the intensity of their love for music--but I shall say more of that
later). There is no reason outside of literature why these people should
have been crude or conventionally Middle-Western. Virtually all of them
had been away to school or college, probably half of the younger men and
a much larger proportion of the younger women in the East; all had
travelled widely in America, and a great many, especially the women, in
Europe. A considerable number of the older ones go to California or
Florida for the winter.
There were, of course, different groups and eddies within this society.
There were the very young--the débutantes and their swains. I observed
them at the dances and talked casually with a few, but I really learned
little about them. My very superficial impression, which I give you for
whatever it may be worth, was that they had magnificent and amusing
_savoir-faire_, beneath which they hid an ashamed ingenuousness. I do
not know or greatly care what their morals were, but I should guess that
they were much the same as morals were among people of their age and
wealth ten years ago or twenty.
There was also the fast set, a small group of young married people.
Personally I saw nothing of them and can only repeat what I was told of
them by others: that they drank hard in order to experience some emotion
in promiscuous embraces, and that it was all hopelessly raw. I cannot
vouch for the truth of the description, but it sounded plausible. Having
refused to generalize about the whole of the Middle-West, I am certainly
not going to do so about the whole of the United States, but I can say
that, from what little I have seen of fast sets anywhere in America,
they have always seemed to me raw. I have seen elegance and swiftness
delightfully combined in Europe, but not in America. It may be that this
group in Zenith represented some obscure, desperate and futile revolt
against the smoothness of Zenith society, of the Zenith soul. If so, it
was pathetic, for it did not cause so much as a ripple. People did not
seem even shocked by it, only bored.
This, then, was the impression I received of Zenith people: smoothness,
ease, manner, something approaching grace, something approaching charm.
It was very delightful.
Still, I should not like to live in Zenith. For, if it has none of the
faults popularly attributed to the Middle-West, it has others,
unsectional, beneath and perhaps even in part the cause of its charm,
that trouble me deeply.
This society, which is the heart and mind and soul of Zenith, is
immensely conservative, immensely conventional, both morally and
mentally. It does not belligerently flaunt, or argue in favour of,
conventional standards; it accepts them as something settled a long time
since. There is a good deal to be said for this--or for a part of it.
Indeed, there is a good deal to be said for most of what Zenith does or
is. Is not more real freedom to be obtained through accepting certain
age-old conventions, such as that of marriage and married fidelity, for
instance, and then making the best of them, than through wasting one’s
strength in struggling against them, with no adequate substitute to
offer? But Zenith accepts too much. It accepts the Steel Corporation,
Mr. Gary, the American Legion, the Republican Party, the total
wickedness of the I.W.W., the sole responsibility of Germany for the
war, and the entire basic system of Capital and Labour as at present
existing, though it is willing to concede improvements in detail. But
this attitude probably makes for the almost suave charm of this society,
which is, after all, the same kind of charm that was to be found in
Upper-Middle-Class English society before the war.
These people are amazingly cut off from and ignorant of the vast
labouring class. They know that not one of themselves could be elected
congressman or mayor or even to membership on the school-board, but they
accept the fact coolly and without much resentment as revealing nothing
more than the jealousy of the ‘Have-Nots’ for the ‘Haves,’ of those at
the bottom for those who have deservedly reached the top. Yet they are
democratic among themselves, and, unlike the McKelveys, admit newcomers
easily, with no inquiry into their antecedents. They are not really
snobbish. Many of the men are employers of labour on a large scale, yet
even they seem to be merely exasperated by the increasing difficulties
in controlling their men, in much the same way that the women are
annoyed by the difficulty of getting and keeping servants. They talk of
demagogues, of Red propaganda, of the unwillingness of men to do an
honest day’s work, of labour unrest, of Bolshevism--oh, especially of
Bolshevism! But among even these employers I could detect no perception
that the whole economic system was being seriously questioned, and
certainly no perception of the numerical strength and growing unity of
the questioners. But it would not be fair to consider this ignorance in
the class of people I am describing as confined especially to Zenith or
the Middle-West. Where in the world does it not exist?
