Part 8
In Asphodelia the poets travel on all-fours, kick their heels toward Mercury, and utter startling cries. In Asphodelia a banker lives in the menagerie, and they feed mathematical instructors through a hole in the wall. This new participant had too much of the stern blood of the Puritan in his rustproof veins to kick more than one heel at a time, but when he observed a gamboling Asphodelian of seventy years he felt a little wishful, and permitted himself a trifling ululation. The local cheer-leader heard him and knew him at once for a Harvard Acutist, and there was joy in Asphodelia.
A year or so sufficed him. He grew tired of sleeping in the branches of the cocoanut tree, and the river of green ink wearied him. So when the next star swung around he slipped away from his pink duenna and crept into the lattice-work to steal his passage home.
Thought slid from him like an oscillant leaf. He hung there lonely, in his Reis underwear, aching in the void.
He alighted in the harbor of Rio. When he trans-shipped to New York in ordinary ways, he prepared his Yonkers uncle, and he was met in undue course on Front Street.
"My boy," said his uncle, "what do you want me to do for you? Speak the word. You have been gone so long, and you were given up for lost."
"Only one thing do I want," confessed the former Acutist.
"And what might that be?" the uncle more circumspectly inquired.
"Take me at once to the great simple embrace of wholesome Coney Island."
So, clad in an Arrow collar and a Brokaw suit, the young poet stepped from Acutism on to the Iron Boat.
And what is the moral of this tale, mes enfants?... But must we not leave something to waft in the spaces of uncertainty?
[3] Inscribed to the _Little Review_
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
I am sorry now not to have treasured every word that came from my poet. At the moment I disliked to play Boswell; I thought it beneath my dignity. But artists like Arnold Bennett who ply the notebook are not ashamed to be the Boswells of mediocrity. Why should I have hesitated to take notes of William Butler Yeats?
In the Pennsylvania station I had met him, as his host agreed, and I intruded on him as far as Philadelphia. I say intruded: his forehead wrinkled in tolerant endurance too often for me to feel that I was welcome. And yet, once we were settled, he was not unwilling to speak. His dark eyes, oblique and set far into his head, gave him a cryptic and remote suggestion. His pursed lips closed as on a secret. He opened them for utterance almost as in a dream. As if he were spokesman of some sacred book spread in front of him but raptly remembered, he pronounced his opinions seriously, occasionally raising his hands to fend his words. He was, I think, inwardly satisfied that I was attentive. I was indeed attentive. I had never listened to more distinguished conversation. Or, rather, monologue--for when I talked he suspended his animation, like a singer waiting for the accompanist to run down.
It was on the eve of The New Republic. I asked him if he'd write for it, and he answered characteristically. He said that journalism was action and that nothing except the last stage of exasperation could make him want to write for a journal as he had written about Blanco Posnet or The Playboy. The word "journalism" he uttered as a nun might utter "vaudeville." He was reminded, he said, of an offer that was made to Oscar Wilde of the editorship of a fashion paper, to include court gossip. Wouldn't it interest Wilde? "Ah, yes," responded Wilde, "I am deeply interested in a court scandal at present." The journalist (devourer of carrion, of course) was immediately eager. "Yes," said Wilde, "the scandal of the Persian court in the year 400 B. C."
It was telling. It made me ashamed for my profession. I could not forget, however, pillars of the _Ladies' World_ edited by Oscar Wilde which I used to store in an out-house. Wilde had condescended in the end.
Yeats's mind was bemused by his recollection of his fellow-Irishman. Once he completed his lectures he would go home, and a "fury of preoccupation" would keep him from being caught in those activities that lead to occasional writing. His lectures would not go into essays but into dialogues, "of a man wandering through the antique city of Fez." In the cavern blackness of those eyes I could feel that there was a mysterious gaze fixed on the passing crowd of the moment, the gaze of a stranger to fashion who might as well write of Persia, a dreamer beyond space and time.
"And humanitarian writing," he concluded, with a weary limp motion of his hand, "the writing of reformers, 'uplifters,' with a narrow view of democracy I find dull. The Webbs are dull. And truistic."
I spoke of the Irish John Mitchel's narrow antidemocracy and belief in the non-existence of progress, such as he had argued in Virginia during the Civil War. Mitchel, he protested, was a passionate nature. The progress he denied was a progress wrongly conceived by Macaulay and the early Victorians. It was founded on "truisms" not really true. Whether Carlyle or Mitchel was the first to repudiate these ideas he didn't know: possibly Mitchel was.
