Part 7
"I'll tell you. Right across the hall from where my wife and me live there's a lovely woman, a Jewess, one of the nicest people you could want to meet, and I'm in her house and she's in mine all the time, until her husband comes home. But he's one of that kind, you know! The other night he comes home with three friends and he says to me, 'Say, Charlie, come on down to Long Island with us in the car for a week. I'll pay all your expenses!' 'You will, eh,' I says. 'Now I'll tell you something. That sort of thing don't go with me. In the first place, you know I can't get leave to be away from the police department for a week; in the second place, you know I can't leave my wife here; in the third place, you know damn well I can't afford to go with you. I know your kind! You have your three friends here and you want them to see what a great guy you are. Well, I'll tell you what you are,' and I told him. Now he'll be the same if he has a million. And I'll tell you another kind that hasn't respectability. No, I mean decency. She was a big fat woman and her baby was crying here the other day, and she opened her dress right there and leaned down to feed the child. You know, just like that statue, I forget the name. And all the little boys rubbering around. That's the class of people you have to contend with around here in this place, with the air full of fish guts they throw out of the windows, and everything."
"But the German ones are different. Not that I want to praise the Germans or the like of that, but they're self-respectful, you know. It's the lack of education with them others--those others."
"But you put the Socialists in power and what difference will it make? I'm--I'm not against Socialism, I want you to understand. But there's human nature!"
A PERSONAL PANTHEON
Not long ago, in the Metropolitan Magazine, Clarence Day shied a cocoanut at old Henri Fabre. Personally I had nothing against Henri. I rather liked him. But I was extremely cheered when Clarence said publicly, "that old bird-artist, you don't have to admire him any longer." Without waiting for further encouragement I bounced Henri off the steps of my Pantheon.
Have you a little Pantheon? It is necessary, I admit, but nothing is so important as to keep it from getting crowded with half-gods. For many months my own Pantheon has been seriously congested. Most of the ancient deities are still around--George Meredith and Walt Whitman and Tom Hardy and Sam Butler--and there is a long waiting list suggested by my friends. Joseph Conrad has been sitting in the lobby for several years, hungering for a vacant pedestal, and I have had repeated applications from such varied persons as Tchekov, R. Browning, J. J. Rousseau, Anatole France, Huxley, Dante, Alexander Hamilton, P. Shelley, John Muir, George Washington and Mary Wollstonecraft. But with so many occupants already installed, with so many strap-hangers crushed in, it has been impossible to open the doors to newcomers. My gods are like the office-holders--few die and none resign. And when a happy accident occurs, like the demolition of Henri Fabre, I feel as one feels when some third person is good enough to smash the jardiniere.
I was troubled by Woodrow Wilson for a while. Two or three years ago he swept into the Pantheon on a wave of popularity, and there was no excuse for turning him out. He was one of the stiffest gods I had ever encountered. His smile, his long jaw, his smoothness, made him almost a Tussaud figure among the free Lincolns and Trelawnys and William Blakes. I stood him in the corner when he first arrived, debating where to put him, but at no time did I discover a pedestal for him. Young Teddy Junior helped me to like Woodrow. So did Mr. Root and Mr. Smoot. So did Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge. But what, after all, had kept Mr. Wilson from being a Republican? How did he differ intrinsically from a Henry Stimson, a Nicholas Murray Butler, a Theodore Burton? The pedestal stood gaping for him, and yet I had not the heart to enthrone him; and never shall I enthrone him now. Now I look upon him with the flat pulse and the unfluttered heart of a common and commonplace humanity. He is President, as was Taft. So is he impressive. But the expectation I had blown up for him is punctured. He would have been a god, despite all my prejudice against his styles, if at any time he had proved himself to be the resolute democrat. But the resolute democrat he was not. He was just an ordinary college president inflating his chest as well as he could, and he has to get out of my Pantheon.
