the war; now, since the war, it blows freely through the air and is one
of the healthiest results of disillusionment. It makes men read their
newspapers sceptically and glance back to see where a dispatch came from
before accepting it as truth; it causes them to look with an ironic eye
on politicians, governments, philanthropists, institutions of learning,
and all other institutions, on everything and every one professionally
noble; it supplies readers for such irreverent publications as the
_American Mercury_, and makes satirical novels, like _Babbitt_, actually
popular. It reveals the grosser forms of credulity as precisely that.
Held to be something dreadful, the Ku Klux Klan would wax in strength,
but people find it ridiculous; it is doomed. Even before the ‘Protocols’
were exposed as forgeries an amazingly large number of people were
unable to swallow them; they were too silly. The _Saturday Evening
Post_, the _Red Book_ and the others go on their tawdrily romantic way,
but I doubt extremely that the millions who read the stories they
contain accept these as anything save sheer senseless relaxation, since
the same millions read and take to their hearts the comic strips--_Mr.
and Mrs._, _The Gumps_, etc.--which are so sordid, so blowzy, so
disillusioned, in both drawing and captions, as to make _Babbitt_ appear
by comparison a lilting romance and Mr. H. L. Mencken a blood-brother of
Mr. Harold Bell Wright. In short, though it is still possible to ‘get
away with’ a good deal of nonsense, it is not possible, even in America,
the most sentimental nation under the sun, to ‘get away with’ anywhere
near as much as once upon a time.
But there is more behind all this than a mere spirit of sceptical
mockery; clean and salty as it is, that spirit is only a part of
something bigger. The truth is, I think, that people have grown up--part
way up, at least. The incredible childishness of a decade ago is gone--I
trust, forever. It is not only that we accept less than before, but that
we are more level-headed both in accepting and rejecting. A questioning
coolness is abroad. Perhaps we expect less of life; certainly we are
less enthusiastic over it. That crass optimism about everything, not
openly to share which used to make an American taboo, no longer soars
and screams. It still lives, but with a broken wing, fluttering clumsily
like a hen. A good thing! There was nothing noble in it. At bottom it
represented only a desire not to be troubled, and was popular for the
same reason that the man is popular who, in response to an inquiry as to
his health, grins and shouts: ‘Fine! Fine! Never better!’
What a load of sentimentality has gone overboard with our
illusions!--sentimental notions about happiness, about country, about
life, about love. That amazing convicton, for example, that the only
thing of real importance in a woman was her chastity. Overboard. Drowned
a mile deep, as it deserved to be for the cheap and insulting notion it
was. In its long day it must have righteously infuriated thousands of
women--possibly more those who happened to be chaste than those who
happened not to be. Its loss signifies not more accent on the
sex-relation, but less, helping to put the relation where it belongs, as
merely one of a number of facts. An immense step has been taken toward
an honester, decenter understanding between men and women. And a score
of other sentimental notions are gone, too, or tottering. The
visualizing of the United States as a benevolent disinterested Uncle
Sam, a bit homely, a bit awkward, but strong and infinitely kind, like
the hero of a Cape Cod melodrama; and of France as a Jeanne d’Arc in
glittering armour, eyes shining, face aglow, shedding her life-blood for
Liberty--hum ...! Mr. E. M. Forster has recently written a very
remarkable novel in which he punctures, dispassionately, but once for
all, the Kipling legend of the English in India as public school
demi-gods; yet in both England and America the book has sold by tens of
thousands and met with almost unanimous praise.
Quite possibly a little that was fine and true has gone overboard with
the rubbish, but most of the destruction was salutary. And it has
served, it seems to me, to bring those two classes, the dumb majority
and the articulate minority, closer together than ever before. In a
sense it is not a real closeness; for, as I have said, the two can never
touch, one living among facts, the other in a picture of facts. But at
least the picture now bears some relation to the facts, is by way of
becoming what it must become to be of any value--an interpretation of
them. This, surely, is something to the credit of our disillusioned
period.
It is a puzzling period to study, and would still be so, I think, even
were we not in the midst of it. It questions everything, all once
accepted premises. Yet it is not like other great periods of change--the
Reformation or the Romantic Revival, for instance. They were, in one way
or another, periods of revolution, when men brushed aside the past, sure
that they had found something better--sure because they felt young and
fresh. The present period is not young and fresh; it is very, very
tired. And so, despite the obvious and extensive social changes that it
has already witnessed, it is not in spirit revolutionary. It questions
everything--governments, nationality, economics, religion, human nature,
life itself--but it is not young enough or fresh enough to discard
recklessly. People question and wonder, yet vote overwhelmingly for the
Republicans in America and the Conservatives in England.
