AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL HAROLD STEARNS America and the Young Intellectual BY HAROLD STEARNS NEW x YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1920, 1921, BY THE FREEMAN, INC. COPYRIGHT, IQl8, BY THE DIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONTENTS PACK AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL 9 VAN WYCK BROOKS: Critic and Creator 24 A STUDY in DOCILITY .... 34 LA PEUR de la VIE 40 WHERE Are Our INTELLECTUALS? . . 46 ILLUSIONS of the SOPHISTICATED . . 52 LOST in the CROWD 59 An INTELLECTUAL EGGSHELL PERIOD . 65 A QUESTION of MORALS . . . . 71 AU-DESSOUS de la MELEE .... 77 COMMON SENSE About FRANCE . . 82 OVERDONE 90 A DILAPIDATED SCARECROW ... 96 BIGOTRY 0n. not amusement, nor cleverness, nor mere artistic in- genuity, nor coating the pill of moral exhortation with the sugar of popularity, but the creative mind. It is a discouraging and almost thankless task, for it is the kind of assumption we all too blithely accept without troubling ourselves about thinking it through. One can easily foresee the result of this touchstone when applied to our more popular novelists; it is more disconcerting when applied to our more pre- tentious writers because it must perforce go beneath sham and self-deception. For instance, although Mr. Brooks resents as hotly as your more naive literary radical, the comparative neglect given to men, say, like Dreiser and Cabell, he cannot content himself with merely tooting their horn; precisely be- cause they do make serious pretensions, he judges 28 VAN WYCK BROOKS: Critic and Creator them seriously, i. e., by European standards, with results not altogether complimentary. Yet the con- ventional disparager of either of these men will find small comfort in Mr. Brooks's severe appraisements; he does not condemn them because they abandon certain American standards, but because, having abandoned them, they did not do so fully or artis- tically. The practical difference is immense. And combined with this high passion for the claims of the creative life Mr. Brooks possesses infinite verbal felicity, sharp psychological insight, true simplicity of approach, and wide scholarship surely no mean equipment for any critic 1 One would not have to make any serious reserva- tions to this judgment, yet four important defects, which impair the easy functioning of his admitted gift, ought to be noted. The first is the most inter- esting, and can be best explained by an analogy. When certain critics complained that Nietzsche's fulminations against aspects of Christianity par- ticularly against charity and humility arose because he was lacking himself in those emotions, and could therefore not adequately appreciate their value, Nietzsche wrote to his sister in defence that, on the contrary, he hated these virtues not because he had not himself experienced them but because he had experienced them to excess and knew their danger. Similarly, Mr. Brooks is a part of the tradition he repudiates; he cannot quite escape being somewhat academic in his attacks on academicism. Unlike a rough and tumble critic such as Mr. H. L. Mencken, to whom the whole academic tradition is external, 29 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL something to be amused at or have fun with but not to take any more seriously than an annoying fly on a hot summer's day, Mr. Brooks has to fight the battle within himself almost every time he writes. He repudiates the academic tradition through internal conflict rather than external contempt; he cannot be quite objective about it. Particularly does this reveal itself in an occasional shrinking quality to his style, somewhat like Matthew Arnold writing at his worst. This faint aura of old-fashioned gentility, which seems to cling to certain portions of Mr. Brooks's writings, this curious lack of gusto and heartiness, really springs from a sort of asceticism, expressing itself in reiterative preoccupation with the claims of the creative life. It is a fine theme, but Mr. Brooks plays on it a little too constantly; he cannot seem to forget it for moments long enough to permit sensu- ous enjoyment of the things of the flesh and the devil, as, for example, with that finest of ironists, Anatole France, one feels that the logic of ideas may always be spiced with frank appreciation of fair women, old wine, and a good table. Mr. Brooks is a trifle too serious to be a great ironist, and particularly in his "Ordeal of Mark Twain" this almost evangelistic fervour to underscore the main theme has evoked from many critics the charge although I believe, on the whole, it is not a wholly just one of something of a lack of sense of humour. It all goes back, it seems to me, to a delicate sensitiveness, a detach- ment, cool and well-nigh impeccable from an intel- lectual* point of view, but not warmed sufficiently with direct experience. It is sensibility moving in a 30 VAN WYCK BROOKS: Critic and Creator rather rarefied atmosphere of ideas and subtle emo- tions, explaining, too, his constant fear that our younger writers will be drawn away from the true spirit of culture into the more or less irrelevant vortex of politics and sociology. For example, Ran- dolph Bourne in the "History of a Literary Radical" spoke of living down "the new orthodoxies of propa- ganda" as he had lived down the old orthodoxies of the classics, and in his introduction to that book Mr. Brooks interprets that to mean that had Bourne lived, his interests would have "concentrated more and more on the problem of evoking and shaping an American literature" an interpretation that I think clearly incorrect. Still, whether correct or not, it is an illustration which serves as an excellent index to this aspect of Mr. Brooks's point of view. He shrinks a little from the practical world, as if it were in a kind of malign collective conspiracy to destroy one's interest in the true things of the spirit whereas the fact probably is, it is in no conspiracy at all, but merely sodden and indifferent, fully preoccu- pied with the economic difficulty of living. The young writer of to-day cannot escape this soddenness and indifference; it is almost imperative he have some central conviction as to how this economic difficulty can be solved so that creative energies may be set free. He does not have to be a conscious propa- gandist for this conviction, quite the contrary; but he must have it as a background to his mind so that the world becomes, so to speak, spiritually tolerable and his creative instincts may function without let or hindrance. It is a penalty all writers have to pay AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL for living in this age that is, a penalty they must pay if they expect to be heard and to exercise any genuine influence. Mr. Brooks does not like to face this difficulty squarely ; he shudders a bit at economics instead of recognizing the imperative need of human- ising it. Perhaps a deeper defect is Mr. Brooks's lack of some central philosophy of life, some definite Welt- anschauung. At some times he writes like a con- vince dfree-willist; he challenges authors because they do not properly see their role of leadership, implying that a handful of creative minds, set free and disin- terested, may change the whole drift and colour of a civilisation as certainly such handfuls seem to have done often enough in the past. At other times he writes like a convinced determinist; he explains the weaknesses of authors in terms of their environment, implying as plainly that unless there is a collective tradition, a way of life, an objective culture furnish- ing clear standards of discrimination, authors must necessarily be crippled and thwarted as certainly such maladjusted authors seem to have been so crip- pled often enough in the past. Yet both points of view cannot be absolutely