as I can see, save the satisfaction (at moments not of her choosing) of
_her_ sexual desires. Surely it cannot be for this alone that women
marry. That would be like buying a whole house for the sake of one
picture in it. In fact, in this matter women have, potentially, an
immense advantage over men. Men, the childish dreamers, will (everywhere
save in pure America) follow unknown attractive women about the streets
of a city for hours, murmuring compliments from time to time, hoping
against hope for some response. It is pathetic. But think of the field
that would be open to women if they chose to behave in this manner! Even
venal professionals are not without some success. The entire male sex
would be at the service of a really ‘nice’ woman; for who ever heard of
a man rejecting any woman’s advances, however indifferent he might be to
her? His vanity would not let him. A man can have only an inconsiderable
fraction of the women he desires; a woman could have any or all of the
men who pleased her--and with the minimum of effort. She could select a
lover at just the moment when she desired a lover. Equally, if she
desired a child she could select a promising father for the child, and,
supposing the combination not to work out so well as she hoped, could
next time select another. True, at present such behaviour might be
looked at askance by the most meticulous; but women could alter this
attitude to a sensible one at any time they pleased.
Instead, they elect to marry. Oscar Wilde was wrong to call ‘woman’ ‘a
sphinx without a secret.’ Women have their secret, and this is it.
_Ministering Angels._
Well, marry they do and will probably continue to do despite my advice.
It offers a field for useless but entertaining conjecture. Do they marry
because they like to try everything? Or because they are sorry for men?
Or because it requires more energy to repel a man’s repeated advances
than is worth devoting to anything, either good or bad? At any rate, one
thing is certain: unless they marry very, very young, it can hardly be
because they expect much of marriage. They cannot fail to know that they
must give a great deal and receive very little.
What they do give is amazing. It makes me feel almost as reverently
toward them as Charles Dickens in his emotional moments. They are so
very kind to men. They habitually smooth out all those difficulties,
such as servant troubles, baby troubles, household difficulties,
difficulties of the kitchen, which men fatuously call ‘the little
problems of existence,’ not seeing that they are gigantic as compared
with their own meagre business troubles. They are extraordinarily gentle
with their husbands in illness or even in fancied illness, rarely
showing any resentment at the impatience with which _they_ were treated
when _they_ were ill. They put up with a turbulence, grossness and lack
of all sense of what is seemly, that outrages their fastidiousness; they
put up with men’s bragging, with men’s vanity, with their ridiculous
assumption of gravity and importance (precisely like that of children
dressed up in their parents’ clothes). In company they listen to their
husbands relate the same, same, same jokes, and, instead of shrieking,
smile, as though that were the first time they, too, had heard those
jokes. They cajole and caress men out of infantile bad tempers, the
logical cure for which would be a spanking. Themselves liking to eat
little and delicately, they allow--nay, assist--men to eat much and
grossly, and they watch the creatures’ mood change, in the process, from
irascibility to mellow tenderness, and merely smile pleasantly, with
scarcely perceptible irony. Have I really said that they are not
artists? They are consummate artists to endeavour to work in such a
hostile medium, to work with such material. But, no, they are not
artists; for they do not do anything with the material, not really, not
anything permanent. Still, that is not their fault, either. No one
could, not even God.
Ah, well, it is not possible that women endure all this, do all this
(both so unnecessarily), out of altruism, sheer self-sacrifice. Earth is
not heaven. They must have some obscure, if probably simple, reason. In
the meantime men flourish and grow fat.
LEGEND
Under the influence of that gentle optimism which once upon a time
suffused the world with a warm twilight glow, I used to believe that in
the very long run truth would out, and that accordingly history was an
exact science. Conceding cheerfully that a veracious history of our own
period or of other periods close behind it was impossible, I yet took it
for granted that, given time enough, falsehoods and misconceptions would
be weeded out and documented objective truth established. This
condition, I assumed, had already been perfectly achieved in the history
of the various western nations up to about the period of the French
Revolution, which still lay in a sort of gradually clearing penumbra.
Now that the attractive twilight glow has given place to a bleak grey
light (whether or not of dawn I have no idea, but, if so, of a
singularly unpleasant November dawn), I have begun to question, among
other things, that comfortable belief. And, questioned, it seems to me
to reveal at once certain lacunae and incongruities that make it appear
extremely dubious and lead me to wonder that I ever accepted it so
unthinkingly.
For example, while, judging from the past, anything like a definitive
history of the late war will probably not be written for two hundred
years or so, from tendencies apparent even to-day it is already possible
to predict that such a history will deal with the struggle coolly as the
result of clear-cut national rivalries, largely economic. Thus history
has explained earlier wars, and thus it is, as yet gropingly, preparing
to explain this one.
