Part 2

This greyness follows Americans throughout their life and is due, I think, to our over-complication of and concentration upon the surface facts of existence. No matter what one does with existence, it remains a dull thing. Radios, motor cars, telephones, vacuum cleaners--they are all infinitely dull because they are all surface things that do not trouble the heart or the brain. Existence is dull, but life, underneath it, is a wild and thrilling adventure. What one does is nothing; what one believes and feels is everything. ‘After all,’ said William James, ‘the most important thing about a man is what he thinks about the universe.’ But if he does not think about it ...? For all its feverish activity, America does not seem to me to have the fever of living. I know of nothing more desolate than the exceedingly well done stories in the most widely read of our magazines, which, to judge from its immense circulation, must almost literally be ‘in every home.’ They are virtually all about the facile success in business of handsome young men with Arrow Collar souls. This tawdry shirking of life is, I believe (and I wish I did not believe it), the mental attitude of most Americans. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has revealed it with a clear, terrible perfection, Mr. Sinclair Lewis has satirized it tumultuously in terms of itself (and has thereby, ironically, become popular), and numerous others have revolted against it with futile bitterness. But there it is. And there, perhaps, it must remain till some great national disaster sweeps away at one stroke the glittering surface rubbish and the worship of it, and turns men’s thoughts inward upon the emotions and desperately evolved convictions that are real life and thrilling. The potentiality, the potential life, is there; it must be. We are men and women like other men and women. Life must be struggling beneath the choking surface. Women bear children in agony. Men love, toil, suffer hardships. It is only that our thoughts are directed elsewhere. It may be that if all our press, all our monthly and weekly magazines, and everything else that carries advertisements were wiped out for a single month, we should begin to live. For advertisements are responsible for no small part of the mischief. They waken our sense of romance or of beauty or of charm and then try to convince us that these feelings, which belong to life and have nothing to do with existence, can be thoroughly satisfied by cake made with a special kind of baking powder or by somebody’s chocolates or by perfume with an exotic name. Thus belittling the emotion they conjure up, they make us smile sheepishly at it--and then, in a half-hope, buy the chocolates or the perfume. They deliberately confuse our sense of values. They depict beauty as a genial strumpet for sale to any one at a reasonable price.

The word ‘beauty’ is at a discount to-day. One is wary of employing it. The trouble is that in the ’nineties of the last century a very loquacious group of aesthetes made a silly cult of the conception and thereby so cheapened the word itself that even after thirty years it has not quite recovered. This sort of thing always happens when an adjective is turned into a noun. (Not, of course, that this had not happened to the word ‘beautiful’ long before the eighteen-nineties--only never quite so hard). As an adjective it modified facts and was thus related to life; as a noun it is credited with an existence of its own and is thus divorced from life. ‘A beautiful woman’ or ‘a beautiful landscape’ means something very real and fairly definite, but ‘beauty’ all alone by itself means nothing at all, or is at best an abstraction to be used for convenience’ sake, and very carefully, in the midst of earthy life-giving facts. Repeatedly employed, it nauseates the hearer and reveals a lack of genuine feeling in the person who employs it. Where the quality belongs, that the word too often mars, is in life itself; it has no god-like existence of its own. There is no occasion to mention it in a low reverent voice or to turn it into a thin cult. But as just this has been so frequently done I have needed all this apologetic introduction before venturing to say that one of the reasons for which I live in Italy is the varied but almost universal beauty of the landscape that encircles me in nearly any part of that country. I trust it may be evidence of my cultless honesty in the matter when I say that I am not in a perpetual state of thrill about my surroundings (though, to be quite truthful, there do come rare, brief, and unexpected moments of lifting delight in some sudden touch of loveliness), but, rather, feel this quality of beauty in them as something friendly, breathed in with the air. Often, because of long familiarity with the landscape about me, I am not consciously aware that it is beautiful. Nevertheless, the fact that it is so is never quite forgotten. If, though with every possible advantage of space, leisure and friends, I had suddenly to live in Patterson, New Jersey, or in Superior, Wisconsin, something of tremendous importance would seem to me to have disappeared from my life, and a background of serenity that enables me happily to do the little that I can do as well as is possible for me would become a background to be at any moment consciously subdued before I should be able to achieve anything at all.

‘But all these things.’ a quite justifiably impatient reader might by now object, ‘are no better than theories. You, who are by way of being a writer, like and are able to live abroad, and it amuses you to depict this as advantageous. But is it really? Let us have facts. Discarding those degenerate rose-garden Americans, are there others to whom living abroad has been of actual benefit?’