true; they are fundamen- tally incompatible. Nevertheless Mr. Brooks seems unable to effect any reconciliation between them, with the result that often in his writings there is an odd effect of internal vacillation that is, intellectually. But Mr. Brooks is still a young man; there is nothing irremediable in this, and I prefer to regard it simply as an indication that Mr. Brooks has not yet reached his full intellectual maturity. After all, one remem- 32 VAN WYCK BROOKS: Critic and Creator bers that William James did not publish his first book until he was forty-eight. Mr. Brooks's reception by other American critics has been, on the whole, encouraging as appreciation, but discouraging as guidance. His power and equip- ment have been recognised and welcomed. Certain academic critics men like Stuart P. Sherman have attacked him, as might naturally have been expected, although usually, I think, for the wrong reason. In any event, his reception has not been personally help- ful to him I mean by that that he has not been able to evoke any considerable body of intelligent criti- cism which would help him to correct his faults. Possibly such a body of intelligent criticism is not to be found in America to-day; there assuredly seems to be no standard to which the young writer, wise or foolish, good or bad, may repair with some confi- dence. There is most certainly no body of tradition to reflect the judgment of his peers. It is precisely the chief function of Mr. Brooks to contribute towards the creation of those institu- tional lacks in our environment. He can hardly fail to help in that creation, if only by virtue of his call- ing such insistent attention to those things in Amer- ica if they are ever to be built at all which he himself missed, and thus, vicariously, missed for others. 33 A STUDY in DOCILITY THE articles on America and Americans by Mr. Henry W. Nevinson, which have appeared originally in the London Nation and the Manchester Guardian and have subsequently been reprinted in some of our newspapers and magazines, are both illuminating and good-tempered a grateful combination, for it must be really difficult for the intelligent and perceiving foreigner to survey our contemporary civilisation without becoming angry. But Mr. Nevinson, with an alert eye for our weaknesses, contrives to keep urbane and well-disposed. It is easy to see that the author has had many of his pre-conceptions destroyed by the facts of our life as he saw them, some pre- conceptions quite amiable and others obviously less so. He seems frankly surprised and pleased at our inveterate good-nature and easy-going ways sur- prised, also, although not so pleasantly, at our ter- ror of public opinion and docility before the ukases of our irresponsible government. He finds it diffi- cult to understand the fetish we make of our anti- quated Constitution, and our deep fear of any funda- mental change. We do not challenge authority, he says; we accept it in any of its forms with almost child-like patience; a heritage, he suspects, from the severity of our Puritan forebears. For the most part Mr. Nevinson's observations are just and shrewd, if 34 A STUDY in DOCILITY also, in our opinion, a trifle too kindly and tolerant; and we can with a clear conscience recommend a reading of them to all who wish to know the cultured outsider's reaction to our contemporary American social life. But the explanation Mr. Nevinson makes of our docility, while true enough as far as it goes, seems to us somewhat inadequate. Further, it is only one side of the medal, so to speak, for our docility, undoubt- edly our worst fault, is the inevitable accompaniment of our lack of class-consciousness or caste-feeling, which, in its turn, is unquestionably our greatest strength. Now this lack of class-consciousness is derived not so much from Puritanism per se as from the whole pioneer tradition. Social distinctions can not in a pioneer country have the rigidity or impor- tance they invariably have in any old and long-settled country. When every one was engaged in the great adventure of exploiting the natural resources of a virgin continent, when economic opportunity lay to anybody's properly acquisitive hand; when for many years the fact and not the myth, as it is to-day of free land created an almost irresistible Drang nach Westen; when a fortune could still be made and lost in a week; when capital was fluid rather than con- centrated; when finance and business had more the aspects of a game than a serious profession with such a pioneer background, many aspects of it con- tinuing even to this day, social distinctions are felt as rather absurd and a definite caste system becomes next to impossible; It is in this respect that one feels most deeply 35 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL American when abroad; we always resent the servile "sir" of the English "man" and find it difficult not to cry out in rage when foreign taxi-drivers or lug- gage men doff their caps out of, if not real respect, at all events immemorial tradition. The spontane- ous sense of equality of the blaspheming American baggage-smasher appears healthy and genuinely dem- ocratic by comparison. In fact, our hatred of ser- vility in any of its forms is one of the deepest of our national feelings; we really do believe that one man is just as good as another if not a little bit better. But this is not ten per cent the outcome of Puri- tanism; it is the equality of the pioneer, or in modern terms the entrepreneur, to become which, if one wishes, is still regarded as every native American's inalienable right. It is not an especially ennobling type of equality, to be sure; it is rather the type of equality that states that every little pig shall have his equal chance at the swill-trough of national pros- perity. Yet whatever its materialistic origins, it has resulted in a very definite emotional attitude, an al- most complete absence of anything like class-con- sciousness. This is the real and fundamental reason why the Socialist party in America remains essentially alien in its point of view, and has never adapted it- self successfully to native psychological conditions. Temperamentally we dislike uniforms, rank, titles, medals, and all other badges of distinction and dif- ference; which has resulted, as all foreign observers have pointed out, in an incredible uniformity of dress and speech and mannerism, a standardisation fitting 36 A STUDY in DOCILITY in extremely well with modern industrial methods, national advertising, and large-scale production. To put it in a nutshell, the docility which Mr. Nevinson justly and correctly deplores is the price we pay for a real democratic equality. When dis- tinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personali- ties or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it to-day, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of every- thing, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second- rate? American docility is the natural result of the pio- neering background of our history, just as European servility is the natural result of that continent's feudal background. In the first instance, our terror before what is called public opinion and our fear that we shall be found out transgressing the accepted moral standards, has its compensation in the absence of any bowing-down before mere caste. In the second instance, the intense class-consciousness in a country like England has its compensation in the presence of 37 AMERICA and the. YOUNG INTELLECTUAL an intellectual aristocracy that does not hesitate to view middle-class morality and middle-class ideals with contempt. Whichever view prevails, there are advantages and disadvantages. Is it possible to reconcile the advantages and at the same time avoid the evils which look like the necessary correlative of adopting