For the general idea and design of this book, I am indebted
to my friend, Harold Clurman, the director of the Group
Theater. During several years, he urged me to publish a collection
of my papers similar to “SALVOS” which united certain of
my short critical writings from 1915 to 1924. I was always
too busy—and the notion of a miscellany does not appeal to
me. At last, at his request, I handed him from my files what
I could find of my articles and papers published in the past
twelve years. I was amazed to find how much it was. Several
months later, he returned to me a selection, reduced by two
thirds. He pointed out that what he had put in order was not
a miscellany but a book with a beginning, a middle and a
conclusion: a book even with a “plot”!
The materials that compose this “collective portrait” of
an era which spans the Boom, the Depression, and (perhaps)
the beginning, in Spain, of the new World War that may
end the world we have all lived in, appeared originally in
the following periodicals (of New York, unless otherwise
noted):
The Adelphi (London), The Dial, Europe (Paris), Harper’s,
The Menorah Journal, La Nación (Buenos Aires), The
New Masses, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Occidente
(Rome), El Repertorio Americano (San José, Costa
Rica), Scribner’s, Soviet Russia Today, Sur (Buenos Aires),
Virginia Quarterly Review, The Guardian (Philadelphia).
viiiMany other magazines reprinted or translated some of this
material, but since I have no full list of these I have not
named them.
xii“... in a dying world, creation is revolution.”
“Our America,” 1919
“The American jungle is rich in denatured elements
of a transplanted world: it consists largely
in those deposits, cultural, political, economic,
which justify our calling ‘the new world’ the
Grave of Europe.”
“The Re-Discovery of America,” 1929
ONE: BOOM YEAR SKETCHES — 1. I DISCOVER THE NEW WORLD — a. — b. — c. — d. — e. — 2. A SAVAGE ISLE — a. — b. — c. — d. — 3. A MOB AND A MACHINE — 4. MURDER AS BAD ART — 5. THE BATTLE OF A CENTURY AND A HALF — 6. ENNOBLING OUR CRIMINALS — 7. READING THE SPORTS — 8. THE NEW CONQUISTADORES — 9. TWO FACES — 10. THE DRUG ON THE MARKET
xiii
3
The most important room at home was the library. Our
house was the usual four-story brownstone segment in the
unbroken wall of an upper West Side block. There were
plenty of windows. Those to the north looked out upon the
street where grocery wagons rattled by day and by night the
gas lamps dimly slumbered. Those to the south gave a broad
view of another wall of houses which at dark became fantastic
with lighted windows holding many secrets and black
silhouettes mysteriously alive behind drawn blinds. And beyond
the houses was the glow of the great city. The library
had but a single window; it was too little for so large and
low a room. Even by day the library was dark and, since
the window opened on a strip of yard choked by an ugly
ailanthus, I never looked through that window. When I was
in this room New York did not come in; New York stayed
distant and silent. The real world became this world of
books; and almost all the books had come from Europe.
Among the pictures on the walls were those of two
Americans: Washington and Lincoln. But they had little to
do with the America outside the window. They spoke to me
less eloquently than the novelists and poets of England, than
the thinkers of Germany, than the Athenians and Romans all
living on the shelves. This library in my father’s house in the
city of New York was a sanctuary of Europe. It glowed with
a secluded quiet and with a life of its own. And here my
childhood lived with an intensity and depth of feeling that
not school, not the streets could give me.
My father nearly every year went to Europe. We would
go down to the ship often, on the eve of his sailing, board
4the great vessel, and dine with the captain in his cabin. I was
in Europe then: everything, from the food we ate to the
words we heard, was strange to America. Father sailed away,
and mother bundled us children into a train. We got at last
into a shimmer of meadows and of young green trees. But
even in the mountains Europe was not far distant. Letters
would presently arrive with foreign stamps. They were long
letters: page upon page of personal description in which my
father narrated his adventures in Hamburg, in London, in
Paris. His trips were short—business trips. When he came
back he brought Europe still more vividly along; in the air
of his clothes, in the scent of his label-plastered luggage. And
then mother was always there: and that made more of
Europe. Mother was an artist. She sang every day. Beethoven,
Wagner, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Wolf—these were the
voices that came with us even to the mountains.
My room in the city home was on the top floor. I was
the youngest, a tragic fate since it meant my going earliest
to bed. It was not easy, this clambering up from the lighted
drawing room filled with the cheer of guests, through the
shadowed house. But the fourth floor was mine, and already
I was a confirmed breaker of laws. I knew that my father
would presently sit down at the organ or the piano to accompany
my mother. I would then take a blanket from my bed,
wrap myself snugly, and seat myself on the stair. My mother’s
singing came clearly through the house. School was a dim
fable beside the reality of those songs; even the strong words
on the library shelves were weak by contrast. That lovely,
breathing voice with its perfect modulation and its subtle
colors brought the lands across the sea miraculously near as
I sat in guilt—and in ecstasy—upon the stair.
So when I went to Europe (several times before I was
old enough for college) I found lands familiar to the library
of my father and to my mother’s music: familiar also through
5the American poets, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes. Cooper’s
redskins and sea rovers were more remote to me than the
cockneys of Dickens, the Parisians of Balzac. As to Poe,
whose wistful little house my father showed me in a Fordham
waste of goats and cans, his land seemed a wraithlike world
in no way kin to the rectangular New York that was, for
me, most of America.
Of course, this European “nature” of my boyhood was
wholly and merely conscious surface. My hours of school,
my mates of the street, the values and activities of parent
and relative, under all, the food I ate and the air I breathed—flesh
of my flesh, bone of my bone—were American. But
these depths were voiceless, and I did not know them. Even
the family traditions: the adventures of my father’s father in
New York during the Civil War, the tales of my mother’s
mother about the Yankee army that burned her Alabama
home and stole her heirlooms, and about her running the
blockade in a tiny rowboat in Mobile bay (with mother a
child in arms and the constant fear that if she cried the
Yankee ships would find them) failed somehow to come as
close as the great tales I read in Homer or in Tolstoi: tales
of Europe. America was in me, of course; but too close for
my roving mind to know it.
In my fifteenth year I had a great adventure. I picked up
a history of American literature which spoke, coldly and
slightingly enough, of an unknown poet, of whose curious
style there was appended an example called “O Pioneers!”
I procured a green-bound volume, “Leaves of Grass”; it
had a title page in archaic type and the portrait of an ancient
bearded sage, all grey, who signed himself Walt Whitman.
I read, studied, annotated, as I might have done with the
Bible if I had been reared religiously. Whitman stirred deep
6voices in my soul; he inspired me. I believe in those early
days I understood him well enough. But one so obvious fact
escaped me, since I was not ready for it: the fact that this
man was an American, that his experience was related to my
own and that this was why I loved him! I thought he was as
remote—and holy—as a Hebrew prophet!
That spring there was the annual oratory contest at the
high school. The usual bright lads rose before an auditorium
of a thousand people and bespoke “The Spirit of ’76,” “The
Blessings of Democracy,” and so forth. And then a strange
thing happened. A short, black-haired boy stood upon the
rostrum and for half an hour harangued the audience about
the merits of an unknown, dead poet called Walt Whitman.
He must have been eloquent as well as amusing, for the
judges gave him the gold medal for his effort. But the whole
affair remained somehow outside his experience as an American.
These teachers who had rewarded him for praising
Whitman kept on quoting Longfellow. Whitman’s value
seemed well symbolized by the useless medal of gold which
the boy’s mother put away and which he never saw again.
Whitman was an outsider, a myth—almost an outcast.
But Europe came ever closer. I was done with school and
too young for college. So I was sent abroad. I discovered
myself at sixteen, at seventeen, to be of an age which on the
Continent was deemed the age of a man! I consorted with
students from every land of Europe: Russians, Spaniards,
Serbians, Jews from Egypt, burly football players from Great
Britain. They were not “pretty” fellows. They knew life—women—books.
We sat about at night, drinking our tea with
rum; and the air was less thick with tobacco smoke than with
the thunder of exciting talk. Revolution, art, morality, death:
all the old dwellers of the books which I had met in my
father’s library took on flesh, grew warm, grew urgent. And
here at last, so many miles from his Manhattan, Whitman
7became alive; Poe found recognition. “America?” said my
European friends. “It is the place that gave us Poe and
Whitman.”
I had engaged my room at Harvard. But I wanted to go
to Heidelberg, I wanted, like my friends, to make the rounds
of the great universities of Germany, England, Paris. I wanted
to persevere in this world of midnight tea and rum with its
dizzy flights into art and metaphysics. Europe beckoned me
on, like a dark, mellow woman in whom the Mother eternally
old and the Lover wondrously young were merged. And my
father would not have stood against my will. He was an imperious,
passionate man, whose prime passion was respect for
the personality of others. A tyrant in matters of deportment,
he hated all interference in adventures of the spirit. He had
watched me, perhaps amused, perhaps with a hidden pang,
go about at the age of twelve with my undigested load of
Ibsen and Zola and Tolstoi. He had observed me, bored with
school, become a truant, frequent the vaudeville shows or
barricade myself from furious teachers in the office of our
high school paper. Now, when the formal letters came from
Heidelberg, telling the young American that he knew enough
to be admitted, my father would not have said no, whatever
his conviction. But my older brother was less philosophical.
He came to Europe; and in a hotel room high above the Seine
we had what for me was a decisive battle.
“You are not going to Heidelberg,” said my brother.
“You are going to be an American, by gum! And what’s
more, you are not going to Harvard. You’re queer enough
as it is. You’re going to be not only an American, but as
human an American as I can make you. I’m going to send
you to a place that will smooth out your angles and your
crotchets. Yale for you.”... And to Yale I went.
I suppose I had been ill-prepared for the “dear old
Campus.” My classmates were engrossed in football, not in
8ideas; in Greek-letter fraternities, not in secret revolutionary
orders. They got drunk on beer and sang sentimental songs,
whereas my friends in Europe had sipped their liquor soberly
for the most part, and got drunk on Nietzsche. Good, groping,
earnest fellows, my chums at Yale seemed children to
me. I went through college a rather cantankerous rebel. To
amuse myself I wrote dramatic criticism for a local paper,
losing no occasion to bewray America’s woeful “lack of culture”;
I played Bach; I wrote a book on the Literature of
Modern France; and always my eyes continued to turn east,
across the Atlantic Ocean.
Active journalism in New York was a leap from a nursery
to a sort of jungle. The academic cloisters had struck me as
anemic imitations of the full-blooded youthfulness which I
had seen in Europe. I liked sport well enough; but was there
not as well an athleticism in literature and in philosophy?
Now came New York once again: a New York of murders,
robberies, politics, and visiting celebrities who spent the interviewer’s
hour telling him pleasant things about America
which were not so.
This New York seemed wholly body. While the slums
reeked with poverty and vice, while the high spirit of youth
was trampled out by the thresh of mechanical progress, the
City seemed aware only of problems of traffic, of taxation,
of money. A vast town, New York; but since it was concerned
only with the mechanics of sheer physical growth, it
struck me as a baby—a sort of Brobdingnagian baby. If a man
proposed municipal ownership of public utilities, or cheap
gas, he was treated like a monster. If a woman was suspected
of infidelity, it seemed right to drag her to a divorce court;
and the important thing—the only important thing—seemed
to be to ascertain the fact; the deep hidden significances of
her character, of her unhappiness, of the subtle treatment of
her husband—all these elements of truth were ignored. I could
9not accept this gross, this infantile America, which was all the
America I knew. Being a child myself, I made the same old
gross mistake: I imagined that my Paradise existed “over
there,” across the sea. I packed a bag at last and went to
live in Paris.
When I arrived it was nightfall. I left my bags at a hotel
and wandered up the Boul’ Mich’—the gaudy thoroughfare of
the Latin Quarter. I saw no face that I knew in the thronged
terraces of the cafés which made two fertile banks from the
Gardens of the Luxembourg down to the Seine. But I felt
happy and I felt at home. I began to write. I found myself
in a world where writing—the sheer creative act—was considered
a sacrament and a service: not because of what it
brought, not for what it did—for itself. It was in the air—this
rhythm of creation. Life was looked on as a lovely, mysterious
adventure, and its true priests were they who sang of it,
who pictured it, who revealed its beauty. I made friends.
Here, among these swarms of enthusiasts who spent their
days arguing about a picture or a poet, I found men after
my own heart. And I found a woman, a true daughter of
this world who took me in and made me part of it. And then,
after a brief year, just as I was beginning truly to be at home,
I packed my bags and I went back to New York!
What had happened? I was having a good time and a
successful one. Living was cheap there. It was extremely easy
for a journalist like myself to send articles and stories to the
United States, convert the few dollars into many francs, and
live like a young lord in this perpetual holiday town where
poverty was no disgrace, where there was as much honor in
contributing to certain magazines as in being elected to the
Senate! Did not wealthy ladies of Paris find the same thrill
in climbing five musty flights of stairs to the garret of an obscure
10American author that our own ladies found in dining
with celebrities from Paris? Was there indeed not a whole
world here fashioned for the artist and ruled by his desire?
Paris itself, vast and modern, had the leisurely freedom of an
aristocratic village. Here was a huge city in which there were
happy people, in which there were trees and gardens, in
which there was room for all moods, all liberties—even for
a bit of license.
I had more than I had ever had, and yet I gave it up quite
simply because I did not want it, and I could not stand it. In
several of the cafés of Paris there gathered artists from
America. Many of them had not been home in years; most
of them came from small places in the interior and had had
no contact with Europe until they had come over. They
spoke seldom of our country. But when they did, they
sneered, they jeered, they swore they were done with the
barbaric land that had given them birth. I could not argue
with them; so much of what they said was simply fact. Yet
it was in the company of these Americans that I began to
feel most sharply my need of coming back. If what they said
was true, all the more urgent was the return of men like
themselves who claimed to be conveyers of the truth, creators
of beauty—men who could endow America with what
they accused America of lacking.
But I went little with these expatriates. My knowledge
of the language, my love and, bit by bit, my work gained me
an entrance into the true world of France, which before the
War was the home of so much of Europe. I was happy here,
but I was not needed. I was being nourished by what other
men, through centuries and ages, had created. I was a parasite.
At least, so it seemed to me. I do not believe that I
thought further in those youthful days. Certainly, I thought
scarcely at all of what I was going to find when I returned.
I knew simply that I was going home. I left the best friends
11that I had ever had, the most congenial home, I left my love
(she never understood). I took a boat. I rented a room in
Washington Place. I stared at the dirty wall—and wondered
what madness had driven me. No matter. I was where I
belonged!
The year was 1913 and I was twenty-three. I was alone
and miserable as I had never been. In Paris they had not
understood why I had left them. But in America no one even
knew that I was here. I had outgrown my old friends. I was
done with newspapers. Everything that a young man most
needs—companionship, ideas, love—was beyond the ocean.
Here? I lay on my iron cot and stared at the blank walls; I
heard the elevated trains pound past and the arrogant motors
shuffle and the crowds press, press in their weary quest for
money—in their vast indifference to all which made my
world. I was unable to eat, unable to sleep—unable to work.
At times, in my weakness, I thought of what I had left behind
in Paris. But always I knew that I was not going back—never
going back until I had proven to my friends abroad,
both the Europeans and the Americans, that I was right in
leaving.
In 1914 America was not what the young artist or writer
found ten years later. There were no magazines hospitable to
virgin efforts, there were no Little Theatres, no liberal weeklies.
The land seemed a hostile waste, consumed by the fires
of possession. Whatever “literature and art” there was had
to be imported from Europe in order to find a market.
But did not this fact prove that such as I were needed? The
very fact that life was hard here, that life did not seem to
want me, that America was quite resigned to letting me
starve—did not this prove that I was needed, and that I had
come home?
12So I set to work upon the pleasant task of making myself
wanted in a world that seemed to be getting along extremely
well without me. I soon learned that it was getting on so
well, chiefly on the surface. I had a vision then, in those dark
days, which gave me light and strength, and which has never
left me.
I saw our land as a fumbling giant child, idealistically
hungry as was no other land in all the West, but helpless to
express its hunger. Our forefathers had come here brimful of
religious energy: Puritans from England, Catholics from
Spain, Jews from Germany and Russia. And here were material
things that must be done: a continent to clear, bridges
to build, a nation to house. Our fathers had learned to perform
these substantial chores; they had performed them so
miraculously well because of the spiritual force which drove
them. But now that they longed to express their deeper
dreams, their subtler ideals, they did not know how. So that,
for want of better, they poured all their poetry and most of
their religion into the business at hand: made it express their
idealism which they could not express otherwise at all!
We spent so much time making money because the poets
had not yet come to teach us to make better things. We were
so proud of our machines because the builders of more significant
beauty had not yet come among us. We were such
busybodies about the personal habits of our neighbors—keeping
them from an innocent drink or even from a cigarette—because
the teacher had not yet appeared to show us better
ways of ennobling our souls. And finally, we marched about
in white sheets, passed restrictive laws against immigration,
grew intolerant of the chaos of creeds and races in our midst,
because we were not yet strong enough, mature enough, to
conceive of a unity of inclusion rather than of exclusion.
Now I was ready to see America. I had intellectually or
in the flesh been “round the world.” I had known personally
13the men of modern Europe, studied the masters of ancient
Greece, Israel, and India. I discovered America last—which
was the right way to discover it, since America is to be the
last word, the summing up of all the yesterdays which have
poured their blood upon the American shores.
I went west. Under the noisy, dirty, braggart mood of
Chicago I felt a childlike spirit—I found childlike men. I
found a fertile and sweet world pushing up in this town
which Sandburg called the Hog-butcher of the world—pushing
up under the coal and the grime like springtime grass
beneath the muck of winter.
I helped to edit a country paper in the heart of Kansas.
I spoke to the farmers, wrote for them, lived with them. And
though I had done the same thing with the intellectuals of
Paris, I found here a warmth of response which I had not
found abroad. Here in this crude corngrower hungering to
“git America and his dream together,” and in his overworked
wife scheming to give her girls the “culture” she had never
had, was a seed of the spirit which needed only nurture and
the sun to flower. And I had talks in the kitchens of solitary
farms that moved me in a way mysteriously deep and gave
me strength.
I lived with coal miners. I found them hungry for light,
possessed of an infallible instinct for the tragic beauty of the
world. They, too, were spiritual seed long underground and
ready to push up. And when a fellow who had mined since
he was twelve and who had never seen his dad by light of day
piloted me through a leaky shaft with a care that was loving
and paternal, I realized what I had won by giving up salutes
of another sort in Paris.
I went south—to the country which my mother had left
as a baby. I spent months in lodgings in that slumberous aristocrat
of cities, Richmond. Here, too, were esthetes, weavers
of silly images of distant Paradise. I did not see them. I saw
14a people, stricken still under the curse of a past and under the
load of an intricate present: a people hungering for light, for
expression—a people hungering and, hence, a people growing.
I came to know the Negroes in the cypress swamps of Alabama
and Mississippi. I lived with them, I spoke to them in
their churches and their schools. In these dark breasts was a
flame. I realized the wondrous wealth of spirit and of dream
which America possesses in her Negroes.
And I saw the Indians of the Southwest pueblos. In their
classic ceremonial dances, in their deeply unselfish religion of
nature, in the dignity and restraint of their lives and culture,
I recognized an American past—and an American example.
Here was a spiritual splendor which America had created.
Like all our past it was waning. Would we create it anew in
our own culture?
Finally, after the War, I went again to Europe. I had
begun to put my vision of America into books. Many intellectuals
had sneered. A large group of them had even come
together under the leadership of one of the Americans who
spend their time in Paris and had published a fat book to
prove that America was hopeless, an altogether unlivable
place. Much of the response which my books had won had
come, not from the intellectuals, but from those very byways
of our country—the farms of the West, the cities of the
North, the fields of the South—where I had wandered and
where I had been nourished. And some of the response had
come from Europe. My books had been translated. And now
that I was again in Paris the writers of that great city called
me to them and told me with warm hospitality that this new
America of which I wrote was what they needed. For, they
said, the spiritual power of Europe was declining. Europe’s
noon was past. Europe, which had created and nurtured us,
15now needed nurture! If America was indeed to be a land to
distil new spiritual values out of our modern chaos it would
be the savior of the Old World!
Some of the writers of France and England had been here,
and were pessimistic. “Do not believe him,” they said. “He
and his sort are only importations from Europe—they represent
a transplanted dream of the Old World. They cannot
thrive in America. They will be crushed out. Their light is
a twilight, not a dawn. The future of America is steel, more
steel; is gold, more gold; is the triumph of a sordid, ignorant
Herd. There is no hope.”
But at these men I smiled. They had seen what I saw as
a boy: they had been repelled by the crude, the ignorant
surface....
A few days before I left for home I was sitting in a library
infinitely richer than the one in my father’s house. It was the
library of the master, Anatole France. There he sat in his red
skullcap by the open fire. About him in manuscript, in illuminated
volume, in precious bibelot, ranged wide treasures of
European culture, and in him lived the essence of that culture—the
exquisite distillation of the thought of a hundred
ages.
“Make no mistake,” he smiled at me, “Europe is a tale
that has been told. Our long twilight is before us. But I believe
in your American dream. And I will tell you why. It
is not because of your books. It is because of the pictures
I have seen, in common magazines, of your girls and your
women. You have said a great deal about Puritanism, about
materialism in America. Those glorious girls belie all that.
How could an ugly world produce such women? How could
such women produce an ugly world?”...
1925
16
I’ve been away from home for almost a year. In France,
in Germany, in Lithuania and Poland, in Egypt and Palestine
and Tunis, I’ve talked with eager men about my own fabulous
country. Everywhere people knew about America. They
told me all about it. I learned a lot.
I’m a peaceful fellow, not given to argument. And I’m
impressionable, delighted to agree with what is told me. This
I find particularly easy when what I hear is pleasant; when
I am taken, for instance, in my capacity of American, for a
citizen of Eldorado or of Ophir. So gradually, as the months
of my absence grew, I found myself accepting what I heard,
in Europe, Africa and Asia, about my native land.
By the time I took ship from Boulogne, this—more or less—is
the portrait of America which the industrialist of Essen,
the rabbi of Posen, the Vilna medical professor, the Tunisian
judge, the merchant of Damascus, the Parisian dentist, the
nationalist of Egypt, had impressed upon me:
America ... meaning above all New York ... is the
most modern, the most civilized, the most genteel, the most
efficient, the most expeditious, the most comfortable spot on
earth. In America, there are no low or humble classes. In
America, everywhere, the families dwell on the twentieth
floors of palaces equipped with electric ice and radiant heat;
and when they descend to the street it is to roll away in private
autos. In America, everybody has a hand in the state;
everybody has a heart for public welfare; everybody reads;
everybody considers everybody’s rights to peace and comfort.
In America, the rich lavish their money upon scientific progress
for its own sake; and of course, in America, everyone is
rich.
17... In America, the women are beautiful, free and pure.
They are comrades to men. The American man is as pure as
his mother. Vice is not tolerated, drink is unknown.
... It is true that this American folk is overconcerned
with material well-being. But at least it has uplifted material
well-being to the rank of an art. The American people have
perhaps too great a care for money. But, at least, they spend
it with splendor, and get for what they spend their heart’s
desire. For here are gleaming cities, marvelously fed with sun
and air; here are farmlands ribboned with smooth roads and
labored by miraculous machines.
... In America, to sum up, are men and women elegant,
cheerful, leisured, powerful, serene. The rest of the backward
world is jealous of America, of course. The world, in places,
quite sincerely thinks that there are spiritual values which
shining America may have missed. But America is the apogee
of material refinement. Beside American towns, Paris must
seem an unkempt village, Warsaw a dumpheap....
Finally my boat put into the great American harbor. I
came up on deck, my eyes shiningly ready to enjoy the
America of the talkers of Europe, Africa and Asia.
I saw no scintillant city rising like an army of arrows
toward the Sun, its father. What I saw was a conglomerate
of buildings, formless with haphazard shapes, a phalanx of
skyscrapers as formidable from the distance as an old comb
lacking half its teeth. A sprawling and grimy town above
the noble Hudson. And the famous buildings, if they were
at all the symbol of power, made me think of a baby giant,
in weak control of his muscles, who had heaped this tilting
mess of blocks upon the floor of his playroom.
The river-front streets had a brash rottenness that hurt,
after the mellow rottenness of Fez. The houses were cheap
18and dirty. They revealed no imagination: a dull obsession
seemed the architect of these innumerable banks of brick. A
folk had dumped these houses where they stood, with its
mind elsewhere or totally absent, with its heart cold or altogether
lacking. As the taxi shunted me along, going slower
than a rickshaw in Pekin (a taxi dirtier than any in Madrid,
and driven by a man who needed but a soiled burnoose and
a turban to brother him with the sword-eater in the Tangier
Sacco), I thought of the improvised squalor in certain modern
sections of Egyptian towns and of the far sweeter and swifter
rhythm of the Saharan camel. And as the traffic crawled under
the marshaling terror of the cop, I remembered the ease and
speed with which one flies through the intricate network of
Paris. Fifth Avenue has a splendor; Park Avenue (when at
last I reached it) flaunted the elegance of a Brobdingnagian
refrigerator, electrically cooled. But I’d gone through an hour
of back yard and alley to get there....
I went uptown. I discovered empty lots throughout the
heart of the city, and unpaved stretches of street where my
car bumped precisely as I had been bumped on the winter-logged
roads of Poland. Indeed, more and more, this iridescent
city of men’s dreams—in its disorder, in its dirt, in its noise, in
its lack of form and style—brought to my mind the towns I
had seen in Eastern Europe: towns where for ten unceasing
years armies, rebellions, insurrections, pogroms, have spewed
their havoc.
I dismounted at last from my taxi, and began to look into
the faces of this most pampered, ultracivilized and genteel
people. Since they are having a good time, enjoying the “top
of the world,” why are they so gloomy about it? Since they
are at ease in their Zion of physical comfort, why are they so
uncomfortable, so nervous, so harassed? Since they have been
polished off by all the polishing machines of the Modernist
Machine Age, why do their brutal faces make me quake? I
19am no dauntless Galahad. But I have roamed the water front
of Antwerp, searched the night kasbah of Algiers, tramped
the lightless wastes of London’s Wapping, tempted the traps
of Cádiz and of Jaffa. I have never seen faces more sullen,
more dehumanized, than these of New Yorkers. I forgot all
about my conversations with the informed gentlemen of
Europe, Africa and Asia. I recalled certain statistics and knew
that I was in a town where thieving is a soft profession and
where holdups and assassinations hugely outnumber the totals
in populous European countries.
Also, I was forced to remember that alcohol intoxicates.
In my first ten hours I saw more drunkenness in my native
village than I had observed in as many months in Spain.
At last I was safely in bed in a room the price of which
for the night was a little over the cost of a week’s rental of
a furnished farm in France. There came to my blasted ears,
beneath the zephyrous purr of a million motors emitting carbon
gas and of a thousand radios drenching the air with the
still more noxious fumes of ballyhoo, fragments of flattering
talks about my native land in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Jerusalem
and Cairo.
“Comfort” ... I heard: “speed ... efficiency” ...
“mechanical perfection” ... “civilization too easy, too
happy, too refined.”... On the fields of France they had
once builded great Gothic myths; and Egypt has her Sphinx;
and Palestine wove the legends of Jehovah. Now, the sons
of these mythmakers croon fables of an America where
houses sing with gladness, and men move noiselessly and
swift from pleasure to pleasure.
Please do not mistake me. I have no grouch; I am not
pessimistic. I live in the land of my birth through choice; I
deem myself fortunate in being a New Yorker. But the notion
20that our country is at an apex of perfection is the most inept
falsehood. We are barbarians in a savage jungle, we are at
the sultriest beginning.
That, precisely, is the fun of living here. Everything,
however primitive and basic, still must be accomplished: the
present generation of Americans are more profoundly pioneers
than Daniel Boone, more original adventurers than
Columbus. The myth consists of supposing that we are, to
date, more than a lot of babies rising from the womb of
Europe.
Of course, the European and African and Asiatic supporters
of this myth have been helped by ourselves. They
have got their “information” and their “facts” from the
News. That modern Wonder, compact of cable, print, radio,
and motion picture—has it not “linked the whole world close
together,” making each man know all about his brothers?
And could I expect the American myth to fail to carry in
Morocco, when it succeeds right here?
Grab your paper and plunge into the subway. The steel
corridors have an infernal beauty and the subway stinks. The
noise deafens you and you are jammed for forty minutes
between strap-hanging troglodytes all reading the same paper.
That paper shrieks an incessant alternation of Lust and Death,
fulfilling the portrait of a savage jungle. No matter. On the
editorial page you will be sweetly informed that your land
is the Pinnacle of Progress, your town the culmination of
man’s seeking ages. And you, too, will be convinced of the
American—the modern—myth.
I know a way out, if you want one. Let the conduits of
“information” and “news” be placed in the hands of philosophers
and men of science. For instance, give the dailies to the
metaphysicians; the weeklies to the psychologists, the radio
21and movies to experts in social science. And let it be stipulated
that no edition and no story be released, until the entire
Board agree upon the truth. This would at once diminish the
output of press, radio and cinema to precisely what that output
was in the year 1200 B.C., and thereby enhance our accurate
knowledge of the world—and of America—to what that
knowledge was in those more illumined days.
1928
I went up to the opening ball game at the Polo Grounds.
A number of thousands of others went along with me. I suppose
it may safely be surmised that all of us were there to
have a good time. However varied our definitions of what a
good time is, all of us, at least, must have had the idea that
a good time was to be had at a ball game.
What happened to us, up there, strikes me as pathetic. I
am not referring to the particular brand of ball played that
afternoon by the Giants or the Braves. It was typical baseball,
more or less: and it was the typical scene.
Here was the great stadium filled with the black human
mass. The field is enormous; the stands must be huge to compass
the field. The majority of us were pretty remote from
the inner diamond where most of the game takes place. On
the periphery of it all were we—we, the great human throng—spread
parabola-wise around the field. And in one corner of
that field was the tight, shut diamond: and was the machine
of players going through its motions.
It would be hard to exaggerate the abyss that separates a
ball game at the Polo Grounds from the vast crowds that
watch it. We all know the picture of the hungry lad peering
at the man in Childs who flips the wheat cakes on the grid
22inside the window. It seems to me that that boy is less remote
from his cakes than we were from our ball game.
Just think of those titanic stands of steel. If they are not
wholly filled, their emptiness makes a menacing unlit presence
all about, chilling the spectacle of the game. And if they
are packed, they form a human mob so great it is unwieldy.
No normal ball game can stir it more than ten seconds out of
every hour.
We and the teams, moreover, had so little in common!
Good baseball, such as is habitually played by the Major
Leagues, is a smooth-running, impersonal affair. As little is
left to the discretion of the players on the field as it is possible
to leave them. They are tools, or rather parts of a mechanism
run by a “mastermind” who sits on the bench. Batsman and
fielder mechanically carry out motions whose plan and purpose
are established for them. Even in the ultimate personal
element that remains—the hitting of the ball, the fielding of
the ball—the good player is a specialist, a coldly trained performer
whose ways are very far removed from the ways of
the urban, sedentary throng. The beauty of baseball, indeed,
is precisely in its mechanical perfection. It is related to the
beauty of a machine, rather than of art.
Far, far away is the crowd. It is not close in any sense, as
is the theatre crowd, for instance, close to the actors on the
stage. A theatre is a shut, packed unity: crowd and performers
are physically knit. And what the physical proximity of
audience and stage does not effect, the emotions expressed on
the stage supply. Humor, pathos, passion, dancing, music—these
are all symbols enacted by the players and immediately
current in the life of every man and woman watching. But
the ball game is a machine: by and large, it remains as separate
from the mob as might a brilliantly intricate dynamo set out
upon the field.
Sitting there, that day, I understood why Babe Ruth—ignoble,
23fat fellow that he is—deserves his vogue. I understood
that a man like the Babe is indeed greater than the National
Game. It is such as he who enable the wistful mob to have
some sort of contact with the game. For baseball is only
clockwork; but the Babe is a boy—moody, clever, human.
He “gets across.” One crowd sees the game: another crowd
follows it on the scoreboard of Times Square; America reads
of it in Kalamazoo and Junktown. All, with a difference only
of degree, are separate from this highly organized, privately
owned, secretly controlled affair of baseball.
Here comes a player, with whom the crowd can identify
itself. Babe Ruth catapulting the pill into the grandstand is a
symbol. There have been subtler batsmen, but all of them,
Lajoie, Wagner, Sisler, Cobb, aimed for the base hit which
stays inside the field. The Babe’s home run is an effort on the
part of the machine to connect with the crowd. When the
ball reaches the bleachers, contact is established. The game
and the watchers of the game for that instant have the ball
in common. Babe Ruth is the demagogue of baseball.
Not only is Babe Ruth greater than the game: such little
episodes as the periodic scandals, so deplored by moral managers
and punctilious pressmen, are little less than godsends.
If they did not crop up from time to time, Judge Landis
would do well to invent them. They, too, introduce into the
machinery of baseball certain negotiable passions: public responses
to bribery, temptation, nobility and vice, come to
reinforce the old worn response of partisanship—a response
difficult to sustain when players are swapped from town to
town like cattle. Anything that makes us feel—even if what
we feel is only anger—helps the game.
What a hungry, wistful crowd we are, seated in our
ascetic seats! The game itself rarely holds us. Most of us,
where we are placed, cannot spot a ball from a strike, until
we see it posted. We cannot tell Bancroft from Marriott at
24the bat, without looking up the number and consulting our
score card. And save for a few tense moments, the game is
as static down there as a dead motor on a winter morning.
No wonder we are driven to help ourselves to entertainment!
We call every player by his first name. That helps. It
makes him less remote, away down there.
We shout advice to him. Praise. Vituperation. We josh
him, we cuss him out. That helps. It makes us, in some wise,
participants, after all, in our great National Sport.
When a ball comes our way, we make the most of it.
We shout at a long fly, even if it is caught. We pray for a
home run in our particular direction.
But even when the game runs on, smooth and cold and
remote, we can make use of it. It permits us to act like children—or
like madmen. That helps, by golly! Where else can
we scream ourselves hoarse—about nothing? Where else can
we make all the strange, uncivilized noises of which the
human throat is capable? We hoot, shout, boo, scream,
whistle. We get excited—without consequences. We get profane,
abusive, grandiose—without danger of having to pay.
Downtown, excitement about much is bad business. Here,
corybantic ecstasy about nothing is good form. To hell with
the ball game, after all. We can enact lyrical dramas of rage,
disgust, beatitude—flinging our jewels of gesture to the empty
air, even if the game be a machine and a sell.
And after an hour and a half of this, we can pack ourselves
like grains of sand into a stifled elevated train, and read
in the headlines of the paper we have just bought what a
significant national event we have just witnessed....
It is quite true that the old-fashioned humble game was
better sport. The bleachers hugged the field. The players were
visible: we could see the sweat on them and the look in their
eyes. They made more errors, but even in that were they not
25closer to us? Well, like everything else in our America, the
Game’s got bigger—and that means better. Even sport had to
be specialized. It used to be an enjoyable means of moving
our own bodies. Not any more. Now there’s a machine that
does the moving, while our forty thousand bodies sit packed
and rancid in the grandstands. You gotta expect to pay for
the privilege of belonging to the most progressive country
on earth.
1925
Nearly every day you see the statistics in the papers.
“Half as many homicides in Erie in an hour, as in England
in an era.” “As many assassinations in St. Louis in a second,
as in Yucatán in a year.” “More murders in Manhattan in a
month, than in Schleswig-Holstein in a century.” From which
it is to be inferred that private slaughter is an American
activity.
When, moreover, you observe the high consideration
accorded to our slayers—a consideration expressed in most
cases by letting them alone (and this, in a democracy where
such a privilege is almost unheard of!) or—in the few authenticated
instances of capture—by hero worship and adulation,
it becomes further clear that we regard the murderer somewhat
as Spaniards the matador, as Frenchmen the poet, as
Germans the philosopher, as Jews the prophet.
Murder is an American expression, a folk art. It contains
some virtue so close to our desire that we have protected it
jealously from the class distinctions which begin to encroach
on our once so purely democratic life. The American murderer
can win a front page, be he millionaire or beggar. The
same sob sisters will write him up—gilded clubman or lowly
26loafer. There is no hierarchy here but Merit; no limit to glory
save the intensest competition. Murder, in short, is an American
art. My quarrel with it is that it is bad art; and that
America’s growing devotion to it threatens our cultural
progress.
Consider, first, the psychology of murder. Murder is
above all a solution. We take an elementary case. A hates B—hates
the sight and presence of B. So A kills B. A no longer
sees what he hates to see. He has succeeded: he has found a
solution. This is the instinctive murder. We will complicate
it with a higher impulse. A wants B‘s purse. B, alive, would
prefer not to give his purse to A. So A shoots B or slits B’s
throat. B no longer objects to giving A his purse. A, once
again, has succeeded. He has found a solution. This is the
emotional murder—what the Europeans know as the crime
passionnel: since the commercial desire, the will to earn, is
the dominant American emotion. We go still higher in the
category. A wants B’s girl, or B’s social status as Beer Baron.
B, active and alive, is too handsome and too clever. A spoils
B’s beauty by bashing in his face, and overcomes B’s intellectual
superiority by bashing out his brains. A, now unimpeded,
wins Girl and Fortune. He has succeeded again:
found a solution again. This is the intellectual murder: since
Shakespeare and Milton severally tell us that love of woman
and love of fame are the last infirmities of the noble mind.
Having thus placed murder under the Microscope provided
by a scientific age, we have detected in it a constant
germ: what might be called the success bacillus—the will to
a quick solution. Now it must be understood why murder is
so advanced and wide a practice in the United States. We
are believers in success: we are clamorers for a solution: we
are no brookers of delay. Take our three hypothetic situations
between A and B; and consider how in a less successful
milieu than our own they might be blunderingly met. A
27French A hates a French B: he grins and bears it—or he fights,
perhaps vainly, to overcome his hatred—or he avoids B—or
possibly he comes close to his foe and, by studying him well,
strains to turn hate to love. These are arduous endeavors, for
which there is no guarantee of success. None of them gets
results, like arsenic or a bullet.
A London A covets the purse of a London B. Unless he
is as atypical as genius, A will not dream of murder. He will
pick B’s pocket, or gamble with him, or slip by stealth into
his room at night—or even do without! Again, it is clear that
success is less assured. The solution is in doubt: the result is
far below 100 per cent certain.
And now, finally, A belonging to any of the effete societies
of Europe has a rival in B for a girl and for social fortune.
He will probably try to get at the girl (an uncertain method
where a moment’s success “carries no insurance”) or he may
try to outstrip B by study and application. The processes are
long, difficult, full of hazard. The American way of assassination
is sure-fire.
But the American method gets so quickly and nakedly at
the result, by destroying what stands in the way: which is
Life itself. And not alone the life of B: what A avoids—trial,
struggle, doubt—is just that content of experience which enriches
living and is the stuff of art. The American system is
very competent, and very sterile. It is related neither to life
nor to art: but rather to the machine.
Let us consider our other American arts. We shall then
see at once how general is this love of a quick solution; and
how systematically we eliminate from life those elements
which might hinder a solution. Quite recently we were mad
over the Crossword Puzzle. The puzzle was soluble: it made
success easy: and it contained nothing—neither sense nor content—except
the incentive toward success. Even if one did
happen to fail, despite the aid of dictionaries and of neighbors,
28in finding the “3-letter word meaning the adult of kitten,”
next morning’s paper put an end to the agony. Similarly,
there is the Movie and the Popular Story. They must contain
a mechanism leading in simple and directest terms to Success
and a solution. They must dispense with any forms of “life”
that might impede solution. We can see now how harmoniously
murder fits in with the other common ways of American
Law and Order.
So much for our recognizable arts. If we tum to our
public life—to our “serious” side—we encounter the same
habit. We have social problems: and we solve them. Folks
get drunk on alcohol? Easy: abolish alcohol. Roundhead foreigners
cluttered up our landscape? Easy: abolish immigration.
Dour dramas corrupted Sweet Sixteen? Easy: censor the
drama. Crazy communists upset bedtime story mood of bourgeois
gentlemen? Easy: jail ’em and let the Supreme Court
of the United States outlaw their nonsense. These are all
problems they still have in blundering, backward Europe. By
gosh, we’ve solved them.
And we’re constructive, too: not merely defensive. Having
money means having a good time. We’ve learned that.
So we are abolishing every value, and throwing in contempt
each occupation, which does not aim at money: either in the
earning of it or in the display of it, once it has been earned.
And finally, success is success. Having discovered this, there
is nothing left but to murder all moods and impulses which
would deny this crucial American proposition.
You have the idea. We jolt off more folk in New Jersey
in a week than they do in France in a generation, because
murder is so consonant with the American Idea. Of course,
murder’s the low form of our art: a folk art. (We have our
pickpockets, too.) But you can’t get away from it. The murderer
is a go-getter. The murderer has a problem, and he
solves it. The murderer sees what he wants, and he takes it.
29The murderer believes in quick action: he is a maker of success:
he is a man with results. (“Success” magazines and
popular platform artists please copy.)
And all this makes for bad art because—as Goethe put it—“art
is long.” The short cut gets you “there.” But what if
the “short cut” cuts out life itself? You’ve had nothing on
the way. And when you are once “there,” what can you do
but start again—on another short cut—for the next place? This
is the joker in our competence. We do away with the means:
and behold! The Means are everything and the End is nothing.
It’s like the modern Sunday afternoon. We used to go
nowhere in particular, on foot: and see the country. Now we
motor a hundred miles to X. And X is nothing. And we’ve
gone so fast, and swallowed so much carbon monoxide gas,
that the way was nothing either. So we speed on to Y and
to Z, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
To solve the problems of life is very simple. All you need
do is to eliminate—to murder—life. That gets rid of the problems:
and that explains 99/100 of what men call civilization.
For life is all Problem, and the brave dwelling therein: and
the solution is death. A good life is the art of avoiding quick
solutions. And murder—this so popular American practice,
this so simple mechanical means toward a solution—is a good
symbol of the bad art of America.
1925
PHILADELPHIA (JULY 4, 1776-SEPT. 23, 1926)
The rain was the hero of the evening. The gentle falling
rain. It appeared second on the scene, pattering down so modestly
just after Tunney had climbed up, and preceding the
30Champion Dempsey. It was not greeted quite so cordially by
the crowd as were Gene and Jack. But ere long it made itself
felt. At the end, it held undisputed sway.
The rain was the hero of that memorable hour in which
the Mauler of Manassa lost his crown to the Sweet Marine—for
a variety of reasons. To begin with, everybody saw the
rain; and don’t you dream for an instant that every one of
those good 130,000 American patriots who had come so far—at
such expense and trouble—just to celebrate their country’s
Sesquicentennial birthday, saw the Fight. Did the seats lack
visibility? Not a bit of it. A marvel of architectural finesse is
the great stadium. But even Mr. Rickard could not stretch the
structure of men’s sight nor mold to a more plastic shape the
sort of scrap he had staged. The seeing was carefully graded,
as everything should be in an orderly Republic.
For $27.50 (up) you saw the Fight, and the stripe on
Jack’s trunks; you saw the exquisite process whereby Dempsey
was softened, slowed, mauled, unshaped by the obdurate
indifference of Tunney. The sum of $16.50 gave you two
men—one square head and one oblong—manifestly clad in
purple and blue trunks; face and condition a blank, but
bodies spinning visibly enough, and hopping and hugging
and lunging, boring and jabbing in a ten-round dance. Fairly
balanced, they were, under the heavy crown of the loudspeakers.
No one went down, no one went through the ropes.
Tunney was steadfast and Dempsey was wild. So $16.50 got
a mere guess at the decision of the Fight you had come so
laboriously to behold. At $10.00, what you saw was a couple
of bright bugs with swift antennae, making love or something
in true insect fashion—and getting nowhere, so that you
could notice. And at $3.30, you beheld, all about a far flame,
a spot, a sky of moveless, pivotless heads, a sky rolling with
human thunder. And that was worth the money.
But when the rain came, the gentle falling rain, it played
31no favorites. It did not pour buckets on Mayor Walker’s
crown, and drip a mere drop on Paddy. And how the rain
was needed! Don’t you believe it put a damper on that mob.
Individual men and women may have been disgruntled—although
they didn’t show it. But the crowd itself, and the
spirit of the show, called for the rain.
In the mists which tided to the crowd from the high shell
walls, see a symbol of tedium, and you’ve got the idea. A
solid, stolid thing was the mob, massing from the ringside.
When the lights that stared from brackets all around went
out, the crowd seemed dead. Myriad heads rose from the
flanks of the thing like carven facets—like knobs—like artificed
protuberances on a woody substance. You felt that a plane,
if it were big enough, could run over the vast surface, and
smooth it, and smooth off the heads. You felt there’d be a lot
of sawdust, and that’s all. You were unjust, however. For
when the lights screamed back, shedding their green-blue ice
on the hot crowd, you saw that each of these myriad individual
knobs had a face: mostly a man’s, perhaps a woman’s,
face. The expression was dull, not too lifelike; and almost
never varied. But if you doubted the monumental genius of
the painter of all those phizes, you couldn’t help admiring the
assiduity for going to such trouble.
Then the Fight, to make the stadium come alive. Shouts,
cheers, murmurs, ran at first through the inert thing: trickled,
jabbed at it, harried—and failed to fuse it together. Many
sparks and no flame. The spirit of the evening was not a
spirit of fire. Sogginess, wetness—spirit of the rain was what
Philadelphia summoned from its weary streets to meet the
wearied visitors from afar. And that’s why, when the rain did
fall, it was right. You can’t blame Mr. Rickard. How could
he know? How could he know, for instance, that this stadium,
unlike other circuses, sprawls too horizontal from the
ring, is too fluid in its forms to be galvanized into a furious
32hard passion? A fight scene should be more vertical, more
funnel-shaped. Then your scrappers have a chance, with their
lean frail arms, to weave a spell to pull the human lump
together—fire it, make it the mad, single-howling creature
which loomed above Dempsey and Firpo in New York....
And how could Mr. Rickard foresee that his two prize babies,
this time, would keep their feet so well?
If the prize fight is to outlive its present mastodonic bulk,
and not—like other dinosauri—collapse from sheer flatulent
vastness, the pugs’ arms will have to grow stronger so that
there is more flooring, or their legs will have to grow feebler,
so that there is more flopping. In a huge stadium, you can see
a man go down flat—and that is always worth a week’s salary
and ten hours’ sweating in trains. But boxing, boring, sparring,
dancing, spinning—but a bloody nose and Jack’s shut
eye—what’n’ell do such fine points get you, when you cannot
see them? The fat ball park developed the fat Babe Ruth.
Slugging makes contact with the huge modern mob, where
all the place-hitting of Nap Lajoie would be lost. The fisticuff
equivalent of a fast-bounding ball in the bleachers is a
couple of giants tumbling each other, as in the Dempsey-Firpo
fracas. There was none of that in Philadelphia.
The crowds were childish about it; and you cannot blame
them. They wanted action: thudding, sudden action. Without
it, they were bored. How far they had come! what hours
they had voyaged, leaving wife and children! what hours’
hard earnings expended! what sweat exuded! what shoe
leather worn away, in order to be in Philly! Was it to see two
boxers, bobbing in a white-roped ring? Once they were there,
they couldn’t wait to get home. A knockout in round
one would have delighted them. Immediate action—what the
French in another context call la jouissance immédiate—that
was the infantile temper of the crowd. They howled down
the announcer, when he wasted time on adjectives. They
33were nonpartisan. They were for Tunney when his blow
landed; they were for Jack when the thud of his glove came
over the acred heads. They were for anybody who’d bring
it all crashing to a decisive thrill. Poor public! Hadn’t they
paid two million dollars for something? I suppose that is why
Mr. Rickard, whose influence with the weather is well
known, brought down the rain.
Which leads me to our Showman. The show was, of
course, the packed stadium. Or, if you prefer, the show was
the show itself. The Fight was the pretext for bringing the
show together. To this end, Jack and Gene fought for championship.
To this end, one hundred and fifty years ago, our
fathers fought for independence. So that Philadelphia might
have her celebration and dawdle through it meagerly for
many months on such nurture as the Pageant of Freedom
(loss $700,000)—and recoup it all in the sudden financial
glory of a scrap fight, which a hundred-odd thousand paid
for, and which the radio stay-at-homes alone followed clearly.
But if the Show was the show itself—who saw it?
Not the newspapermen, not the frontiersmen in the wide,
cheapest spaces. All of them erroneously had their eyes on
the ringside. The chief appreciator of this thing of beauty
was the chief creator of it: Mr. Tex Rickard himself.
From 8:00 to 9:30 P.M. I followed this enraptured artist
as he moved from entrance to entrance of his golden dump.
I was happy to catch the esthetic gleam in his eye, and to
hear him murmur:
“Gee! Only look at ’em all! See that silver blimp tipping
the stadium askew as if we were on a boat in a storm. See
that Penn State Building yonder, like a city in the air. See
the heavens rolling, rumbling near. All so fluid, all so fairy-like—above
the solid substances of my crowd! One hundred
thirty thousand ... solid ... solid ... paid for! By
Michael Angelo,” cried our leading modeler of mobs, “it’s
34worth earning half a million dollars to make a thing as beautiful
as this.”...
And so, to make that beauty perfect, he summoned down
the rain. It worked on the crowd like water on a thirsty
plant. It eased them—brought them together. It gave them
something more immediate and urgent than that distant dance
in the ring. Water, drooling from one bosom to another,
joined them. The little raindrop, bounding from head to
head, made brothers as it bounded. We knew that our forefathers,
fighting for freedom, had fought to make a Nation,
after all.
Men and women removed their hats and swathed their
heads in handkerchiefs that gleamed in the gloom like turbans.
The stadium turned Oriental; the fight fans became
worshipers at some rite. Now, the remoteness of the bout
was good—since a rite before an altar should be occult. Now,
the cavortings and borings of two men on a light-blazed box
seemed fitting. And it was well that a little man in an incongruous
dinner coat should make noiseless speech under a
diadem of arcs and amplifiers; and that his voice should loom,
by some sudden miracle, into each shadow of the conchshaped
pile. And, finally, it was right that at the very end,
at least a hundred thousand of the worshipers (who had,
they thought, come to see a fight) should stand quiet until
the Metal Voice belched forth the news to them of who had
won.
Slowly, sweetly they plashed away through the mud and
the motors, toward their distant homes. Through the waterlogged
rhetoric of a National Fair which needed a prize
fight to put it on the map. And the heavens wept gently.
But when we reached the Penn Station at Broad Street,
all my hopes for mankind were reborn. With a greater drive
than Dempsey’s, with more stamina than Tunney’s, silent
mobs of men stormed with drenched bodies through the gates—to
35the New York trains. And then I knew that my brothers,
after all, were capable of enthusiastic action when some high
purpose urged them.
1926
So it has come to this. They’re advertising for the crook
and the yegg. The first practical sign of the uplift was in the
modest little placards which blossomed out some time ago
in the “L” stations: they reminded prospective robbers of
ticket offices that, if they were caught, they’d get from six
to seven years. The suggestion, of course, was: not to be
caught, and doubtless some few courageous men were thereby
inspired to do better work. But now there are to be flamboyant
posters—every bit as good as the old ones which urged
us to Buy Liberty Bonds, to Save Sugar, to Save the World
from the Kaiser.... These new works of democratic art
speak out to all whom they concern: “You CAN’T win. Ships
Don’t Sail Beyond the Arm of the Law.” Or, “You CAN’T
win. You Have to Get All the Breaks. One Little Slip Means
Sing Sing.”
It is fair to assume that these exhortations are not addressed
to the little girl who works all day in a milliner’s shop; nor
even to the plumber riding home from his pipes. There must
be a criminal class, large and plebeian enough to use the
streetcars, to whom these advertisements are devoted and
whom they are aimed to improve. This is highly significant
as perhaps the final proof that we are a democracy. I feel,
however, that much good material is neglected by not putting
the posters also in the taxis.
At last the criminal class is to be exalted. Today, of course,
it is small pumpkins to hold up a bank clerk or sandbag an
36aged millionaire as he saunters from his club. Mediocre men—men
of conservative instincts and cool passions—have degraded
the ranks of crime. All this is now to be changed.
The crook is to be challenged! The yegg is to be dared!
“You can’t win” shout the ads. This will, of course, discourage
the weak members. It will fire and inspire the strong
ones. It will weed out the cautious crooks. It will raise the
moral and spiritual standard of the whole fraternity of pillagers,
marauders, brigands, thugs and pirates who grace our
peaceful land, and serve to circulate moneys and emotions.
Dick Turpin, Robin Hood, the great corsairs, had no
encouragement like this. They worked against a spirit of
states and peoples which in every way encouraged “virtue.”
When one thinks of the drawbacks of those days one wonders
that picaroons, spielers and strong-arm men survived at all!
It merely goes to show the indestructibility of genius. Men
were discouraged from peculation by thoughts of God, and
by the subtle suggestion of the priests that it was harder to
go straight! Moses had thundered: “Thou shalt not”—with
the assumption that, of course, thou couldst. Jesus of Nazareth
went even further. He made it clear that it was almost
impossible to be good. For ages, the aristocracies and the
churches kept up their propaganda, discouraging crime on
the ground that crime was easy, forgivable and mean.
We have changed all that. “You can’t win my swag!”
challenges the banker, knowing well that this is the very
tune to inspire the daring crook against him. Indeed, the best
of this new scene of our Democratic Drama is the altruism
of the leaders.
They have suffered, after all, very little from holdups.
Crime has been endemic, but sporadic. The land buccaneering
art needed uplift and stimulation. It needed the standards and
the token of popular support which advertising—that university
of democracy—alone would give it. Enough vivid
37posters encouraging superior youth to bust safes or board
bullion-carrying motors—through the method of challenge
and of a call to adventure, and we can look forward to the
day when all banks will be broken, all rich ladies stripped of
their jewels, and all motors in the hands of thieves, save, of
course, those taxis which are already run by licensed yeggmen.
Our ruling class disproves the cynicism of the materialist
philosopher. Are they not now inspiring a criminal class,
with educational posters, to despoil them?
But perhaps there’s a way out of this dilemma, after all.
Everyone knows that about fifty years ago our pioneers
and pork-barrel experts instituted the campaign which has
resulted in the present flood, throughout the land, of novelists
and poets. Advertising methods in those days were more intimate,
because the science had not been standardized. Yet
the process was essentially the same as that now begun for
the benefit of our criminal classes. Instead of shouting in
posters, it was whispered about: “Write Poetry—and
Starve.” “Creators—You Can’t Win. The Possessive Arm of
the Law Will Get You, Even in Paris.”