A lesser fault was that there was no good general conversation. Indeed,
there was virtually no general conversation at all. Perhaps this was
because the men did not join in. There seemed, in fact, to be a strange
separation of men from women in Zenith. The attitude of the men toward
the women was delightful--easy, courteous without being deferential in
the obnoxious Southern fashion--and the women’s attitude toward the men
was equally pleasant. But men and women seemed to have nothing in
common. They often did things together, played golf or bridge or tennis
or even went on long canoe-trips, but they did not think together. They
did not even appear to be united by sex-attraction. One simply did not
feel, not ever, the haunting presence of that restless vivifying
emotion. Zenith was uncannily, horribly cool. How in the world, I kept
wondering, did babies get born here? Still, they did, and their mothers,
with quite inadequate help, looked after them admirably. For real
amusement the men liked to get off by themselves, have dinner, drink,
and play poker or bridge. They were continually giving small parties of
this sort in some private dining-room of the Zenith Club. At one which I
attended a discussion of wives arose, the model wife being esteemed the
one who cheerfully let her husband go out any or every evening. On this
same evening a mixed dinner-party was being given in the ladies’
dining-room of the club, and when it was over the young men of that
party drifted into our smaller room for a few minutes. They sniffed up
rather wistfully the doggy atmosphere that pervades a stag-party and
helped themselves to drinks from the bottles on the sideboard. ‘And
where are you going now?’ one of us inquired. ‘Up to Jim’s house to play
bridge.’ ‘Think of it!’ exclaimed my host pityingly, as the victims to
sex filed out. ‘They’re going to Jim’s house--to play bridge--with
women!’
This absence of sex-attraction in Zenith gatherings was only one
expression of a lack that in course of time seemed to me almost
insupportable--the lack of thrill. Everything was too quiet, too even,
too reasonable. Nobody seemed ever to feel or think anything
passionately. The key was low, pulled down, like the decoration of the
houses, which was usually in good taste but so very sober and
restrained. These people, I said to myself, must have some emotional
outlet; what is it?
Well, the young men, no doubt, found an outlet in business. For it must
be remembered that among all these men there was not one professional
idler. It was one of the accepted conventions that a man must work. Some
of them were idlers by nature and worked, I dare say, as little as
possible; most of them worked almost fiercely, though not during such
long hours as had the men of their fathers’ generation. And they drank
hard at their stag-parties. I heard of one or two disreputable
road-houses in the country near-by, so somewhere in Zenith
sex-attraction did exist, but it existed as something outside the magic
circle. So far as I was able to learn, very few of the young men I knew
frequented those places. Their outlet was not women; they seemed
strangely uninterested in women; they did not even talk about them at
the stag-parties.
But what of the women, the younger women, themselves? They appeared so
cool, so reasonable, so sure of themselves, and so gracious, that it
seemed an impertinence to be sorry for them. Nevertheless, I was sorry
for them--secretly. What outlet did they have? It is true that they had
their homes to manage and their children to bring up. But, even with at
best inadequate servants--hardly ever more than one, never more than
two--and at frequent intervals no servants at all, this took only a
small part of their time. Their homes were so well organized, and
possessed, too, every known mechanical labour-saving device, from vacuum
cleaners to electric stoves. What did these attractive young women do
with their spare time? Well, they read, of course, and they gave or
attended a great many teas, at which no man was ever present. That could
hardly be an emotional outlet. Music, perhaps, was a partial one. As I
have said, there was excellent music to be heard in Zenith. There were
two concert courses every winter, to which came really great
artists--Paderewski, Mischa Elman, famous string quartets, the Vatican
Choir. And to these concerts, I feel sure, these young women listened
with intelligence and emotion. (Their husbands sat through the concerts
patiently). But even so? Zenith is, after all, only a small city. There
may have been fifteen concerts in a season. What about the rest of the
time? A few young women played exceedingly well, themselves. That might
really be an outlet. But most did not play well enough to find
satisfaction in playing at all, knowing what they knew of great music.
They went in for golf and boating, and they danced a good deal,
too--well, but without the grace of abandon. To me, for all their
perfection and intelligence, they seemed only half alive.
They _were_ intelligent, more so than their husbands--or perhaps more
grown-up. And in a way they were well educated. They knew something
about, were interested in, a great many subjects to which their husbands
were indifferent--music, Russian dancing, Scandinavian literature,
social welfare work, civic improvement, and so forth and so forth. But
it is true that they did not know any one thing thoroughly, as their
husbands knew their business. Again, I think, that was because they did
not know any one thing passionately. ‘What can have been their outlet?’
I asked a woman--not in Zenith. ‘Virtue, perhaps,’ she replied. They
seemed sadly wasted, somehow, those delightful young women, and only
half alive.
I think, perhaps, that subconsciously they were afraid of coming alive.
