A topsy-turvy chapter of no particular meaning and of little
consequence; whether pointing to some divine, far-off event, the reader
must determine for himself.
He came into the office and fixed me with his glittering eye across the
desk. Under ordinary circumstances I should have found his manner of
speech rather odd. But it was the last week of the Cubist Exhibition on
Lexington Avenue, and a certain lack of coherence seemed natural. He
said:
"Is there a soul in things we choose to describe as inanimate? Of course
there is. Can we assign moral attributes to what people usually regard
as dead nature? Of course we can. Why don't we do something then? Take
the abandoned farm. Doesn't the term at once call up a picture of
shocking moral degradation? We are surrounded by abandoned farms, and
do nothing to reclaim them morally. But I have hope. That is the fine
thing about the spirit of the present day. It abhors sentimentality. It
is honest. It recognises that before we can do away with evil we must
acknowledge that it exists. Look at the wild olive! Look at the vicious
circle! Look at Bad Nauheim!"
"Are you sure it's me you wished to see?" I asked. "Because there's a
man in the office whose name sounds very much the same and the boys are
apt to confuse us. He is in the third room to your right."
"It doesn't matter," he said. "The main thing is that the present uplift
does not go half far enough. Just consider the semi-detached family
house. Can anything be more depressing? There are happy families; of
them we need not speak. There are unhappy families; but there at least
you find the dignity of tragedy, of fierce hatreds, of clamour, of hot
blood running riot in the exultation of excess--Swinburne, you know,
Dolores, Faustina, Matisse, and all that. But a semi-detached family, a
home of chilly rancours and hidden sneers, too indifferent for love, too
cowardly for hate, a stagnant pool of misery--can you blame me?"
"I do not," I said. "Far be it from me to censure the natural antipathy
for real estate agents which surges up--"
"Thank you," he said. "That is all I wish to know." He rose, but turned
back at the door. "Of course," he said, "there is the other side of the
picture. Not all nature is degenerate. There are upright pianos. There
are well-balanced sentences. There are reinforced-concrete engineers. I
thank you for your courtesy." And he went out.
I had no scruples in directing my visitor to the third floor from mine
on the right, because that room is occupied by the anti-suffragist
member of the staff. Between editions he reads the foreign exchanges
with a fixed sneer and polishes up his little anti-feminist aphorisms.
These he recites to me with a venomous hatred which Charlotte Perkins
Gilman would have no trouble in tracing back to the polygamous cave
man. He came in now and sat down in the chair just vacated by my
somewhat eccentric visitor.
"Mrs. Pankhurst," he said, "is completely justified in asserting that
the leaders may perish, but the good fight will go on. There are plenty
of frenzied Englishwomen to carry the torch. The practice of arson, you
will observe, comes natural to woman as the historic guardian of the
domestic fire. We have great difficulty in preventing our cook from
pouring kerosene into the kitchen range. Instinct, you see."
"But look at the other side of the question," I said.
"That doesn't concern me in the least," he replied. "Of course you will
say there is the hunger strike. But what does that prove? Simply that
another ancient custom of the submerged classes has become an amusement
of the well-to-do. We are all copying the underworld nowadays. We have
borrowed their delightfully straightforward mode of speech. We have
learned their dances. We are imitating their manners. Now we are
acquiring their capacity for going without food. Not that I think the
hunger-strike is altogether a futile invention. Practised on a large
scale it will undeniably exercise a beneficent influence on the status
of woman. Modern fashions in women's garments have already reduced the
expenditure on dress material to an insignificant minimum. When the
wives of the middle and upper classes have learned to be as abstemious
with food as they are with clothes, it is plain that the economic
independence of women will be close at hand."
"You are assuming that the sheath-gown is less expensive than the
crinoline," I managed to interject.
"I consider your remarks utterly irrelevant to my argument," he said.
"Mind you, I don't deny that forcible feeding is a disgusting business
as it is carried on at present. But that is because it is being
misdirected. If the British Government were to apply forcible feeding in
Whitechapel and among the human wreckage that litters the Thames
Embankment, I am confident that the problem of social unrest would be
speedily disposed of."
He, too, turned back at the door.
"Mark my word," he said, "it won't be long before the manhood of England
asserts itself, and then look out for trouble! You know, even the earth
turns when you step upon it."
But sometimes you find yourself wondering whether it is really (1) the
solid earth we tread to-day, or whether it is (2) on clouds we step, or
whether (3) we walk the earth with our heads in the clouds, or whether
(4) we are standing on our heads on earth with our feet in the clouds.
It isn't an age of transition, because that means progress in one
direction. It isn't revolution, because revolution is an extremely
clear-cut process with heads falling and the sewers running red with
blood; whereas the swollen channels to-day run heavy with talk chiefly.
It isn't a transmutation of values, because we have no single accepted
standard of exchange. It isn't a shifting of viewpoints, because it is
much more than that.
It is a shifting of the optical laws, of the entire body of physical
laws. Pictures are painted to be heard, music is written to be seen,
passion is depicted in odours, dancing aims to make the bystander lick
his chops. Mathematics has become an impressionist art, and love, birth,
and death are treated arithmetically. Grown men and women clamour for
the widest individual freedom, and children, if you will listen to the
Princeton professor, should render compulsory service to the State. We
are in full revolt; in revolt toward State Socialism, toward Nietzsche,
toward Christian idealism, toward the paganism of the Latin Quarter and
Montmartre, toward university settlements, toward the cabaret. Are we in
a fog? Are we in the clouds striving toward the light? Well, I haven't
the least doubt that the mist will roll away and leave us in man's
natural position, his feet planted solidly on earth, his face lifted to
the sun. But for the moment it's puzzling.