Yeats's one political interest at that time, before the war, was the Irish question. He believed in home rule. He believed the British democracy was then definitely making the question its own, and "this is fortunate." I spoke of Jung's belief in England's national complex. He was greatly interested. Ulster opposition to home rule he regretted. "The Scarlet Woman is of course a great inspiration," he said, "and Carson has stimulated this. His one desire is to wreck home rule, and so there cannot be arrangement by consent. I agree with Redmond that Carson has gone ahead on a military conspiracy. Personally, I do not say so for a party reason. I am neither radical nor tory. I think Asquith is a better man than Lloyd George--less inflated. He is a moderate, not puffed up with big phrases. He meets the issue that arises when it arises.... I object to the uplifter who makes other people's sins his business, and forgets his chief business, his own sins. Jane Addams? Ah, that is different."
His lectures he would not discuss but he spoke a good deal of audiences. In his own audiences he found no one more eager, no one who knows more, than an occasional old man, a man of sixty. He was surprised and somewhat disappointed to find prosperity go hand in hand with culture in this country. In the city where the hotel is bad there is likely to be a poor audience. Where it is good, the audience is good. In his own country the happiest woman he could name was a woman living in a Dublin slum whose mind is full of beautiful imaginings and fantasies. Is poverty an evil? We should desire a condition of life which would satisfy the need for food and shelter, and, for the rest, be rich in imagination. The merchant builds himself a palace only for auto-suggestion. The poor woman is as rich as the merchant. I said yes, but that a brute or a Bismarck comes in and overrides the imagination. He agreed. "Life is the warring of forces and these forces seem to be irreconcilable."
It could cost an artist too much to escape poverty. I spoke of the deadness of so much of the work done by William Sharp and Grant Allen. He said it was Allen's own fault. He, or his wife, wanted too many thousand dollars a year. They had to bring up their children on the same scale as their friends' children! And he kindled at this folly. "A woman who marries an artist," he said with much animation, "is either a goose, or mad, or a hero. If she's a goose, she drives him to earn money. If she's mad she drives him mad. If she's a hero, they suffer together, and they come out all right."
Phrases like this were not alone. There was the keen observation that the Pennsylvania station is "free from the vulgarity of advertisement"; the admission of second hand expression in Irish poetry except in The Dark Rosaleen and Hussey's Ode; a generalization on Chicago to the effect that "courts love poetry, plutocracies love tangible art." Not for a moment did this mind cease to move over the face of realities and read their legend and interpret its meaning. Meeting him was not like Hazlitt's meeting Coleridge. I could not say, "my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge." But the Yeats I met did not meet me. I remained on the periphery. Yet from what I learned there I can believe in the sesame of poets. I hope that some one to-day, nearer to him than a journalist, is wise enough to treasure his words.
"WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE"
Last night I woke up suddenly to the sound of bombardment. A great detonation tore the silence; an answering explosion shook it; then came a series of shots in diminishing intensity. My windows look out on a rank of New York skyscrapers, with a slip of sky to the south. In the ache of something not unlike fear, I thrust out my head to learn as quickly as I could what was happening. No result from the explosions was to be seen. The skyscrapers were gaunt and black, with a square of lost light in a room or two. The sky was clean-swept and luminous, the stars unperturbed. Still the shots barked and muttered, insanely active, beyond the blank buildings, under the serene sky.
I heard hoarse cries from river-craft. Could it be on the river? Could it be gun practice, or was there really an interchange of gun-fire? A U-boat? An insurrection? At any rate, it had to be explained and my mind was singularly lively for three a. m.
Long after your country has gone to war, I told myself, there remains, if you have sluggish sympathies, what may fairly be called a neutrality of the imagination. You are aware that there is fighting, bloodshed, death, but you retain the air of the philosophic. You do not put yourself in the place of Americans under fire. But if this be really bombardment, shell-fire in Manhattan? I felt in an instant how Colonel Roosevelt might come to seem the supreme understander of the situation. An enemy that could reach so far and hit so hard would run a girdle of feeling from New York to the remotest fighters in Africa or Mesopotamia. To protect ourselves against the hysteria of hatred--that would always be a necessity. But I grimly remembered the phrase, "proud punctilio." I remembered the President's tender-minded words, "conduct our operations as belligerents without passion," and his pledge of sincere friendship to the German people: warfare without "the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them." Here, with the Germans' shell-fire plowing into our buildings and into our skins? Here, meeting the animosity of their guns?