The result, of course, was Greenwich Village, and our ten
thousand Little Theatres. In the bright lexicon of youth,
there’s no word of challenge like CAN’T. But the crowning
stroke of this maneuver for supplying our land with a
sufficiency of poets, was the system of awards and prizes
which has since sprung up.
The creators, of course, were first challenged into existence
by the possessors. Then, those who were wise enough
to make their imagination and their art work for the possessors,
were paid sumptuously in coin.
Similarly, bank robbers and holdup men must first be inspired
to know the dignity of their calling. These posters
will help to draw the right class of energetic youth. All that
38remains, then, will be to announce positive rewards for those
criminals who make good.
1925
Oh, how glad I am that spring is coming and that baseball’s
here! For once again, I can get something from the
papers. I am what America would unanimously call a highbrow.
Put me down as that, since the Majority Rules. It is
because I am a highbrow, spending my days and nights in
philosophic contemplation, that I rely on the sports in our
dailies. During these last months, life has been bitterly empty.
At its best, pro football is a vague business, and tennis is the
sort of game you must see in order to believe. I have suffered
frightfully for lack of news. But now I am myself again.
The sun shines promisingly in my window. Mayor Walker
has thrown out the first ball and at last I can spend my
pennies evening after evening, for Baseball Finals: certain at
last of having news to read.
It is, if you insist on explanations, because I am a highbrow
spending my days and nights in philosophic contemplation
that I require the sports. You don’t see? Well: let’s examine
the matter like two highbrows together.
I prop my morning paper carefully (so as not to spill it)
against the water tumbler, with its edge held down by the
plate which holds my grapefruit. Right column spread:
Briand and the League of Nations. Do I read it? No. Why
do I not read it? Because I am not concerned in International
Affairs? Wrong again. It is because I am concerned
in International Affairs, and know something about International
Affairs, and know a good deal about papers—that I skip
this column. For I am aware, whatever the true crux of the
39crisis, that I’ll not find it printed. Vague conjectures, superficial
facts, details, a perfect avoidance of everything causal—of
all that counts in this particular matter—this is what my
faithful paper spreads before me, on International Affairs.
Next door, an article about the Police and Bootlegging and
the Crime Wave in our city. I am exceeding interested in
all crime news, and in the liquor market. That is why I skip
the column. If I desire to be sure what really happened, I
must wait till I can drop in on the boys who know one thing
and who write another.... Left column: the big story
about Congress. It also fails to qualify. Nothing but the hot
air is in the print. The real plots, plans, motives, are as far
from this open page as are the committee rooms and dining
rooms of Washington from the visitors’ gallery at the Capitol.
I turn the page. I fare no better. Discovery of ruins in
Yucatán, Egypt, the Gobi Desert. I know the “desk” has
sedulously deformed the trickle of “quick” news which the
telegraph has shot across the sea.... Divorce? I’ll get none
of the violet rays of subtle human truth in this odious, scarlet,
lyingly “whole” report. Taxi smashup? Perhaps the
names at least are right (though even they may be misspelled,
unless they’re famous). Music? I happen to know too much
about music to marvel convincedly at Marion Talley’s voice.
Ah, but here is the book page! I may glance at the ads.
They tell me at least, with a modicum of truth, that Mr.
Mencken’s new novel is out; and that the Hexameter Epic
to which Mr. Broun has devoted so many years of silence
is to be published in the fall. But will these lengthy and
pontifical disquisitions about the current output give me
either facts or credible opinion? Alas! I fear not. There is
more honesty and candor here than in the sections devoted to
politics and crime. But not more competence. Real information
about books and art requires an informer with background
40and perspective, and fairly permanent esthetic standards.
And I crave facts! I’m a highbrow: I want to know at least
of SOMETHING that’s happened in the world, since yesterday.
So I turn to the sports page.
I am told that Babe Ruth fanned three times, and I believe
it! I am told that Vance pitched as good a game as that
famous one of Walter Johnson’s, five years ago in Detroit.
I’ll stake my dollars, it’s true! Here is the statement that the
Giants blew in the seventh and the Pirates hammered five
earned runs. I know it! I know the runs were earned!
(What a relief it is, to know anything at all in our chaotic
world—when even the atom has crumbled!)
I am pretty certain that these boys in the Majors are really
Major Leaguers, and deserve to be there, by the best of baseball
standards. I believe these baseball critics. I am willing
to accept, without the tedium of a personal inquiry, that the
fellows who are playing in Paterson or Oshkosh are not as
good as their brothers in Big Time. But I am quite as sure
that the real Major Leaguers in politics, law, business, literature,
education, are usually ignored by the papers; whereas
every morning there’s a new crop of tenth-rate Minors in
the five-column spreads.
McGraw would stand for no Mayor Hylan in his line-up.
It wouldn’t pay him, as it paid Tammany. No sentimental
blurb can hide the fact if Ruth has batted .170 for a week.
No lack of a blurb can blur the fielding and batting splendor
of George Sisler. There’s plenty of stuff about the past, that
we believe in; plenty of hopes for the future. But today—what
can we believe today? In the sports I get rare satisfaction,
for I can say: “It’s in the papers, and I do believe it.”
You’ve got to have some certainties at breakfast. You’ve
got to have some English written in a style living, appropriate,
honest. There’s plenty of fiction: forty pages, daily, in our
41average-sized journals. Forty pages of cake. That’s all very
well. But, being a plain highbrow, I need a little of the bread
of fact. Thank the Lord for baseball.
1926
So I went to Florida for a rest....
Of course, I left all my money there in real estate ventures,
and had to return by boat. This is a cheaper way than Pullman,
and I soothed my pride by arguing that it would round
out my experience. In Miami, Sarasota, St. Augustine and
Jacksonville, I had encountered nothing but millionaires.
There must be a nether side, an “other half of the world,”
even in Florida. More modest revelers in sunshine surely must
go south by winter and doubtless I would find these coming
north by boat.
I was mistaken. The steamer was crowded. Every cabin
and berth were occupied by men and women who, according
to admissions obliquely and nonchalantly let fall in talk, were
larded with money. Everyone had tried to get a de luxe
stateroom, alas! and had failed. Everyone, moreover, was
traveling by boat because of a tender love of the sea. There
was not much wind; but a good portion of our company
were sick. Nor do I recall any gazing at the ocean, save on
one or two instances when porpoises were sighted. Perhaps
there was more sea to the voyage than the pampered landowners
had bargained for. It is true that from beginning
to end the boat was utterly surrounded.
And besides, there was too much of an intellectual, cultural,
public-spirited nature to discuss on board for any
childish pleasure in salt water. These were men and women
on a holiday. Yet, everybody knows that the athletic mind
42finds rest, not in lazing, but in a simple change of the topic
of cerebration. These men and women had gone South
ostensibly in quest of sunshine, alligators, golf and bathing.
Their alert minds had soon discovered that Florida today was
the very apex of American progress, the cynosure of all
live American eyes, the ideal of every purse possessed of the
creative impulse to increase and multiply. What more inevitable
than that, returning to their estates in Kalamazoo,
Newark and the Bronx, they should discuss and discuss?
We were foregathered in the smoking room.
“They are sure doing wonders down there in Florida.”
A heavy Elk spoke with gleaming eyes. His chest was deep
and so was his voice. It was strange how two-dimensional
those eyes seemed.
As the four others of us round the table nodded and
sipped our near beer and chewed at our cigars, I became
aware of a strange presence overhead. The smoking room
was fitted out after the fashion of an old English inn. In the
ceiling were open rafters clouded in smoke. And here, straight
above us, through the darkling mist, I saw another group of
men gathered like us about an oaken table.
At first, I thought that there must be a mirror in the
beams, catching our group through the haze; for these men
above were placed like us. But as my vision cleared I saw that
they were different, after all. They were clad in steel coats
of mail; swords swanked angularly at their sides; they wore
flaring boots; armored gauntlets were drawn off, and freed
the harsh-haired fists of conquistadores clasping silver goblets
filled with ruby wine.
My neighbor answered—a weasel fellow, all grey, whose
nose seemed in a perpetual tremor of scenting and searching:
“Why, Jacksonville’s population alone has doubled in ten
years!”
43—Tell the Padre that we have made another hundred
converts, came from the smoke-veiled rafters.
“They got 268 manufacturing plants that can turn out
$50,000,000 worth of goods a year.”
—Our first stone building at San Agustin is a school for
the Indians.
“You know that filling-in of marsh water front at Sarasota
cost the Ringling Brothers about $10,000. They sold it at
$13,500 the acre.”
—The new Cathedral was built by Christian natives. We
have sent the deed of the property as a gift to the University
of Salamanca.
“Miami has a transient population of 90,000. That’s what
pays ... the transients.”
And over my head the echo:—We are being urged to
marry with the Indian if need be, and to settle. Are these men
not the hidalgos of a great land? Has not Don Francisco
called them brothers of the Spaniard?
“Fifteen thousand hotels in Florida.” The Elk eyes
glowed.
—A Mission in the Everglades at last! was the refrain.
“The whole thing is stupendous,” came the shrill voice
from the grey man at my side. “It’s the greatest land rush
in the history of the U. S. A.”
“Which means, in the history of the world,” said a surgeon
who operated in lots on the side. He was a man burly and
sinuous. There was in him something of the otter and a good
deal of the boar. “Why, compared to this, the great movements
of history—the gold rush into California, the dash to
the Klondike, the opening of the Middle West and the Northwest
with Harriman and Hill, were puny.”
He was an eloquent as well as learnèd speaker. And as
each glorious instance rolled from his soft mouth, there came
an echo mysteriously transformed by the smoky rafters....
44—Movements of history ... passage of the children of
Israel across the Red Sea ... the quest of the Holy Grail ...
Crusades ... Columbus....
“But it ain’t business only!” I protested.
“You bet not,” said the Elk. “‘Come to Florida and see
the nation at play.’” He quoted the great line without hesitation.
I saw our nation at play. Motoring ... movies ... lot
jugglings ... motoring ... walnut chocolate fudge sundaes
and bad booze ... motoring ... boosting, boasting ...
motoring....
Overhead clinked silver goblets. The conquistadores were
humming a “malagueña.” From the mist about them came a
glow as of mellow vineyards yielding sunny wines, and of
women dancing. Below, hard lips told of sport.
Said our Elk: “I dropped in on the Yankees at St. Petersburg.
Those boys clear a fortune even out of training.”
The tale of sport from overhead was different. Honor and
love were counters; the players risked life and joyously won
death.
“Not alone a nation at play,” exclaimed the surgeon.
“Florida is a frontier with all the culture of the capitals. Here
is a whole state being opened up, with the best accommodations!
For modern improvements, New York’s got nothing
on it.”
“And they ain’t forgot religion,” added the grey man
with the tremulous nose. “They just put up a church in De
Land, cost $300,000. You bet I bought all the lots I could in
a town like that. Where they spend money on a church,
they’re going to stick. A swell church means business.”
—Our Mission was builded by volunteers from the old
Settlements elsewhere. They were not paid, of course; but
we had to shoot many infidel natives who did not understand
45why we wanted to build so fair a church in a land that was
not ours. Yes, many were killed and some were tortured.
There is no room for infidels. We let the gold go home for
the greater glory of our Gracious Queen.
“Well,” cried I, emptying my mug of legal beer,
“Florida is certainly a hum-dinging first-class show of American
progress.”
“It’s enough to make you proud,” said the Elk.
“—and rich,” smiled the sly surgeon.
“Why, in Jacksonville every guy in town’s got to wear
a big button—and if he don’t, you just bet he gets into
trouble. It’s yellow and on it is printed in red [those are old
Spain’s colors, you know]: We are believers in Jacksonville.”
—We are believers in God, came clearly from the rafters.
1925
In the literary office of a certain magazine there is a vast
table piled with books. “Mostly junk,” the editor will explain.
My hand feathers the outskirts and picks a volume with title:
“Calvin Coolidge. His First Biography.” I am not permitted
to speak of it here. Nor shall I linger wistfully over the so
symbolic circumstance that a book about a living President
should be a thing void of ideas, vile in composition, rancid,
and false in spirit. Within its covers, I found the portraits of
two faces: one of the President and one of the President’s
mother. Thereby hangs my tale.
She was beautiful. She looks out at you in a black dress of
satin, sterncuffed in white, high-collared, with a cameo at
the throat. The hands lie demure in the lap. The hair is
drawn tight and sideways to the ears. She looks out at you,
46not so much from the frontispiece of a book as from New
England.
She is impressive. The sharp small chin is firm. The mouth
is pursed, its prim lips faintly flexed into a downward frown.
The nose is straight. It has delicacy; its nostrils seem to quiver
not from emotion, but from restraint of emotion. Under the
plastered hair is a forehead high and ample: a square forehead
which is the feminine form of the stern unsubtlety of pioneers.
It holds a mind serene through exclusions, correct through
lack of doubts. The eyebrows are straight as a whiplash.
Above them the flesh puckers like a girl’s, ere the forehead’s
rigor claims it. But the eyes are deep-set as in some dark
seclusion.
They glower. Their gaze is reproof. And their sight is
a shadow. Pain lurks in them, muted and proud, and constant.
There speaks a virtue assumed, a mastery willed: almost a
habitude of judgment. The eyes dominate all. Under the
girlish brows with their faint fleshliness, above the exquisite
nose, within the contour both fragile and brittle which the
folded hands whitely enhance, these eyes are paramount.
Tenderness turns hard; frailty assigns itself master; weakness
wills itself mighty. The result is a transformation. This face,
so gracious in its elements, gives for its final word inhospitality
and shutness. The result, in more personal terms, is
Calvin Coolidge.
His face is the response to his mother’s. She was the obscure
farmer’s wife in the Connecticut River Valley. There,
as with countless other women, her loveliness had its begrudging
bloom. Winters long as a siege, summers of swift
fever, the inclement lordship of Puritan ideals, made her
astringent. Weather attuned to will hardened this flesh and
drew the spirit down to the sure rigor of material affairs.
Virtue became a saying of Nay and an economic cunning.
Poetry took property for symbol. And so at last, on a certain
47Fourth of July, this daughter of New England gave birth to
Calvin Coolidge. Not she alone. A whole decadent Puritan
tradition gave birth to him; fathered his spirit; molded his
memorable face.
The little man waxed great. And as he grew, his face became
the caricature of his mother’s fairness. It is a caricature
horrible in its significance, superb in its logic.
Chin, mouth, nose, brow, eyes of Calvin Coolidge are
children of the splendors strangled in his mother. Her face
already is this twilight, is a recession of splendors. Her features
speak but greyly an ancestral greatness. Moral power,
will, devotion, chastity, singleness of vision, bore this woman.
But the essence of their means to life made the mind intense
to the exclusion of content; made the beauty neurotic; made
the virtue shut. Made, inevitably, their own culminant death
whose Person now presides the American lands.
The chin of Calvin Coolidge has grown pointed, out of all
proportion: it is a shallow, contentless thrusting. The lips
have almost disappeared. The mouth is a crease of shrewd,
complacent purpose. The fold of resolution beneath his
mother’s nose becomes a dugout of meanness. The nose itself
is bulbous, perhaps with too much half-baked nutriment: it
is a proboscis of forwardness unchallenged along the path
which the canny eyes select from all the paths of the world.
The forehead is blown into a windy conch, unruffled and
unfilled save with the echoes of dead covenants. It crowns
the face like a seashell; and the face itself becomes, beneath
it, a pucker of soft parts like some naked creature peering
forth for food. The head, indeed, is the Rhetoric of absence.
The face is the expression of an immaculate instinct for sure
and mean details.
Again, as with his mother, the man’s eyes give the key.
They have lost the tragedy of hers. They have flattened,
hardened, and come out to the surface. They do not, from
48a secret depth, glower upon a hostile world: but have pressed,
with a twist and a leer, to Victory. They twinkle. They have
the lasciviousness of cold possession. They are the logical eyes
of the battener on nullities: the eyes of the democratic
politician.
So, as Calvin Coolidge, professional legislator, might declare:
The Nays have it. Here is a face at last, ultimate and
stripped to the model of a will like a machine. A face where
no dream lingers beyond the dreams approved by a smug
world: a face which no thought troubles that has no answer
in the current coinage: a face that knows not passion, unless
it be charted and chartered in the Statutes. The mother’s
frown is gone with the conflict it expressed. Here, in lieu,
is a smirk. All the realms of spiritual risk which her men,
good pioneers, to such good purpose barred, have here stayed
out, indeed. A race’s turning of its ideal power into the body
of Success becomes this face and body, stripped to cunning,
instinct with the spirit of acquisition. The symbol becomes a
man; the man becomes a symbol. He crawls up the greased
ladder of public honors. He becomes a leader and an idol,
in whom the mob can worship its own meanness....
1926
It is prevalent and poisonous. And the land is proud of
it. Its manufacture is a huge industry; its sale is a popular
art. Billions of dollars are spent in making it: millions more
go to the appurtenances of its use: and billions are paid in
wages to men and women who devote their lives, openly, to
its production, distribution, upkeep. The states all license it,
turning a tithe of the wealth spent for it by our people to
their own coffers. Great magazines and newspapers grow
49fatter with its advertisements. Some papers, indeed, are entirely
given to its commercial and esthetic aspects. And no
publication, however ethical in editing its columns, however
adverse to such drugs as coffee or tobacco, refuses to display
its blandishments for money.
All America lives under its influence, and does not suspect
that it is enslaved by a drug. “Shows” are planned yearly in
great towns to propagate its sales and sing its praises. Special
sections of the dailies detail its progress. Schools teach the
beginner how to enjoy it. And everywhere ordinances and
officials tune the whole life of the land to the needs and
habits of those who use it.
It comes in varieties of kind which display distinct differences
in expenditure of money. And these gradations have
a truly hierarchic value. In a democracy where castes are
vague, where money-power has few manifest badges of dress
or standard of living; where, indeed, millionaire and clerk go
to the same movie, read the same books, travel the same roads,
and where intellectual distinctions must be very carefully
concealed, the conspicuous uses of this drug have become a
standard of social status. The lowest classes aspire, first of
all, to earn the means of visibly possessing it. When they have
risen so far, they may be said to have a foot on the first rung
of the Ladder of Success. Thence, they are urged, instructed,
exhorted, by advertisement, editorial, numberless methods of
herd pressure, to progress upward. It is neither uncommon nor
unworthy to mortgage a farm or keep it bare of such luxuries
as furniture and books, in order to purchase a more showy
form of the drug: one whose effects are swifter and whose
price is higher.
Like all drugs, this one has estimable virtues. Its effect is
great on the motility of man, when used in moderation. It
is a synthetic product. It is not found in a state of nature,
but must be concocted; although, of course, from natural
50ingredients both mineral and vegetable. I do not know how
man first came to put it together. Probably his love of new
combinations led him. I doubt whether the incentive to increase
our mobility on earth was there at the beginning. (The
thing, by the way, was invented in Europe; and in Europe,
largely still, it is controlled within the limits of good use.)
But America soon transformed it from a delicate ornament
to the mastering instrument it is today. It increases man’s
power to move things, and to move himself. It increases his
power to see things. It opens up to him stretches of the world
he might elsewise never reach: communities of action and
intercourse with other men whom he might elsewise not
come near enough to work with.
This virtue of the drug is a positive contribution. It makes
it not unworthy to be placed in man’s esteem beside other
concoctions long known and loved. Alcoholic drinks, for
instance, with their heat-making, cheer-making, fat-making,
nerve-relaxing power: tobacco, which is a subtle sedative to
mind and stimulant to nerve: coffee and tea which cheat
fatigue: opium, morphine, cocaine, ether, by means of which
men and women are helped across the crises of the body
without the drain of too great suffering.
The drug’s most typical and most desired effect is the
sense of self-motion. The user feels that he is “on the go.”
The faith that he is covering ground or getting somewhere
(although that “somewhere” be of no intrinsic value) is, of
course, the type of morbid rationalization common to all
addicts of all poisons. The sensation of flight is the main
matter. The drug is a means of physical escape. It becomes
a symbol of psychological escape.
Now, “progress” is an American superstition whose chief
feature is movement. To progress, you’ve got to move on:
you’ve got to be perpetually passing from what is to what
will never, never be—since as soon as that is, it also must be
51passed. This superstitious tic is potently flattered by the
effects of our drug. From being a means of motion and escape,
it has grown into a symbol of progress. It began by cajoling
our nerves. It ends by cajoling our ideals.
Of course, this subtle transition from use to abuse is
generic of all vices. Far too soon, the ill annuls the good
which tempted us into the path leading to addiction. But
with older narcotics, men have had time to learn the dangers
hidden in delight. They have elaborated mental and moral
mechanisms to protect them. It is deemed a “social vice” in
Europe to drink too much liquor. Men almost everywhere
have become “afraid” to employ opiates without the doctor’s
sanction. Sometimes this instinct of defense hardens into law.
America, for instance, as befits a timid land, was armored by
Constitutional Amendment against the ravages of a mug of
beer, against the blight of a little glass of wine. (This may
not be known to the reader, who can verify it by consulting
any lawyer.) The instinct of self-protection is naturally
strong in the small and the weak. This makes it all the more
amazing that America has developed no defense, and no
awareness of the need of defense, against the holocaustic uses
of this drug on our market.
The reason is, that we have not yet had it long enough.
The lapse from use to abuse has been too subtle and too
short. And the reason is, also, that there has been confusion
between the sensory effects of the drug and what Americans
consider their ideals. The notion, for instance, of bare movement
as value—is this, indeed, a human value or is it the
delusion of a drug fiend? or the idea of utilitarian progress
whereby all present life is successively sacrificed to a never-reached
tomorrow? or the standard of measuring worth
which makes man neglect himself and give his love only to
the accumulation of dead external objects? It might well be
52argued that such “values” as these are the results of a drug
habit, rather than the spiritual traits of a Great Republic.
The key to the popular appeal of this narcotic is, then,
an induced sense of flight—idealized into the delusion of
“progress.” The addict becomes nervous and restless. He
hungers to “progress” with his drug to help him move; and
also he aims to heighten the outward splendor of the drug
itself, so that the world may judge his “progress” in the
world by it. Battening on change, he dares not stop. He
must go on moving. And since even motion can become a
constant almost as steady as rest, he must be forever changing
his pace of motion. His life must be accented motion—ever
irregularly accented. And change, from being a means,
becomes an end.
Now follow other results. Swift movement, increasing
the extension of our sight, enfeebles the intensity and quality
of what we see. With the delusion of seeing more, we
see less: with the delusion of unfolding more miles of the
world, the span of living shrinks. The drug is foe to meditation,
to solitude, to careful and loving observance. It frees
the addict from resorting to himself in the crises of dullness:
he need not explore the devious trails of his soul, when so
many, wider, asphalted roads are beyond him. But meditation
and leisurely observance are the traits whereby life becomes
real.
In lieu of them, we have the bare experience of passing.
Moments are not dwelt in; they are overcome. The “present”
of life, no longer a treasure to be mined, is a barrier to
be vaulted. But moments and places are real to us only in so
far as we put ourselves within them. Now with this drug
the converse happens: we take ourselves away from moments
and from places. Moments and places grow void. Life becomes
a succession of zeros.
Within each soul there is a kindred process. The drug
53is a substitute for thought and for emotion. So hallucinatory
is its sensuous effect of “progress” that the addict literally
moves out of his troubles. Are troubles not matter for thinking
and for feeling? And do not thought and feeling require
some rest—or at least some constant, unconscious motion—in
order to be enjoyed? This drug of ours, spelling flight, flight
from the hour and the place upon us, brings flight as well
from the problems of life that fill the place and the hour....
Remains only motion ... only the emotion of motion.
The drug’s use is a short cut: and nothing is more dangerous
and sterile. A short cut through time, through place,
through life—leads to death! Life is swift, and the value of
life is the value of every moment. A machine, an act, a drug
which makes us leap this moment is murderous. Alas! here,
too, there has been confusion between the effects of a narcotic
and what we consider our ideals. For we are proud of the
short cuts with which we clutter and sterilize our world.
Newspapers, telephones, radios, are imperious short cuts, demanding
that we devote an ever-increased portion of our days
to details and surfaces of men and matters we might well
ignore. The use of this drug eliminates the ground between
the “beginning” and the “end.” But both “beginning” and
“end” of anything are abstractions, darkness, death. The
between is life. So the use of the drug lessens life.
It has another, curious effect upon the user: a subtle
one, hard to grasp—but not without importance. It lifts the
user from the embrace of living things, setting him, half
insulate, in a machine. To walk the earth, to sail the sea,
to ride a horse or plod behind one in a buggy—to drink the
heady brews of grain or vine—these are all ways of touching
life. But to box oneself into a thing of iron, and race through
the verdurous world as fast as ever one may, is to get almost
out of life, even without the common aid of accidents. It is
54to exile oneself from the sensuous growing earth which is our
ultimate food.
Now, to move is to overcome resistance. And to overcome
resistance too well is to avoid life’s loveliness which
dawns on men only when they are forced to pause. The
perfect, unconscious mechanism of an animal knows neither
thought nor beauty. The child begins to think and to enjoy,
only when life stops him. This drug of ours induces a child’s
heaven—or an animal’s. It makes things too easy: seeing the
world, seeing folks, seeing your girl, too easy. And man can
stand the adversity which bores him, far better than a lubricated
ease. To see an endless series of places is to value none
of them. To see too many folks is to see too little of oneself.
For the value of things lies, in great extent, in the amount
of ourselves we must put forth to get them. Take love-making,
for example. Resistance and time are so necessary for its
right consummation that even the brutes know it. Make the
tryst between the boy and the girl too facile and too swift—eliminate
the hazards of invading little brothers in family
drawing rooms—and the couple will very soon prefer the delights
of a hard-won brown bottle to the delights of each
other.
So the vicious circle rounds. And the drug whose use was
to bring increased power and joy turns its addict impotent
and sad. This specific concoction has done much to make of
us a gloomy people. Or, perhaps, it was the other way. Being
a lugubrious lot, we have fallen victims to a drug which turns
us even worse: making us roll along on lines of motion far
less fancifully pleasant than the devious ones induced by
alcohol.
Unfortunately the drug’s ill results have not yet made
us sick of it. We are merely demanding more of the same.
Swifter mobility to kill time and trouble; more elaborate
and expensive emptinesses to fill empty holidays. In the
55American town, the effect is sadly visible. The streets are
cluttered with the wheeled instruments in which the drug is
used. And the air is fouled with its miasmic fumes. And the
poor folk who took to it in order to be free, in order to
know flight from trouble, find themselves grooved into traffic
lines, manacled by traffic laws, crawling like slaves under the
haughty signals of the cop.
Verily, the hour calls for some great solver of problems
to save the nation. I think at once of Mr. Henry Ford. He
has been so successful in solving our transportation problems.
He has earned so much wealth in that beneficent task. And
he has shown himself so eager to go on serving his people—if
possible, in bigger, better ways! Has he no scheme for
curbing the evil uses of this Thing which causes our noble
countrymen to roll along the landside in a complacent stupor?
1927
TWO: PORTRAITS — I. MEN — 1. RANDOLPH BOURNE — 2. CHARLES CHAPLIN — 3. D. H. LAWRENCE — 4. HERBERT CROLY — 5. SIGMUND FREUD — 6. SHERWOOD ANDERSON — 7. HART CRANE — II. AMERICAN TRAITS — 1. IN DEFENSE OF OUR VULGARITY — 2. THE MOVIES AND THE MASSES — 3. THE COMEDY OF COMMERCE — 4. JAZZ AND FOLK ART — 5. STRAIGHT STREETS — III. IDEAS — 1. SERIOUSNESS AND DADA — 2. MR. MENCKEN, KING OF THE PHILISTINES — 3. PSEUDO LITERATURE — 4. “UTILITARIAN ART” — 5. ART IN OUR JUNGLE — 6. THE ARTIST IN OUR JUNGLE — 7. THE MACHINE AND METAPHYSICS
I. MEN
II. AMERICAN TRAITS
III. IDEAS
59
A girl friend of his mother snatched him away from the
wise arms, to hug and coddle him; let him slip and dropped
him from the balcony where they were standing. This is
the origin of the sad mutilations with which Randolph
Bourne went through life. The tale has the true depth of a
legend. The affection of a young woman, clumsy with unskilled
love; the desire to share, to help, perhaps—and as
aftermath, the lifetime of agony and visible disgrace. This is
the sort of irony that Randolph relished, and bore with him
through the world. Beholding him, one felt that his deformity
somehow was not the profane traditional one: it was
rather the stigmata of some miscarried loveliness.
He was very deformed. Not alone was he dwarfed and
hunchbacked: his face was twisted, he had a tortured ear,
his color was sallow and his breathing was audible and hard.
He walked in a cape that hid him. He took a chair for the
first time in your presence, let fall the black shroud about
him, and revealed a form so mangled that you despaired ever
to find sufficient ease for the sort of conversation his immediately
brilliant mind demanded.
But the magic of Randolph Bourne was not separate from
his poor body, and at once you knew this. This is why, in
writing of his splendid spirit, it is meet to dwell upon his
misery. Within half an hour, your discomfort was gone—so
miraculously gone that your mind was prone to look about
for it. But whenever, in the future, awareness did return of
60the grotesque shape in which this spirit was imprisoned and
was doomed to walk, it was intellectual altogether: the mind
needed to stir the senses with the thought of it, while the
senses moved in full ease within his presence.
It was Randolph’s eyes and hands that brought about the
wonder. The hands were exquisite, gentle, quiet. They seemed
made for such clear profundities as the playing of Bach:
they bespoke his style—the caress of his ruthless understanding.
And they flowered from his body with the inevitable
irony of all his being. The eyes were penetrant, studious.
There was a reticence in them, after the adventure, not before
it. You knew from them that Randolph Bourne was wise,
and that he had withdrawn some subtle spirit of himself
forever from gross contacts: that he had learned to see and
to experience without the ill-focused turmoil of too close
contacts. So surely consonant were his hands and eyes with
what he said, that the body became a sort of Christian Lest
Ye Forget—a sign to thrust you back into the humiliating
coil of life, from the high freedom of his discourse.
All of him had this counterpoint. His spirituality was
shrewd; his warmth was ironical and measured; his gaiety
was leashed; above all, his direct caustic wit was barbed with
a general indulgence. The body had forced on him this
complex economy of emotion. And there ensued from it a
splendor of free energy for every challenge of liberty, for
every accolade of the creative life. This little man, indeed,
so celled in a crushed body that even breath was hard, became
a rounded athlete of the spirit, as none, perhaps, of us
who have survived him. The loss of Randolph Bourne is a
shadow that lengthens....
1925
61
a.
Chaplin’s eyes are a blue so darkly shadowed that they
are almost purple. They are sad eyes; from them pity and
bitterness look out upon the world. They are veiled: while
the man moves forward with irresistible charm, his eyes hold
back in a solitude fiercely forbidding. No one who sees the
eyes of Chaplin can feel like laughing. They are the one
part of the man which does not show in his pictures.
For fifteen years these eyes have looked out on Hollywood.
Much nonsense has been written about this suburb
of Los Angeles, which is itself a suburb of the country.
America reviles it as an indecent stranger somehow lodged in
its midst, or romanticizes it into a scene from the “Arabian
Nights.” But, of course, Hollywood is no worse a place
than any provincial city of our land; nor better. Hollywood’s
producers are typical money men; its directors are typical
professional men; its actresses and actors are typical girls and
boys. Its army of mechanics, craftsmen, engineers, are the
usual American sort: grime them up a bit, lower their wages,
and they would fit in to your town garage. Hollywood’s
swarm of aspirants buzzing about the lots are typical floating
seed of the American jungle: the wastrel seed that finds no
soil to root in, whether it rots near home or blows away.
Only in one respect is Hollywood unusual: its girls are really
as fair as all girls would like to be.
Hollywood is the perfect mirror of banal American success.
Ordinary souls dream extraordinary dreams—in the way
of ordinary souls. And in Hollywood the dreams come true.
Here is uncounted money, here is glamour, here is the exact
mechanical production of that ideal to which success means
a show. And Chaplin, with those frightening eyes of his,
62which almost no one ever sees, looks out upon this world,
his home since he was twenty-four. There is another world
which he looks in upon: the grey, grinding London of his
childhood. He loves the London slums; for these slums were
his and they are in his heart. But on his mother’s side the
blood of Chaplin is half gypsy. Through her, whom he
brought from England to live near him on the Coast, yet
another world lives in him: a world of meadows and irresponsible
laughter.
In the city of success he carries with him the taste of the
London slums. But even there he was not at home: even for
that sad past which formed his body and his mind he has a
grim, ironical refusal—since there, too, the gypsy in him
was a stranger.
This counterpoint of sympathy and denial is our first
clew to the man. The drawing room of his house is packed
with bibelots, pictures, bric-a-brac, sent him by the admiring
splendor of the world. Here are tributes from Chinese mandarins
and from the royalty of Europe. And here, too, on
the wall, hang a few colored lithographs of Whitechapel and
Wapping. Chaplin loves to take these from the wall. They
depict streets that are like some cold inferno, in which the
people stir slowly like souls stripped of all save the capacity to
suffer. Watch his eyes as he looks at this picture of his childhood
world. They are at once too soft and too hard. The
emotions of understanding and of refusal are separate in
them. In this room I once sat with Chaplin while the Comte
de Chasseloup exhibited to us what are perhaps the most
terrible photographs in the world: close-ups in progressive
detail of tortures and executions which he had collected in
China. We looked on the deliberate process of men being
carved alive—as a butcher quarters a calf. We saw faces black
with the horror of their pain, and then white with the relief
of death. And in Chaplin there was the same counterpoint of
63feeling. His eyes took in the tremendous pity of these portrayals
of man’s way with man. Suddenly his eyes hardened;
he jumped up, and his mouth was cruel. “There’s humanity
for you! By God, they deserve it. Give it to them! That’s
man. Cut ’em up. Torture ’em! The bastards!”... The pity
he had felt was intolerable to him. He summoned hardness
to wipe it out: to save himself from this danger of being
overwhelmed. Chaplin does not wish to give himself to any
emotion, to any situation, to any life. Life draws him too
terribly for that. Whatever he feels must immediately arouse
its opposite; so that Chaplin may remain untouched—immaculate
and impervious in himself.
With this same reserve he moves through Hollywood.
He is no recluse. His secret apartness is far subtler than that.
He frequents the Coconut Grove at the Ambassador, where
the slightly decayed youth of the Coast ferments in dance.
He sits for hours in the smoke of his friend Henry Bergman’s
restaurant on the crowded boulevard. He goes to
parties—to those of his friend Marion Davies at her Beach
House, to those of William Randolph Hearst at his ranch.
And wherever he goes he is the life of the crowd. He acts,
he mimics, he plays, he insists on amusing and on being seen.
But always there is the same immediate wavering away from
the life about him and from the effect he produces. He does
not give himself nor does he really take. Above all, he does
not aggressively refuse any advance or emotion. He is noncommittal.
Intactness—this is the principle that best explains the balance
of opposites in feeling, conduct, thought, which he sets
up. He is like an atom that must journey alone through the
world. The atom moves an intricate course, swerving here and
there, myriadly attracted, myriadly repelled, seeming to give,
seeming to respond—always remaining free and alone. A
direct refusal of the world about him would mean a definite
64relation with it. This is not Chaplin’s game. If the world
draws him, he responds—passive. His course has been swerved,
but he is uncommitted. He resolves every force with its opposite.
Emotionally this means that he frustrates in himself
every impulse of utter giving or of utter taking. He remains
unpossessed and ultimately unpossessing. But this deep frustration
is the key to his profound success. Do not pity him
for it. He is no pitiable creature.
With sure instinct Chaplin has guided his personal life
through channels where he would be always alone. He loves
the world he lives in, and despises it. He does not want to
change it: no man is farther from the fervor of the prophet,
and yet few men have done so much to show it up as ridiculous
and worthless. He does not want another world. He
uses this one, just as it is, in order to ensure his aloneness.
But, were he really alone, he would meet in the silence of
himself some acceptance which would prove his unity with
the world. So he courts the world, and dwells in it, in order
to frustrate such a possible self-encounter.
There was a time when Chaplin seemed to me a kind of
fallen angel: an angel cursed by God with all human feelings
and with the inability to fulfill them: cursed with the gift of
evoking laughter and love and with no power to take laughter
and love to himself. But this was a sentimental error. The
inordinate tenderness of the man, his gentility and grace, are
checked by his native rejection of the self-bestowal to which
such qualities must lead. Hardness and ruthless egoism are as
primal in him as the generous emotions. He refuses to be lost
in any synthesis of love. He must remain the atom of himself.
And in his perfect poise between the forces of the world—the
poise of opposites—this is what he remains. And this is
what he wants.
What he wants, Chaplin has infinite resources for getting.
The shrewd technique of his art is but a phase of the same
65art in his life. This is the man who, when he was first
approached with an invitation to enter pictures—untried and
unknown—jacked up the initial offer of seventy-five dollars
a week to twelve times that figure. “I saw they were anxious,”
he explained to me. “When I said to them, ‘I think I’ll study
philosophy; I don’t care for acting,’ I saw them go white.
That’s how I knew what I was worth.” And this is the man
who, three years later, when Mary Pickford, Fairbanks,
Griffith, Hart and himself were in danger of being shamefully
exploited by the business end of the game, gathered
them all together into “United Artists” and preserved a fair
portion of the treasure to the men and women who were
doing the work. Chaplin is endowed with consummate
powers for connecting with the world. “I’d make a great
banker,” he once told me. He is intelligent, so intelligent
that he intuitively grasps the abstruse currents of modern
thought, esthetic, political, even philosophic. He is sensitive,
so exquisitely that the gamut of human joy and pain plays
endless responses within him. And he is passionate and earthy,
a lover of good food and of women and of racy words. All
these gifts naturally conspire to make him one with the world.
Yet there is in him this dominant need to be one only with
himself, to submit to no marriage, to let himself be lost in
no union, to which his mind and sense impel him. What, in
this diathesis, can he do? He can keep on moving. He can
make his life a constant journey through the inconstancy of
impressions which, if he dwelt with them, would bind him.
He can make of his life an escape.
b.
The life, then, of this first master of the motion picture,
is motion. His art is the treasured essence of his life. The
theme of the Chaplin picture is Chaplin himself, in relation
(opposition) to the world. He journeys through it, immeasurably
66roused, solicited, moved—yet aloof, yet intactly alone.
The form of the Chaplin film is his own body, set off by the
world: his body made into a mask behind which the man,
all intact, goes slyly and painfully on his impervious journey.
And the plot of the Chaplin film is merely some sequence of
episodes in this constant opposition of himself journeying
through life and never fused within it.
Of course, it is not as easy as it sounds. Precisely because
his work is the incarnation of his life mood, of his life journey,
its birth is a delicate issue. In the beginning there is the
atomic Chaplin, cast in some role that will motivate his passage
through the required number of reels. But that passage—as
pawnbroker’s assistant, circus fool, convict pilgrim, fireman,
seeker of gold, tramp, janitor, country bumpkin, etc.—that
passage must be blocked out with events. Each foot of
the film is an event, an encounter between Chaplin and the
world. Since the art is to be the essence of his life, it, too,
like his life, must be completely fleshed; and must breathe!
From each encounter, either with another person or with
some inanimate object like a brickbat, there must rise visible
and palpable the personality of the entire journey. So each
event of the film must be a work of art in itself. And there
must be sequence, breathing, flowing, mounting. Each event
must rise into the next until the mass of events becomes a
plastic music where each episode is a note. The whole tale is
a motion of events to represent the journey of the man—his
escape, intact, through the myriad mass of life.
The mood of the tale, being intimately Chaplin’s own, is
carried within him. What he must wait for is the precise
scale of episodes that will form the mood. Even when the
events have come to him (the particular stunts of the film),
they must be weighed and measured. Where do they fit in?
Do they fit in at all?
This period of gestation is painful and long. Chaplin lies
67abed an entire morning. He broods, measuring the tentative
“body” of his tale by the inner sense of what he wants.
This sense is infallible, but it is inarticulate save as the completed
picture will be its articulation. Chaplin does not know,
he has no words for saying, the exact timbre and gamut of
physical actions that will express this particular body of his
life journey. The picture will be his knowing.... Meantime,
several miles away, his studio awaits him. It is a charming
lot, several acres in size. Here lives Kono, the remarkable
Japanese factotum who manages Chaplin’s personal journey
through life, who serves as a kind of intelligent oil against
the inevitable frictions of the inevitable encounters with
stranger and friend. Here wait his general staff: Alf Reeves
(who has been with him since music-hall days), Harry
Crocker, Carl Robinson, Henry Bergman, Henry Clive,
Roland Totheroh—possibly the director Harry d’Arrast, who
once worked with him in Crocker’s present place and who
remains his chum. All these men are distinguishably sweet,
sensitized, intelligent, aloof in the crass Hollywood world.
(That world is full of workers who carry on after they have
left him, bearing the stamp he gave them—Menjou is a celebrated
instance.)
The staff all feel the tension of their chief. The strain,
indeed, is so great that there are men in the “industry” who
could not stand it. At last, possibly around noon, Chaplin
arrives. The instant has come when he is ready. He has
dropped into his clothes, stepped into the limousine which
waits all morning at the door, with the engine throbbing. He
is hatless, tieless, and his vest is open. But the clothes are the
most dapper product of the London tailor. He wears them,
at work, like a gypsy. Even in this detail there is the meeting
of the Chaplin opposites. Gypsy and exquisitely groomed
young gentleman delete each other: leaving, as ever, merely
Chaplin.
68He joins his crowd in the little bungalow on the lot,
where lunch is served and where he has his dressing rooms.
Tentative moments of the film are brought up, altered, discarded,
readjusted. Chaplin paces, his face hard, his mouth
half open, his eyes far off in himself. Infinitesimal details are
studied, rehearsed, discussed; gags, postures, meanings, properties,
business. Walking up and down, the little man holds in
his head the film’s inexorable rhythm, the inner logic of its
growth. As the ideas fly back and forth, in words and mimicry,
Chaplin brings them to the measure in himself: rejects
or accepts.
There may be months of this. Nothing seems to be going.
The corps of workers champ and chafe. Chaplin moves with
his preoccupation through his habitual life: parties, dinners,
wanderings about town, swift flights with friends, long hours
alone. At last certain scenes, having withstood the critical
pause, seem certain. Carpenters and plasterers get busy. Sets
rise on the lot. Chaplin wanders about among the hammers,
alone or with his group: judging, silent, suddenly exasperated,
lost in a new angle of vision—giving sharp orders that destroy
the work of weeks. A shot that cost a long journey to location
(and $50,000) will be ruthlessly scrapped. Later a scene
will be repeated a literal hundred times; and, if the fifty-ninth
time was right, each detail of it will be so clear in
Chaplin’s eye that he will reproduce it for the camera. Finally,
a thousand feet of photography will be collapsed into a yard
so pregnant with the essence of the event that it will move,
intact like the man himself, through all the world.
This perfect consciousness of Chaplin as craftsman would,
of course, be less conspicuous in any other place. (In Paris,
for instance, where men work with words and with pigment
as Chaplin does with human masses, his métier is understood
as merely the highest form of a common practice.)
But Hollywood is a usual American town—not a capital of
69artists. And the studios of Hollywood confine their precision
and consciousness to problems of mechanics and finance.
They are monuments of esthetic vagueness, intellectual
nullity, artistic hit-or-miss. The usual story, to begin with, is
an externalized contraption put together by the combined
shrewdness of half a dozen wholesalers parading as writers,
scenarists, directors and producers. The actors have no accurate
technique. The directors have no conscious control. In
such a combination the chance artist is helpless and lost.
When a scene is “pretty good,” it is shot. And the result is
the kind of flat approximation that feeds the dreams of the
millions. But by the time Chaplin gets ready to rehearse a
scene its precise place in the architectonic of his tale has been
measured, even as the theme itself has been measured in his
life. And as he rehearses, he knows what happens. I mean
that he knows the interplay of muscle, mass, space, and their
focal value as the camera lens will catch it. He is no expert
in photography. In his especial choreography he is supreme.
All organic life has a commanding, individual rhythm: the
beat of a heart, the slant of a mind, the indecipherable stir
of cells must go with that rhythm. Such an organic rhythm
besets the consciousness of Chaplin, incarnating his subjective
mood into a story. At the beginning, he knows the rhythm
only. He has to grope for the episodes to flesh it. But when
he finds his episodes he knows what he wants. And at the
moment of shooting a scene he knows how to recall what he
wants. And he can do this because, from the twist of a leg to
the flicker of an eye, he knows how everything is done.
c.
All this, however, has not explained what it is that Chaplin
is doing. His work may be the incarnation of his personal
escape from those trammels of life to which his sensitivity
and capacity for love expose him; his way of escape may
70be shrewd with all the shrewdness of his cockney-gypsy
genius; and the esthetic expression of that journey of his soul
may be done with consummate craft. Yet the inward value
of the entire adventure is not yet clear.
We can best approach the significance of Chaplin’s art
by considering another constant presence (besides himself)
in his meditations on the story, in his conferences with
Crocker and d’Arrast, in his rehearsals, in his final prunings,
acceptances and rejections. That other presence he always
alludes to by a simple name. He calls it “they.” “They” is
the public. “They” collaborates unceasingly with Chaplin.
“They” has the final veto over even Chaplin himself.
Of course, a similar “they” seems to preside over all the
lots of filmland. But in the usual studio there are a number
of men pawing over the platitudes of the human race in the
deliberate effort to concoct from them a pattern which the
public will pay for. Chaplin, too, is a child of the theatre.
And there is no theatre without a “box” in front. But in the
studio of Chaplin there is, most really of all, a man of the
people—a cockney, a gypsy, a music-hall fellow—who looks
into the eyes of the world as into a mirror, in order to see
himself more objectively and sharply. So it is that, coming
to Chaplin’s public, we return to the man. By means of this
reflection we can see at last, in clarity, how he manages his
escape and what it is which, behind the mask of “funny-legs,”
goes its immortal journey into the heart of the world.
Chaplin looks upon the world of today. He sees failure:
poverty, agony, disease, chaos, fear, pitiful passion, pitiful
love. He sees success: deceit, garishness, tinsel, boast, disillusion.
He sees his own past in London—his mother in the drab
uniform of the poorhouse. He sees his own victorious present.
He sees and feels too much. He is afraid of being lost in
this world. There is a kernel of him that is neither this success
nor this failure: a core in the man that can dance its own life
71if only it may remain alone. That is why he must escape;
why he must look on all the invading world as an enemy and
must hate it. Chaplin is a hard and princely fellow: his brow
is strong, and his jaw and his mouth. But the modeling about
his temples is girlishly tender, and the deepest spirit in his
eyes is a retreating terror. He is afraid for that core in him
of grace and loveliness and youthful dance. To protect it, he
will fight—he will employ all his skill, all his hardness.
Now consider Chaplin’s public, which is the modern
world. In each breast live grace and loveliness and wistful
dream. But in the common man that personal treasure of each
heart cannot remain intact. Family, business, law and war
invade it. All civilization becomes a foe, trampling on this
secret heart, dispersing its dream, bruising and breaking its
love.
Chaplin, who has striven to keep it whole for himself, has
made his fight for the world. Here, in his films, the grace and
beauty of the human “atom” are visible once more. Behind
the mask of Chaplin—behind the swinging cane, the ambling,
painful feet, the tight drawn coat, the cocky derby hat—marches
the common loveliness of man—marches and journeys
as it must through a hated modern world—dissociate
from social forms, shabby, despised, pitiful, poor; yet
miraculously intact and miraculously triumphant.
Rousseau, I suppose, perfected this tragicomedy of the
modern world, with its dualistic conflict between beauty and
civilization, between love and man’s habitual life. Marvelously
gifted, he gave to the world its rationale for the impulse to
creep back into a mythic childhood, to worship the self at the
expense of the towering forms about it. As Mr. Lardner
might say: “Jean Jacques started something.” Charles Chaplin
has finished it. (Even the cut of his comic coat recalls the
romantic century—the age of Alfred de Musset.) The cult of
loveliness at war with the sobrieties of life could beget no
72greater art than this journey of Chaplin carrying beauty untouched
through an atmosphere of heavy institutions, of brickbats
and policemen. French intellectual, London clerk, Chinese
coolie, Mexican peon, Park Avenue child, in the common
distress of their submission to a world too full of money
to leave room for singing and for dancing, can gaze together
at this secret triumph which Chaplin has enacted for them.
His song explodes their oppressive world. His primitive refusal
to “grow up” in the “respectable way” becomes the
modern spirit of revolution.[1]
d.
In the old days Charles Chaplin worked not less meticulously,
but a good deal faster. His theme has always been the
exact transcription of the mood of his life. But when his life
was simpler, the bridge to his work was more immediate. It
was easier for the man to remain impervious, intact, virginally
himself. The instinctive operation of his will had found no invasion
too bruising or too tiring for him to repel. But he has
had to pay the toll of his way; and that toll has grown great.
It is hard to sustain one’s solitude when one is so full of
eagerness as Chaplin; and when, precisely because the world
loved his aloneness, the world has done everything to destroy
it. His recent struggles, not so much against the clamor of the
public as against his own human need for that peace and love
which can be gained only by some union with another, have
made him conscious of himself. Consciousness and weariness
have stood between him and his journey—slowing him and
73slowing his work, which is the expression of that journey. His
hair has turned grey, and his beautiful face is lined.
“The Circus” marks the crisis. The terrible year[2] that
separated its first-made scenes from the last brought a new
somberness into his art. The picture on which he is at work
at present is the most meditative, the most complex, the darkest
story he has ever imagined. A progress like that which
distinguishes the end of “Don Quixote” from its rollicking
outset is manifest in his work. Chaplin is still alone; still intact.
But the fight he has had to wage in order to remain so
has worn him. It is the natural destiny of so passionate a man
to lose himself. Thus far Chaplin has refused this death. It
would mean, indeed, the death of his old gay art. It might
mean the birth of a new tragic artist.
Meantime the circumstances of his career in Hollywood
have conspired to perfect his solitude. Here was an artist
whose theme was an essential motion: the pantomimic medium
of the motion picture was there to express him. But
now the motion-picture industry of Hollywood decides to
talk. Chaplin, whose excellence made him solitary enough,
finds himself almost literally alone.
A little more entirely than he may have dreamed, he is
having his way. He is alone in his great house, alone with his
few friends, who love him but who cannot really reach him.
He is alone among his professional comrades, who, unlike
him, have abandoned the silent picture. Chaplin has reached
a goal. A goal is an end. An end can be also a beginning.
1929.
74
Lawrence lived his entire life in a transition. Hence his
painful and irascible temper: hence also his illuminations, exquisite
and unbearable as direct contact with a nerve.
One world he had left: the world of plural “facts.” He
was no dupe of the parade of detailed separatenesses that
clutter mortal eye. He knew that this world of things, this
matter-of-fact and practical world of commonplace, was
false; for he had left it for a truer. But that other world he
never quite attained: the world of unity and wholeness,
whereof all things are momentary foci. He was close enough
to this world to be pulling away from the other: but he was
not of it sufficiently to accept the world of “things” in the
transfigured sense that makes things real. He was close enough
to the true to win from it vision and power to illumine the
“things” he fought; close enough to create a vision of them as
an artist. Yet he was not of the true world of organic oneness
so deeply as to incorporate himself within it and thereby to
be at peace with the many.
He was always striving to organize himself in wholeness:
and always failing, and always furious and exacerbated by
his failures. These failures are his life, and are his books. The
characters of his stories are never wholly persons in the sense
of either world: the passion of the writer of his books is never
wholly either illumination of his characters as organic bodies
or life within the characters themselves.
Lawrence was exiled from the moderate pace of things that
enact their part in the Whole unconsciously. This blessed
naturalization he had left forever. He could never share the
peace of the clod which knows not its share in the Life it
enacts. Nor could he accept the clod, from within the realm
75of the conscious Life itself. The ecstasy of knowing himself
part of the Whole was never quite natural for him; he never
assimilated it into the processes of living. To possess that
ecstasy, he had to deny the lineaments of life: he had to seek
extraordinary moments. The true ecstasy of knowing the
many common things of the world as the common features of
life’s oneness was never his.
He was imprisoned in transition. And he frantically
strove to incorporate himself entirely in the world of truth
by lopping off his attachments to the separatistic world that
dragged him. Thus his denial of “mind,” of tenderness and
pity, of the feminine as contradistinguished from the female.
These were qualities that seemed to hold him back near the
world of “many-ness” which he hated as false. He was neither
strong enough nor clear enough to know that it was his failure
to fuse these qualities into wholeness, rather than the
intrinsic qualities themselves, that thwarted him and kept him
divided.
1930
Most men are set and long past growing before they are
forty. This is true of the conspicuous and successful, no less
than of the common. They have contrived, from their first
impacts with the world, some attitude, trick or gesture; it
works; they stick to it until they are repetitive as machines.
Herbert Croly was a growing man until he was stricken; and
the rate of his growth kept on accelerating with the years.
This rare capacity, which toward the end transfigured him,
was his true genius.
If we analyze the nature of his growth, we come close to
the man, and understand what made him so sound and beautiful
76a being. And the first trait upon which we come is his
humility. Herbert Croly was authentically humble. Not
humble with the inverted pride of a Franciscan or of a character
of Dostoevski’s—because of raging lusts intolerable to
himself which he had to flay into their opposite lest they drive
him mad. Herbert Croly’s humility came from a true sense of
himself in the world—a sense of true proportion. In the years
when I knew him, at least, he never seemed to be looking
upon himself alone: always, he felt and saw and thought himself
within a texture that was the world. From this proportion
came sobriety and humility; and from this organic contact
with life’s sources, a springlike energy that kept him growing.
There was nothing, I suppose, superficially brilliant or arresting
about him. He was in cool fact what Whitman romantically
sang: a “divine average.” By which I mean that he
was a man whose pre-eminence came from the purification
and exaltation of those traits that made him most like others.
With the shining talents of the market place he was not
lavishly gifted. The talent he had is rare in any mart: the
passion for growth, the moral, intellectual powers needed for
growth, and a courage in devotion to the life of growth that
served him in his long fight as sudden illumination serves the
romantic hero.
How differently shrewd he was from the shrewd men
with whom he deliberately consorted, and whom he ruthlessly
noted while, for the most part, they took scant note of him.
This world of atomic egos, bursting with pride and will, and
disappearing into the darkness of the mass, after their brief
explosion. And Herbert Croly, beginning in the mass, groping
his obscure way through a sense of brotherhood and life, into
true personality, into wisdom. His first impulse was to accept.
