Part 2

In the second argument of the abolitionists there is more force, but even here, I believe, the ground under them is very shaky. Their fundamental error consists in assuming that the whole aim of punishing criminals is to deter other (potential) criminals--that we hang or electrocute A simply in order to so alarm B that he will not kill C. This, I believe, is an assumption almost as inaccurate as those which must be made by a Federal judge. It confuses a part with the whole. Deterrence, obviously, is _one_ of the aims of punishment, but it is surely not the only one. On the contrary, there are at least half a dozen, and some of them are probably quite as important. At least one of them, practically considered, is _more_ important. Commonly, it is described as revenge, but revenge is really not the word for it. I borrow a better term from the late Aristotle: _katharsis_. _Katharsis_, so used, means a salubrious discharge of emotions, a healthy letting off of steam. A schoolboy, disliking his teacher, deposits a tack upon the pedagogical chair; the teacher jumps and the boy laughs. This is _katharsis_. A bootlegger, paying off a Prohibition agent, gives him a counterfeit $10 bill; the agent, dropping it in the collection plate on Sunday, is arrested and jailed. This is also _katharsis_. A subscriber to a newspaper, observing his name spelled incorrectly in the report of a lodge meeting, spreads a report that the editor of the paper did not buy Liberty Bonds. This again is _katharsis_.

What I contend is that one of the prime objects of judicial punishments is to afford this grateful _katharsis_ (a) to the immediate victims of the criminal punished, and (b) to the general body of moral and timorous men. These persons, and particularly the first group, are concerned only indirectly with deterring other criminals. The thing they crave primarily is the satisfaction of seeing the criminal before them suffer as he made them suffer. What they want is the peace of mind that goes with the feeling that accounts are squared. Until they get that satisfaction they are in a state of emotional tension, and hence unhappy. The instant they get it they are comfortable. I do not argue that this yearning is noble; I simply argue that it is almost universal among human beings. In the face of injuries that are unimportant and can be borne without damage it may yield to higher impulses; that is to say, it may yield to what is called Christian charity. But it never so yields when the injury is serious, and gives substantial permanent satisfaction to the person inflicting it. Here Christianity is adjourned, and even saints reach for their sidearms. The better the Christian, in fact, the more violent his demand for _katharsis_--once he has unloaded the Beatitudes. At the time of the Leopold-Loeb trial in Chicago the evangelical pastors of the town bawled for blood unanimously, and even a Catholic priest joined them. On lower levels, it is plainly asking too much of human nature to expect it to conquer so natural an impulse. A keeps a store and has a bookkeeper, B. B steals $700, invests it in Texas oil stocks, and is cleaned out. What is A to do? Let B go? If he does so he will be unable to sleep at night. The sense of injury, of injustice, will keep him awake. So he turns B over to the police, and they send him to prison. Thereafter A can sleep. More, he has pleasant dreams. He pictures B chained to the wall of a dungeon a hundred feet underground, devoured by rats. It is so agreeable that it makes him forget his $700. He has got his _katharsis_.

The same thing precisely takes place on a larger scale when there is a crime which destroys a whole community’s feeling of security. Every law-abiding citizen feels menaced and frustrated until the criminals have been struck down--until the communal capacity to get even with them, and more than even, has been dramatically demonstrated. Here the business of deterring others is no more than an afterthought. The main thing is to destroy the scoundrels whose act has alarmed everyone, and thus made everyone unhappy. Until they are brought to book that unhappiness continues; when the law has been executed upon them there is a sigh of relief. In other words, there is _katharsis_.

There is no public demand for the death penalty for ordinary crimes, even for ordinary homicides. Its infliction, say, for necking, for playing poker or for bootlegging would shock all men of normal decency of feeling--that is to say, practically all men save the evangelical clergy and their lay catchpolls. But for crimes involving the deliberate and inexcusable taking of human life, by men openly defiant of all civilized order--for such crimes it seems, to nine men out of ten, a just and proper punishment. Any lesser punishment leaves them feeling that the criminal has got the better of society--that he can add insult to injury by laughing. That feeling is intensely unpleasant, and no wonder! It can be dissipated only by a recourse to _katharsis_, the invention of the aforesaid Aristotle. That _katharsis_ is most effectively and economically achieved, as human nature now is, by wafting the criminal to realms of bliss.

