you will find the key to many a correlative mystery. For one thing,
it quickly explains the observed hopelessness of trying to pump up
inspiration by mere hard industry--the essential imbecility of the
I,000 words a day formula. Let there be stenosis below, and not all
the industry of a Hercules will suffice to awaken the lethargic brain.
Here, indeed, the harder the striving, the worse the stagnation--as
every artist knows only too well. And why not? Striving in the face
of such an interior obstacle is the most cruel of enterprises--a
business more nerve-wracking and exhausting than reading a newspaper
or watching a bad play. The pain thus produced, the emotions thus
engendered, react upon the liver in a manner scientifically displayed
by Dr. George W. Crile in his "Man: An Adaptive Mechanism," and the
result is a steady increase in the intestinal demoralization, and a
like increase in the pollution of the blood. In the end the poor victim
comes to a familiar pass; beset on the one hand by impotence and on
the other hand by an impatience grown pathological, he gets into a
state indistinguishable from the frantic. It is at such times that
creative artists suffer most atrociously. It is then that they writhe
upon the sharp spears and red-hot hooks of a jealous and unjust Creator
for their invasion of His monopoly. It is then that they pay a grisly
super-tax upon their superiority to the great herd of law-abiding and
undistinguished men. The men of this herd never undergo any comparable
torture; the agony of the artist is quite beyond their experience and
even beyond their imagination. No catastrophe that could conceivably
overtake a lime and cement dealer, a curb broker, a lawyer, a plumber
or a Presbyterian is to be mentioned in the same breath with the
torments that, to the most minor of poets, are familiar incidents of
his professional life, and, to such a man as Poe, or Beethoven, or
Brahms, are the commonplaces of every day. Beethoven suffered more
during the composition of the Fifth symphony than all the judges on
the supreme benches of the world have suffered jointly since the time
of the Gerousia.
Again, my hypothesis explains the fact that inspiration, save under
extraordinary circumstances, is never continuous for more than a
relatively short period. A banker, a barber or a manufacturer of patent
medicines does his work day after day without any noticeable rise or
fall of efficiency; save when he is drunk, jailed or ill in bed the
curve of his achievement is flattened out until it becomes almost a
straight line. But the curve of an artist, even of the greatest of
artists, is frightfully zig-zagged. There are moments when it sinks
below the bottom of the chart, and immediately following there may
be moments when it threatens to run off the top. Some of the noblest
passages written by Shakespeare are in his worst plays, cheek by jowl
with padding and banality; some of the worst music of Wagner is in his
finest music dramas. There is, indeed, no such thing as a flawless
masterpiece. Long labored, it may be gradually enriched with purple
passages--the high inspirations of widely separated times crowded
together--, but even so it will remain spotty, for those purple
passages will be clumsily joined, and their joints will remain as
apparent as so many false teeth. Only the most elementary knowledge
of psychology is needed to show the cause of the zig-zagging that
I have mentioned. It lies in the elemental fact that the chemical
constitution of the blood changes every hour, almost every minute.
What it is at the beginning of digestion is not what it is at the end
of digestion, and in both cases it is enormously affected by the nature
of the substances digested. No man, within twenty-four hours after
eating a meal in a Pennsylvania Railroad dining-car, could conceivably
write anything worth reading. A tough beefsteak, I daresay, has ditched
many a promising sonnet, and bad beer, as every one knows, has spoiled
hundreds of sonatas. Thus inspiration rises and falls, and even when
it rises twice to the same height it usually shows some qualitative
difference--there is the inspiration, say, of Spring vegetables and
there is the inspiration of Autumn fruits. In a long work the products
of greatly differing inspirations, of greatly differing streams of
blood, are hideously intermingled, and the result is the inevitable
spottiness that I have mentioned. No one but a maniac argues that "Die
Meistersinger" is _all_ good. One detects in it days when Wagner felt,
as the saying goes, like a fighting cock, but one also detects days
when he arose in the morning full of acidosis and despair--days when he
turned heavily from the Pierian spring to castor oil.