Phenomena such as these and others more distressing are frequently
cited as evidence that ours is a period of discouraging reaction. I do
not agree. The bitter intolerance displayed by such movements as
Fascismo--or, for that matter, Fundamentalism--is, to my thinking, a
good sign, rather than a bad. It means that violent intolerance is
to-day forced back where it belongs--to the outskirts, to the extreme
Right or the extreme Left. It is violent and domineering because it
dares not be otherwise; it represents only an inconsiderable fraction of
the whole, and is afraid. At the moment when I write this, Fascismo
still governs Italy, but it has against it probably eighty per cent. of
the population, and governs by force alone, suppressing its most
dangerous enemies, muzzling the press, forbidding political gatherings,
dissolving societies, outraging the constitutional rights of
individuals. Such tyranny signifies fear--fear based on the certain
knowledge of the Fascisti that they and their policies do not represent
the country.
Yet people have not risen up _en masse_ and turned them out. No, and
this, too, is characteristic of the period. It lacks the ardent juvenile
faith in Utopias essential to drive multitudes to action. Instead,
people ask coolly: ‘What have you got, to put in place of what we so
unsatisfactorily have?’ But it is also a rather mature, almost wise
period, saying: ‘Let the Fascisti rave. Whom the Gods would destroy....’
The Republicans and the Conservatives must watch their step closely. In
neither case was the large majority obtained a loving endorsement. A
tired period but an extremely clear-eyed one, as periods go, with less
belief than usual in miraculous panaceas, but with still less in all
things being for the best. It is not a romantic period, though it is
full of superficially romantic events; there is no youth in it and small
enthusiasm. But it is a period out of which more of permanent value may
come than if it were.
SOPHISTICATION
My text is from Michael Arlen’s _The Green Hat_ (iv. i. 116) and from
Ford Madox Ford’s _Some Do Not ..._ (II. i. 196; ii. i. 215).
_Lady Pynte liked young men to be Healthy and Normal; Mrs. Ammon
preferred them to be Original. Lady Pynte liked Boys to be Boys;
Mrs. Ammon didn’t mind if they were girls so long as they were
Original. Lady Pynte insisted on Working For the Welfare of the
People at Large and Not just for Our Own Little Class, she played
bridge with a bantering tongue and a Borgia heart, she maintained
that the best place to buy shoes was Fortnum and Mason’s, and if
she saw you innocently taking the air of a sunny morning she would
say: ‘You are not looking at all well, my good young man. Why don’t
you take some Clean, Healthy exercise? You ought to be Riding.’
That was why one maintained a defensive alliance with one’s haddock
rather than do the manly thing and dance with Lady Pynte. She would
say one ought to be riding, and for four years I had hidden from
Lady Pynte the fact that I did not know how to ride. I simply did
not dare to confess to Lady Pynte that I could not ride. I had
already tried to pave the way to that dénouement by confessing that
I came from the lower classes, but she did not appear to think that
any class could be so Low as that._
* * * * *
_Being near Tietjens she lifted her plate, which contained two cold
cutlets in aspic and several leaves of salad; she wavered a little
to one side and, with a circular motion of her hand, let the whole
contents fly at Tietjens’ head. She placed the plate on the table
and drifted slowly towards the immense mirror over the fireplace._
_‘I’m bored,’ she said. ‘Bored! Bored!’_
* * * * *
_‘If,’ Sylvia went on with her denunciation, ‘you had once in our
lives said to me: “You whore! You bitch! You killed my mother. May
you rot in hell for it” ... you might have done something to bring
us together.’_
_Tietjens said:_
_‘That’s, of course, true.’_
And my subject is--what else with such a text?--Sophistication.
