Part 17

The only drawback, as far as we are concerned, to becoming a Buddhist is the vow to abstain from intoxicating liquors. In this respect the Western religions seem to us more liberal. We have meditated long and earnestly on the subject and still have never been able to understand why an occasional exhilarating drink should be contrary to any wise man’s ethic. Indeed, if Nirvana (or Perfect Release from Struggle) is the object of life, we have seen it well attained by three or four juleps or Tom-and-Jerries. The lay Buddhist has to take five vows; the Bhikshus (or Brotherhood of the Elect) take ten. Some of these additional vows required of the Bhikshu are:

_I vow and promise not to eat food at unseasonable times--that is, after the midday meal._

_I vow and promise not to dance, sing light songs, frequent public amusements, and, in short, to avoid worldly dissipation of every kind._

_I vow and promise not to wear any kind of ornament, nor to use any scents or perfumes, and, in short, to avoid whatever tends to vanity._

_I promise and vow to give up the use of soft bedding and to sleep on a hard, low couch._

These, we admit, present some difficulties. Frequenting “public amusements” offers too many opportunities for quibble. In one sense every possible mingling with the world is a public amusement. If there is anything more amusing than a smoking car full of men or a Broadway pavement at lunch time we don’t know what it could be. Sleeping on a hard, low couch is easy enough--we can sleep anywhere with equal satisfaction, even on the floor. The queer thing that we always notice about every kind of moral code is that, sooner or later, it begins to lose sight of the distinction between essentials and non-essentials. Such matters as intoxicating drink and public amusements should not be (for the Western philosopher) subject to prescriptive legislation. The individual may very rightly impose restraints upon himself in non-essential matters; but to lay them upon him from above is to stultify the whole purport of ethics--which, if we understand it, is to encourage and develop a worthy personal will. And the Buddhist Catechism recognizes this in a very potent phrase--“Every one of us must become his own redeemer.”

But Buddhism seems to have a firm grasp on one very essential and valuable idea, which is comparatively rare among religions. Thus the Catechism:

43. _Does Buddhism teach its followers to hate, despise, or persecute non-believers?_

Quite the reverse. It teaches us to love all men as brethren, without distinction of race, nationality, or creed; to respect the convictions of men of other beliefs, and to be careful to avoid all religious controversy. The Buddhist religion is imbued with the purest spirit of perfect toleration. Even where dominant, it has never oppressed or persecuted non-believers, and its success has never been attended with bloodshed. The true Buddhist does not feel hatred, but only pity and compassion for him who will not acknowledge or listen to the truth, to his own loss and injury only.

Of course, all forms of human attempt to unscrew the inscrutable are fascinating and full of interest. The Westerner, however, is a bit troubled when he finds “Love of life on earth” listed among the “ten fetters” which, according to the Buddha, prevent the soul from receiving full freedom and enlightenment. That seems, to our earth-bound and muddied conceptions, a shabby doctrine. Even the most timid tincture of good manners suggests that a life so exciting, so amusing, so painful, so perplexing, and so variously endowed with unearned beauty and amazement deserves at least a courteous gratefulness on our part. Mr. C. E. Montague (if you will allow us to quote him once more), explains what we mean:

Among the mind’s powers is one that comes of itself to many children and artists. It need not be lost, to the end of his days, by any one who has ever had it. This is the power of taking delight in a thing, or rather in anything, everything, not as a means to some other end, but just because it is what it is.... A child in the full health of his mind will put his hand flat on the summer turf, feel it, and give a little shiver of private glee at the elastic firmness of the globe. He is not thinking how well it will do for some game or to feed sheep upon.... No matter what the things may be, no matter what they are good or no good for, there they are, each with a thrilling unique look and feel of its own, like a face; the iron astringently cool under its paint, the painted wood familiarly warmer, the clod crumbling enchantingly down in the hands, with its little dry smell of the sun and of hot nettles; each common thing a personality marked by delicious differences.

It is this sensuous cheerfulness in mere living, apparently, that the Buddhist would have us cast away. You remember Rupert Brooke’s fine poem _The Great Lover_. Western students may be pardoned for wondering whether “Love of life on earth,” whatever that life’s miseries, ills, and absurdities, is not too precious to be tossed lightly aside.

INTELLECTUALS AND ROUGHNECKS

I

We look forward with keen interest to reading _Civilization in the United States_, the work of thirty-three independent observers commenting upon various phases of the American scene. So far we have only glanced into it, and have already found much that looks as though it needed contradiction. It is obviously going to be a gloomy book, rather strongly flavoured with intellectual ammonia. Of course, it is a healthy thing that some of our Intellectuals are so depressed about America. It is a good thing for a nation, as it is for an individual, occasionally to go home at night cursing itself for being a boob, a numbskull, and a mental flounder. But we feel about some of our Extreme Intellectuals as we do about the Physical Culture restaurants. The people in these restaurants eat nothing but vitamines and plasms and protose; they live in an atmosphere of carefully planned Scandinavian hygiene; yet most of them look mysteriously pallid. And some of our most Conscientious Brows, in spite of leading lives of carefully regulated meditation, don’t seem any too robust in the region of the wits.