either point of view? The history of American democracy during the last ten years does not seem to point to an affirmative answer to that question; to tell the truth, to find an answer to the riddle appears too much like discov- ering how to eat one's cake and have it too, a discov- ery not yet made although mankind rather obsti- nately refuses to give up hope. For is it not really an open question whether we have not abandoned our terror of mere caste only to replace it with an even fiercer terror of that democratic leviathan, The Average Man? Have we not refused to bow down to noble blood, only that we may bow down in even more lowly fashion to the average man and his commonplace prejudices? Certainly any thoughtful student of the course of social history in democratic America would hesitate to answer these questions in the negative. We have witnessed a steady increase in the glorification of the average; the average in health, in morals, in intel- lect. Our strongest passion seems to have become more and more the passion to be as closely as possible like every one else. From the point of view of hu- man personality, we have literally become afraid to go home in the dark. This increasing standardisa- tion is no mere accident; it is part of the normal de- 38 A STUDY in DOCILITY velopment of our type of democracy, at least up to the saturation-point. At present, our most logical hope can only be that this saturation-point has been almost, if not fully, reached. We shall but be hug- ging illusions, if we imagine that any great literary or artistic movement will be possible in America until the present ideals of democratic equality have been re-examined and re-evaluated. 39 LA PEUR de la VIE IT is curious what different types of mind and what different methods of intellectual approach have pro- duced an almost identical diagnosis of the anaemia of modern industrial civilisation. Long before the present world war William James, in his now pro- phetic essay "A Moral Equivalent for War," ex- pressed the criticism of the alert and discerning mind at the thinness and barrenness of a universe con- structed from merely well-intentioned humanitarian ideals. To a man of such vigour and real daring a world of placid utopianism was intolerable. James's whole essay was a straightforward attempt to assess the high value of danger and risk in any endurable society. Yet so utterly unlike a temperament as that represented by George Santayana made a similar complaint in "Winds of Doctrine," saying with great bitterness that nothing was meaner and more con- temptible than the desire to live on, somehow, at any price a desire which seemed to be the chief characteristic, and to further which was the main intellectual preoccupation, of the age. Even in so unphilosophical and essentially journalistic and con- temporary a writer as H. G. Wells there often re- curred this same bitterness at the lack of colour and movement in modern life, where, as he once ex- pressed it, a man could live through his entire three score years and ten fudging and evading and never 40 LA PEUR de la VIE being really hungry, never being really thirsty or angry or in danger, or facing a really great emotion, until the agony of the deathbed. Civilisation had not merely refused to calculate on death, but had come almost to the point of refusing to believe in it. The keener minds rebelled against that hypocrisy. Then came the war, and with it that most discon- certing phenomenon which L. P. Jacks has described as "the peacefulness of being at war" the sense, at last, that there was really danger and high adventure and the possibility of dealing and receiving death once more. Of course the conventional reformist type of mind was shocked and horrified at this emergence of death as a reality. Up to what we might call the saturation point of sensitiveness these minds dwelt with almost unctuous detail upon blood, pus, agony, and human hopes shattered to bits by unfeeling fire and shrapnel. These were the people who during the first year of the war never tired of telling us that civilisation had tumbled into ruins. But as they had never really faced death before the war came, so they never really faced it afterward. Their shrinking from war's horrors was not sincere; they protested too much. Unlike the average soldier, dragged from an industrial life of doubtful happi- ness, thwarted in his aspirations for creative activ- ity, crushed in his few timid strivings for genuine emotions, bound by routine, they did not accept the war as a kind of release from the diligent muffling against the realities of life and death which we call modern civilisation. In all men in whose veins blood has not wholly turned to water there is left a strong 41 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL instinct of what the French call nostalgic de la boue, and while they do not pretend to like lice and mud and sudden pain and hunger and cold and an iron discipline that reduces their own individuality to zero, it would be idle to deny that they find in all these things a kind of deep gratification (a grati- fication which the conventional pacifist mind cannot even imaginatively appreciate) that life is not the smooth, round, tasteless monotony which the indus- trial revolution had almost succeeded in making it. Naturally soldiers do not intellectualise about war in the ingenious fashion of Mr. Jacks, and for them its glamour has little connection with the trap- pings and parade and music of militaristic romance. What is undeniable, however, is that war, in so far as it is a war and not a corporation-like mechanism, does satisfy a fundamental and thwarted human need. This is either ignored or denied by the con- ventional humanitarian mind, which suddenly in August, 1914, discovered that war was horrible and men were the sons of women. And as a consequence this type of reformist intellectual approach by far the most common after its first shattering of amia- ble illusions developed a curious technique of evasion, which is precisely as much a denial of the reality of death in actual war time as it was formerly in the piping days of peace. Details are not here neces- sary, for we all recognise those for whom to-day the emphasis is all upon the happy by-products of the present agony, the new world, integration, and so on. Indeed, instead of being shocked by war out of their earlier paltry utopianism to face and to cal- 42 LA PEUR de la VIE culate upon the reality of death in life, the last four years seem merely to have made them take refuge in even more grandiose utopianisms. Too many of the schemes for a reconstructed world after the war are merely self-protective prisons in which the well- wishers defend themselves from the assaults of the awful reality beating at their doors. But the competent and realistic mind is not afraid either to face the possibility of death or to describe modern war in any other terms than those of per- manent human values. It does not shrink from a world of danger and struggle, yet neither does it gloss over or prettify the tragic fruits of the modern battlefield. Bertrand Russell is a signal example of the humanist and realist who strikes this compromise between a recognition of the necessity for danger and colour and creation and movement in a decent civilisation, and a recognition of the futility and waste of modern war. He realises, as Gilbert Can- nan in his passionate little book "Freedom" also realises, that modern wars are the atonement we make for our lack of appreciating the human evils of a pallid, "safe" industrialism. On the other side of the enemy frontier, Professor Sigmund Freud voices much the same idea in his short essay, "Re- flections on War and Death," for the translation of which we have to thank the diligence and scientific interest of Dr. A. A. Brill and Mr. A. B. Kuttner. It