Part 11

There must be some reason beyond the mere sound of a word for the popular horror of pornography; and, in fact, as soon as one begins to dig down, one discovers all sorts of reasons, such as they are. There is, for example, especially in America, a buried remnant of puritanism, which makes people feel obscurely that something is wrong with anything conveying such intense pleasure as the sexual relation, which therefore should be considered morosely, if at all, and should certainly not be made the starting point for all sorts of agreeable fancies. (It is only fair to add that most of the people who feel this would deny quite sincerely that they feel it; nevertheless, they do). More obscure than this objection, but probably even more potent, is another, based on the average individual’s inharmonious attitude toward the whole question of sex. He has been taught, and holds firmly, that the sexual relation is a grave and sacred thing to be celebrated as a holy married rite; but, considering himself honestly, he perceives that it is, instead, a wild physical ecstasy with nothing of grave and little that is perceptibly sacred. Desiring to be honest, he is baffled and exasperated by the contradiction between what he thinks and what he feels, and it is probably this which makes him avoid explaining the facts of sex to his children. He is right about this emotionally; it is an indication of moral integrity for which he should be admired, rather than censured. How in the world can he explain the sexual relation to his sons as something grave and sacred when he knows in his heart that it is not that at all? Pornography stirs up and intensifies this latent discomfort in him. Gambolling about and impudently joking, it obviously considers sex neither as something grave and sacred (which he is convinced is the way it ought to be considered, at least publicly) nor yet with the shrinking fear due it, if it is, as he knows it to be, a shattering earthquake among emotions. It is as though pornography were sticking out its tongue at him personally. He is upset by it.

Among more maturely self-conscious persons, who, knowing more about themselves, care less, the sole objection to pornography is one of taste, and is felt only for its grosser primitive forms.

Now it is true that good taste is not a creative thing, but even something of a drag. Great art frequently violates it, and forces subsequent modifications of its criteria. But for minor art, and by and large in the world, taste is valuable. It tends to level things down to a standard--but it only tends. Good taste preserves the amenities. It is taste that makes existence agreeable; with life it has little to do. Used with discretion, it is of great service. For instance, good taste objects to violent noise, violent smells and all monstrous deformities; and while it is true that what at first hearing sounds as violent noise may be made by a Stravinsky, and what at first appears a monstrous deformity be created by a Baudelaire, most noises and deformities are really such, and deserving of suppression. Anyway, no permanent harm is done by good taste; it cannot crush genius. Aristophanes was unable to demolish Euripides. Good taste objects to emotional unrestraint, whether at a prize fight or at a religious revival. It aims at moderation in everything; and the proof that moderation is not fatal to achievement is that the Greeks professed to love it beyond all else.

Especially, taste is averse to anything that inspires disgust, the most sterile and desolate of all emotions. Now there are certain things that almost universally inspire disgust--why, it does not matter; they do. The odour of hydrogen-dioxide, for instance, goitres, or a disfigured human face. And in gross unworthy pornography there are brutal or distorted forms that do so for most of us: _Le Rideau Levé_, the Marquis de Sade’s _Justine_, or Cleland’s _Memoirs of Fanny Hill_. These offend against taste. They do not in a mature man arouse a shuddering sense of horror, but they do arouse disgust, which is a much worse sensation. But it would be as absurd to condemn all pornography on account of these books as to condemn all music on account of ‘Yes, We Have no Bananas.’

It is to be noted that books such as those I have just cited are not really sophisticated; they are unaware of the mental richness enveloping the facts of sex. This is as true of De Sade’s novels, for all the complicated aberrations they record, as of Cleland’s puerile story. They concern themselves solely with the facts, and are still at the stage of trying to increase the number of these, whereas the aim of civilized pornographers is to get away from those monotonous facts into a richer region. A common trick among lesser pornographers is to hint mysteriously that the facts are more numerous than they really are. For example, in an absurd novel by Catulle Mendès, the author, after describing with wearisome detail what the hero and his mistress did together (which was pretty much all of the little that _can_ be done), sends them out into the night. ‘When they returned,’ he says, ‘they did not dare look at each other; they had committed the unforgivable sin; henceforth they were cut off from humanity’--or words to that effect. A puerile and ridiculous piece of bravado. One cannot alter the facts or stare them out of countenance. In truth, it is intolerable to stare at them at all. The sexual act itself, while thrilling to the two concerned, must be depressing and even faintly revolting to a mentally adult observer of it--in part because the violent unrestrained expression of any emotion is distasteful (I can still remember with a touch of nausea Mrs. Leslie Carter in _Zaza_), but chiefly because such a spectacle can only remind us drearily of the elementary paucity of those facts on which all life is constructed. I am told that there are sordid resorts in Paris, where, for a price, one may gaze through a peep-hole at this primitive exhibition. It is incredible to me that any one should want to. I should go home and weep. ‘“Dust and ashes!” so you creak it ... what’s become of all the gold ...?’ There are enough barren unsought-for moments, God knows! when all life seems but a skeleton affair, unendurably indigent--merely greed, hunger, passion, passion, hunger, greed--without one’s deliberately going in search of others.