Now any man who at maturity lived through the period from 1914 to 1918
must be aware that such an explanation, however fully documented, will
not be a complete and truthful explanation of the war. In retrospect the
war will seem, from its results, to have been an inevitable, coldly
logical affair; but the fact remains that it was not that, as we who
witnessed it know. To begin with, many hundreds of thousands of young
men went willingly into the war, though aware that they were going to
almost certain death. That is simply not done in behalf of an economic
conflict. A considerable proportion of those young men went to war
because they believed with all their heart that they were to fight for
an ideal. That final history will doubtless ignore their emotional
attitude. To-day, when it is not yet possible to ignore the attitude,
the tendency among interpreters of the war is to discount it as of no
importance, to brush all these dead thousands aside as deluded--mere
tools of the real forces that brought on the war. But unless one is to
adopt the absurd belief that economic laws, nationalistic rivalries and
so forth, are objective things with a life of their own, instead of what
they obviously are--expressions of the minds of men assembled in groups,
it is clear that if these thousands of young men were deluded they must
have been deluded by some person or group of persons.
But if one thing should be apparent by now to any one who lived through
those four trying years, it is that the war had no villain or villains
responsible for it. There were, indeed, fierce economic and other
rivalries between the groups of men called nations, but no one,
literally no one, intended or devised that catastrophe. The peoples
blundered into war. It was a vast, senseless, chaotic mêlée. History
may, and doubtless will, write it down as something clear and logical;
in truth it was neither one nor the other. People rather fortuitously
but none the less rigidly assembled in groups were at odds with people
assembled in other similar groups, about trade, world markets, the
congestion of population, and the like; but they were far less clearly
so than history is going to give them credit for being, and their being
so was only half the story. The other half was emotion. Neither, given
the bewilderment over the war, when it came, of positively every one
save the regular army officer (whose mind, if you can call it that, is
not subject to bewilderment), can I believe that within each
comprehensive national group smaller groups of people pulled strings
and, callously exploiting the majority, deliberately brought on the war
for their own advantage. The result may prove to be the same as though
they had done that, but they simply did not. They were as bewildered and
upset and emotional as the others. History, I begin to perceive, cares
really only for results--with, perhaps, neat, post-factum causes; and
that is why I grow sceptical of it, since a result without its
causes--all of them--is not truth and lacks significance.
Presumably, then (still judging by the past), what we are going to have
a couple of centuries hence is a cold, neat, logical, definitive history
of the World War, with, running along beside it, a body of literature
patriotically chronicling, exalting and deforming its episodes of
heroism. And never the twain shall meet, any more than East and West,
Highbrow and Lowbrow, mind and matter. And which of the two will be the
falser it is hard to say. The former will not explain truly why people
made the war, and the latter will _not_ tell what they truly felt. Each
will fail even in its own chosen province. A novel like _War and Peace_
may be written that will come amazingly close to the real truth, but the
historians will sniff at it because some of its facts are inaccurate and
because it is a novel, and the addicts of the patriotic literature will
detest and condemn it because it does not picture their ancestors as
heroes, but as bewildered mediocre individuals like themselves.
It is only of late that I have begun to distrust history, but this
patriotic literature I have, ever since I was old enough to think,
disliked and found depressing. Depressing because it is so sweet,
wide-eyed and simple, giving always somehow the effect of being written
in words of one syllable; because it attributes to the men whose deeds
it recounts the minds of children--not real children, at that; and
because it would reduce the obscurely motivated happenings of this rich,
confused, infinitely interesting world to the insipid level of a
Sunday-School story or a play by Schiller. However, it is not very
important. Despite its use of real names, people can hardly accept it as
real--that is, as in any way related to their own lives. And I should
not have devoted even a paragraph to it but for one thing that it does,
from which comes its only strength and in which lies its only danger.
This is: to attempt to exploit legend.
A legend, like a gigantic shadow with blurred edges, forms about every
man who has been of great importance in his day. For that matter, a
legend forms about every significant period in history, too. There is a
Greek legend and an Italian Renaissance legend, just as there is a
Socrates legend and a Leonardo legend. But the personal legend is the
less vague and the more important. When a man’s influence on his fellows
is impressive, and often when it is not, a legend grows up about him,
even during his lifetime. There was certainly a Roosevelt legend long
before Roosevelt’s death, and there is already a Coolidge legend to-day.
For the most part these legends eventually fade, flicker and go out
(there was even a Blaine legend once upon a time), but when a man’s
existence has modified that of millions and left an impress on events,
his legend grows and solidifies, rather than diminishes, as the years
pass. Until finally it becomes so strong that it alone has life; you
cannot possibly get at the vanished individual for the impenetrable
legend surrounding his memory.