is true that Dr. Freud's final plea has not entirely the hopeful and prophetic quality of Bertrand Rus- sell's vision. Evidently the essay was written early in the war, for it is spotty and unco-ordinated and 43 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL slight. Freud has not attempted to deal with the second and less cynical part of the dilemma of modern war as definitely and optimistically as Rus- sell. But he has stated afresh with great vigour, and with the powerful reinforcement of his well-known technique of psychological analysis, the barrenness of modern civilisation a barrenness which arose from its refusal to calculate upon death. "Life becomes impoverished and loses its inter- est when life itself, the highest stake in the game of living, must not be risked." In ordinary, every- day existence we can get only the thin gratification of our ever-dying, ever-resurrected heroes of litera- ture and the stage. All our risks and our challenges of fate are vicarious. Thus we are inconsolable when death actually happens, and we act "as if we belonged to the tribe of the Asra, who also die when those whom they love perish." As Freud points out, war compels us to change all that to recognise the real- ity of death, just as the death of the beloved of primitive man (who, like our own unconscious to-day, did not believe in death) forced him to recognise its reality. For war restores what civilisation can hide, heroism which springs from our deep inability to believe in our own death, pleasure in the killing of the hated one in the enemy (the hatred which is the component of all love), and power to rise above "the shock of the death of friends." Freud asks us if we have not, in our civilised attitude towards death, lived psychologically beyond our means. His own answer of course is in the affirmative, and the affirmative is probably correct. He Is certainly right 44 LA PEUR de la VIE in urging us to shake off our hypocrisy about death and to calculate upon its realities. But it is a plea which is relevant for peace as for war. Whatever civilisation emerges from the recent clash of arms, it can have no stability and no creative joy unless our former timidities are exorcised. Life loses its major virility when we strive at all costs to maintain it. That is the justification for Freud's plea, and it is sufficient. WHERE Are Our INTELLECTUALS? WHAT is the matter with the American intellec- tuals? If they really occupy the valid position of mediating between extremes, the alternate attacks of the conservatives who hint that they are insidious, and of the extremists of the other end who call them timid and time-serving, ought to flatter them tremen- dously; for they are always being attacked in just this fashion. On the Sunday following the explosion in Wall Street, the Reverend Dr. Manning, of Trin- ity Church, at the head of Wall Street, preached a few words of warning against them; and every issue of your downright "red" periodical has at least one contemptuous fling at them. Yet somehow the care- ful observer comes to feel both charges as unreal; the intellectuals are not so much faint-hearted as they are bewildered, and they can hardly be called insidious in their influence, when the fact is that they exercise practically no influence at all. The trouble goes much deeper. First of all, as is true of all other countries, they are numerically an extremely small class. By com- mon consent, they are not the college and university professors occupying official positions. These pro- fessors may sympathise with certain phases of their activity, in fact, they often do so; but it is a sound intuition that puts them outside the class. It is felt 46 WHERE Are Our INTELLECTUALS? that by the terms of their official position itself they have given hostages to fate: they are committed. And the intellectuals' ideal the correct and fine one, too is that first and foremost the intellectual must be disinterested, non-sectarian and non-partisan, de- voted to no pursuit except pursuit of the truth. Offi- cial educators are not easily thought of as in this group; only occasionally can the man of genius like William James, rise above his professorial identifi- cations. Similarly, although the man of science might be thought to be the natural leader or certainly the first member of the intellectual class, science has been cut up into too many unrelated specialisms. Once more the intellectuals' ideal and once more the correct and fine one is that the truth in question is not any narrow one of method or of limited and precise observation, but the truth of the whole range of life. It is the philosopher's point of view; what to-day we call the humanistic view. Only occasion- ally can a man of genius like Huxley or Agassiz, tran- scend his special sphere, and attain it. No, the term intellectuals, has come to mean something both broader and narrower; publicists, editors of non- trade magazines, pamphleteers, writers on general topics. In France they are represented by such men as Henri Barbusse, Anatole France, and Romain Rolland; in England, say, by Shaw, Wells, Chester- ton, Angell, Massingham, Scott, Brailsford, Wallas and Cole; in America by such as the reader may nominate. It is true, then, that the class is a small one. Per- haps for that reason it might naturally be expected 47 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL not to have much influence ; and in this country there is a certain excuse for its impotence, in the fact that minorities are more despised here than in any other country. Well and good; but the same class is small in all countries, as we have already said, and even if other nations are more tolerant in such matters, it is never in the nature of things for a minority to be popular. Yet the fact remains that in France and England this group has exercised, and is exercising to-day, enormous influence; it is also the fact that in America to-day it is exercising no influence at all. Differences in social structure can explain a good deal, but not everything. There are deep internal weaknesses in the position of the American intellec- tual. In our brief definition of the ideals which the in- tellectual attempts to represent, we come upon our chief clue to these weaknesses. The American intel- lectual is primarily not disinterested; second, he has kept his attention upon an extremely narrow range of subjects, politics above all which perhaps is to be expected in a country where politics, in spite of its accomplishing so little, is so much the topic of com- mon conversation, so much the reformer's instrument and then, after politics (although in a curiously faint-hearted manner, as if only in answer to the persistent attacks of the radicals) economics. A few, by force of a curious cultural atavism, apparently, are interested in certain derivatives of religion; a larger number take a lively interest in literature and art and philosophy; although in the last instance, of- tenest with contempt for those who devote over-much 48 WHERE Are Our INTELLECTUALS? of their energy to economic and political subjects. But one can count on the fingers of one hand those who, like Mr. Bertrand Russell in England, are flex- ible enough and unafraid to take for their province the whole diverse range of contemporary American social life. This almost instinctive limitation of in- terest is both the result and the cause of a kind of partisanship, the bias which inevitably comes from too close preoccupation with one subject; exem- plified most drearily in the myth of the Ph. D. As a cause of this partisanship, it is linked up with what we ventured to term the primary weakness of the American intellectual his almost complete lack of disinterestedness. This primary weakness can best be seen as the consequence of a far and an immediate historical tradition, a