However, we shall study this book with care. It contains articles by a number of people whom we admire specially. What we have been wondering is whether among its rather acid comments it gives any panoramic picture of the America we see daily and admire--an America which, in spite of comical simplicities and tragic misdirections of energy, seems to us, in vitality, curiosity, and surprising beauty, the most thrilling experiment of the human race.

In one article in this book we find the following:

Everything in our society tends to check the growth of the spirit and to shatter the confidence of the individual in himself. Considered with reference to its higher manifestations, life itself has been thus far, in modern America, a failure. Of this the failure of our literature is merely emblematic. Mr. Mencken, who shares this belief, urges that the only hope of a change for the better lies in the development of a native aristocracy that will stand between the writer and the public, supporting him, appreciating him, forming as it were a _cordon sanitaire_ between the individual and the mob.

Well, our confidence in ourself is not yet wholly shattered, in spite of the grinding horror of American life. We feel confident enough to venture that this theory is dubious. Greatness in literature does not need to be protected from the insanitary infection of the mob. How Charles Dickens would have roared at such a timid little bluesock doctrine! Great writers do not need any clique of private appreciators or supporters. They are not produced by plaintive patter about ideals and the pride of the “artist.” They arise haphazard, and they carry in them an anger, an energy, and a fecundity that deny all classroom rules. And the mob, heaven help us! is the ground and source of their strength and their happiness. Nothing can “check the growth of their spirit,” because the spirit is big enough to turn everything to its own inscrutable account. You might as well say that Shakespeare couldn’t write great plays because the typewriter hadn’t been invented.

Of course, if by “a native aristocracy that will stand between the writer and the public,” we are to understand an efficient service of tactful office boys and mendacious telephone girls to keep the chance caller from cutting the mortal artery of Time, we applaud. But we fear that is not meant.

When we get weary of upstage comments about literature we go aloft and have a talk to the fellows in the composing room (who, by the way, are all reading _Moby Dick_ nowadays). There is no priggishness in their criticism. They have the sound, sober, sincere instinct--as when one of them tells us, with magnificent insight, that _Moby Dick_ is “Hamlet stuff.” When professional connoisseurs can teach us as much as the composing room can about the human values that lie behind literature, then we will mend our manners.

The more we think about it, the more we are staggered by the statement that American life “tends to check the growth of the spirit.” To us the exact opposite seems true. American life as we see it all round us seems to be crying aloud for a spirit great enough to grasp and express it. It seems the most prodigious and stimulating material that any writer ever had for his contemplation. It is a perpetual challenge to the imagination--a challenge that hardly any one since Whitman has been great enough, or daring enough, to deal with; but to say that it stunts the spirit can only be valid as a personal opinion. It is to say that a hungry man going into a restaurant loses his appetite.

II

We have ventured a little further into _Civilization in the United States_ (which someone has said should really be called “Civilization between Fourteenth Street and Washington Square”) and, to tell the truth, we are astounded. This time we are astounded by the extraordinary mellow gravity of the Young Intellectual. It is sad, by the way, that the editor of the volume is actually not much younger than ourself; but indeed he makes us feel immeasurably aged and decadent.

There are, of course, admirable things in the book. Mr. Mencken is at his best in his attack upon Congressional mediocrity. Messrs. Macy, Van Loon, Lardner, and Ernest Boyd carry us with them, as they very often do. Mr. Henry Longan Stuart’s “As an Englishman Sees It” is the most quietly pregnant of the essays we have read. But we must confess that when the editor (Mr. Harold Stearns) writes on “The Intellectual Life” he leaves us puzzled and unhappy.

Perhaps Professor Colby’s contribution on “Humour” affords a clue. At first we did not quite “get” it; we did not realize that Mr. Colby was having his little joke at the expense of some of the masculine Hermiones who met fortnightly (so Mr. Stearns assures us) at the editor’s home “to clarify their individual fields, and contribute towards the advance of intellectual life in America.” After reading the appalling solemnities of Mr. Stearns’s Preface we realize how charmingly Mr. Colby is (as becomes a veteran) chaffing the young pyrophags. He remarks that the “upper literary class” in America is utterly devoid of humour. This intramural stab he must have meditated at one of those fortnightly meetings while the chairman was remarking that “the most moving and pathetic fact in the social life of America to-day is emotional and æsthetic starvation.”