‘Surrounding his memory’ is perfectly accurate; for the legend is not
equivalent to the memory. It is, indeed, something quite different, as
some of those who knew the dead hero intimately often struggle in vain
to show us. Yet in their struggle there is a kind of perplexity; even
these intimates become submerged by the legend, and get it all mixed up
with their personal memories, so strong it is. The best example of which
is to be found in the reminiscences of old men who actually knew
Lincoln, since rarely about any one so recently dead has a permanent
legend formed so compactly. It is as impossible to know what Lincoln
truly was as to know what Washington or Napoleon was. No amount of newly
unearthed documents can alter the legend or shake it.
For this is the strength of legend: that it is not thought, but feeling.
When I know a man well I do not think of him as having dark hair, a
straight nose, rather small eyes, and a stoop. His presence or the
mention of his name produces in me a certain sensation that, so far as I
am concerned, _is_ the man. My like or dislike for him, my opinion of
his character, may be affected by what others tell me about him; but
that sensation nothing can alter. It is of precisely the same kind as
the sensation given me by a certain odour or a certain melody. It is
unmistakable.
Something like this, legend gives. One says Lincoln, and a feeling, a
sensation, springs up in the mind.
This emotion, this legend, the patriotic Sunday-Schoolish brand of
literature attempts to exploit, and history attempts to ignore.
The former effort is, I have suggested, not without danger. (To what?
Oh, I suppose, to truth, to sanity of mind). It would employ a strong,
universally felt emotion for the purposes of a chronicle as falsely
innocent as a fairy-tale. One might compare the effect of such
exploitation to that of a moving-picture in colours. The colour values
are all wrong, not thus do grass and a red gown look in sunlight; but
there the grass actually is, waving, and through it in her false red
gown actually walks the heroine. It is confusing. Even so, I do not
think the danger very serious for any one with enough of a mind to be
worth saving. The point of all this twaddle, plausible as the stuff may
at first appear, is too naïve, too utterly unlike any conceivable
expression of the reader’s own psychology.
The deliberate and persistent attempt of history to ignore legend is
another and graver matter.
That the attempt should be made is perhaps natural. Legend is pure
feeling, and historians distrust feeling, noting contemptuously how
unfounded it usually is and how wide of the mark its conclusions more
often than not appear to them, whose business it is to examine facts.
Also, their minds being trained to weigh and measure, they are not
interested in anything that cannot be weighed and measured.
All the same, they are wrong. Whether or not legend is something we
should be better without, it exists. You cannot ignore something that
is. And legend exists as solidly as the Battle of Waterloo. You cannot
get through it or around it or behind it, and therefore you cannot
dismiss it.
I admit that if I were an historian I should probably want to. Not only
should I be disdainful (as I am, even without being an historian) of the
tawdry foundationless legends spawning all about me, with their cheap
slogans (‘Keep Cool with Cal!’), and apt to forget that the death-rate
among legends is higher than that among Jews in Poland, but I should
feel despairingly that to let oneself in for legend, to concede the
necessity of considering feeling, would make the writing of history an
enterprise too gigantic to be possible; and so, very likely, it is.
Nevertheless, history written, as it is, without knowledge and due
consideration of emotion begins to appear to me a colossal falsehood.
Men’s acts are three-fourths the product of emotions, and, no matter how
false the emotions may have been, without intimate acquaintance with
them you cannot rightly understand men’s behaviour. As for dismissing
legend, the attempt would be insolent if it were not so hopeless.
Legend has swayed more minds than has fact. Indeed, half the time it is
legend that produces facts. The Napoleonic legend has had a hundred
times more effect in shaping actual events than ever, for all his
greatness, had Napoleon himself (who, moreover, exploited his own legend
consummately). Dismiss it? ‘Wake Duncan with thy knocking!’
How legends arise would be a curious and fascinating study, very far
from being so simple as one may at first fancy, with his attention
focussed on the standardization of thought achieved by the daily press;
for legends sprang up equally, and endured, long before printing was
invented. But this is a side issue that the unfortunate historian may
leave to some one else. Legend itself, once it is firmly established, he
has no right to disregard. It is too important--I mean, actually
important in its practical results.
To get an idea of _how_ important, observe what happens when a legend
blows up. A perfect example of that phenomenon occurred not long since.
With the discovery of the semi-official murder of Matteotti in Rome, and
the revelations that followed, the Mussolini legend exploded and was
gone, utterly. It had to go. Either Signor Mussolini was himself among
the criminals or he was helpless against the machinations of a corrupt
and evil clique. In either case, the legend of the ‘Duce,’ the
super-man, the benevolent tyrant, wisely, righteously and firmly
governing Italy for her own good, became untenable. There remained only
Mussolini, the man. And, with the collapse of that legend, the whole
strength, other than physical, of Fascismo evaporated. Yet it was only a
silly little legend that, even left undisturbed, could not have lasted
fifteen years.
