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.
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.