When young men of thirty or so begin to talk about “contributing to the advance of intellectual life in America” they should do it with a smile. Otherwise someone else will have to do the smiling for them.

Consider the weight of the Great Problems faced by the editor of _Civilization in America_ at those fortnightly meetings, while (let us hope) the elder members, such as Jack Macy and Professor Colby, smiled a trifle wanly--

... “These larger points of policy were decided by common agreement or, on occasion, by majority vote, and to the end I settled no important question without consultation with as many members of the group as I could approach within the limited time we had agreed to have this volume in the hands of the publisher. But with the extension of the scope of the book, the negotiations with the publisher, and the mass of complexities and details that are inevitable in so difficult an enterprise, the authority to decide specific questions and the usual editorial powers were delegated as a matter of convenience to me, aided by a committee of three.”

But you must read that Preface entire, to get the full humour of the matter, to get the self-destroying seriousness of the Young Intellectual. It ought to be reprinted as a pamphlet for the warning of college students. Consider the syntax of the first sentence quoted above, as a “contribution to intellectual life in America.” For our own part, after reading that Preface we couldn’t help turning to the quiet and modest little prefaces of some of the great books, e. g., _Leviathan_ and _Religio Medici_.

We must not be ill humoured. The editor of the volume, we are told, has made his own contribution to the intellectual life in America by leaving for Paris as soon as the proofs were corrected. He is perhaps a victim of that oldest of American sophomore superstitions--the idea that Paris is the only city of the world where men of letters may enjoy true freedom of the body and the spirit. Mr. Stearns has for some time been threatening that the sterility and coarseness of American life will drive our sensitive young men overseas. Well, the rest of us must shuffle along as best we can, and see what we can do with this poor tawdry civilization of ours. And incidentally, as a gesture of divorce from American crassness, going to Paris and taking a job on the Parisian edition of the New York _Herald_ seems to us inadequate. We are reminded of another Young Intellectual--in Chicago this time--who greatly yearned to write a masterpiece of obscenity, but could not spell Messalina correctly.

Mr. Stearns speaks of himself and his friends as “unhappy intellectuals educated beyond our environment.” There is a roaring risibility in this that leaves us prostrate. The tragedy is that they apparently mean it. We admire their sincerity, their high-mindedness, and all that, but even at the risk of seeming argumentative we cannot, as long as honesty and clear thinking mean anything, let that sort of remark go by unprotested. It is impossible for any man to be educated beyond his environment--whatever that environment may be. For no man can be greater than Life itself, and in whatever field of life he may be placed, if he has the true insight and the true humility, he will find material for his art. The extraordinary panorama of American life, whatever its cruelties and absurdities, should be glowing material for any artist with the genuine receptive and creative gift. The real “artist” (since our Intellectuals love that term) will not timidly crawl into a corner and squeak; nor need he run away to some imagined Utopia abroad.

Perhaps this is a more serious matter than we had supposed. We are one of the stoutest--one of the sincerest, let us say, to avoid misunderstanding--partisans of the Young Intellectual. We used to like, in our wilder moments, to think ourself almost one of them. But it looks now as though we should have to organize a new clique--the Young Roughnecks. The Young Intellectuals are too easily pleased with themselves. In the first place, we honestly believe that few men have any real critical balance and judgment before they are forty. In the second place, the Young Intellectuals are perilously devoid of humour. Of that rich, magical, grotesque, and savoury quality they have far too little. They have it, but it works spasmodically.

We welcome a book like _Civilization in America_ because it shows in a clear cross-cutting what is wrong with a great many excellent young minds. They are quick to scoff, but they are not humorous; they are eager for human perfection, but want to escape from humanity itself. They say a great many admirable things, true things; but so condescendingly that, by some quaint perversion, they impel us to fly to the opposite view. Life itself, apparently, is too multitudinous, too terrible for them. They enjoy pouring ridicule upon the world of business and upon the business man. We should like to see them tackle their own tasks with the same devotion and lack of parade that the business man shows. Some of the most amazing beauties of American life have been the work of quiet business men who were not clamouring for admiration as “artists.” Our friends the Intellectuals keep shouting that the “creative class” (so they call themselves) must be more admired, more respected, more appreciated. We answer, they are already respected and applauded as much as--perhaps more than--is good for them. Let them cease to consider themselves a class above and apart. They are too painfully conscious of being “artists.” They make us feel like gathering a group of Young Roughnecks--let us say Heywood Broun and H. I. Phillips for a nucleus--and going off in a corner to be constructively and creatively vulgar.

THE FUN OF WRITING

On the way to the station this warm / chilly morning [_Note to Linotype Man: Please kill the inappropriate adjective; we like to be accurate, and this April weather is so inconstant_] we were thinking how little appreciated is the true pleasure of writing.