And this alone marked him off from his intellectual generation,
and made his discoveries far more potential. He had a
sympathy for the commonplace. His humility, deriving from
77his sense of proportion, made him instinctively, even intellectually,
share. Here, his “averageness” ceased. For what he
accepted and shared he weighed with the same quiet ruthlessness
that he brought to bear upon himself. That is why, at
the end, he had won a deeper vision of his world than had
any of his fellows. He had begun by letting himself be part
of it, refusing nothing. From within, he had scrutinized, purified—inexorably
judged.
Yet, if in this spirit, temper, method, he was different
from the New York in which he worked, it was because he
carried on so purely an American tradition. It is true, of
course, that he did not come of old American stock, both his
parents having been born in Europe. But it is also true that in
the making of Americans lineage is the least factor. The immigrant
is potentially American: that is why he came: he is
brother in spirit, if not in blood, of Roger Williams or of
Franklin. Moreover, the land itself stamps the child more
deeply than do his fathers. Thus, despite the European background
of Herbert Croly, there was much of the Puritan
about him, a great deal of the pioneer. He trekked our continent
of the modern spirit “on foot,” slowly and laboriously
blazing his way through the American chaos. He understood
creatively and creatively served it, because he had given himself
to it; and this he had done because—like Emerson, like
Whitman, like Thoreau, like all its deepest critics—he had
faith in it.
These homespun traits, almost exactly transposed from the
plane of the American forefathers, reveal the nature of his
ideological growth. The man who, twenty years ago, wrote
“The Promise of American Life” had been essentially one
who accepted the intellectual pattern of the hour. Herbert
Croly was thinking in terms, then, of government commissions
with ideals of knight-errantry, of moral agencies somehow
working out through legislative bodies. His way of
78facing the problem of the good life at that beginning would
have been familiar enough to Gladstone or to Burke. But,
having accepted the pattern, he applied to it a sincerity of
penetration rare in any hour. His book, instead of following,
became the test—and the destroyer—of its own pattern. He
was feeling his way; and all of his career may similarly be
termed a feeling of his way.
This trait gives the quality of his style; it lacked charm and
ease because it was a process rather than a conclusion. It never
flowered; it burrowed and made roots: whatever energy it
evolved from its growth turned downward into deeper roots
instead of blooming upward. From the standpoint of English,
this is a grave defect. A written style should be a fruit, not an
embryology for some future fruitage. But from the standpoint
of the promise of American life, the style, like the man himself,
was the very substance. His words portrayed the passage
of the author slowly, circuitously through the jungle
of half-decayed surmise which is the heritage of our generation.
The ultimate light of what he wrote was the consequence
of that passage. His words might be said to have ended with
light, in contrast to most modern words which begin with
glitter and end in darkness.
This book of 1910 began with a certain premise: America
has the political technique and the human equipment to fulfill
itself. The book studies the equipment—institutional, personal—turns
back on its premise, and rejects it. The book does not
conclude; it institutes. While the author writes, he grows:
instead of ending, he changes. At the finale, he is free of the
pattern of his hour, truly free since he has first accepted it
and lived it through.
More than once, he espoused causes that seemed contradictory
to the essence of the man as I later came to know him.
Thus his acceptance of the War, his sponsorship of the Progressivism
of Roosevelt, his apparent dedication to the Pragmatism
79of John Dewey. But to condemn him for this was to
misjudge him by standards that did not apply. Herbert Croly
was not a prophet; he was an experimental and emergent force
within the body politic—the force that energizes prophecy and
must precede it: he personified the gradual principle of detachment
within the process of his time. He was not espousing
these causes that were, indeed, denials of his essence, so much
as living through them, and as growing through them. By his
acceptance of the War, of the noisy and supine Progressivism
of Theodore Roosevelt, of the spiritually prostrate Pragmatism
of John Dewey, he was—in his own way—getting beyond
them. And his humble method is, to me, the only possible
promise of our nation, which, too, having accepted these
false positions, with a self-knowledge and a humility like
Herbert Croly’s may also get beyond them.
His ultimate refusal was significant because he had lived
through what he rejected. Herbert Croly went through a
gamut of faiths in political reform; that is why his final doubts
about the political method and his convictions on psychological
and religious re-education were important. He was
well versed in the instrumentalisms and technological credos
of his day; that is why his recognition of the nuclear spiritual
force within the person and beyond the reaches of pragmatic
methods was important. He knew the principles and methodologies
of modern engineering; that is why his transposition
and application of them to the problem of the person were
important, and why his ultimate religious interest—emergent
from a practical participation in the affairs of our day—was
so convincing and potential.
These later phases of his growth were clear only to those
who personally knew him. He spoke of two books that he
was going to write: a sequel to “The Promise of American
Life” and an intimate record of his own evolution. I do not
know if any part of these works was ever set down. But I
80feel that the quality of the man and the form of his spirit
were best revealed to his friends. At night, within the shadows
of his bookshelves, a release came to Herbert Croly. He
was morbidly sensitive. He spoke so low that when one ate
with him in a restaurant it was difficult to hear what he said.
Yet to have raised his voice in a public place, one felt, would
have been an outrage to the nature of this man who was,
without doubt, the deepest publicist of his generation. In his
own occult way, Herbert Croly had embraced the world. A
kind of dogged heroism through the years had driven him to
accept the crass contacts of politics and journalism. For that
was the method of his philosophy: his knowing was action.
But now, in the stillness of his room, his knowing became
words. What he said had a luminous strength, like wine kept
long. For these were words aged in the cellar of himself. The
exquisite perceptions had grown strong in secret. His eyes
glowed, at such times, with his words. He was relaxed. A
flame burned from the hard wood of his reticence.
Like an old wine, this strength of Herbert Croly’s was
not aggressive. It did not come to you; you had to find the
means of taking it. He had none of the prophet’s and mystic’s
need of self-assertion or of liberation from the trammels of
his time. His method was always the same humble one: to
work in the substances of the day, to live his day, and slowly
to go on emerging without separation from the day’s humble
matters.
Some men synthesize the actuality of their time. Such a
one was Theodore Roosevelt, once Croly’s friend. Another
kind, more rare and more precious, synthesize not the day’s
actuality, but its promise. Such was Herbert Croly. But even
within this group, he was unique. These men are likely to be
at odds with their hour, and quite aloof. Their method of
revelation is often the prophetic attitude which refuses all
participation with the actuality which they transcend. But
81Herbert Croly synthesized American promise by his acceptance
of the American fact. He did not intuit his promise, he
distilled it from the facts themselves. He was very far from
the conventional prophet or mystic. His exquisite nerves
grappled with the iron and blood of the twentieth century.
What could come of this embrace of an almost feminine spirit
with a body in which plunged a billion horsepower? The
spirit of the man remained undriven, clear; it became the
record of a slow revelation.
If we translate his career into terms of our national destiny,
how does it read? America runs the gamut of political
credos. America sets up its external technologies and worships
in them its own infantile power. America swears by the machine,
and patterns from it arts and folkways. Under high-sounding
slogans of pragmatism and instrumentalism, America
submits to the hour—to all the miseries and tyrannies of a
caste clad in the immediacy of the hour. But America will,
from its experience, return unto itself; learn that there is no
substitute for the strength and value that reside secretly in
man, and that there is no conduit to mastery of the world
other than mastery of self. America will again hear the voices
of the fathers who came to create a dwelling place, not for
gilded slaves of the machine, but for man—a world made new,
not by mechanical proliferation, but by the growth of the
spirit of man and woman.
Such was the progress of Herbert Croly, who moved
through the American jungle to find himself, and in himself
projected what must be the destiny of his country, if that
destiny be salvation. The promise of American life has had
no truer form than this life.
1930
82
a.
The nineteenth century in Northern Europe was a time
of Titans struggling to create worlds of their own. The medieval
Catholic world had crumbled: simple or timid souls
still lived in it, but for several hundred years the strongest
spirits had been engaged in tearing it to pieces. This destruction
was, of course, creative; was, indeed, largely the cultural
work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in astronomy,
geography, physics, economics, mysticism and esthetics. But
it was work of pioneering or analysis, rather than of synthesis.
And it bequeathed to the eighteenth century, not a new world
for the whole man to live in, but a miscellany of abstract,
mutually discordant principles with which to begin to build
it. These principles were known as laws: there were the laws
of mathematics, of mechanics, of biology, of the natural and
the economic man. They were all based upon the law of
reason, and this was religiously believed in. The destructive
centuries had not invented the faith in reason; that faith was
a legacy of the Catholic world which reason, by shifting its
premise, undermined. Reason, to be hypostasized, requires an
unchallenged premise; in Catholic theology this premise was
the revelation of the Bible; now it was to be the revelation of
the human senses or of the original rightness and divinity of
man. With such instruments, abstract and confused, the forerunners
of the nineteenth century (Kant, Rousseau, Blake,
etc.) strove to create a cosmos of their own to replace the
glorious fertile world of St. Francis, Aquinas, Dante.
The period of great romantic art was ushered in; and it
had many forms. In philosophy, there were Schopenhauer,
Hegel, Spencer, Comte; in the novel, there were Balzac and
Dostoevski; in music, there were Beethoven, Moussorgsky,
83Wagner; in painting, there were Delacroix, Ingres, Cézanne;
in the sciences, there were Marx and Darwin. All these men,
despite immense distinctions, were of one family. They were
in touch with objective reality, masters of inquiry, often discoverers
in the fields from which they mined their materials.
But their constructions, unlike the worlds of the great Catholic
creators right down to Bach, Descartes, Racine, were the
embodiments of the personal will of their creators. There is,
here, no contradiction; nor were these nineteenth-century
worlds less “real,” because personal, or of less social use. Man
is not an isolated atom. The genius who erects a world in the
image of himself—if his self-search be deep and his self-mastery
strong—will produce a work of universal nature. The
more profound the subjective impulse, the more complete the
command over objective nature in order to fulfill it. That is
why the scientific realism of a Cézanne qualitatively equals
that of a Darwin; why a poet like Wagner portrays the reality
of Middle Europe; why an economist like Marx may write as
emotionally as Isaiah; and why we find in the solipsistic verse
of a Rimbaud prophecies, which science has fulfilled, of the
nature and behavior of the atom.
I have needed to speak of these nineteenth-century Titans,
because Sigmund Freud, whose work dates from the 1890’s,
is the last of their line. To understand him, we must know his
family. It was a family of men moved to replace, by their
own work, the broken synthesis of Catholic Europe. They
were all absolutists, seeking in some genetic principle of unitary
vision the pattern that God supplied in the old order. The
law may have been progress and reason or (as in Dostoevski
and Rimbaud) their denial; may have been will or (as in
Schopenhauer) its overcoming; it may have been some genetic
rule like the survival of the fittest, sexual selection, Aryan-Lutheran
supremacy, class struggle, etc. Always there was
implicit in the texture of these men’s constructions an absolute
84rationalism, or the nullification of reason; a faith in the
sufficiency of the senses as a report of truth, or total rejection.
These worlds, risen from an abstract and absolute law, were
built of materials preponderantly personal—more idiosyncratic,
indeed (although the work were a book on economics),
than the love lyric of any medieval poet who accepted
his immersion in a common cosmic pattern.
The twentieth century will be different: its creative work
will be to reconcile and integrate apparently contradictory
laws by the aid of supersensory dimensions. It will be the
relativistic age, in which the discoveries of the absolutists of
the nineteenth century—Nietzsche and Marx, Dostoevski and
Darwin, Rimbaud and Spencer—will be worked together for
the making not of worlds, but of the world, and not less personal
because socially pragmatic. To this new era, barely
ushered in by men like Bergson, Whitehead, S. Alexander,
André Gide, Franz Kafka, etc., Freud does not belong. But
in the perspective of cultural history, he will be seen as a contemporary
of Darwin, Schopenhauer, Dostoevski, Marx; and
he may be known, by the fecundity of his work, as their
equal.
b.
Freud began as a physician; as one seeking to heal human
ills. But he found, in the dark places of the human heart, a
world as personal, tragic and universal as the world of Dostoevski.
The psychological system of Freud is, first of all, a
great human drama. Here, in the arcana of the soul, are complex
organisms: the superego, dwelling place of the fathers—conscience
and tradition; the id, hinterland of the immense
accumulations of instinct, habit, appetite; and between them
the ego, where lives the individual will. These organisms are
interacting units, from whose clash rise devious characters
with strange names: cathex, complex, sex-urge, death-urge,
85neurosis, fixation or repression or sublimation of libido. They
are all filled with the life of action; they make lyric and epic
conquests of the objective world; they also interlock in secret
combat or in more terrible alliance, giving forth the gamut
of emotions from horror to ecstasy, and producing the many
mansions of human deed from pastoral beginnings when the
infant offers its prized excrement as a gift to its mother, to
heights where men make philosophies and religions.
This world of Freud has complex unity. Among the welter
of symptom, dream, and cultural act move the “heroes”: the
radical urge for life (sex and self-preservation) and the masochist-sadist
hunger, born of life, for the return to death. And
like all the esthetic constructions of the nineteenth-century
Titans, this world has a personal savor. “The Interpretation
of Dreams,” Freud’s pivotal work, in its revelation of a passionate
individual nature may be compared with the “Confessions”
of Rousseau (the father of the century), with Dostoevski’s
“Notes from Underground,” with Volume I of
“Capital,” with Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and
Idea,” and with “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” A man is speaking.
He is building a system from his discoveries and observations
by the use of a legitimate instrument of science. But first and
last, a man is revealing himself. And only less intensely is this
true of all Freud’s books. Whether he writes of the genetic
sources of Da Vinci’s art (in “Leonardo da Vinci”) or of a
savage totem (in “Totem and Taboo”) or of a slip of the
tongue (in “Psychopathology of Everyday Life”), he brings
himself to the construction. While with healing hand he
touches the lesions of a soul, he is really carrying to these
dark places a flame from his own Promethean nature.
Most men solve their inner conflicts by forgetting about
them (with the magic of ready-made solutions or of drugs,
sexual, mechanical, alcoholic, patriotic); some men need to
create a world of their own to solve them. Marx, suffering
86within himself the lesion of social injustice, created a world
that mankind will use as a rationale of cure for its social diseases.
The humbly religious Darwin, agonized by an age of
“Enlightenment” that had dissevered him from God only to
marry him with chaos, forecast a biological order where the
human species could begin again to find the peace of integration
between its lowest and its highest parts. Freud also makes
answer to a personal conflict.
He is a man who accepts the dogma of nineteenth-century
science. “There is no other source of knowledge,” he says,
“but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations,
in fact, what is called research ... and no knowledge
can be obtained from revelation, intuition or inspiration.”
This is pure eighteenth-century rationalism. Thus armed, he
goes down into the irrational depths of the soul, a chaos to
be conquered. His highway is the dream; and the Freudian
technique of dream interpretation by word and thought associations
and by the use of symbols is one of the mightiest acts
of the imagination. The domain where the dream has led him,
which he calls the id, is a jungle of the lusts of human organs
aprowl like wild beasts among the tropical trees and swamps
of primeval habit. But Freud will not surrender to this phantasmagoric
and miasmic world; he will draw forth from its
flux, by means of reason, energy for the three-dimensional
world of reasonable practice, and this limited world he will
insist to be the one reality. It is a struggle between uneven
forces, and the consequence is a psychological design (called
“real”) that is drenched with the passionate and heroic will
of its author.
It is illuminating to compare this Freudian world with the
world of Dostoevski. The novelist explores the same Amazonian
jungles of the unconscious, made manifest in their
most morbid extremes. He, too, has gone down, through the
need of an integrating principle that shall transfigure this chaos
87into truth. His method is the precise opposite of Freud’s.
Dostoevski follows the unconscious impulse of men to its
irrational source, and he accepts this source as the sole reality,
finding in it his God and his values. He rejects as unreal the
contradictory world of reason and all the social-moral constructs
of reason. This rejected “conscious” world is dream for
Dostoevski; the nineteenth-century culture built from it in
Europe is false for him; and in the obscurantist ecstasy of what
Freud calls the “lowest levels of the id,” the Russian finds
his salvation of “waking.” Freud moves toward the irrational
source only to reject of it what reason cannot bind; and only
such energies of the unconscious as reason can draw back into
a world of social conformity will he call “real.” The materials
of Dostoevski’s art, made plastic in the great organisms of his
novels, are identical with the materials of Freud’s world made
into the looser esthetic form of a psychological system.
Dostoevski does not succeed in his absolutist attempt to
deny reality to all experience of reason: if the irrational ecstasy
is man’s sole waking, there is much sleep in his books,
and hence their substance. The same holds with Freud. He
would be the first to disclaim victory in his attempt to naturalize
all the energy of the id within the domain of reason.
There is much “sleep” and much darkness in his system: hence
its livingness.
Time and again, Freud is led to limits where he is face
to face with Dostoevski’s “real”—the mystic and the occult.
“It can easily be imagined,” he says, “that certain practices of
the mystics may succeed in upsetting the normal relations
between the different regions of the mind, so that, for example,
the perceptual system becomes able to grasp relations
in the deeper layers of the ego and in the id which would
otherwise be inaccessible to it. Whether such a procedure can
put one in possession of ultimate truths [there speaks the absolutist
devotee of reason] may be safely doubted. All the same,
88we must admit that the therapeutic efforts of psychoanalysis
have chosen much the same method of approach. For their
object is to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent
of the superego, ... to take over new portions of the id.
Where id was, there ego shall be.”
Freud does not admit the premise of the mystic method,
which is, of course, that the cosmic lives within the individual
unconscious (the id) so that the following of percepts to
their source rounds man’s circle to God. But Dostoevski,
typical mystic in revolt against the world of reason, would not
see the implication in Freud’s rationalist method: if the findings
of reason are universal, reason must be cosmic. This
rationalist premise is also mystic, and also irrationally rounds
the circle between man and God. Freud, like all the nineteenth-century
rationalists, is an unconscious follower of the
older, ethical Kant. Dostoevski was a conscious, and hence a
more reasonable, mystic. But both groups of absolutists, in
their attempt to exclude a part of man’s equipment for
finding truth—the one group reason, the other group organic
intuition—are doomed to failure. And in Freud, no less than
in Dostoevski, this awareness of limitations gives the poignant
note of the Titans who are helpless to create a world against
the indefeasible God who is the Whole. In all the great nineteenth-century
creations, there is this discord between the
will and the work. It gives to the pages of Freud a personal
vibration that is not the least of their value.
c.
What of the scientific values of Freud’s work? Psychoanalysis
is, first of all, a therapy in the treatment of nervous
and psychic disorders. Thousands of physicians, for the most
part in the Central European and Anglo-Saxon countries,
practice it, and seemingly with success. But therapy is the
least important aspect of Freud’s work. Most of the ills of
89personal maladjustment which the Freudian analysis may cure
are symptoms of the disorder, economic, social, cultural, of
the contemporary world. The right way to overcome them
is to attack the disease, not its individual symbols. In this task,
the light thrown by Freud on the human psyche is of great
importance; the actual relief given to a few persons is immaterial.
The time required by an analysis, and the expense, make
the method (under our present system) available chiefly to
the type of idle woman and parasitic man who are not worth
saving at the price of the lengthy effort which the analyst
must devote to readjusting them into a morbid world. It
would really be better for the whole leisured class, who have
supported so many analysts in luxury, to be converted en
masse to the Catholic Church. They could all go to Lourdes,
whose record of cures is vastly more varied. There is this
difference, however. When a patient finds relief at a Catholic
shrine, no one is the wiser: the cure has been worked in an
invulnerable darkness. But when even the most useless society
woman is analyzed by a Freudian, although she may not be
cured, the analyst and science know something more about
the human soul. Psychoanalysis as a therapy is justified, in
so far as the physician is more important than the patient.
Freud, therefore, is within the tradition of his Jewish
fathers, to whom Wisdom was never (as it was with the
Hindus) an end to be independently attained, but the common
fruit of the tree of humane living. Freud, the physician, is
moved to heal the suffering of his fellows; and from this
humble, socially immaterial ministration has issued a deep
knowledge.
I am not qualified to judge the precise final values, as objective
science, of the Freudian system. But, of course, objective
science has no final values. Despite its assumption of definitive
laws, the light of generations makes of the science of any
epoch a mere trend or method toward knowledge. That
90scientific work whose path is followed farther, is good work;
and here is its ultimate value. Thus the mathematical science
of a Pascal or a Leibnitz is good; and in this sense, it is
already clear that the Freudian technology is good. His dicta
on any specific problem, such as the origin of neurosis or the
setup of the psyche, may be amended. Indeed, Freud has himself
refuted several of his early propositions. For instance, he
used to hold that in the anxiety neurosis, the repression caused
the anxiety, and his analytic experience has now taught him,
as indicated in “A New Series of Introductory Lectures to
Psycho-Analysis,” that the anxiety comes first, and that its
source is a (disguised) actual trauma. In the technique of
analysis, this reversal is important. But it reveals at what
deeper level than any fact or system lies the scientific value
of Freud’s work. Freud’s vision of the soul as an organism in
dynamic integration with the physical body, with the social
body, and with the historic body of mankind, has given us a
method. And by this method we have come more close than
we had come before to the sources of behavior, to an anatomy
of ideas and emotions. Already, the uses of the method have
proliferated widely. It has shed light on the social origins of
man, anthropological and cultural; and on the problems of
character formation without which there can be no science
of education and no science of ethics. By its fecundity, the
method of Freud’s psychology will perhaps prove to be as
good science as the method of Darwin’s biology or of the
Marxian historical critique.
I have said that the least value of Freud’s work is its therapy;
I may amend this by saying that in therapy lie its greatest
evils. Persons who go to psychoanalysis to be cured of
neurosis or of a functional maladjustment, inevitably look for
guiding values which anciently were given by religion. They
seek a way of life; and the analyst is placed in the position of
spiritual leader. This is not Freud’s claim. He scouts all Weltanschauung
91beyond the scientific acceptance and ordering of
the report of the senses. These rationalists are all naïve in
their failure to recognize the limiting dogmatism of their
creed. A measuring rod that negates what lies beyond its
scope is the sternest of dogmatists. The man who disclaims
any individual norm of values, and yet deals with the subtlest
problems of human adjustment, implicitly accepts the values
that are current and actively rejects what lies outside his
measure. The patient is sick because he does not fit into the
world as he finds it; the analyst who cures him helps him into
this world, which means that he has set up, as the desired
norm, the values of the world. If the analyst is not aware of
this, his acceptance is merely the more blind and his work
upon the soul of the patient the more irresponsible. This is a
serious criticism to be made against psychoanalysis from the
viewpoint of a world sorely in need of revolution in the
domain of values. And it may well be that the maladjusted
neurotic of today is closer to the norm of healthy social transformation
than the neurotic whom Freudian analysis has
made “fit and content” within a society of false individualism
and cultural decay.
A more serious, because more philosophical, indictment is
that the Freudian system (not the method) makes of mental
life a region without polarity with either cosmos or individual
person. The explorer Knud Rasmussen once asked an Eskimo,
who lived within the ice of the Arctic Circle and whose food
was the raw flesh of caribou, “What do you understand by
the soul?” And Ikinilik, the savage, answered: “It is something
beyond understanding, that makes me a human being.”
Freud, the man, would probably agree; Freud, the nineteenth
century rationalist, cannot admit of this “something beyond
understanding.” He must draw his charts of human behavior,
his maps of the mind, without allowance for this “x.” But
what if the “x” is needed to produce, from Freud’s hypothetic
92id and ego, the human being? What if all Freud’s analytic
counters, lacking this “x,” do not add up into the synthesis—the
actual person? “The id,” says Freud, “is the whole personality
and the ego is within it.” But Freud’s id is a chaos
of instinct and desire, timeless and spaceless, from which by
definition all cosmic connection is excised. How does it
manage, out of its anarchic tidings, to throw up the ego and
the superego with their cultural cosmic sublimations? Where
is the forming factor? Dostoevski, who finds God at the
irrational and subnormal source, has a more logical explanation.
Jung, the Swiss psychologist, although he lacks Freud’s
intellectual genius and although his work is not, like Freud’s,
a great esthetic body, is more logical, calling the id the
“collective unconscious” and finding there the cosmic seed
that can explain the human fruit. You can insert no new element,
says Whitehead, in an evolving organism. It must be
there at the beginning. Freud, in his rationalist refusal to allow
within the id, at least hypothetically, the mystic “x” which
can alone explain the flowering from the muck of the intellectual
and esthetic capacities of man, meets the tragic fate of
all rationalists whose ultimate syllogism proves the irrationality
of the rationalist dogma.
But whatever the reader judges to be the validity of the
Freudian system or the virtues of his own use of his method,
he must know, as he reads the books of Sigmund Freud, that
he stands within the presence of true human greatness.
Freud, indeed, is one of the supreme intellectual heroes of
our time: one of those men who make life more livable for
us all through the fact of their existence. In his writings, we
sense the heroism of his effort, armed alone by faith in reason,
to conquer cosmic continents. We think of the first Spaniards,
exploring with the blunderbuss and a Cross, yet giving the
Americas to man. Freud, also, with a faith and weapons
93equally foredoomed, has discovered a new world which, by
outliving him, will make him immortal.
1934
One must approach the stories of this storyteller in the
spirit of reverence, in the spirit of mystery—as one approaches
the child. Let the critical come after. If one begins by analyzing
Sherwood Anderson, one will not receive him; and all
one’s analysis will go for naught. Let him lodge in us ungrudgingly;
not till then let our intellectual questionings have
play.
For his tales are a testimony; and they testify to the still
infantile revelation of Our America. What would have happened
in Europe, if the naïve confessionals of convert Gaul
and Frank and Goth had been analyzed before they were
accepted? Anderson’s books are a relation of the search for
fresh religious values; a groping toward an Apocalypse in our
own inchoate terms. Woe to us if we do not nurture this act
in the childlike simplicity of the man who gives it!
We shall create a Scripture in our land. And of the stuff
of Scripture are the glowing songs of “Winesburg, Ohio,” “A
Story Teller’s Story,” the subsequent volumes. Scripture they
are not. They are not hard, clear, strong enough for that.
They are to our new Scripture that shall be, possibly, as were
the lost Songs of Miriam to the subsequent Books of Moses;
as the pre-Vedic psalms to the Rig-Veda; as the stammering
testimonies before St. Isidore of Christians from the Rhine
to the Guadalquivir, to that medieval Scripture of Abélard,
Anselm, Aquinas. They are source, a living inchoate source.
We must let them speak in us and for us, in order to grow
beyond them.
94If we fail to accept them, America will turn against them.
There are already signs of this revulsion—weakness turned into
bravado—in the shrill gestures of young-old men like Ernest
Hemingway. We shall have to spew out this false maturity;
we shall have to go back and live through Anderson in order
to grow beyond our childhood.
From the molder heap of nineteenth-century America rise
flames of longing and dance a moment in the air. Then they
fall back into the smoke, lost, fetidly lost. There is still too
much damp muck for the divine bonfire which America shall
be. We cannot yet burn. We can get ready to burn.
Such is the burden of Sherwood Anderson’s books; they
are a playing of wistful flames over the muck heap. There
have been other flames, hardier, greater. Either they came before
our modern muck heap, or they played on its edge. The
flames of Thoreau, Melville, Poe, the fire of Whitman, stood
clear enough away to cast light to Europe. Anderson’s flame
is more modest. But it is at the heart, not at the edge of the
molder. It does not light Paris and London; it helps warm us.
It helps prepare the muck heap for the great bonfire. Its value
lies in its inwardness, in its humble staying.
All the tales of this storyteller are little inward-creeping
tongues of fire. Anderson himself is a fragment flame flickering
through America’s chaos: licking, curling, dancing, smoking,
fainting. He is not organic, he has no body and no eyes.
He ignites nothing. He warms, he lessens the dank, he cleanses
the stench of the muck heap. After, the bonfire.
When we have accepted him, we can place him; and by
this means place America. Looking upon this man’s nature,
listening to his words, above all to the dull beat of his feet, we
realize what a task this is: to make America into a holy land.
Elijah and Amos wrestling with their idolaters, the Judges and
Prophets swearing to force their pack of stubborn shepherds
into the Word of God, had a task no harder than ours who
95would make America into a luminous land. If you have doubts,
here are books to strengthen despair; if you hesitate in your
need to transcend despair, here are books to hearten you by
their songs of man’s mysterious emergence.
Whence came Sherwood Anderson? and what had he?
If this be not God in his blundering step, in his blinded eye,
then God is not immanent on earth. Not intelligence, not
shrewdness, not cultural purpose, moved this man. To the
end he will be deaf, dumb, blind. The Midwest lives in his
stories but not in his knowledge of himself. He comes to
New York, a man past forty years. Can you say that he saw
even one skyscraper, even one person? High men, low men,
bitter men and sweet, dance in equal delirium before him. He
goes to Europe, a pilgrimage through the detritus of his own
youthful readings about Europe. So he has gone through
life: so, in a true esthetic form of faint emergence out of
chaos, he has created his tales. Creeping flames searching in
muck and drench for the dry brand, striving so wistfully hard
to catch on, to ignite!
I spoke with a sharp critic from England about “A Story
Teller’s Story.” He disposed of it with ease: it lacked form,
it lacked clarity of image and thought, it gave nothing of
Ohio, nothing of New York; it was vague in picturing the
associates of childhood, the transition years; it had no incisive
word on the artists encountered in the East. The European
mind could not touch the flavor of this revelation. What it
saw as muddle is search; what it saw as evasion is honest
effort.
Sherwood Anderson used to sing of the gods, the new-old
gods coming out of the corn into the streets of Chicago.
Primitive gods they were, almost phallic. Mere trunks of
power, moving; mere conveyancers of life greyly luminous
into the builded blackness of our cities. Sherwood Anderson
96is such a god, himself. There must be many, ere the new
Elohim grow into the new Jehovah.
1926
I dwell in Possibility
A fairer house than Prose,
More numerous of windows
Superior of doors.
Emily Dickinson
a.
Agrarian America had a common culture, which was both
the fruit and the carrier of what I have called elsewhere “the
great tradition.”[3] This tradition rose in the Mediterranean
world with the will of Egypt, Israel and Greece, to re-create
the individual and the group in the image of values called
divine. The same will established Catholic Europe, and when
it failed (producing nonetheless what came to be the national
European cultures), the great tradition survived. It survived
in the Europe of Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution. With
the Puritans, it was formally transplanted to the North American
seaboard. Roger Williams, Thomas Hooker, Jonathan
Edwards; later, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, carried on the
great tradition with the same tools, on the same intellectual
and economic terms, that had been brought from Europe and
that had failed in Europe. It was transplanted, it was not
transfigured. But before the final defeat of the Puritan avatar—a
defeat ensured by the disappearance of our agrarian economy—the
great tradition had borne fruit in two general forms.
The first was the ideological art of what Lewis Mumford calls
97the Golden Day: a prophetic art of poets so diverse as Emerson,
Thoreau, Poe, whose vision was one of Possibility and
whose doom, since its premise was a disappearing world, was
to remain suspended in the thin air of aspiration. The second
was within the lives of the common people. Acceptance of
the great tradition had its effect upon their character; and
this humbler achievement is recorded, perhaps finally, in the
poems of Robert Frost.
Frost’s record (“North of Boston,” 1914; “Mountain Interval,”
1916) was already made when the United States
entered the War; and the War brought final ruin to the
American culture of “free” individuals living for the most
part on farms, whose beauty Frost recorded. The tradition
which had tempered the persons in Frost’s poems had already,
before the Civil War, sung its last high word in the old terms
that were valid from Plato to Fichte. And this, too, was fitting,
for the Civil War prepared the doom, which the World
War completed, of the agrarian class culture. But the great
tradition, unbroken from Hermes Trismegistus and Moses,
does not die. In a society transfigured by new scientific and
economic forces, it must be transfigured. The literature and
philosophy of the past hundred years reveal many efforts at
this transfiguration: in this common purpose, Nietzsche and
Marx are brothers. The poetry of Whitman was still founded
on the substances of the old order. The poetry of Hart Crane
is a deliberate continuance of the great tradition in terms of
our industrialized world.
If we bear in mind this purpose of Crane’s work, we shall
be better prepared to understand his methods, his content,
his obscurity. We shall, of course, not seek the clear forms
of a poet of Probability, like Frost. But we shall also not too
widely trust Crane’s kinship with the poets of the Emersonian
era, whose tradition he immediately continues. They were
all, like Crane, bards of possibility rather than scribes of realization.
98Yet they relied upon inherited forms—forms emotional,
ethical, social, intellectual and religious, transplanted from
Europe and not too deliquescent for their uses. Whitman’s
apocalypse rested on the politics of Jefferson and on the economics
of the physiocrats of France. Emerson was content
with the ideology of Plato and Buddha, his own world not
too radically differing from theirs. Even Emily Dickinson
based her explosive doubts upon the permanent premise of a
sheltered private garden, to which such as she could always
meditatively retire. These traditional assumptions gave to the
poets of the Golden Day an accessible, communicable form;
for we, too, have been nurtured on the words of that old
order. But in Crane, none of the ideal landmarks, none of
the formal securities, survive; therefore his language problem—the
poet’s need to find words at once to create and to communicate
his vision—is acute. Crane, who began to write while
Frost was perfecting his record, lived, instinctively at first,
then with poignant awareness, in a world whose inherited outlines
of person, class, creed, value—still clear, however weak,
in Emerson’s Boston, Whitman’s New York, Poe’s Richmond—had
dissolved. His vision was the timeless One of all the
seers, and it binds him to the great tradition; but because of
the time that fleshed him and that he needed to substance his
vision, he could not employ conventional concretions. In his
lack of valid terms to express his relationship with life, Crane
was a true culture-child; more completely than either Dickinson
or Blake, he was a child of modern man.
b.
Harold Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, July
21, 1899. His parents, Clarence Arthur Crane and Grace Hart,
were of the pioneer stock that trekked in covered wagons
from New England to the Western Reserve. But his grandparents,
on both sides, had already shifted from the farm to
99small-town business, and Clarence Crane, who had inherited
his father’s general store in Garrettsville, became a wealthy
candy manufacturer in Cleveland. Here the poet, an only
child, lived from his tenth year. At thirteen, he was composing
verse; at sixteen, in the words of Gorham Munson, “he
was writing on a level that Amy Lowell never rose from.”
In the winter of 1916, he went with his mother, who was
separated from her husband, to the Isle of Pines, south of
Cuba, where his grandfather Hart had a fruit ranch; and this
journey, which gave him his first experience of the sea, was
cardinal in his growth. The following year, he was in New
York, in contact with Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap,
editors of “The Little Review”; tutoring for college; writing;
already passionately and rather wildly living.
At this time, two almost mutually exclusive tendencies
divided the American literary scene. One was centered in Ezra
Pound, Alfred Kreymborg, the imagists, Harriet Monroe’s
“Poetry” and “The Little Review”: the other was grouped
about “The Seven Arts.” Young Crane was in vital touch with
both. He was reading Marlowe, Donne, Laforgue, Rimbaud;
but he was also finding inspiration in Whitman, Sherwood
Anderson and Melville. His action, when the United States
lurched into the war, reveals the complexity of his interests.
He decided not to go to college and by his own choice returned
to Cleveland, to work as a common laborer in a munition
plant and a shipyard on the lake. He loved machines, the
earth tang of the workers. He was no poet in an ivory tower.
But also he loved music; he wanted time to write, to meditate,
to read. The conflict of desires led him, perhaps, to accept
what seemed a comfortable compromise: a job in the candy
business of his father.
The elder Crane seems to have been a man of turbulent
and twisted power, wholly loyal to the gods of Commerce.
He was sincerely outraged by the jest of fortune which had
100given him a poet for a son. Doubtless, he was bitter at his one
child’s siding with the mother in the family conflict. But
under all, there was a secret emotional bond between the two,
making for the ricochet of antagonism and attraction that
lasted between them until the father’s death, a year before
the son’s. The candy magnate set laboriously to work to
drive the “poetry nonsense” out of his boy. Hart became a
candy salesman behind a counter, a soda-jerker, a shipping
clerk. He received a minimum wage. Trusted employees were
detailed to spy on him, lest he read “poetry books” during
work hours. Hart Crane escaped several times from the paternal
yoke, usually to advertising jobs near home or in New
York. And at last, in 1920, he decided to break with both
Cleveland and his father.
His exquisite balance of nerves was already permanently
impaired. The youthful poet, who had left a comfortable
household to live with machines and rough men, who had
shouldered “the curse of sundered parentage,” who had tasted
the strong drink of literature and war, carried within him a
burden intricate and heavy—a burden hard to hold in equilibrium.
Doubtless the chaos of his personal life led him to
rationalize the accessible tangent ease from the strain of balance
which excess use of alcohol invited. Yet there was a
deeper cause for the disequilibrium which, when Crane was
thirty-two, was finally to break him from his love of life and
to destroy him. Hart Crane was a mystic. The mystic is a
man who knows, by immediate experience, the organic continuity
of his self with the cosmos. This experience, which is
the natural fruit of sensitivity, becomes intense in one whose
native energy is great; and lest it turn into an overwhelming,
shattering burden, it must be disciplined and ordered. A stable
nucleus within the self must be achieved, to bear and finally
transfigure the world’s impinging chaos. Personally, Crane did
not win this synthesis.
101But the poet was clearer and shrewder than the man. His
mind sought a poetic principle to integrate the exuberant
flood of his impressions. The early poems, collected in “White
Buildings” (1926), reveal the quest, not the finding. Allen
Tate, in his Introduction to this volume, writes: “The poems ...
are facets of a single vision; they refer to a central imagination,
a single evaluating power, which is at once the motive
of the poetry and the form of its realization.” But the central
imagination, wanting a unitary principle, wavers and breaks;
turns back upon itself instead of mastering the envisaged substance
of the poem. That is why, often, a fragmentary part of
a poem is greater than the whole: and why it is, at times, impossible
to transpose the series of images into the sense-and-thought
sequence that originally moved the poet, and that
must be perceived in order to move the reader. The mediate
principle, coterminous with the image logic of the poem and
the feeling logic of the poet, is imperfect. The first lines of
the volume:
As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by....
are a superb expression of chaos and of the poet’s need to
integrate this chaos in the active mirror of self. Page after
page, “realities plunge by,” only ephemerally framed in a
mirroring mood which alas! melts, itself, into the turbulent
procession. Objective reality exists in these poems only as an
oblique moving-inward to the poet’s mood. But the mood is
never, as in imagist or romantic verse, given for and as itself.
It is given only as an organic moving-outward toward the
objective world. Each lyric is a diapason between two integers
of a continuous whole. But the integers (subjective and objective)
are almost never clear. This makes of the poem an
abstract, wavering, esthetic body. There is not yet, as in the
later work, a conscious substantiated theme or principle of
102vision to stratify the interacting parts of the poems into an
immobile whole.
But in the final six lyrics of this volume (“Voyages”)
there is the beginning of a synthesis. Its symbolic theme is
the Sea. The turbulent experience of Crane’s childhood and
youth is fused in a litany to the Sea.
... Sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.
The sea, first source of life, first Mother, is death to man.
To woo it is to return to death’s simple singleness. This solution
from the burden of chaos is like the erotic mysticism of
D. H. Lawrence. Immersion—hence loss—of the burdened
mystic self in perfect sexual union is a romantic myth, old
as the myth of the Sea. It satisfied Lawrence. But Crane was
intellectually too strong, and too robust an artist, to abide it.
“White Buildings” closes on the unitary theme of surrender.
But the poet is ready to begin his quest again.
In 1924, the poems of “White Buildings” written but not
yet published, Crane was living in Brooklyn, in range of the
harbor, the Bridge, the sea-sounds....
Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails,
Far strum of fog horns....
And now, the integrating theme came to him.
The will of Crane in “The Bridge” is deliberately mythmaking.
But this will, as we have seen, is born of a desperate,
personal need: the mystic must create order from the chaos
with which his associative genius overwhelms him. The poem
retains this personal origin. The revelation of “The Bridge,”
as principle and myth, comes to an individual in the course
of his day’s journey; and that individual is the poet. In this
sense. “The Bridge” is allied to the “Commedia” of Dante,
103who also, in response to desperate need, takes a journey in
the course of which his need finds consummation.
Lest the analogy be misleading, I immediately amend it.
Dante’s cosmos, imaged in an age of cultural maturity, when
the life of man was coterminous with his vision, contains time
and persons: only in the ecstatic last scenes of the “Paradiso”
are they momently merged and lost. Therefore, the line of
Dante’s poem is clear, being forth and back in time: and the
focus of the action is cogent, being the person of the Poet
with whom the reader can readily graph points of reference.
Crane’s cosmos has no time and his person-sense is vacillant
and evanescent. Crane’s journey is that of an individual unsure
of his own form and lost to time. This difference at once
clarifies the disadvantageous esthetic of “The Bridge” as compared
with that of broadly analogous poems of spiritual
search, like the “Commedia” or “Don Quixote.” It exemplifies
the role played by the cultural epoch in the creation of
even the most personal work of genius.
In “Proem,” the poet exhorts the object of his choice—the
Bridge. It shall synthesize the world of chaos. It joined city,
river and sea; man made it with his new hand, the machine.
Parabola-wise, it shall now vault the continent, and, transmuted,
reach that inward heaven which is the fulfillment of
man’s need of order. Part One, “Ave Maria,” is the vision of
Columbus, mystic navigator who mapped his voyage in Isaiah,
seeking to weld the world’s riven halves into one. But this
Columbus is scarcely a person; he is suffused in his history
and his ocean; his will is more substantial than his eye. Nor
does he live in time. Part Two, “Powhatan’s Daughter” (the
Indian princess is the flesh of America, the American earth,
and Mother of our dream), begins the recital of the poet’s
journey which traces in extension (as Columbus gives in
essence) the myth’s trajectory. The poet awakes in his room
above the harbor, beside his lover. Risen (taking the harbor
104and the sea-sounds with him), he walks through the lowly
Brooklyn streets: but walks with his cultural past: Pizarro,
Cortés, Priscilla, and now Rip Van Winkle whose eyes, fresh
from sleep, will abide the poet’s as they approach the transfigured
world of today. The poet descends the subway that
tunnels the East River (the Bridge is above); and now the
subway is a river “leaping” from Far Rockaway to Golden
Gate. A river of steel rails at first, bearing westward America’s
urban, civilization (“Stick your patent name on a signboard”)
and waking as it runs the burdened trudge of pioneers and
all their worlds of factory and song. The patterning march
of the American settlers traces the body, gradually, of Pocahontas;
the flow of continent and man becomes the Great
River; the huge travail of continental life, after the white man
and before him, is borne southward, “meeting the Gulf.”
Powhatan’s daughter, America’s flesh, dances and the flesh
becomes spirit. Dances the poet’s boyhood memories of star
and lake, of “sleek boat nibbling margin grass”; dances at last
into the life of an Indiana mother, home from a frustrate trek
to California for gold, who is bidding her son farewell; he is
going east again to follow the sea. (“Write me from Rio.”)
There are no achieved persons in the universe, barely
emergent from chaos, of Hart Crane; and this first crystallization—the
prairie mother—is the first weak block in the poem’s
structure. Now, with Part Three, “Cutty Sark,” the physical
course of the poet (the subway ride has exploded into the
cosmic implication of the River) returns to view, but blurred.
The poet is in South Street, Manhattan, near midnight: he
is carousing with a sailor who brings him in snatches of song
Leviathan, Plato, Stamboul—and a dim harbinger of Atlantis.
“I started walking home across the Bridge”: there, in the hallucinatory
parade of clippers that once winked round the
Horn “bright skysails ticketing the Line,” the poet is out
again, now seaward.
105Part Four, “Cape Hatteras,” is the turning point of the
poem. Thus far, we have seen the individual forms of the
poet’s crowded day melt into widening, deepening cycles of
association. Columbus into the destiny and will of the Atlantic:
two lovers into the harbor, the harbor into the sea: subway
into a transcontinental railroad, into a continent, into a
River; the River into the Gulf; the Indian princess into the
Earth Mother, and her dance into the tumult and traffic of
the nation; ribald South Street into a vision—while the Bridge
brings the clippers that bring China—of Atlantis. Now, the
movement turns back toward crystallization. “Cape Hatteras”
at first invokes the geologic age that lifted the Appalachians
above the sea; the cosmic struggle sharpens into the birth of
the airplane—industrial America; the “red, eternal flesh of
Pocahontas” gives us, finally, Walt Whitman. “Years of the
Modern! Propulsions toward what capes?” The Saunterer on
the Open Road takes the hand of the poet. Parts Five and Six
are interludes. Part Seven, “The Tunnel,” carries the poem
to its climax. The poet, in mid-air and at midnight, leaves the
Bridge; he “comes down to earth” and returns home as he
had left, by subway. This unreal collapse of bridge into subway
has meaning. The subway is the tunnel. The tunnel is
America, and is a kind of hell. But it has dynamic direction.
In this plunging subway darkness, appears Poe:
And why do I often meet your visage here,
Your eyes like agate lanterns...?
If the reader understand Poe, he will understand the apparition.
Of all the classic poets of the great tradition in America,
Poe—perhaps the least an artist—was the most advanced, the
most prophetic, as thinker. All, as we have noted, were content
more or less with the merely transplanted terms of an
agrarian culture. Only Poe guessed the transfiguring effect of
the Machine upon the forms of human life, upon the very
106concept of the person. The Tunnel gives us man in his industrial
hell which the machine—his hand and heart—has made;
now let the machine be his godlike hand to raise him! The
plunging subway shall merge with the vaulting bridge. Whitman
gives the vision, Poe—however vaguely—the method.
The final part, “Atlantis,” is a transposed return to the beginning.
The Bridge, in time, has linked Atlantis with Cathay.
Now it becomes an absolute experience. Like any human
event, fully known, it links man instantaneously, “beyond
time,” with the Truth.
The principle that Crane sought, to make him master of
his sense of immediate continuity with a world overwhelmingly
chaotic, gave him “The Bridge”; but in actual life it did
not sustain him. The later poems, despite their technical perfection
(and with the exception of “The Broken Tower”),
mark a retreat to the mood of the last pages of “White Buildings.”
The Sea, symbol of the return to a unity of personal
abolition, had ebbed while the poet stood upon his mythic
bridge; now again it was rising. The periodicity of his excesses
grew swifter; the lucid intervening times when he could write
were crowded out. Crane went to Mexico, where individual
extinction has for a thousand years inspired a cult and a culture.
On his return to New York, heart of the chaos in his
life, there was the Sea; and he could not resist it. As his boat
was bearing him from the warm waters which fifteen years
before had given him a symbol, he took off his coat, quietly,
and joined the Sea forever.
c.
The beauty of most of Crane’s lyrics, and of many passages
of “The Bridge,” seems to me to be inviolable. If I analyze
this conviction, I am brought first to the poetic texture.
Its traditional base is complex. Here is a music plainly related
107to the Elizabethan poets. And here, also, is a sturdy lilt like
the march of those equal children of the Elizabethans—the
pioneers. Although Crane describes a modern cabaret ...
Brazen hypnotics glitter here;
Glee shifts from foot to foot ...
always, there is the homely metronomic, linking him to his
fathers. Hence the organic soundness of his verse. Its livingness
it owes to the dimension of variant emergence from the
traditional music, like the emergence of our industrial world
from the base of old America. The entire intellectual and
spiritual content of Crane’s verse could be derived from a
study of his typical texture. And this is earnest of its importance.
The structural pattern of “The Bridge” is superb: a man
moves of a morning from Brooklyn to Manhattan, returns at
midnight, each stage of his course adumbrating by the mystic
law of continuity into American figures with cosmic overtones,
and all caught up in a mythic Bridge whose functional
span is a parabola, and an immediate act, of vision. The
poem’s flaw lies in the weakness of the personal crystallization
upon which the vision rests, as the Bridge is spanned
upon its piers. This flaw gets into the idiom and texture.
Sometimes the image blurs, the sequence breaks, the plethora
of words is blinding. There is even, in the development of
certain figures, a tendency toward inflation which one is
tempted to connect with the febrile, false ebullience of the
American epoch (1924–1929) in which the poem was written.
Yet the concept is sound; the poet’s genius has on the whole
equaled his ambition. Even the failings in execution help to
express the epoch, for it is in the understanding and creating
of persons that our rapidly collectivizing age is weakest.
Crane’s myth must, of course, not be confused with the
myth as we find it in Homer or the Bible or the Nibelungen.
The Bridge is not a particularized being to be popularly sung;
108it is a conceptual symbol to be used. And the fact that this
symbol begins as a man-constructed thing is of the essence
of its truth for our instrumental age. From a machine-made
entity, the poem makes the Bridge into a machine. But it has
beauty. This means that through the men who builded it, the
life of America has flowed into it—the life of our past and
our future. A cosmic content has given beauty to the Bridge,
and must give it a poetic function. From being a machine of
matter, it becomes an instrument of spirit. The Bridge is
matter made into human action.
We may confidently say that this message of “The
Bridge” will be more comprehensible in the future (not in
the immediate future), when the functionally limited materialism
of our collectivist era has, through success, grown inadequate
to the deepened needs of a mankind released from
economic insecurity and prepared, by leisure, for regeneration.
For even as necessity, today and tomorrow, drives most
men to think collectively in order that they may survive;
necessity, day after tomorrow, will drive men to think personally
(poetically, cosmically) in order that their survival
may have meaning. When the collectivist era has done its
work—the abolition of economic classes and of animal want—men
will turn, as only the privileged of the past could ever
turn, toward the discovery of Man. But when that time
comes, the message of “The Bridge” will be taken for
granted; it will be too obvious, even as today it is too obscure,
for general interest. The revelation, in Crane’s poems, however,
of a man who through the immediate conduit of his
senses realized the organic unity between his self, the objective
world and the cosmos, will be accepted as a great human
value. And the poems whose very texture reveals and sings
this man will be remembered.[4]
1933
109
If refinement implies spiritual values, vulgarity might
be called their aggressive absence. The values need not be
individually acquired. They may be traditional, unconscious.
They are not necessarily linked to personal traits like morality
and learning. The Negro peasant in the Alabama black belt
is illiterate and often drunk. But in his native state, he draws
from the soil and sky in whose cycles he is seasoned, a grace
which is refinement even if it be unconscious like the grace
of a flower. Perhaps he is transplanted to some crude mining
suburb of Birmingham. Probably, then, he loses his refinement.
But if the loss remain passive, if it be not aggressive,
he is not yet vulgar. Give him now a shrewd head by means
of which he pushes north and lands in Harlem. Teach him
that he is a free-born, American citizen on whom it is incumbent
to amuse himself in metropolitan fashion. Hand him a
little money and a good dose of our contemporary eighteenth-century
notion of Equality. Now, his absence of refinement
will grow aggressive. He will be vulgar.
We all came from Europe with a modicum of refinement.
And the collateral descendants of our forebears have it still
in the mines and farms of Britain, in the towns of Germany
and Italy, in the ghettos of Galicia. No natural peasant of
Europe is quite without it. For this refinement is almost as
widespread as vegetation—as perishable, as passive.
Transplanted, we lost this leguminous bloom. But we
were not vulgar until we had grown conscious of being
110great. American vulgarity is the sum of our spiritual loss and
of our assertive energy. Were we less lordly, our lack of
spiritual values would not make us vulgar. And were we
spiritually full, our assertiveness might prove a virtue. Vulgar
people exist everywhere. We are perhaps the only nationally
vulgar people. And therein dwells not alone our predicament,
but our hope.
Surely, this vulgarity is clear in all our words and acts,
from Maine to Texas! In my optimism, I would have it no
less than universal. I would not be cheated of finding it,
wherever America and Americanism wave. Politicians of
other lands may be merely corrupt or dull: ours are vulgar.
There is naught vulgar about the servant of a European lord.
But there is naught more vulgar than an American lackey
at post before the barracks of Park Avenue—save the barracks
themselves, and the millionaires they house. Our newspapers
are vulgar. But so are many of our churches. Witness their
aggressiveness, their display of results, their want of the sanctity
of silence. Our evangelists are vulgar, being void of vision
and full of advertising. But the Menckenites who rail against
them are no less vulgar—for the identical reason. Chicago is
doubtless vulgar: but so is Ben Hecht who hates Chicago.
And the whole land has turned the motorcar into vulgarity’s
badge: since it has become an instrument of display, a means
of elocuting at so many miles per hour the owner’s social
status up and down the country.
Now, if you analyze this universal vulgarity of ours, you
will discover in it a constant element of misplaced effort. The
European servant may be quite as spiritually void as ours;
but he is less vulgar because he is less striving: what he lacks
is precisely the unfounded aspiration which makes our lackey
vulgar. Our advertisements are vulgar because they strive so
commonly to be something beyond the nature of advertisements—sermons
or homilies, editorials or art. Our newspapers
111are vulgar because they presume to be arbiters of taste and
morals; and our churches are vulgar because they labor for
results of the spirit with methods of factory and salesroom.
Run down the list, and it will bear me out. This vulgarity
of ours means no intrinsic lack of spiritual will and energy;
it means the failure of that good will and energy. We dwell
in a confusion of impulses and forms. The spirit is exiled from
the deed. The deed hungers vainly for justification by the
spirit. That is why we are aggressive. And the spirit lacks
body. That is why we are wistful, credulous, neurotic. High
energy we have—energy of the kind known as religious. It
vaporizes for lack of a container; or it is misapplied in the
pushing of old creeds no longer fit to house it. Emptiness
grows emphatic because it strives to be full.
Now, all this is the due consequence of our past. For
more than three centuries, old forms of thought and life—for
the most part hostile to each other—were dumped upon
our soil. Not until about 1860 had they all rotted enough
to begin to come together; rotted enough for the first tender
shoot of a true America to rise from the fecundity of decay.
In our outward life, we are still committed to forms of living
which our nascent spirit has rejected. We lug around the
archaic body of theological pioneers; and by means of it we
attempt to stammer out the rounded New World vision of a
Whitman. The result, of course, is a botch. The result, also,
is a promise. This madness of ours, finding symbols in motors,
dramas in football games, art in advertisements, morality in
statutes, and sermons in tabloid papers, lacks only a working
method to become supremely sane. Deflect this misplaced
will to unity into some channel that will hold it; and we shall
see how the energy which mothers American vulgarity and
American folly can father greatness.
Nor must we forget that all these forms of life in which
today we express vulgarity, because they are not proper conduits
112for the clamorous spirit with which we endeavor to
infuse them, are not American at all—are European. We may
produce 90 per cent of the motors of the world; we may
measure our progress by our physical power: but the machine
and the gold-and-iron standard of value are fundamentally
and historically of Europe. Our contribution has been not in
the form, but in the spirit which deforms it. We have not
made the machine: we have made of the machine the carrier
of a Dream. Mr. Henry Ford may be more vulgar than
M. Citroën of Paris, because he is a tuppenny prophet: but
it is the prophet in him, not the mechanic, which is of our
land.
