And, certainly, if some of these can only attain
full self-development through living in another country than their own,
for their sake we can well afford to disregard the larger number of
silly snobs and rose-garden idlers that such a life creates.
ZENITH
If Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s fine novel, _Babbitt_, is simply the story of
George F. Babbitt, the only adverse comment I can make upon it is to
question whether that gentleman deserved such detailed and careful
study. One thing is certain: he does not deserve it a whit more if, as
some newspaper has asserted, there are ten million of him than if there
is only one.
But there are indications that Mr. Lewis intended also to depict the
city of Zenith and to show Babbitt and his friends as typical of its
spirit, to do with this novel for the city what he attempted to do in
_Main Street_ for the village. True, there are circles above Babbitt, in
which move William Eathorne, the banker (magnificently sketched), and
the McKelveys (not realized at all). And one is made to feel intensely
that beneath the all-too-articulate Babbitt and his friends are toiling,
almost inarticulate masses. ‘At that moment in Zenith, three hundred and
forty or fifty thousand Ordinary People were asleep, a vast unpenetrated
shadow.’ Nevertheless, it appears to me that in Babbitt, Vergil Gunch,
Howard Littlefield, and the others, Mr. Lewis intended to typify the
dominant spirit of Zenith. Indeed, if they did not typify it, if they
were not significant of anything greater than themselves, he would
hardly have taken such pains to depict them. ‘Vergil Gunch summed it up:
“Fact is, we’re mighty lucky to be living among a bunch of city-folks,
that recognize artistic things and business punch equally. We’d feel
pretty glum if we got stuck in some Main Street burg....”’ This sounds
very like special pleading.
Well, I recently spent a summer in Zenith. At least, it may well have
been Zenith. It is in the same part of the Middle-West and it looks like
the city Mr. Lewis describes. True, it has only 150,000 inhabitants,
whereas Mr. Lewis claims 340,000 for his city. But Mr. Lewis is himself
sufficiently of the Middle-West to be unreliable on this subject. And,
to tell the truth, his city does not feel like a city of 340,000. The
social items in its newspapers are too boisterous and unsophisticated;
it has, apparently, neither orchestra nor art gallery. No, Mr. Lewis’s
Zenith is my Zenith. But if this essay should happen to meet his eye,
and he should protest that I have selected a city quite different from
his, called it Zenith, and then set out to prove that it was not what he
said it was, I can only reply that he may be right, but that if the
Babbitts are not typical of a city of 150,000, still less are they
likely to be of a city of 340,000.
As I say, I recently spent a summer in Zenith; but any observations that
I make are not based solely on that single visit. My parents moved to
Zenith when I was six years old--which, alas, was long enough ago to
make them Old Residents by now; I lived there as a child, as a boy, and
during my summer vacations from college; and I have returned to Zenith
for six months or so every two or three years since. I have seen the
city grow and have noted the changes more sharply for the intervening
years of absence. And I assert that Zenith is not at all in spirit the
kind of place that Mr. Lewis implies.
Of course I did not know, not really know, even one individual among the
toiling throngs in the factories, at the steel plant, in the cement
works. How should I? And I did not know the Babbitt group, save,
superficially, a member here and there. But I observed them on the
streets and heard them talk in hotel lobbies, and I admired the accuracy
of Mr. Lewis’s eye and ear. The people I played with were the people who
take their diversion at the Country Club or give dinners at the Zenith
Club in the city proper. I saw them, too, at work in their offices:
lawyers, doctors, railwaymen, brokers, architects, contractors,
merchants; young men of twenty-five to forty; middle-aged men of forty
to sixty-five; and their wives and daughters. A not unfair cross-section
of Zenith life, once the hopeless separation from the vastly larger mass
of manual labour beneath is admitted, and I think they were more
numerous than the Babbitts. Of course I do not profess to have known
them all; but I am not concerned with their numbers. The point is that
they _were_ Zenith. They gave the city its tone; you felt them in
looking at the blocks and blocks of handsome houses; they made the
Babbitts appear not so much shoddy as unrepresentative, insignificant;
their composite soul was the soul of Zenith.