Well, if by ‘benefit’ is meant actual benefit to achievement, I honestly cannot say. I know, or know of, a number of American writers and painters who live in France or Italy, and I cannot truthfully claim that I think any of their work as good as the best that is being done by some in America itself. But that, unfortunately, proves nothing. Their number, of course, is very small compared with the number of those at home, and among these last only a handful are achieving work of consequence. The significant question (which it is quite impossible to answer) is whether these transplanted Americans are painting better pictures or writing better books than, given the limitations of their talent, they would have been able to write or paint had they stayed at home.

If, on the other hand, the word ‘benefit’ is to be taken in a wider sense than simply that of creative achievement, I can at once answer the question in the affirmative, without (thank heaven!) having to confine myself to artists and authors. One does not come readily to know these expatriates of the best sort. They are isolated individuals who value their isolation. (It is the rose-garden people who at first acquaintance press you, with a pathetic wistfulness, to come to tea or dinner at their villas). But some, to my good fortune, I do know, and I hear quiet rumours of others--individuals scattered here and there, not all of them by any means writers, painters or composers, but solitary absorbed students of this or that period or local fragment of a period, or even only (_only?_) of the intense modern life about them. Useless? I do not think so. Being, necessarily, of independent means (though it is astounding on how slender an income they are often content to live), it is not essential for them to go on making money. Yet that, if they had remained in America, is probably what the force of public opinion would have compelled them to do. Instead of studying the development of the Commedia dell’ Arte or the annals of the Medici or the history of the Risorgimento or the development of co-operatives in pre-Fascista Italy, they would have been selling bonds or juggling with real estate. It is not probable that one would have found them useful members of more serious professions, since it was precisely for that study of the Commedia dell’ Arte or co-operatives that their minds were really fitted. And even if the bits of curious knowledge that they dig up are of no external value, or, though of some small value, are not passed on to others, individuals of this sort are not without use both to their adopted country and to the one they have deserted. In their infinitesimal way they help toward the distant mutual understanding of two races. They spin one thin spider’s thread across the Atlantic. For they respect and partly understand the people among whom they live, and are respected and partly understood by these. Some day, if the world lasts that long, a vast number of such threads, entwined, will make a cable that will bind two countries together as no governmental treaties or commercial agreements or grandiloquent speeches by distinguished momentary guests will ever bind them. It is not without significance that on the outbreak of the war Americans living in Germany sided with the Germans, Americans in France with the French. It indicated that through daily intercourse such Americans had begun to see into the hearts of another people, and had found them individuals like themselves. Given enough of this peaceful interpenetration among all nations, war would surely become more difficult.

Yet it is not the problematic value to others of the knowledge these expatriated Americans acquire nor their slight influence upon international relations that appears to me their real importance, but what they have, quietly and almost unconsciously, done with themselves. The few individuals of this sort whom it is my privilege to know seem to me more fully developed, rounded, and, especially, grown-up than they could possibly have become except through this way of living. I have even now more friends, if vastly fewer acquaintances, in America than in Europe, but not one among them is as mature and mellowed as are these expatriates. They have, the latter, a tolerance, an illusionless sympathy for mankind and an insight into human motives. They see men solely as individuals.

Take, for example, my friend Etheredge (that is not his name). In a way it is not fair to do this, since, to my mind at least, he is so very much more of a person than any of the few other expatriates of this sort whom I know as to be uncharacteristic. Nevertheless, he could not have become what he seems to me to be without his many years of living abroad, and also there is something to be said for taking not the average but the finest exceptional result as a study of a type.

I first met Etheredge fourteen years ago, shortly after he had come to live in Europe. He happens to be a painter (as also is his wife), but I am not myself capable of judging as to whether he is a good painter or not. Some of his pictures (which become increasingly abstract) move me; some do not. I have heard supposedly competent critics say that they were very good indeed, and others, equally expert, that they were very poor. To tell the truth, I do not care in the least which they are. By all American Standards Etheredge would, I suppose, be accounted a failure, since he can hardly ever sell his pictures, and then for a wretched price. And for that, too, I do not care in the least. It is in his personality that Etheredge seems to me really important.

Even fourteen years ago, at thirty, he had an arresting personality. There was something at once quiet and eager about him, as though he were questioning everything without quarrelling with anything, which struck me as rare. But I should not at that time have set him down as a success. He had not yet found himself. He was not yet sufficient to himself. Now, after fourteen years, he is. I know no one else who is so completely rounded a personality, who accepts so simply the external world and is so little troubled by it. He has built around himself a wall not of indifference but of acceptance, against which waves break unavailingly, within which he lives with his whole self, serenely, gently and richly.