This eviction of the President relieves my feelings like a good spring cleaning. To be con-structive gives me pleasure, but not half so much pleasure as to be de-structive, to cast out the junk of my former mental and spiritual habitations. A great many people are catholic. They have hearts in which Stepping Heavenward abides with Dumas and East Lynne. I envy these people and their receptive natures, but my own chief joy is to asphyxiate my young enthusiasms, to deliver myself from the bondage of loyalty.
There is Upton Sinclair. I was so afraid I was unjust to Upton Sinclair that I almost subscribed to his weekly, and when I saw his new novel, Jimmie Higgins, I actually read it.
"My best book," Mr. Sinclair assures the world. If that is really the case, as I hope, I am happily emancipated from him forever. He is something of an artist. He converts into his own kind of music the muck-rake element in contemporary journalism. He is always a propagandist, and out of religious finance or the war or high society or the stockyards or gynecology he can distill a sort of jazz-epic that nobody can consider dull. But if one is to act on such stimulants, one ought to choose them carefully, and I'd much rather go straight to Billy Sunday than take my fire water from Upton Sinclair. Once on reading his well-known health books, I nearly fasted nine days under his influence. That is to say, I fasted twenty-four hours. The explosions of which I dreamt at the end of that heroic famine convinced me that I was perhaps a coarser organism than Mr. Sinclair suspected, and I resumed an ordinary diet. But until I had a good reason for expelling this uncomfortable idealist from my Pantheon I was always in danger of taking him seriously. Now, I am glad to say, I have a formula for him, and I am safe.
Nietzsche is the kind of sublime genius to whom Upton Sinclair is nothing but a gargoyle; yet the expulsion of Nietzsche was also required. When we used to read the _New Age_ ten years ago, with Oscar Levy's steady derision of everything and anything not Nietzschean, I had a horrible sense of inadequacy, and I started out to read the Master's works. It was a noble undertaking, but futile. Slave and worm as I was, I found Nietzsche upsetting all the other fellows in the Pantheon. He and William Blake fought bitterly over the meaning of Christianity. Abraham Lincoln disgusted him with funny stories. He was sulky with George Meredith and frigid with Balzac and absurdly patronizing to Miss Jane Addams. It pained me to get rid of him, but I voted him away.
This Olympian problem does not seem to bother men like William Marion Reedy. Mr. Reedy is the sort of human being who can combine Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay, single tax and spiritualism, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. He knows brewers and minor poets and automobile salesmen and building contractors and traffic cops and publishers, and he is genuinely himself with all of them. He finds the common denominator in machine politicians and hyperacid reformers, and without turning a hair he moves from tropical to arctic conversation. He is at home with Celtic fairies and the atomic theory, with frenzied finance and St. Francis. If he has a Pantheon, and I believe he has, it must be a good deal like a Union depot, with gods coming in and departing on every train and he himself holding a glorious reception at the information booth. I am sure he can still see the silver lining to W. J. Bryan and the presidential timber in Leonard Wood. He does not make fun of Chautauqua. He can drink Bevo. He has a good word for Freud. He has nothing against Victorianism. And yet he is a man. This receptivity puzzles me. A person with such open sympathies is called upon to slave in their service, to rush here and there like a general practitioner, to sleep with a watch under his pillow and a telephone at his head. How does he find the energy to do it! I admire it. I marvel at men who understand all and forgive all, who are as omnivorous as Theodore Roosevelt, as generous and many-sided as Walt Whitman. Think of those who have a good word to say for Bonar Law! It is less democratic, I am sure, to run a hand-picked Pantheon, but it saves a lot of much-needed vitality. Give me a temple on a high hill, with a long drop down from the exit.
NIGHT LODGING
It is sadly inept, not to say jejune, to accuse Maxim Gorki's Night Lodging of "gloom." Gloomy plays there certainly are. Twin Beds was one of the gloomiest plays I ever saw, and what about a play like She Walked in Her Sleep? That defunct comedy was as depressing as a six-day bicycle race. Night Lodging is somber. No one denies that. But to believe that a somber play must necessarily be a "gloomy" play is like believing that Christmas must necessarily be unpleasant. It simply isn't true, and to suppose it is mentally inelastic.