Becoming awake enough to think about the war, I began to reason about this "bombardment," to move from the hypnoidal state, the Hudson Maxim-Cleveland Moffett zone. The detonations were continuing, but not at all sensationally, and soon they began to shape themselves familiarly, to sound remarkably like the round noises of trains shunting, from the New York Central, carried on clear dry November air. Soon, indeed, it became impossible to conceive that these loud reverberations from the Vanderbilt establishment had ever been so distorted by a nightmare mind as to seem gun-fire. And my breathless inspection of the innocent sky!
But that touch of panic, in the interest of our whole present patriotic cultural attitude, was not to be lost. It is the touch, confessed or unconfessed, that makes us kin. If we are to retain toward German art and literature and science an attitude of appreciation and reciprocation, without disloyalty, it must be in the presence of the idea of shell-wounds German-inflicted. Any other broad-mindedness is the illusory broad-mindedness of the smooth and smug. It is Pharisaical. It comes from that neutrality of the imagination which is another name for selfish detachment, the temperature of the snake.
A generation less prepared than our own for the mood of warfare it would be difficult to imagine--less prepared, that is to say, by the situation of our country or the color of our thought. To declare now that New York has made no provision for the air-traffic of the future is not to arouse any sense of delinquency. No greater sense of delinquency was aroused ten or fifteen years ago by the bass warnings of military men. It is not too much to say that Lord Roberts and Homer Lea were felt to have an ugly monomania. In that period Nicholas Murray Butler and Elihu Root and Andrew Carnegie were thinking in terms of peace palaces. Colonel Roosevelt had tiny ideas of preparedness, but he was far more busy enunciating the recall of judges--and he earned the Nobel Prize. Few men, even two years ago, believed we would be sending great armies to Europe in 1917. In the first place, men like Homer Lea had said that the United States could not mobilize half a million soldiers for active service in less than three years. And in the next place, we still felt pacifically. We had lived domestic life too long ever to imagine our sky black and our grass red.
Because of this mental unpreparedness for war, this calm enjoyment of an unearned increment of peace, there was never a greater dislocation of standards than our recent dislocation, and never a greater problem of readjustment. For England, at any rate, there was a closeness to the war that helped to bring about an alignment of sentiment. But here, besides the discrepancies in the entailment of services, there are enormous discrepancies in sentiment to start with, and policies still to be accepted and cemented, and European prejudices to be suppressed or reconciled. Misunderstanding, under these circumstances, is so much to be looked for, especially with impetuous patriots demanding a new password of allegiance every minute, that the wonder is not at how many outrages there are, but how few.
Most of these outrages fall outside the scope of literary discussion, naturally. "Let the sailor content himself with talking of the winds; the herd of his oxen; the soldier of his wounds; the shepherd of his flocks"; the critic of his books. But there is one kind of outrage that requires to be discussed, from the point of view of culture, if only because there is no ultimate value in any culture that has to be subordinated to the state. That is the outrage, provisionally so-called, of mutilating everything German; not only sequestering what may be dangerous or unfriendly and vindictive, but depriving of toleration everything that has German origin or bears a German name. The quick transformation of Bismarcks into North Atlantics, of Kaiserhofs into Cafe New Yorks, is too laughable to be taken seriously. The shudderings at Germantown, Pa., and Berlin, O., and Bismarck, N. D., are in the same childlike class. But it is different when an Austrian artist is not permitted to perform because, while we are not at war with Austria, she is our enemy's ally. It is different when "the music of all German composers will be swept from the programmes of scheduled concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra in Pittsburgh. 'The Philadelphia Orchestra Association wishes to announce that it will conform with pleasure to the request of the Pittsburgh Association. The Philadelphia Orchestra Association is heartily in accord with any movement directed by patriotic motives.'" It is this sort of thing, extending intolerance to culture, that suggests we have been surprised in this whole matter of culture with our lamps untrimmed.
In a sense we, the laissez faire generation, have been unavoidably surprised--so much so that our "proud punctilio" has been jogged considerably loose. So loose, in fact, that we have given up any pretension to being so punctilious as soldiers used to be. It used to be possible, even for men whose hands dripped with enemy blood, to sign magnanimous truces; but science has made another kind of warfare possible, and the civilian population of the modern State, totally involved in a catastrophe beyond all reckoning, falls from its complacency into a depth of panic and everywhere believes that the enemy is inhuman in this war.