All this that I feel about Etheredge I express badly. I cannot successfully put it into words. I make him sound smug and even selfish, whereas he has come very near to abolishing self--and thus has grown the more. The best I can do is to give up the attempt at portrayal and fall back on a few tangible results. Thus, I am not alone in my estimate of Etheredge. Quiet and unassuming though he is, people of distinction gravitate toward him. He has, to my knowledge, exerted a profound influence on three creative artists of international fame and upon a number of other individuals of even greater sensitiveness and fineness of character if of less effective talent. Again, if financial disaster were to overtake me to-morrow, Etheredge would, I know, share with me whatever he has. But it is not that which is of importance (he was always generous), but the fact that, though his income is very small, this would honestly seem to him now no hardship, of no importance. Yet again, neither he nor his wife has ever made a single sacrifice to comfort. They continue to live in one after another of the most inaccessible places in all Italy--places with no water, places with no light, places with toilet facilities straight out of the Stone Age. To plan a Tour of Discomfort I could hardly do better than enumerate the villages where they have lived. If this were ever for them an act of heroism, if they ever gave an impression of struggling bravely against heavy odds for the sake of the Higher Life, I should consider such behaviour with distaste. But they never do. They simply ignore the discomfort. All that mattered to them was that each of these places was a place of singular beauty and interest. They _liked_ living in them. And, whether I have made you feel Etheredge as important or have failed to do so, it must, with this, surely be apparent that his kind of development would be all but impossible in America.

There are things about Etheredge that exasperate me at times. I cannot, for instance, understand both his and his wife’s failure to learn the language. Their Italian is distressing. Now Italian shopkeepers and servants are no worse than those or other countries--if anything, I think, a little better, being capable of extraordinary acts of generosity toward suddenly impoverished clients--but undoubtedly their dominant thought in the presence of strange and presumably wealthy foreigners living, heaven knows why, in their midst, and with difficulty stammering mistakenly a few phrases of the language, is that the Lord has delivered these into their hands. Accordingly, Etheredge and his wife have been the victims of a long series of minor frauds and peculations. I do not know why this should annoy me, but it does. It does not annoy them; they disregard it.

Similarly, I am at times annoyed by Etheredge’s indifference to the social movements that swirl madly around us all. It is, for instance, impossible for me to watch the progress of Fascismo coolly. I feel grudging admiration for the machine, resentment at the suppression of free speech, bitterness at the cynical pretence of constitutionalism. I cannot, in other words, keep Fascismo out of my life, any more than I can keep out the problems of international relations, German indemnities and the war debts. Etheredge can. He scarcely, I believe, thinks about these things at all; certainly he does not think about them passionately.

In this, I know at heart, I am wrong and he is profoundly right. For it is on my part, and would be on his, a waste of energy to puzzle and think and fume over these questions. Neither he nor I is fitted to cope with them; neither of us can have the faintest influence upon them. And, indeed, gigantic though they loom above the world to-day, they are but ephemeral phenomena. Beneath, far beneath, lies the only truth--the perplexed, troubled, struggling, human soul. Only contact with individuals can have significance, either to them or to oneself. To such relationships and to the beliefs and questions arising from them Etheredge devotes his fine unwasted strength.

The influence he exerts is deep but not wide, and its necessarily narrow range is, in my saner moments, the only thing I hold against him. Here, I think, is a man of rare sympathy, insight and character. Must his influence be exerted only upon the small number of individuals whom he can personally know? Well, of course, there are his pictures, at which he works with intense and persistent energy. They must to some extent express his personality, and if the critics who call them good are in the right they will doubtless some day reach a wider circle than that of personal acquaintanceship. But, even so, comparatively few will see them, and of these only a small proportion be able to understand clearly the fine spirit they express. Another insoluble problem.

But, as I meditate upon it, I have a sudden happy suspicion that here, too, I am in the wrong, still believing despite myself in widespread movements, organization and the like. Perhaps, after all, the finest and most hopeful thing about an apparently sorry world is that over its surface are sparsely strewn men and women of matured developed charm or intelligence or perception, who exert unconsciously the influence of their personality on those in immediate touch with them. Why expect or ask for more than this? And, certainly, if some of these can only attain full self-development through living in another country than their own, for their sake we can well afford to disregard the larger number of silly snobs and rose-garden idlers that such a life creates.

ZENITH

If Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s fine novel, _Babbitt_, is simply the story of George F. Babbitt, the only adverse comment I can make upon it is to question whether that gentleman deserved such detailed and careful study. One thing is certain: he does not deserve it a whit more if, as some newspaper has asserted, there are ten million of him than if there is only one.