The world wistfully senses this. Europe reads the book
of Henry Ford and studies the vulgarest of American expressions
through a deep instinct and a mastering hunger. It seeks
new spiritual gold. It knows—although it may not analyze the
knowledge—that our vulgarity is an ore which holds it.
1926
The American motion picture is a truly popular art. It
has more than one audience, of course: Broadway patronizes
it, and Europe, and Africa and Asia. But whereas it could get
along without these more decorative plaudits, it depends
vitally on the American masses. A film that will please only
the capitals and languish in the locals, means little to Hollywood’s
master minds. It is the people who count: the workers.
It is, hence, fair to say that the sentiments, attitudes and
dreams of the American masses will find, if not flattery and
full reflection, at least some harmonious note on the American
screen. The makers of our movies are, of course, high middle
class, with all the ideals and prejudices of wealth. You may
113accuse them of “putting across” their standards in their work.
But you give them a heroism which they lack, if you suggest
that they would go to the length of imbuing their wares with
unpopular ideas, just because they believed them. Much as
they love success and armies, the makers of the movies would
refrain, no doubt, from confessing their weakness in public,
if such confession weakened their incomes. After all, these
men have made money because they have pleased the public.
They will keep their money only so long as they hold off
from antagonizing their public. If you find in our motion pictures
a set of standards, a gamut of values, not only bourgeois,
but actually oligarchic, military, antiproletarian, the reason
must be, not alone that these suit the bourgeois fashioner of
the films, but as well that they do not too radically displease
the proletarian patrons.
What the tastes and standards in the movies are, is plain
enough. Films devoted to the depiction of labor or rural life
are extremely rare. High life is the average film life. Or life
in the rising provincial class which begins with a Ford and
attains a Packard. Alternate with this is the romantic cowboy
world of the West. But such tales are no more proletarian
than those of Wall Street. Here also is a realm of the picaresque,
sentimental, admittedly mythic, and aspiring to the one
True Value: the money and position of the middle class.
Run over in your mind the movies you have seen in a
year. How many dealt honestly with the life of a farmer, of
a carpenter, of a factory hand? If the hero began as a mechanic,
was he not an automobile manufacturer at the end?
If he was a stableboy at the outset, did he not own the stable
or marry the girl who owned it, at the fade-out? If Reel One
found him a country bumpkin, was he not a magnate ere you
left the theatre?
Our movie world, like any theatre of its audience, is a
confessional of the masses. And what it seems to mirror very
114plainly, indeed, is that the achievement of bourgeois status is
the heart’s desire of the average toiling man and woman in
our country.
This is nothing new. But the obvious conclusion, that this
is what the masses really and positively value, is the conclusion
we do not wish to make. Worship of big guns, military,
financial, social, on which the American movie thrives, is indeed
the tonal will of the moviemakers. This is what really
moves the businessmen and women who distribute, produce,
direct, compose and act our movies. But the true reason why
the masses—above all, the plastic sons and daughters of the
masses—accept such values is that they have not received a
set of values of another kind.
The people must love, must worship, something. What
school and church provide them, as substance for their dreaming,
has gone so dim that it disappears in the brash glamour of
our jungle. The movie gives an idealization of the powers
and hungers of daily American life. Empty the people go
from church and schoolroom. But the press agent of the silver
screen needs only to give a twist to the actual presences of
the busy street in order to make the shopgirl a lady and the
laborer a millionaire.
The corruptly glamorous values of an exploiting class are
absorbed by the people, not because the people are corrupt,
but because they lack values and glamour of their own.
They have no ethos, they have no myth, they have no simplest
story in which the elements of the laboring life take on
essential and intrinsic worth. Lincoln, let it not be overlooked,
became a corporation lawyer—like any movie hero.
And Whitman has not yet been translated into American
speech. But when a poet does arise, inspired to sing, as Burns
did for his people, the values and virtues of laboring men as
men, rather than as aspirants to wealth, the masses will follow
him—even in the movies.
115It is significant that no one has yet given the movie audience
a set of values other than the prevailing. Has anyone
tried? We suspect that such a poet would not languish in the
anterooms of all the movie magnates.
And one reason for our confidence is the unique case of
Charlie Chaplin. The average moviegoer does not love Chaplin
more than he does Doug Fairbanks or Harold Lloyd or
Lon Chaney because he thinks that Chaplin is a greater artist.
The average movie fan believes that the high art of the screen
is in such stars as Swanson or the Gishes. He is likely to be
a bit ashamed of his love for Charlie. There are a dozen more
“admired” actors. But the average American loves Chaplin
most tenderly because Chaplin on the screen is so often a
poor cuss of the people who remains one: and who “puts it
over,” not by becoming a millionaire, but by remaining a
human being. Charlie as waiter, bricklayer, fireman, bank
sweeper, pawnbroker’s assistant, convict, is not at the tale’s
end and in accordance with film formula, the owner of the
restaurant, the contractor, the fire commissioner, the banker,
the police lieutenant. He remains, fragilely, wholly, triumphantly,
of the people. (“The Gold Rush,” in which Charlie
strikes gold, is an exception.) He is the frail and unutterably
sweet beginning of a movie mythos in which the common
man may absorb poetic values not by changing his class, but
by becoming himself. And this is the true reason why the
common man adores him.
Here is a first step in our American labor and farmer
movement which remains to be taken. It consists in the creating
of living values within the life of laborer and farmer.
Only so will the extrinsic values of “getting ahead” and of
“getting into another class” be displaced. When such living
values exist, the radical movements organized to put labor
into power will have something to work with.
1927
116
Industrialism’s mood is tragic. In the early years, men’s
wonder gave to it the glamour of romance. Something of the
delicious terror memorialized in “The Castle of Otranto”
went to men’s consideration of these new giants fleshed of
iron and belching steam. But the monsters’ bite was too hard;
too dolorous was the displacement which they brought to
good men’s lives. These were no proper prodigies like the
“Gothic,” avenging merely wrongs and rescuing the noble.
So the romantic mood grew swiftly dark. With the early
socialists and anarchists, it took on the Doom note of prophecy.
Zola made it tragic. In the muckraking days of our
magazines, the tales of factory and mill were grey and ominous.
They were, indeed, replicas of the infernos of our
industrial towns. Laughter, like the hero-workman’s little girl,
languished and died in those swart caves whose breath was a
blast and whose light was a sear of fire.
But as industrialism became more the usual circumstance,
we began to react against it. And our reaction, having as its
aim recovery, was comedic. That particular response to the
grim industrial glower, which is the Comedy of Commerce,
has found perfection in America. In England, the monsters’
bite has been too cruel. There are no spirits left, there is no
energy, for the recovering laugh. In the Latin countries, the
monsters’ sway is not bitter enough as yet to have provoked
a systematic answer. (There are signs of it in France.) In
Germany, as soon as industrialism flourished, the Teuton
genius turned not to a balance of frolic or of smiles, but to
an ideal compensation. The machine was drafted by neo-Hegelian
argument into the soldierly service of Kultur. In
America, we had no such metaphysical bent. The best we
117could do with our industrial tragedy was to cover it up with
a surface, coruscating and comedic.
The symbol of this new comedy is the electric light on
Broadway. It is, of course, commercial and of industrial antecedents.
It is bright, dazzlingly. It displays power and wealth,
yet it does not reveal. Instead it covers, with its hard cold
beams, the rather shoddy buildings. It distracts the eye from
the beholding of sources. It is a light that blinds. Any artist
will assure you that the electric light is false—in the sense that
it deforms.
But thanks to such enterprise, it will soon be inexact to
speak of our “industrial cities.” Industry must continue, of
course, to have its home. But industry will not continue to
control the tone and nature of our dwellings. It will be disguised
or hidden. It will become as the kitchen or the plumbing
system of our social house, as the bowels of our social
body. And we will be outwardly bedecked and bedizened
in an obtrusive laughter the ingredients of which, indeed, will
be the results of industry, and the purpose of which will be
to deny its parent.
Already, not alone New York among our splendid cities
has cloaked this tragic source of its greatness in the comedy
of commerce. Forget the blare of the Broadway lights, and
think of the shop windows. How gaily drugstores, hardware
stores, delicatessens, shine with their myriad cavorting forms
and colors. Think of the newspapers whose columns of dour
news are plentifully (and profitably) balanced with the comedic
patter of the advertisements. In our popular magazines,
the reaction is complete. The mill town is disappearing from
them; the honest workman’s daughter languishes less in print.
It is the doughty salesman, the go-getter of commerce, with
his steed a motor and his muse a flapper, who commands the
pages not already commandeered by “National Advertisers.”
Our more sophisticated books reveal the same aversion. Our
118“first-line” critics must, above all, be comic—if not clowns.
They must provide the sedative of laughter. And the books
they tout do likewise. Tragedy is nefas. The tragic stuff
about us has cowed our spirit from the enterprise of making
it a means for that joyous confrontation of truth which is
tragedy. We glance off into comedy—if not farce. And the
cleverism, the anecdote, the epigram, the swift cartoon—so
close to the heart of the salesman—clutter as well the minds
of our intellectual classes.
It is so with the theatre. In such a typical success as “The
Show-Off” (called our best comedy by many of the reviewers)
a minor role fell to Industry. Not the boy mechanic who
actually invents is the hero; but the salesman, the show-off,
the man who by empty bluff and in utter ignorance of the
product he is pushing, puts over the invention. The industrial
source of wealth remains wistfully indulged and sedulously
hidden beneath the noisy comedy of commerce.
The comedy of commerce is a comedy of display. It is a
denial of the industrial gloom by a boast of brightness. And
yet its materials and its very rhythms are conditioned tragically
by the tragic world it aims to deny. It is only a disguise;
often frenetic, often wistful, never more than momently
successful. Nowhere is this more plain than in the music of
the comedy of commerce—Jazz. I do not desire to discuss the
music roots of jazz: whether they lead you back to the Barbary
Coast of San Francisco or to the Argentine or to the
Congo. The product we have naturalized is the song of our
reaction from the dull throb of the machine. Jazz syncopates
the lathe-lunge, jazz shatters the piston-thrust, jazz shreds the
hum of wheels, jazz is the spark and sudden lilt centrifugal to
their incessant pulse. Jazz is a moment’s gaiety, after which
the spirit droops, cheated and unnurtured. This song is not
an escape from the Machine to limpid depths of the soul. It
119is the Machine itself! It is the music of a revolt that fails. Its
voice is the mimicry of our industrial havoc.
You will find this irony in all corners of our successful
world. Industry is the source of our power and of our sorrow.
We are ashamed of its ugliness, hurt by its cruelties. We
will employ the power it gives us to escape the sorrow. We
seem so adept! We have ten thousand gay contrivances, all
born of industry, to hide it. But all of them are like that
paragon, the motor. Its chief purpose, of course, is to carry
us away from factory smoke: ourselves figuratively, and the
laborers whose Fords stand parked outside the mill, literally,
when the day’s work is done. But alas! the machine that carries
us away from industrialism carries its spirit along. The
clever story in the Satevepost, the bungalow, the radio, the
song and dance—all the little acts of the comedy of commerce—hold
the bitter taste, essentialize the spirit and the
forms of the industrial discomfort they are supposed to combat.
The Comedy of Commerce is a failure. It is an antidote
brewed of the poison it would save from. We must go deeper
for a healing laughter. Laughter that heals must come from
health, not from the disease. It must spring from the whole
vision and whole experience of life, not from a mere shrewd
juggling and twisting of any of life’s products.
1925
In “The Comedy of Commerce,” I referred to jazz, not in
uncomplimentary terms, but critically as an instance of the
art of a commerce- and industry-ridden people. Many readers
gave protest. So far as I could see, the chief point against me
was that I had dared be critical of a folk art. Jazz, went their
120sentimental plaint, was the expression of a people. (I had not
denied it.) Hence, hands off! Hence, down on worshipful
knees!
There has, indeed, been abroad for a full century the
curious notion that folk art—as once the king—can do no
wrong: that folk art is necessarily good art: that the critic
who dares to question folk art commits the unpardonable sin.
This is a point I would examine briefly, forgetting jazz
as the mere pretext for it. The notion, to begin with, seems
to be quite modern. Before Rousseau, folk art was known,
of course; was appreciated; was, indeed, taken for granted.
It was neither idealized nor despised. It was the art of the
folk: the elite regarded it with the same relative eye with
which they looked upon the people. The people was the mass,
the soil, the loam, whence they had sprung; the body, if you
will, for the aristocratic spirit. It was indispensable and it was
causally, if not finally, good. No tyrant could think otherwise,
without deleting the very substance of his power.
Molière, in the first act of “Le Misanthrope,” expressed the
common philosophic attitude toward folk art. To excoriate
the precious nonsense of Oronte, Alceste quotes a popular
Parisian ditty, and declares it vastly better than the sophisticate’s
sonnet. He shatters the courtier with a point which
today would be altogether lost. For he is uttering a paradox.
Here, in our language, is the gist of his attack: “This popular
Parisian song—you know its class—may not be much; but it is
sincere, sweet, lovely. And your sonnet, M. Oronte, which
should of course be an improvement on such primitive traits,
shows but their total loss.”
The crowning of folk art is a corollary from Rousseau
who preached a “return to Nature”—as if civilized man were
somehow miraculously out of nature; and “a return to infancy”—as
if his own doctrines had not been the dream of a
weary adult. If you accept the Rousseauistic premise, the
121modern notion follows about art. The best art, then, will be
the least cultured, the most primitive, the most childlike. And
poor man, addicted hopelessly to beauty, had best pursue
his weakness in the art of folk who, thinking least, are least
attainted. If, however, you reject the creed of Rousseau—which
does not mean that you deny his value and his genius;
if it seems clear to you that civilized man belongs as much to
nature as a tree does, and that man’s need to live well, to
know true, to aim high, is as healthy and as natural a function
as the tree’s to grow good roots and blossom, then this indiscriminate
adoring of folk art, merely because it is folk art,
is nonsense.
Dante was once ten years old. He was a remarkable child.
He babbled sonnets and rondeaux which revealed his nature.
Do you put the prattlings he produced at ten before the
“Divina Commedia” he composed at fifty? If you are the
usual folk-art worshiper, why not? Were those lyric works
of Dante’s youth not the pure Dante? the untrammeled sign
and substance of his soul? Were they not Dante’s folk art?
And the “Divina Commedia”! what alien and sophisticate and
unoriginal matters dulled the raptures of his early years to
this! Aristotle, Aquinas, Virgil, the apocalypses of Jerusalem,
the pseudo epigraphia of Alexandria—the whole theology and
logic of the school-men had to “debauch” the pure Dante, ere
he was ready to write his intricate, conscious poem. If you
are a real lover of art, surely you will turn with mild disgust
from the “Commedia” to his childhood singing.
I do not think this caricature of the folk art fad is too
unjust to sharpen a just point. It is literally true that if greatness
be ever in a man or a race, it must potentially have been
there at the outset. Therefore the beginning expressions of
that man or race will hold the germ of their significance.
Most men, moreover, fail (perhaps most races also) to fulfill
their spiritual promise. The promise universally exists. No
122child, no child-race is without it. Only the mature achievement
is rare. And so it follows that the search for spiritual
values among children will be, by and large, more fruitful
than among men and women. But to say that the art expression
of all children gives more than the art expression of all
adults, because children all have the germ and adults seldom
the flower—only this bad logic can lead us to conclude that
child art and folk art are best, or even always good. Folk art
is the seed of great art: seeds are more numerous than flowers.
To cultivate the seed at the expense of the flower is a
defeatism and a folly we are not quite cured of.
But folk art is not naïve in its elements, any more than
are the babblings of the “purest” child. It is, more often, the
naïve mirroring and mimicry of ideas caught from above.
The emotions of folk art are childish. Yet they are the result
of unconsciously inherited ideas, imposed by ruling classes.
Take, for instance, the folk arts of medieval Christian Europe,
the spirituals of the American Negro slave. Did the folk invent
the intricate theology and philosophy on which they
rested? Rather, they vulgarized the product of intellectual
minorities—Prophets, Plato, Plotinus and the Patrists: made it
a pabulum, at last, which later intellectuals could re-employ
for the creating of more cultivated art. Another example:
Russian folk music reveals traces of liturgical and synagogical
music. Now, a new group of cultivated artists—Rimsky,
Stravinsky, Ornstein—reforms this popularized pabulum of
older minorities into a fresh intellectualized music.
Or consider our jazz. Jazz is not so much a folk music—like
the Negro spirituals—as a folk accent in music. It expresses
well a mass response to our world of piston rods, cylinders and
mechanized laws. The response is of the folk and is passive.
The nature of our world itself is due to the work and temperament
of minorities alien to the jazzmakers. Jazz expresses
a personal maladjustment to this world, righted by sheer and
123shrewd compliance. And this, doubtless, is why the races at
once most flexible and most maladjusted—the Negro and the
Jew—give the best jazz masters. Since the rhythm of our age
is not transfigured in jazz, as in truly creative art, but is assimilated,
the elements of the age itself which we may disapprove
will appear also in jazz. In other words, a folk art—being so
largely an art of reaction and of assimilation—will contain the
faults of the adult minorities that rule the folk, as well as the
pristine virtues of the people.
And we have other folk arts. “The Rosary”—jazzless,
European saccharine—is as truly a folk art as any of the
Berlin or Gershwin ditties. Harold Bell Wright’s books—messes
of Victorian notions in decay—are also an American
folk art. The New York “Daily News” is the daily art of a
folk numbering several millions.
The adorers of folk art in its own divine right need but
observe what they adore. That will be enough to cure them.
Nor should they forget that in all culturally early epochs,
dissatisfaction with folk art is one of the incentives for the
production of great art.
1926
What is the meaning of our cities of rectangular streets?
What is their effect on our souls? It is plain that Nature likes
curves. You may find rough angles in rocky mountain wastes,
or in the sort of creature that a microscope makes vaguely
visible. But the Nature of man and near to man is a sinuous,
rounded being. Think of our bodies and of the bodies of animals—not
a Euclidean angle in the lot. Think of the shapes of
flowers, plants, trees; of the configuration of the hills and
fields; of the sweep of waters; of the globe. Now think of our
124interior worlds. Our physical dynamo has not a straight line
in it. And our mental digestion is tortuous as our intestines.
Logic may proceed theoretically like a plummet; but there’s
nothing natural in such logic. Draconian justice might
be called rectilinear, but it, too, does not exist in Nature.
Uprightness when it is not tempered by the curves of mercy
is repellent. Man’s mind moves in curves. His thoughts arch,
vault, melt into reverie. Dream and sense swerve into each
other. His heart, too, is full of arcuations. And the heart’s desires
are parabolas. There is naught angular within us. Nor
above us. Space, we have learned from Riemann, has a crimp
and a curve. The “straight gravitational line” of Newton
proves to be the “Einstein shift.” From the detour of solar
systems back upon themselves within a spheroid Space, to the
devexities of dream, man has a universe full of everything but
angles. And yet, the American urbanite has elected to spend
his days in a gridiron.
The towns of the Old World were and still are curved
creatures. From Iceland to the Cape of Good Hope you will
not find an ancient city that does not gyre like a heart or
twist like the intestines. Indeed, the European links angles
with humanity only in his thought of death. Christ was killed
on a cross. St. Laurentius was roasted on a grid. When the
fanatical Felipe of Spain built a monastery to express his contempt
for life and his withdrawal to the grave, he patterned
it after a gridiron.[5]
Curves rest: angles tire. How often the American abroad
lets his eye float down the gentle swerve of a street and is
soothed sensuously, and is moved as by a freshet of pleasant
impulse. It is the curve! The jolliest street in Manhattan—the
one that is most human, most laughing, most restful—is Broadway,
which has a curve or two; and even at its straightest runs
diagonally to the ruthless grid, thus giving the delusion of a
125flex. No wonder it has become the avenue of shows, the road
for informal saunterings clear up to Harlem. No wonder the
automobile, our pathetic symbol of escape, has made Broadway
its home.
If straight bobbed hair delights, the reason is that it sets
off the curves of our girl’s face. Her straight dress has value
in so far as it reveals the rondures of her body. American
civilization has revolutionized the shape of cities. It may yet
appreciably alter the shape of man.
For we seem to be angularized in almost everything else.
Not alone our streets are straight and stiff. Our houses are
as rigid as if they were made of the building blocks of
Brobdingnagian babes. Where else is there a spectacle like the
recently grown splendor of Park Avenue—that parade of
pompous tombs, shutting in wealth and shutting out the sun?
Is it possible that the disfavor of Riverside Drive as a residence
street among our leaders is due to the swinging rise and
fall of that untypical parkway? Our laws, like our houses,
become more rectangular and upright. Our morals are strait
like the gates of Ellis Island. Even our faces.... If there be
in all the world a human countenance made of angles instead
of the immemorial curves, it must be that of Calvin Coolidge.
So perhaps biology will give way after all to the rectangular
will of our American world. Perhaps the flapper of tomorrow
will have pyramidal breasts....
There is a reason for all this, and a good one. If you care
to go to the heart of the matter you entrain by the Santa Fé
and alight in some New Mexican pueblo.
The Indian’s culture is prophetic of what our culture must
be. His nature is a guide to the understanding and achievement
of our own. This does not mean that we are going to
give up motors, and dress in paint and feathers, nor that the
skyscraper will dwindle to the wigwam, nor even that our
women at some distant date will be swinging their papooses
126across their shoulders. But it does mean that there is something
deeper than these discrepancies between the Indian and
ourselves. Something deeper, which we share.
The Amerind was profoundly, beautifully adjusted to the
land. If you study him in his demeanor, his dance, his music,
his pyramiding pueblos or his simple tepees, in his flinted
arrows, in his decorations, you will find that the general symbol
of his expression is a curve so sharp and so severe that
it barely escapes being an angle. The curve is the way of
acceptance: the angle is the way of resistance. America is a
feverish world. Its geological tempo is not like that of Europe.
It is far more terribly intense. I am certain that when the
ancestors of the Indian crossed to America from Mongolia
(or Atlantis) they resisted this atmospheric fury, as have we,
with an angular restraint. That reaction was not a culture,
any more than our present reactions from Europe or from
mechanical civilization constitute a culture. The Indian culture
began when his innate spiritual and intellectual values
formed a solution with the world about him: his culture was
achieved when the responses between his soul and the world
had rounded into a unified life which expressed both fully.
After many ages, the Indian’s first reactive restraint toned
down, and became the subtle and fertile curve of the Indian
music, the symbolic gesture of his dance, the exquisite reticence
of his demeanor.
Recently Dr. Jung of Zurich was in this country and
made a visit to the pueblos in which he had been rightly
advised that he would find archetypical remains of classic
Indian culture. Dr. Jung had psychoanalyzed many Americans,
and found in them all (whether their ancestry was
Nordic, Latin or Semitic) a unique alliance of wildness and
restraint which did not exist in the European nature. Dr.
Jung’s intuition told him that he would find this combination,
so hidden in our souls, culturally expressed in the Indian
127pueblo. He was right. Despite the ponderous luggage with
which we came from Europe and which so differs from what
the Indian brought along, we must inevitably go the Indian’s
way in the spirit, since we have come his way in the flesh.
When Babbitt tells us that American towns are laid out
“regular” because it “pays,” he does not know how deeply
he is right. Regularity and angularity pay, indeed, because
such is the beginning of our self-assertion against a cosmic
factor. In our straight streets, in our jazz, in our dress, in our
morals, in our lantern-jaw Puritans, in our raillike girls, we
manifest the first stage of resistance to the furious fire which
is the nature of our world. The rigid angles will smooth out,
will take on the curves of life—will become the forms of our
American culture.
1925
128
(An Exchange with Malcolm Cowley)
a.
It is possible in small space to touch but briefly, and upon
one of its phases, the complex and defunct Dada movement.
Its immediate progenitors were the Italian heirs of Athens
and of Rome—they called themselves futurists: a restless Jew
whose ancestors had settled in Rumania brought it to Paris.
It had behind it, therefore, the ripe Mediterranean littorals
and the full growth of Europe. It was a salutary burst of
laughter in a world that felt itself too old. Europe was crystallized
and desired a solvent. It creaked in stratified forms
and laws and notions, and it yearned to explode.
The War was a violent but unsatisfactory excursion of a
similar sort. The ponderous machinations of diplomacy had
prepared this laughter of young millions rushing to a bright
shambles from the straitened gloom of ordered cities and inherited
farms. But the war was too superficial. Jaded Europe
learned the inconsequent effect of such inebriety as death and
murder. The deep spirit of the land was unmoved by columns
of men miles long and by guns that raked cities. It was
the esthetes of France—the solemn romanticists, the shrill
Parnassians, the symbolists, the votaries of Bergson, it was the
pragmatists of Germany and the rhetoricians of Italy, who
invited the release of Dada by their formulations, hedgings-in
and dogmas. There is no doubt that the face of Europe
129yearned for the smashing of a few cathedrals. But also
the heart of Europe hungered after the battering of a few
spiritual laws.
Dada was an emanation of this will of a too sober, too
mature, too sanctified rationalist church. Scampering in disarray
against metrics and the still more cloying bondages of
“freedom,” imping against the roll of such millstones as
Truth, as Unity, as Beauty, Dada was as logical as the most
Freudian hallucination. It was an eruption, a breakup, a
shower: it was a jag and a reversion. And having cooled the
face of the old land and made Europe forget her uncomfortable
age, it disappeared.
Good jokers, the Dadaists were: wistful creators, against
sour sense, of sweet absurdity. But they did nothing more
ridiculous than the installation of the Dada mood in American
letters. Europe called for Dada by antithesis: America for
analogous reasons calls for the antithesis of Dada. For America
is Dada. The richest mess of these bean-spillers of Italy, Germany
and France is a flat accord beside the American chaos.
Dada spans Brooklyn Bridge; it spins round Columbus Circle;
it struts with the Ku-Klux Klan; it mixes with all brands of
bootleg whisky; it prances in our shows; it preaches in our
churches; it tremolos at our political conventions. Dada is in
the typical Western university that spends $50,000 on cows
and $200 on books. It is in the esthetics of Mr. Bryan, whose
favorite work of art is any old Madonna. It is in the commercial
comedy of our advertisements. (Do Your Duty:
Chew Mixlets Gum. Be an American: Throw Your Rubbish
Here.) It is in the counterpoint of callow Hollywood
and the immemorial desiccation of the California desert. It is
in the medley of strutting chimneys and bowed heads, of
strutting precepts and low deeds that make America. We are
a hodgepodge, a boil. We are a maze of infernos and nirvanas.
Our brew of Nigger-strut, of wailing Jew, of cantankerous
130Celt, of nostalgic Anglo-Saxon, is a brew of Dada. No wonder
they imported our essential chaos to lighten the regularities
of France! But we are young, and what we need is a bit
of mature action. We are fantastic ourselves, and what we
need is integrating thought. We are the most fecund joke on
earth—for the overserious others. What we need, by way of
rounding our lives into livableness, is a bit of seriousness for
ourselves.
Our complexities provoke strange paradox in our deeds.
Ourselves a spontaneous combustion of contrariety and antithesis,
there grew up in us a fear and a shame of the spontaneous.
(This is, of course, a trait of adolescence.) In order
to become unspontaneous, we turned to Europe. Our attention
was caught by a lot of youths of age on a “bust” of
spontaneous laughter. In all solemnity, we artificed their
spontaneity, crowning thereby the best of the Dada jokes.
But we did not create Dada art. Dada art arose from the
traditional maturity of Europe. The intellectual stuff and
stamina, in our own case, were lacking: and what we got
were weakling strains of the European pose muddled with
American incompetence and lost against the background of
American bewilderment.
A healthy reaction to our world must, of course, be the
contrary of Dada: it must be ordered and serious and thorough.
Dada worked well in overmature Europe. We, by analogue,
must be fundamental, formal. That, indeed, is the
proper mood of youth. The young cutup in the literature of
our land is the bromide. We need him doubtless, but humbly
in the rank and file. To be coruscant, smart and swift in the
American language is to be platitudinous and banal. Therefore
it is that the literature which poses as most advanced in
the United States is for the most part quite the contrary—is
as undifferentiate, indeed, from the common wallow, as the
Mecca Mosque on Fifty-fourth Street, as the Hearst headlines,
131or as were the jokes of Josh Billings. Our cosmopolites
who think that they are emulating Aragon and Cocteau and
Firbank, our local realists and shockers who think they are
reforming us, are all in reality but sweepings of the immense
centrifugal action of the American world. Our surface twists
and scintillates and shrieks. They are caught in it, they are
slavish functions of the American mass which they profess to
lead. They are the reflections of a world that is Dada and
that is in danger of becoming narcissistic: of growing infatuated
with its own twitching image.
The first step in the absorption and control of our Dada
Jungle is the achievement of a serious, of a literally religious
temper. The academies are turned away from America: their
earnestness is frivolous. The neoclassicists are turned away
from America: their nostalgia is anemic and their grace is
shallow. The realists are submerged by America. The pragmatists
are bluffed by America. The clever and decorative boys
who clutter our “serious” magazines are reflecting not even
America’s surface, but Europe’s thirsty reflection of our surface.
None of this is serious, although doubtless all of this
has its place in the chemistry of ferment....
If we can produce a handful of serious creators—men
unafraid of unpopular words like philosophy, profundity,
saintliness, devotion—and if we can keep them alive and at
work a score of years, perhaps there’ll be a start toward integration:
and after several hundred years, we may be mature
enough to inspire a Dada of our own.
b.
Dear Mr. Frank:
The progress of literature (and here progress does not
imply a betterment) is largely a series of reactions, a passage
from one extreme to the other: romanticism succeeding
132classicism, realism against romance, estheticism against naturalism
and Dada against the esthetes. But given the fact that
every national literature starts from a different point and
follows a different course, their reactions of a given moment
can hardly be the same. For American writers to revolt from
the tradition of Remy de Gourmont or Mallarmé is empty
imitation, a gesture with no more significance than could be
given to a French protest against anticigarette laws in the
state of Kansas.
To this measure your attack, in the last issue of 1924,
against a hypothetical group of American Dadas was completely
justified. It would have been more valuable, however,
less obviously biased, had you gone on to consider that the
progress of literature is also a discovery of new principles,
involving a rejection or reaffirmation of the old; and that such
principles are international.
To call Dada “a ‘bust’ of spontaneous laughter” was
absurd. You were on safer ground when you spoke of it as
a reaction against European writers whom you listed as “the
solemn romanticists, the shrill Parnassians, the symbolists, the
votaries of Bergson ... the pragmatists of Germany and
the rhetoricians of Italy”; or when you added that since few
of these schools were represented in America, a similar
American reaction would be stupid.
But Dada was also a discovery: that nonsense may be the
strongest form of ridicule; that writing is often worst when
it is most profound, saintly or devoted and best when it is
approached in a spirit of play; that associational processes of
thought often have more force than the logical; that defiance
carried to the extremes of bravado is more to be admired
than a passive mysticism.[6] Dada was the sense of exhilaration
133which was born when our old shackles were tested and found
to be rusted away.
There was nothing geographical in these discoveries. But
you prefer to play geographer.
You have been to Paris and carry back the gossip of
Monsieur X the poet and Monsieur Y the novelist. Other
American writers (I was one) have been to Paris. Some met
Paul Fort and wrote polyphonic prose in his manner, some
met Paul Valéry and became classicists, some met Soupault
or Tzara and wrote a Yankee Dada, some met Jules Romains
and his little group, studied his treatises, adopted his more
solemn faults with some of his virtues and are proud to be
called the Unanimists of America. There were a few Americans
who met many writers of many schools, took the best
of each and retained enough personal force to write about
their own surroundings in their own manner, but you, Mr.
Frank, are not generally included in their number.
Neither am I. One tries to keep free of the ten schools
and two academies, but in this day of slogans we must all be
ticketed, must possess a little slip of red, white or yellow
cardboard printed with a name. I was in doubt which name
to choose, but your article decides me. Let me therefore be
considered as your butt: the clever but not coruscant, smart
or swift young man who clutters our more serious magazines,
the American Dada.
Malcolm Cowley
Dear Mr. Cowley:
It was good of you to send me a copy of what you consider
your answer to my article “Seriousness and Dada,” with
the invitation that I—as you phrase it—“continue the debate.”
I have read carefully what you say; and I am forced to conclude
that if there is to be a debate upon the principles suggested
in my little essay, it has yet to begin. Until it does,
I rest.
134Many questions of fact rather than of theory are brought
up, it is true, by your letter: but they are irrelevant to the
issue. I might point out that your definition of the progress
of letters is a good juvenile one, defining nothing. I might
suggest, after your linking of the term “mysticism” with the
adjective “passive” that you study a mystic, taking your
choice from Hosea, Plato, Paul, Plotinus, Gabirol, Abélard,
Aquinas, Bernard, Roger Bacon, Dante, Spinoza, Pascal,
Teresa, Calvin, Blake, Dostoevski, Whitman, or any other
who may appeal to you, and explain to us why and how this
mysticism is passive. Finally, I might refer to your allusion
to myself as having “been in Paris and returned with the gossip
of M. X. and M. Y.” or to your veiled reference to my
American “unanimism,” as convicting you of an impertinence
which in turn is the result of an ignorance so essential as to
disqualify you in your present temper from true intelligent
discussion.
However, all of this is aside the point of my paper which
sought by no means to destroy American Dada, but merely
to put it snugly in its little place. The one statement in your
letter which has the force of relevance is that in which you
volunteer to be considered an American Dada. Of course,
one must accept you so, since you insist upon it. I admit,
however, that I for one could accept you in this guise with
less regret had not my acquaintance with your poetry convinced
me that you will be fit for better things when you
achieve the moral courage to confront the reality of our
world, and the spiritual energy to take issue with it; instead
of permitting yourself to be flung off by its centrifugal
action, in the fond belief that because you fly off to Nothing
in a graceful pirouette and with a foreign oath upon your
lips you are being any the less booted and beshat by the very
elements of life which you profess to despise.
W. F.
135This exchange appeared in the December issue of 1924, a little
magazine edited and published by Edwin Seaver.... Of course,
out of Dada have come the surréalistes; and the best of their leaders
(Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, André Breton, etc.) combine
their romantic creed with communism. Malcolm Cowley has
moved in a similar direction. At least one of the important writers
associated with Dada, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, has moved into
fascism, like Marinetti and other earlier Italian futurists.
America, which protects its deer and partridges, still has
perpetual open season for philosophy hunting. Dr. Durant
turned “The Story of Philosophy” into a best seller by the
shrewd device of leaving philosophy out and putting in its
place anecdotal stories, whole chapters on nonmetaphysical
authors, and his own not too subtly diffused contempt for
the entire silly business of “ultimate problems.” John Dewey,
the most characteristic American mind of his generation, has
always been an antiphilosopher at heart (with unconscious
vestiges of the poor side of Hegel). And here is Mr. Mencken,
tripping upon the autumnal scene, all decked out in leather
jerkin, hunting cap, cartridge belt, and his usual supply of
automatic popguns.
“If you want to find out,” says Mr. Mencken, “how a
philosopher feels when he is engaged in the practice of his
profession, go to the nearest zoo and watch a chimpanzee at
the wearying and hopeless job of chasing fleas. Both suffer
damnably and neither can win.” The “fleas” in this case, you
realize, are truth, the absolute, any ultimate concept of the
real world, any distinction at all between reality and appearance.
Elsewhere, in the same lofty Menckenian column, the
same matter is called “bunk.” “For the absolute, of course,”
136he absolutely assures us, “is a mere banshee. No such thing
exists. Philosophy in the narrow technical sense”—read, in
the sense of the whole silly lineage from Pythagoras to
Whitehead—“is largely moonshine and wind music.”
At last I know, from Mr. Mencken’s rigorous definitions,
what is his secret desire: the unsated hunger which all his
literary work has struggled to fulfill. Since, to his mind,
philosophy is bunk and wind and moonshine, is it not clear
that Mr. Mencken looks upon himself as a writer of philosophy?
And if he strives to sharpshoot all the other philosophical
fellows off the field, who can blame him, since he
knows that his own particular brand of brass fanfare is
the best for us?
Let us therefore take him as a philosopher: take him seriously,
I mean, of course. And consider the matter of this
“bunk” of metaphysics. A moment’s inquiry should make
clear that if the philosophical “woolgathering” of man is
to be judged merely by practical results—by results in the
way man has lived; in contrast with the metaphysicians, the
builders of temples were builders in sand, the makers of
empires were but furious blowers of bubbles.
Of course, the findings of metaphysics—the logic of reality,
and of epistemology—the logic of knowledge, are disputed,
disputable, relative, impermanent. What is not? Even the
term “eternal” is a pitiful, anthropomorphic thing, having
no life and no sense save in the mouth of the evanescent
creature who knows himself for mortal. If you will have
nothing less than the eternal, what will you do with language,
music, economics? what with religions, empires, arts? Do
these outlast philosophy? On the contrary, they rest and
have ever rested upon it.
Take the age of the Upanishads, nearly thirty centuries
behind us. Do we speak the language of that day? We speak
its philosophical thought. Do we live by its arts, its customs,
137its gods, its laws? Yet its metaphysics is a cogent factor in
modern psychology, in modern letters. The era of the Upanishads
is living for us, solely through its professional philosophers—those
“idle” sitters-about who spent their days spinning
webs about Absolute and Will—webs so marvelously
strong that they have outlasted cities and cultures.
What exists now of the Greece and Magna Græcia of
the sixth century before Christ? Chiefly Pythagoras: and
through him a good deal of history, ancient and modern, of
science, ancient and modern, of mathematics, of physics, of
religious doctrine. From his philosophy of number came the
science of numbers: came Euclid: came the whole forever
adumbrating realm of physics and mechanics, the modern
mathematics of analysis, the modern critical realism (via
other philosophers, of course, like Descartes and Leibnitz)
which in men like Mach, Einstein, Russell, Whitehead, is
once again transfiguring the world. From the abstractions of
these technical philosophers of preclassic Greece came Plato
(even as Aeschylus and Tragedy came from the Eleusinians):
came Aristotle, came Plotinus: came at last such fairly practicable
structures as the whole civilization of Christian
Europe. From the moonshine of such men as Pythagoras,
Protagoras, Plato, Heraclitus, Democritus and Zeno, tough-minded
men managed to build states, churches, sciences,
atomic theories, machines. Similarly, the prophets of Israel,
the wise men of India and North Africa—questers of that
Absolute which, in their ignorance they called God or Atman,
whereas Mr. Mencken in his more modern language calls it
bunk or fleas—gave to man a concept so very real that
he has dwelt in it, builded from it his art, his ethics and his
state, for many thousand years.
Mr. Mencken probably forgets that Bacon’s preparation
for modern science was possible to him only because he
rested wholly on a metaphysical faith: the assumption of an
138absolute Order without which, as Hume points out, there
could be no science, because there could be no deduction
from particular to general, from appearance to Law, from
passing effect to eternal Cause. So Newton, also, rose from
an intricate, profound, world-satisfying structure of metaphysical
faith which a whole lineage of “professional flea-chasers”
from Plato to Aquinas had molded at last into the
Christian Cosmos.
Perhaps Mr. Mencken does not know that Dante, Cervantes,
Shakespeare, Goethe, had their metaphysics—had,
above all, their masters, technical and abstruse, in metaphysics.
Has not his careful study of the philosophical classics, which
he assures us he “rereads every year when the weather is
too hot for serious mental work,” revealed to him that his
favorites, Conrad and Nietzsche, are romantic versions of
Schopenhauer who, in turn, rests upon Kant and the philosophers
of India? If he has no use for Kant, his disgust with
the post-Kantian idealists (Hegel, for instance) is utterly
beneath words. Yet, from these sources come psychoanalysis,
Marxism, the Nietzschean anti-Marxism: come the non-Euclidean
and n-dimensional geometers (Gauss, Riemann,
Lobachevski, Minkowski), who in their turn nourished
Lorentz, Einstein, the critical realists—makers of the modern
world. And straight from Hegel is derived the impressionistic
style in criticism which Mr. Mencken so adorns—since
it is, indeed, his own.
It is one of the burdens of philosophy that lesser men turn
its noble doubts into dogmatic denials: chip from its high
structure of critique little stones to fling against it. In all
ages, heedless people accept what the great past bequeaths
them, live by it, and betray it. The man who is most proud
of his Buick is most contemptuous of the thinker whose intricate
thought made his car possible. The man most at ease
139in his Zion sneers most at the makers of the concepts which
built his state and his morals.
1926
The term, I believe, is Schopenhauer’s. He declared that
there are two streams of writing, for the most part indistinguishably
merged save for a very few. One of these, the
effect of creative thought and of creative vision, he called
literature; and all the rest, however pleasant and respectable,
he outlawed. To go back to any flourishing epoch is to be
convinced that Schopenhauer was right and that our present
status is not essentially unique. The modish ladies of Weimar
forsook Goethe for the “more modern” Kotzebue. Pradon and
Quinault outbid Racine for favor. Alexandria, Rome, Athens,
Jerusalem, had swarms of writers who were so close to the
contemporary clamor that they have died with it into as whole
a silence. The printing press and the mock crowning of
demos have merely aggravated an immemorial condition.
Where only a minority could read, only a minority could
be idle readers. Now that everyone is forced to read, the
flood of words without creative source is stintless, and there
are organized for it great armies of “distributing agents,” of
which an unconsciously servile group call themselves reviewers—even
critics! The swollen plethora of pseudo literature
has perhaps lowered the visibility of the real through
its sheer mass. But if this be argued an increased deterrent
to the life and health of literature it is more than overcome
by the increasing of the potential public for what is good.
The more persons who can read at all, the more may read
what is authentic.
There is then no good ground for the friend and writer
140of literature to complain. He has traditionally addressed
a minority in a minority; and it exists for him today. The
new presence of hawkers and bawlers purveying printed
goods to the mob has not altered his position any more than
has the deformation of the democratic doctrine into the
myth that everybody is as good as everybody else. If the
writer hungers after enormous sales, he is the victim of confusion:
unconsciously, he desires to leave his true domain. If
he feels that he is entitled to the royalties of a Michael
Arlen or to the popularity of a Fannie Hurst, the urgence
of his vision must be very weak. For it is the glorious compensation
of the wooers of beauty and of truth that all other
of life’s guerdons are by contrast dull. To have heard clear,
even once, the word of God is to hear it forever in all the
calls of life.
More serious and more concerning is another phase of
this mutual attraction between the real with its rigorous solitude
and the false with its populous cordialities. The purveyors
of pseudo literature are so many that they fall into
classes. They have their snobs, too, their social climbers. And
there is among their readers an ample group sufficiently
emerged from the rest to desire “culture” even at the cost
of thrills. These persons are aware of the term “literature”
and want their share in it. Their conception, of course, is
derived from shallow study of the past. Incapable of recognizing
the essence of an art, they dwell on its external traits
and manners. And the contemporary writers who most flatter
them are the emulators of these imitable parts. Such authors
are competent in style, they are elegant, they reproduce in
terms of up-to-dateness the forms and virtues of previous
pioneers. Most of them will be novelists, dramatists, even
poets. But they must have their critics. And to them falls
the dangerous task of establishing a rationale for their kind;
an aggressive apologia for all their sterile wares.
141The creative, the heroic, the religious spirit of true literature
is by such critics utterly ignored; and by repeated omission
comes to be regarded as nonexistent. The novel which
flows well, the tale which is pleasing, the construction which
reflects current thought or current passion is hailed as good,
and the more reflective, hence passive, it is, the higher is rated
its importance. Unconsciously, it is assumed that literature
has no independent body: that its real substance is the public
taste. From this fallacy it follows that criticism becomes a
solemn discussion of secondary traits—timeliness, grace and
color. The primary creative stuff of literature without which
these secondary qualities can have no true existence is forgotten.
The terms of what is genuine are borrowed for what
is false. And the confusion grows.
What hungry common reader could dream, from contemporary
criticisms of Mr. Hergesheimer, of Mr. Cabell, of
Miss Cather—supply your own names from the current columns—that
these are makers of books with an essential lack:
a lack as crucial as that which parts organic death from life?
The books of such novelists are competent in so far as they
are elegant reflections of styles in form and thought and language.
As contributions to the creative life of the mind and
of the spirit, they are inept. Their source is neither a luminous
vision nor an authentic knowledge; but rather the shrewd
perusal of past masters and present moods. Neither their purpose
nor their substance adds one iota to the experience of
man. To call them literature is to degrade the name.
And it is precisely urgent that the name “literature” be
not degraded. For there is much in a name: much directing
of intelligence, much shaping of powers. And we possess
an age in which intelligence is not small, but confused, in
which powers are lavish, but debauched. A critic of our day
as aware as were Abélard and Anselm, would be as concerned
as they were with the pragmatic virtues of the Name. He
142would know, as they did, that a confusion in words is the
symbol of confusion in continents and souls. Much of the
dangerous condition of our time springs from the fact that
in the readjustment of social and spiritual forms, names have
become the prostituted playthings of any fool or knave who
wishes to mouth them.
Thus, the gigantic reaches of pseudo literature from the
Hearst papers to Harold Bell Wright, being allotted their
proper place, do no great harm. They touch only the senses
they appeal to; they convince only minds incapable of conviction;
there is no formidable claque to name them other
than they are. Far more pernicious is the snob class of pseudo
literature; for it sails under false colors and of late it proceeds
almost unchallenged.
The challenge of other days was a competent tradition.
Pseudo literature has always thrived on pretension. But an
audience to whom the classics, holy or profane, were valid
had an incessant standard to protect it. If a French academician
extolled Quinault, there was Euripides to answer.
If an Alexandrian put out a bad pseudepigraphia of Ezra, the
Chronicles could face him. Our situation is more arduous. In
the general liquidation of old forms, the esthetic tradition has
dissolved. We must build up a new critical standard not only
within, but from the current chaos.
1925
It is revealing that the notion of “art for art’s sake,” of
art sprung from itself and for itself, arose with the utilitarianism
of the nineteenth century. If you will read the conversations
of Goethe, the prefaces of Racine, the notebooks of
Leonardo, the prose works of Dante, and finally trace back
143to Aristotle and to Plato, you may marvel (if you are a
“modern”) at the ethical bias in all our classic art. Not alone
Milton believed that he was writing “to justify the ways of
God to men.” It is safe to say that if a respectable goldsmith
of the Renaissance had been cornered for a “reason” for his
work, he would have professed some moral or some religious
purpose not too remote from that which moved the Alexandrians
and the prophets. While theology was hale, esthetics
was its handmaid. Later, art went into the service of the God
of Reason; and later still, took on the harness of metaphysics
when that logic had assumed the imperatives of revealed
religion. Only when modern man has debauched the ideal of
spiritual progress—old as the Hindus and the Hebrews—to a
bare functional or mechanistic pattern do we come upon art so
divinely considered that it may have no “purpose.”
The reason for this is not far to seek. While man’s fate
was still linked with gods or with godlike values, the arts could
honorably serve. When that fate was mechanized into some
economic or utilitarian or biological “design,” art rebelled
and set up a church of its own. The dogma of “pure poetry”
and of “art for art’s sake” is a reaction from the dogma of
vulgar materialism and of “man for his belly’s sake.” Being
a reaction, it partakes of the nature of the source whence,
however obscurely, it has risen.
The doctrine of utilitarianism had two esthetic offspring.
One is obvious: it is the art which in devious ways aims
to “get results” in actual life. The debased condition of such
art is coming to be suspected even by the bourgeoisie.
The other offspring is the art of the Ivory Tower—the art
of “esthetics”—the art of “purposelessness” and of aloofness.
And I wish to make clear that these two are radically one.
However they may differ in the intelligence that makes them,
they are both utilitarian: they are both debased from art’s
full function.
144The philosophy of utilitarian materialism defined life in
terms of the pursuit of specific material values. (I speak of it in
the past, for it still lingers only in the minds of tyros.) It
committed the fallacy of taking some “end” or process within
life—economic or sexual, personal or biological—and setting it
up as the Cause. Like all geneticisms, it was illogical and was,
indeed, refuted in the texts of the very philosophers whose
shallow disciples had invented it. Now, the same point may,
of course, be raised against the nugatory notion of “utilitarian
art.” Whereas art in its full sense is an organic event of life,
sensorily formed, autonomous and yet contingent, like any
individual, on its living context, utilitarian art disavows this
individual organism of art, and aims to reduce art’s essence to
some specific effect within the world of men.
Examples of this class of instrumental or utilitarian art
are everywhere about us. Such is the “art” of advertisement,
of exhortation: such is the play “with a thesis,” the fiction of
reformers like Upton Sinclair or H. G. Wells. Such, too,
are the industrial “arts” whose purpose is to turn out salable
machines, rather than livable ones, as was the purpose of the
ancient craftsmen who worked for an intimate, spiritually
harmonious client. The arts of the popular magazines are no
less utilitarian. A story which strives simply to amuse is kin
to the story which endeavors to reform. The novel that
“cleaned up” the Chicago Packingtown may have been more
laudable, it was not more utilitarian than the tale that aims
merely at killing a few hours’ boredom. In both instances,
you have that organic life process called art narrowed and
debased to meet some specific sensory demand. Whether the
demand be for clean meat or a vicarious amour, esthetically
your books are of one class.
And as “utilitarian art” must be grouped—and condemned
also—the current works of the esthetes. Mr. Cabell’s fancies
may be more refined than Mr. Sinclair’s: they are as remote
145from the whole province of art which can “help” in life by
no less fact than that it is life. Mr. Cabell, engineering an
escape from life, is not in the lineage of the masters: he is an
epigone of the materialists who lowered the whole life process
into a “struggle” for comfort or for survival. I see no essential
esthetic difference between the schools of Mr. Cabell and
Mr. Aldous Huxley, and that of Pollyanna. In the latter case,
you get sugar instead of a whole experience of life; in the
former, you get some acrid opiate. If this is in any way the
revelation of a superior taste, then the jaded adult who adores
rotted cheese is superior in taste to the child who calls for
candy.
The organism of art is, of course, constructed of physical
materials with sensory and ideological associations, even as
is the individual life made up of physical substances. In life,
these materials—chemical, mineral, vegetable—are mysteriously
organized into the unitary, indivisible living organism.
And in true art, the same holds. The sensory appeals—to eye,
ear, appetite, memory, emotion—are the materials which the
artist has composed into the organic whole called art: which
differs from its elements, even as life from its ingredients. A
utilitarian philosophy of life might be called one in which
some group of these materials in life is made more causative
than the whole. A utilitarian art, by analogue, is one in which
the main matter (instead of the means) is some appeal to the
senses.
Purposely, my definition lumps with the commercial, the
pornographic, the dully sensational artists, a whole school of
haughty favorites: for instance, Virginia Woolf. Analyze
“Jacob’s Room,” and what do you discover? A sensitive
woman (the authoress) with deft hands picks to pieces the
banal story of an English boy. Upon her nerves, its fragments
register sensations. She is not, like James Joyce or D.
H. Lawrence, composing these sensations into organic life.
146They are her end and she is using them for a personal sensory
delectation which her reader may share. She is not creating
at all: she is transposing.
You may apply, for yourself, the same criterion to our
music or our painting. Is the composer building the sensory
ingredients of his music into an organic life which transcends
bare sense, as life transcends inorganic matter? or is he using
his theme—transposing it perhaps from a well-known tonal
to a striking dissonance—in order to get a sensory appeal?
If this is his end, even though his name be thrice Russian,
he is as completely a utilitarian artist as the man who writes
a Buick advertisement.
1927
When you have done with the latest work on relativity
or the theory of quanta, and the once so solid universe has
melted into a mere congeries of spaceless, timeless, substanceless
vibrations, go to some modern art gallery and bask in
the certainties of our painters. For the best of these are men
who hold to a reality or are resolved to re-establish it.
From Picasso to Weber, from Marin to Orozco, it is
amazing how harmonious most of these painters and sculptors
are, in their formal purpose, even in their formal use of color.
They are builders of structure. Not of architectures or machines:
not even, for the most part, of such designs as the
fugue or the canon. The structure which they seek to produce
is the answer to the chaos which they find about them. It is
as if they were plunging through a liquidated world; and as
they fall they build—in order to cease falling.
The best of them are workers in a crisis. Confusion of
fundamentals is our atmosphere. Emergency in danger is
147their temper. Their response to the carpers who expect them
to be pretty and pleasant is: “We need ground to stand on!”
Would you criticize the manners of the man who rescued
you at sea? or judge by metropolitan standard the costume
of the fireman who led you from a blazing building? If not—and
only then—are you in the proper mood to appreciate the
contemporary artist.
Let us hope that the modern gallery director has interspersed
a number of pretty or “academic” paintings among
the works of the creators and of the seekers of form. They
establish a curious dissonance. Who shall quarrel with dainty
ladies flimsily attired and dancing to a rose? or with excellent
gentlemen silk-hatted and promenading with a spaniel? But
what if you find them at their peaceful antics on the walls
of an embattled city? In some such way are men like Charles
W. Hawthorne, Childe Hassam, Henri Martin, most of the
British, out of place in a serious exhibition.
The capacity of any generation for misunderstanding its
art is not mysterious: it is equal to, for it is the same thing
as, each man’s capacity for ignoring the essence of his soul.
How long is it, since you last heard the usual Wise Word
about the whole esthetic movement since Cézanne? “Oh, ho—a
Saturnalia of decay! These wistful little artists, so out of
touch with the great world; reflecting their defeat, their
impotence, their despair. These inadequate anarchists glorifying
their own chaos! How lucky it is that we have Solid
Science!” Well, your too-solid scientific world has melted.
Gone is the atom, gone is ether, gone is the whole Mechanism
in which, from Aristotle to Newton, man dwelt irrelevant
and complacent. The conclusions of our physicists hurl us
back, through three thousand years of certainties, to the
“vagary” of the Upanishad: our universe is but the Breath
of Brahma.
Relation, Vibration, entity of Movement, conformity of
148impalpable motions into a dream called substance—these are
the lean relics of our centuries of science. And these are
the precise materials with which the contemporary artist
is creating truth and beauty!
The age which produces Picasso, Maillol, Brancusi, Derain,
Braque, Marin, Juan Gris, Rivera, Orozco, is not alone an
age of art: it is an age of classical and of religious creation.
Only the labelmakers, the “wordmen” are lacking, in order
that we may know it. These artists are, if anything, too
somberly intent upon their basic purpose. Were the saints
more pure to their ideal? Man Ray extracts the essential
line of jazz, and has no time for dancing. Picasso establishes
the formal counterpoint in a woman’s body, and has no eye
for the woman. Brancusi’s Bird is the bird at its height: a sort
of hero-bird which neither mates, sleeps nor builds its nest—a
bird, a bird which soars, which is sheer soaring. One and all,
these men make a demand on nature as heroic as their own
temper of salvation. One and all, they seem to say: “You,
bird; you, woman; you, farm; you, landscape—you are
doomed: all of our glamorous dream of earth, sky, men is
doomed. Unless you are transfigured—unless you will permit
that our spirit of the god burn you pure of your phenomenal
dross—of your associations of sentiment, of hierarchy—unless
you go to your allotted place as parts of an essential Whole,
you are doomed. For we assure you, O bodies and sights of
nature—you do not exist save in that Whole. The old men
who sought to build up their Whole, by adding you together
one by one, as you appeared to yourselves, were wrong.