But the trouble is, we are mentally inelastic. We say, Ah yes, Strindberg, the woman-hater; or Ibsen, the man who bites on granite; or Gorki, the Big Gloom; when as a matter of fact these artists are simply human beings who have got beyond the comprehensions of the fifth grade. This is itself an old story in criticism. Only the story has to be re-told every time the New York newspaper critics are called upon to characterize a serious drama. With a regularity as unfailing as the moon, the New York critics reaffirm their conviction that a play concerning derelict human beings must of course be squalid, sodden, high-brow and depressing. It is mentally ruinous to believe and assert such things, yet their belief and assertion are endemic in the New York newspapers, like malaria in the jungle or goiter in the Alps.
Mr. Arthur Hopkins's presentation of Night Lodging at the Plymouth Theatre may or may not be better than the presentation some time ago at the German theatre. I do not know. I never saw the performance at the German theatre and I am inclined to distrust the persons to whom the German theatre is not so much a thing in itself as a stick with which to whack the American theatre. But, better or worse than the German performance, Mr. Hopkins's is to the good. It is a strong, firm, spacious, capable performance, resting not so much on a few pinnacles as on a general level of excellence. It is presented bravely. Making no attempt to sweeten the drama to the taste of American critics, it allows the resolute sincerity of Gorki to penetrate every word and action of the performance. The result is undoubtedly not Russian, even if every actor in the cast talks with a semblance of foreignness. But the result is viable, Russian or not. A sense of human incident and human presence is quickly secured, and after that there comes a stream of events which never loses its reality either in force or direction. The impact is tremendous. Gorki inundates one's consciousness with these human fortunes and misfortunes of his tenement basement. And while occasional accents slip awry in the tumult of his creation, the substance of his story finds one a corroborator--in a way that one simply never corroborates depression or gloom.
The men and women, who come together in this night lodging of a Russian city, are of the emancipated kind that one sees on the benches in Madison Square. They are recruited from the casual worker and the non-worker, the unemployed and the unemployable, the loafers and the criminals and the broken and the declasse. On the first evening when one hears their voices through the murk of the ill-lit basement, one realizes that their anarchism is bitter. They grate on one another, sneer at one another, bawl at one another, tell one another to go to hell. They are earthly pilgrims whose burdens have galled them. They do not understand or accept their fate. They are full of self-pity. They are, in a word, one's tired and naked self. But this relaxed and wanton selfness is projected by a Russian who keeps for his people the freshness of childhood--a freshness charming in some cases, horrible in others, but always with a touch of immortality. How they reveal themselves in this nudity of common poverty! A woman in the corner is coughing, coughing. She wants air. Her husband does not go to her. His patience is snapped. In the middle of the room lies a man half recovered from a drunken brawl. He aches loudly with stale liquor and stale wounds. In the other corner a youth dreams of his mistress, the wife of the lodging-house keeper--a mistress from whom he pines to escape. The "baron" sits in the shadow, telling of his high antecedents, to weary sarcastic listeners. Elsewhere the broken young actor repeats the medical verdict that his organism is poisoned with alcohol. "You mean 'organon,'" shouts another. "No, organism. My organism...." And so, these lives sweep round and round in an eddy of helpless egotism, the sport of the winds of heaven.
Then arrives a leonine old man, a philosophical patriarchal wanderer. Quite simply he fits into this life of the basement, but unlike the rest he is no longer self-centered or self-afflicted. He walks erect in his anarchism. And gradually the lives of the night lodging group around him. He sits by the dying woman. He talks of women to the young thief, and talks of the fine life in rich Siberia that is beckoning to the young. He stands like an untroubled oak in the gales that toss the others hither and thither. Lord, he has seen life! And he meets them all with compassion, a man among children.
