mind. Our youth will not explain it (our youth being, as Oscar Wilde
pointed out, our oldest tradition); neither will puritanism, nor the
pioneer spirit, nor even, entirely, our standardization. Perhaps as much
as to any one thing it is due to our unquestioning assumption that the
business of making a living and better is the single, really important
function of a man’s life. (In at least one provincial American city of
considerable size the half-page conceded by the morning paper to art,
letters and music is entitled ‘In Woman’s Realm’). Now it is difficult
enough, heaven knows! to make a living; and, what with the fierceness of
competition, to achieve ‘success in business’ may very likely demand
every ounce of a man’s energy and almost every moment of his day. But it
does not develop more than a very small part of his mind. At the end of
an intensely active life the business man is mentally in much the same
condition as the workman who for thirty years has made the same
automobile part in a factory. Really he is intensely ignorant of life.
By which, of course, I do not mean that he is ignorant because he has
not read Thomas Hardy or heard a Richard Strauss tone-poem; rather, that
he is ignorant of himself. He has not grown up; he is still a child; in
any true sense he does not think at all. And his childish spirit is over
everything; it and his puerile canons are shared even by the thousands
who have not succeeded in business or in so much as making a living. He
is so sure of himself; but he is sure of himself just because he does
not know himself at all. And as he is, so are we.
This widespread ignorance of self is no doubt fostered by the manifold
senseless activities with which our life is encrusted. Telephones, motor
cars, radios, phonographs, movies, magazines, and newspapers save us
from the leisure that we dread because, not being able to think, we
should not know what to do with it. However that may be, ignorance of
self is certainly at the bottom of our conception of the world as
black-and-white and miracle-spotted. One deep unafraid look into our own
hearts, and we should never again see life as so simple, sharp-edged an
affair, because we could never again dissociate ourselves from any
manifestation of it. That, of course, is exactly what we do at present
and have always done, and it leads to many strange and wonderful
things--among others, the institution of scapegoats.
Scapegoats are essential in a black-and-white world--to explain the
black part; and we have had precisely as long a line of them as of
short-cuts to Utopia. At one time, in the golden early days of
muck-raking, they were trusts and their founders; and then we read, with
a shudder of revulsion, of how Mr. Rockefeller’s face resembled that of
an evil bird of prey. For Mr. Henry Ford the Jews are apparently the
scapegoats, while to these the very numerous members of the Ku Klux Klan
generously add the Negroes and the Catholics. But among our intellectual
élite the scapegoats of the moment are undoubtedly Governments and
Diplomats.
Gazing with horror upon the wreck to which the recent war reduced the
world, these more thoughtful members of our public nevertheless share
with the unthinking masses the need of a scapegoat, of something evil
completely outside themselves, on which the blame can be laid. It
approximates the need of a personal Devil. And so they say: ‘France is a
menace to the peace of the world; she wishes to destroy Germany (or to
obtain an hegemony over the coal-and-iron industry of Europe); she is
cold-blooded and selfish. England’s pretence to greater generosity is a
lie; she has annexed two million square miles of German colonies, and
would be lenient toward Germany now in the matter of reparations solely
because she needs a market for her industrial products.’ (Not to mention
what they say of our ex-enemies). By ‘France’ and ‘England’ Americans of
this sort do not mean the French and English peoples; they are not, like
the Ku Klux Klansmen, childish enough to indict whole races. They mean
the governments of England and France; but these they conceive of as
flawless entities with a soul--an evil soul. Now it is undoubtedly true
that any group, whether it be a mob, a literary circle or a government,
does evoke a kind of group-spirit, a sort of soul, which is worse than
the soul of any one of the individuals who constitute the group. But
this is a pallid thing at best, or worst. The group-entity is but a
thought in the minds of the individuals, who alone are real, and very
like ourselves. Once one admits this, the whole black-and-white world
collapses, and one faces a troubled, obscure, but also infinitely richer
and more human world, full of pathetically mixed motives.
Diplomats, the choicest scapegoats to-day, are accused, not without
justice, of playing callously with the lives of millions; using them
like pawns on a chess-board is, I believe, the accepted figure. But what
else, given the power, should we ourselves do, who live equally among
abstractions, and are capable of reading the account of an earthquake in
Colombia and then turning without emotion to the history of the latest
movie scandal in Los Angeles? I do not say that we ought to feel emotion
in learning that thousands have been killed in an earthquake. The lack
of imagination displayed in our failure to do so is doubtless a
necessary protective trait. Without it, to read any newspaper would be
anguish; and we should, like those imaginative persons called cowards,
die many times before our death. The intensest suffering of Jesus, the
Man, must have been not His crucifixion, but His lifelong sympathy for
the suffering of others. It is only this lack of imagination, plus the
tradition in which they are bred, that makes diplomats what they
notoriously are. There has been a good deal of amateur diplomacy of late
years; yet one is not aware of any great improvement on the old, either
in results or in methods.