They filled their days deliberately with pretty, well-ordered,
superficial activities. They made existence so pleasant and so full that
it disguised the absence of life. A proof of this seemed to appear in
their gregariousness. They clung together in everything. If they wanted
to study a period of history they did not do it in solitude; they
organized a club among themselves to study it. They organized a club or
a class or a group for everything. It was as though they huddled
together, for comfort--and in fear. Fear of what? Of their individual
selves, I fancy. Groups have only a factitious life; real life is in the
individual alone. And I think these young women were afraid of real
life. So they were, I suppose, failures. But there was something finer
in their failure than in their husbands’ narrow success. The young men
were aware of but one possible activity in life--business; and threw
themselves into it desperately. The young women were aware of a score,
and, held back by all the pleasant conventions among which they existed,
and, unlike their husbands, by a vague perception of dark troubled
depths in the individual soul, threw themselves into none.
But how charming they were, how candid and clear and--oh, decent! I
wonder if they would mind if they knew that, even while admiring, some
one had found them, and Zenith, a little pathetic.
DISILLUSIONMENT
We can hardly fail to perceive that we are living to-day in a period of
profound disillusionment. There is nothing strange about that. Every
great war has brought disillusionment in its wake. What is of interest
is to examine the nature of the disillusionment and estimate its
probable results.
In the first year or two after the Armistice it was a bitter and
passionate thing, almost as sharply felt among civilians as among the
returned soldiers. Life appeared barren and profitless, religion a
mockery, civilization a myth. The young cursed the old for creating such
a mess; the old, though not conscious of having deliberately created
anything of the sort, were broken-hearted at the spectacle of what some
one must have done--and who, then, if not they? Governments were a
mirthless laughing-stock. Moral laws were thrown overboard; for if all
that moral laws had resulted in was _this_, of what possible value were
they? Marriage all but went to smash in favour of a cheap promiscuity.
No one believed in anything, no one trusted any one else; life resolved
itself into three elemental desires--for food and drink, excitement and
the gratification of sex. With all of which unrestraint, there was far
less happiness in the world than before. People were ‘fed up’--‘fed up’
even in the midst of their most reckless adventures in gaiety.
This summary of the state of mind in the year of grace 1919 is, of
course, exaggerated, but such was undoubtedly the impression one
received in any country that had seen the worst of the war.
The reason for the impression and also the reason why it was only a
fractionally true impression was that the hubbub was being raised by the
articulate minority. As some one has already pointed out, a considerable
majority of the world’s inhabitants were not disillusioned by the war,
having had no illusions to shed. Life had been hostile to them; they had
always been forced to give a great deal to get a very little; they had
never had the slightest faith in governments or in human goodness;
knowing marriage stripped to its bare essentials, they had always seen
it as a fact like any other, never as something sacred and beautiful;
they had always been as promiscuous as possible; they had never had the
opportunity to dress life up and worship it. Times were either a little
harder now or maybe not quite so hard. There was no occasion for all
this fuss, though, naturally, they took advantage of it to get as much
more for themselves as they could.
No, it was the articulate minority that was upset. But this, though
distinctly a minority, is very large. It does not consist of any one
class in a rigid social sense, but simply of all the people for whom
existence is relatively easy. I do not mean the people who have no
worries, are never hard-up, never in danger of bankruptcy, nor even
altogether people who do not work with their hands; I mean those whose
daily life is not among the hard primitive facts, who have not suffered
actual griping hunger, whose mental existence follows some sort of
order, whose work is not the deadening physical labour of mines,
steel-plants or the most squalid factories, and whose homes, however
imperfect, offer something better than the horrible promiscuity of one
or two crowded rooms. This class, if you can call it such, sees life
altogether differently than the majority beneath sees it, and it is
almost solely from this class that come the interpreters of life--the
thinkers, the writers, the artists, the journalists. Also the two
classes never really touch. The minds of each are alien to the minds of
the other. There are to-day many individuals among the minority who are
trying to get at and understand the minds of the majority; but they
cannot, because the majority live among facts, they among ideas about
facts. The attempt is as impossible as for a painted figure to step down
from its picture and walk the earth--or vice versa, since I do not in
the least mean that ideas about facts are necessarily less real than the
facts themselves. In short, one half not only does not but cannot know
how the other half lives. This is so true that when sometimes, rarely, a
writer of genius, such as Gorki, has struggled up from that great,
incoherently muttering sea, the account he gives of life there is to us
of the minority, even while it moves us, as strange as though it were
indeed an account of life in another element.