You’ve crumbled and disappeared. The very atoms of your
bodies—the very words of your consciousness, have vanished.
All that remains is God. If we can reinterpret our tragic
memory of you—O bodies and colors of existence—in terms
of God, perhaps we can bring you back to life.”
Of course, I am saying this in words: the painters are
149creating this in paint. Spaniards, Frenchmen, Rumanians,
Americans, Orientals, all are tending toward a single declaration.
And it would be a shallow error to believe that this
symphonic kinship is due simply to the influence of the schools
or of certain men in Paris. Paris for fifty years has been the
focus of so much modern art, because men from all the
world were looking in one direction. Paris is not an influence,
it is a confluence. The reason why Cézanne rediscovered El
Greco, and why French Colonials brought African sculpture
to their metropolis, is aside my point. The significant is that
the arabesque or body-language of Picasso, the plastic lyres
of Maillol and Brancusi, the mosaics of Braque and of Marin,
the rituals of O’Keeffe, the revelations of Julia Codesido and
Sonia Brown, the mass equations of Derain and Walt Kuhn,
and the instinct rhapsodies of Walkowitz and Epstein, are
so many personalized departures from a common experience
and toward a common purpose.
The common experience is that the old static formulas
and bodies wherein Western civilization dwelt are gone; that
only relations and the movements of relations are real and
are immortal. The common purpose is, to produce from these
immediate experiences of relation new bodies (unities) and
new forms (faiths and ideas) wherein mankind may dwell
and thrive again. And the achievement is already of sufficient
stature to presage a modern classic art.
1926
Gilbert Seldes has revived what might be called the classic
debate of American culture: Should an American artist stay
at home? Mr. Seldes holds that the artist is at home wherever
he chooses to settle. And he cites instances in favor of his
150contention. He is indirectly seconding Edmund Wilson who
reproached Van Wyck Brooks for writing an admirable book
about Henry James without more than a word about the
novelist. Mr. Brooks, of course, was writing about Henry
James the exile; and employed him as a symbol in his own
thesis which is contrary to that of Mr. Seldes. It seems to me
that the considerations and examples presented by both sides
have suffered, because they were neither specific nor general
enough. Perhaps the exiles of Joyce, Stravinsky, Picasso, were
successful; perhaps the pilgrimage of Henry James meant
failure. If a law or a rule is to be sketched from these instances,
the elements that enter into them should be essentially understood.
One might study the basic idiom of the arabesque which
Picasso brought with him from Málaga, or the basic folk
voice with which Stravinsky came away from Russia; and plot
the intellectual transfiguration of these primary materials by
the schools of Paris. Or one might attempt to correlate the
chaste designs which Henry James desired to produce, and the
American chaos from which he escaped in order to produce
them. One might at the end decide that James was a shrewd
tactician, saving his art by retreat; or that Picasso was a
brilliant culturist, enhancing his art by transplantation. Yet
the general and haunting problem of the artist in America,
which unconsciously inspires all these arguments, would be as
untouched as ever.
This problem of the artist is, after all, not unrelated to
the question of his materials. In some manner, the successful
creator organizes a fusion between what we call his will,
his vision or his experience, on the one hand, and what we
call life, on the other. Both the creative will and the workable
objective material must exist, else there will be no art. Now
with this simple idea to illumine us, let us venture into the
specific dilemma of the American artist and the American
world.
151The first thought to occur is that this material of ours
is still inchoate; it has not been digested by the conceptual
activity of previous generations of American artists and thinkers;
and in this it is abysmally apart from the native material
of the European. The arabesque, for instance, has been an
essential form in Andalusian life for so many ages that Picasso
must have absorbed it as instinctively as he did his language.
Ages of cultural selection have simplified the expressional
background of European peoples; these simplifications beget
traits and provide tools for the European artist which he can
take with him: moreover, the relation between these concepts
in different European countries is so close that deeply a European
artist remains at home, wherever he is, in Europe.
A concept is an essence; and it can be transported. Or,
to shift the figure, if one belongs to a world which has
culturally refined its gold, one can leave that world yet take
the gold along. But if one has had the fortune—good or ill—to
be born upon the scarce-scratched surface of an unmined
treasure, and if one indeed wants that treasure for his own—then,
it is necessary to get down and dig.
This, it seems to me, is the very human crux of our classic
problem: Should an American artist stay at home? The answer
may be left to him. He will seek the material fitted for his
creative will. To the peculiar will of Henry James, of Whistler,
of Ezra Pound, it seems clear that the right material was
best available abroad. The point of vision of these artists was
static; they required a fixed focus wherefrom to trace in
leisured sureness the Apollonian intricacies of their designs.
The creator who yearns to weave ever more intricate
glosses upon a given fundamental statement of life is fortunate
if he is born across the water. France, for instance,
will provide him with a completely conceptualized experience
which he can build on and variate forever. And if such
a man is born in America and yet feels drawn to the, after all,
152not too-distant cultures of Europe, it is idle to begrudge his
departure.
But there is another kind of artist: he who rejects the
fixed limits of any established cultural status, and whose will
it is to forge the parabolas of chaos into unitary form. This
creator might broadly be termed the religious artist, in so
far as his purpose is to bind together what appears confusion,
and to make whole what strikes the sense as multiform and
diverse.
If an artist of this kind is born in America, he is fortunate
indeed. For he inherits a world particularly apt for his purpose.
The life of America is a stupendous symbol of the
human chaos which such an artist beholds in all life ere the
transfiguring magic of his unitary vision has been worked
upon it. And yet the implicit idea of America is symbolic of
just such a unitary will. America, in other words, is a multiverse
craving to become One; it both challenges and invites
the purpose of the religious artist.
This American will to be One is manifest in every noble
chapter of our history. More encouraging still, it is the very
theme of our follies, the essence of our most ignoble social
acts. It is the ideology shallowly applied, of our bar on
immigration. It is the unconscious factor in our sumptuary
laws, in our pathetic efforts to legislate uniformity of morals.
We are not One; and we desire to be One. The whole American
scene is, hence, a symbol on a human plane of the sort
of activity which takes place in the mind of the religious
artist. It provides him with the challenging material; it energizes
him toward creation.
The Middle Ages in central Western Europe established
a similar apt symbol for the religious artist. Europe was a
turbulent chaos in material and fact. Yet it possessed in the
ideal Body of the Catholic Church a unitary will. It was this
marvelous conjunction of material and will in the objective
153world, with material experience and will within the artist,
that made possible the success of Dante, of Aquinas, of the
Gothic architects, of the polyphonists—a success not equaled
in the modern European epochs, whose art has been for the
most a wistful echo or a frustrate fragmentation of that last
great Synthesis.
The American artist whose will is to join in the tristful
litany over the dissolving body of European culture does well,
like T. S. Eliot, to live abroad. The American artist who
feels within himself the power to add to the intricate glosses
of that culture does well, like Ezra Pound or Henry James,
to live abroad. But the artist who is tempted to the task of
forging new organic life from chaos may bless his stars if
America is his home. For in all the world there is no symbol
of this chaos so potent and so pregnant as our American
jungle.
Moreover, the failure of artists of this high aim heretofore
in our land need dishearten no one. It is true that the
athletic will of Poe was not supported by a consonant strength
of nerves. It is true that Melville broke down. It is true
perhaps that Whitman sounded little more than a summons.
But failures of a kind so heroic—and all within a century—will,
we may be sure, discourage only those whose intimate
desire it is, for their own comfort’s sake, to be discouraged.
1925
At first thought there seems an insoluble difference between
the machine and the tool. The tool is passive in the
hand of the workman, and by that fact comes to express his
will both intimately and directly. The tool is, indeed, an
extension of the hand. The crude laborer has a crude tool
154and does crude work. The subtle craftsman becomes an
artisan, an artist: the tool holds close to his nature and works
his will in ways so immediate that the instinctive love attaching
limb to mind goes over, consciously, into the brush, the
knife, the hammer.
With the machine, this alchemy inspiriting a thing of
wood or stone is gone. The machine is set in motion and
achieves therewith a somewhat autonomous life. Moreover,
the nature of this life does not depend upon the man who
works it. Its qualities and its powers are fashioned for it
and are inevitably determined, at a source to which the machinist
has no access. An inventor, abstracted from his products,
designs their future acts. The machines go forth. And
the mechanic by a series of rote behavior sets them going,
runs them, stops them without for an instant coming into
creative contact with the thing by which he lives. A crude
man may work at a delicate machine: a blind or illiterate man
may print a book: a man with no sense of texture or design
may run a machine which manufactures lace or turns out
decorations. And conversely, the delicate man—the creative
man—can find no immediate channel for his will in running
a machine. Whatever creativeness or delicacy it possesses has
been ordained for it and is aloof. He cannot swerve it from
its stubborn independence. All he can do is care for it. Attendant,
doctor, nurse—however you look at it, he is the
slave of a creation which in its act and its idea remains beyond
him.
Now all this is clear enough and from it philosophers deduce
our woes, rightly—and wrongly our despair. If this
state of things were final, we might forsee man’s downgoing
in sterile servitude to a too-exterior, too-permanent grandeur.
For, indeed, much of our common misery has sprung from
man’s loss of tools which were his own and through which in
myriad ways he did express himself. With the tool came
155beauty, because it was a subtly extended and yet obedient
hand bringing between subject and object that harmony
which is beauty’s norm. With the tool came contentment,
because by means of it the humblest worker put his seal on
his craft; and came pride and those births of pride—morality
and value—since the work of the tool was the man himself,
and so must be good, and so must be regarded. Finally, with
the tool came fullness: for that man alone is unified and
full who has spent himself in self-expressive labor. And by
contrast, the man is empty and disrupted who has been spent
in labor which excludes his deep co-operation. Thus far the
pessimists of the machine are right. But here their rightness
ends. Could they look back upon what must have been the
experience of man ere he mastered the tool, they might more
sanguinely look forward.
The primitive man, wielding an artifact, paddling a dugout
or making an instrument of a horse, had to undergo a
profound psychological revolution ere this element in his
hands, stone or wood or flesh, could become an extension of
his personal will. He had to grow. How far he had to grow
you can see symbolized for yourself by comparing your
own hand with the paw of a dog. The step was inscrutably
vast: so vast that once man made it, he dared not look back,
and soon he forgot—and still he fights to forget. Who shall
say what tragic ages went to the transition? to what insanities
and despairs men plunged with the strange tool in their
bewildered hands, with a wild horse beneath them? Surely,
those unmastered weapons must have committed follies; must
have broken the measure of men’s life; must have inspired the
wiseacres of that day to gloomy forecasts. We do not know
the names of the Rousseaus of these desperate generations in
which man’s brain had not yet instinctively grasped the tool.
But nothing is more certain than that they existed.
Now, with the machine, we are once more primitive. The
156tool is ours: we have tamed it and made it part of our dominion
by a step in consciousness. Before the machine, we are still
barbarian or savage even like early man before a horse or a
stone. Through a failure to make a certain further step in
consciousness, before the machine we are still external.
Of course, there are differences. And it is precisely they
which point to a new departure in man’s life. If the machine
were merely a more complex tool, there would not be this
new element to our exciting day. The machine is a new part
of nature: one which did not, like the stone or the horse,
exist before. There is in the machine a marriage of what we
call the old elements and what we call the human. The domestic
animal, in this sense, was a tool: its elements were
outside of human nature. In dominating it, as with any other
tool, we mastered a part of external nature. And this was
comparatively simple, since in our use of the tool we did not
come in conflict with any human will. But if we dominate
the machine—make it part of ourselves—we shall have won
control over a realm of nature which includes mankind;
for man’s will, other men’s wills, are constant and determining
factors of the machine. We shall have won a victory of
consciousness not merely over the nature of the external
world—but over our own nature.
The problem was one of consciousness in the days of the
stone artifact; and it is again of consciousness today. It is
a problem profound as human destiny, inscrutably complex.
Yet I think the heart of it can be thus simply stated. The
animal, so far as we can see, is incapable of the idea of any
part of nature becoming part of itself. Man, with the tool,
achieved this: fused unto himself the animal and the stone.
Call the process what you may, this attitude of his toward
portions of the physical world was metaphysical. And no
savage could paddle a canoe without this metaphysical inheritance,
made instinct.
157We flounder before the machine, we are features more
or less groveling of its external life, because we lack an
instinctive metaphysical consciousness to make us master and
absorb it—to fuse the machine with all its elements of will
and act into our own expression. Such consciousness, of
course, must be evolved vastly beyond the childish metaphysics
beneath the use of a tool. In the machine are adumbrated
the will of the inventor, the will of the owner, the
will of many workers, the will, indeed, of an age and of a
world. Only when the individual worker experiences that
these wills are not alien to him; that these elements of life
contained in the machine fuse, in a higher synthesis, together
with his own, into a unitary act—only then will his spirit
in participation be able to go out through the machine, so
that it and the whole mechanized world may once again, in
his joy, in his beauty, in his human pride, express him.
But such a mechanic would possess the consciousness of
a Spinoza? No less! No less is needed, in order that the human
world may not go down before this new Nature—the free-spawning
mechanical invention. The modern machine converges
with the wisdom of the ages to force man ahead. From
India, from Judea, from Greece, from Germany, has come the
single canon: that life is unitary, that experience is One, and
that the human consciousness in one form or another must
know and be this One. The machine will compel us, at this
human crisis, to experience what heretofore merely great
men have known. The machine again makes metaphysics
man’s most practical engagement.
1925
THREE: BOOKS — I. POE AT LAST — 2. FRANCE AND THOREAU — 3. FAIRY TALES FOR THE OLD — 4. DUSK AND DAWN — 5. ELEGY FOR ANARCHISM — a. — b. — 6. THE BOOK OF LEO STEIN — 7. REFLECTIONS ON SPENGLER — 8. THE MODERN DISTEMPER — a. — b. — c. — d. — 9. THE “UNIVERSE” OF T. S. ELIOT
161
Perhaps the classic figures of American literature should be
regarded chiefly as actors in the epos of the American birth.
With one or two exceptions, they did not produce great
books. Yet all of them were heroes; were characters who in
their defeats as in their victories fleshed and fixed features
of our nascent world. Their lives—like the careers of the
patriarchs of Genesis—may prove more current in our future
mind than any of their works.
This certainly will be the case with Poe. Despite his influence
abroad, despite the range of his activity, he wrote
neither verse nor prose intrinsically great. His significance is
not to be extracted from his situation. And the construction
of the creative Poe—the true Poe—has lagged, precisely because
this situation was misunderstood. Poe paid bitterly for
his youthful Byronism. From his neighbors and the Bostonians,
it shrouded him in sentimental horror; from us, it has
quarantined the man in an equally blinding sentimental glamour.
His first biographer, Griswold, was incompetent. And
Professor Woodberry inherited this incompetence for all his
scholarly good will since crucial features of Poe’s life were
hidden and since without them Poe’s work, unlike organic
great art, lacked an entire dimension.
There has now been published a sheaf of letters[7] which
will mark the true birth of Poe as an authentic, working
figure in our cultural world. For the most part, they are
notes written by Poe to his foster father, with brief notations
162or replies by Mr. Allan. They give us at last the young
Poe, the crucial Poe, and the world which he went forth to
live in and to conquer. The first of them dates from the
University of Virginia which the poet entered at seventeen;
the last reveals him, seven years later, abandoned for the final
time by Mr. Allan who has remarried and is soon to die.
The years—from seventeen to twenty-four—are the years of
Poe’s confrontation with America. Prior to them, he was a
child—what manner of child, nurtured and spoiled in the
Richmond mansion of the Allans, his words reveal. And after
them, there come the open pages of his books, of his trafficking
with editors, of his relations with Mrs. Clemm and with
his wife, Virginia. These letters form the link that makes the
whole. Their appearance is a major event in American letters.
The career of Poe becomes a scene in a symbolic drama.
He is creative will, nakedly let loose upon the American
world. Who shall say America did not summon him? He
rises like an impulse from this land which cannot act him
out. Between America and Poe, as between Poe and his
foster father, are the chains of a need unrecognized. Without
his adopted son whom he bred to hyperesthesia and left to
starve, whom he set high and then cast down, John Allan
would be a clod. And without John Allan, Poe would have
been altogether disembodied. In the tortuous recriminations
of these letters, there is the plea for love as well as bread.
Transpose the family quarrel into general terms, and you
have the full years of Poe: Poe, the most highly potential
intellect of a land whose hour of realization had not struck.
In this failure there is no object lesson, no call for a
morality. It is too inevitable and too right. It is true that,
with the intellectual range of a Goethe, Poe gave forth but
a few shriveled and glittering pages. And yet, in his hour and
for his hour, he gave the ultimate, since he gave a Symbol.
An imagined Poe, petted to old age in the rich library of
163an adoring foster father, would have been less—far less—than
the frail, fierce, frustrate Poe we have.
Unarmed, unguided, he went forth to create in the American
desert. His masterful will found no immediate object
upon which to work. He had absorbed haphazard the philosophers,
the metaphysical poets, the occultists and seers of
the Kabala, the chroniclers of exotic journeys. But he did not
stay in their world. His constant effort was to refocus and
apply this chaos of ideas to some absolute experience of life.
Witness his treatment of the values of poetry and music: his
making metaphysics out of the relation of facts or out of
the forecast of facts: his use of the machine, or airships, of
mesmerism, of physiology and mechanical contrivance, to
express the widening consciousness of the human soul. Even
the wanderings of Arthur Gordon Pym end in a revelation.
Of course, Poe failed. Grub Street in Baltimore and New
York—this remained the stage for his apocalypse. And the
hazard crumbs from the intellectual banquets of Asia and of
Europe were but manna, in no wise transfiguring the Wilderness
which for forty years he wandered.
Yet the lofty impulse of his work is lodged, forever. Poe’s
theory of pure poetry holds the intuition of a great esthetic.
His “Eureka” gives the glimpse of a vision deep as that which
is imagined in the Kalpa and the Brahma of the Hindus. A
half dozen of his tales, “Eleonora,” “Ligeia,” “Morella,” “The
Fall of the House of Usher,” etc., are variants of a single theme
which envisions the mystery of the Person as close as any
prophecy of Blake. Hard, shut, shrunken work it is: and yet
it holds a vaster sense of life than do the amplitudes of Whitman
or of Emerson. Holds it, however, as a seed the tree.
In Whitman and Melville there is life’s blossoming. Poe belongs
less with the creators of art than with its prophets.
His creative impulse, first to last, was metaphysical and
religious. Behind these horrid trips to Ulalume and Usher,
164these dogmatic repetitions of telltale hearts and reincarnate
lovers, is the man’s will for a world timeless and absolute.
That his materials were the shoddy “seconds” of the romantic
Gothic, we may leave to the pedants to assure us. Poe’s
impulse was no more romantic than was Goethe’s. He had a
flair for the Real: he lacked the power to establish this reality
from the world about him. Hence his defeated flights to
other realms. But in his Poetics and in “Eureka,” it stands
proved that the glancings-off which constitute his “works”
were but his trial flights: that Poe was resolved to found his
revelation within the visible, audible, beating world. Unlike
the Bostonians, Poe was no transcendentalist by choice or
reason. The confrontation of experience and then the act of
alchemy upon it, by virtue of his vision, was beyond his
powers. And was beyond him not, as seemed manifest, because
of his harried and brief life: was beyond him symbolically,
inevitably, since it was beyond the America of which he was
so high, so near, so unachieved an impulse.
Let us make this Poe ours. Let us not twang semi-sentimental
plaints about his failures. Let us not fool ourselves
as to his triumphs. Let us not blame the symbolical Mr. Allan
for acting so well his ungrateful role in a Scene so vastly
without his canny ken. Let us, above all, not split Poe—as
is the fashion of the day—into pseudo-scientific fragments of
psychologic and sociologic terms. Let us take him whole—the
man and his work: Poe the embodied impulse of an
Organism which holds not only him, but us; Poe the impulse
of America to transfigure the worlds within it into a world
more real. And let us proceed to the Adventure.
1925
165
Since Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, French literature has come
variously to America for materials and forms wherewith to
re-create itself. The greatest instance is still perhaps that of
Chateaubriand whose impossible Indians may outlast the too-possible
Frenchmen of Flaubert. The sustenance which Stendhal
won from contemplation of our scene for the esthetic
of his novel of the modern will is less widely recognized. We
are aware, however, of how the symbolists transfigured Poe;
and more recently of the enthusiastic creation by the Dadaists
of a romantic America of cowboys, skyscrapers and jazz.
Romantic movements in classicist France are ever forages for
nurture rather than voyages of discovery. Like Greece,
France is omnivorous and egocentric. In every period of
influences her writers are like a family consuming beefsteak.
That beefsteak will become, let us say, part of a lanky father,
a fat mother, a bad pagan boy, and a noble Christian sister.
At this moment, we may behold America turn into Louis
Aragon, Valéry Larbaud, and Bazalgette....
Bazalgette’s translation and biography of Whitman had a
dynamic share in the slow stirring of French letters, away
from the Narcissus mood which led to the masterworks of
Claudel, Valéry, Proust, toward a new gesture of spiritual
excursion whence a good range of fresh romantic stuffs will
accrue for the young classicists to work on. His Whitman
was a biography that held fairly close to the narrative form,
save that a lyrism illumined it and made it speak with emphasis
and fervor to the imagination of the French. In “Henry
Thoreau,” however, Bazalgette stands revealed more clearly:
a poet himself, and a prophet, he employs a certain spiritual
experience made manifest in America because less assimilated
here than the experience of Rousseau and of Tolstoi in their
166lands; and he makes of it his own spiritual Word for France.
This technical analogy between Bazalgette in sophisticated
Paris writing of Thoreau, and Chateaubriand in rationalist
Paris dreaming of our virgin forests must not be strained too
far. Bazalgette is less a poet than Napoleon’s noble hater,
but he is more historian and critic. His book has the lilt and
passage and effect of a packed personal paean; and yet it is
perhaps the best of all pictures of our great New England.
There is no phenomenal relation between Chateaubriand’s
America—or that of the Dadaists—and ourselves. Their work
is, therefore, not negotiable beyond their immediate needs.
But clad in the fine English of Van Wyck Brooks, Bazalgette’s
“Thoreau” responds to our experience. It becomes an
American classic as surely as it is a French one.
The method is not narrative: it is a composite of allusiveness,
colloquy, lyrical projection and dramatic scening. A hard
method to follow unflagging through three hundred pages;
and at first the frail figure of Thoreau seems insufficient for
it. The author has sustained his tone with ruthless logic that
at times may pall. One would occasionally welcome passages
in a more direct, conventional prose. But the consequence of
the author’s lack of mercy is an esthetic form the more remarkable
when one considers the, after all, comparative slightness
of Thoreau’s stuff and the frustrate colors of his milieu.
At the end, one realizes that this unsparing method was the
inevitable right one for the subject. Thoreau’s greatness did
not loom like Whitman’s. It was the consequence of impacts
on a small living nucleus, of the organic yet reactive growth
of that nucleus within an inchoate social envelope. When
he created his Whitman, Bazalgette had but to follow Whitman.
Hence his use of narrative was correct. Even the Civil
War fell into place as a sort of objective scene for the hero’s
progress. Creating Thoreau, Bazalgette creates primarily the
New England town, and the woods and the rivers and the
167birds, creates the astringent air of Emerson and Alcott, creates
Mr. Greeley and his Tribune, John Brown and his raiders,
lyceum audiences and village ne’er-do-wells. A superb massivity
of America bounding Thoreau gives him his dimensions
by indirection and by the dynamism of the man’s responses.
It was a subtle task, and Bazalgette has done it. It required
a complete mastery of the American scene; and the extent
to which this Frenchman who has never visited our land
knows it—its past, its present, and its future—is uncanny.
Where did he learn what a New England village feels like,
what winter is in a Canadian wood? How did he catch
this scent of the Emersonian family, this shuttling rhythm of
Broadway, this dark deluvial stain in the Judge’s house in
Staten Island? No mere thorough scholarship can explain it.
Chateaubriand’s Indians, Baudelaire’s Poe, are alien and exotic.
Bazalgette possesses a true intuition of America. Strange as it
may seem, he loves us—loves our promise, our struggle to
evolve it. But his love is clairvoyant: his mind has stratified his
vision of us with analytic understanding. He knows the heartbreaking
husk of social and psychic life in which our promise
stifles. Bazalgette is a Roussinean romanticist in that he chooses
to bring to Paris our Thoreau as a reality for it, from the
New England town. But he is no romanticizer of the town.
Nor of Thoreau who emerges from the book as a true hero
almost by a process of survival. Thoreau is a hero of his age,
we gather, because his age was otherwise unheroic.
The book is a new type of novel, if you please, rather
than biography in the strict French sense. There is a new
novel form—the Proustian—in which the hero is literally “I.”
An example of it in our language is Sherwood Anderson’s
“Story Teller’s Story.” Here is another kind of novel—a sort
of Crocean history—in which a real personage is drawn ruthlessly
as regards the facts and yet with Dionysian freedom in
spiritual emphasis and in esthetic.
168A work like this dares to contain anything: and there
is to be found here a bit of literary criticism so original in
form that it must be mentioned. Thoreau and Whitman meet.
Their talk is a failure. Walt is distrustful of this highbrow
Yankee who has so consciously turned away from Harvard.
Bazalgette records the futile dialogue and adds to it, by way
of antistrophe, an imagined dialogue consisting of responses
gleaned from the two men’s work. The effect is powerful
and convincing: a contrapuntal fugue that does more to prove
the nuclear energy of the American mind and its unity, in
variety, of direction, than a score of essays.
Mr. Brooks’s translation has a tendency toward “toning
down.” The original title, as an instance, reads “Henry
Thoreau, Sauvage.” This might be faithfully Englished as
Henry Thoreau, the Untamed. Mr. Brooks has preferred to
substitute Emerson’s “bachelor of Nature.” Perhaps he shares
somewhat Emerson’s Apollonian attitude toward this nature-drunk,
nature-sweet, neoprimitive neighbor. But the translation
is very far, indeed, from a betrayal. It is the process
whereby Bazalgette’s book becomes indigenous and takes
its place in our American literature between the old and the
new. Thoreau stands with Whitman and with Melville for
the creative transitional gesture between that new America,
inheritor of Old World forms, and our old America, creator
of a new world. Of this hazardous long birth-hour in whose
travail we persist, there is no lovelier expression than the
prose of Van Wyck Brooks.
1927
Our country was not young from the beginning. It had
to achieve youth. From the Old World came old shoots: the
169transplantation as often as not aggravated their antiquity.
Ere we could be young, our elements had to rot and to be
remingled. This took time. And it may broadly be said that
only with the opening of the West and the demise, in civil
war, of our old sectional cultures, did America become at last
a single sprawling infant.
Even then, the sectional elderships persisted. They took
many forms. None more pleasant than the glowing second
childhood of New England which stands expressed in the
stories of Sarah Orne Jewett. These are tales mostly of
Maine in the later decades of the nineteenth century. And
rightly enough the best of them are about old women. The
occasional story of a child is sicklied over with an aged cast:
for instance, Sylvia of “A White Heron” is an old woman’s
child, and lives with an old woman. And when there is a
wooing in “The Country of the Pointed Firs” the maid has
grown grey in service of her mother; the man—son of the
almost centenarian Mrs. Blackett—is a simpleton past fifty.
But whether the scene be the Poor Farm or a spruce island
home or the tiny palace of Queen Victoria’s Twin, there is
ever a single glamorous illusion making the substance and life
of these sweet tales. And it is the manner of illusion that
dwells in the hearts of folks who have grown sweetly childish,
rather than sour, in their senility.
It is not necessary to insist that the farms painted by
Miss Jewett are about as “realistic” as the England of “Alice
in Wonderland” or of Tennyson’s “Idylls.” Yet these uniformly
charming people, so pure of thought, so innocuous
in action, so redolent of lavender and lace, are true, although
the theatre of their verity is the poetic fancy of Miss Jewett.
We may all snatch from our coming decrepit days the nodding
wish to turn from the rot of our world into a sweet-scented
realm of senile wishes, in order to enjoy Miss Jewett.
The Maine of a mature mind, contemporary with these
170stories, must have revealed men and women more like the
persons of Robert Frost, more like those one feels, rather
by reaction than by direct creation, in the works of Thoreau,
Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Melville. And yet these kind
and well-groomed vagaries of Miss Jewett’s are no less a
result of the crass facts—no less respectable. The spirit of
them is a sort of iridescent mist rising from the shut pools
of that life.
Of course, stories with substance so wistful and so misty
cannot rank high as art: and we must not permit the present
mood of American reminiscence to which are due so many
biographies, so many re-editions, so many reconstructions, to
blind us to their frail value. The fairy tales of youth have
greater destiny, because they have harder substance. The
child transcends his world: his ebullient vaulting energy despises
a mere unmastered round of fact and with parabolic
power brings Mystery to earth. But with second childhood,
reality is too much and is avoided by a sharp reduction.
Energy, exhausted, draws back in catatonic gesture; re-creates
smallnesses to dwell in as a comfortable offset to the no longer
challengeable world.
Willa Cather, a feeble daughter of Miss Jewett, has had
the fondness to compare her tales with “Huckleberry Finn”
(a fairy tale of youth) and “The Scarlet Letter”—one of
the maturest dreams of American romance. But these perfumed
pictures of the land of pointed firs are a gross reduction
of the truth. All the primary lines, colors, forms, are
missing. Indeed, all life-welling passion, all organic substance,
have been mulcted out by the desire for Peace: and what remains
is a predigested brew of natural descriptions and carefully
balanced converse—a true diet, indeed, for old and
toothless gums.
Yet, although their stuff be small, these tales have loveliness.
And one rereads them, after all these years, marveling
171at the grace with which their frailties have aged. The scenes
of nature are good lyrics. Although Miss Jewett’s sea has
become strangely gentle, like a parlor pet, it is still living:
it is captured somewhat as life is captured in certain two-dimensional
prints from old Japan. The dialect has the mark
of absolute perfection; and yet is musically mannered so that
none of the conscious stress on veracity is there to irk one.
But above all—those women, those adorable, impossible old
ladies, brewing tea, gossiping, sewing! They are there, not like
our grandmothers, but like our childish vision of them—like
what our grandmothers would have liked to be, to our rapt
young love. Even this sentimental splendor is reduced to a
kind of loophole glimpse. And yet the lens is never blurred
and the effect has all the negotiability of art.
There was a strength in old New England which passed
maturity without losing all its power. There are wild flowers
still in these rock-bound fields that go to seed hardily: they do
not scatter or fall with the first turning away of the summer
sun; but wraithlike they stand aloft upon their stems and
let the autumn air run through them. Something of this
prowess is in Miss Jewett’s stories. For all their simplification,
for all their romantic refusal of the true stuff of tragedy—finally,
hence, for all their subtle denigration of New England
which deserves greater and more athletic art, these tales bear
well. They may be tales of senescence—of a soul’s twilight:
but this is a soul not impotent even in decay.
Most of them appeared in magazines well over forty years
ago. As one measures them with what has followed, one is
dismayed. For hidden in their glamour is a sinister seed. True
enough are tales which spring from a felt illusion. But it is
only the lie which has brought forth progeny. The hallucination
of Miss Jewett, making her see such paragons of peace
and sweetness in the New England farms, causing her in all
solemnity to compare the “Bowdoin reunion” with “a company
172of Greeks going to celebrate a victory, or to worship
the god of harvest”—this peculiar magic of old age could not
be copied and has not been transmitted. Only the trick of
reduction, only the simplification, only the falsehood. And
the consequence, patented and standard, swarms within our
fiction magazines and in our novels.
The fairy tale turned formula—the fairy tale without the
motive of youth or of old age—becomes the harsh, cold,
mechanical, nugatory art which makes up most of our current
“competence” in fiction. It marks the extension into
literature of the processes of mass production which belong
to an industrial age. It is responsible for the factories and
sweatshops whence reading matter is turned out for the
million. How it came to be born you can trace in the soft,
warm, gradually shallowing and self-repeating art of Sarah
Orne Jewett.
1925
The basis for any criticism of a book by Lewis Mumford
must be respect for the author and thankfulness that he is at
work in our country. Rare, indeed, are American critics
who, like him, venture into the realm of general ideas; and
rarer are the men who, with his good will, possess his rounded
equipment. For Mr. Mumford tries to be no specialist save
in the task of seeing and interpreting life whole. No less
than all the works of men shall be his laboratory; no less
than the search of values for “the good life” his aim. He
can write of archaic Utopias and future city plannings, of
modern books and ancient pictures and medieval guilds;
he is at home in all subjects since he has gained awareness
that all of them are one.
173Mr. Mumford’s “The Golden Day” sustains this sense of
him. It is in many ways a beautiful book. It flows easy,
brilliant, poetical, from the store of its maker. It has style, it
has form. There is no reason to doubt that it will take its
place in the sparse critical literature of our uncertain era.
Mr. Mumford has written an essay in interpretation of
the American past. With this purpose, he has utilized an
analysis of our customs, of our ideals, principally through
the medium of our writers. But the standpoint of his study
is the present. He has not written history; he has established,
as his focus, not alone our day, but as well our need. His
retrospect receives its dynamic rhythm, one might almost
say its life, from the author’s mastering interest in “What
next?”
The general theme, viewed as a series of facts, is plain
enough and has been proposed in similar terms, before. Europe’s
state since the Middle Ages is regarded as a disintegration.
Of this profound breakup America is a conspicuous
symptom and expression. America was colonized by forces
of Europe’s decomposition; and America itself, determining
such states of mind as pioneering, hastened the deliquescence
of that spiritual world which man raised up in Europe and
whose tearing down had no deeper symbol than the emigrations.
Howsoever, before the final breakup of Europe in the American
West, new shoots of the transplanted European
culture rose on our Eastern seaboard. In the Golden Day of
Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, they reached a splendor fresh
and unparalleled in the contemporary hour of a Europe less
swiftly, but as essentially decadent. Thereafter, the American
West, in which the disintegrated force of the Old World and
the barbarizing condition of the New came to a climax, gradually
prevailed. Already, with Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, the
Golden Day was waning: the good elements of old Europe
were rotted by unconscious “new” American factors. The
174“pragmatic acquiescence” marks America’s rationalized slump
into the barbaric mood of the industrial pioneer. William
James, John Dewey, are good men ennobling the sterile cause.
The descent, now, is swift. The muckrakers are social critics
themselves submerged in the muck, failing of any principle to
catapult them free. Novelists socially and spiritually submerged
are Mark Twain, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser—scavengers
whose true function is to pick to pieces what still
remains of a once noble structure. And not deeply otherwise
are the wistful “pillagers of the past” of whom the finest are
Henry James and George Santayana; their retreat into Europe
or to “philosophy” is motived by as forceless an acceptance
of the barbaric day as the rationalization of the pragmatists.
Finally, Mr. Mumford brings us to ourselves. After this ebb,
we are sunk so low that naught could remain but a new
rising. Mr. Mumford is hopeful, one feels, for sheerly tidal
reasons.
Of course, to state in a paragraph what the author himself
has athletically stripped to but three hundred pages is to leave
out much and to denature more. This book, it seems to me,
is chiefly a personal essay—a confession by a significant man.
You will find, here, excellent pages on the “romanticism” of
the pioneer, on the genius of Emerson, on the limitations of
Dewey and Santayana. You will find other pages less adequate:
as the discussions of Whitman, Melville, Poe and
Dreiser. What interests me most in “The Golden Day” is not
its assemblage of interpretations, but its focus.
This focus is external. Mr. Mumford is outside his own
book. He depicts superbly the Platonic, pagan and mystical
glories which in America’s Golden Day were called Emerson,
Thoreau, Whitman. But they are experientially remote
from Mr. Mumford: as remote as Dante and Aquinas. Ideally,
of course, we share all greatness and find its recognition in
our souls. Yet those medieval worlds were not actually ours:
175their source, their form and their behavior differ. Mr. Mumford
depicts, also, and with no less eloquence, the horrors of
the American scene: the barbaric frontier, the Protestant decadence,
the tyranny of the machine and of the job, the
fallacies of materialism, utilitarianism, experimentalism, pragmatism.
But he is outside the experience of these also. When
he praises the age of Emerson, there is an aloofness of elegy.
When he exhorts the young men, his contemporaries: “Allons.
The road is before us!” there is an aloofness of rhetoric. What
is the matter with Mr. Mumford?
The matter is that he has considered us, rather than experienced
us. He has gone deep to behold our past greatness,
our present miseries; but not deep enough to establish the
vital connection between them, and between them and himself.
America is an organic subject. Mr. Mumford, for all his
studies in causation, treats as a series of isolate manifestations,
“good” or “bad,” “tasteful” or “disgusting,” what are really
acts of a single spiritual Organism, yet immature, yet basally
“in the making.” The Golden Day whereof the author so
wistfully sings was not a day at all: it was not even a dawn:
it was, if you insist on solar terms, a dusk of Europe. But only
in its ideologies and cultural forms! More accurately, it was
a moment in the American childhood when the spirit spoke
lyrically, before the whelming demands of body—of nutrition
and of growth—plunged America more fully into chaos. The
fact that this age was not a Day is plain in its shimmering,
surface passage over the American mind: and in the sequence
when America transformed the idealism of its transcendentalists
and poets into immediate adolescent matters of expansion
and of self-indulgence. Mr. Mumford makes Emerson the
hero of this “day.” Yet if ever a man was a congeries of lovely
echoes, of wistful longings, of fleeting and unfleshed intuitions,
Emerson was he! His intimations of immortality were
almost literally those which the great Wordsworth beheld
176on the visage of a babe! Emerson was such an intimation on
America’s huge child face. He was our first, unfleshed, undifferentiate
glimpse of manhood—of a manhood still very
far ahead.
In Whitman this intimation is no longer the tremorous
glimpse so well symbolized in Emerson’s frail and evanescent
prose. It is a roar of adolescence: a true hunger call: no
more. Now, note Mr. Mumford’s basic misunderstanding of
Poe and Melville. These men were the first to try to flesh
what we might style the Emersonian intuition in American
life. Mr. Mumford calls them figures of the twilight. And
yet, from the standpoint of a study of the American Organism,
they are more advanced than such more successful artists
as Whitman and Thoreau. Poe’s mystical attitude toward the
mechanism and applied science, his marvelous attempt to add
a dimensional sense to the inherited experience of life; and
Melville’s tragic effort to wed God and whaling—these are
the first organic acts after the childhood intimations of the
men whom Mr. Mumford esteems as makers of our Noon.[8]
And the author fails to recognize them, because he has no
organic experience in America to guide him. He is in love
with the gesture, the dream, the childhood faëry of our past:
yet he rejects the body—our present interim of the Machine
and of the romanticisms of the Machine—whereby alone this
promise from our past may be organized into a living future.
Therefore, finally, his book brings the flavor of a plaint:
his envoi is wistful and vague, his call to future action has
no ring. For American future spiritual action must rise organically
from the facts of our hideous present, since these
facts are an insuperable sequence from our past ideals. Mr.
Mumford, in this book, is a man sincerely, prophetically in
177love with the sweet spirit of childhood; yet turning from
the physical, often bestial process whereby alone the child
can grow in order to express that spirit. When the child
America lisps purities half understood, Mr. Mumford blesses.
But when the child America gulps food, wallows in mud,
slugs and robs comrades, adventures, bullies, cheats—Mr.
Mumford merely scolds.
1926
I hoped to glean from the autobiography of Emma Goldman
four experiences, each of them worth while: the intimate
life story of a remarkable woman, the history of her ideals
and thoughts as an anarchist, a portrait of toiling America
during the past four decades, and an account of the years
of military communism in the U.S.S.R. I got what I wanted,
although in each case the net gain in light is different from
what I had supposed it would be—different, I feel certain,
from what Emma Goldman herself believes her book has
given.
The most enlightening point, for me, in the first volume
where the author describes her girlhood, her marriage, her
entrance into the anarchist ranks after the Chicago executions,
her love affairs, her friendships with Johann Most and Alexander
Berkman, is that her narrative is almost bare of experience
and ideas. The pages fly with gusto, Emma Goldman
holds back nothing. But she has, rather amazingly, almost
nothing inward to give! Intimately, for all her good will,
she appears to remember little of her own sensations; and
if there was a period of doubt and inquiry before she accepted
Kropotkin and Bakunin, she takes her own thoughts for
granted, giving us the bare conclusion. I had a sense of
178Emma Goldman writing these pages of her youth; but it was
a sense of the mature woman the author, not of the young
woman the subject. And this very fact: that Emma Goldman
describing her loves, her factories and sweatshops, her cities,
her encounters with magnates and policemen, gives no direct
experience of her feelings and thoughts, helps to reveal the
nature of the woman. One must make one’s own deductions,
as one might if one were actually speaking with the author.
For Emma Goldman is a presence in her book—a deep, hearty
presence. She is never the analyst or integrator of her story.
Her chief traits are goodness and energy. There is something
abstract in her élan vital, since she is unaware of causes.
The Freudians would doubtless call her career a flight from
a cruel father (who became symbolized as authority and the
state). More obviously, her life was a simple escape from
the intolerable pain of inhibitions (personal and social) and a
blind rush toward that freedom which the word “anarchism”
convincingly evoked. In a life so purely dynamic, there is no
pause for thought, hence her book’s total lack of ideology;
there is no room for emotional contemplation, hence its author’s
want of vivid memory. Emma Goldman cannot be said
to remember her girlhood, and its record, pictorial or sensory,
is absent from her pages. Which is to say, that her first thirty
or forty years were lived not on an intellectual, not even on
an emotional, plane; but were instinctive. Instinctive action
(if I may use this obsolete term) is automatic, and leaves no
memory.
But Miss Goldman’s instinctivism must not be confused
with that of others. It is paradoxical, being extremely good
and brave. Most women who live on this level are self-indulgent,
cowardly, shallow. Miss Goldman, although she
seems never to have thought, has a nature both good and
profound. At any moment of her youth, it is clear that she
was ready to give herself to her Cause. Even her sex life, one
179feels, was the response of a motherly heart rather than of a
lusting body. And if she followed the dictates of her body,
the wonder is that even selfish impulse moved her to constant
sacrifice and the acceptance of suffering.
This paradox convinces me that there are really persons
in the world like the “free souls” on whose actual existence
Rousseau, Proudhon and the other romantic anarchists based
their theories. No wonder Emma Goldman was an anarchist—and
without having to think about it. Her innocent nature
predicates and incarnates the anarchist creed. Even in her
appetites, she is a woman instinctively good and pure: a
woman whose blithe spirit only the alien contacts of official
law could poison.
The pages are, of course, full of references to anarchist
comrades. Directly, she analyzes them no more than herself;
but her own vitality imbues with life her portraits of men
like Berkman, Reitman, Brady and Most. Like the author,
these figures belong to the romantic movement. They are an
issue of the same social forces which gave the Atalas, Renés,
Adolphes and Werthers. The key to these characters is a
deliberate return to “self”—a return which is a reaction from
a system, social and intellectual, that was losing its vitality:
so that the romantic return to “self” was literally the escape
of “life” from the old Western order. In the profounder
romantics (Rousseau, Blake, Beethoven, Stendhal, Balzac,
Whitman, Nietzsche, etc.), this return to “self” was sufficiently
thorough to reveal the self’s cosmic implications and
therewith the nucleus of a whole new social fabric. Intellectually
weaker romantics did not go so far. They discovered
their own yearning ego, and loved it, and regarded the
world as a mere bar to its divine trajectory. Their ideas of
social justice were rationalizations of their lyric need of
freedom. They were the anarchists. They knew nothing of
the objective world, save that it got in their way. They knew
180nothing even of each other, since in the last analysis they
knew nothing of themselves. They were “pure being,” and
since “pure being” is a rationalized fantasy, their own lives
have an abstract air, a lack of body and of reason.
This unreality of the anarchists is perfectly revealed by
Emma Goldman. It is epitomized in the attentat on Frick by
her lifelong comrade Berkman. Young Berkman (a very different
man from the mature Berkman of later years) is as good
as his girl friend. He knows nothing, either: not how to make
a bomb, not how to speak English, not the crucial differences
between an American magnate and the lords of Tsarist Russia;
not (at the end) how to aim a pistol. His act is a “pure act”
in a cruel, complex world that has thrown him off, so that he
wills to destroy it. The anarchist is a tangential force from the
social center, but in his naïve egoism he conceives himself as
the center. Thus, by immediate logic, the legalized social
world becomes the centrifugal tangent—and he erects a philosophy
or builds a bomb, to wipe it out.
Volume One of Emma Goldman’s story might, then, be
called the premise of anarchism: there are really born in the
world persons instinctively good, whom the complex tissue of
laws tortures and maims. Volume Two is the conclusion of
anarchism: the fate of such persons in the real world that persists.
In her record of the past ten or fifteen years, the author
is closer to the subject. We no longer have a woman of sixty
trying to re-create a girl. We know what the young Miss
Goldman was, by what she failed to record: we have the contemporary
in a more positive record. For this other woman has
been forced, by her frustrations, from the instinctive rush of
her élan vital to the emotional plane. The natural mother
blindly fighting for her children becomes the contemplative
mother who can no longer wield arms, who can only suffer.
The bud of the young woman’s goodness blooms into a dark
flower of pain. Now Emma Goldman has memory. Her last
181pages, in which she gives us a War America and a Russia of
her own, are suffused with tragic light.
I do not wish to appear to minimize the intellectual contribution
of the great anarchist writers. They established a theory
of the state which Marx accepted. Indeed, the bitter war
between anarchism and communism is one of methods toward
a common goal—the classless and stateless society. As anarchism
evolved, however, it became an unrealistic fixation on
the end, whereas the Marxists assumed the task of establishing
the ideological and technical means that might bring the end
into existence. The anarchists (in the contemporary jargon)
became a dissociation from the context of life: they represented
that extreme of social suffering which touches madness
in so far as madness is a dislocation from the whole. And
against them, Marx brought his organic rationale to the cause
of revolution. He counteracted the instinctive anarchist flight
from an unjust world by making reasonable the relation between
the rebellious impulse and the capitalist system, and by
integrating social revolution as an organic (dialectic) issue
of our social order. In this effort, it is natural that all the leading
Marxists—Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, etc.—should have
made conscious war against the anarchists. But it is a beautiful
stroke of fortune which led a leading anarchist, like Emma
Goldman, into articulate contact with the first Marxist nation.
Her bitter rejection of bolshevism is well known. She went
to Russia in 1920, ready to defend and to collaborate. A year
and a half later, she and Berkman left, heartbroken by what
she names the betrayal of the Cause for which she has given
her life. Her record is full, and is—for reasons unknown to
herself—the most significant part of her book. It is the final
revelation of the utter unreality of her own kind of revolution.
Emma Goldman found in Russia a ruthless state employing
182repression of all kinds—censorship, imprisonment, execution—in
the effort to survive both the inherited chaos of the
Tsarist regime and the seventeen White armies that were attacking
it. This was enough for Miss Goldman: the old hated
state at its old methods. She had never stopped, in her assaults
on bourgeois society, to understand it; why, now, should she
stop to understand the real problems of the proletarian dictatorship
in Russia? Contexts are beyond Emma Goldman,
whether they be White or Red. The whole activity of relations
is beyond her.
Her book, in its finality, becomes the tragedy of good will
and a good heart unguided by a sense of the Whole. The
impulse that had made her a rebel was generous; her methods
of rebellion were brave and pure. But rebellion became the
automatic habit of her life; her one positive response to the
objective world of men and of values. If she had understood
the evils of bourgeois society, she would have understood the
inevitability of their survival in the transition period which
she witnessed in Russia. Her descriptions of what she saw
are factual enough: Emma Goldman is incapable of deliberate
falsehood. But she is also incapable of truth, which is the placing
of facts in their vital context.
Her failure to understand Russia is the anarchist failure
to understand and hence to work upon the world. Her story
of a great anarchist (there is something about this woman
that is great) becomes the most eloquent defense of communism.
If the revolutionary impulse can go so far astray
through blind emotion, become so hysterical, so impotent, so
unjust, and finally so destructive, the Marxian method is
imperative.
But if the lesson of this book went no further, it would
scarcely deserve the space that I have given it. Anarchism as
a system and method of revolution is dead: communism has
killed it. What remains in the revolutionary world is the
183menace of a fixation, different but as deadly as that which in
a hundred years turned the fertile beginnings of Godwin and
Proudhon into so pitiful an end. Anarchism has died of intellectual
dry rot induced by its eccentric emotionalism. There
are signs that orthodox communism is threatened by a dogmatic
rationalistic creed (by no means discoverable in Marx)
whose inadequate depth and breadth would ultimately exclude
the creative energies of mankind.
The intelligent communist will not gloat over the tragic
story of Emma Goldman. He will bear in mind that a revolutionary
cause must be constantly Creative, and that to this
end it must be vigilant against mental or emotional habits
that exclude the right of fresh discoveries. To bring a new
mankind into the world is a long act of birth menaced at
every instant by the nearness of death.
1931
The man whose conversations about art have gone into
the nurture of most of the important artists of our day in
Paris has written a book. For one who knows the author, it
will be hard to dissociate these printed pages from the voice
of the man who wrote them. To have had acquaintance with
this tireless seeker, watched the beautiful curves of his mind
moving for hours of uninterrupted discourse upon a mental
action, and to have relished his piquant admixture of spiritual
humbleness, intellectual passion and ascetic distrust of all passions,
is not the sort of experience to be overlooked, just because
one of the best talkers of our day has turned to writing.
Mr. Stein’s work is, moreover, in the best sense, conversation.
From beginning to end, his curt and quiet tone is a manner of
speaking. The color of the man stands in his most abstracted
184thought. He has written a volume in which all thinking and
all topics are so securely focused to a personal rhythm, that—whatever
else—his essay is a work of art.
Mr. Stein has a poor opinion of philosophy, and of what
esthetics, at its hand, has suffered. Mr. Stein, moreover, has
loved art. He has, in consequence, attempted what might be
called a “rescue.” The sentimental mists of philosophic
thought must be cut away from his beloved; the basis of the
esthetic act must be presented in simple, matter-of-fact, assumptionless
terms. This is the program. Actually, what Mr.
Stein has achieved is a statement as subjective as Amiel’s journal:
a self-portrayal which is both beautiful and significant,
since its hero is so archetypical of his time.
With the purely technical part of his examination of
esthetics, there can be no quarrel. It is superb. Mr. Stein has
studied the picture with a combined sensitivity and intelligence
of which I, at least, can name no even approximate
equal. To read his discussion of focus, interval, the physiology
and analogies of rhythm, distortion, tension, composition, is
to be aware of mastery and to know what sentimental perfume
most literary art appreciation—from Goethe to Elie
Faure—consists of. Mr. Stein’s technique for the practical taste
of art seems to me to be perfect. His chapter, for example, on
“Pictorial Seeing,” in which he makes clear how the eyes can
turn a dish into a picture, how this ideal act is the basis of
esthetics and must inevitably determine the distorting, flattening
and focalizing, is a masterpiece; and the man who understands
it is ready to see pictures. Moreover, the book is
filled with apophthegmatic observations on life, the ego,
civilization (which, to Mr. Stein, is yet far from dawning),
that should make his volume precious to all lovers of delicious
talk. Indeed, the work is so complete in its foreground—the
physiology of the esthetic object—that its utter lack of background—the
matrix, causality and dynamics of art—becomes
185the clearer. Mr. Stein makes plain how in a picture it is upon
the depth dimension that esthetic success hinges: how, indeed,
much European art has failed because of the failure to throw
the focus organically back and to make alive the planes which
support and enact the forward action. And in this criticism
he has given the measure of himself.
If, having so amply learned from Leo Stein how to transform
the dish before our eyes into a picture, one were to ask
him: (a) why one should do this; (b) why anyone has ever
done this; (c) why and how this act is universally linked with
the entire history of man’s spirit; (d) why feeling and value
accrue from this act, and (e) what is the nature of this process
whereby the self is enhanced, one would receive no answer.
As I have said, Mr. Stein is “against” all philosophy and metaphysics.
He takes furious pride in telling us that he has never
been able to understand the writers on these subjects: and he
makes clear that, if you think you have understood them, you
are suffering from a delusion. “Philosophy,” he tells us, “is
a pseudo-knowledge which attempts to add a dimension to
human capacity.” “Mysticism,” he adds, “is sentimentality
taken seriously.” The entire effort to establish truth from
facts, or the real from our complex of thought and sense and
act, being “philosophical” or “mystic,” is inadequate and acrimoniously
barred from his discussion of esthetics. “Esthetics
gives us fact, not truth,” he tells us. The work of art is a
cognitive object, an object by means of which men may know
but which they must “stay outside of.”
Mr. Stein sticks about as heroically to his backgroundless
thesis as he could, without becoming inarticulate altogether.
What value exists in that rhythmic synthesis of ingredients
intercepted by self, and called art, unless the unity achieved
conveys an experience beyond the matters abstracted? Why
should we care to know a Cezanne landscape, if this especial
focusing of hills and houses is a mere unification of themselves?
186Mr. Stein, in refusing to ask such questions or to place
his facts in a context that inherently transcends them, dislocates
every fact, every question he discusses; as assuredly
as he would dislocate a dish (in a picture) if he essayed to
represent its planes without the planes that intersect them.
To render art intelligible by isolating it from those causes
and associations which invade the philosophic realm is just
about as wise as it would be to employ a language after
abstracting the meaning of the words. (This, by the way, is
not far from the method of Mr. Stein’s illustrious and ridiculous
sister, Gertrude.) In his fear of unproved assumptions,
Leo Stein has made a two-dimensional picture of esthetics.
For the expert, his study of the traits of art in analytical
cross section is instructive. But for the reader who is really
seeking an alphabet of esthetics, the result is arid.
Leo Stein represents, in his attitude, the philosophical defeatism
of our day. Because so many little boys have burned
their fingers, he will eschew fire and live cold. There is something
positively heroic in this spectacle of a man aborting the
creative process of his mind, because so many births in the past
(as he sees it) have been abortions. Even worse, Leo Stein,
having no sympathy with the birth pangs of the world, decides
there shall be no more birth at all. To this end, the work
of art is reduced to a mere rationally cognitive object, with
self as a static co-ordinate of the cognition; and that entire
process of dynamic osmosis between self and not-self, which
is the history of culture, is put away as sentimental nonsense.