He goes. His presence has not prevented the lodging-house keeper's wife from driving the young man to kill her husband. Nor has it prevented that flashing devil from mutilating her sister whom the young man really loves. But though the old man departs he leaves after him a rent of blue in the clouds that choke these people's lives. One after another the night lodgers question life afresh under the wanderer's influence. The tartar's arm is still smashed. The kopecks are still scarce. Nastia is still helpless. The baron is still reminiscent. The actor is still alcoholic. But there is aroused in the night lodging the imperishable dream of happiness, and no one is ready to quench it.
Why is the grave and beautiful play _not_ gloomy? It is not enough to say that the really gloomy play gives a naturalistic version of life which the spectator rejects as false. Nor is it enough to say that the falsity of a sodden play consists not in its shadows or in its discords but in its absence of the vitamin of beauty. Many plays are denied truth because their truth is not agreeable. Many plays are denied beauty simply because their beauty is a stranger. Yet we know that truth or beauty may be as sable as the night, as icy as the pole, as lonely as a waterfall in the wilderness. The fact is, gloom is the child of ingrained ugliness, not the child of accidental, conventional ugliness. It is the people who think too narrowly of poverty and failure who see Night Lodging as depressing. It does not fail in beholding life. It is not poor in sympathy.
YOUTH AND THE SKEPTIC
In 1912, I think it was, Mr. Roosevelt told the public how Mr. Taft had bitten the hand that fed him. I have forgotten Mr. Taft's rejoinder but it was a hot rejoinder and it led to some further observations from the colonel. Those were the days. Nothing but peace on earth and good will among Republicans.
About that time I happened to have lunch with a most attractive young man, one of the first American aviators. He was such a clear-cut young man, with trusting brown eyes and no guile in him. And said he to me, "But how can these things be true? I can't understand it. If any one else said these things you'd pay no attention to them, but both of these men are fine men; they've both been president; and if these things they say _are_ true, then neither of them can be such fine gentlemen. I can't make it out, honestly." And he looked at me with a profundity of pained inquiry.
What could I say? What can you say when you meet with such simple faith? It took years of primary school and Fourth of July and American history to build up this conception of the American presidents, and now the worst efforts of a president and an ex-president had only barely shaken the top-structure. What was the good of forcing this youth to unlearn everything he had learned? If I took away his faith in the divine office of president, perhaps he might begin to lose his patriotism and his willingness to lay down his life for the flag. Perhaps he might go on and lose faith in the jury system, the institution of marriage, the right of free speech, the sacred rights of property, the importance of Harvard. Faith is a precious but delicate endowment. If I unhinged this lad's faith, perhaps he would follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther, Voltaire, Anatole France, Bernard Shaw and Emma Goldman--the "Goldman Woman" as the Ochs man and the Pulitzer man and the Ogden Mills Reed man call her in their outbursts of American chivalry. I wanted no such arid and lonely career for this splendid young man. I hated to think of his wearing an ironic smile like Anatole France or losing his fresh bloom to be a subversive idealist like Eugene Debs. Much better, said I to myself, that he should hug Taft to his bosom, even if mistaken, than that he should repulse him and face life without him. So I gave the lad soothing words and earnest though insincere glances, and he went his way puzzled but greatly reassured.
Now, I ask you, did I do wrong? You may say that simple faith is all very well, but a man ought to live in the real world and know his way around. Otherwise he is incapable of handling the existing situation. He is compelled to evade uncomfortable facts. Very true. Quite right. Exactly so. But is it better to be able to face facts at the cost of being a nerveless skeptic, or to be something of a simpleton and yet a wholesome man of action, a man of will and character and pep? What is the good of knowing facts, especially unflattering and unpalatable facts, if it confuses you and upsets you and undermines everything you've been brought up to believe? What's the use? Voltaire may be all right in his way, but is his way the only way? Can we all be Voltaires?