Moreover, it must be obvious that the very conditions under which works
of art are produced tend to cause great aberrations in metabolism. The
artist is forced by his calling to be a sedentary man. Even a poet,
perhaps the freest of artists, must spend a good deal of time bending
over a desk. He may conceive his poems in the open air, as Beethoven
conceived his music, but the work of reducing them to actual words
requires diligent effort in camera. Here it is a sheer impossibility
for him to enjoy the ideal hygienic conditions which surround the
farmhand, the curb-broker and the sailor. His! viscera are congested;
his eyes are astrain; his muscles are without necessary exercise.
Furthermore, he probably breathes bad air and goes without needed
sleep. The result is inevitably some disturbance of metabolism, with a
vitiated blood supply and a starved cerebrum. One is always surprised
to encounter a poet who is ruddy and stout; the standard model is a
pale and flabby stenotic, kept alive by patent medicines. So with the
painter, the musical composer, the sculptor, the artist in prose.
There is no more confining work known to man than instrumentation.
The composer who has spent a day at it is invariably nervous and ill.
For hours his body is bent over his music-paper, the while his pen
engrosses little dots upon thin lines. I have known composers, after a
week or so of such labor, to come down with auto-intoxication in its
most virulent forms. Perhaps the notorious ill health of Beethoven,
and the mental break-downs of Schumann, Tschaikowsky and Hugo Wolf had
their origin in this direction. It is difficult, going through the
history of music, to find a single composer in the grand manner who was
physically and mentally up to par.
I do not advance it as a formal corollary, but no doubt this stenosis
hypothesis also throws some light upon two other immemorial mysteries,
the first being the relative æsthetic sterility of women, and the other
being the low æsthetic development of certain whole classes, and even
races of men, _e. g._, the Puritans, the Welsh and the Confederate
Americans. That women suffer from stenosis far more than men is a
commonplace of internal medicine; the weakness is chiefly to blame,
rather than the functional peculiarities that they accuse, for their
liability to headache. A good many of them, in fact, are habitually
in the state of health which, in the artist, is accompanied by an
utter inability to work. This state of health, as I have said, does
not inhibit _all_ mental activity. It leaves the powers of observation
but little impaired; it does not corrupt common sense; it is not
incompatible with an intelligent discharge of the ordinary duties of
life. Thus a lime and cement dealer, in the midst of it, may function
almost as well as when his metabolic processes are perfectly normal,
and by the same token a woman chronically a victim to it may yet show
all the sharp mental competence which characterizes her sex. But here
the thing stops. To go beyond--to enter the realm of constructive
thinking, to abandon the mere application of old ideas and essay to
invent new ideas, to precipitate novel and intellectual concepts out
of the chaos of memory and perception--this is quite impossible to the
stenotic. _Ergo,_ it is unheard of among classes and races of men who
feed grossly and neglect personal hygiene; the pill-swallower is the
only artist in such groups. One may thus argue that the elder Beecham
saved poetry in England, as the younger Beecham saved music.... But, as
I say, I do not stand behind the hypothesis in this department, save,
perhaps, in the matter of women. I could amass enormous evidences in
favor of it, but against them there would always loom the disconcerting
contrary evidence of the Bulgarians. Among them, I suppose, stenosis
must be unknown--but so are all the fine arts.
"La force et la foiblesse de l'esprit," said Rochefoucauld, "sont
mal nommées; elles ne sont, en effect, que la bonne ou la mauvaise
des organes du corps." Science wastes itself hunting in the other
direction. We are flooded with evidences of the effects of the mind
on the body, and so our attention is diverted from the enormously
greater effects of the body on the mind. It is rather astonishing that
the Wassermann reaction has not caused the latter to be investigated
more thoroughly. The first result of the general employment of that
great diagnostic device was the discovery that thousands of cases of
so-called mental disease were really purely physical in origin--that
thousands of patients long supposed to have been crazed by seeing
ghosts, by love, by grief, or by reverses in the stock-market were
actually victims of the small but extremely enterprising _spirochæte
pallida._ The news heaved a bomb into psychiatry, but it has so far
failed to provoke a study of the effects of other such physical
agents. Even the effects of this one agent remain to be inquired into
at length. One now knows that it may cause insanity, but what of the
lesser mental aberrations that it produces? Some of these aberrations
may be actually beneficial. That is to say, the mild toxemia
accompanying the less virulent forms of infection may stimulate the
brain to its highest functioning, and so give birth to what is called
genius--a state of mind long recognized, by popular empiricism, as a
sort of half-way station on the road to insanity. Beethoven, Nietzsche
and Schopenhauer suffered from such mild toxemias, and there is not
the slightest doubt that their extraordinary mental activity was at
least partly due to the fact. That tuberculosis, in its early stages,
is capable of the same stimulation is a commonplace of observation.