His subject has its revenge upon him. You cannot trace
more than a diagram of the means of esthetics, unless you
know that the configuration of facts in any work of art establishes
for both artist and observer an experienced entity called
truth, which as radically differs from these facts as water does
from H2 and O, or as a human body differs from the sum of
inorganic chemicals within it. And—unfortunately for Mr.
187Stein—you cannot talk about anything with perseverance,
without having to choose between a philosophy of your own
(which is at least alive and yours) and a philosophy that is unconscious
and not yours and uncontrolled.
This is the fate of the antiphilosophic Leo Stein. He
says, for instance: “Some believe there are quite a lot of emotions.
Some believe there are only three. I doubt very much
that there is more than one, which is just emotion.” This
sounds like a brave refusal to “assume.” It is really an assumption
based on an atomistic philosophy whose tenet was that
you must split up psychic states just as physicists split up
matter into atoms. I might respond that there are no emotions—only
organic contexts from which the mind may abstract
analytic elements which partake solely of the mind process and
which it has called emotions. I don’t say my organic philosophy
would be truer. The point is that Mr. Stein, in disagreeing
with me, is as philosophical as I am.
Throughout his book, such unconscious philosophical assumptions
are present: and they are inadmissible because he
does not admit them. He says, for instance:
Esthetics gives us fact, not truth. But fact to be interesting
to adults in the long run must be true. Only science and practice
can judge validity beyond the mere aspect. The world as it is
scientifically known is not a whole world, but the nature of that
world is such that it can find in science a partial reflection that is
true enough to work. Our esthetic perception of the world must
not contradict this knowledge.
If this is not philosophy—philosophy of a very classic mold—then
Aristotle was a landscape painter.
I have here no space to isolate the assumptions which
color the esthetic of Leo Stein; nor to work out the inadequacy
of his definition of art as a cognitive object. The task
would be the more difficult, in that he forbears from the
method of statement of his first principles—a method which
188makes it so easy to attack the systematic thinkers. I detect, under
Mr. Stein’s abnegation of first principles about the “real”
and the “true” and the “good,” the cowardice of our epoch.
Every man who lives should know that his life is an assumed,
rationally unproved first principle. The real and the true are
categories of our existence and enter as functions into all our
acts. Our sole choice is between a creative and a passive attitude
toward the first principles thus given. So far as I know,
the one honest, if vain, effort to reject first principles is suicide.
Much of the brilliant intellectual activity of our day is a
comfortable surrogate for self-destruction.
1927
Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West,” from
1918 to 1926, sold in Germany almost a hundred thousand
copies. It would be inspiriting to believe that a profound
historical and philosophical work could have so large a sale
in any modern land. But the originality of Spengler does not
reside in his erudition; it is poetic. The book’s metaphysics is
eclectic rather than sound; its historical research is vast rather
than uniformly deep. “Der Untergang des Abendlandes” is
an epos, a myth. So, if Germany has not bought a hundred
thousand copies of a great philosophic work, it has at least
welcomed a personal mythos of deep interest: one whose
elements are philosophy, history, esthetics: one whose comprehension
requires of the reader a great familiarity with
comparative history and comparative religion.
I think at once of “The Outline of History” of H. G.
Wells, which had an analogous popular appeal in America and
England. Wells, like Spengler, under the guise of writing history,
offered a thesis and a myth. Here the analogy stops. The
189story in Wells is a vulgar, obvious narrative of “events”: his
thesis is the most illiterate notion of “human progress” and his
myth is a mere flatulent, optimistic dream. Spengler’s work is
formally beautiful. He builds, not by storytelling, but by the
presentation and analysis of analogies. And he concludes on
a note as darkly glamorous as it is pessimistic. The Winter is
upon us, he declares in doom words that are closer to the note
of the prophets than he would care to admit. Our salvation
is to perform, nobly and perfectly, the work of Winter: to
understand ourselves, to set down as the Seal of our glorious
dying life a ruthless scrutiny of what we were.
I shall criticize Spengler harshly enough. Let it be, however,
always clear that Spengler has written a work of heroic
poetic power. The land that dared to welcome such a volume
still possesses culture.
The book’s main thesis seems to be disguised in the title.
“The Decline of the West”—is it not a misnomer? Has not
Spengler really written a history and a morphology of Cultures?
But no. Though the title may mislead—may, indeed,
have misled its author and its readers, it is a true self-confession
of the poet’s veritable purpose. Spengler has composed
this erudite, overpoweringly brilliant thesis on the anatomy
and physiology of cultures, in order to prove that his Culture
(the Culture of the West) is dying. This is where his heart
lies. He has written a swan song. And since he is a citizen of
the world whose most valid mythic material is no longer the
personal legend, the hero, the war, the romance; is, on the
other hand, metaphysics, history, epistemology and science,
Spengler has employed these elements to make his tragic tale.
And the value of the book lies not in its thesis and its
proof. This decline of the West is obvious enough. Spengler
shares his conviction of it with a great measure of good Europeans.
For several generations the disaster has been in the
190air. The Great War was but an episode. Rousseau had some
ideas on the subject. No sooner had the Germans after Kant
invented the notions of Culture, Progress, Spirit, than the
critics rose to prove that their culture was moribund and
their spirit sleeping. Since Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Europe’s
religious decline has been taken for granted. Tolstoi
and Nordau from contrary directions met in calling modern
art the herald of the fall. Rimbaud, Blake, Dostoevski, Whitman,
were the sort of prophets who declared the death of
Western Europe, although it was to predict a new spiritual
rise. Long past its zenith is the myth that the “modern age”
is a height rather than a decline from the medieval. The
notion that the Middle Ages were “Dark Ages” is relegated
to Chautauqua.
Spengler’s value (and it is very real) lies in his attitude
toward this decline of the West and in the method whereby
he establishes it. His attitude is poetic. He despises the Superman
construction whereby Nietzsche cheated his despair of
tomorrow: he is closer to the marvelous poet Rimbaud who
accepted the complete negation of all values, without hope of
heavens or nirvanas, and who, yet, made of his acceptance
a last song. Spengler is in love with winter. So bitter-passionate
is his embrace of the death he feels in his own soul that he
has written a vast book to prove the inevitability of his love.
The romantic “proves” the perfection of his lady by showing
how the birds and the trees and the winds sing her praises.
Thus has Spengler bent the art and mathematics of the
Greeks, the religion of the Jews and Arabs, the cultures of
Egypt, India and China to his one loved purpose: he has made
them over into ineluctable signs of the winter upon Europe.
Before such thorough passion one must be respectful. This
is a song—a death song the Prussian is singing. The work of
art is a matter of focus. Here a man with the whole world’s
learning in his hand has focused it to make refrain for a great
191downgoing. He has seen mankind whole, in order to make
that whole the accomplice of his own particular end. He has
warped history, maimed philosophy, chain-ganged science,
perverted art. But he is an artist himself. He has written a
book which is poor history, worse anthropology, perhaps. So
was Dante’s “Divina Commedia.”
Spengler, I have said, is a poet, his metaphysics eclectic
rather than sound, his historical research vast rather than uniformly
deep. Spengler’s masters, as regards the material with
which he works out his conception, are almost legion, nor has
he always done them justice. The notion of a culture-organism,
independent, impenetrable, yet somehow mirroring the
universe within its autonomous self, and moved only by God
in the mysterious shape of Destiny, is very close to Leibnitz
with his Monads. Spengler, indeed, is an instance, with Whitehead
and Bertrand Russell, of the revival of Leibnitz, whose
realistic, pluralistic universe was for a time submerged under
the idealistic waves of Kant and Hegel. To this Leibnitzian
base, Spengler adds a good measure of Hegel. His treatment
of mathematics, science, history, all the attributes of culture
from geometry to esthetics, as expressions of Spirit and as subjective,
is Hegelian or Kantian idealism. On the other hand,
his radical differentiation of mathematical time (which is reversible)
from the irreversible Time which he calls Destiny
brings to mind Bergson who opposed creative Time, the signature
of Life, to the false, spatial, materialistic time which he
condemns as a constructed figment of the intellect. Spengler’s
anti-intellectualism, whereas it is as logical as Hegel, springs
from Bergson, as does, likewise, his hostility to the geneticisms
of Darwin and of Marx. His treatment, however, of the art-phenomena
of any age as physiognomic traits of its people is a
brilliant evolution of what Taine and Renan themselves derived
from Hegel.
192Spengler avows Goethe as his master. He is forever quoting
Goethe, appealing to him as the scientific and philosophic
source of his conception. And he is right, in so far as both
these men are poets. Spengler is very far from the ideas of
Goethe; but in his use of ideas toward an absolute, mythmaking
end, he is allied to the creator of Faust.
Goethe’s philosophic master was Spinoza. This manifest
fact would be inadmissible to Spengler who regards Goethe
as the last master of the Faustian soul and Spinoza as an
anomalous survival, out of time and out of place, from the
alien Magian or Arabian culture. Spengler’s thesis of intact,
autonomous culture-organisms does not allow that a master
from one culture can do more than impede the evolution of
another. Spinoza, he declares, shows his strangeness from
Western (Faustian) Culture in that he lacks the force-element
which is that culture’s primary trait. Faust denotes force
tending toward the infinite. But why cannot the same be said
of the personal nature of any of the Hebrew prophets or of
Prometheus? In Spinoza, it is true that this trait of personal
force is assimilated—or, rather, it is equated—in that balance
of individual wills whose sum is God. The point is that whereas
Goethe as artist depicted personal force in Faust, he transcended
it as a philosopher precisely in his acceptance of the
Spinozistic synthesis of forces. Goethe, maturing as a thinker,
transcended the concept of personal will as ultimate. Spengler
has taken Goethe’s esthetic creation of the individual, willing
Faust, and made of it a philosophic symbol for an entire
culture.
Let us take Spengler for a while, as he demands to be
taken, critically. My notes of specific disagreements with the
Spenglerian presentation of facts and of conclusions would
cover many pages. This is no place to print them. Yet I cannot
avoid some minimum of analytical discussion.
193The major thesis is the critical issue. Spengler considers
the culture as an organism. He discerns in history a number
of such cultures. He examines the Chinese, the Egyptian, the
Indian (Hindu), the Classical (Greek and Roman), the
Magian (Jewish-Persian—early Christian-Arab), and the
Western or Faustian (roughly Western Europe since 900
C.E.). He discovers in each of these cultures a regular life
span of four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter. They
sum to about one thousand years. The form and length of
this course never varies. Each culture has a soul: this it expresses
through a chief spiritual attitude, through an individual
vision of life and through a specific symbol. The mathematics,
science, art, religion, political, financial and economic
forms of every culture express its soul, its vision—are symbols
of its attitude toward life. These expressions go, with the culture
itself, through the seasons to decrepitude from youth.
Each epoch in any culture is strictly homogeneous with the
“contemporary” epoch of any other culture. In the spring,
that is, of Classical culture, you will find manifestations in
every activity of man which are analogous to those of the
spring of Western or of Chinese culture. Each culture lives
out its own destiny, dies its own death. No other culture can
do more than impede it, even as one tree may impede another’s
sunlight. There is no interpenetration. There is no
mutual understanding. It is an illusion on the part of the Western
soul to believe it understands the Chinese, the Arabian,
the Greek. The inherent growth of each culture is a matter
not of geneticisms and material evolutions, but of Destiny.
There is no cause and effect; there are monadlike cultural
units, mapped through irreversible Time from birth to death.
Now, the trouble with these organisms is that they are
placed in vacuo. They are described as evolving their destiny
sheerly out of themselves, without relational struggle, drama,
reaction, interference. And yet they are also described as
194having the nature of biologic organisms: i. e., they have youth,
maturity, old age; they have a specific lifespan. But no organisms
known to man exist in this utter isolation. One and all,
they arise from other organisms like them, they live in a continuum
of interaction with other organisms like them, they
give birth before death or in death to other organisms like
them. The culture-organisms of Spengler do not seem to be
really alive: they are mere synthetic constructions of the
author. In order to prove them alive, Spengler has been forced
to a progressive and virtuosic deforming of the facts.
When I say that the Spenglerian culture-organism, absolute,
monadlike, impenetrable, does not exist, I do not mean
that there is no valid view of cultures as organic within their
rise and fall. Before I can come to this, I must examine in at
least one detail the Spenglerian proof.
Each culture, Spengler undertakes to show, has a soul
unique and radically different from that of any other culture.
(If this is so, why is there such strict analogy in the
forms, seasons and lifespan of all cultures?) This soul’s Weltanschauung
is its own. And its prime symbol is its idea of
space or of extension. From this symbol each culture-soul constructs
its mathematics, its sciences, its religion, its architecture,
etc. They are all expressions of the prime symbol. Therefore
every mathematics, science system, religion, etc., differs
radically from every other. Moreover, there is no one mathematics,
no one system of physics, etc. There are as many as
there are cultures. Each is true, and true uniquely for its
culture.
To prove his thesis of the individual prime symbol of
each culture, Spengler bravely ventures to establish that
Greek “number” and “space” and “mathematics” differ radically
from the Western. The Classical prime symbol is the
finite unit, the entity, the here and now. It denies infinitude,
past, future. It considers space as the mere emptiness between
195objects. Therefore it looks on number (Pythagoras) as the
essence of all things: and by all things it means literally things
perceptible to the senses. From this prime symbol has come the
Classical esthetic unit—the human body: the Greek tragedy
of episode and exterior fate: the political unit, a small city
(polis): the coin, etc. But the Western (Faustian) soul has
infinity as its prime symbol. Space for it is infinite and comes
prior to the objects which have their being within it. Western
mathematics is, therefore, one of function, analysis, relation.
Its geometry is non-Euclidean. Its State is a cosmic empire.
Its money is credit, not the coin. Its signal art is not sculpture
but atmospheric painting and contrapuntal music. Its architecture
is not the interiorless Greek temple, but the infinitely
soaring Gothic church.
To make his thesis absolute instead of merely suggestive,
Spengler is forced to explain away the Dionysian (anti-Apollonian)
element in Greek culture and the Renaissance in
Western Europe: to ignore the mystical in Pythagoras and
Plato, together with the Aristotelian elements of medieval
thought and modern science. The idea of the infinite and of
aspiration toward it existed, indeed, in Greece. It came over,
organically, from Egypt. Classic Greece did not lose it, but
formed it, rather; and transformed it. Moreover, the modern
mathematics is different from the classic and the Newtonian
only in so far as it is a growth. Infinity was a problem evaded
by the classical geometers: admitted as insoluble by the Cartesians:
and eliminated as solved by the non-Euclidean mathematicians
of the nineteenth century. The Classical attitude
toward ultimate problems was a status of childhood. It
admitted only the object and the material. So it evolved
materialistic systems like those of Thales, Democritus, Heraclitus;
or turned the abstractions of ideas into quasi materials
called essences, as in Plato. The Faustian attitude was one of
adolescence. It stressed the unsolved and aspirational: the
196concept of infinite space, the autonomy of the personal will.
Faust is a growth from Œdipus; even as the Cathedral is a
growth from the Temple. To differentiate the prime symbols
of cultures which so obviously were interpenetrated, not
alone one by the other, but each by still other cultures (such
as the Egyptian and the Hebrew), is to do them violence. It
is an unnecessary abstraction. Why Spengler wanted to make
this abstraction we shall see in the sequel.
Here is a book packed with intricate allusions. To criticize
it in detail would take almost page for page. I must confine
myself to one more example. One of the cultures discussed by
Spengler is the Arabian—the culture of the Magian soul. Its
prime space-symbol is the world-cave. It lacks the force element
of the Faustian, and the unit-object notion of the Greek.
The individual, here, is a mere passive emanation within God,
as within an aloof yet immanent and defining Cave. The
Arab arch, the mosque-dome, the mosaic painting, are alike
expressions of this symbol. As are also algebra (the arithmetic
of indefinite number), the arguments of Talmudry, the fatalism
of the Moslem. The Magian culture-soul was born about
the first year of our era. Precultural to it was the whole pre-Christian
history of Judea, Persia, Arabia. Now, as “springtime
scriptures,” come the Gospels, come the philosophies of
Origen, Philo, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Mani. With Augustine
and the Nestorians we are at the summer. Mohammed marks
the decline into the autumnal dryness whose strawlike flowers
are the Arab and Judaic thinkers of Babylon and Spain.
Perhaps this amazing violence done to such various spirits
as ancient Hebrew prophet, Berber mystic, Alexandrian
pseudepigraphist, Arab Moslem and Granadan Moor, in the
attempt to enclose them all within one organic cultural conception,
born at the birth of Christ, reaching summer about
400, drooping in 800 and dead with the rigor mortis of “civilization”
197at the year 1,000, will most briefly prove the dangers
of the Spenglerian method.
Of course, there are analogies between St. Augustine and
Ibn Gabirol. Are there, then, none between Faust and Job?
between the writers of the Upanishads and Whitman? between
the sculptors of Egypt and the painters of Spain? If
Maimonides is a “Magian Winter man,” why is Aquinas a
“Faustian Spring man”? If kinship of “prime symbol” bring
Philo, Plotinus, Mohammed, Rabbi Akiba and Jehuda Halevi
together as seasonal expressions of a single culture, why not
prove for the entire world one spiritual Body, one organic
culture—with its systoles and diastoles, of course, its tides, its
shifts, and yet as well with its deep unity of purpose, its continuity
of form and of method of creation?
Death is a breaking up; a lapse from unity into multiplicity.
When a human being dies, only his unity is gone.
Disease means dis-wholeness. Spengler breaks up the world
into these absolute cultures which are really fragments, because
there is the tendency toward death—toward disunity—in
his own high Prussian soul. He is breaking and so
is his particular portion of the world. Let him, therefore,
make conscription of all the wisdom of his world to prove
that his experience is the Law.
Nowhere is the man’s will to see crooked plainer than in
his virtual ignoring of the Jews. The whole Scriptural era
before the Gospels is set aside as “inorganic”—not cultural at
all. Now, Spengler’s thesis is that the pure mystical religious
ethos is the trait of the birth of a culture. Legalism, materialism,
socialism, communism, the various systems of utilitarianism,
mark that culture’s end and herald the “state of suspended
death” which he calls civilization and which, with all its
wintry signs, he declares now to be upon the European and
American worlds. But if, hypothetically, he had deigned to
198consider the Hebrews and Jews as a culture, what would he
have found? Mosaism (read: materialism, legalism, utilitarianism)
came first! “Civilization” or death came before culture
or birth. And from this winter a gradual unfolding toward
the spring of the prophets. He would have found matter even
more disquieting than that. For this “organism” of the Jews
is hopelessly irregular: its seasons and states recur and are
intermingled. Nor does Spengler’s millennial limit for the
entire story tell one-half of its creative tale. He would have
found, moreover, that this hypothetic culture interpenetrated
with others: revived and created others, was revived by others.
And, looking from the Jews back to his Greeks and Faustians,
he would have found a similar intricate story. He would
have found, in other words, hope in lieu of his dear despair.
Wherefore he looked elsewhere, reasoned otherwise.
The culture-organism is a notion abstracted from human
life. It is an abstraction. And abstractions are needed for intellectual
work. They are right when they are fruitful. To
regard the life of Greece as a strict cultural whole is wrong:
yet pragmatically it may be correct to do so, since it enables
us to get the results which observation in isolated status alone
brings. The danger rises when we forget that abstractions are
of use qua abstractions. Take them for real and they turn
monsters.
Indeed, the idea of the periodic rise and fall of man is
probably a similar abstraction. Yet it is justified so long as we
employ it either to criticize the past or to envisage a greater
future. Both of these acts require the analytic method: and
analysis is abstraction. And now we are at the root of what
ails Spengler. His “cultures” are counters of the analyst. And
these he has turned into a poet’s bodies. This is why his book,
although its impulse is poetic, cannot rank as great poetic art.
He tells us a good deal about the cultures which have filled
199the world. And much of what he says is true and is profound.
Nowhere, for instance, have I encountered better comment
on German music, on the deep significances of Classic and
Gothic architecture. Yet the cultures themselves, whereof he
speaks as breathing entities, do not become plastically real. We
learn much in detail about their traits. They neither breathe
for us nor move. They cannot. For they are not persons of a
drama: they are tools of an argument.
Human spirit takes forms, of course, and all forms die. But
the constant is the human spirit. And it is poor philosophy to
take its forms as really abstracted from each other. Even the
painter of a group of persons must relate them, one and all,
upon his canvas if he aims to achieve esthetic truth.
Among the forms of human spirit are the arts which rise
and fall; are social entities like state and city, which are
builded and broken. But the Spenglerian assumption that the
human spirit has no other life than in the splendor of great
buildings, great realms, great arts, is a profanation. To prove
that the abstraction called Rome was “decadent” in the year
400 is not to prove that Man, then, was less great than in the
days when Caesar strutted. It may require a peculiar conjunction
of poetic genius and social readiness to produce a Vergil.
But there are other ways to the light. And some of them are
always open.
Spengler feels death in his own soul. Wherefore he marshals
a whole retrospect of life to funeral him in true Prussian
glory. But human history is subtler. Man is a variable
constant. He can achieve greatness with the ruins of a world
as his sole instruments, as well as with the aid of outward
fortune. Here, too, the evidence of the Jew might have saved
Spengler—from the writing of his book! Variant circumstance
has infinitely varied the expressions of this people.
They have been warlike and humble; unphilosophical and,
later, abstruse beyond the Greeks and Hindus. They have had
200no drama and flooded the stage: no worldly arts at all, and
later supplied such arts for all the world. They have been
pastoral, and adverse from the soil. They have been creators,
politically, of Greek polis, of Oriental empires, and of invisible,
Platonic Zions.
Only in so far as Man remained alive among the Jews was
Jewish culture a constant. And this is true of any culture.
The undying kernel is humanity: this is the locus of organic
growth and of organic permanence which Spengler should
have studied. For cultures are never isolate. Cut them off from
their immersion in other cultures—in Life, they will die uprooted.
They move upon and within each other: they fall to
rise, fade to be transfigured.
Above all, the human spirit, in any cultural body, is capable
of unprecedented transformation, provided an unprecedented
new element of life comes fertilely upon it. This is the
destiny of evolution. And evolution is true, however discarded
the mechanistic form of it may be which Darwin
degraded from Lamarck. And this crucial fact—that the culture,
if to be regarded as an organism at all, must be taken as
a transforming organism; an organism related to the genus,
not to the individual, to the possibly infinite genus, not to the
sharply delimited and mortal person—is entirely ignored by
Spengler.
Look on cultures, not as biologic bodies with their youth
and age, but as indefinite series like those in mathematics, and
you have a fertile abstraction in lieu of a dead one. These
series have, each, their inner laws, perhaps, but they are intertwined
and any figure belonging in one place to one series
may differently occupy other series. Paul, then, who in the
Spenglerian sense was a “winter man” for the Jews, could be
a “spring man” for Western Europe. And Jesus, his strict
contemporary in time and race, could have in him all seasons.
Or take America. Spengler would rightly say that America
201was born of the dying of European culture. So he condemns
us to the rigor mortis of civilization; to a noisier
Egyptian fellahdom. But what of the new mythmakers, the
springtime men, those creatures of pure ethos—Whitman,
Lincoln, Melville, Thoreau? In an organic body, shut by
Destiny, they have no place, and Spengler doubtless would
deny them. In a life series, self-contained yet indefinitely
progressing, they are in place. For with such a series each
integer is at once the conclusion of what came before and
the outset of an infinity beyond....
1926
(A diagnosis through Joseph Wood Krutch and
Bertrand Russell)
In the days when all men of a nation shared a view of life—worshiping
Jehovah and obeying Torah, dwelling within
the cosmos of the Catholic Church, accepting the divine right
of their king or of their reason—it was possible for the author
and critic to make his individual contribution without explicitly
stating the philosophic ground on which he rested.
The base of his point of view was common, and was commonly
understood. The personal variation was what mattered.
This, of course, is the contrary of our modern state. It is
precisely the foundations of human vision—hence of human
thought and of language—that have shifted. In place of essential
harmony in the premises of intellectual action, there is
chaos. But the American writer, despite this obvious fact,
seldom honors his public with a clear-cut statement of what
his philosophy and his religion are. He may even go so far as
202to deny that he possesses any, and make of his lack a virtue.
Yet, however negative and confused, each human being
must possess an attitude toward life. Every thought is a judgment,
every act is a judgment, the interpretation of every
word is a judgment: and judgment implies a standard. If that
standard is not stated, it may function contrary to the conscious
will of its possessor. But it functions nevertheless. Current
literary work is for the most part the expression of a
philosophy and a religion that are not stated at all. The essential
implications never come to light. The student could, of
course, go to the complete works of each writer and discover
the traits of his Weltanschauung; but most readers possess
neither time nor power for such research. They are therefore
constantly taking in, under cover of a stream of articles,
biographies, poems, novels, plays, an attitude toward life of
which they never become aware. And this hidden attitude
works in them; shapes and nourishes, or corrupts them.
Joseph Wood Krutch is a well-known American critic.
He is neither more able, nor less so, than a dozen others who
write in our liberal magazines. But he has done what all of
his fellows should have realized the need of doing; and what
most of them have shamefully neglected to do. He has written
a book, entitled “The Modern Temper,” in which, with
all the clarity and honesty at his command, he has set forth
the philosophy behind his judgments—the measure of life that
determines his specific critical responses. How far he is justified
in calling his mood the modern temper, we shall see.
Certainly, his is a modern temper, widespread and hence significant.
His book therefore offers an occasion, exceptionally
concise, to study the philosophy and spirit of some of the
men who write our books and who review them.
In order to take fair advantage of this occasion, I must
begin by setting forth in some detail what Mr. Krutch has
said. In my summary I shall, without criticism, follow the
203line of the book in its exact progression, using wherever possible
the words of the author.
Chapter 1. (a) Freud says that the unborn babe is the happiest
of creatures; into his consciousness has entered no conflict,
nor is there any limitation upon his desires, (b) As the babe
grows up and experience and knowledge make life miserable, he
invents myths of all sorts to recapture or protect his infant bliss.
The realm of poetry, mythology, religion, represents the world
as a man would like to have it, while science represents the world
as it is. (c) Connections between parts of life, explanations of life,
reasons for life—relations between the parts—are supplied by the
imagination. Which means, they are illusions, (d) Only man has
rationality; the universe is not rational, (e) Therefore man is an
alien in the universe. His rationality, being “unnatural,” is hence
an illusion, (f) Our morality and emotional lives are adjusted to
a world which no longer exists—because it has been destroyed by
reason (science being the reasoning from facts).
Chapter 2. (a) The social virtues of the humanists—serving
one’s children and posterity, living for society, etc.—are really
animal traits, (b) Don Juan is the real type of human, (c) An
individualism that is antagonistic to and destructive of the social
virtues is the highest human value, (d) Human individualism, the
real human value, is perfect separatism of each soul, (e) Nature
reveals no ends only means for its own self-perpetuation, (f)
Man in civilization strives for ends, and turns means (sex,
thought, etc.) into ends. Therefore man is unnatural, (g) Apotheosis
of the ant, as the ideal of nature; since the ant has no individualistic
ends, living entirely for the anthill, (h) The antithesis
between natural means and human ends is irreconcilable, for
when man makes his own thought or sensation or life an end, he
neglects the procreation of the species, (i) Therefore, all cultures
no sooner ripen than they rot. (j) The alternatives for man
are an antlike stable group, or recurrent death at the top. (k)
Humanism is riddled with mutually destructive contradictions.
Chapter 3. (a) The generation of Huxley, Tennyson, etc.,
was sure that science was going to disclose a world in which man
is perfectly and regally at home, (b) But science has revealed
only a vast emptiness, in which, lost like Milton’s Satan, we wing
our way. (c) Scientific mastery of the inner life, the soul, leads
204likewise to no real mastery of it, but only to more confusion. (d)
There is no ethics or morals. Anthropology and psychology
reveal merely a variety of ethics and morals. (e) Yet man persists
in being an ethical, moral creature. (f) There is no royal
reason. (g) The reason in which Aristotle, Shakespeare, Spinoza,
believed is revealed by science to be mere rationalization. (h)
Science itself is doubtful. 2,000 years of epistemology have made
it dubious if man can know any reality outside himself. (i) Science
gives us one table—consisting of nothing but electrons. Our
senses give us another table. The former we know as truth; but
the second only can be of use to us in our experience. (j) Science
gives us the real universe. (k) Huxley, etc., were deluded, thinking
we could make this universe ours. (l) There is no relation
between the outer world of science and the inner world of man’s
needs and emotions.
Chapter 4. (a) Love is defined as the sexuality of the individual
separate ego. It is a discontinuous, physical phenomenon
with no implications in reality beyond its naked self. (b) Since
science and modern freedom have freed love of the old taboos
and of the religious and poetic myths, love, as more than naked
sexuality, turns out to be illusion. (c) Sex is a mere physical need,
and hence has no values whatsoever. Man is simply cursed with
this need and must make his peace with it, as he can. (d) We
shall have to get used to a loveless as well as to a godless world.
Chapter 5. (a) Tragedy is based on noble action, and noble
action is based on the belief (as Sophocles and Shakespeare had
it) in the dignity of man’s soul. (b) This dignity is an illusion;
for it derives from the notion that man is the center of the universe,
or at least that he belongs to the universe, and that his
deeds have some universal import. (c) With the going of this
illusion has gone man’s dignity, his possibility of noble action—and
Tragedy. (d) The art of the present can only distrust its
own thoughts, despise its own passions, realize man’s impotent
unimportance in the universe, and tell no story except such as
makes it more acutely aware of its trivial miseries. (e) Yet with
the passing of Tragedy, our need of Tragedy (i.e., of dignity,
noble actions, etc.) has not passed.
Chapter 6. (a) To medievalism, life was an exact science. The
laws, rules, etc., of that science have broken. (b) Life regarded
as a science is now and forevermore intellectually indefensible.
205(c) The modern mind, realizing that there is no Peace unless
each life is made into some self-sufficient pattern or order or
whole of its own, strives to achieve this. Strives, that is, to make
life an art. (d) For in science, there is only one Truth; but in
art, there may be many truths. Many men have striven to make
their lives an art: e.g., Cellini, St. Francis, the heroes of Henry
James’s novels, Anatole France. (e) In art, there is no standard
except the artistic perfection of the individual work, according to
its own rules. As an artistic creation, Othello is no better than
Iago. (f) In art, there is no ethics. (g) To conceive of life as a
group of works of art means, therefore, anarchy. (h) No society
can five by such a scheme. Life lived as an art is pragmatically
impossible, from the standpoint of mankind.
Chapter 7. (a) What progress did philosophy or religion ever
make? None. It was only when the thinker discovered how small
are the things he can do, that he did anything at all: only when
he renounced looking for the key to heaven, that he was able to
keep chimneys from smoking. (b) The world grows more comfortable,
as man ceases to strive for anything beyond comfort.
(c) But now, despite this progress, behold metaphysics is reborn!
(d) It is typified by the neo-Catholicism of France, and the
neo-Anglicanism of England. (e) Its essence is expressed by T. E.
Hulme, who wrote: “One of the main achievements of the nineteenth
century was ... the principle of continuity. The destruction
of this conception is, on the contrary, an urgent necessity
of the present.” The premise of the new metaphysicians is
therefore dualism, or discontinuity. It says: “There are two
worlds: one, the empty spaces of materialism and science, and
two, the world of man—spirit, faith, ethic, value, emotion, God.
And there is discontinuity between them.” (f) But there is nothing
of which we are so sure as of the continuity taught by science.
To earlier, naïve men, the important thing about living
matter was that it lived: but science can only be sure that it is
matter. (g) We believe in matter, accepting its continuity, wiping
out the merely hypothetic world of spirit, value, etc.—the
world of the modern metaphysicians. (h) Metaphysics is but
another petty effort to make life an art: it is a confession of its
own despair and failure.
Chapter 8. (a) It is not by thought that men live. The less
they think, the better they live. The more they think, the more
206willing they are to die. (b) The very need of thought proves
that man’s vitality is ebbing. An animal, a barbarian, has no such
need. (c) Civilizations, constructed on thought, reach death; then
the naïve barbarians rush in, the man begins anew. (d) The fresh
hordes of barbarians destined to renew us are perhaps the Russians.
(e) Communism, despite its sophisticated phraseology, is a
new barbarism. In communism the individual does not count,
only the anthill counts. No religious speculation is allowed. Life
is perpetuated, unquestioningly, for its own blind sake. (f) But
the inevitable despair of the modern man who, having learned to
think, has learned the hopeless abyss between himself and nature,
is not so bad after all: since he has physical comfort. Philosophical
pessimism is not so hard to bear as cold or hunger. Ours
is a lost cause, but we should rather die (in comfort) as men, than
live as animals.
Our next step is to examine the various elements of Mr.
Krutch’s philosophy of life: to test their quality, their typicality,
and to compare them; to measure their cogency as the
cause of such desperate conclusions. The references are to the
divisions of his argument, as catalogued, omitting repetitions
and minor points.
Chapter 1. (a) states with apparent sympathy that a prenatal,
vegetable life, bereft of struggle or aspiration, is a possible
desideratum. (b) asserts that there is a dualistic conflict
between art, which is an illusory world, and science, which is
the real world. Here is the author’s doctrine: the relation between
the unborn babe and the womb in which it lives is real;
but the relation between the born man and the world in which
he lives is illusion. Therefore, since life in any individual consists
of the relation between it and its environment, and since
no man could live an instant without some relation with the
air and the world, what Mr. Krutch is really saying is: the
life of the unborn babe is real; the life of the born man is an
illusion. (c) implies that relations and connections between
207man and the universe, such as imagination supplies, are necessary
for his welfare. But they are illusory, since the imagination
is delusion. Yet Mr. Krutch has not even attempted to
prove that imagination is delusion. This is his premise, so that,
of course, this must be his conclusion. (d) and (e) invalidate
man’s reason, since the universe has no reason. Yet the author
employs his reason to prove his alienness in the universe.
Virtually, he says: “My reason is invalid, since the universe
is not rational. Yet my reason is, miraculously, valid enough
to prove that no relation between me and the universe exists.”
What he should have said, logically, from the premises, is
this: “I declare my reason to be exclusively mine. Therefore
it is not a cogent measure to determine any relation outside
myself. To discover if I belong in the universe, I must employ
some measure common to both me and it: some measure
that I can move from myself to the universe.” Of course, if
he had relied on some such measure—a measure of mass, for
instance, or of causation—he would have found continuity
between man and the universe. Conclusion: the chapter assumes
that continuity between man and the universe is desirable,
but that absolute discontinuity exists. The assumptions
are sustained by means of indefensible logic.
Chapter 2. (a) states that since man’s social virtues are
found also in animals, they cannot be human. This is tantamount
to asserting absolute discontinuity between animal and
man. Darwin, evolution, modern biology, are therefore
flouted. The author unconsciously assumes an attitude more
close to the early ascetic Christian and neo-Platonic concept
of an abyss between man and brute. (b) and (c) lift up an
old Spanish myth as the real human type. Don Juan was a
“man” who could make love to countless women without ever
becoming tired, without ever becoming attached, without
ever changing, without ever feeling. Psychologists class him
as the archetype of “fixated adolescent” and agree that he
208never existed, outside the realms of pathology. This insulate
human “atom,” the “perfect individualist,” with no social relations
or connections, this abstract fiction of infantile will, is
the human ideal of our author. (e) and (f) carry on the
thesis of discontinuity. Nature has no ends and is not moral:
man has ends and is persistently a moral creature. The traits of
nature are determined by studying the ant, etc.: they are by
no means to be determined by studying man. For the ant, by
some inscrutable right, belongs to nature, whereas man does
not. This is really the premise of the argument: Mr. Krutch
makes it the conclusion. His syllogism in its pure form is this:
“Man is not part of nature: man has certain traits: hence
these traits are not part of nature. Therefore man, possessing
these (unnatural) traits, is not part of nature.” However, let
us grant the premises that the ant is in nature, man is not.
The conclusion must be that man is different from the ant.
From this, our author is inspired to conclude that man, to
succeed as man, must behave like an ant! Man, to succeed
like a man, must build anthills and—nothing else. Conclusion:
the chapter declares, in the face of anthropology, biology,
sociology, psychology, that man is utterly apart from nature
and from animals, and that (even as the old ascetics and transcendentalists
insisted) he is a separate creation. Here is the
syllogism, transposed for clarity: “A tree is made of wood.
Apples are not wood. Therefore, apples cannot belong on
trees.” But despite the organic difference between man and
“natural creatures,” he must behave—if he would succeed—just
like the creatures whom he in no way resembles! (Here,
the ascetics were more logical. Having posited man as different
from the brute, they mapped out for him a totally
separate course.) Assuming the organic difference, our author
insists that the two relationless entities must go the same way.
He builds up the definitions of his humanism upon illogical
209contradictions; and then dismisses “humanism” as full of the
contradictions of his own bad thinking.
Chapter 3. (a) and (b) are repetitions. (c) looks for science
to “master” the soul—and looks in vain. Pure science
attempts merely to measure, from the outside. For instance,
it weighs the sun and names its elements. It has no mastery
of the sun, in the sense of controlling the sun. To a slight
degree, science has similarly tried to “measure” the soul: i.e.,
to analyze its components. Pure science has never attempted
more, leaving the application of its discoveries to education
and religion. The modern effort in these fields is unknown
to our author. (d) comes down to this: science has found
that noses are not alike, in any two parts of the world. Negro,
Eskimo, Malay, Nordic, have decidedly different noses. Ergo,
science has discovered that noses do not exist!... To prove
that morals and ethics do not exist, it would be necessary to
prove that the sense of right does not exist or is at least very
rare. But anthropology shows that this sense is universal. Its
diversity of ethical and moral forms, of course, is due to the
fact that morals are a product of the interplay between men
and their environment. To say that morals vary is simply to
say that men vary. To say that morals do not exist, because
they do not agree, is to say that men do not exist because
men do not agree. Chapter 1 revealed the genesis of the
author’s mood as the result of an exorbitant faith in reason.
Now (f) and (g) call reason a bad name, and dismiss it.
Chapter 1 illogically employed human reason to establish the
preponderance of an external, irrational universe over man.
Now the evidence of the mind is declared to be poor: the
universe itself may be but the projection of that poor human’s
reason which (in another part) has no existence within the
universe. Mr. Krutch has said: the table of science is real.
The table of his senses, like the neo-Platonist dwelling in
Tyre or Batanaea in the year 300, he rejects as unreal. But
210the old Tyrian was logical. He lived where his faith was: he
utterly declined to follow his senses. This is too athletic for
our modern. With one breath, he gives credence to the table
of electrons; with the next, he confesses that the false table
is the only one he ever hopes to live with! But the lack here
is greater than merely one of logic. Mr. Krutch has the most
childish notion of what science means, when it states that the
table is a congeries of electrons.... The language of science
is mathematics; and mathematics is a logic of forms.
Everything that cannot be expressed in symbols of mass and
motion is nonexistent within the realm of mathematics. Now,
pictured in so far as it exists within the domain of science,
i.e., in so far as it is a congeries of mass in motion, a table,
of course, can be nothing but a congeries of mass in motion:
a chart of electrons. In the precise same way a living
body, pictured in terms of anatomy, can be nothing but an
anatomical structure. But there are other domains; for instance,
human behavior, which has qualities that the language
of mathematics does not cover. In this domain, the description
of the chair as a group of electrons will not work: but
the notion of the child who has never heard of electrons, but
who wants to sit down in the chair, works very well, indeed.
To say that science is the whole truth, because it prophesies
an event like an eclipse, is just as reasonable as to say that
the ideas of the child are the whole truth, because the child
prophesies that it is going to sit in that chair, and straightway
does so. The eclipse takes place in a realm where human
quality is largely extracted: so we are right to deal with
eclipses in the logic of science. But man’s experience of
beauty, for instance, before that eclipse is largely in the realm
of human value. Here, the language of poetry is more adequate
than that of mathematics. To deny one of these measures
in absolute favor of the other is as reasonable as it would
be to say that the architect’s blueprint is more real than the
211house. Mathematicians of high order, of course, are aware of
the limitations of their language and therefore of the realm
which their language expresses. It is only the weakling, desperately
in need of an absolute Word, who speaks like Mr.
Krutch, of the “certitudes of science.” Not Poincaré, not
Einstein. Not the typical Eddington who says: “There is a
constant unknowable in science.... Scientific laws are
merely truistic measurements of a single physical condition....
So long as the electron is not reacting with the rest of
the universe, we cannot be aware of it.... A particle may
have position or it may have velocity, but it cannot in any
exact sense have both. An association of exact position with
exact momentum can never be discovered by us, because
there is no such thing in nature.”... All of which is tantamount
to saying, that the mathematical electron is an abstraction,
that it is a mere plausible symbol; and that certitude can
never exist in a field which is built up on the assumption of
discrete, separate parts; since these parts do not exist—cannot
exist in a continuum; and could not be observed by man, even
if they existed.
Chapter 4. A display of the same dualism and an assumption
of the same discontinuity between the various functions
of man, and between man and his world. The author’s attitude
toward sex is worthy of the hermit in the Egyptian
desert. Sex, as an energy expressing the whole man and
woman, linking them in a full human relation, mobilizing
their creative as well as their possessive nature, is unreal for
the author. But unlike the antique gymnosophist whose rejection
of sex he shares (while ignoring his science of self-control
and despising his God), Mr. Krutch has not the courage
or the will to carry out his own convictions. He considers
himself superior to his sex; but he is quite willing to capitulate
before it.
212Chapter 5. The finest writing of the book is here. Mr.
Krutch discourses on Tragedy “as it once was” with discernment
and fervor. It is plain that he is attached to Tragedy,
“dead child of fallacy and illusion”; he can write with loving
observation about the body of a “fraud.” (a) and (b) assume
discontinuity, once more. (c) and (d) misread the modern
status of literary art. Human dignity still exists, noble action
and noble lives still persevere. The disappearance of the
anthropocentric cosmos and of the personal heaven have
enhanced man’s sense of dignity within himself. He is responsible
now, not as the child of a mythic Father, but as the
father of himself. Yet more is needed than dignity and noble
action for the production of Tragedy. Tragedy is a social
form. It must enact man’s dignity in communicable, common
terms. These terms are wanting. The modern conscience of
the world has not yet bridged from private into public symbols.
There is nothing discouraging in this. There were
ages of social preparation, also, before Sophocles and before
Shakespeare: ages in which individual men had dignity, in
which men lived nobly, and yet in which no great Tragedy
was written.
Chapter 6. (a) begins with a dubious statement. The
medieval science of life was inexact; it was, indeed, founded
upon self-contradictory laws, and the dualism of these laws,
which were supposed to conform to life but did not, eventually
disrupted medieval science. In “The Re-Discovery of
America,” I have gone into this question at some length.
Here it is not centrally cogent, so we let it pass. (d) and (e)
again imply discontinuity and discreteness not alone between
man and the universe, but between man and man. Men, says
the author, have so little relation among themselves that (f)
if each man lived his truth according to his essence, these
multiple truths would sum to anarchy! If men are essentially
related, if the reality or truth of each is a focus of the interplay
213of the whole (as philosophy, psychology and social sciences
agree), then their living by the light of their individual
reality and truth would bring them into active relation with
one another, and would result in harmony. These premises
are denied by Mr. Krutch. The rest of the chapter is less
essential. It is interesting to note, however, that it implies the
impossibility of man’s ever achieving any inner principle of
order or control, whereby he might integrate his life within
the vicissitudes of the world. The chapter is the final admission
of man’s impotence. The artist is the creator of a kind
of order. Man can be an artist, says the author, when he deals
with words or pigment or marble. When he deals with life,
man can be only an amoeba.
But the reader has had enough of this dissection of a
dreary argument. Let him give one final backward glance to
Chapter 7, and I shall insist no more. There he will discover
that Mr. Krutch, after desperately building upon the premise
of discontinuity (of absolute separation between man and
nature, between man and man, between certain traits in man
and certain others), refutes the “new metaphysicians” on the
ground that they are the discontinuists; while he falls back
on the continuity of science! The reader will agree that Mr.
Krutch has now sufficiently revealed himself as a befuddled
man. If he were a thorough pessimist like Schopenhauer or
Gautama, if he were a thorough transcendentalist like St. Paul,
if he were a thorough materialist like Haeckel, if he were a
thorough individualist like Rousseau, we could disagree with
him and yet respect him. But he is thoroughly nothing, except
confused. His thinking quavers between contradictory extremes
of which he is not even aware; his values are a crazy-quilt
of fragments pieced together from the worn creeds
of Manichaeism, Puritanism, Rousseauism, Nietzscheanism,
214Haeckelian monism, etc., etc. His emotions are infantile. His
spirit is an aggressive fear that would deny to others the
dignity it lacks. He has nonetheless been worth our scrutiny.
For his argument contains most of the clichés and most of the
implications of our current “culture.” It shows the distemper
of the modern mind, unable to bear the chaos of three centuries
of ideological destruction, and unschooled to reform that
chaos. If the average pundit in “The Nation,” “The New
Republic,” “Harper’s,” “The Atlantic Monthly,” “The Dial,”
were to put down, with a like candor, his philosophy of life, it
would turn out a no less pitiful confusion. If our current literary
arts were analyzed, they, too, would reveal a message as
ill-founded. Behind the stubborn bewilderment of Theodore
Dreiser, behind the lyric bewilderment of Sherwood Anderson,
behind the bravado of Hemingway, behind the dandified
despairs of Cabell and the earlier T. S. Eliot, behind the
dainty froth of Thornton Wilder and of Carl Van Vechten—behind
the materialism, the cynicism, the indifferentism, the
impertinence, the impotence of most of our popular writing[9]—exists
a failure to think straight from the facts, and to
feel straight, not identical with the failure of Mr. Krutch,
but essentially related.
The key to the situation—perhaps the basic cause of the
“modern temper”—is suggested in Chapter 7 of Mr. Krutch’s
book. What the author calls the “new metaphysic” is merely
the old transcendentalism. These men whom he attacks—neo-Catholics,
sentimental mysticalists, spiritualists, deniers of
the “flesh” in one way or another—answer the “certitudes
of science” by declaring that there is another world—their
world of value, spirit and religion. Here, you have transcendentalism
defined. And Mr. Krutch rejects it on the
proper ground of discontinuity. But he does not see that his
215own argument—the separateness of parts and traits of man
from other parts, and of man from men, and of men from
nature—is discontinuity no less. And he does not see that he
has blinded himself to the discontinuity of his own thought
by the naïve method of calling his favorite part of reality
the Whole.
Like the two ladies in Kipling’s jingle, transcendentalist
and materialist are “sisters under the skin.” The transcendentalist
(Platonist, Christian, Christian Scientist, etc.) starts by
dividing the world into (1) spirit-value-quality-soul and into
(2) matter-body-evil. Having begun this dualistically, he cannot
go on. Unknown to himself, he must reduce this duality
into a whole. This he does by denying the part he does not
like—by denying matter. (He may be subtle about it, like the
followers of Henri Massis, or crude, like the disciples of Mrs.
Eddy.) Now, he has his Whole, which is all life, all good—which
is All. But this All will not bear the buffets of the
world: for it is really a fragment. And the transcendentalist
begins his endless labor of corrupting reality, in order to
make it fit his figment.... The materialist starts likewise.
He, too, divides the world into (1) measurable matter and
(2) the unmeasurable qualities of certain kinds of matter—good,
value, love, spirit, color, poetry, dream, etc., etc. He,
too, cannot abide this dualism, and must somehow manage
to resolve it into a One. He simply rejects what the transcendentalist
exalts, and takes what the other refuses. He sacrifices
everything that is not measurable matter. Whatever cannot
be measured, he says, does not exist. But the part of the
Whole which he has legislated into nullity still “functions”
in him. He wears himself out, denying the domains of emotion
and thought which his petty “whole” has no room for.
He becomes the tired cynic, like Mr. Krutch; or the arrogant
pseudo-scientific clown, like Dr. Watson.
(Of these two sisters, it must be avowed that the transcendentalist
216is less foolish. Both find “living matter.” The one
rejects matter and retains the abstract living: the other accepts
matter and denies life. But it is plain that we are more sure of
the undifferentiate quality of living than we are of matter.
Living without form does not exist, of course: living-matter
cannot be divided. But there is a difference of degree in the
folly of the camps.)
Between dogmatic transcendentalist and dogmatic materialist—each
hoisting his “part” into a Whole—stands the agnostic,
of whom Bertrand Russell is an illustrious instance. Mr.
Russell understands the limitations of the language of mathematics,
and how they must limit the scientific universe which
mathematics symbolizes. He says that there are two general
logics: the logic of quantity and the logic of quality or feeling.
He says that both are right.[10] But since the logic of quantity
(measurement and science) is within the mind of the
observer who personally must follow the logic of feeling,
Mr. Russell concludes that there is no way of measuring the
measure value. So he decides that it is all no use: man can
217never know anything since in order to do so he would have
to “get out of himself.” And of this agnosticism he makes
a dogmatic virtue.
The agnostic is not so different, after all, from the other
two. He also has begun wrong: he has arbitrarily divided the
world into two parts, of which one theoretically is “the
truth,” and its expression into two languages or logics. Having
made this dualism, he also irresistibly is driven to seek
his Whole: and this he does, not by the sacrifice of one part
to the other, but—since he cannot separate them—by the sacrifice
of both! For the Zero of the agnostic is a kind of
Whole: nescience is an assumed omniscience. The man who
knows that we cannot know is dogmatic also. Again, in this
agnosticism,[11] there is the same false premise: the dividing of
reality into two parts. Wherever this is done, there must
ineluctably follow confusion and falsehood, agnosticism or
despair....
The voices of confusion, agnosticism, despair, are the
popular voices of today. The average American reader of
the so-called educated classes has been brought up on literature
and science that were crassly dualistic. He probably left
a dualistic church when he was young. He has fallen at once
into the camp of Rousseau (the individual as a separate, perfect
atom), or into the camp of dogmatic science (only measurable
matter exists), or into some allied camp like that of
vulgar collectivism (society is real, but its individual integers
are not). These statements, of course, are caricatures: that is
why they express the distorting effect of modern doctrine on
the average mind.
The consequence has been that the common reader of
218books (the kind that calls himself an intellectual) is helplessly
lost and helplessly confused. For his doctrine and the world
will not go together. “Feeling” draws him imperiously one
way; “knowing” another. He is miserable. And misery loves
company. The literary art which makes that misery respectable
by “proof” that there is no other course, and by decking
out impotence in gracious gestures, becomes the popular
art. Books have engendered the modern distemper. The least
they can do, now, is to justify it.
The curative, recreative task is very hard. It is the work of
the ages before us. And those of us who choose it for our
own will have to labor in the cold of an unfrequented dawn.
Yet, although it is the task of generations—of armies of artists,
of corps of truly scientific thinkers—the essence of it can be
stated very simply.
We have seen how even the dualist and discontinuist is
irresistibly drawn to believe in a Whole, and to create a
Whole (out of his favorite fragment). The concept of wholeness,
the experience of wholeness, the living of wholeness are
the unavoidable aspiration of human life.[12] This is so inevitable
that even the intellectual denier of wholeness in the effort of
his thought and deed belies his rejection. The right beginning,
therefore, of our task must be to conceive a Whole that
will be the Whole. Let us passionately refuse all dualism, all
denials, at the outset. If science is so foolish as to say: “There
is no color in the colored thing,” let us challenge that science.
If religion is so foolish as to say: “Man’s soul is separate from
his body,” let us challenge that religion. If mathematics is so
foolish as to say: “x and y, although they are in the universe,
are not joined, but are discrete and separate,” let us challenge
that mathematics. Let us say:
“There is one and only one irrefutable truth: the universe
219exists. Men differ about what it is, men differ about where
it is. Some say it is all ‘matter,’ and outside; some say it is all
‘thought,’ and within. All must agree that it is.
“There is, to this one truth, one corollary that is irrefutable
also: the universe, for each of us, is focused from the
self. Self—whatever it is—looks out, or looks in, on the universe.
Men differ about that. Yet must agree that self is that
focus of the universe which knows the universe exists. Self,
therefore, is of the universe (it may be the whole of it, of
course) which self asserts.
“All my words, all my thought, all my action, shall be
determined by this single common truth—this single common
premise of existence. My words will be such that when they
point to a ‘thing’ or a ‘state’ (as all words do) they will imply
the tentative existence of the thing or state, within the certain
Whole. For the thing is vague and fleeting: only the universe
is certain.... My thought will be such, that when it represents
a ‘thing’ or a ‘state’ or an ‘action,’ as all thought must,
it will imply its tentative existence within the certain Whole;
and its valuation of the ‘thing’ or the ‘state’ will be the relating
of it with the universe which alone is certain.... And
my action will be such, that it expresses this relationship of
self and of all things involved, within the Whole that is the
premise of all thought and all behavior.”
If these few words, necessarily insufficient, suggest the
revolutionary task that challenges human life—the re-creating
of language, of society and of man in the image of the Whole
which is God—they will have served their purpose. But the
task is not impossible. The ant is born with the capacity to
fulfill his function. Savage man was born with the capacity
to fulfill his. Why should historic man alone, of all creatures
in the world, be born without the capacity to realize himself?
All history attests that man’s nature is a striving toward the
divine achievement: the focusing of the Whole in his thought,
220the enacting of the Whole (this is called holiness) in his deed.
But whereas all art, all science, all religion, are the striving
toward this consummation, they have always been too weak:
so they have broken. Dualism, with its rejections, its denials,
its corruptions, is the symbol of this breakdown. Dualism,
in its twin forms of transcendentalism and materialism, has
always brought a temporary death to man’s immortal effort.
History is a short tale. It has been just long enough to tell
us what, as men, we have to do.
But let us Americans not delude ourselves. Only the Remnant
lives. And this is so, because the way of death is easier
than life. Mr. Krutch has stated well the inevitable end to
which the dualist—whether he calls himself materialist or
transcendentalist or agnostic—is ineluctably brought. “Ours is
a lost cause,” he closes, “and there is no place for us in the
natural universe.” So he elects to die. This is the death, indeed,
of the race of men who look upon themselves as alien
from the remotest star, and who put their loyalty in life upon
one jot less than the Whole which is God. Let them die....
And for the race, still at its dawn, let Spinoza speak:
A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his
wisdom is not a meditation upon death, but upon life.