In a way it is a shame that we cannot permit the movies to become appreciably pornographic. Still, we cannot. As a virtuous man I admit that at once. Pornographic books and spectacles seem to do something physiologically harmful to immature boys and girls, and while we can (possibly) keep such books out of their hands, we cannot forbid children the movies, which are obviously made for them. Appealing only to the eye, the cinema could not, anyway, achieve such richness as can literature; still, some very pretty pornographic effects might be obtained. Even with the heavy-handed censorship and the determination of producers to run no risks, something now and then slips through. I remember a delightful film in which Miss--no, I had better not mention her name, because perhaps she or her press-agent might assert that the film taught a great moral lesson, and sue me--in which the heroine, when wearing a scandalously alluring bathing suit, paused for a full minute, arms upstretched, before diving--because the water was cold. Later, there was a lovely scene in which the heroine, in the daintiest of nightgowns, was surprised in her bedroom by a young man. The beauty of this scene was that neither he nor she was thinking any harm, both being absorbed in the solution of I forget what innocent problem, whereas the audience, including myself, was thinking all the thoughts that pretty girls in bedrooms normally arouse; just as in the bathing picture the heroine was convincingly thinking about the chill of the water, while we were not. This was really good pornography--something pretending to be something else.

Delight in the pretence of something to be something else is not in itself a sophisticated emotion; it is, like most others, a primitive emotion capable of great sophistication. If you find it in the ceiling decorations of the Settecento, where frescoes are mockingly made to look like architectural reliefs, you also find it in the humblest Italian houses, where an outer wall is grossly painted to represent a window with a blind half-open and a woman looking out. For that matter, you find it--or might have found it thirty years ago--in the American folding-bed (in which incarnation it was certainly not art--not even minor art). This extraordinary piece of furniture really solved no problem of space (a couch would have done that much better), and existed, for a time, solely because it was something pretending to be something else. It disappeared, partly because it was uncomfortable, but chiefly because it did not keep its promise, since the most ingenuous observer could never possibly have mistaken it for a sideboard or a chest of drawers. Children themselves rejoice in examples of this pretence.

It is well that this is so, that the emotion is primitive, since thus, even when the pretence of something to be something else is refined upon and made acceptable to civilized adults, a fresh youthful quality inspires it. One’s delight in words that say one thing while pretending to say another, is not at all due to a sense of one’s own cleverness in detecting the real meaning, and is only in part due to the richness created by the allusions and by thinking of two things at a time; there is, besides, that gay light-hearted relish of pretence. Nothing, for example, is more delightful than a conversation with a woman whom one does not really desire--well, at least not very much--that is all made up of very risky _sous-entendus_ (and the riskier they are, the daintier they must become), leading to nothing at all, indulged in for their own sake.

Precisely this is what pornography does. It plays about the idea of sex with all the art and wisdom and trained fancy of experience--but _it plays_. Good pornography is always gay, which is the more to its credit since the subject it is being gay about is so grim. We should welcome such gaiety, not suppress it.

SUCCESS

It is sometimes hard to divine what a certain period in the past was all about, what its principal aim was, if indeed it had one. But the retrospective investigator of some hundred years hence will surely have no difficulty in discovering what our period was about. Discarding (since we assume him to be intelligent) whatever we may have produced of permanent and therefore universal and therefore uncharacteristic of any single epoch, he will devote himself to our ephemeral literature, once the last word in modernity, in his day totally forgotten, but preserved in the British Museum and the Congressional Library. He will also, to even better effect, pore delightedly over such bound volumes of our weekly and monthly magazines as he can obtain. And he will know with a most beautiful certainty that what our period was about was Success.

We can hardly miss the fact ourselves, since our novels do little but exalt success or revile it, and our magazines glorify it, and all our advertisements canonize it. We live in a utilitarian epoch (it is possible that this has been said before), and results are what people demand.

Well, results are surely important, and if one sets out for results it is of no interest, or of little, why he fails to obtain them. The fable known as _A Message to Garcia_ is admirably typical of the spirit of the age we live in.