Not sophistication in the original unencrusted meaning of the word, but
in the overlaid current understanding of it--an emotional rather than an
intellectual condition. It is a condition very hard to define, since it
is emotional, yet sufficiently easy to recognize--and admire. To be
sophisticated you must be _blasé_; you must be witty; you must not take
anything, especially vice, very hard; you must be gay and casual about
problems that unsophisticated people are earnest about, though you may
(here you are reaching rarefied heights of sophistication) be as earnest
as you like about things that average people consider trivial. You must
show familiarity with the world of High Society, but also amused
disdain for it; you must know, and prove that you know, everything about
ordering a dinner in such places as Ciro’s (Monte Carlo), the Ritz
(Paris), and the Café de Paris (Biarritz). You should also be able to
let fall--now and then, very carelessly, merely because you cannot at
the moment think of the English word--a French or an Italian or even a
German word or phrase; but it is not excessively important that you
should do this correctly or even appropriately; the effect will be the
same anyway. Among contemporary writers Carl Van Vechten and Ronald
Firbank are sophisticated; and so is Michael Arlen, and so is Ford Madox
Ford (_né_ Hueffer).
There is one small drawback to sophistication: it is impossible without
an audience. One cannot pleasurably, perhaps not possibly, be
sophisticated all alone by oneself. One cannot think of a man getting
into an unshared bed as sophisticated--I mean to say, of course, after
his valet has left him. Fiction is full of people marooned on desert
islands; but only one writer, M. Jean Giraudoux, has ever thought of
thus marooning a sophisticated character. It was a delicious and
fantastic idea, which made _Suzanne et le Pacifique_ an irresistibly
funny book.
This disadvantage, however, is not grave, since sophisticated people are
rarely alone, even at night, and in public are sure of an admiring
audience. We all admire sophistication in real life, and we admire it
still more in novels. This is partly because it is never quite so
perfect and finished in the former as in the latter, but chiefly because
there is a touch of envy in our admiration for sophistication in life,
whereas we share flatteringly in that displayed in a novel. We, too,
love Iris Storm fastidiously and consider Sylvia Tietjens’ complicated
vices with tolerant weariness. We, too, are of the _haut monde_ and are
very offhand about it. We, too, have lived very, very hard and exhausted
everything and have come to look with a mellow amusement on all
intensities. It is delightful.
Unluckily for me, I do not know any sophisticated people in real life. I
have jealously seen them about, in restaurants and places, but I do not
know them--or perhaps I should say that they do not know me. But I know
sophistication in novels, none better. The sophisticated novelist must
be very sophisticated indeed to satisfy my fine trained taste. Any
momentary lapse into ingenuousness, and I am on him like a wolf. Thus,
among the writers I have mentioned, and among others whom I have not, I
salute most especially Mr. Michael Arlen; and this because, more
perfectly than the others, he knows how a sophisticated novel should be
written: to wit, in a _baroque_ and decorative prose. Mr. Firbank and
Mr. Van Vechten may also know this; but they lag far behind Mr. Arlen in
turning their knowledge into achievement. They do not discover such
felicities as: ‘ ... and over the breast of her dark dress five small
red elephants were marching towards an unknown destination’; or, ‘The
stormy brittle sunlight, eager to play with the pearls and diamonds of
Van Cleef, Lacloche and Cartier, aye, and of Tecla also, chided away the
fat white clouds, and now the sun would play with one window of the Rue
de la Paix, now with another, mortifying one, teasing another, but all
in a very handsome way.’ There you have the authentic manner for
sophisticated prose.
The reason why the authentic manner is _baroque_, even _rococo_, heavily
encrusted with ornament, is a melancholy reason. (‘That was a gloomy
reason,’ Mr. Arlen would say). It is that there is a certain lack of
body in sophistication. To eschew the passions--or perhaps not to eschew
them, but to smile at them--to be polished, suave and unobtrusively
superior, is delightful, but limits one a bit. Emerson’s assertion that
the exclusive man excludes no one but himself is doubtless an
exaggeration; but it is certainly true that the exclusive man does also
exclude himself. The technique of sophistication in literature is even
more exacting than the technique of the drama. Let no one fancy it easy
to write sophisticatedly. It is extremely difficult. A considerable
proportion of the writers in two continents is attempting it; yet one
can count the successes on the fingers of two hands. There is no
mistaking the genuine article in sophistication, for the very simple
reason that the false is always ludicrous, sometimes violently so,
sometimes faintly. English, French and American bookshops, and once a
week the _Saturday Evening Post_, are half full of hilarious attempts at
sophistication. It would be a mistake to deplore them; they add to the
gaiety of nations. If you care for clear laughter with no malice beneath
it, and must give up one book or the other, which would you sacrifice,
_Alice in Wonderland_ or _The Rosary_?