In the last sentence you may discover an indication that, for my part, I
distinguish between the value of ephemeral legends and that of legends
which endure. So, in truth, I do. If the Mussolini legend and the
Coolidge legend appear to me absurd aberrations that we should have been
better without, tried and established legends, like the Lincoln or the
Washington legend, seem to me of great value; I am not at all upset by
the impossibility of getting through or behind them. They are, I fancy,
of more importance than the men about whom they grew up. Not Lincoln
himself, but that glowing Lincoln legend, sways multitudes, and sets,
above all the cheap facts of actual politics, a standard of what, at his
best, a President of the United States may and should be. There really
is, incongruously and almost incredibly, a rough fundamental idealism
displayed by a good many men in American public life, and, better,
demanded of them by the mass of American citizens, that is largely due
to the solid permanence of that legend. Not for anything would I see the
legend vanish; which is fortunate, since it never will.
If I am right in this, that in the long run it is not a man but his
legend that affects events and the natures of other men for good or
evil, then it is of no importance that we cannot penetrate through it to
the man himself and learn whether or not his legend falsifies his
character. Nevertheless, the problem is a fascinating one, partly
because it is insoluble, but chiefly, I fancy, because hidden in its
depths lies that eternal question: ‘What is truth?’
My own undocumented theory is that an enduring legend does not falsify
the individual about whom it has formed. When a man falls in love with a
woman he has an exalted perception of her as something rare and
wonderful, yet perfectly definite, concrete, individual. From no one
else could he receive that particular sensation. When he was in love
before, he received one, equally sharp, from another woman; but it was
not this sensation. If it were, I should agree with those who consider
the poor creature merely deluded. Since it is not, I am inclined to
believe that he has obtained a fleeting glimpse of truth. Not the
average daily truth about the person worshipped, but an unrealized and
unrealizable yet more significant truth--a vision of what that person
might become at her best and truest. Presently the emotion fades and is
gone, either utterly or to return but faintly for an instant now and
then, ever so rarely; but it was surely, in its moment, too sharp and
clear a fact to have been without significance. It was actually, I
fancy, a sort of intensification of the personality glimpsed, together
with a stripping away of everything unessential.
A somewhat similar intensification and stripping away it is at least
possible that legend, an enduring legend, gives. Seizing on the
individual’s essentially personal dreams, evil or good, divined beneath
a few of his inadequate acts, and exaggerating, or perhaps only
intensifying, them, legend gives us these as the man. Probably that was
not the way the individual appeared to himself. Probably no other
individual ever saw him like that, unless, for a moment, his passionate
lover or his passionate enemy. Yet that, says legend confidently, is
what he was.
TRUTH AND FICTION IN ITALY
There is in most contemporary Italian fiction a limpness, flaccidity--I
hardly know what to call it--which at its least offensive expresses a
feeble despair, and at its worst becomes a whine. It is not the
expression of a rugged pessimism; there is nothing rugged about it.
Rather, it reveals a lack of vitality, a thin-bloodedness, the spirit
one is accustomed to think of as ‘womanish,’ though, as a matter of
fact, the women writers of Italy appear less guilty in this respect than
the men. Grazia Deledda and even Annie Vivanti show more virility than
most of their confrères, and there is gusto in the slap-stick prose of
Matilde Serao, despite its appalling sentimentality. But Marino Moretti,
a fine and sensitive writer, is only too clear an exponent of the fault,
Panzini himself often succumbs to it, and even the late Federico Tozzi,
cut off by early death from what promised to be real achievement, was
far from guiltless.
Clear as the fault appears to me, and arousing, as it does, an
exasperated distaste, it is difficult for me to make it clear to any one
else. This is because it is at bottom the result of an attitude of mind,
a conventionally accepted attitude of mind, rather than anything more
definite. It is easy to lay an accusing finger on the concomitants, the
specifically annoying tricks and habits that go with it (more obviously,
of course, in third-rate writers, such as Teresah or Luciano Zuccoli):
the tender mournful contemplation of something small and helpless, the
employment of pity for its own sweet sake, the abuse of diminutives (‘he
took her poor, emaciated, little hand in his’), etc., but the thing
itself, the spirit behind all this, remains elusive, and will remain so
until we have got at its source.
Whatever this may turn out to be, the characteristic is doubly
obnoxious: it is obnoxious not only in itself, but also because it
grossly misrepresents Italian life and the Italian spirit. It is true
that there is a vast deal of sentimentality loose in Italy, always
readily on tap, as it were, but this national sentimentality is a hearty
thing, a wasted by-product of exuberant life, like the sticky yellow
foam churned up by a tumultuous sea; not thin-blooded, careful, and
mauve-coloured, like that of the printed page.