The consumptive may be weak physically, but he is usually very alert
mentally. The history of the arts, in fact, shows the names of hundreds
of inspired consumptives.
Here a physical infirmity produces a result that is beneficial, just
as another physical infirmity, the stenosis aforesaid, produces a
result that is baleful. The artist often oscillates horribly between
the two effects; he is normally anything but a healthy animal.
Perfect health, indeed, is a boon that very few men above the rank of
clodhoppers ever enjoy. What health means is a degree of adaptation
to the organism's environment so nearly complete that there is no
irritation. Such a state, it must be obvious, is not often to be
observed in organisms of the highest complexity. It is common,
perhaps, in the earthworm. This elemental beast makes few demands
upon its environment, and is thus subject to few diseases. It seldom
gets out of order until the sands of its life are run, and then it
suffers one grand illness and dies forthwith. But man is forever
getting out of order, for he is enormously complicated--and the higher
he rises in complexity, the more numerous and the more serious are
his derangements. There are whole categories of diseases, _e. g.,_
neurasthenia and hay-fever, that afflict chiefly the more civilized
and delicate ranks of men, leaving the inferior orders unscathed. Good
health in man, indeed, is almost invariably a function of inferiority.
A professionally healthy man, e. g., an acrobat, an osteopath or an
ice-wagon driver, is always stupid. In the Greece of the great days
the athletes we hear so much about were mainly slaves. Not one of
the eminent philosophers, poets or statesmen of Greece was a good
high-jumper. Nearly all of them, in fact, suffered from the same
malaises which afflict their successors of to-day, as you will quickly
discern by examining their compositions. The æsthetic impulse, like the
thirst for truth, might almost be called a disease. It seldom if ever
appears in a perfectly healthy man.
But we must take the aloes with the honey. The artist suffers damnably,
but there is compensation in his dreams. Some of his characteristic
diseases cripple him and make his whole life a misery, but there are
others that seem to help him. Of the latter, the two that I have
mentioned carry with them concepts of extreme obnoxiousness. Both are
infections, and one is associated in the popular mind with notions or
gross immorality. But these concepts of obnoxiousness should not blind
us to the benefits that apparently go with the maladies. There are,
in fact, maladies much more obnoxious, and they carry no compensating
benefits. Cancer is an example. Perhaps the time will come when the
precise effects of these diseases will be worked out accurately, and
it will be possible to gauge in advance their probable influence upon
this or that individual. If that time ever comes the manufacture of
artists will become a feasible procedure, like the present manufacture
of soldiers, capons, right-thinkers and doctors of philosophy. In those
days the promising young men of the race, instead of being protected
from such diseases at all hazards, will be deliberately infected with
them, as soils are now inoculated with nitrogen-liberating bacteria....
At the same time, let us hope, some progress will be made against
stenosis. It is, after all, simply a question of technique, like the
artificial propagation of the race by the device of Dr. Jacques Loeb.
The poet of the future, come upon a period of doldrums, will not tear
his hair in futile agony. Instead, he will go to the nearest clinic,
and there get his rasher of Bulgarian bacilli, or an injection of some
complex organic compound out of a ductless gland, or an order on a
masseur, or a diet list, or perchance a barrel of Russian oil.
V. SCIENTIFIC EXAMINATION OF A POPULAR VIRTUE
An old _Corpsbruder,_ assaulting my ear lately with an abstruse tale of
his sister's husband's brother's ingratitude, ended by driving me quite
out of his house, firmly resolved to be his acquaintance no longer.