What, then, were these people like? In any profound sense that is a
difficult question to answer. There was a deep similarity among them;
something important that they all had in common, but something that was
very hard to get at. It is, however, easy to say what they were not
like. They were not like the Babbitts; they were not at all like the
McKelveys or Horace Updike, the people whom George Babbitt longed to
know; they were not like the characters in Mr. Hergesheimer’s
_Cytherea_, nor like those in Margaret Banning’s _Country Club People_.
They were less sophisticated, if to be sophisticated means to have a
weary air and to say cynical things cleverly; they were more so, if it
means to be reasonably well educated, to stand unconsciously for some
reality (no matter what), and to have ease of manner.
The strongest impression they made on me was that of smoothness. Their
homes ran quietly, despite perpetual servant trouble; they entertained
easily; even the weekly dinner-dance at the Country Club gave me a sense
of smoothness that was rather delightful. The immense dining-room would
be crowded--scores of big tables and little tables almost uncomfortably
filled; but there seemed to be no friction, and the voices were a
well-modulated hum, pleasant to hear. People did not seem to get in one
another’s way; and that was true mentally as well as physically. They
were very well-bred and they were not at all self-conscious. Almost,
these people, collectively, had grace. A kind of delightful suavity
surrounded them, that was like the suavity of their smoothly running
Packards and Cadillacs.
Not that they all had Packards or Cadillacs. Many of the younger men
were still struggling near the bottom of the business ascent; a great
many were less than well-to-do; a few were known to be virtually down
and out. But the point is that none of them, even among these last, ever
so much as questioned the system. Hatred and jealousy of individuals
there must have been; a revolt against the collective whole, or even a
doubt of its importance, none whatever.
They were so very sure of themselves, so beautifully sure. They had
something of the easy charm one sniffs up at the tea-room of the Ritz
(in Paris). They were so sure of themselves that if an outsider
expressed radical opinions or even questioned rudely the importance of
the reality for which they stood, these Zenith people were not annoyed,
but, quite politely, amused. They were, in fact, civilized.
This was the dominant surface impression that I carried away from Zenith
after my last visit, and it is so different from anything that I have
read or heard about even the smallest minority in any Middle-Western
city that I have gone about telling it to a number of people--in New
York and elsewhere. My listeners, when at all interested, were
sceptical, and usually observed that Zenith must be very different from
most Middle-Western cities--a special case. It may be so. I do not
profess to generalize about the whole region. Zenith is the only
Middle-Western city that I know well. But I am doubtful. I rather fancy
that people are corrupted by literature. They do not see things for
themselves, even those close-by; instead, they read in novels or plays
that things are thus and so, and take the author’s word for it. And the
author, himself, I fancy, is frequently writing about what he, too, has
read to be thus and so. One sees Victor Margueritte, for example,
becoming uncomfortably aware (like all the rest of the elderly writers,
through hearsay) that something dreadful has happened to the younger
generation, and then setting out to write about it in _La Garçonne_--a
work as sheerly literary, lacking in observation, and impossible in its
psychology, as a novel by Florence Barclay.
But, to return to the people of Zenith, I found them very like well-bred
people anywhere else--like, say, well-bred people in Philadelphia or in
an English city. They read--the women, anyway--desultorily, as people
everywhere read, but books demanding some effort: _The Revolt against
Civilization_, _The Education of Henry Adams_, novels by Couperus,
Bojer, and Knut Hamsun; almost never poetry. They did not know a great
deal about pictures--at least, pictures and statues were not an intimate
part of their lives--because in Zenith there was no art gallery; they
did not have daily opportunity to look at pictures. But a great many of
them were intelligently and sincerely fond of music, because there was
much good music to be heard every year in Zenith. A string quartet would
be glad indeed to draw such a house in New York as it draws in Zenith.