cultural driving force in American life long antedating the war, and powerfully reinforced by it. It is, in brief, the tradition of getting things done, of definite accomplishment. That is why so many young Americans start out to become intellec- tuals, disinterested lovers of the truth, and end up by becoming reformers. The natural temper of the country is horribly evangelical, and it is only by try- ing to get some new idea or reform "across," that the intellectual comes to feel that he has a respectable place in our contemporary social life. When thought is despised and feared, one must make action and verbiage do duty for thought; one must "show re- sults." The pitiful breakdown of American intel- lectuals under the pressure of war-hysteria can be traced to the working of this immemorial national 49 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL tradition. To stand outside the current of events in splendid isolation, like Randolph Bourne, was felt to be both erratic and snobbish, and also ineffective; that was the crushing argument, ineffective. Every intellectual prided himself on being pragmatic, and bristled with indignation at the ultimate sceptic of any of the values supposedly involved in "winning the war." It would have been utterly alien to Amer- ican temperament, something incredible to conceive, that any party should have arisen in America such a party as did arise in Russia in 1916 and early 1917 advocating the idea that true national salvation lay in defeat rather than victory. The very Russian word podvig is almost untranslatable. We make a religion of optimism, of activity, of getting things done and always for the better. It is against this metallic social environment that the intellectual has to fight, and to which he usually succumbs. But this succumbing to the gospel of accomplish- ment, which the intellectual often rationalises as the victory of his common sense and good balanced judg- ment, is really only the outcome of an incredible naivete. The true and permanent influence of the intellectual is never so much the result of what he specifically advocates as of the example that he sets, and of the ideas that he clarifies and sets in motion. The true and permanent influence of the intellectual comes as much from a complete lack of the evangel- ical temper as from anything else. He is humble, but without any of the vain self-depreciation that shrewd old Dr. Johnson so unerringly exposed; because all those really interested in the life of the mind are 50 WHERE Are Our INTELLECTUALS? humble, humble before the facts. He is hard-work- ing and patient, unlike too many of our contempo- rary intellectuals who are just clever dilettanti in ideas. He is content with what, to the impatient reformer, must seem like very small "results." Above all, precisely because he is disinterested, he is objective, curious, and inquiring. Where in this present American environment of propaganda and counter-propaganda, of material triumphs and spirit- ual defeats, can he be found? He can not be found; he is too busy getting on the band-wagon. It is part of our national tradition that he should get on the band-wagon, and that he follows this tradition is the ultimate reason why he has such negligible in- fluence. He wants to "find" himself so eagerly and so quickly, that he only succeeds in losing himself in the crowd. ILLUSIONS of the SOPHISTICATED IF one wished to prove the soundness of the in- stincts of the ordinary man, one might do it most neatly, not by pointing out his virtues and general level-headedness, but rather by revealing the naiv- etes of his betters. For, in truth, it is oftener the sophisticated, the intellectual, and the highly edu- cated who is the victim of illusion than it is the every- day man of little or no schooling the sophisticated are merely more ingenious in disguising the fact. Thus, to be specific, one might take as a concrete example of naivete on the part of those who most pride themselves in their lack of it, the fact that the sophisticated always welcome with ill-concealed de- light the downfall of the charlatans and mounte- banks who dabble in mysticism of psychic phenomena. Precisely what is the flavour of the enjoyment they feel when the tricks of "mediums" are unmasked? Usually their explanation is that the exposure of intellectual dishonesty when it is no worse than that is of itself a guarantee of a wholesome desire to cherish intellectual integrity. This is true enough, as far as it goes. But this is not the whole reason for the educated man's delight in such exposures, nor in the final analysis, the primary one; and just so far as the sophisticated person really imagines it to be 52 the whole reason, he is as nai've as the gullible soul he is "showing up." Untrained, with no scientific discipline, without perhaps a high degree of intelligence, the ordinary man rushes in where many a philosophical angel fears to tread often, indeed, denies there is any such place to rush to. The field of mysticism, the field of the miasmatic and the unknown (in the common sense of the word) is a field extraordinarily resist- ible to the ordinary rationalistic methodology. Its concepts are much vaguer than the concepts of the objective world of observable fact, or at least they appear to be so. Its values seem to have no place in the hierarchy of the ethical scheme evolved by the alertly logical intellect. Consequently the sophis- ticated person denies the relevancy of any discussion of this field, and he points to the charlatan as a con- firmation of this judgment. What has happened, of course, is that a certain field of discussion has been declared closed, not be- cause it may not exist, but because exact and intel- ligible exploration of it is so unusually difficult. The ordinary man, blissfully unaware of the severe discipline required even to survey the objective, ob- servable world rationally, has none of the sophis- ticated person's qualms or fears. He has the cour- age of his lack of training. He dabbles in what is usually called spiritualism, because his interests lead him there. That he is bound sooner or later to make something of a fool of himself in his quest does not discourage him. The intellectual it does discourage rather, frighten. The intellectual is often 53 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL tired after a rational survey of the observable world; he finds that world hard enough to be intellectually honest with; he seldom sighs for new worlds to conquer. Thus he usually welcomes those who, when they go outside the ordinary plane of rational inquiry, by their blunders and ineptitudes apparently prove that no other than the ordinary plane has meaning. This is an illusion, of course, the joint product of intellectual weariness and cowardice, and it is here that the dialectical geniuses of the East can teach us a wholesome lesson. For in its best estate, Eastern philosophy does not shrink before these new diffi- culties; it applies the logical process still more rigor- ously to them. Too often your Western-minded, determinedly objective and rationally purposeful thinker, will at that point where reason needs to be applied more rather than less, simply deny the rele- vancy to the discussion of reason at all. He will deliberately put it outside rationalistic controversy; for the sophisticated person is really afraid that fur- ther rigorous, logical and rational exploration may show that all his previous concepts are on a false basis. Something of this sort has happened in the realm of higher mathematics. The present concept of infinity, for instance, to a certain extent corrects and to a certain extent modifies the earlier and more simple mathematical concepts, which, for most prac- tical purposes, were adequate. Non-Euclidean geom- etry, for a further instance, means nothing in the