If I stick up for good faith in the character of presidents, I know that there will be a bad comeback. I know the tricks of the skeptic. But even if my opponents use their ugliest arguments, am I therefore to give in to them? I refuse to admit that there is nothing else than to destroy a beautiful faith in the good that is everywhere.
What the skeptics do, of course, is to use the old argument of the war. They say: Yes, your fine brown-eyed trustful young aviator is a typical product of patriotism. And where were the prime examples of patriotism to be found? In Germany. He happens, in your instance, to believe in the divine office of the presidents. But it is much more characteristic of him to be on his knees to the Kaiser. Yet consider how one-sided you are. When he declares himself ready to die for the Kaiser you see the joke. You see the joke when he is pouring out his reverence over the Tsar of Russia or the Tsar of Bulgaria or the King of Greece. But when it comes to an American you say, "Oh, don't let's destroy this beautiful faith! How precious it is, how noble, how commendable! Hands off, please." And you act in the same way toward the Constitution or the Supreme Court. It's magnificent when the Germans come ahead with a perfectly good new constitution, model 1920. But we must stick to the brand of 1789, with the cow-catcher added in 1910. Hail to Our Iron Constitution! And hail to the Old Man's Home down in Washington where they hand out the uncontaminated economics that they themselves lisped at the Knees of the Fathers of Our Country. Straight from the source, these old men got their inspiration, and they are a credit to the early nineteenth century. You think we exaggerate your loyalty? You agree that the simple faith of young Germans and young Turks can be highly dangerous, but do you counsel unquestioned faith for young Americans?
That is the argument, rather ingenious in its way; but hardly likely to fool the intelligent, law-abiding, God-fearing citizen. Because no good American could admit for one instant that the cases are on all fours. America, after all, is a democracy. And when a young man starts out having faith in a democracy he is in an altogether different position from Germans and Turks and Bulgarians and Soviet Russians and people like that. A democracy, whatever its faults, is founded in the interests of all the people. It is unquestionable. Therefore simple faith in it is equivalent to simple faith in a first principle; and you cannot go behind first principles.
That, in the end, is the trouble with the skeptic. He thinks it is very clever to question the things that are of the light in just the same spirit that he questions things that are of the darkness. And of course he goes wrong. He is like a surgeon who cuts away the sound flesh rather than the diseased flesh. He is, in the evergreen phrase, de-structive not con-structive.
And so I am glad that I did not seek to disillusion my fine young aviator. If I had succeeded in disillusioning him, who can tell what the consequences might have been? We know that during the war there were grim duties to be performed by our young men--towns to be bombed where it took excessive skill to kill the men-citizens without killing the women and the children. If I had sapped this boy's faith even one pulsation, perhaps he would have failed in his duty.
You cannot be too careful how you lead people to rationalize. In this world there is rationalism and plenty of it. But is there not also a super-rationalism? And must we not always inculcate super-rationalism when we _know_ we possess the true faith?
THE SPACES OF UNCERTAINTY OR, AN ACHE IN THE VOID[3]
The floor, unfortunately, was phosphorus, so he had to pick his steps with care. But at last he came to a French window, which he opened, and sprang to a passing star. Star, not car. He was a poet, and that is what young poets do.
He had a pleasant physiognomy, as young men go. Unformed, of course--perhaps twenty minutes late and the hall only two-thirds full. But he was no longer young enough to hang his hat on the gas. He was from the East via Honey Dew, Idaho, but he had long resided with an aunt in Nebraska and so was a strong Acutist. He wore gray shirts and a lemon tie. At Harvard--he went to Harvard--he had opened his bean with considerable difficulty and crushed in a ripe strawberry of temperament. So that he could never stop himself when he beheld a passing star.
The motion was full, with significant curves. It made him a little air-sick at first, but he preferred air-sickness. He made no compromise with the public taste for pedestrianism. After a few days that quickly ceased to be solar, he was rewarded. He came to Asphodelia, a suburb of Venus on the main line.