1929
The collected essays of Mr. Eliot provide a portrait of
a mind that for the past twelve years has prominently played
on the American literary scene. The volume contains theoretical
chapters from “The Sacred Wood,” eleven papers on
the Elizabethan dramatists, the entire brochure on Dante,
essays on the Metaphysical Poets and on Dryden, Blake,
Baudelaire, Swinburne. It represents Mr. Eliot’s social and
221theological position in the studies of Lancelot Andrewes, in
“Thoughts after Lambeth,” and in the two essays on Babbitt
et al., which did so much more to discomfit the new humanists
than the lunges of their foes. And finally, it reveals the
more casual man—delightfully—on topics like poetry in drama,
Wilkie Collins, Dickens and Marie Lloyd. The book portrays
a sensitive, finely endowed person. Itself an accumulation of
comments on many matters, it suggests a review of like
nature: one is tempted to pass from page to page detailing,
comparing, dissenting. But the place of Mr. Eliot as a literary
influence in our time, and the cultural crisis of our time, make
this method inadvisable. It is important to employ the book
as a means for seeing the man whole; and, having done so, to
deduce a measure of his values as a leader and thereby a
measure of the time which took him as a leader.
The first revelation is of a man with an exquisite, almost
infallible, taste for the stuffs of literary art. Whether he
touches a line of Dante or of Swinburne, a melodrama
of Cyril Tourneur or of Wilkie Collins, the prosody of
Baudelaire or of Blake, Mr. Eliot evinces an esthetic delight
which implies true contact with his subject. This first trait
is particularly distinguished in an age in which the field of
literary discussion has been almost monopolized by writers
who may know something of baseball or economics but who
ignore the nature of literary art. The second trait of Mr.
Eliot, not less pervasive but more subtly entextured in his
book, is his moral sense; and this, coupled with his first, is
even more rare. We have had plenty of moralists—More,
Mencken, Lewisohn, are examples—writing on literature and
totally insensitive to literary esthetics; we have had a few
“estheticians” disclaiming the moral sense (as if esthetic form
were some kind of insubstantial absolute and not an organic
configuration of ordinary human experience and motive), and
therefore writing with even worse futility on books. When
222Mr. Eliot compares lines in Massinger and Shakespeare, contrasts
tropes in Dryden and Milton, draws a prosodic sequence
from Donne to Shelley, he reveals, in his taste and judgment,
the moral integer: he knows the human nature of esthetics.
This moral sense is organic in the man; it is no mere acceptance
of rules, it is not moralistic. Being the permeation, within
his specific literary experience, of his general view of life, the
moral quality in Mr. Eliot is religious. Everywhere, although
he may be discussing merely a choice of verbs in Middleton,
he reveals a general and definite attitude toward existence
taken as a whole: and this attitude, when logically formed,
becomes religion.
T. S. Eliot, then, is portrayed by this book as a man with
a sense of the whole, with a conviction of his place in the
whole, as a man engaged in an activity (literature) for which
he is fitted and to which he gives his entire equipment. Such
a crystallization comes close to what Nietzsche meant by a
cultural act; and in an epoch whose literary critics have been
insensitive and incompetent men, it makes Mr. Eliot an exceedingly
welcome figure. If, however, we turn from those
contemporaries in contrast with whose nullity he looms, and
measure him rather by his own subjects and by the literary
exigencies of our epoch, Mr. Eliot dwindles. No single major
essay in this book, for instance, can be said to be organic
either as a presentation of its subject or as a literary essay.
Consider the “Dante” in whose study he is at his best: every
observation is exact, many a phrase stands forth a luminous
gem; but the observations merely mount arithmetically into
so many pages of running comment. Dante and his work are
never objectified, never dimensionally re-created either in the
world of Dante or in the world of T. S. Eliot. Or consider
the justly admired pages on the Elizabethans: they contain
glimpses both precise and profound into the art of the theatre,
into the poets and their world. But none of the plays, none
223of the dramatists, is made to stand whole, either in the epoch,
in the drama, or in some total conception of the critic.
If, then, as I have stated, there is wholeness in Mr. Eliot,
we are led to question what kind of wholeness it must be
that can focus so superbly on details in a dozen poets and
a dozen epochs, and yet fail to envelop any one of them.
It is true that this failure is not always complete. In the
“Baudelaire,” for instance, or the “Swinburne,” we obtain a
kind of two-dimensional cross section, built from the prosodic
study, which we can place for ourselves in the organic milieu
of the nineteenth century. But in the essays on the more
cosmic men there are no dimensions beyond mere points
of light. And in the studies of dynamic but little-discussed
figures, the failure is disastrous. The pages on Bradley, for
example, proceed without the faintest evocation of the two
ideological worlds—Hegelianism and English individualism—which
Bradley sought to synthesize. The chapter on Lancelot
Andrewes is a mere ringing of personal responses to the old
priest’s music, which become sentimental and pretentious,
since there is no effort to place this music in the symphony
of Roman Catholic, Jewish and Arabic exegesis, from which
it was never truly independent.
T. S. Eliot, it becomes plain, is a man of integrity in the
real sense of the word; but his vision is such that it can never
hold more than details; and his energy is too weak to give
organic form either to his subjects or to his essays. Unlike
most of his fellows, who suffer in a chaos, he lives in a “universe.”
But this “universe” of Mr. Eliot’s is evidently small
and minor. It is achieved by huge and deliberate exclusions.
It scarcely contacts with the modern world—the world whose
radical transformations in physics, psychology and economics
have dissolved all the old formal values. Nor does it really
embrace the past worlds with which Mr. Eliot is so sympathetic:
Dantean Europe or Jacobean England. This failure
224of mastery even on Mr. Eliot’s chosen ground is revealing.
No one can understand a living past who is not actively
engaged in the living present. For any past age is an integer
in the creating of today, and only by conscious sharing of
this creation can the past, as part of it, be understood. Fundamentally,
Mr. Eliot’s subjective love of the Anglo-Catholic
tradition leaves him as remote from what England really was
as his distaste for modern problems leaves him remote from
us—and for the same reason.
That reason brings us to the heart of our portrait. Any
living world, whether it be Seneca’s or Shakespeare’s or our
own, in so far as it lives, is dynamic; and Mr. Eliot’s world
is static. Wherefore, in confrontation with a chaos of dynamic
forces like our modern era, a chaos which our dynamic will
must meet, grapple with, and mold, Mr. Eliot can only ignore;
and in confrontation with dynamic worlds of the past, he can
only rather sentimentally adore. His own static vision picks
out details, reflects them and variates them into a kind of
series, like the stills of a cinema, whose total effect may be
sensitive and delightful, but cannot be organic.
This same static quality explains Mr. Eliot’s loyalty to a
class and a class creed. A static universe does not evolve, cannot
believe in evolving. It does, however, accumulate, and
its “additions” make a quantitative change—the one kind of
change and of cultural contribution which Mr. Eliot admits
(see his essays on “Tradition,” “Individual Talent” and “The
Function of Criticism”). In a static universe, transfiguration
and revelation, and the capacity for these, are all stratified in
the past. And this is another way of saying that Mr. Eliot’s
spiritual experiences, from which issue his moral and esthetic
taste, although they are real, have the form not of life, but of
an inherited convention. Thus Mr. Eliot, with a religious
sense, conceives of no religion except the orthodox Christian;
225with a tragic sense, conceives of man’s struggle exclusively in
the cant meanings of Original Sin; with a sense of the spirit’s
need of discipline and order—both in society and in the person—dreams
of no method but that of a moneyed class ruling
through church and state.
Are such views valid, in the sense of having a relationship
with reality? Is there a position from which the universe is
static; in which transfiguration and revelation are past; in
which Good, Evil, and the given political and economic forms
are absolute? The answer is Yes, in the sense that death, being
real, is valid. The living world of the mind is as dynamic as
the material world (they are one); there, too, the individual
life must partake of the dynamism of the whole, and when
it is severed from that dynamism we call it dead. The only
difference is, that in the world of the mind we do not commonly
employ the term “death”; we prefer to say conventional,
dogmatic, static. Mr. Eliot’s position is that of a man
who has withdrawn from growth—in our meaning, withdrawn
from life. He is static, his soul’s transfiguration is past,
whatever progress he conceives must be a mere consolidation
of himself into forms already uttered. His intellectual, spiritual
and poetic “life” is a rationalization of this death deep
within him.
We hold now, I believe, the key to T. S. Eliot. He is a
man who has abdicated; but since he has been deeply sensitized
to life, the articulation of his experience remains an
exquisite, lingering echo. Such abdicated men have always
existed, and have never been vital: even in periods of cultural
stability (like that of Dante, for example), the cultural whole
had constantly to be re-created by dynamic men. But in our
age, where stability has foundered into chaos, and where the
need for spiritual growth has become absolutely identified
with the bare struggle for survival, the discrepancy between
226a man like Mr. Eliot and adequate leadership becomes
enormous.
What we have really defined in our portrait of T. S. Eliot
is a type of minor poet. He is in the tradition, neither of our
major poets—Poe, Whitman, Melville—nor of the great Victorians.
He is close to a cultivated and popular figure like
Thomas Gray; and his “Waste Land” is a poem as good, and
of the same nature, as the “Elegy.” Gray also was a technical
innovator with an immense appeal because he foreshadowed,
unconsciously, what was to become the dominant appetite of
Europe: closeness to nature. From the energy of this appetite,
Titans were to evolve the method for absorbing and controlling
nature. But in Gray, the motion took a reactionary
form: a sentimental harking back to the values of Puritanism
(and to the language of Milton). The analogy with “The
Waste Land” is complete. Here, too, is technical innovation
together with a vague foreshadowing of what is now the
dominant need of the world: the need of an organic, a livable
Whole in which all men and all man may function. This foreshadowed
need gives to the poem its pathos, its unity and its
importance. But, as in Gray, it is negatively stated by an
evocation of a sentimental memory and by the use of old
materials—in Mr. Eliot’s case, more diffused and catholic,
since no strong Milton stands immediately behind him.
The questions remain: why has Mr. Eliot been a leader
and what does his leadership reveal about our literary generation?
The questions are swiftly answered. Even in an age
of confused standards, there is recognition of literary merit.
Mr. Eliot’s clarity, it is true, is achieved not by integrating
the chaos that has bewildered us, but by withdrawal. Yet to
the men whom the cultural dissolution has frightened and
weakened (the majority of men), these limitations make him
only more acceptable. A long time ago, I wrote of what I
227called “the comfort of the limit,” and explained its appeal to
many types of mind lost in our modern chaos. Only athletic
souls can face a world that has become, perhaps more than
any other era, an overwhelmingly open and darkened future.
The temptation to limit this world, either by rationalistically
charting its future (a disguised reactionism) or by merely
advocating its reform in an image of the past, is great and
manifold.
All the dogmatisms of our day are really such “limits”—such
simplifications of the real. There is the dogmatism of
science (the comfort of limiting reality and its mastery to
problems of mechanics and addition); there is the dogmatism
of cynical despair (the comfort of giving up hope and therefore
struggle); there is the dogmatism of a pseudo-Marxian
dialectic (the comfort of explaining the human tragedy in
terms solely of a simple, solvable class struggle). And, for the
weakly poetic, there is the haven of an elegiac past, like Mr.
Eliot’s, in which great poets still sing and sure priests thunder.
The one way of life that has no limit and affords no comfort
is the way ahead—into the bitter and dark and bloody
dawn of a new world, wherein mankind shall integrate without
loss the stormy elements that make the chaos of our day,
and its promise.
1932
FOUR: SOME PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS FOR THE SURVIVAL OF MAN — 1. SOLIDARITY IS NOT ENOUGH — a. — b. — c. — d. — e. — f. — 2. WITH MARX, SPINOZA.... — a. — b. — 3. FROM MANY MESSAGES TO MANY PEOPLE — i. War Is with Us Now To the First United States Congress Against War, Held in New York, 1933 — ii. To the Students of Cuba ( April, 1931 ) — iii. The Touchstone on the anniversary of the October Revolution, 1935 — iv. To Romain Rolland on His Seventieth Birthday — v. To the Premier of France — vi. Values of the Revolutionary Writer — vii. The Writer’s Part in Social Revolution — 4. TERRE HAUTE HOTEL
(Notes written in the Great Textile Strike of 1934)
At dawn, they are all outside the mills: men, girls, mothers
with children. The huge structure, submerged in mist,
leaps suddenly with lights; the gates swing open; nobody
goes in. The men talk in lively groups, the mothers smile,
the girls have put on their glad rags and there is song in
their throats. At the doors stand a few guards, glumly. In
half an hour, they swing the gates shut and the lights snap
out. The crowd of strikers, sure of its strength, strolls up the
long flank of the mill, stretches in the morning sun; idles
down to the next mill where stands another crowd before
shut doors.
The strike has begun gaily. Men and women have joy of
themselves in their common purpose, like a young animal discovering
the health of its body.
Over on the North Side, before the open gates of a mill
stands the crowd of strikers. Half a dozen girls pass forward,
their heads low, their shoulders hunched. They are going to
work. As the guards let them in, women call after them:
“Ain’t you ashamed!”; men mutter angry and then ugly
words. The thousand strikers understand the six disloyal
girls; a sharp doubt stirs in them all, particularly the women.
“We need the money too ... maybe they’re right. Maybe
we’ll lose and only the girls will win.... Rent ... milk ...
coal ... winter coats for the children.” The strikers
are murmuring against their own fears ... the faithful presence
of poverty and cold ... which they see personified in
232the six girls. The girls are at work now. The mill has become
the form of their betrayal, and of the fear of the strikers.
Already the holiday mood is gone.
Fall River molders in the ruins of an industrial era. Small
mills, built like castles with Colonial windows and with ivy
on the brick, have been abandoned to the sweatshop rats.
And the wood houses of the workers have died into festering
shanties, the streets rank as rotten teeth. A man climbs the
outside stair of one of these dead houses and enters a room
at dawn. A mother stands at the stove; three men bend over
a mimeograph machine in the far corner; and from two cots
four children eagerly look up at the comrade.
He takes a leaflet, reads it, and nods. “Here’s another we
need at once.” The children hear the words: “... the independent
unions ... because they hate the U.T.W. they
won’t come out. We got to show ’em that they must come
out. We got to make ’em see, even if the A.F.L. did doublecross
’em, we must stick together....”
The men huddle again over the mimeograph machine.
One of them is Portuguese, the first shaft of sun lights his
fine hard mouth; another is a French Canadian, lumberly,
musical, a Northern spruce walking the world. The man who
has come in with the text of the new leaflet is a Yankee with
the lantern jaw and gangling limbs of his Puritan forefathers.
“Here, you drink coffee first,” sings the mother.
“No time——”
“You drink coffee first,” she insists.
Back in the South Side of New Bedford, five thousand
strikers gather round the bandstand in a park to hear their
leaders. Near by the harbor waters dance in the morning sun,
233dance up to the silent shadow of the mills. But a little along
there is a line of mills athrob with labor: the great tire-fabric
plants called the Fisk and the Devon, which recognize no
union and worked clear through the six months’ strike of
1928.
William Batty, chairman of the strike committee of the
U.T.W., gets to his feet. He is a burly fellow with a sharp
nose and piercing eyes in his red face. He praises the strikers,
he praises the President, he hurls his contempt and hate at
the “Reds who are trying to make trouble.” One gets the
impression, as he talks, that the strike belongs to him and to
the other leaders: the workers are accessories and servants.
“Leave it all to us,” is the burden of his message. “Washington”—sacrosanct
word; “Strike headquarters in the Carpenters
Building”—a Temple which only U.T.W. leaders are
good enough to enter. The man has power, and has shrewdness.
No doubt of that. Look at the heavy shoulders, the
thin-lipped mouth. But where does he belong? He is standing
on the bandstand a bit above the workers, he is talking a good
deal down to them: one hears, in the rumble of his hatred for
communists and shop committees, the echo of other voices,
more shrewd, more potent: voices of politics and Money.
After Batty comes Ferdinand Sylvia, U.T.W. organizer
and local favorite, who is running for State Representative
on the Democratic ticket. A little, passionate Portuguese he
is, and clever; the hard black eyes are nobody’s fool. How
he praises the workers! “I’m proud of you. You’re making
history today. We got a great friend in the White House
who will help us against the bosses.... All you got to do is
stick together. We’ll go back to Washington and do the rest.”
There is no personal enthusiasm in the crowd for these leaders.
But there is devotion to the cause which these men lead;
and above all, there is the will, tense and a little wistful, to
believe that they are truly leaders.
234Sylvia speaks of the tire-fabric mills that are still working
and holding New Bedford from a 100 per cent tie-up. “Go
down and picket,” he cries. “Get ’em all out!” The mass, five
thousand strong, moves quiet down the harbor.
A youth with the high forehead of a poet, the Socialist
Minister Glen Trimble, starts the picket line before the Fisk
and Devon plants. Batty waves the crowd on the opposite
side of the street to join; a couple of hundred men, women,
girls, are soon patrolling. They are having a good time. They
sing “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf” and, in lesser
number, the old I.W.W. “Solidarity” song. Down from the
windows peer the workers who refuse to strike. In the eyes
of some is a defensive disdain: “If I can despise the strikers.
I’ll not feel the need to join them.” Others are torn in conflict.
Some of the boys and girls look down in veritable terror:
not terror at the pickets, but at something in themselves
that holds them back ... that makes them fear to join their
sisters and their brothers. Fear of their own fear—the beginning
of wisdom.
I slip into the office and ask for the manager. He says
he’ll talk to me, provided I do not disclose his name for publication
(I do not blame him). The same stale line about his
“happy family of workers,” and the conscientious refusal to
let “outside and alien organizers interfere in our affairs.” “We
figure,” he says, “we can run our plant best with our own
men. We give better minimum wages than NRA has asked
for.”
“But,” I ask, “aside from the issue of wages, don’t you
recognize a democratic, an American, a human issue? Labor
is struggling to organize, like the bosses and business. Aren’t
you working against the American spirit by discouraging
your men from getting together? You admit conditions are
235bad in other mills. Why don’t you encourage these workers
to help their brothers by joining the same union?”
The managerial eye grows cold and blank; the hands
twitch. Then, obliquely: “I don’t get you. What good would
it do if these men struck with the others? If one is starving,
is it better that two starve?”
I realize the hopelessness of making a class-bound man
hear the theme of loyalty and dignity in another class—in
the class which he must exploit and degrade in order to survive.
I expected no better. But as I return to the town center
(while the pickets march) for a bite to eat, I find that the
waitress is on the side of the strikers; the barkeep across from
the best hotel, mixing me an excellent Tom Collins, says:
“Sure, the tire-fabric mills should strike!” and the garage
mechanic who fills my tank is warmly and openly with the
strikers. This was not the case four years ago at the last great
strike. Even a cop on the corner confidentially leans to me
and says: “I guess the boys’ve got it!”
Up in the Labor Temple sits a little Scot, Abraham Binns,
and runs the works. Dispatches pickets to hesitant outlying
mills; phones Washington, puffs his pipe, and wonders, if
Federal Relief backs down, where the funds will come from
to feed the strikers. A sincere old-timer, he is, with a good
eye for the detail of the battle and no vaguest notion of what,
really, the battle is about. A thirty-hour week, a minimum
wage? Sure! But that a world is breaking and has to be replaced
by another lest the heart of mankind perish?...
I ask him about the National Textile Workers Union.
“They’re communists,” he burrs, as if to say: “They’ve
got the smallpox.”
The workers think they can force the bosses to abolish
the stretch-out. Binns sees that, and he’ll fight for it, too. But
he does not guess that what the workers really want is to
236live, and that they must create a new world to live in. What
chance has such a leader against Capital, the shrewdly conscious
foe that knows, indeed, it is fighting to live and for its
world to live in?
Yonder in Hazelwood Park, a young woman is talking:
she knows what Binns and Batty have never dreamed of.
It is dusk of the first day. Seventeen thousand of the
twenty thousand textile workers of New Bedford have come
out; the exceptions being the tire-fabric mills. The talker is
Ann Burlak, organizer of the N.T.W., herself a weaver and
the child of Ukrainian workers of Northern Pennsylvania.
The Boston and local papers have put the spotlight on Ann.
She is the “red flame”; she is reputed to be “in hiding in the
tenements of the South Side,” and the police announce they
will run her in “on the slightest provocation.”
Ann is a tall blond girl in her early twenties. Her body
bespeaks tenderness and grace; you feel that, were it not for
a stronger love, she’d spend a lot of her time dancing. The
firm jaw, the clear eye, the intelligent brow, make you understand
why there’s so little time for dancing. On the bandstand,
all around her, is a bunch of kids. They frolic about,
none too silent, in the way of children; and I wonder how she
manages to keep her mind, and her hearers’ minds, on her subject.
The local N.T.W. organizer, Walter Burke, has the
same concern; and he tries to shoo away the kids. But he is
far too gentle about it; the kids refuse to go; and when Burke
observes that they are not troubling Ann he gives up. Then
it comes to me, that far from disturbing this reputed “fireeater,”
the gathered children give Ann Burlak the appropriate
setting. Truly, she is speaking for them; of the gay young
world they can inherit, if their parent-workers know what
they want, and fight for it, and know how to fight.
237How different her tone from the U.T.W. leaders who
harangued their crowd from the same stand! Ann Burlak appears
to have faith in the workers and to be pleading with
them to take hold of their own battle. She has to go easy. If
she tells them straight what their leaders are up to, dickering
with politicians and capitalists, they will scare. If she tells
them straight what her motherly heart is full of: that the
bosses cannot lose under capitalism, that the workers under
capitalism cannot win, they will turn pale, and glance about
them and cease to listen. It is a subtle task, this leading of the
ignorant American workers to the realization of their own
needs, of their own powers, of their own nature. And Ann
Burlak does it well. Gradually, unobtrusively, she draws her
hearers to the facts about “arbitration,” to the shortcomings
of the U.T.W., to the single devotedness of the slandered
“Reds.” The men and women listen. They have come, many
of them, to have a look at the “red flame”; a good show for
nothing. “They say she’s hot stuff,” explain the boys in the
bench before me. Curiosity and frivolity fade, as the tall
young woman gives her sensible heart and her motherly mind
to her hearers. Mothers find themselves face to face with the
truth: the bare cupboards of their homes, the bare bodies,
the bare futures, of their children. Men see with their eyes
what for long their hearts, despite the palaver of journal and
politics, have known: that they, the workers, live in an enemy
country! Latin, Slav or Yankee, they live in a land possessed
and ruled by foes who are sworn to exploit and to degrade
them.
At the close of her pleading to the workers to know themselves,
to respect themselves, to be themselves, Ann Burlak
tries to lead them in song. The men and women pitifully
follow. And I am minded of the singing at a camp meeting
which I recently attended. How the words rang for Christ’s
238second coming! Surely, had Christ been in his heaven, he must
have answered these splendid ringing voices. And the thought
came: When the workers of America learn to sing the coming
of their world on earth as their fathers, the Christians,
sang for their world in heaven, the Revolution will not tarry.
It is midnight, after the first day. Around the Fisk and
Devon mills, gravid with lights and labor, stand battalions of
police: the comparatively kindly town constables with clubs
and the sinister khaki-clad motor-cops with guns in their
holsters and tear gas in reserve. On the park side are massed
the strikers, a good ten thousand. Glen Trimble harangues
them.
“They won’t let us picket? We’ll see about that. All of
you here at the crack of dawn. And when the workers file
in to work, we’ll have a picket line for them to pass through.”
A Negro in the crowd, in a quiet penetrant voice, says:
“Why wait till tomorrow? Why not picket now?”
The crowd turns toward the mill; Trimble accepts the
challenge. The police clubs stop them. The picket line halts,
wavers, turns. And its repressed energy gathers in hands behind.
Stones fly from the park side, and smash the mill
windows. The police press forward.
Seven hours later, huge shut vans roll up to the red buildings
and disgorge officers. Far off, beyond an empty lot, fully
a fifth of a mile from the mills, stands the crowd and boos as
the tire-fabric workers pass through to their jobs. Near the
gates, they form hesitant knots. A man stays behind, while
his wife enters. A girl looks up at a bevy of her sisters beckoning
from a top mill window, grasps her bag and joins them.
The police, guns swinging, slide across the empty lot, and
the workers fade in the grey background of the harbor.
“There’ll be no picket line,” shouts the police chief at
239Batty and Sylvia. “We had enough last night. Look at them
windows. Just you let your men come up, and we’ll take care
of ’em.”
But while the clubs and the guns mass at the Devon side
of the huge block, and the crowds die before them, another
corps of workers comes to birth on the farther slope of the
mills; a line forms ... marches.
The sun rises, the mill throbs. The clusters of hesitant
workers have vanished, either inside to the machines or away.
Suddenly, a gate swings open. The crowd rises in voice:
“THEY’RE COMING OUT”: and forward, four abreast,
march the Fisk workers to join their brothers and sisters.
Sylvia crows like a cock. “I’m proud of you!” And to
Mary Vorse and me: “Tell ’em in Washington and New
York, New Bedford has the world’s best workers.” Even the
cops smile. The walk-out is 100 per cent. Now what?...
I think of the heroic tiny groups of revolutionary organizers
throughout the nation: individuals, isolated, threatened,
resourceless save for their own luminous spirit. Pleading with
the workers, against the workers, to know themselves, to be
themselves, to fight the good fight; while the official leaders
and the pack of papers and the towns and the churches vomit
their fear of the new world in the form of insults and lies.
Workers, like everyone else, get the leaders they deserve.
The workers are pitifully ignorant. Ignorance is the mother
of misleaders.
I think of the great show of strength that the Textile
Strike—like San Francisco yesterday—has summoned. And,
while Ignorance is in the saddle, of the inevitable betrayal!
When the American workers know what they are, there’ll
be a different story.
That is the task of all young men and women: let thousands,
each in his own way, go among the people, and humbly,
240quietly explain the cause of Life, which is the cause of
Revolution.
This essay would not have been written at this hour had
it not been for the dark hour of the German Jews. But their
catastrophe is the deepening, within the crisis of the world,
of a threat that for two centuries has gathered against Jewry.
Judaism has never solved the challenge of the modern world;
and this challenge is now a crisis—one of those historic crises
from which Jewry must be reborn, if at all, through the
threshold of death.
I do not stop to swell the lamentations that the fate of
half a million highly cultured Jews has aroused in all sane
people. My object is more stern. It is to analyze the response
of the Jews in the United States to Hitler: to expose and
study from the response certain traits of modern Jewry.
There has been, in all the tears and rage, one constant refrain.
“Why are we persecuted?” cry the leaders. “We are not
different from you Gentiles—not in any point of thought,
conduct or allegiance, that counts. In Germany, we are good
Germans; in America, we are good Americans. There is no
reason for this persecution.” Now, Jews have often suffered
persecution; although I suspect never by such ruthlessly
efficient methods as the German. But Jews have always
known why they were maltreated. It was because they were
different; in thought, in conduct, in allegiance, in all that
counted, a peculiar people. It was because they were Jews.
241This might cause great sacrifice. But since Jewishness was the
treasure of their lives, source of their beauty and joy, they
deemed even the price of persecution not too great to pay
for being Jewish. They took the persecution for granted,
meeting it as shrewdly as they could. The stress of their
energy and will was focused, not on avoiding or denying
reasons for persecution, but on being Jews. Here, then, is an
enormous difference. For the first time in a history of three
thousand years, the leaders of Jewry do not know why they
are persecuted: for the first time they disclaim any reason
for persecution.
This sheds new light on the German Jewish disaster. Are
these half million victims to be considered undifferentially as
suffering human beings? Then they deserve no more pity and
help—no more and, of course, no less—than the millions of
other sufferers of our dark age: than the Negroes of our
South, for instance; than the countless families broken by
unemployment; than the communists whom Hitler and the
Balkan sadists are torturing and maiming. But such pooled
pity does not satisfy the Jewish leaders. In their appeals and
reports they are careful to separate their cause from others.
They imply that German Jewry calls for more than its quantitative
share of the concern of a world riven with anguish;
they assume, indeed, that a great people, whose value to mankind
is high, is being menaced. Now this claim, on the evidence
of the past, can be denied by no intelligent man. The
Jews have through the centuries made contributions to the
Western world that are inestimable, and organic. But are not
the contemporary leaders confused in time? Should the Jews
be saved today for what they were in the past? Such a plea
runs counter to all natural law. What is there alive in contemporary
Jewry to distinguish it from any other quantitative
group of human beings?
The answer, alas! is, there is nothing. There are still, it is
242true, traditional Jewish communes in Eastern Europe and
North Africa. But we do not hear from them; they provide
no Jewish leaders. Indeed, the modern world no longer gives
them nurture or function, and they are doomed by their own
archaic form. The Jewry that protests against Hitlerism and
is menaced by it the world over, and that assumes its past
worth as argument for its present survival, is a “progressive”
Jewry, freed from that past. It is the Jewry that cries: Why
are we persecuted? Let us examine it, then, for Jewishness—and
in its most prosperous member, the Jews of the United
States.
First, I must define the Jew; and this, fortunately, can be
done without raising the old problems of race and nation.
To be a Jew has always meant to live a certain way of life:
a way which, evolving with the ages and with the cultural-economic
conditions of the lands, was yet an organic growth
from a single tradition. This tradition was one; and the Jewish
groups made it organic with their lives. Other nations
had prophets, the Jews enacted theirs. Other nations had arts,
the Jews lived theirs. Other peoples had high standards for
personal, communal and cosmic relations: the Jews, by the
minutiae of their 613 commandments, made flesh and bone
of their vision of the divine and the eternal. The defining
Jewish trait is unification of values, personal and communal,
into an organic body of behavior. The defining Jewish term
is action.
The Jewish principle—unity of value and deed, harmony
of person and group—has always had a dual form. That the
values of the person shall be fulfilled in the community, there
must be social justice. And that within the cosmos there shall
be preserved and furthered the values of men and of Man,
there must be God. Social justice, of course, was an aspiration
limited by the economy of the particular land and era—limited,
that is, by possibility. What did God mean to the
243Jew? At first by miracle and confusedly, then rationally,
God meant the dynamic immanence, in the world of matter
and of man, of what the person most deeply recognized as
his own truth and worth. God meant the principle of order,
the will to unity, in an otherwise chaotic multiverse. God
meant value in Being. The Jews, as a people, were the first
to understand that this Value-in-Being could not be abstract,
not diffuse, not impersonal, although it transcended individuals;
but was myriadly focused and fleshed in human lives.
This means that for the Jew every man and woman holds a
purposive and creative place in life’s dynamic process.
Now, bearing this definition in mind, where—outside the
vanishing Old World ghettoes of our East Side—are the
Jews? Where in New York, in Cincinnati, in Chicago, in San
Francisco? The American Jew is as divided in his ideals and
his behavior as any Gentile. His amusements and his arts, his
family life and his business methods, his loyalties to class, state
and God, are the same tissue of contradictions. Like any Gentile,
he scrambles for the dollar, lives for his belly, shares in
the stampede for cheap delights. As businessman, he also
exploits his brother; as citizen, he votes for the same liars,
crude or gilded. He shouts the same chauvinistic phrases and
is ready, with the rest, in time of war, to rush with the courage
of Gadarene swine to his destruction. He enjoys (and
writes) the same inane novels, movies. In a society whose
crucial trait is the abyss between ideal and deed, he—the Jew—is
indistinguishable from his neighbor. Is the “Jewishness”
of these modern Jews a dynamic pattern of action? or is it
a mere moldering heap of sentiment, vanity and habit?
I am speaking of the prosperous American Jew; not yet
of the rank and file, the humble clerks and clothing workers,
artisans and mechanics. These, as Jews, are passive. And in
so far as they have Jewish leaders to make them act (as contradistinguished
from labor leaders, for example), they choose
244the very type who have grown great by shrewd collaboration
with a world that is the antithesis, in every value, to what is
Jewish. This is a cardinal point in the lethal condition of
American Jewry. Its leaders and spokesmen, in their loyalty
to the exploiting class, have dangerously identified the Jew
with a bourgeoisie that is degenerate and doomed. In the
Middle Ages, the Jew was allied functionally with the rising
burgher class whose destiny it was to break the feudal system.
This alliance was one reason for the Jew’s survival. But
burgherdom, in medieval Europe, played a different moral
part from the grande bourgeoisie of today. In the realm of
practicable action, the burgherdom stood for social justice and
intellectual freedom, as against the exploiting landowning
gentry and the landowning church. Technically, the profit
system always meant exploitation of labor. But socially, this
early bourgeois exploitation was in the direction of justice,
since it was a departure from slavery and spread the margin
of leisure whereby man’s culture could alone advance. Until
the invention of the machine, some exploitation of men was
needed in order that a privileged portion of mankind could
think—and at last, by perfecting the machine, and spreading
possible leisure to all humanity, abolish the need of human
exploitation altogether. The alliance of medieval Jewry with
burgherdom was therefore within the rhythm of advancing
social justice, and hence harmonious with Jewishness. But
today, the dominant bourgeoisie is the power of stratified
social injustice: it is the power of war, of spiritual death and
intellectual ruin.
The intensity of American Jewish allegiance to the exploiting
class can be measured by the lives of the prominent
Jewish leaders.
Almost without exception they are lawyers, judges,
merchants, bankers, proprietors of newspapers and other vast
affairs; men who have grown great in the American game of
245grab, men indistinguishable in spirit, mind and action from
thousands of other divided men who (with like shamelessness)
call themselves Christian. In a few instances, they are
writers and rabbis—apologists, rank or subtle, of the exploiting
classes.
Since their deeds are contradictions of their ideals, are
such leaders Jews? Is a folk that such men lead, a Jewish
folk? From the Jewish premise that value and vision must
become action, a trait of Jewry has ever been to create true
Jewish leaders.
But it may be said, there are other Jews, greater than
these: not necessarily American, yet the real leaders of Jewry.
There are Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Stieglitz,
Henri Bergson, Leon Trotsky ... others. These men are
great, and are leaders, and are Jews. But they are not leaders
of Jews. They are leaders of scientists, philosophers, artists,
revolutionists. They and other great Jewish men of our
times are products of Jewish life; but modern Jewry cannot
claim them. They are the offspring of the old communal
Jewry which still existed in their formative years. And the
fact that they have been forced to function quite outside
modern Jewry is another proof of its present dissolution. The
Jewish world no longer holds its men of genius; the highest
products of its spirit, of its intellectual discipline and of
its sense of life, leave the parent body. And the world of
Jews, in deadly division from the Jewish spirit, chooses
leaders who hasten its death.
Consider now the pitiful, the ironical condition of the
Jew. To suffer for a cause that our soul loves is bearable:
is, indeed—since we must suffer—man’s most enviable destiny.
But to suffer for nothing! To be hated and ruined as a
Jew, when one’s life is not Jewish! The Jews of Germany,
taken as a whole, exist inertially because their past way was
246Jewish and because it takes more than a generation to destroy
a way of life so strong and so vital. If two hundred years
ago, they had ceased living as Jews, Hitler and the Nazis, who
are ignorant men, would probably not have heard of them.
Hitler persecutes them now because in a confused way he
has inherited what was a real reason, then, for a German
in revolt against Western civilization to dislike real Jews who
had so much to do with its creating.
But that is only half the picture. The Jews are allied
with an agonizing and desperate middle class. When that class
flourished, the Jews, functioning in it, were tolerated by it.
Now that it droops and its spoils dwindle, it turns—like a
man in a panic—against its weaker neighbor. It is the principle
of “every man for himself”—the basic law of bourgeois life.
Oh, the ironical confusion in the fate of the modern Jew!
He is persecuted by barbarous and desperate men because of
ideals that he no longer lives: and he is persecuted by a class
to which, in the main, he is loyal, because he is a rival of its
barbarous way of life—a way that contradicts his own ideals!
This is Germany today: who doubts that with variations
it may be America tomorrow? that it may be any capitalistic
country where the Jew, in his present, is a minority factor
in a desperate middle class and in his past a reminder of the
liberal culture of the Western world, against which that
desperate class is in revolt?
Now for the final questions: How can the Jew survive
in the modern world, and why should he survive? To answer
clearly, I must first state some of the reasons why he survived
in the past. And since the kaleidoscope of Jewish generations
is so great, I take the latest period of undisputed Jewish health:
the Middle Ages (which lasted for the Jews until the eighteenth
century), when the Jews lived, harmonious and whole,
247within a Europe of violent divisions, and often savagely
hostile.
1. Jewry’s strict unity of ideal and conduct made the community,
although small and surrounded, an efficient body. All its
energy was conserved for itself and applied functionally for survival;
whereas in a greater community where value and deed are
divided, there is conflict, loss of energy, disease.
2. In Judaism, both ideally and actively, there was no separation
between man and group. Although infiltrations from Alexandrian
and Platonized Egypt corrupted the ancient Hebrew
knowledge that there is no personal immortality, this superstition
of a surviving individual soul (the deepest cause of the failure of
European cultures) was never strong against the healthy Jewish
unification of individual and commune. Therefore, medieval
Jewry had no destructive egoism—no “great men”—to mislead it
for discordant personal ends. (The egoistic leader battens on the
accumulated egoisms of his rabble.) In Jewry, the leaders were
as organic to the commune as an eye or a brain to the body.
Moreover, these leaders were not soldiers, not megalomaniacs of
fame and money: they were the seers and the thinkers. Here,
then, was a social body whose eyes and brain literally led it—in
contrast to our modern world in which the eye and the brain
often appear to be discards or decorations.
3. Jewry had, despite theological and cultural differences, a
deep community of values with Christian cultural leaders. These
recognized the worth of the Jewish ethic; the beauty of the Jews’
concept of Godhead as immanent in human action. The best in
Christian Europe at all times respected, and often learned from,
the “hated” Jews. And during the ages when the church was
strong, it had enough influence to defend the Jews against
extremities of persecution.
4. Through these times, Jewry had an economic function. Its
activities in international commerce, banking, exchange, and in the
practical sciences of communication and of navigation, did a
necessary work in feudal Europe. And this allied Jewry with the
struggling middle class—the burghers who were to inherit and
transform feudal Europe. Without this function and the alliance
with a rising economic class, Jewry’s inner harmony of action
could not have saved it. For there would have been lacking a
248harmony of function within the larger body of the Gentile
world.
To return, now, to our time; the Jew obviously can survive,
if the immutable essence of the Jewish social organism
can somehow be transformed to function in the modern
world. And obviously, the Jew should survive, if this essential
Jewish nature still has a part to play before mankind.
These questions are the subject for a book—which I shall
write, if I live long enough. Here, I can but sketch my answer.
The Jewish principle of value-in-Being, of God and social
justice, of the enactment of value by individual and group,
did not exist in vacuo. It existed within a matrix. And this
matrix was the agrarian economic-cultural world—a world
so basally static that the eighteenth-century Galician Jew
shared it, fundamentally unchanged, with Amos and Isaiah.
So long as the matrix held, the Jew could follow the commandments
of his prophets as interpreted by twenty centuries
of fathers.
We may now see why the Jewish organism broke in the
impact with the modern world. Modern industrialism destroyed
the simple, paternalistic economy under which the
Jewish commune approximated social justice. And modern
thought and science corroded the theologic-ethic form under
which the Jew knew God. To survive, the Jewish principle
must be transfigured into modern terms. Judaism must embrace
an again workable program approximating social justice:
and that means the unequivocal destruction of the unjust
anarchy called industrial capitalism. And Judaism must redefine
what it has always meant—or meant to mean—by God.
Now, let the reader answer: Is the principle of social
justice needed today? And that Man may live, must there be,
not an anthill system, but a living social form that nurtures
the inward need of every human being to create and to share
249his inward vision and value? If your answer is Yes, then
there is need in the world of what has been, for nearly thirty
hundred years, the Jewish principle. And as if history urged
that this cardinal dual need of the world may yet be the
peculiar business of the Jewish people (there have always
been, in all nations, saintly and isolated men who lived and
died for it, as greatly as any Jew), the need stands most
forcibly answered in the work of two Jews—Jews of a “new
remnant,” Marx and Spinoza.
I place Marx first, because in the perspective of function
he comes first—although Spinoza lived two centuries before
him and profoundly influenced his thinking. Marx, from the
Jewish premise of history as an organism evolving toward
“good,” has given to the industrial world a realistic logic
and a technique of social justice. Time, of course, has amended
or refuted many details of his plan; yet it is nonetheless
categorical that every man who wants to enact social justice
in the modern world must be a Marxist in spirit although
he may reject certain Marxist dogmas. The modern Jew,
if he is to exist, must interpret Marx as a prophet as surely
as his forebears interpreted Moses and Isaiah. Marx (despite
chronology) comes before Spinoza, because the social discord
is a disease immediately threatening the survival of civilized
mankind; and because collective consciousness comes before
mature self-consciousness. Marx without Spinoza is an imperative,
immediate, primitive first step in action. Spinoza,
without Marx, remains an abstract philosophy, removed from
possible action.
But as Marx is the man who most surely projected the
prophetic aspiration of social justice into a workable modern
program, Spinoza is the prophet who has completed the purifying
of the knowledge of God into the God of inwardness,
of substance and of action. If Marx carries on Moses and
Ezra, Spinoza carries on Isaiah and Jesus. It is he who has
250best established the organic being of God in matter and in
human thought; who has made rational the ancient mystic
intuition that the cosmic dwells within the man in so far
as the man grows self-conscious. By giving value to matter
in a form acceptable to the age of science, Spinoza will crown
the work of Marx, who gives reality to a program of social
justice in the age of machines.
Now, it may be that Spinoza and Marx are the swan song
of Jewry: the final message of a great people before its
ultimate death. It may be that the work of unifying and
enacting their contributions shall fall to other peoples. There
is a Soviet Union in the world, and China, and the two
Americas; from such virgin soil may come the fulfillment of
the prophets. I do not know. But I do know that, if the
Jew is to survive as an organic group, he must enact his
modern prophets as his fathers (after rejecting them, also)
enacted the prophets of Scripture. And I conclude by broadly
sketching what the modern Jewish way of living must be.
To begin with (for, I repeat—in the field of action, Marx
comes before Spinoza), the Jew must renounce loyalty to
the exploiting class. Without that, all his “service” is a “vain
oblation.” Today, as twenty-six centuries ago, the word of the
prophet is true:
Bring no more vain oblations;
It is an offering of abomination unto Me;
New moon and sabbath, the holding of convocations—
I cannot endure iniquity along with solemn assembly....
Cease to do evil;
Learn to do well;
Seek justice....
“Learn to do well!” In our industrial world, this means
active allegiance to the class whose historic function it is
to abolish economic exploitation—the base of social injustice
251and of war—by doing away with economic classes altogether.
This new allegiance will not be easy; since the Jews for
centuries have been forced to earn their bread within the
middle class, it will have the value, by itself, of a religious
conversion. But this new loyalty as a group does not mean
that the Jew will be submerged in the working class or in
any proletarian body like the communists. He must fight for
the workers (and the farmer and the intellectual, too, are
workers), help them with his brain and body; but he may be
detached from them, at least at present, because of his particular
stewardship of values—“the realm of God,” in each
man, with which the harried and hungry worker has not had
time to grow familiar.
The revolutionary proletariat cannot trouble about God.
There are good functional reasons for the atheism of most
Marxists. The word “God” has been monopolized so long
by the apologists of the class of exploitation: theologians,
philosophers, poets! To detach (as Spinoza did) the reality
in God from all the accumulated lies is a problem that calls
for subtlety beyond the present anguished state of the masses;
for energy that the masses and their immediate leaders cannot
spare from the day’s struggle. It is unhistorical to expect the
active revolutionist of our time to do more than reject the
false “God” of the churches and the synagogues. Yet the
true experience of God must not die even in the heat of
revolutionary battle. The first Marxist ends cannot be won
and man be raised from animal penury and fear into the human
stage of security and leisure unless the individual finds life
good: and this can be only through the Spinozistic sense of
God. The experience of the divine in mortal life must be
preserved. Wherefore, there is need today of a people, scattered
through the nations, that know and nurture the experience
of God. By the tradition of ages, by their ancient
252prophets and their modern thinkers, the Jews have inherited
the challenge and the right to be such a people.
This Jewish “remnant”—and only the remnant, through
the ages, has preserved the Jew—will be loyal to the class
of social revolution; but through its consciousness of God it
will be still separate, and must remain so. It will understand
the functional “atheism” of many simple-minded revolutionists,
and not demand that it be understood in return. The God
in man will be the still secret treasure it must lovingly preserve
against the day when men, free of fear and hunger,
learn to look within themselves where God is. Thus, the
Jews will still be a peculiar people. And they will be subject
to the dislike and distrust of the zealot for whom the word
“God” is anathema; although it was in the name of God that
his values of social justice and individual dignity were preserved
and prepared, through the barbaric ages.
Now, a majority cannot rise to so high a challenge of
rebirth. Bankers, merchants, lawyers, professional men and
politicians, even artisans and mechanics among the Jews, will
not yield their old allegiance to the middle class, although
that class turns (as it is turning!) against them. And these
will disappear in the general human welter, as Jews have disappeared
in Assyria, Babylon, Alexandria and Rome. But
what a magnificent remnant there may be! The teacher, the
doctor, the engineer, the clear-eyed man of commerce who
knows and hates the rottenness of capitalist commerce, the
Jewish worker and the student—above all, the Jewish student!
Already, these are on the side of the productive class that
alone holds the energy to remake the world. Already, they
accept Marx. Let them fulfill this knowledge with devotion
to the inward value—the God whom Spinoza has explored in
man and in matter—and there will be again, in the world, a
Jewish remnant!
253Persecution? It is already here, even in America; and as
the capitalistic era shrinks, darkens and despairs, it will grow
worse. The lesson of Hitler, in offering the Jew as the traditional
scapegoat for the accumulated rage of a bewildered
people, is bound to be learned; already we have our little
Hitlers, profiteers of suffering stupidity and blindness. The
Jewish people are going to suffer. And for those who are
individually and innocently hurt, and who know not why,
there can be no soothing words. Before their anguish, we
can only bow our heads, humbly, as they enact the world-old
mystery of pain. But at least, for the conscious Jew, the
real Jew, there will again be reason for Jewishness, reason to
bear his persecution; and comrades to help him bear it. And
if individual Jews die, their death will be in the cause of
humane life; no man can ask a higher guerdon. And the
history of the Jews will hearten them with knowledge, that
when a people is ready to be persecuted and to die for a good
cause, the cause lives—and the people.
Postscript:
This article, which appeared in “The New Republic” in 1933 and was
reprinted in many journals, is itself an abbreviated form of an essay published
in French by “Europe,” of Paris, and in Spanish by “Sur,” of Buenos
Aires. I have used it here, rather than the longer version, because both are
a project or programmatic abstract of the essay I must someday write, in
which all the terms of my argument will be more fully and fundamentally
defined. Recent attacks on socialism and communism by prominent Jews—rich
men, shallow, slavish, scared, of the kind I have described, or by truckling
labor leaders, make the writing of this essay an imperative duty.
I trust it is clear in my conclusion about the possible leadership of a
Jewish “remnant” in our recreative task, that I have not mentioned the like
necessary role of a Christian “remnant,” only because this paper deals
specifically with the Jews. That the prophetic-revolutionary strain is not
dead in the American Protestant churches is proved by the labors of such
men as Reinhold Niebuhr—one of the truly creative minds of America.
254
Two thousand delegates from every part of the country,
and of every shade of progressive opinion, are meeting in
New York in a Congress Against War. A most laudable
enterprise; and a most needed. For war threatens the world;
and with war, civilization, still staggering from the blows
of the last conflict, may definitely founder. The crisis is
immediate and tragic. But no congress of good men can avert
it. All that this congress can do is to bring men’s consciousness
to focus upon the present danger; and to raise men’s consciousness
to the pitch of intensity where it becomes action.
Before everything else, we must become aware that war
is already here! The political and economic setup of the
modern nations IS war. Battles on land and sea, millions of
lives destroyed, cities and fields laid waste, are but a concentrated
form of the jungle anarchy that is called “government”
in the metropolis, that is called “diplomacy” in the
embassies, that is called “business” in factories, mills, mines
and markets.
So long as we have nations playing the lone game of power
and aggression, or banding together like packs of wolves in
“alliance” against other nations, we have war—war in peace.
And all the congresses of the world will not prevail against
the inevitable, periodic outbreak of this constant war into
pitched battles.
So long as we have a social system within each nation
that divides the citizens into classes whose economic basis is
255exploiter and exploited; a social system in which success
means power gained at the expense of others and enjoyed
to the exclusion of others, we have war—civil war in peace,
within each nation. The small ruling class is brutalized by its
success in enslaving others; the large classes are brutalized by
their slavery—brutalized the more if they are not conscious
of enslavement. In such a social system (and all the “planned
economics” of capitalism can only make it more dangerous
by disguising it), it is inevitable that the state and the nation
will reflect, on a large scale, the jungle spirit of individual
men. It is inevitable that the jungle greed of such a state
and nation will come into conflict with the greed of other
nations where the same system prevails. It is inevitable that
this normal state of conflict shall break out, from time to time,
in formal warfare.
But our present condition of war is even deeper! So long
as war prevails in the internal economic structure of each
nation, it will prevail as well in the internal psychic structure
of the men and women who constitute the nation. A society
that is a rationalized jungle of greed and violence, encourages
the lust for individual power in all men and women and
atrophies the social instinct in all men and women. The
members of such a society war upon each other in their
individual lives: and each individual soul is itself the seat of
warfare. Of course, such divided men band together in gangs,
classes, nations, to make war upon other gangs, classes,
nations.
War has been the constant condition of what we call
civilization. War between individuals, war between classes,
war between peoples—each seeking profit and power at the
expense of others. But there is a new factor in the situation
of today.
Modern science has made war deadlier than it has ever
been: so that war now threatens—not only persons and individual
256nations, but all mankind. And this new factor of
science, by its potentiality of large-scale production and co-operation,
has also made the old systems of exploitation and
rivalry no longer needed.
This is the crucial state of the world—its mortal danger
and its hope. War, as never before, is a menace to human
survival. And war (military, economic, social war) has been
made unnecessary, as never before, by our modern mastery
of means of production, distribution, communication,
whereby it is feasible today for all men to live in plenty
and with leisure, without enslaving or exploiting others.
The United States Congress Against War represents a
good impulse. But men’s protest against war is not a new event
in the so-called Christian world. It has been futile, throughout
the ages, because war was organic in men’s way of living.
Similarly, this congress will not pass the limits of “good intentions”
unless it writes down formally in its record that
the abolition of war means revolution. Fundamental revolution.
Revolution in the social structure of the nations, and
revolution in the souls of men and women.
I am following with deep emotion your struggle to renovate—indeed
to re-create—the life of Cuba. I am poignantly
aware of the terrible dilemma that confronts you. Your
government is the slave of irresponsible financial interests of
the United States, and of the State Department at Washington
which with cynical hypocrisy is launched on a deliberate
campaign to imperialize the entire Caribbean. If your prostitute
government remains in office, Cuba will continue to
257be a “factory” for American investments, a “factory” protected
by no laws such as limit exploitation on American
soil; since you Cubans are not citizens of the United States
and your political “independence” more and more is coming
to mean the privilege of our exploiters to work in your
country with a ruthless irresponsibility which they would not
dare to display in their own. Yet, if you overthrow this
government, it may mean the landing of American marines
in Havana and the swift setting up of a new rule which will
be the replica of Machado’s—the other horn of the dilemma!
What can you do? What can a citizen of the United
States urge you to do? In a way I am ashamed to speak to
you, ashamed to mention my own sorrow and my shame,
as a native of the oppressor country, who is helpless to help
you. Men like myself in the United States are powerless.
There is no enlightened public opinion here with any punch
to it. Most of our good will is Platonic, in the bad sense
of the word. And who, here, is interested in a students’
revolutionary movement? Our intellectuals, as a body, have
lost contact with the spiritual, the human source of art; our
student groups are too pampered and too infantile to get
excited over anything but football.[14] You are alone in your
fight, alone with the student bodies and the workers of other
Hispano-American countries who, for the most part, are as
dispossessed as you. You are alone with the truth!
Yet I can say to you: Go on! If for no other reason,
go on because only then will you be happy. Do not let
so-called practical affairs and worldly wisdom compromise
your ideal. Look at the men who have made these “necessary
compromises”: the successful men, the rulers of the world.
See what ugly, misshapen, miserable men they are. Look well
at the “practical” men, and do not go the hideous way which
258they have gone, and of which the ignoble shambles of the
modern world is the result. Even if you are imprisoned, even
if you are shot down (as some of you have been), you must
have the satisfaction of knowing that you are living the sole
way that makes life tolerable. The enemies who have sold
themselves for dollars are not happy; the indifferent ones, in
Cuba, in the United States, who follow opportunism—for
success, for pleasure, for power—are not happy. They must
drug themselves with ever more success, more pleasure, more
power, lest they awake to the intolerableness of their way of
living. And that is why they hate you: because you are the
constant revealers to themselves of their own nullity. They
must deny their nullity; and by a common psychologic
mechanism they do so by denying you who make them cognizant
of it.
I cannot promise you success in your present endeavor
to free Cuba and to bring Cuba to real independence. It would
be false to promise it. You may not succeed in actually overthrowing
the hideous anarchy of which men like Machado
are mere minor servants. So to do requires more than your
good will; it requires method, technique and long hard work.
But this triumphant method can come only from such will
as yours. Before you achieve it, perhaps you individually will
be crushed, since the ordered anarchy and greed of the
modern world has method. But even if this is so—this worst
which must be bravely envisaged, it makes no difference in
what you must do, not merely from a sense of duty, but in
order to be happy! You must go on struggling to free and to
reorganize your country; knowing that that labor is its own
reward; that the man who gives his life for freedom, by that
fact is alive and is free.
You know that your problem as Cubans struggling for
independence is not apart from that of most of the other
nations of America Hispana. Yet you are divided from your
259allies, not alone by mountains and deserts and seas, but by
proud persistent nationalisms, by differences of race and culture—the
differences of Indian, Negro, mestizo, criollo. You
are all rich in plunder, and the imperialist power feeds on
it the better by exciting the disunities between you. But you
are profoundly gifted peoples; your resources of the spirit
are as great as the resources of your lands—greater, surely,
than the difficulties inherited from your historic pasts. You
will help yourselves and one another, synchronously, by
deeper self-understanding. For brothers who fulfill themselves
achieve thereby not homogeneity, but harmony. Without
harmony, both your lands and your cultures would be taken
from you. But you are already far on the way to achieving
this organic unity among you, in cultural terms and in terms
of political aspiration.
The imperialist power exploits you and incites you to
fratricidal war, because it has allies within your borders:
your own capitalists and their servants, the politicians. If you
effectively fight the domestic enemy, the foreign enemy will
at last be helpless against you, even as he was helpless against
revolutionary Russia. I know that your task is more complex
than was Russia’s, because you are not politically united.
But, essentially, it is one problem.
And it is our problem, too. We in the United States fight
the same foe as you. This, when we attain a conscious intelligentsia
and a conscious working class, will serve to unite
us.