world of affairs, yet ultimately it may radically mod- ify the whole methodology of formulae, to the ad- 54 ILLUSIONS of the SOPHISTICATED vantage of certain of the more complicated higher sciences. This goes to show that these new concepts were achieved, not by the abandonment of the ra- tional methodology that created the earlier and more nai've concepts, but by the extension and intensifica- tion of this same methodology. The sophisticated who laugh at the ordinary man dabbling in spiritual- ism are like the high school teacher of algebra laugh- ing at the Principia Mathematica of Mr. Bertrand Russell. They do not see it, for the people they laugh at are simple, eager souls for the most part; but if they had a few highly disciplined Eastern dialecticians for their opponents, they might laugh, as the saying has it, on the other side of their face. Another illusion of the sophisticated springs from a lack of historical perspective, and is, after all, a rather gracious one. If one surveys the record of Western man, say from 1500 or 1000 B. C. to the present time, it becomes apparent that those periods in which art has truly flourished those happy con- junctions and harmonious interplay of men's emotions and instincts with their environment are but brief interludes in a ceaseless flow of bloodshed, intoler- ance, and ignorance. Except for the lucky few caught in the right generations, most of us are doomed to live in fallow periods, periods that live on impassioned recollection of the past or rosy hope- fulness about the future. In America of this gen- eration we happen to be in a fallow period of the second sort, and it is reasonable to suppose that this eminently unsatisfactory condition may continue for two or three generations to come. What we 55 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL know as romantic Western Christianity is infallibly coming to an end, and there are few civilised men to watch its demise with regret. Yet the will to dis- cover the best is strong in all of us, and in the sophis- ticated this will is always manifest in an exaggerated emphasis upon the importance of art. Now art, of course, is important, but it is never important when it is taken in an important way. Art is important as a fact as distinguished from a recollection or a hope only when it is unconscious, that is to say, spontaneous. But art is seldom spon- taneous when people talk about it; it is spontaneous when people live it when the expression of happy life flows without let or hindrance into song or poetry or music or painting or sculpture. It is a paean of accomplishment, as a man whistles when he is well content with the things of this world. It is the sign of a happy marriage between instinct and instinct's object. When it exists, it does not require discussion; it incites enjoyment. Like love and pleasure and the amenities of life, it is a by-product. It is a sym- bol of success. The naivete of the sophisticated is strikingly re- vealed in their exaggerated emphasis upon aesthetic values. They do not want to face the hard, unpleas- ant facts that the period in which they happen to be living is ugly and balked. Their method of escape is the simple one of talking much about beauty. Of course, there is a certain charm in this; the wan vitality of tradition may be reflected in ancient cathed- rals and noble, antiquated poems. The timelessness of classic forms can always be reaffirmed, and to 56 ILLUSIONS of the SOPHISTICATED some extent the old emotions may be rekindled. But the emotional satisfactions of feeding upon tra- dition are like thin tapers of light compared with the sunshine of creative living, to which art is a musical accompaniment. There is dignity and some pathos in the situation of the cultured and civilised, caught, as they are, in a crude era of the modern machine organisation and slave State. There is, too, illusion the old illusion that the stuff of our dreams may soften the outlines of reality, may cap- ture glamour just as the hunter traps birds. Yet before the inexorable facts of life the illusion, for all its kindliness and generous warmth, seems wholly nai've. Closely connected with this self-deception about art, are the more conventional self-deceptions about progress and democracy. In these two instances the influence of social custom and structure is so subtle and persuasive that even to raise the question has in most quarters the flavour of heresy. Professor George Santayana has shown, in an admirable essay in his latest book, "Character and Opinion in the United States," how even so independent and fear- less a mind as that of William James could not escape the milieu of Cambridge and America : "He seems to have felt sure," says Professor Santayana, "that certain thoughts and hopes those familiar to a liberal Protestantism were every man's true friends in life. This assumption would have been hard to defend if he or those habitually addressed had ever questioned it; yet his whole argument for voluntarily cultivating these beliefs rests on this assumption, that 57 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL they are beneficient." Yet of all the illusions which' revolt the soul, the illusion of progress is the most trying, the illusion that mere chronology in time works automatically towards moral ends. This teleo- logical superstition has been scorned by real thinkers in every age and in every country; that it happens to exist to-day, with more social compulsion than ever before, means merely that the real thinker is having a more difficult time of it. Indeed, his ener- gies are almost wholly concerned in fighting a use- less battle, for it is the sophisticated people, who are naturally his audience and his supporters, that cher- ish this illusion most strongly. The plain man often has his doubts about progress; frequently he is more of a genuine sceptic than are the educated. Similarly with democracy, the illusion has social sanctions which are very difficult to resist. One has to be on one's guard here about definitions. As one understands democracy, one is a democrat; one be- lieves in equality. But, in the words of Aristotle, "equality is just but only between equals." The current theory of democracy, that the decision of fifty-one per cent has a sovereign virtue, must be re- jected utterly. The notion that sovereignty, in the final analysis, rests anywhere but in individual voli- tion, openly and freely arrived at; that government or the State or the Church or any other abstract in- stitution has any final authority, that it has any other function than one of convenience, is as great a super- stition as that of the divine right of kings. Yet one can search the highways and the by-ways before one can find the sophisticated person to agree with this. 58 LOST in the CROWD IF a social psychologist should take the trouble to compute the amount of time that the average citizen, of any big American city spends as a member of one or another kind of crowd, he would get a vivid sense of the importance of his own subject : and at the same time he would quickly realise how unscientific and speculative that subject still is. Experimental psy- chology, educational psychology, neurology, psychi- atry, reaction-time to pain, and so on all seem to be commendably disciplined sciences in comparison with the vague and nebulous field of phenomena called social psychology. Yet it is precisely this vague and nebulous field which is of primary importance for the humanist. It is man reacting as a whole, and not in parts, which is the humanist's first consideration; and it is just there that the social psychologist, in spite of the regrettably elementary nature of his science, can help him most. For in considering the modern man as a whole, the first thing that strikes a dis- passionate observer is the fact that he lives as