But there are indications that Mr. Lewis intended also to depict the city of Zenith and to show Babbitt and his friends as typical of its spirit, to do with this novel for the city what he attempted to do in _Main Street_ for the village. True, there are circles above Babbitt, in which move William Eathorne, the banker (magnificently sketched), and the McKelveys (not realized at all). And one is made to feel intensely that beneath the all-too-articulate Babbitt and his friends are toiling, almost inarticulate masses. ‘At that moment in Zenith, three hundred and forty or fifty thousand Ordinary People were asleep, a vast unpenetrated shadow.’ Nevertheless, it appears to me that in Babbitt, Vergil Gunch, Howard Littlefield, and the others, Mr. Lewis intended to typify the dominant spirit of Zenith. Indeed, if they did not typify it, if they were not significant of anything greater than themselves, he would hardly have taken such pains to depict them. ‘Vergil Gunch summed it up: “Fact is, we’re mighty lucky to be living among a bunch of city-folks, that recognize artistic things and business punch equally. We’d feel pretty glum if we got stuck in some Main Street burg....”’ This sounds very like special pleading.

Well, I recently spent a summer in Zenith. At least, it may well have been Zenith. It is in the same part of the Middle-West and it looks like the city Mr. Lewis describes. True, it has only 150,000 inhabitants, whereas Mr. Lewis claims 340,000 for his city. But Mr. Lewis is himself sufficiently of the Middle-West to be unreliable on this subject. And, to tell the truth, his city does not feel like a city of 340,000. The social items in its newspapers are too boisterous and unsophisticated; it has, apparently, neither orchestra nor art gallery. No, Mr. Lewis’s Zenith is my Zenith. But if this essay should happen to meet his eye, and he should protest that I have selected a city quite different from his, called it Zenith, and then set out to prove that it was not what he said it was, I can only reply that he may be right, but that if the Babbitts are not typical of a city of 150,000, still less are they likely to be of a city of 340,000.

As I say, I recently spent a summer in Zenith; but any observations that I make are not based solely on that single visit. My parents moved to Zenith when I was six years old--which, alas, was long enough ago to make them Old Residents by now; I lived there as a child, as a boy, and during my summer vacations from college; and I have returned to Zenith for six months or so every two or three years since. I have seen the city grow and have noted the changes more sharply for the intervening years of absence. And I assert that Zenith is not at all in spirit the kind of place that Mr. Lewis implies.

Of course I did not know, not really know, even one individual among the toiling throngs in the factories, at the steel plant, in the cement works. How should I? And I did not know the Babbitt group, save, superficially, a member here and there. But I observed them on the streets and heard them talk in hotel lobbies, and I admired the accuracy of Mr. Lewis’s eye and ear. The people I played with were the people who take their diversion at the Country Club or give dinners at the Zenith Club in the city proper. I saw them, too, at work in their offices: lawyers, doctors, railwaymen, brokers, architects, contractors, merchants; young men of twenty-five to forty; middle-aged men of forty to sixty-five; and their wives and daughters. A not unfair cross-section of Zenith life, once the hopeless separation from the vastly larger mass of manual labour beneath is admitted, and I think they were more numerous than the Babbitts. Of course I do not profess to have known them all; but I am not concerned with their numbers. The point is that they _were_ Zenith. They gave the city its tone; you felt them in looking at the blocks and blocks of handsome houses; they made the Babbitts appear not so much shoddy as unrepresentative, insignificant; their composite soul was the soul of Zenith.

What, then, were these people like? In any profound sense that is a difficult question to answer. There was a deep similarity among them; something important that they all had in common, but something that was very hard to get at. It is, however, easy to say what they were not like. They were not like the Babbitts; they were not at all like the McKelveys or Horace Updike, the people whom George Babbitt longed to know; they were not like the characters in Mr. Hergesheimer’s _Cytherea_, nor like those in Margaret Banning’s _Country Club People_. They were less sophisticated, if to be sophisticated means to have a weary air and to say cynical things cleverly; they were more so, if it means to be reasonably well educated, to stand unconsciously for some reality (no matter what), and to have ease of manner.

The strongest impression they made on me was that of smoothness. Their homes ran quietly, despite perpetual servant trouble; they entertained easily; even the weekly dinner-dance at the Country Club gave me a sense of smoothness that was rather delightful. The immense dining-room would be crowded--scores of big tables and little tables almost uncomfortably filled; but there seemed to be no friction, and the voices were a well-modulated hum, pleasant to hear. People did not seem to get in one another’s way; and that was true mentally as well as physically. They were very well-bred and they were not at all self-conscious. Almost, these people, collectively, had grace. A kind of delightful suavity surrounded them, that was like the suavity of their smoothly running Packards and Cadillacs.