Only from the platform of War Against Capitalism can
you effectively meet your national problem. For your foe is
only superficially an alien government; more deeply it is the
capitalist power with its twin heads: the Machados at home,
the armed Dollar abroad. Most deeply, it is the ignorance
of all the people—in Cuba, in America Hispana, in the United
States.
260Students of Cuba, you have come out into the clear air
of action; you have created leaders for yourselves, and a
program. You are blessed in this. I find myself almost envying
you, rather than pitying you despite your anguish and your
struggles. My heart and my mind are with you. If I could
feel that my word warmed you in the slightest degree,
heartened your perseverance, it would be for me an inexpressible
joy, who am alone here in this great country—alone,
and unable to act for and with men like you who stand for
everything I cherish.
Note: This is one of many messages by the author clandestinely introduced,
printed in pamphlet form, and distributed, in Latin-American countries
under brutal dictatorships. It has been re-Englished from the Spanish
text.
More than ever, in this day of spiritual and social confusion,
the attitude of men toward Soviet Russia is a touchstone
of the quality of their good will. By this criterion three
large groups stand forth.
There are, first, the enemies of the Soviet Union: and
these are the souls whose true love, despite all their fine
words of God and Man and Freedom, is for their pocket-books.
Their real nature is manifest in their leaders, archetypes
of human ugliness and degeneration—the Hearsts, the Hitlers,
the Hoovers. A second group consists of the “liberals,” the
“socialists,” the idealistic “revolutionaries” who are so busy
deploring the mistakes and injustices committed in the Soviet
Union that they have no time to understand or to defend it.
These are men (when they are sincere) so infatuated with
their own private notion of what truth and justice should look
261like that the spectacle of a great nation, heroically serving
truth and justice with the humble tools of humble human
nature, leaves them cold. Essentially, these are men devoted
to their own egos: men whose professional love for mankind
masks a childish and shallow and ill-tempered self-adoration.
The third group consists of those who know that in the
Soviet Union a people is dedicated to the task for which
in all ages the inspired few—the prophets and the poets—have
given their lives: the task of founding upon earth,
at last, a culture not of slaves but of men, a society of
universal justice, in which human truths shall be sought and
expressed by the common and communal life of all men and
women. They know that this people consists not of gods,
but of humans. They know that this people must meet and
overcome, in their great undertaking, the obstacles of a
hostile world and, no less, the obstacles of their own enslaved
past and of their faulty natures as human beings. They
know that the labor of the Soviet Union is the more precious
because it is the work of humble men and women, subject to
trial and error; and that those who reject this labor because of
its failures and imperfections are at heart cowards. They know
that if the dark years, in which we have lived since the Great
War, shall appear in the perspective of history as the time
of a great Dawning, the reason is the light that has come
since 1917 from Russia.
These sincere men and women, today more than ever,
while the clouds of aggressive ignorance and ill will gather
upon the world, must declare their devotion to the Cause of
the Soviet Union.
262
Your seventieth birthday comes at a time when France
holds in her hands the immediate destiny of the Western
world. The result of the struggle for power in France between
the elements of reaction typified by the Croix de Feu, which
are the forces of death, and the elements of re-creation
typified by the Front Uni, which are the forces of life, may
well determine the result, at least as it affects those still living,
of the same struggle throughout the Occident. If France fails,
Great Britain fails; the sinister forces in the United States,
emboldened by a century of capitalist anarchy, may sweep
America into the same disaster. If France fails, Western man
may fail: a period of overwhelming darkness may intervene
for us all, before that future time when our progeny once
again takes up the Torch, held aloft meanwhile—who knows
for how long?—by the Soviet Union and perhaps by certain
parts of China, India, America Hispana that prove inaccessible
to fascist armies.
In this crucial scene of mankind, as so often in the past,
France plays a leading role. And we, who celebrate your
seventieth birthday, Romain Rolland, perforce look upon
you as the symbol of our hope in your great country. You
are a great man, a great person, Romain Rolland, because you
are a symbol; because a world spirit speaks through you. At
this hour of crisis and of celebration, for many in my country,
you incarnate the genius which for eight centuries has sustained
French culture.
This genius is a kind of “common sense,” rare alas!—both
individually and collectively rare. It is “common” only as
essence, as the universal, is common. It is compounded of a
ruthless clarity in meeting the Real and in relating its parts
263together; of an invincible courage in following whither the
Real leads at whatever sacrifice of individual peace and comfort;
and of a creative vision in so mastering the facts that
they may ever more closely conform with man’s intuition
of his dignity and destiny.
As I look about me at the world in which I have now lived
for over forty years, meeting men of all qualities of mind and
temperament and talent, I am appalled at the rarity of this
“common sense”; and I am no longer amazed at the cruel and
dolorous pass to which the world has come. Men of genius in
the usual sense of the word are not rare; nor men of physical
courage, nor men of imagination. But terribly rare is the
man who, capable of knowing the truth, continues to serve the
truth beyond the point at which such service begins to make
him suffer; terribly rare is the man of imagination who, finding
that he can sell his gifts at high price unto the prostitutes
and exploiters who rule the world, elects still to give his gifts
into the hands of his humble brothers; terribly rare is the
man who, possessing courage, does not get drunk with it and
lose his control of reality, finding it easier to move armies or
mobs than to master his own ego.
Men of this rare “common sense” will, perhaps, someday
be more common; this, then, will be a different world. But
until that time of maturity arrives, these men are historic.
You are one of them, Romain Rolland. In you, there is no
break between conviction and action; between recognition
of the truth and every word and deed within your power
to fulfill it; between the responsibility you feel for your
dignity as an heir of Man and the responsibility you feel for
your dignity as a servant of men. Ten years ago, I called
you a whole man, Romain Rolland. I cannot improve this
term, today. The whole man is he who possesses this common
sense I speak of.
264I pray that France may duly celebrate the seventieth
birthday of her great son and heir to those intellectual and
ethical qualities which have made France great. If she does
so, it will have to be by her actions. France knows where the
truth lies: will she have the common sense to serve it? She
knows that truth lies first of all in fearless realization of the
collective economic freedom which can alone make true
those principles of Egalité, Fraternité, Liberté, which now for
a hundred years she has flaunted on all her public buildings.
To this end, the people of France must grimly sever from
their loyalty to La Patrie those greeds and inertias and self-indulgences
of class which are the germs of fascism and of
death. The hour has come when France must accomplish the
promise of her great tradition to herself and to the world.
She must mature into realization. It will hurt, it will be heroic.
But if France fails now, she goes down; she commits that
suicide of the spirit which ever precedes decomposition of
the body.
Great nations mirror their powers and their vision in the
lives of their great men. Let France, today, look to herself
by looking to you, Romain Rolland. Let her study the clear
progress of your thought from the humanitarian idealism of
your bourgeois youth, through the trial of war which schooled
you to find the truth in facts, and to the strong revolutionary
realism which is your deed, today. What France sees, in studying
you, let her understand to be the symbol of her own
ineluctable course, if she would continue to be France.
... This prayer to France, this challenge to France, this
confidence in France, is my way, Romain Rolland, of celebrating
your seventieth birthday.
January, 1936
Note: This letter, before publication, was read at the great mass meeting
held in the Paris Trocadéro, on Romain Rolland’s birthday.
265
Dear Léon Blum: I presume to address you in this personal
form because you are more than the head of a French government,
you are more than leader of the People’s Front of the
French nation: historic circumstance has made you arbiter
of the present destiny of Europe, perhaps of us all. To fulfill
your role, only a true man can suffice. And it is to the man
that I am speaking.
All the world knows just what is happening in Spain. The
Spanish people last February by a great majority chose a
government of their own—somewhat similar to the one you
are now leading. Having created a government of their
own, they proceeded by means moderate and legal to create
a Spain of their own. And as their program began to take
effect, the enemies of the people of Spain, they who hate
the people because they exploit them and because their
privilege depends on the continued degradation of the people,
took arms against the nation. Alone, these reactionaries would
have failed, for they had almost a whole nation against them.
Even with the trained mercenaries of the army, with the
resources of vested property and vested superstition, they
would have failed. But there were allies at hand—groups of the
same kind, some in power and in possession of their respective
countries, dealers in falsehood and blood, manipulators of
ignorance and confusion. With the military and economic
aid of these enemies of the Spanish people, and of their own
peoples, Spain is being invaded, Spain’s democracy is being
crushed, the world is being forced to stand by day after day
while the machines manned by mercenaries and by the lusters
after power destroy the naked body of a nation.
Léon Blum, this is no civil war of Spain; this is the conquest
266of the Spanish people by an armed international class
to whom the destruction of life in the defense of property
is an everyday routine. This class knows no frontiers. Its
henchmen, called Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, the Tories of
Great Britain and America, may mouth national slogans, but
they are of one brotherhood, they adore one Baal and one
Mammon. Was the conquest of Ethiopia a civil war? Plenty of
African troops fought with Mussolini against the Negus who
to them was a local exploiter less desirable perhaps than the
Italian. But who fights against the loyalists in Spain? A military
caste traditionally removed from sympathy with the
people, a clerical caste trained to submission to the powers
that be, all the dupes and victims of these castes—in other
words, the forces, whether in Spain, in Italy, in France or in
Britain, who are the sworn enemies of you, your party and
your allies.
This is not a civil war in Spain; this is the civil war of
Europe. This is a war of attempted conquest, Léon Blum,
waged by all the elements you have devoted your life to
combat against all the values you hold dear. It is your war,
Léon Blum; it is our war.
The fascists of Italy and Germany know this. They know
that the fascists of Spain are fighting their battle of conquest.
Therefore they are giving aid to their own kind. And the reactionaries
of Japan, the United States, of every nation where
money or privilege is in power, by the force of credits and
propaganda are helping the men of their own stamp in Spain
in order that their machines may prevail against a defense
of mere human flesh and blood.
This, Léon Blum, is the war in which you have declared
that France must remain neutral.
In all Europe there are three governments that can claim
with validity to represent the interests of the entire people.
They are Spain, which is fighting for life; your government,
267and the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R., far removed from the
immediate scene of battle and menaced by the two most
aggressive militarist states of the world, Germany and Japan,
cannot act alone; cannot act at all without regard to the
decision of its sole ally, the French Republic. If the Soviet
Union made legal its overwhelming sympathy for the Spanish
nation as against your neutrality pact, you, Léon Blum, would
fall; the People’s Front of France would fall; there would be
chaos in France to match Spain’s, and perhaps a similar
fascist uprising.
What does this mean, Léon Blum? It means that yours
is the decision. In all Europe, France alone can act; France
by the unified nature of its government and by the immediate
threat to it both east and south, must act.
The world knows where your heart lies in this struggle.
We know that if you could purchase victory for Spain with
your life, you would gladly give your life. We know that
what holds you back is the refusal of the British government
to join you, is the criminal leadership of English Labor, is—in
a word—your fear of war waged against the lives of your
people by the united fascists. Yes, that is the superiority of
the fascists over men and women of the democracies. The
fascists, despising life, readily risk it; despising the lives of
others, readily mislead and destroy them; whereas at the Left
are they who hesitate because they think, because they feel,
because they are more wholly human.
But, Léon Blum, it is a true saying: He who hesitates
is lost. There is another old saying: He who loses his life
shall find it. The words originally had a supernatural meaning.
We can give to them a modern, psychological, rational form.
We can say: “He who through fear of losing what he values
dares not run risks is sure to lose what he values.” You fear
war if you aid the Spanish people; you fear to alienate Britain;
you fear to provoke the enemy who are giving aid to their
268factions by every means in their power. And your fear is
helping the enemy; your fear is making more hopeless the
cause of the people not only in Spain but in Germany and
Italy, who need encouragement to rise against their executioners.
Your fear is making more assured the position of the
fascists when at last, made mad by their successes, they choose
to unleash their war against you. Your fear—if need be—to
risk war now is making war inevitable; and meantime your
hesitancy and caution are throwing to the fascists the first
battles.
Léon Blum, we who in everything human know ourselves
superior to the fascists must equal them in daring and
in resolution. Otherwise, our hatred of war and love of humanity
will defeat us and deliver the world to the war makers.
There are times when the best strategy is to get one’s eye
on the goal and to move toward it. This is the strategy of the
fascists, and it has been victorious in Ethiopia, on the Rhine
and elsewhere. It is a strategy not every nation is able to
pursue. Britain is too divided to pursue it. France has the
power, the perspective, the government—and the incentive!—to
pursue it.
Already the aid of the fascists to their kind in Spain, while
France rigidly and solitarily remains neutral, is demoralizing
the masses of all countries. They say to themselves, in England,
in France, in Brazil, in the United States: “The fascists
help their gangs; we leave our people to be massacred and
their cities to be bombed.” The masses do not understand that
the U.S.S.R. must act with France, must uphold your hand,
Léon Blum. None of us understands what holds you back.
Your “neutrality” is breaking the heart and spirit of the peoples,
everywhere, who soon or late must fight your battle.
If I have presumed to address this letter to you, Léon
Blum, it is because I know that my anguish is that of millions
before the tragedy of Spain; and that my expectation of
269your leadership is that of millions everywhere—not excluding
those in Italy and Germany—who cannot act alone, but who
are waiting to follow.
We implore you: Recognize the facts in Spain. Recognize
that there is no neutrality in this irrepressible conflict
between the two possible futures of mankind—the way forward
to human dignity, the way backward to slavery. Open
the frontiers of France for aid to the legitimate government
of Spain before it is too late! Help them with food, guns,
planes, credit, and above all with the moral force that will be
theirs when they know that the French are their comrades.
If you do this, at once, you will be doing merely what one
legitimate government should do for another; you will be
doing merely what the fascists, the world over, are doing for
their conspirators in Spain.
If you do less than this, Léon Blum, you are betraying
what your country represents, what your People’s Front gave
you the mandate to perform. You will be betraying mankind.
October, 1936
(This address was read at the first session of the American Writers
Congress held in New York in April, 1935.)
1. Definitions
The world stands at the crossways. It goes forward into
the socialist order, or human culture, not as we know it but
as we aspire to create it, will perish. I do not say the way
forward is certain. The life of man is at issue; and with man
the alternatives are present, at all times, of life or of death.
They are present now. But this is certain. To agonize within
the present system, to refuse to get clear by the social revolution
270of the working classes, means the plunge of Western
man into a darkness to which his productive and his intellectual
forces, if they continue uncontrolled, must doom him:
a darkness from which even the intimations of light that have
made our present, will have vanished. This makes clear that
the cause of the socialist society is not, finally, a political-economic
problem: it is a cultural problem: it is the human
problem.
I propose to show the specific value, in this crisis, of the
literary work of art—not as a chorus of revolutionary politics,
not as an echo to action: but as an autonomous kind of action.
I propose to show that above all in America today, owing to
our peculiar cultural conditions, the revolutionary writer must
not be a “fellow traveler”: that his art must be co-ordinate
with, not subordinate to, the political-economic aspects of
the re-creation of mankind.
This requires some definition of history and of literary
art (for we are engaged in making history). Fortunately, I
may point to the historic sense of mankind, implicit in Marx,
as of a body which, like all organic life, evolves by reason of
inward assimilations of an objective world from which it
wins sustenance and on which it reacts—all according to a
pattern which is the nature of the organism: a pattern which
in man is capable of great variations chiefly through the
process of what, vaguely, we call consciousness.
The part of consciousness, or if you prefer, of experience,
in historic evolution is important for us because it leads
straight to the social function of art. The work of art is a
means (among other things) for extending, deepening, our
experience of relationship with life as this organic whole.
The feeling of intimate kinship with any part of the objective
world is what we mean by beauty. As this relationship expands
to an inclusive social form, it is what we mean by culture.
The basic social function of art is so to condition men that
271they will, as a social body, be the medium for the actions of
growth and change required by their needs. These social
actions, to be healthy, must be performed within the true
experience of the whole of life involved—and the conveying,
the naturalizing, of this experience is the especial function of
art.
I will make this plain. Suppose a man needs to hammer
nails for his new house. He must hit the nails square on the
head. But in order to do this, the man must be in good
general condition. If his eyes are poor, if his brain is dizzy,
all his technical skill of wrist-action won’t save him from
hammering nails badly. No man, it is obvious, is in shape
for even an act so simple as hitting a nail on the head unless
his body and mind are a fit medium for the job. No society of
men or class of men is in shape for any needed action, save
in so far as it has been conditioned to become the effective
medium for that action.
In simple societies, the prime conditioning arts are lyrical:
they are music, the song, the dance. By means of the experience
absorbed and sustained through them, the folk becomes
the effective medium for the kind of action its emotional
and economic needs, and the needs of its rulers, call for. In
our world where a chaos of forces is breaking down the
life of man before our eyes, the chief conditioning art—although
all arts have their place—must be one to synthesize
our complex pasts and present, and to direct them. This is
the art of words, by which man captures the worlds and
selves that have borne him, and renders them alive with his
own vision.
We know now, roughly, the kind of social action to demand
of our literary art. It is in general to condition men
for the multitude of direct actions of which their life consists:
it is, with us, the crucial task of conditioning our readers—who
272we hope will be the workers, the farmers, and their allies, to
become the effective medium of revolution.
This subtle process of conditioning is not to be confused
with the work of direct preparation for daily struggle: work
which falls primarily to the teachers, the theorists, the organizers
of party and of union, who are largely conditioned
by the accumulated work of writers. And it must be clear
that this work of conditioning the social body, however
invisible it seems, is the direct action of the writers. Words,
of course, are also instruments for “preparation”: reportage,
pamphlets, slogans, manifestoes (this paper is a kind of manifesto),
have their legitimate uses in political work. But only
in so far as the need of the revolutionary medium is understood;
and as the main function of literary art, which is to
create this medium, prevails. The writer who forgets this, in
order to bend his art to some seemingly more immediate task,
weakens the organic health and progress of mankind by betraying
his integral part in it. And in a world full of hunger,
of hideous injustice, of threatening war, only a clarity rare,
hard and heroic, will hold the literary artist to his own often
thankless, often obscured, yet fundamental, action.
2. The American Writer Under Capitalism
I apply at once these definitions to the special problems of
the American revolutionary writer. To this end, we must
first glance at the general state of readers and writers in our
country.
We have never lacked literary talents. But the economic
soil in which they rooted was washed away ere the roots
could hold. We have had great writers. They have been influential
abroad, where an organic cultural life possessing
what we still lack—memory and consciousness—could employ
them. Here, a Poe, a Whitman, a Thoreau, a Melville, could
273win only sentimental disciples because the discontinuity of
ethnic and industrial conditions made their message obsolete
more quickly than a generation could mature to hear them.
We Americans are weak—infinitely weaker than the peasants
of China, America Hispana, or old Russia—in that intuitive
connection with soil and self and human past, which makes
of a folk an effective medium for creative action. In this, our
common state of cultural malnutrition, the need of sound
literary art cries aloud. But our writers have been attainted
by the disease they must help to cure. A sense of impotence,
derived from their unconnectedness with the vital classes of
the American world, has delivered them up to a succession
of European fads and dogmas; and their reflections of foreign
literary styles, like the shallow glints of a kaleidoscope, have
added up to nothing. When they have turned to our world,
our writers have been unable to resist the overpowering
pulls of the capitalist system. They have been entertainers,
purveyors of candy and cocktails. When at the end
of the War, they began to rebel in numbers, their revolt
was hollow: an exhibitionistic beating of drums or a snarl and
a sneer.
Now the deepest cause of their subjection as writers, and
of their impotence, is the hidden ideology of the American
system, which—liberal and conservative alike—most of our
writers have absorbed. And this is painfully to the point,
because—whether they know it or not—the same ideology prevails
among our revolutionary writers. Far too many of us
have taken over the philosophy of the American capitalist
culture that we are sworn to overthrow.
3. The American Revolutionary Writer
This American ideology, which has ruled from the beginning—from
the time of those prophets of bourgeois business:
274Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, the true
masters of our way of life—is a shallow, static rationalism
derived from the thinnest, not the deepest, eighteenth-century
minds of France and Britain: an empirical rationalism based
on fact-worship, on a fetishism (both unscientific and unpoetic)
of the finished cut-and-dried report of the five senses,
which is not remotely related to the organic rationalism
explicit in Spinoza and implicit in the historical dialectic of
Marx. Had this vulgar rationalism ruled in seventeenth-century
England and France, there would be no modern science.
It is, since it ignores the organic and evolving nature of man,
by definition the foe of all creative work: the foe, therefore,
however hidden, of art and revolution.
Briefly, I will disclose symptoms and attitudes in our revolutionary
writers, which reveal (although the writers know it
not) this sterile philosophy....
(1) Disbelief in the autonomy of the writer’s art; in its
integral place as art in the organic growth of man and specifically
in the revolutionary movement. This self-distrust makes
the writer capitulate as artist: leads him to take orders, as
artist, from political leaders—much to the dismay of the more
intelligent of said political leaders. It moves the American
writer to misapply in his art borrowed foreign definitions of
values which have cogence in their place and time of origin;
but are meaningless here. This is a carry-over of the faddism
of middle-class American writing.
(2) From the same inorganic view of life and hence of
art, comes the servile or passive concept of revolutionary
literature as primarily “informational,” “reflective,” “propaganda.”
This is, of course, borrowed from the mid-Victorian,
middle-class idea of utilitarian or moralistic art. There is no
reason why good literature should not be of high documentary
importance, and have a strong political appeal. Indeed, in a
275dynamic age like ours, a profound literary art, insofar as it
must reveal the deepest evolving forces of man at the time,
must be “propaganda” for these forces and for the goal of
these forces. But this kind of propaganda derives from the
work’s effectiveness as literary art and is dependent on it.
(3) What murders the effectiveness of so much of our
revolutionary writing? The clue is the word “murder.” We
all know that murder is a conspicuous American trait: there
are more murders, we are told, in the United States in a day
than in some European countries in a month. Now murder
is a sort of short cut: it is an oversimplified solution of a
problem—say, a nagging wife or husband—by simply getting
rid of them. It eliminates the life of which the problem is a
factor. What murder is to the art of life, this dead philosophy
is to knowledge; and translated into literary terms it becomes
“oversimplification.” Call it, if you prefer, a kind of misplaced
or forced direct action. Here are some of its results:
(a) Novels, aiming to reveal the revolutionary portent
and substance of our world, which are stuffed with stereotypes ...
or imitate the spiced journalese of newspaper reports
of surface events ... or echo the bravado (hiding
weakness) of the Hemingway-Dashiell Hammett school ...
or borrow the drab pedestrian effects of Victorian realism—as
if these were adequate to convey the body—tragic, farcical,
explosive, corybantic, tender, deep as hell and high as heaven,
of American life!
(b) Proletarian tales and poems which portray the workers
as half-dead people devoid of the imagination, soaring
wills and laughter, which are the springs of creation—and of
revolution.
(c) Laborious essays in criticism and literary history in
which the organic bodies of the works of poets and prosemen
276are mangled and flattened to become mere wallpapering for
the structure of a political argument.[15]
(4) In these refusals, often by men of genuine literary
gift, to recognize the material for a deep revolutionary art,
lies the one ideological taint. Its final evil is to turn Marxism
itself into a dogmatically, mechanically shut philosophy. And
the effect of this, were it to prevail on our eager, unschooled
and sensitive youth (workers as well as writers), would be to
repel them: indeed, to drive many of them (and not the
worst because the worst bewildered) to seek a home in
reactionary schools of thought which do lip service to old
forms of man’s organic intuitions.
If the youth of America are drawn by the decayed loyalties
of nationalism and church into the ranks of fascism, it
will be in part because our revolutionary writers have been
thwarted, by this dead rationalism implicit in the dying capitalist
culture, from making clear that life today—in the depths
that call for sacrifice, loyalty and love—is on the side of
revolution.
The American revolutionary writer ... to act his part,
which is to create the cultural medium for revolution ...
must see life whole. He will have a political creed; if he is
a generous man, it will be hard for him to forgo some share
of the daily political-industrial struggle. But his political
orientation must be within, must arise from, his orientation
to life as an artist. Any course of action, any creed, lives
within the dynamic substance of life itself: and this substance,
in all its attributes, is the business of the artist. Therefore
it is proper to state that the artist’s vision of life IS the
material of his art.
277There is much confusion among us as to “material” and
“subject.” The subject of a book is a mere label or container;
it may mislead or be empty. Our revolutionary poet or proseman,
by his loyalty to the working class (whether born in it
or not) and by his natural selection of strong, expressive
subjects, will write more and more of the struggles of farmer
and worker. But if his vision be sound, it will make—whatever
his subject—the material for revolutionary art. The term “proletarian”
applied to art should refer to the key and vision
in which the work is conceived, rather than to subject. It
should be a qualitative, not a quantitative, term. A story of
middle-class or intellectual life, or even of mythological figures,
if it is alight with revolutionary vision, is more effective
proletarian art—and more effective art for proletarians—than
a shelf full of dull novels about stereotyped workers.
I wish to characterize two of our specific problems.
We writers have two highways for reaching mastery of
our material. We must go into life ... in persons and in self.
These two ways are really one; and the writer must follow
them together, else he will make headway in neither. If we
look upon persons or classes, save with the eye of self-knowledge,
we will not see them; and if we look inward upon self,
save with an eye disciplined by objective understanding, we
will see only the mists of egoism which are the tree self’s
denial. Even more complex is this double way we must take,
and never cease from taking. If we look upon persons of one
class we will not know them unless we see the class opposing.
If we look upon the present of any scene, we will not know it
unless we see within it the past ... and its dynamic direction:
its future. This is the dialectic of the artist.
Because classes are in mortal conflict, and because we have
taken sides, does not mean they have nothing in common: it
means they have life in common. The class struggle, for us,
is a focus of light, a modern form, by which timeless ingredients
278of human nature common to every person are revealed.
It is not a substitute for understanding, but a kind of spectrum
wherein hunger, passion, love, pity, envy, worship, dream,
fear, despair and ecstasy receive a dynamic modern order.
The other branch of our simultaneous highway is the self.
Self is the integer of value and of social action, the norm and
form of life as man may know it. The revolutionary writer
must understand the person, or his portraits of social struggle
will be flat and ephemeral as the poster on a billboard. As
early as Shakespeare, Cervantes and Racine, the artists were
creating the image of the “lonely Soul,” the “atomic will”—an
image which served to make the medium in which the
Protestant-bourgeois, individualist economy could flourish.
We must have poets to sing the image of the new and truer
person: the person who knows his integration with group
and cosmos; the person through whom the Whole speaks.
Only by bringing home the timeless human values in the
class struggle to every member of the exploited classes and
to the sensitive of all classes (for under capitalism all decent
men and women are oppressed) can the writer stimulate the
will to revolutionary action. Only by deepening his comprehension
of cultural historic forms, such as religion, in
which, however faultily and impurely, man’s profoundest
intuitions of his organic nature were embodied, can the writer
touch the spirit of the American worker and farmer and
middle class, to release their spirit from obsolete forms into
new creative channels. And only thus can we save them from
the decayed devotions which are the treacherous bait of the
fascists.
Thus, for the American revolutionary writer to give less
than the whole picture is poor philosophy, poor art—and poor
strategy.
We are aware there is war; we have declared this war to
be ours; and we know that in war strategy is important. But
279this is a war whose battleground is the world—the world of
extension and, no less, the world of inward depth. In this
battle are countless separate struggles. Many, engaged on their
particular fronts, are forced by the crisis of their position to
ignore its relativity in the whole; or to misprize and forget
values which do not appear to apply to their one urgent need.
Therefore we writers must know the breadth and depth of
the whole struggle: know its background and its foreground:
know its ultimate values within its immediate aims: in order
that, by the common experience of our work, the balance
and unity be kept; that in the fever of struggle no human
heritage of truth and freedom languish; and that the great
war for Man move, without error or blindness, to its issue.
Our special work is the universal. In our field there can
be no strategy but the whole truth.
If a writer doubts this, I doubt he is an artist.
If we believe that communism is the organic next step of
the world to be released by freeing the world’s forces of
health, we must believe in the art revealing man’s depths
which bear this destiny. We will embody in our work the
substance of life: the blood, the bone, the eye, the conscious
embrace of necessity whose child is freedom—knowing that
in so far as we create this truth, we are moving, and moving
those who hear us, toward the Revolution.
(An address to the International Congress of Writers for the Defence
of Culture, held at Paris, June 21–25, 1935.)
We are all here, not as Frenchmen, Germans, Americans,
but as men of letters who conceive their art as an articulation
280of the human spirit. Each of us bespeaks his class and his
country only in so far as he voices deeply his self, and thereby
voices mankind. This is the irreducible character of the artist.
Whether he knows it or not (and in our day, most do not
know it, whence the fragmentary and corrupted nature of
their works and of themselves as men), the artist is one who
acts on the premise that the universal lives in the particular;
that cosmos lives in the person. This is the meaning of the
mysterious words “beauty” and “truth” applied to art. As
we share the universal in a particular form—a painting of a
tree, a story of a beggar—we call it the experience of beauty.
We feel the unity between self and some other object, a
unity which (far from destroying) heightens and makes true
the particularity of both the self and the object. And whether
we know it or not, we value this experience of truth and
beauty; we love it as somehow good. This is another irreducible
trait, beneath our differences, of us all. The conflicts
of our actual existence may so weary and confuse us that
we believe we long for death; may fill us with distrust and
despair: it is love of life, none the less because wounded and
twisted, that writes the darkest of our pages. In so far as a
man seeks beauty, he knows that life is value; for the recognition
of beauty is nothing but the joyous acceptance of our
part and our participation in the body of living.
In periods of normal cultural rhythm, when the social
body moves moderately well in all its organs, this act of
conscious participation in life as a whole, the essential act of
the artist, can remain implicit in the quiet body of his story
or song or picture. Such times see no Congress of Writers
such as this one. But today the forms and modes of human
existence, unevenly evolved, have broken the equilibrium
which is life itself. Today, the active and aggressive faith in
life, the revelation of its intricate harmony, which is the sole
science of the artist, is so at variance with the actual world
281that we feel the need of a direct action, transcending the
solid, quiet, slow certainty of art, to reinforce our love and
our vision in the experience of the people.
All this may seem to you irrelevant esthetics. But you
must pardon me, for the application I wish to draw from it
(my brief message to this Congress) is relevant.
The revolutionary hour in which we live is but the
present phase of the process, centuries old and destined to
outlast almost the memory of economic conflict, whereby
man (not a privileged, exploiting class, but man as a whole)
will emerge into a conscious culture; even as the child at a
certain physiologic stage must become adult or go down into
degeneration. The key of the present phase of the long
process is economic; therefore the importance of the class
struggle and the imperative of entering it on the side of the
workers. But the process itself, now as ever, is organic. By
which I mean that the whole of man, heart and mind, subtlest
sense and deepest intuition, as well as belly and loin, must
partake of it—or it miscarries.
The orthodox revolutionary creeds, which are the technique
of the transition of this crucial hour, do not comprehend
the whole man. They stress, rightly, the aspects of
mass social-economic action. They slight other parts of man:
the intuitive, the intimate, the personal which leads to the
cosmic—phases which are the concern of the creative writer.
But since the process of man’s growth must at all times be
complete, these phases too must enter the revolutionary movement.
Since they lag, blame not the political leaders but the
writers. Since in consequence even the immediate economic
aspect of the whole process lags, and threatens to miscarry,
again blame (at least in part) the writers.
Excluding the hordes of parasites and peddlers who dare
call themselves “writers” only in a world where illiteracy
thinks it can “read,” we might divide our writers into two
282groups. The first stress the sensuous, the personal; strive perhaps
after the mystic; ignore utterly the masses of men, and
that vast region of each man’s life involved in economic
forces. The other group, often recruited or converted from
the first, in the enthusiasm perhaps of their discovery of the
social-economic factor limit themselves to it or at least permit
their awareness of the intimate, infinite dimensions of human
life to become dulled. Their work, like the first group’s, is
inorganic. And what is worse, the great Cause—man’s rebirth—to
which they are devoted continues, because of them, deprived
of elements needed to make it whole and to make
it live.
Of course, the values of the creative writer, as I have
named them, are of the very stuff of the Revolution which,
indeed, is the expression in terms of urgent human need of
just these values. At the heart of socialism and communism,
bequeathed to it direct by romantics like Rousseau who saved
it from the contradictory theological impedimenta of the
church, lies a view of men and of man which the degenerate
humanisms of the eighteenth century and the sectarian Protestant
creeds had abandoned. It is the view of human history
as one organic body, growing by tragic effort toward consciousness
and justice; it is the view of the individual (in so
far as he is real) as an integer of this body, so that the health
of the whole and the health of every part are one; it is the
view that universal meaning is inherent in material behavior,
and therefore, that society becomes by its actions the immanent
presence of timeless value. This view, which I call the
organic view, is implicit in every major artist, however dissident
may be his intellectual convictions. It runs with infallible
continuity from the Egyptian sculptors and the Hebrew
prophets through the patrists, through the builders of the
Gothic, through the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
founders of modern science, through the systems of Spinoza
283and Hegel—ineluctably leading to the historical-prophetic
vision of Karl Marx.
But in the eighteenth century there had grown strong a
countercurrent in the thought of Europe. So successful was
the conquest of facts about material bodies, the capture of
their movements in the laws of mechanics, that certain men,
hungry like all men for simplifications, cut down the organic
humanisms of Erasmus and Rabelais, the organic rationalisms
of Spinoza and Newton, to a dogmatic empiricism
of the five senses. Theirs was a “universe” containing everything
that moved by mechanical law—everything, that is, except
life. And the victories of applied science were so great
that these shallow empiricists swelled in prestige; while the
organic view grew enfeebled, being confined to artists with
no “scientific” magic to win them credence, to mystics overburdened
with theologies that contradicted their intuitions,
and to simple men and simple women with no intellectual
weapons.
The nineteenth century, of course, brought giants who, in
philosophy, literature and the sciences, revived the organic
view. In Marx, who belongs to his century’s great tradition,
the organic view of man is fundamental, and is complete as in
perhaps no other modern thinker except Spinoza and Goethe.
But this shallow empiricism was in the air. Marx, overanxious
to attack theological creeds and theological metaphysics, at
times fell into the use of easy terms borrowed from the vulgar
materialists whom he despised as much as he hated the idealists
against whom he aimed them. There are contradictions in
Marx—great prophet, great historical philosopher, great economist,
but too harried a man to be a complete logician. Often
on the same page with an unsurpassed word about man’s
primal unity, in thought and deed, with the dynamic principle
of all life, one will find uncritical outcroppings of sensationalism,
phrases from the eighteenth-century materialists
284whom he rejected, implicit denials of the validity and primacy
of man’s intuitive organic sense—all of which betray the premise
of the Marxist dialectic. These flaws in his work have
been stressed as virtues in our Western world by sterile
men to whom a dogmatic reduction of life to the report of
the five senses offers comfort; and it has been a blight upon
our revolutionary growth.
I have no time, nor need, to expatiate upon the symptoms
of this blight. The course of socialism in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Germany, France, England, America, is
full of them. Witness the degradation, one might almost say
the disappearance, of the true person from revolutionary
letters as the individual is shrunk from an organic integer of
cosmos to a mere quantitative factor of the collective mass,
possessing no inwardness—in consequence of which the
human mass likewise becomes denatured. Witness the simplification
of the human being to a passive product of environment—a
fallacy which any man who has ever planted a carrot
seed next to a pea in a garden knows enough to laugh at. And
the failure, in judging the course, both hideous and heroic,
of contemporary events, to allow, in some adequate modern
term, for what our fathers fancifully called the demonic and
the angelic aspects of human nature. Witness the degradation
of literature from being an integral part of life’s creative
process to a mere reflection of events falsely conceived as
“objective” or to a mere instrument for some surface action.
Witness, in such poor thought as this, the decay of logic and
the decay of metaphysics. Witness, above all, the dangerous
failure to distinguish between the true essence of religion—its
creative role in human culture—its major role, indeed, in
the genesis of socialism, and religion’s outworn theological
and class superstructures.
All such systems indicate the contempt for human life and
destiny which comes when man is cut off from his primitive
285participation in the cosmos without finding a conscious synthesis
(the task of the writers!) to replace it: all, regnant in
the vulgar revolutionary thought of Western Europe and
America, strike at the very heart of revolutionary meaning.
In agricultural lands, such as Russia, China, great sections
of America Hispana, the folk have not lost that immediate
integration with life, through soil and self, which is the
organic sense in its first phase. The revolutionary doctrines
of the West, even with their present limitations, tend to free
these peoples from the imposed dualism of their priestcraft,
to discipline them for technical advance against the cloudy
helplessness in which their misery has mired them, and to
release their instinctive monism so that it should flow with
ease into the organic view and form of a communist order.
This procedure is particularly plain in the Soviet Union
where, despite an orthodox terminology which frequently
sounds mechanistic or traditionally dogmatic, the true foundations
of organic Marxism are understood and are being passionately
enacted by the people.
In our industrialized countries, the case is different. Science,
prostituted and misapplied, has for a hundred years
plowed down the primitive monistic intuitions of the masses:
the same vulgar empiricism which attaints our literature flouts
its obscene excesses in every penny paper, every school, every
church. The stress on the “environmental,” the “behavioristic,”
the “economic” man, the failure to appeal, in revolutionary
terms, to the whole man, stimulates the mechanolatry
to which we are already enslaved; dims further our enfeebled
sense of wholeness from which alone fertility and power
issue; and threatens our whole birth-period with disaster.
I do not deny the economic-political causes of fascism.
But only psychological and cultural factors in all the people
can explain its spread. Among these factors, pre-eminently
in Germany, was the failure of both great revolutionary
286parties to lead forward into fresh forms of loyalty and action
those primordial intuitive energies of man which, balked of
their future, flow back into the rotted channels of church,
state, race, devotion to a Fuehrer mouthing decayed loyalties—there,
of course, to be exploited by the sinister high priests
of Money.
I do not mean that the revolutionary cause in its present
form fails to enlist the heroic loyalties of numbers of men and
women. The concentration camps of Hitler give the lie to
such a statement, as does every industrial struggle of the world
from the Saar to California, where you will find them: the
young crusaders for Man, the geniuses of social vision, clear-eyed,
quiet of soul. These are the gifted vanguard who, of
their own lyric health, absorb and express what is deeply
organic in the revolutionary movement. But the world cause
cannot rely exclusively on heroes or on the natural poets of
action. Its Word must be such as to fire also the more cautious,
the more conservatively rooted. And the more subjectively
sensitive must also be entrained, those hosts of men and
women (teachers, poets, mothers, subtle and humble craftsmen)
whose religious and esthetic instincts are balked by the
antireligious and antiesthetic conventions of most Marxists.
For each youth who is driven into the fascist ranks because he
finds it easy to adore his own petty ego magnified in a Fuehrer
or a Duce, there are a score of men and women too decent
and intelligent to be tempted by these obscene gestures, who
yet remain unmoved while the world cries for them, because
the appeal of Revolution seems to deny those very depths of
man, secret and mysterious, whence the creative will and
energy must issue.
The New World of which the old world is in travail is
like an embryon. Until it be whole, it cannot be born. What
intimate knowing moves the embryon, long after its organs
and muscles are complete? This knowing of completeness is
287the final phase of completion. When it is there, and not before,
the being issues forth; a new life breathes.... I sometimes
feel that all the organs, the limbs, the brain and nervous system,
of the New World exist. They are the laws of science,
the methods of production and communication, the treasures
of literature, art, religious wisdom; and, embodying these, the
mass of workers possessed of the will and the power, together
with their indispensable leaders, drawn from all classes, the
intellectuals, the teachers, and technicians. Why, in this hour
of travail, when death threatens the generations of man, does
not the new life issue? The final integrality is lacking ...
the final completeness which is organic consciousness, the
knowing harmony of all the parts, making them move to life,
making them breathe together. This, within the ready social
body, is the function of the writer.
Outside the nine cells[16] of our ward runs a corridor which
is left open part of the day, and through its barred windows
I can see the country. Right under my eye is the mellow
muddy river that Theodore Dreiser’s brother sang, long ago.
On the banks of the Wabash I see a huge pile of discarded
cars, rust-rotted fragments of machines, shanties paintless and
broken-roofed, the homes of human discards among the industrial
refuse. This view outside the jail makes me feel at
home in the jail. The bars shut me into, rather than out of, a
familiar world.
The men in the ward enhance my feeling of having come
more close to the America that put me here. There are details,
288of course, inanimate or crawling, to which I am not used; but
like the iron-barred windows, the grated doors, these separating
elements are superficial; they do not avail against the
growing knowledge that to be in this jail, among these men,
and with the police and the chamber of commerce outside, is
to be at the heart of a common experience and (given the
society we live in) to be in the right place.
The men of our ward have set up a “kangaroo court” to
deal with their day-by-day needs, problems primarily of supplementing
the vile, scant prison food, of bringing in tobacco,
of keeping the ward comparatively clean. The chief
of the court is a big fellow whom I’ll call Jack, a natural
leader. Jack’s boyhood was rooted in the shanties along the
banks of the Wabash; joy for him, from the earliest days,
meant escape from everything familiar—and the best means
to it, whisky. Jack found a good job in a local gymnasium.
One night of payday, he left a bootleg dive and was attacked
by a gang who knew that he had dollars in his pocket. There
was a fight; a policeman butted in, and a chance blow of
Jack’s great fist sent him to the pavement, fracturing his
skull. The cop died, and when Jack got out of jail, the police
hounded him and no more jobs were open. Jack had to eat, he
had to drink, he had to have a girl; so he became a bootlegger.
From then on, he has spent half his time in jail. When he’s
out, he falls inevitably back into the one way he can think of
to make a living: a way of disorder, of course.
But here in jail (where he has more essential freedom than
outside), Jack is an orderly man. His cell is clean, his clothes,
his toilet articles, his library of magazines, are arranged in
shipshape fashion. With a Flit can, he holds the bugs in
abeyance. And with his authority as chief of the kangaroo
court, he keeps order in the ward, teaching the newcomers
and the vags who are let in for the night their duties and their
places. Jack is a great reader, and if what he reads is trash,
289the reason is that trash is all he knows—a point in common
with the vigilantes. He is the kind of taciturn man who, when
he talks, talks well. I note, in his description of his friendship
with the little children of his brother, the tenderness that is
in him, the kind of tenderness that I have often felt in preadolescent
boys for very little children. Utterly wanting in
Jack is a critical sense of the society he lives in, is a concept
for understanding and bettering his place. Mentally, spiritually,
he is a child, because he has been stopped from growing;
but in his fixedness of immaturity certain virtues of the
boy remain untarnished. I observe this, when he comes into
my cell, of his own accord, and shows me the trick of driving
the bedbugs to cover. And I shall not forget his bringing out
to me, as a spread for my bread, his jar of peach preserve, a
homemade gift from his mother; and his sensitive lie, when he
feels my hesitation (I know already what good food means
in jail): “Go ahead, eat all you want—I don’t eat that stuff
much.”
Jack’s right-hand man is Pop, who supervises the ward’s
housework, cooking, cleaning, laundry; an old man of sixty
doing time for perjury. Pop’s grey face has a beauty difficult
to decipher, until one catches its two main elements: a childlike,
animal gaiety impervious to experience and an old man’s
pain, the two transfused into a mask, sly, ironic, covering
them both. Pop also is a child; he’d play treacherous tricks on
you if he chose; that is clear. But it is also clear that if you
touch his emotions decently, he may not choose. He’s a child
brought up among hostile and undiscerning masters. He does
not question their authority, nor does he conform. He escapes
by remaining in the limbo of his boyhood, a psychological
place beyond good and evil but saturated with feeling and
humor.
Tony is the kind of chap who affects white buck shoes,
and even in stir tries to keep them polished if not clean. He
290wears a saffron necktie and his blond hair is pushed up from
his vague blue eyes in a pompadour. Tony is being held for
manslaughter—killing a truckman while driving his car in a
state of intoxication. He used to be an iron molder; but molding
jobs have run thin in the mills since the production of
capital machines has dwindled; and bad times have reduced
him to the status of a common laborer. He likes the boys in
jail; he’s having a good time doing nothing.
In this, he is like the farm boy from the Kentucky border—Willie—who
denies the grand larceny charge that has put
him here, but visibly enjoys his moratorium from cribbing
corn and milking. Willie, with brand-new blue overalls,
curled-up amber hair, baby blue eyes, could take the part of
the farmer’s son in the melodrama, the youth smelling of
clover who comes to the big city to reclaim his girl lured by
the wicked traveling salesman. Willie is handsome, nonchalant,
illiterate, with many a childish virtue. Back on the farm
he has a wife and two kids. He is glad to be free of them for
a while, and time for him does not go beyond the vague
measure of a season.
When night falls, the lock on the door frequently grinds
and the homeless men are turned in for a night’s lodging. Not
to dull my story (which has a point, if you’ll be patient), I’ll
describe but two of these night-guests. One is an old man,
dweller in the filthiest shanties of the Wabash, an aged human
body clad in squalor. Sam has been south, picking cotton, and
he tells us it doesn’t pay. That’s why he’s back home. He
hails the tin dish of malodorous slop called supper with delight;
although he has no teeth, the pork chop gets gnawed
to the bone.
Beside Sam is a riveter, a young South Indianan who has
helped build bridges from Bayonne to St. Louis. He’s broke,
but he expects a job tomorrow. Meantime, he shows us where
a molten rivet missed his pail and caught him in the belly;
291his clothes ablaze, he jumped to the elevator, dropped to a
tank of water and then spent three months in a hospital bed.
But he’s all right now: to prove it he takes hold of a steel
butt on the ceiling with the forward half of his fingers and
chins himself six times. Old Sam jumps up, and chins himself
twice, giggling with pride. Sam’s body is still gamy and
beneath his dirty unshaved beard is the bland face of a boy, a
face essentially sweet....
Do not judge that I am sentimentalizing this common,
typical group of failures. There are, of course, vicious men in
jails, just as there are vicious men out of jail. They are the
exception in both categories, and I’m sure I do not know in
which one will find relatively more. Perhaps the vicious
among convicts are as rare as the Mellons, Rockefellers, duPonts,
among businessmen; as the Hearsts among journalists;
as the Hitlers and Huey Longs and Coughlins among politicians.
Every broad social group has certain basic traits; in
the criminal group not viciousness is such a trait, but childishness.
Without a doubt, the percentage of rotten men among
criminals is so small it is no wonder that every single man in
my ward of the jail happens to be a decent person.
That they were all childish was not accidental. It may
help to explain why I liked these men. I have always felt at
ease among children. And perhaps this means that I am something
of a child myself. And this draws me closer to the point
of my story.
Two inmates of our ward, mugged and fingerprinted like
the rest of us, I have not yet named. They are the communist
organizers, Andrew Remes and Charles Stadtfelt. Stadtfelt is
a young man with a playboy’s smile and a body pitifully
invaded by tuberculosis. So slight is Stadtfelt’s resistance that
every hour or so he must dive into his lousy bunk, under
mine, for a rest. When he emerges, there is a cigarette in his
292mouth, a laugh in his eyes and a jest on his tongue. Stadtfelt’s
way of curing his consumption is to forget it, and devote his
life to bringing on the Revolution. There is no feverish strain
in his good humor; it comes from a harmony of the whole
man which tubercular bacilli have not yet broken. The second
communist, Remes, is studious and unsmiling. Brought in
later than I, the first thing he does is to ask me for an explanation
of why the Soviet Union does not officially help the
Spaniards. Back and forth in the corridor we walked, while
he put his questions. But the sobriety of Comrade Remes is
not objectionable to the camaraderie of the others. His intellectual
preoccupations trouble them no more than his
working out the crossword puzzles in the old papers (while
they hunt tales of daring gunmen and passionate lovers).
Instinctively, they are aware that Remes looks at the bosses
with eyes parallel to theirs.
These bosses are the symbolic “fathers” who keep the boys
behind bars. They have tools. Lowest are the turnkeys, for
the most part men brutalized by long practice of mechanical
repression without understanding; men dehumanized to the
bare repressive function. A little less low are the police, dull
incarnations of conformity to the rules the criminals break;
professional opponents, players of the same game as the lawless
but on the other side of the line and held in contempt by
the crooks, who instinctively sense that to obey the rules
of our society means less fantasy, less generosity, less feeling,
than to break them. The true fathers are rarely seen by their
unfortunate children: they are the respectable citizens, the
taxpayers, the makers of the rules, the builders of the courts
and jails, the dealers of prison terms. Implicitly, men like
Jack, Pop, old Sam and Tony regard them as children regard
grownups.
These pillars of society are less childlike than the jailbirds.
But they are not the mature men fathers should be. If they
293were mature (and the crooks instinctively know this), there
would be less filth in jail, there would be no need of jail at
all, there would be less misery, corruption, injustice, in the
chaotic outer world which the jail’s false order impotently
strives to correct. The lawbreakers are children; the sustainers
of the legalized anarchy called the capitalist system are
neither children nor grown men. Call them men in a transition
between infancy and adulthood: that will explain their
natural selection for eminence by a society that is itself an
epoch of transition. Capitalism is a transition age between the
naïve childhood of the race and that mastering maturity in
which alone the dreams, values, inventions of childhood, transfigured,
may flower.
This explains why the “children” are in jail; why the
men who have not grown up build the jail and place the “children”
in it: it explains also why the communists, who are
creating a form for maturity, are in jail with the “children.”
The two communists in our ward (not to mention the leading
communist in a ward belowstairs) legitimately stand for a
will, a discipline, a method, whereby men may outgrow the
irrational chaos of capitalism, may mature to a society for
both grown men and children. By this truth, symbolically, the
communists belong in jail. For the values which they strive,
through changing the laws, to bring to normal life are kin to
the values which the criminals, by breaking the laws, impotently
struggle to retain. The mature man rounds the cycle,
giving organic form to the lyric impulses of childhood—the
need for joy, for play, for freedom, which man outgrows at
his peril.
But this natural conjunction of child and mature man in a
jail, as against the halfmen who put them in jail, may be still
further broadened. After we had been released, Chief of Police
Yates came up to us. Yates is a jaunty young man, smooth
and hard-eyed, half a machine, a type too common in this
294world, without whom fascism could not function. He is
simply the shallow young man, wanting to get along in a
hurry, who sells out to the forces in immediate power—the
owners of the Machine; and who wants for his reward, not so
much a fat pay envelope as freedom to give play to his desires,
less destroyed than repressed into sadism by the dull business
world of which he also is a victim.
Yates saunters up to us, and tells us with pride of the
congratulatory cable he has received from Berlin. Capitalist
society has already driven back into infantilism the weakest
members of the working class; and you will find some of
them in jail. Fascism is a method for finishing the process!
Fascism would infantilize all the workers; not in order to put
them into jail if they are good boys, but to put them into a
brown, black or silver shirt, and stick a slogan in their mouths
and call them the fatherland’s army. Fascism is the program
for the forced regimented infantilization of the people; implicit
or explicit, it must be the program of all rulers under
capitalism, since these rulers, by the nature of their transitional
order, are themselves caught in a transition before maturity,
are not men enough to lead men or to work with men, and
are compelled, before the threatening maturity of the masses,
to drive them all—through force, falsehood, ill nurture—down
to a morbid, regressive, infantile level.
Either down to infantilism or forward to the revolutionary
beginning of a human order in which normal men may normally
mature: that was the choice, palpable as human bodies,
within our ward’s barred windows. In the Terre Haute jail
I had our world with me: the atavistic, careless and abnormal;
the future, striving to be; the dolorous, dangerous present. I
felt at home there....
(published only in Spanish—Madrid and Buenos Aires)
DAWN IN RUSSIA (1932)
IN THE AMERICAN JUNGLE (1937)
THEATRE
NEW YEAR’S EVE (1930)
1. Arturo Mom, the Argentinian writer, tells us that Lenin once said:
“Chaplin is the only man in the world I want to meet.” It is a story readily
believed. Chaplin’s art expresses the germinal seed of the revolt—tender and
ruthless, romantic and realistic—which Lenin’s technique attempted to fulfill.
Chaplin and Lenin—they are probably the two most potential spirits of our
age. Bring them together—pure individualist and pure collectivist—into a
single force, and you have a vision of tomorrow.
2. The year of his trouble with his second wife, the truth about which
has not been told.
6. Bertrand Russell says, “Traditional mysticism has been contemplative,
convinced of the unreality of time, and essentially a lazy man’s philosophy.”
It has always seemed to me that the mysticism of Mr. Frank’s novels
was of this traditional type.
7. “Edgar Allan Poe Letters Till Now Unpublished,” in the Valentine
Museum at Richmond, Virginia; with introductory essay and commentary
by Mary Newton Stanard.
8. I feel moved to recall that in “Our America,” a work with a kindred
theme published in 1919, Poe receives even unfairer treatment than that
accorded him by Mr. Mumford; and Melville is utterly ignored.
9. The reader of “The Re-Discovery of America” will know that I find
important exceptions to this general statement.
10. We have in America a logician who, obscurely and unaided, is working
out the fundamental problem of the dualistic languages of modern culture,
and who is relating them into a logic of the Whole. His name is
Scudder Klyce and he resides in Winchester, Massachusetts. He has published
three books: “Universe,” “Sins of Science,” “Dewey’s Suppressed
Psychology.” In the first (which I have not yet read), he attempts to
establish continuity, or the Whole, in purely empirical terms and to construct
a logic to express it. In the second, he exposes (often brilliantly and
at times wildly) the contradictory dualisms in modern thought. The third
volume, as invaluable as it is unwieldy, reveals the failure of John Dewey
to carry his own “infinite pluralism” to its logical conclusion: an explicit
philosophy of the Whole.... So it goes in our America. Just as one is
getting ready to despair of the current tendencies, along comes a man like
Klyce who is doing work as essential and great as any I know in the contemporary
world. I was not aware of Klyce when I wrote “The Re-Discovery
of America.” That is my excuse for not mentioning his contribution
and its organic part in what I call the Great American Tradition.
P.S. Since the writing of this note, Scudder Klyce has died. The first
work to acknowledge the greatness of his contribution has yet to be
published. But it will come!
11. Not to be confused, of course, with the athletic skepticism that is the
servant of positive knowledge.
12. The reader will find a development of this idea in “The Re-Discovery
of America.”
13. A short time after this article was written and published, the five
hundred thousand textile strikers were sold out by their “leaders” in
Washington.
14. Since this was written, a strong revolutionary students’ movement has
sprung up in the United States.
15. I have read only three volumes of Marxist literary criticism in the
English language: “The Liberation of American Literature,” by V. F.
Calverton; “The Great Tradition,” by Granville Hicks; and a short book
by John Strachey. All three are of this category.
16. The author accompanied Earl Browder, communist candidate for
President of the United States, on a tour of Midwest industrial cities as a
newspaper correspondent and was jailed with him in Terre Haute.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
Renumbered footnotes and moved them all to the end of the final chapter.