Writing is an art (or, if you prefer, a trade) never wholly and properly enjoyed except by the intensely indolent. What we mean is this: there are a lot of things in life that are not at all as they should be. But the writer, by magnificent pretence, improves all that. Gardening, for instance. No one enjoys seeing beds thickly decorated with bright flowers and superb vegetables more than we do. But the grubby and tiresome task of groping about with trowels and quicklime and all the other fertilizers is distasteful. Getting sweet peas to climb is a noxious business. Somehow the seedsman always palms off on us a kind of horizontal sweet pea that runs lowly along the ground and never blossoms at all. But take up the pen, or typewriter, and how quickly everything is rectified. When you set to work to compose a story, how easy it is to have things nice and genteel. Thus:

Out in the bland freshness of the suburban morning, Mr. Frogbones was enjoying his garden. In twin beds under the tall French windows the gardenias and sunflowers were just opening towards the violent orb. Sweet peas and daffodils and vast claret-coloured roses aspired upon a green trellis. “How I love a little nosegay,” he said, as he clipped off a couple of dozen of the great cider-tinted chrysanthemums, and bore them indoors to his wife. In the breakfast room a well-trained maid servant was putting the fragrant coffee on the table and the children were drinking their morning milk with neatness and gusto. “Elise,” said Mrs. Frogbones to the maid, “you may bring in the sausages, kidneys, bacon, scrambled eggs, anchovy toast, marmalade, grape fruit, porridge, raisin bread, and gooseberry jam. Mr. Frogbones is ready for breakfast.”

Now what could be easier, what could be more agreeable, than to write that? And yet not a word of it is true. We know Henry Frogbones well: his garden is contemptible; the maid’s coffee is execrable, and she is going to leave at the end of the week anyway; his children roar with anguish when they see a mug of milk, which they detest. But how pleasant it is to lend a hand to the travailing universe when you are writing.

As Henry Frogbones finished his ample breakfast the large absinthe-coloured limousine rolled with a quiet crunch across the terrace which was pebbled with small blue gravel. He slipped on his new herringbone surtout, lit a fine black cheroot, hitched up one spat which had got twisted, and rolled away to town. Ambrose, the chauffeur, was accustomed to his employer’s ways: he drove gently so that Mr. Frogbones could read the morning paper with comfort. After an hour’s ride through exquisite scenery [_if the editor pays more than five cents a word, it may be well to describe this scenery_] Mr. Frogbones reached his office, where the morning mail had already been opened and classified by a competent assistant. In the anteroom a number of callers were waiting, held in check by a respectful young man who was explaining to them that no one can possibly disturb Mr. Frogbones until his morning article is written....

As a matter of fact, we don’t feel that we can go on with this any further; it is beginning to seem too unlikely. But it only seems unlikely to us, because we know the truth about old Frogbones. The average magazine reader would swallow it without cavil. That is why we say that writing is huge fun, because you can solve all the perplexities and distractions of life as you go along, and really enjoy yourself at the same time, and (most remarkable of all) get paid for it.

A CHRISTMAS SOLILOQUY

I

In the most peaceful spot known to American life--a railroad train--we had several hours of that pleasure which offices are devised to prevent, viz., meditation; or even (if we may dare so high) thought. Our thoughts, or whatever they are that go round inside you when you are sitting passively in a train, were tinged by the approach of Christmas.

There was evidently something in the bright air and pre-Christmas feeling of that December afternoon that even softened the heart of the news butcher, for we noticed as the train hastened along the Connecticut shore his manner became more and more fond. He began, at Grand Central, in a mood of formality, even austerity. “Lots of nice reading matter here, gentlemen,” he cried. “Get a nice short story book” (by “book” he meant, of course, magazine) “to kill time for a coupla hours.” We thought, perhaps a little sadly, of the irony of begging men to annul Time when they had happily reached almost the only place in America where it can be enjoyed, examined, taken apart, and looked at. But, perhaps due to a niggardly spirit among his congregation in the smoker, the agent gradually became more fraternal. His manner was almost bedside by the time we had got to New Rochelle. “Choclut pepmints, figs, and lemon drops, fellas!” And at Stamford he was beginning to despair. “Peanuts: they’re delicious, boys.” We made up our mind, by the way, as to the correct answer to our old question, Where does New England begin? The frontier is at South Norwalk, for there we saw a sign _The New England Cereal Company_. And just about there, also, begin the billboards urging Codfish, surely the authentic image and superscription of New England.

Of course there is a great deal to think about in the signs you see along the track. There is that notice:

+------------+ | DANGEROUS | | LIVE WIRES | | KEEP AWAY | +------------+