4

_War_

My mail is flooded with the briefs and broadsides of pacifist organizations, damning war as a curse and those who make it as scoundrels. Such literature I always read attentively, for it is full of racy satire against the military, a class of men inevitably more or less ludicrous in time of peace. But does it convert me to the pacifist cause, which, as the pacifists contend, is the cause of God? I can only report simply that it does not. I read it, enjoy it, pass it on to my pastor--and go on believing in war myself. War is the only sport, so far as I know, that is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport that has any intelligible use.

The arguments that are brought against it are chiefly arguments, not against the thing itself, but only against its political accompaniments and consequences, most of them transient and gratuitous. They reached a high tide of obnoxiousness, revolting to all self-respecting men, during the last great moral combat. That combat was carried on, at least from this side of the fence, in a grossly hysterical, disingenuous, cowardly and sordid manner. The high participating parties were vastly alarmed by the foe, and insanely eager to keep business going as usual, and even better than usual. The result was that the thing began as a sort of Methodist revival and ended as a raid on a gentleman’s winecellar, with the Prohibition agents fighting among themselves for the best jugs. The richest of them, once peace came, began sending the others extortionate bills for the brass-knuckles, Bibles and jimmies that all had used in common, and the heroes serving this usurer began demanding tips in cash. But all that swinishness, I submit, had no necessary connection with war itself. It is perfectly possible to conduct war in a gallant and honorable manner, and without using it as a mere cloak to rob noncombatants. More, the thing has been done, and many times in the history of the world. If it has been seldom done by democratic nations, then blame democracy, not war. In democratic nations everything noble and of good account tends to decay and smell badly.

War itself, in its pure form, is something quite different. It is a combat of men who believe that a short and adventurous life, full of changing scenes and high hazards, is better than a safe and dull one--in other words, that it is better to have lived magnificently than to have lived long. In this doctrine I am unable to discern anything properly describable as fallacy. If you argue that, assuming every man to embrace it, the human race would come to an end, I reply at once that you assume something wholly impossible. And if you argue that the life of a warrior is not actually magnificent, then I report that the warrior should be permitted to judge of that himself. Against all such arguments lie the plain facts that the great races of the world have always been more or less warlike, and that war has attracted the talent and satisfied the aspiration of some of their best men. I do not speak of antiquity alone; I speak of our own time. The English, the Germans and the French are all warlike, to-day as always--and if you took away the English, the Germans and the French _Homo sapiens_ would be shorn of his stomach, his liver and his ductless glands. If war is immoral, then these great races are all immoral, and so are their greatest men. The pacifists, of course, do not shrink from that absurd argument. But the more they maintain it the more it becomes evident that, as logicians, they are on all fours with the Prohibitionists.

War, so conducted by warriors, is a superb business and full of high uses. It makes for resolution, endurance, enterprise, courage. It puts down the sordid yearnings of ignoble men. Does it, incidentally, shed some blood? Does it cost lives? The pacifists, discussing those lives, always enmesh themselves in the theory that, without war, they would go on forever. It is, I believe, not so. War, at worst, shortens them somewhat. But at the same stroke it speeds up their tempo. The net result is simply a matter of bookkeeping. A man killed at thirty, after six months of war, has lived far longer than a man dead of a bellyache at sixty, after forty-five years on an office stool.

But I am not on my legs to-day to sing the charms and glories of war; my purpose is to argue that, whether glorious or not, it will remain inevitable on this sad mud-pie so long as the great races of men retain the view of it that I have described, and to deduce therefrom the doctrine that pacifism, as a scheme of practical politics, is thus not only unsound but also very dangerous. All that it could conceivably accomplish, imagining it to succeed anywhere, would be to make the nation embracing it highly vulnerable--in brief, a sort of boozy idealist or unarmored butter-and-egg man, roaming the world unprotected, and so holding out irresistible temptations to less moral and more realistic nations.

War, under the sorry scheme that now passes for civilization, has been degraded--transiently only, I hope and believe--to the uses of robbery. Whoever has gold must have an army to guard it, or resign himself to losing it. Especially must he have a guard for it if his public repute is that of one with a not too fine understanding of the difference between _meum_ and _tuum_. Such a reputation, it must be manifest, is precisely that of the United States to-day. The rest of the world is so passionately convinced that it is a thief that robbing it would take on the high virtue and dignity of a constabulary act. It is not robbed because it is strong. It will not be robbed until it grows weak.