The exact offense I heard inattentively, and have already partly
forgotten--an obscure tort arising out of a lawsuit. My ex-friend,
it appears, was appealed to for help in a bad case by his grapevine
relative, and so went on the stand for him and swore gallantly to
some complex and unintelligible lie. Later on, essaying to cash in
on the perjury, he asked the fellow to aid him in some domestic
unpleasantness, and was refused on grounds of morals. Hence his
indignation--and my spoiled evening....
What is one to think of a man so asinine that he looks for gratitude in
this world, or so puerilely egotistical that he enjoys it when found?
The truth is that the sentiment itself is not human but doggish, and
that the man who demands it in payment for his doings is precisely the
sort of man who feels noble and distinguished when a dog licks his
hand. What a man says when he expresses gratitude is simply this:
"You did something for me that I could not have done myself. _Ergo,_
you are my superior. Hail, _Durchlaucht!"_ Such a confession, whether
true or not, is degrading to the confessor, and so it is very hard to
make, at all events for a man of self-respect. That is why such a man
always makes it clumsily and with many blushes and hesitations. It
is hard for him to put so embarrassing a doctrine into plain words.
And that is why the business is equally uncomfortable to the party
of the other part. It distresses him to see a human being of decent
instincts standing before him in so ignominious a position. He is as
flustered as if the fellow came in handcuffs, or in rags, or wearing
the stripes of a felon. Moreover, his confusion is helped out by his
inward knowledge--very clear if he is introspective, and plain enough
even if he is not--that he really deserves no such tribute to his high
mightiness; that the altruism for which he is being praised was really
bogus; that he did the thing behind the gratitude which now assails
him, not for any grand and lofty reason, but for a purely selfish and
inferior reason, to wit, for the reason that it pleases all of us to
show what we can do when an appreciative audience is present; that we
delight to exercise our will to power when it is safe and profitable.
This is the primary cause of the benefits which inspire gratitude,
real and pretended. This is the fact at the bottom of altruism. Find
me a man who is always doing favors for people and I will show you a
man of petty vanity, forever trying to get fuel for it in the cheapest
way. And find me a man who is notoriously grateful in habit and I'll
show you a man who is essentially third rate and who is conscious of
it at the bottom of his heart. The man of genuine self-respect--which
means the man who is more or less accurately aware, not only of his own
value, but also and more importantly, of his own limitations--tries
to avoid entering either class. He hesitates to demonstrate his
superiority by such banal means, and he shrinks from confessing an
inferiority that he doesn't believe in.
Nevertheless, the popular morality of the world, which is the creation,
not of its superior men but of its botches and half-men--in brief,
of its majorities--puts a high value on gratitude and denounces the
with-holding of it as an offense against the proprieties. To be
noticeably ungrateful for benefits--that is, for the by-products of the
egotism of others--is to be disliked. To tell a tale of ingratitude
is to take on the aspect of a martyr to the defects of others, to get
sympathy in an affliction. All of us are responsive to such ideas,
however much we may resent them logically. One may no more live in the
world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one
will be able to go to hell without perspiring....
Let me recall a case within my own recent experience. One day I
received a letter from a young woman I had never heard of before,
asking me to read the manuscripts of two novels that she had written.
She represented that she had venerated my critical parts for a long
while, and that her whole future career in letters would be determined
by my decision as to her talents. The daughter of a man apparently of
some consequence in some sordid business or other, she asked me to
meet her at her father's office, and there to impart to her, under
socially aseptic conditions, my advice. Having a standing rule against
meeting women authors, even in their fathers' banks and soap factories,
I pleaded various imaginary engagements, but finally agreed, after a
telephone debate, to read her manuscripts. They arrived promptly and I
found them to be wholly without merit--in fact, the veriest twaddle.
Nevertheless I plowed through them diligently, wasted half an hour at
the job, wrote a polite letter of counsel and returned the manuscripts
to her house, paying a blackamoor 50 cents to haul them.
By all ordinary standards, an altruistic service and well deserving
some show of gratitude. Had she knitted me a pair of pulse-warmers it
would have seemed meet and proper. Even a copy of the poems of Alfred
Noyes would not have been too much. At the very least I expected a note
of thanks. Well, not a word has ever reached me. For all my laborious
politeness and disagreeable labor my reward is exactly nil. The lady is
improved by my counsel--and I am shocked by her gross ingratitude....