Sophistication in literature, then, as (I presume) sophistication in
real life, is immensely difficult of attainment; it demands a special
skillful technique, a wary sense of humour and a narrow selection of
material. Therefore, as I have already suggested, its manner becomes of
great importance. To avoid a lurking sense of impoverishment you must be
provided with decorative flowers to pluck by the wayside. The
luxuriously appointed cruise around the world on the _Arabic_ (22,000
tons) is not enough; you need those side-excursions to Capri, the
Balearic Islands and the foot-hills of Java. Once again I salute Mr.
Michael Arlen. His is _the_ manner. One can be sophisticated without
it--Mr. Ford is, and M. Paul Morand--but how much better to have it!
Let us turn now to the two novels from which I have taken, almost at
random, my text. The novels themselves I selected with considerable
care; for, while their sophisticated qualities of course overlap, there
are certain examples of sophistication in _The Green Hat_ that are
wanting in _Some Do Not ..._ and a few in the latter book that one will
not find in the former. Moreover, the two books are done in very
different manners.
What, except any one of a score of others from the same book, could give
a more admirable condensed example of sophistication than the passage I
have quoted from _The Green Hat_? The narrator introduces you to two
ladies--for no reason at all except your amusement and his own. One lady
has a title, the other has not. Excellent! He--I have to call him ‘he’
because I do not remember that his name is once mentioned in the
book--pokes good-humoured fun at both, but more especially at the one
with a title, and then goes on innocently (_innocently!_) to reveal the
fact that he comes from the lower classes and does not know how to ride.
You will go far to find a rarer expression of sophistication. For--do
you not see?--the narrator, at his ease in the homes of the great, is
smiling at class, is actually smiling at riding. This is, by consummate
inversion, raising snobbishness to a fine art. And all in such high
spirits.
You do not get the high spirits in the two passages I have quoted from a
rather long marital conversation in _Some Do Not ..._ (you will look for
them in vain in that novel); but you are given a very pretty example of
sophistication nevertheless. Sylvia Tietjens is of a most awfully good
family, and her husband of an even better one. People in society are
not, by plebeians, supposed to throw things at one another. Sylvia does
throw something--a plate of food--at her husband. Good! Moreover, it
hits him. But observe! He does not upset the dining-room table and hit
her back. He remains perfectly calm. And as for Sylvia, she drifts
slowly towards the enormous mirror over the fireplace (good touch,
that!) and remarks that she is bored! bored! Here, too, you are high in
the scale of sophistication. For it is obvious that to commit a breach
of manners, to do something that simply is not done, and then only to
feel bored, is far more sophisticated than to break one of the ten
commandments, usually the seventh, in the same spirit. Also I call your
attention in passing to the contents of the plate that Sylvia threw--two
cold cutlets in aspic and a few leaves of salad. At once elegant and
efficient.
The second passage, too, is admirable. The words ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ are
not popularly supposed to be addressed by a gentleman to his wife; nor
is the wish that she may rot in hell. Yet when Sylvia suggests to her
husband that, to ensure their mutual happiness, he ought to have
addressed her in this manner, he says reasonably: ‘That’s, of course,
true.’ Which is all the more to his credit in that for twenty pages his
uniform has been dripping with oil from the salad that hit his shoulder.
Here, too, you perceive, you get inversion. These characters outrage,
and thereby show themselves above, the conventions. They always react to
stimuli in the opposite way from which average people react. They are
violent when we should expect them to be well-bred, and serene when we
expect them to be violent. Another example: to ingenuous people the
disease called syphilis is a shameful thing, to be considered with
horror and never to be mentioned aloud; to average people it is an
aesthetically disgusting malady and therefore not an available subject
for conversation. But the characters in sophisticated novels talk about
syphilis as carelessly as though they were talking of a family-tree.
But is there not in this, you may by now inquire, just a little
monotony? Once the trick is apparent, is it not almost as wearisome to
watch a man invariably do the unexpected thing as to watch him do the
expected? There is. Oh, it is! It is more wearisome. Because when the
expected thing is done for any reason more emotional than mere habit it
is significant of something other than individual dullness; it has roots
that penetrate down into the dark earthy past of a whole race. Whereas
to do invariably the unexpected thing, in order to show oneself superior
and startle an audience, is significant of nothing at all; beneath such
behaviour is emptiness.