an in- dividual only about one-twentieth of his waking, con- scious life. The other nineteen-twentieths he spends as a member of a crowd. Personal individuality is almost completely smothered; indeed with a few more mechanistic developments in our modern civil- isation it may some day be smothered altogether. Consider, for example, the average city-man's 59 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL daily routine. He gets up, let us say, at eight. He shaves and washes his teeth, using a standardised razor and soap and tooth-brush. He gets into standardised clothes and eats a more or less stand- ardised breakfast. Then he comes to his office by train or subway, reading his morning newspaper; which again hundreds of thousands of others are doing at that same moment of time. In one sense, his newspaper is just another crowd to which he be- longs. At his office he goes through the routine of his business, sharing the crowd-assumptions of the organisation of which he is a part, and in general sharing the wider assumptions of the whole business- world in which his particular organisation functions. After a hasty lunch eaten with the crowd he goes back to the afternoon routine; and then goes home with the crowd, reading his evening newspaper the while. Possibly after dinner he goes to a show, to his lodge, or to a friendly game of poker with the boys. Thus he spends the larger part of the day as a member of a crowd; but this fact barely begins to tell the story. When he is alone, or when for a moment or two he stumbles on the curb, day-dream- ing and not keenly aware of his immediate environ- ment, his mind is full of crowd-assumptions, snatches of propaganda from his newspaper, dramatisations of himself before certain crowds; and if the average city-man once gave an honest introspective account of his own stream of consciousness, he would be astonished at how little of that stream is his personal own, and how much of it is contributed by the crowds which press upon him from all sides. 60 LOST in the CROWD While man is largely a social animal, he was never meant to be as social as all this. Somehow or other, human individuality must peep through the smother- ing blanket of modern crowds; and what is happen- ing to-day is a curious and dangerous exemplification of this ancient truth. Curious, because man is mak- ing use of the very thing that is crushing him; dan- gerous, because he is not making a success of it. Before 1914 it would perhaps have been difficult to make it clear how modern man is using the crowd to give vent to those very dispositions of which so- ciety as a whole must disapprove. Fortunately the experiences of the war and of the period of intensive propaganda since the war, make the assertion ap- pear less paradoxical to-day. It is a thesis that social psychologists, for example so able a writer as Mr. Everett Dean Martin, are increasingly emphasising. Investigation has not gone far yet, but the importance of further investigation and research can not be underestimated. Briefly, the facts appear to be something thus: The anti-social dispositions in man, the crude sexual waywardnesses and anarchial aggressiveness, for in- stance, are ordinarily disciplined by the civilised en- vironment and by teaching; the result of which is to push them back into the unconscious where they take their revenge, innocently in the form of dreams, and savagely in the form of sudden pathological out- bursts. This is fairly familiar; the strain of balked dispositions created by modern civilisation is to-day a well-worn theme. In contrast to these wild anti- social impulses are usually set the so-called social dis- 61 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL positions; to gain prestige in the community; to be well thought of; to build a family; to rise in one's profession; to take part in public affairs; and so on. Society, groups, clubs, nations, communities are then pictured as organisations which perform the double function of stimulating these social dispositions in man and of furnishing the means through which these aroused dispositions can find satisfaction. It is con- ventional to call a man civilised when the second group of dispositions has developed power enough to hold the first group in check. Society, and the groups into which society naturally divides itself, are supposed to furnish the most efficacious aid in stimulating man to develop such power. The strain of the balked dispositions is then supposed some- how to disappear into thin air, to have been civilised away; or in our modern jargon, sublimated. The war and its aftermath have clearly shown us that this analysis is much too simple. The anti-social dispositions manage to break through in spite of all; and the amazing thing is that they break through by using a crowd as the means of their expression. For example, to think of the nation as a whole is to be social in a large and wholesome way; yes, but in time of war, thinking of the nation as a whole be- comes translated into entirely different terms. It is to hate the enemy and to release vicariously all those fugitive sadistic impulses which ordinarily are kept decently hidden. Again, to act as part of the crowd in a lynching party is a social act, in so far as one is associated with many people in the enter- 62 LOST in the CROWD prise; but it also releases the most anti-social im- pulses imaginable. These, it will be demurred, are extreme cases. To be sure; yet they illustrate graphically the principle in question. More and more as one studies the sub- ject, does it become clear that propaganda, reform, standardisation, intolerance are all parts of the same sort of thing the use of the crowd to give vent to dispositions which in themselves deserve to be called anti-social. To a certain extent this has always hap- pened in human history; it has been a way of balanc- ing repression with release; but never has this prin- ciple been so ubiquitous and insidious as it is to-day. The fanatic speaking for his small minority, a crowd of which he is an important part, and attempting to impose the views and dogma of that minority on everybody else by weapon or by threat, enjoys the warm glow of the social approval of his group along with the personal satisfaction which comes from re- leasing his personal impulses towards cruelty. The ordinary man reading his newspaper and chuckling over some unfair attack on a politician who belongs to the party for which he does not vote, is under- going the same kind of psychological process. Now, the dangerous side of this method of finding release for certain dispositions does not, as we might at first suppose, lie in the fact of the release itself. Until we find a more civilised way of handling them, the bottled-up dispositions of man towards aggres- sion and anarchy will be periodically drained away in wars. War has that indubitable psychological function; and we have never squarely faced the prob- 63 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL lem of finding its moral equivalent. The deeper danger in this method of releasing certain disposi- tions is that the creative impulses, too, are under a strain in modern life; and they, too, find their vent through the medium of the crowd instead of through the expression of human personality. This, it seems to us, is the underlying reason for the deeper dissatisfaction of man with modern civili- sation. Increasingly the only method he can employ for the expression of his individuality is through the crowd. He must use an instrument which in a sense is a denial of his original purpose. To express his individuality he must employ the very thing that is by nature designed to smother it. It is a dilemma that our modern form of civilisation has posed for us, by accident rather than design. But it is a di- lemma that we must somehow resolve