But armed strength, argue the pacifists, does not prevent war: it causes it. Who, reading history, could believe in such transparent nonsense? Let us turn to the late enemy. What kept the peace in Europe for forty-four years if it was not the mighty German army? If it had been weak, France would have struck in 1875, and again in 1882, and again in 1887, and again every two years thereafter. It took nearly half a century to roll up a force sufficient to tackle the colossus, and it took four years to bring it down even then. Our own history is full of examples to the same effect. In 1867 Napoleon III, believing that the United States was war weary and its army disbanded, prepared to move into Mexico and tear the Monroe Doctrine to tatters. He overlooked the large forces engaged in burning barns, robbing hen-roosts and raiding cellars in the late Confederacy. When General Sheridan marched upon the Rio Grande at the head of this army of heroes, Napoleon changed his mind. Three years later he was disposed of by the Germans, and the Continent settled down to forty-four years of peace.

Consider, again, the Venezuela episode. When President Cleveland sent his message to Congress on December 17, 1895, war with England became imminent overnight. What prevented it? Was it the fact that the United States had no army worthy of the name? Or the fact that the United States had a brand-new, highly effective and immensely pugnacious navy, notoriously eager to try its guns? Come, now, to 1898. Of all the nations of Europe, only England sided with us against Spain. The Germans, at Manila, went to great lengths to show their hostility. Did they refrain from attacking Dewey because his fleet was smaller and weaker than theirs, or because it was larger and stronger?

I could multiply instances, but observe the timekeeper reaching for the gong. So far as I know, there is no record in history of a nation that ever gained anything valuable by being unable to defend itself. Such nations, true enough, have sometimes managed to exist for a time--but at what cost! There is the case of Denmark to-day. It is discussing disbanding its army on the ground that any probable or even possible foe could dispose of that army in five days. But what does this mean? It means that the Danes must reconcile themselves to living by the sheer grace of their stronger neighbors--that they must be willing, when the time comes, to see their country made a battle-ground by those neighbors, and without raising a hand. Here I do not indulge in idle talk: I am quoting almost literally a member of the Danish cabinet.

I can’t imagine the people of a truly great nation submitting to any such ignominious destiny. The Danes have been forced into acquiescence by their weakness. But why should the United States invite the same fate by putting off its strength?

II. FOUR MAKERS OF TALES

1

_Conrad_

Some time ago I put in a blue afternoon re-reading Joseph Conrad’s “Youth.” A _blue_ afternoon? What nonsense! The touch of the man is like the touch of Schubert. One approaches him in various and unhappy moods: depressed, dubious, despairing; one leaves him in the clear, yellow sunshine that Nietzsche found in Bizet’s music. But here again the phrase is inept. Sunshine suggests the imbecile, barnyard joy of the human kohlrabi--the official optimism of a steadily delighted and increasingly insane Republic. What the enigmatical Pole has to offer is something quite different. If its parallel is to be found in music, it is not in Schubert, but in Beethoven--perhaps even more accurately in Johann Sebastian Bach. It is the joy, not of mere satisfaction, but of understanding--the profound but surely not merry delight which goes with the comprehension of a fundamental fact--above all, of a fact that has been coy and elusive. Certainly the order of the world that Conrad sets forth with such diabolical eloquence and plausibility is no banal moral order, no childish sequence of virtuous causes and edifying effects. Rather it has an atheistic and even demoniacal smack: to the earnest Bible student it must be more than a little disconcerting. The God he visualizes is no loving papa in a house-coat and carpet-slippers, inculcating the great principles of Christian ethics by applying occasional strokes _a posteriori_. What he sees is something quite different: an extremely ingenious and humorous Improvisatore and Comedian, with a dab of red on His nose and maybe somewhat the worse for drink--a furious and far from amiable banjoist upon the human spine, and rattler of human bones. Kurtz, in “Youth,” makes a capital banjo for that exalted and cynical talent. And the music that issues forth--what a superb _Hexentanz_ it is!

One of the curiosities of critical stupidity is the doctrine that Conrad is without humor. No doubt it flows out of a more general error; to wit, the assumption that tragedy is always pathetic, that death itself is inevitably a gloomy business. That error, I suppose, will persist in the world until some extraordinary astute mime conceives the plan of playing “King Lear” as a farce--I mean deliberately. That it _is_ a farce seems to me quite as obvious as the fact that “Romeo and Juliet” is another, this time lamentably coarse. To adopt the contrary theory--to view it as a great moral and spiritual spectacle, capable of purging and uplifting the psyche like marriage to a red-haired widow or a month in the trenches--to toy with such notions is to borrow the critical standards of a party of old ladies weeping over the damnation of the heathen. In point of fact, death, like love, is intrinsically farcical--a solemn kicking of a brick under a plug-hat--, and most other human agonies, once they transcend the physical--_i. e._, the unescapably real--have far more of irony in them than of pathos. Looking back upon them after they have eased one seldom shivers: one smiles--perhaps sourly but nevertheless spontaneously. This, at all events, is the notion that seems to me implicit in every line of Conrad. I give you “Heart of Darkness” as the archetype of his whole work and the keystone of his metaphysical system. Here we have all imaginable human hopes and aspirations reduced to one common denominator of folly and failure, and here we have a play of humor that is infinitely mordant and searching. Turn to pages 136 and 137 of the American edition--the story is in the volume called “Youth”--: the burial of the helmsman. Turn then to 178-184: Marlow’s last interview with Kurtz’s intended. The farce mounts by slow stages to dizzy and breath-taking heights. One hears harsh roars of cosmic laughter, vast splutterings of transcendental mirth, echoing and reëchoing down the black corridors of empty space. The curtain descends at last upon a wild dance in a dissecting-room. The mutilated dead rise up and jig....