_A Message to Garcia_, if devoured eagerly by half a world, was an American fable. It is, in fact, America (however resentful older countries feel about this) that more and more sets the pace and the standard to-day. And possibly it is just the ability to succeed (less characteristic of the mass of Americans than they would have us believe, but at any rate characteristic of what they would like to be) which is most influencing the rest of the world.

The admirable things about success are so obvious as hardly to demand mention. Courage, determination, impatience with ineffectiveness and vacillation, refusal to acknowledge defeat, and a kind of drastic simplification of the facts, are among the virtues inherent in the doctrine.

It is, however, equally obvious that if nothing is to matter but success, the attainment of results, the results for which everything is thus sacrificed, and for which innumerable complex side-issues are swept away, must be of the highest importance. Yet extraordinarily little of the energy and intelligence so lavishly employed appears to be directed toward ascertaining the quality of the results to be striven for. That is assumed almost as a matter of course. All the magnificent effort is devoted to achieving them. It is as though in the midst of a terrific blizzard, with the roads impassable and no trains running, people all about me were to say: ‘It is very important that you should go somehow from New York to New Haven and buy a certain kind of lead-pencil made only there,’ and I should reply, though my lips were white: ‘Yes, it is very important that I should go get that lead-pencil made only in New Haven,’ and then should, in fact, at the risk of my life, make that journey on foot through snow-drifts--and procure the pencil. But the oddest thing of all would be if then New York and New Haven were both to ring with my praises, and there were not a soul, not even half-dead me, to ask whether a lead-pencil was really worth all that effort.

Well, any sustained heroic effort is admirable for its own sake. We quite properly admire explorers of poisonous forests and climbers of difficult peaks, even when there is little of value to be obtained by their reaching their goal. Yes, but this particular merit has nothing to do with the matter, but, indeed, runs counter to it, is one of those side-issues to be brushed away. ‘Results! Get results!’ is the cry. There is no way out of it: if the cry has significance it can only be because the results are important.

I wonder whether they are. The quality of our current civilization does not appear especially high. There is a cheapness about it that was lacking not only in more leisurely epochs, such as the first half of the eighteenth century, but also in others as fervent as this. The same splendid intensity of effort pervaded the civilization of the Renaissance as pervades our own; yet the quality of the former civilization was incomparably finer than that of ours. Since the energy is equally admirable in either period, it can only be the nature of the results striven for that renders one period fine and the other cheap. Neither do I think that this was because the Renaissance was All for Art and Art for All (a thesis of which I am profoundly sceptical), whereas our own is--what it is. No, one cannot dismiss current civilization loftily by calling it ‘money-getting.’ When did people not desire money--all the money they could possibly get? Read the letters of great painters of the Renaissance. Their social status was equivocal, and their demands were difficult to enforce, but they drove the hardest bargains they could, and cared every bit as much for money as do modern realtors. The problem goes deeper than that.

What is this success, for which all are striving with magnificent energy, to achieve which brings wide acclaim, and to fail of achieving which relegates one to contemptuous indifference? As I have suggested, it is not merely money-making. We, too, have our artists, and (a more important fact) in business itself, to which most men turn perforce, there are other aims than just that one. To build up a flourishing business from a decrepit one results of course in money-making, must be tested by money-making; but it is the building-up, rather than the financial profit, that is recognized as success.

‘Recognized as success.’ Here we are getting warm. The recognition is essential. You cannot in our modern American-led civilization be a success without being recognized as one. And recognized by whom? By majority opinion. In other words, it is not sufficient that a small heterogeneous minority, who more or less understand the kind of thing you are trying to do, should consider you to have succeeded. The recognition must come from the large homogeneous majority. A man may do something sensitive and significant in one of a dozen fields, but unless he obtains this recognition he is set down as a failure.

Here is part of the trouble. For majorities are always wrong--except when they are right for the wrong reasons. (Not a maxim of my own, but of Time’s). It is invariably a minority that is right. But there are many minorities, with as many varying minds, and most of them prove in the long run as hopelessly wrong as the majority itself. There was once a minority that considered Oscar Wilde a very great author, and another that thought Rossetti a very great painter. True, there is always a minority that turns out to have been right--I mean, what the centuries simmer down to approximate ‘right’--on whatever subject was in question; but how to recognize it--the more as it is a heterogeneous minority?

Fortunately, one does not have to. Even a minority is too much. There is one, and only one, judge of true success: the man who has succeeded--or failed. He is corrupted by vanity, he may desire avidly the acclaim of the multitude, he is full of falsities and pretences, but, all alone by himself, he has moments of clairvoyance when he knows, as no one else ever can, whether he has succeeded or failed in what he tried to do, and just how significant his success was, or how wretched his failure.