Here, suddenly, however roundabout the way may have seemed, we find
ourselves back at the subject of self and knowledge of self. We (and by
‘we’ I no longer mean only ‘we Americans,’ whose world, after all, is
but a little more crudely black-and-white than that of other
peoples)--we lack the imagination to project ourselves into others’
lives chiefly because we know so little about ourselves. We may feel
pity, even shed tears, at the sight of a man crushed by a motor car,
because we have all felt physical pain; but we remain cold toward the
feelings of a man caught in embezzlement, because we are unaware of the
latent possibility of embezzlement in ourselves, given sufficiently
impelling circumstances.
Yet even were we gifted with imagination, we could learn directly almost
nothing of other people. There is a wall that shuts us off. We can know
so infinitely little about any of them that it is a wonder we trouble to
divide such strangers into friends and enemies; and, indeed, as one
grows older he finds his enmities dwindling to indifference, and his
friendships fading or congealing into mere habit. In that very imperfect
book, _L’Enfer_, Barbusse’s observer, watching (with a desperate, almost
sick desire to get inside other people’s lives), through the hole in
his chamber wall, what takes place in the room beyond, perceives only
the impenetrable loneliness of the individual--in birth, in death, even
in love.
We are always being told that we should go directly to life for real
knowledge, not get it at second hand from books. And this is no doubt
true enough for certain impressions. What it means to be hungry, for
instance, cannot be learned from the printed page; nor can vivid
impressions of nature be gained in that way. But I suspect that we can
learn more about other men and women from books than from direct
intercourse with them. In a book the writer has, presumably, set out to
say something long meditated, and has deleted all excrescences in the
saying. Such chatter as we indulge in, and listen to, when, instead, we
talk directly with our neighbours!--aimless, pointless, its rare bright
spots extinguished in a sea of words! Read the court stenographer’s
record of any trial, where, at least, the questions and answers are
supposed to be held rigidly to a certain subject, and then consider what
the dictagraph report of any purposeless conversation would be like! But
that is by the way. The important point is that one learns a little
about others from books because from any worthwhile book one learns a
little about oneself. Just as surely as in a novel, an essay, or a poem
the writer reveals himself, so surely do I in reading it reveal myself,
weighing the author’s opinions, likening them to or contrasting them
with my own, and, to the extent of that self-revelation, perceiving his.
Thus, it is better to read difficult books than easy ones, not as
puritanism teaches, because whatever is unpleasant is good for us, but
because the fact that a book is difficult for me means that in my
response to it I am forced down into obscure and unknown regions of
myself. On the other hand, there are for every one, I suppose, certain
books that he is permanently unable to read, certain authors who remain
for him as unknowable as any one met in flesh-and-blood. I, for example,
simply cannot read _Lavengro_ or get to know Borrow. Nowhere in me is
there any response to his thoughts and emotions. It is true that I feel
a vivid distaste for his style, which perhaps ought to be something to
start on; but it does not seem to be enough to melt my icy indifference
to the man and his work. I can learn nothing of myself from _Lavengro_,
and so I can learn nothing of Borrow. It is a pity. My world might be by
just so much the richer, less black-and-white.
Given this profound isolation of the individual, his inability to learn
of others except through learning of himself, it is hard at first to
understand men’s passion for gregariousness. But if you will listen to
almost any conversation you will presently note that each individual in
the loquacious group is but asserting his own opinions, the more
blatantly the less he knows what they really are. In primitive circles
this is done frankly, often with every one talking at once: ‘What _I_
say is----,’ ‘Now _my_ notion is----,’ ‘Well, now, just listen to
me----.’ It is as though all were shouting: ‘How black-and-white the
world is!’ Among more civilized persons there is greater suavity, a
pretence of listening to others’ opinions while awaiting an opportunity
to express one’s own. But it is only a pretence. Still, there is
something in civilization. For in very, very civilized circles
conversation becomes a dainty game. Nothing really felt is ever said,
and ideas are played with as amusing toys; which is both sensible and
delightful.
But if we would really learn about our fellow-men, and exchange our
silly black-and-white world for a subtler, richer, kinder one, we had
best go and live alone on mountain tops. Ten years of such solitude
would give us a deeper, tenderer and more tolerant understanding of
humanity than a lifetime of jostling contacts in the market-place.
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[1] No longer true, alas, since the complete suppression by the
Fascista government of all freedom of speech and of the press.
[2] I do not happen to have read anything by Valéry Larbaud, but from
what I read about him I conclude that possibly Monsieur Maurois may
find a little relief from loneliness in his company.