It is curious, re-reading a thrice-familiar story, how often one finds surprises in it. I have been amazed, toward the close of “The End of the Tether,” to discover that the _Fair Maid_ was wrecked, not by the deliberate act of Captain Whalley, but by the machination of the unspeakable Massy. How is one to account for so preposterous an error? Certainly I thought I knew “The End of the Tether” as well as I knew anything in this world--and yet there was that incredible misunderstanding of it, lodged firmly in my mind. Perhaps there is criticism of a sort in my blunder: it may be a fact that the old skipper willed the thing himself--that his willing it is visible in all that goes before--that Conrad, in introducing Massy’s puerile infamy at the end, made some sacrifice of inner veracity to the exigencies of what, at bottom, is somewhat too neat and well-made a tale. The story, in fact, belongs to the author’s earlier manner; I guess that it was written before “Youth” and surely before “Heart of Darkness.” But for all that, its proportions remain truly colossal. It is one of the most magnificent narratives, long or short, old or new, in the English language, and with “Youth” and “Heart of Darkness” it makes up what is probably the best book of imaginative writing that the English literature of the Twentieth Century can yet show. Conrad learned a great deal after he wrote it, true enough. In “Lord Jim,” in “Victory,” and, above all, in a “A Personal Record,” there are momentary illuminations, blinding flashes of brilliance that he was incapable of in those days of experiment; but no other book of his seems to me to hold so steadily to so high a general level--none other, as a whole, is more satisfying and more marvelous. There is in “Heart of Darkness” a perfection of design which one encounters only rarely and miraculously in prose fiction: it belongs rather to music. I can’t imagine taking a single sentence out of that stupendous tale without leaving a visible gap; it is as thoroughly _durch componiert_ as a fugue. And I can’t imagine adding anything to it, even so little as a word, without doing it damage. As it stands it is austerely and beautifully perfect, just as the slow movement of the Unfinished Symphony is perfect.

I observe of late a tendency to examine the English of Conrad rather biliously. This folly is cultivated chiefly in England, where, I suppose, chauvinistic motives enter into the matter. It is the just boast of great empires that they draw in talents from near and far, exhausting the little nations to augment their own puissance; it is their misfortune that these talents often remain defectively assimilated. Conrad remained the Slav to the end. The people of his tales, whatever he calls them, are always as much Slavs as he is; the language in which he describes them retains a sharp, exotic flavor. But to say that this flavor constitutes a blemish is to say something so preposterous that only schoolmasters and their dupes may be thought of as giving it credit. The truly first-rate writer is not one who uses the language as such dolts demand that it be used; he is one who reworks it in spite of their prohibitions. It is his distinction that he thinks in a manner different from the thinking of ordinary men; that he is free from that slavery to embalmed ideas which makes them so respectable and so dull. Obviously, he cannot translate his notions into terms of everyday without doing violence to their inner integrity; as well ask a Richard Strauss to funnel all his music into the chaste jugs of Prof. Dr. Jadassohn. What Conrad brought into English literature was a new concept of the relations between fact and fact, idea and idea, and what he contributed to the complex and difficult art of writing English was a new way of putting words together. His style now amazes and irritates pedants because it does not roll along in the old ruts. Well, it is precisely that rolling along in the old ruts that he tried to avoid--and it was precisely that avoidance which made him what he is. What lies under most of his alleged sins seems to me to be simple enough: he views English logically and analytically, and not through a haze of senseless traditions and arbitrary taboos. No Oxford mincing is in him. If he cannot find his phrase above the salt, he seeks it below. His English, in a word, is innocent. And if, at times, there gets into it a color that is strange and even bizarre, then the fact is something to rejoice over, for a living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small internal hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transfusions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.