Were such beliefs special to this war, hatred might well go beyond the fervor of the Inquisition, and the hope of exterminating the Germans as a people might be universally entertained. But no one who has read history to any purpose will trust too far to this particular emotionality of the hour. To say this, in the middle of a righteous war, may sound unpatriotic. But, if hatred is the test, what could be more traitorous and seditious than Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other.... The prayers of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the Providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that _he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came_, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet,... so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." It is, perhaps, like quoting the Lord's Prayer. And yet it is the neglected wisdom of a man who had gleaned it from long meditating fratricidal war.
But, you may say, Prussia has always been outside humanity. We are engaged in a war foreordained and necessary, a natural war. A war inescapable, yes, but not inevitable. Let the plain testimony of hundreds of books speak.... To ask for such discriminations as this is, however, scarcely possible. It is too much, in the face of superstitions, anxieties, and apprehensions, to expect the attitude of culture to be preserved. In peace-time we are allowed to go outside our own state to enjoy any manifestation of the seven arts; and such violent nationalism as attacked The Playboy of the Western World in New York is at once called "rowdy" and "despicable." But in time of war it is part of its morality, or immorality, that culture must be subordinate to clamor, and that even national sculpture must become jingoistic, making railsplitters neatly respectable and idealizing long feet. How far this supervision of culture goes depends only on the degree of pressure. It may go so far as to make the domination of political considerations, state considerations, paramount in everything--precisely the victory that democracy, hoping with Emerson that "we shall one day learn to supersede politics by education," has most to fear.
It is in war itself, with its enmity to so much that is free, that one must seek the opposition to enemy culture, not in the culture that is opposed. Must one, on this account, think any peace a good peace? To do so is to show an immunity from the actual which is not to be envied. It is only necessary to imagine New York bombarded, as many French and English and Belgian and Russian towns have been bombarded since the beginning of the war, to realize the rush of resistance that is born in mankind, expedient for government to recruit and to rally to the end. But for the man who has partaken of democratic culture this "end" involves democracy. All character and all spirit cannot be absorbed in the will to cure the homicidal enemy by his own poison. The only course open to the man who is still concerned for democratic culture is to remember the nobility of Lincoln's example--by concentrating on the offenses rather than the persons that cause the mighty scourge of war, to avoid the war-panic and war-hatred which will enrage our wounds.
WAR EXPERTS
"War is not now a matter of the stout heart and the strong arm. Not that these attributes do not have their place and value in modern warfare; but they are no longer the chief or decisive factors in the case. The exploits that count in this warfare are technological exploits; exploits of technological science, industrial appliances, and technological training. As has been remarked before, it is no longer a gentleman's war, and the gentleman, as such, is no better than a marplot in the game as it is played."
---- Thorstein Veblen in _The Nature of Peace_.
Across a park in Washington I followed the leisurely stride of two British officers. Their movement, punctuated by long walking-sticks, had a military deliberation which became their veteran gray hairs. They were in khaki uniforms and leather leggings, a red strip at the shoulder marking them as staff officers. Amid groups of loitering nurses and tethered infants and old men feeding pop-corn to the birds they were as of a grander race of men. After a pang of civilian inferiority I asked who they were and learned that one of them was simply a Canadian lawyer--and that, being a judge advocate, he was obliged to boot and spur himself in his hotel bedroom every morning and ride up and down the elevator in polished leggings, for the good of the cause. Never in his life had he heard a machine-gun fired. Never had he flourished anything more dangerous than his family carving knife. On inspection his companion looked similarly martial. The only certain veteran in the parklet was a shrunken old pensioner feeding tame robins on the grass.
Part of the politico-military art is window-dressing of this description. It excites the romantic populace, composed of pedestrians like myself, and serves to advertise the colors. It suggests a leonine order of values from which the shambling citizen is debarred. But back of the window-dressing, the rhetoric of costume and medal and prepared ovation and patriotic tears, there is a reality as different from these appearances as roots are different from flowers. If I had ever supposed that the gist of war was to be derived solely from contemplating uniformed warriors, I came to a new conclusion when I overheard the cool experts of war.
These experts, such of them as I happened to overhear, had come with the British mission to America, and they were far other than the common notion of lords of war. The most impressive of them was a slight figure who reminded me externally of the Greek professor in Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara. Before the war he had been a don at Cambridge, a teacher of economics, and he retained the lucid laboratory manner of an expert who counts on holding attention. It was not in him, as it is in so many older pooh-bah professors, to expect a deference to personal garrulity; but one gained an impression that no words were likely to be wasted on vacuous listeners by a person with such steel-gray eyes.