Emptiness, indeed, yawns beneath the literature of sophistication. There
is no probing of truth below the glitter. There cannot be, since the
glitter is achieved through a superior disregard for truth. One would
not mind this if the literature of sophistication set out only to be
elegant amusing nonsense. (And I ought, in justice, to say here that if
Mr. Ronald Firbank were somewhat more amusing, his contribution to such
literature might fulfil that requirement). But too often it pretends to
be investigating truth. And this pretence, even though in some cases it
signify only a crowning sophisticated inversion, is impertinent and
annoying.
_The Green Hat_ lies open before me at the page of press comments which
the publisher has seen fit to append. I read: ‘_The Green Hat_ is the
novel of the year.’ ... ‘The most memorable novel I have read during the
past year.’ ... ‘I call it the finest novel of the last five years.’ ...
‘Heavens! what a lot that man knows about men and women--especially
women.’
If after this broadside one feels slightly giddy one should not hold it
against Mr. Arlen, who of course is not responsible and who distinctly
calls _The Green Hat_ a romance; but one would have thought that even
reviewers might have had a little more insight than this into what they
had pleasurably read.
For, leaving on one side the delightful manner of the book, consider the
material of which it is cleverly built. What and whom have we got here?
The identical material of those interminable melodramas which the French
(probably in an impotent attack on the tyrants of their national life)
call ‘literature for concierges,’ and which in England was dear to the
hearts of Ouida’s public. A glossy world of high society; some one (just
as in _Under Two Flags_, and in how many other long-forgotten romances)
assuming, for quite inadequate reasons, some one else’s sin and
suffering bravely as an outcast until a third person blurts out the
truth (the original touch being that in _The Green Hat_ the victim is
the heroine instead of the hero, that she suffers from a husband’s
syphilis instead of from a brother’s embezzlement, and that she dies at
the end of the book); the cruel father separating youthful lovers who
never, never forget one another (though, for the sake of modernity,
during their separation the heroine, not the hero, leads a scandalous
life--which, mind you, is never described, since its reality would have
been squalid) and come together at last, when, in a final triumphant
burst of renunciation, the heroine surrenders her lover to his wife and
commits suicide. Sheer melodrama, as false, as quite properly false, as
_Scènes de la Vie de Bohème_ or _Scaramouche_--precisely that sort of
thing, in fact. And the characters: can you _see_ Hilary, or Guy, or
Napier, or Venice? Have they three dimensions? Can you walk around them?
Of course not. You’re not (I give Mr. Arlen credit for intending)
supposed to be able to. And Iris, the radiant, the well-beloved, what is
Iris? What but a very young man’s dream of a woman--experience plus
innocence, a prostitute with the soul of a virgin? Go back a generation
and you will find her in Mr. Le Gallienne’s _The Quest of the Golden
Girl_.
Well and good. I have no objection to any of this. I enjoyed the book
immensely. But, please, let us not take it for something else than it
is.
I know almost nothing about Mr. Arlen, I have never even seen his
photograph; yet I feel a pleasant personal liking for him. He provided
me with an amusing book couched in a delightful style; and I do not for
a moment believe that he himself takes it more earnestly than I do or
considers it anything other than an agreeably up-to-date fairy-tale. If
I have pointed out that the material of which it is constructed appears
to me melodrama, not drama, sentimentality, not sentiment, artifice, not
life, it is only because I wished to express my opinion that this is
true of all the literature of sophistication, which--not here, but
elsewhere--frequently presents itself as something more significant.
A reading of _Some Do Not ..._ does not leave me with a similar
affection for its author. I cannot escape the feeling that Mr. Ford
takes that book hard! hard! and that in it he set out to write a
masterpiece.
To begin with, there is the style. We have often been told that Mr. Ford
is a master of style; and so, in truth, he is. But of what use is style
all alone by itself? The style of _Some Do Not ..._ is the grand style,
simple, sonorous, purged of affectation, well suited to such a novel as
_War and Peace_; but it is not the right style for _Some Do Not_....
Indeed, in my opinion, no style is the right style for that novel. _Some
Do Not ..._ has for me all the defects of the literature of
sophistication, with none of its virtues. It is false and pretends to be
true; it is artificial without being witty; it is romance without
glamour; it is essentially literary; it is without any more sense of
humour than that required to keep it from becoming ridiculous; it has
not a touch of spontaneity; it is as dreary as it is well done.