It was this minority that was disillusioned by the war, and, frankly, I
think we deserved to be--though perhaps somewhat less rudely. Not
because we had ideas about life, but because we had _such_ ideas--so
smooth, so smug, so unrelated to the facts, so inconsistent with what,
if we had only looked honestly, we might have seen in ourselves. For
example, individually none of us was more than spasmodically happy, none
contented; cowardice alone or, at best, habit and lack of initiative
restrained each of us from committing the most dastardly acts;
selfishness lay at the bottom of our behaviour; honest introspection
would have revealed to any one of us a handful of impulsive good deeds
to show against a lifetime of petty greedy actions the motives for which
had been painstakingly disguised: yet, by and large, we believed, really
did believe, that the world was growing steadily better, that there was
more good than evil in human nature (by which, if we had been honest and
intelligent, each of us could only have meant in the nature of every one
save himself), that certain things (of which every one of us was
capable) simply were not done by decent people, and that, given the high
state of moral progress in the world, wars were unthinkable.
The shock of the awakening (which did not come at its fullest during the
war, when thought was suspended, but afterward) was tremendous and
painful. And the pain and anger were all the worse for being, even if we
recognized it but dimly, directed against ourselves. That was the secret
of the wretchedness, the disillusionment, that the reason for feeling
‘fed up.’ We blamed it on civilization or governments or God; at heart
we knew it was ourselves who were to blame. Beginning with the hurt
recognition that the world was not as we had pictured it, we went on
logically to the gloomier recognition that we were not what we had
fancied ourselves. This was inevitable. A man who distrusts the honesty
of others is a man who secretly does not believe in his own honesty; a
man who is afraid to leave his wife and his friend alone together is a
man with whom his friend’s wife would not be safe.
The disillusionment, then, was potentially salutary. Stripping men of
false ideas and ideals, it forced them to look into their own hearts.
Only potentially salutary, however. In its first results it was sheerly
destructive; and this, too, was logical. The great Chicago fire of 1871
was doubtless a good thing in that it wiped out a sordid and ugly city,
but the first reaction to it of the inhabitants must have been despair.
Despair, at any rate, was the prevailing emotion in the hearts of most
thinking members of the minority during the chaotic period that followed
the Armistice. All these centuries to work with, and we had
achieved--this!
But there are two very noble traits in men, or in the best of them: a
fundamental love of truth and a refusal to accept defeat. So presently
such men began to shake off despair and to look about them
clear-sightedly, like Noah and his companions after they had emerged
from the Ark. And their love of truth, burning more clearly now that the
lamp was less encrusted with illusions, showed them some very heartening
facts: that the thirty centuries of recorded human life were not as
barren a waste as all that; that always, as far back as eye could see,
even in the midst of war, pestilence and external chaos, some men had
laboured patiently, and for no other reward than the satisfaction of
their love of truth, to guard and, bee-like, add a few drops to the
small store of knowledge transmitted to them; that explorers had charted
the earth and its seas, and astronomers mapped the movements of the
stars; that to have worked up from nothing more than a few primitive
sounds to the indescribable beauty of a Mozart symphony was an
achievement beyond all praise. True, men were also beasts. Nothing could
justify this war or ever excuse it. It was unmitigatedly evil, a crime
without a reason, for which not one or two or a dozen, but all men, were
responsible. But there, too, was that other side of men, that grazed
divinity. All was not lost, though ten million human lives were.
Civilization, many said gravely, might come to an end. Sad, if true,
but, at bottom, what of it? It would only be one civilization. Another
would follow. For what goes on indestructibly is the steady soul of
man, loving truth and never defeated. So I conceive such men as
meditating for a little while before going back to their patient work.
These, whether they knew it or not, were themselves among the lonely
guarders of the flame. But others besides them, many others among the
rest of us, have profited by our disillusionment. Indeed, we have
profited more than they, since their lives had always a noble directive
never entirely obscured, ours none.
One thing that we have gained is the spirit of wholesome mockery for
grandiloquent twaddle. This bubbled up to us perhaps from that great
mass beneath, which has moments when it is not inarticulate. In Italy,
some time about the weary middle of the war, when, as always, generals,
politicians, journalists, and diplomats at banquets never opened their
mouths or lifted their pens save to speak or write of ‘the Cause of
Liberty, Justice and Civilization’ and all the rest of it, a ribald
soldiers’ song suddenly swept the country and set it rocking with tonic
mirth, though how the song got about so universally is a mystery, since
it could not be sung in public. It had many verses, all equally
scurrilous, but it will suffice to quote one, the best known:
_Il General Cadorna_
_Scrisse a la Regina:_
_‘Se vuol veder Trieste_
_Si compri una cartolina.’_
_Ah! Ah! Ah!_
_Ah! Ah! Ah!_
(_General Cadorna wrote to the Queen: ‘If you want to see Trieste, buy a
picture postcard.’ Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!_)
The music fitted the words outrageously, and the mocking insolence of
those six ‘Ah’s,’ each accented, at the end of every stanza, was
ineffable (_do, mi, re; si, re, do_). They were so utterly final--a
funeral march for rhetoric.