In this lies the difference between the Renaissance (or any other period of fine quality--I have no special brief for the Renaissance) and our own period. Then it was the individual who finally decided what was worth while. True, in the arts (to which one turns because after so many centuries they are what chiefly remains to us of the period) there was, perhaps, an unusually sensitive, intelligent and powerful minority opinion; but did the artists very much heed that opinion? Not they! It was not good enough. Throughout all his life Leonardo experimented. What did he care for the judgment of the minority?

We have come a long way from that point of view to-day. Success is no longer success without the sanction of the majority. More than that, at bottom, success _is_ that sanction.

It is difficult to feel this condition of affairs as other than harmful. For while standardization of dress and behaviour are negligible evils, standardisation of thought comes pretty close to being the end, the abject death, of thought.

Take, too, that simplification of the facts, which I have mentioned as one of the essentials to modern success. Up to a certain point, and if the aim sought is worth while, it is admirable. The world is altogether too ‘full of a number of things’ not to demand their simplification for the attainment of a single purpose. Some of them must be lopped off. But the larger your majority, the more primitive the simplicity it demands, and the more drastic the pruning. It cuts off living branches along with the dead. Even so, if its aim were only significant! But what it is trying to do is to make a flag-staff out of an umbrella pine. An infinite number of instances, all richly different, capable of a hundred diverse developments--and the majority wants them all the same: one meagre jejune type that it can understand. A forest of flag-staffs!

Yet drill and organize them as we may, this sorry but infinitely exciting world continues, and will continue to eternity, to be made up of some hundreds of millions of individuals, each one, if we will let him be, blessedly different from all the others. Therefore, the effect on these of our present standards of success cannot conceivably be permanent. Neither, one surmises, can the standards themselves. But for the time being, while they endure, the effect is disastrous.

It is not only that the results of our civilization, by which it will be known to future generations, are essentially cheap. They, the future generations, will, it is to be hoped, accomplish other and better things. There is plenty of time. It is also that a finer, truer, if less transmittable form of success is rare to-day: I mean, the full, free, robust development of the individual, whether gifted or not. This, not objective results, is what it seems to me success should mean. If the individual is very gifted, his development will, indeed, bring with it results that may influence men even after his death; but that is by the way, the merest side-issue. It is not, in fact, about the very gifted individual that I am chiefly concerned. However unduly hampered, he will thrust his head up eventually into the free open air; he will develop somehow in his own way, despite majority opinion. But the man with one talent will go bury it in the ground. Every one will tell him he ought to, and he will readily see that he ought to himself. ‘Good Lord, man! Talents went out with the fall of the Roman Empire! Can you _buy_ anything with a talent? Just so much dead weight. Some day when you’re in a hurry, carrying it about will mean just those two seconds or difference that will make you miss the eight-twelve train to business. Has Jones got a talent? Have I got one? Go bury it quick!’

At first glimpse, this majority-ruled civilization appears a terribly strong, ruthless machine. Conform or be damned! Is it not akin to the stern puritanism of the early New England colonies? So a number of writers deem it, and therefore hate it, and cry out desperately against it. I am not so sure. Its results are, indeed, thin and cruel, but I am unable to see it as that fearful Juggernaut; the legend of its harsh strength leaves me unconvinced. For what is this majority opinion to which all must bow?

If a hundred million people really thought alike, it would be possible, even probable, that they were right. Not right, of course, on specialized subjects such as the doctrine of Relativity, the achievement and failures of Cubist painting, or the merits and defects of the Federal Reserve banking system, since these are matters which only a comparative few have the ability and training to understand, but tolerably right on the universal problems common to all men. But have we in America (which I take only as a symbol) a hundred million people who really think alike? We have not. We have not got a hundred million people who think at all. When you overhear pert snappy retorts hurled by waitresses or shop-girls at impudent young men, or quick lines got off by flappers at country-club dances, do you imagine that such crackling wit spatters spontaneously from these young ladies’ alert brains? Then you must indeed be out of touch with our civilization. Gleaned from the comic strips, echoed from the dialogues of vaudeville, its aim not to be original but the very latent thing. ‘You poor fish’--or ‘prune’ would be a hopelessly bad retort, being yesterday’s slang; ‘Wet smack’ (at the moment I write) a good one, being to-day’s.

Rising to higher matters, do you fancy that a hundred million Americans calling in chorus for the Americanization of immigrants, the conservation of the Nordic Race, and the election of Calvin Coolidge, signifies that the hundred million have reached their belief in the desirability of these things through processes of thought? Nonsense! A few individuals have patiently, cleverly, and with deadly repetition told them dramatically about these things in words of one syllable; and they have taken up the cry immensely, much as an insensate mountain hurls back tumultuous echoes of a single slender voice.