That is, conventionally, superficially, as a member of society in
good standing. But when on sour afternoons I roll the affair in my
mind, examining, not the mere surface of it but the inner workings and
anatomy of it, my sense of outrage gradually melts and fades away--the
inevitable recompense of skepticism. What I see clearly is that I was
an ass to succumb to the blandishments of this discourteous miss,
and that she was quite right in estimating my service trivially, and
out of that clear seeing comes consolation, and amusement, and, in
the end, even satisfaction. I got exactly what I deserved. And she,
whether consciously or merely instinctively, measured out the dose with
excellent accuracy.
Let us go back. Why did I waste two hours, or maybe three, reading
those idiotic manuscripts? Why, in the first place, did I answer her
opening request--the request, so inherently absurd, that I meet her
in her father's office? For a very plain reason: she accompanied it
with flattery. What she said, in effect, was that she regarded me as a
critic of the highest talents, and this ludicrous cajolery--sound, I
dare say, in substance, but reduced to naught by her obvious obscurity
and stupidity--was quite enough to fetch me. In brief, she assumed
that, being a man, I was vain to the point of imbecility, and this
assumption was correct, as it always is. To help out, there was the
concept of romantic adventure vaguely floating in my mind. Her voice,
as I heard it by telephone, was agreeable; her appearance, since she
seemed eager to show herself, I probably judged (subconsciously) to
be at least not revolting. Thus curiosity got on its legs, and vanity
in another form. Am I fat and half decrepit, a man seldom noticed by
cuties? Then so much the more reason why I should respond. The novelty
of an apparently comely and respectable woman desiring to witness me
finished what the primary (and very crude) appeal to my vanity had
begun. I was, in brief, not only the literary popinjay but also the
eternal male--and hard at the immemorial folly of the order.
Now turn to the gal and her ingratitude. The more I inspect it the more
I became convinced that it is not discreditable to her, but highly
creditable--that she demonstrates a certain human dignity, despite her
imbecile writings, by exhibiting it. Would a show of gratitude put
her in a better light? I doubt it. That gratitude, considering the
unfavorable report I made on her manuscripts, would be doubly invasive
of her _amour propre._ On the one hand it would involve a confession
that my opinion of her literary gifts was better than her own, and
that I was thus her superior. And on the other hand it would involve
a confession that my own actual writings (being got into print without
aid) were better than hers, and that I was thus her superior again.
Each confession would bring her into an attitude of abasement, and
the two together would make her position intolerable. Moreover, both
would be dishonest: she would privately believe in neither doctrine.
As for my opinion, its hostility to her aspiration is obviously enough
to make her ego dismiss it as false, for no organism acquiesces in its
own destruction. And as for my relative worth as a literary artist,
she must inevitably put it very low, for it depends, in the last
analysis, upon my dignity and sagacity as a man, and she has proved
by experiment, and quite easily, that I am almost as susceptible to
flattery as a moving picture actor, and hence surely no great shakes.
Thus there is not the slightest reason in the world why the fair
creature should knit me a pair of pulse-warmers or send me the poems
of Noyes, or even write me a polite note. If she did any of these
things, she would feel herself a hypocrite and hence stand embarrassed
before the mirror of her own thoughts. Confronted by a choice between
this sort of shame and the incomparably less uncomfortable shame
of violating a social convention and an article of popular morals,
secretly and without danger of exposure, she very sensibly chooses
the more innocuous of the two. At the very start, indeed, she set
up barriers against gratitude, for her decision to ask a favor of me
was, in a subtle sense, a judgment of my inferiority. One does not ask
favors, if it can be avoided, of persons one genuinely respects; one
puts such burdens upon the naïve and colorless, upon what are called
the good natured; in brief, upon one's inferiors. When that girl first
thought of me as a possible aid to her literary aspiration she thought
of me (perhaps vaguely, but none the less certainly) as an inferior
fortuitously outfitted with a body of puerile technical information
and competence, of probable use to her. This unfavorable view was
immediately reënforced by her discovery of my vanity.
In brief, she showed and still shows the great instinctive sapience of
her sex. She is female, and hence far above the nonsensical delusions,
vanities, conventions and moralities of men.
VI. EXEUNT OMNES