if the spiritual integrity of the individual man is to be preserved. '64 'An INTELLECTUAL EGGSHELL PERIOD THE steadily progressing relegation in this coun- try of the lusts of the body to a furtive subterranean life the climax of the neo-Puritan regime under which we live before, as we hope, the inevitable reac- tion comes upon us has had disastrous social conse- quences; this will hardly be denied. Healthy sexual impulses have been transformed into a back-of-the- barn sort of an affair; natural laziness, the deep in- stinctive contempt for work as such and the necessary forerunner to the play, or creative impulse, has be- come a sin against the modern spirit; the drinking of wine, an amiable and glorious tradition, has been ignominiously thrust into the environment of what is graphically and accurately known as a blind pig; the impulse of anger and belligerency has been drained away by a ridiculous emphasis upon physical training of the set, mechanical type and by games which have little of the sting of adventure left in them. Santayana a few years ago diagnosed the case correctly when he said that the true symptom of the anaemia of the age was its emphasis upon virility and ironically enough, at a time when most of Europe is suffering from malnutrition, never in America has the preoccupation with physical well-being been so great. It greets us daily in the street-cars with their eternal indigestion-cure advertisements; in the news- papers with their page displays of how life may be extended; in the interminable interest in interstitial and other glands and in frequent stories of how run-down men of sixty can be changed into frolicsome colts of twenty-five. It would require a diligent sta- tistician to enumerate the different brands of tooth- paste, the thousands of new styles of soap, the long list of patent antiseptics. We want to acquire life, as we acquire possessions. We are afraid of dirt; afraid of disease; afraid of death. We are afraid even of morbidity. And most of all we are afraid of unleashing any of those natural impulses of the body which, by the merest unhappy chance, might lead even remotely to any of those things. Yet to be so afraid of disease and death, almost hysterically afraid as we are, is at bottom only to be afraid of life itself. The coward, says a Japanese proverb, dies many deaths, the brave man only one. Our modern psycho-analysts can tell us a pretty story of the many American neurotics they have to treat for this more fatal disease of anticipatory extinction. Now, this exaggerated emphasis upon health, with its invariable concomitant of an iron discipline over what are regarded as the wayward impulses of the body (a similar discipline was the precursor of Sparta's downfall), is always the stigma of true anaemia as it is the first characteristic of Puritanism. True health is joyous and reckless, it comes from plunging fearlessly into life; it has little relation to our contemporary specious well-being that is but a life-long grovelling before bacilli. Above all, Puri- tanism loves to hide its terror of joy and natural 66 'An INTELLECTUAL EGGSHELL PERIOD animal gaiety behind the arras of Anglo-Saxon hu- manitarianism and an intense regard for future gen- erations a regard, by the way, biologically suspi- cious in itself, since those races which have given little or no thought to the welfare of future gen- erations seem to have produced the most numerous and the most healthy progeny. But the point here is that this shivering, corn-fed timidity before the joyous waywardness and gaiety of life dominates in American culture and social manners to-day. It may be inwardly weak, as we believe it is; yet it occupies the strategic position in our contemporary civilisation. Able to set the social standards, it keeps the majority of the populace (which secretly despises these arrogant minorities) screwed up to a kind of verbal and external obedience. That is the inevitable price we have to pay for still living under the pioneer tradition, where to go against the tribal sanctions was, as it still is, the ultimate sin. Be- cause such uniformity was a pragmatic necessity in the early days of our national life, we are still to-day when conditions are so rapidly changing content to be led around by the nose by these self-appointed dictators of national morals. Sooner or later there will be a reaction against them. For fundamentally, so we think, the American temperament (as distinguished from the purely Anglo-Saxon temperament) is not of this morbid, timorous, Puritanical, conformistic strain at all life would be intolerable, if we were so pessimistic as to have to think so. Puritanism of the kind that rules us to-day came from the fens and dour marshes 67 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL of Prussia, from a land of fog and brutality and no joy. It acquired certain hypocritical twists in its passage through the British Isles, although it has never changed its basic character. But it is a quality of thought and life really not adapted to the Amer- ican environment and temperament at all, and only a sort of deliquescent pioneer docility, so to speak, gives it its temporary strangle-hold. We are a land of sunshine and plenty; a land of sparkling, elec- trical air; a land of many strains of blood, quickly transforming themselves in the amalgam into a type quite distinct from the Anglo-Saxon (just as the American Indian, originally Mongolian, soon became a distinct type). Give us half a chance, and we like nothing better than to laugh and play and be gay. We have abundant vitality, if the truth were known; it is just an historical anachronism that to-day we are ruled by the anaemic, the feminine, and the fearful. But where then, in this unpleasant transition pe- riod, does our vitality express itself, cramped and thwarted as it is? Subterraneously, as we have said, on its more joyous side. Into business and the mak- ing of money on its aggressive side, although here too a great deal of romantic nonsense is talked about the "intense" American business man, for business is almost as much a game with us as golf or base- ball. On its darker side, it goes into lynching and violence of all kinds. And on the side of plain neurology, if one likes, a great deal of real energy is consumed in gum-chewing, rocking-chair ecstasy, and "jazz." Pitiful substitutes, to be sure, and often 68 'An INTELLECTUAL EGGSHELL PERIOD unpleasant ones from the purely medical point of view, as any honest psychiatrist can tell us. Yet proof, too, that all vitality has not beta quite vacuum- cleaned out of us by the moralists. The very energy of our contemporary adulation of our anaemia is proof well, proof, paradoxically, that the vitality to destroy it is still there. But none of this thwarted energy and it is a very melancholy thing to reflect upon gets into our intel- lectual life. With us it was a natural pioneer tradi- tion that to be interested in the life of reason was in itself rather feminine and sissified. We are far from having finished with what Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has so aptly called the apotheosis of the low- brow. And for the next generation of young men, who will still in all probability be living under the tyranny of anaemia, the outlook is particularly black. Balzac had a very fine phrase to describe a period through which every young man ought to go, the period of nostalgie de la boue. Where, however, will this next generation turn when this period of late adolescence comes upon it? There will be no mud, only Y. M. C. A.'s and Chautauquas and back-of- the-barn. The healthy and vigorous will turn to the subterranean expression of their vitality, the only expression vouchsafed them. The censorship and the social conventions will prevent any of this vital- ity finding its natural vent in literature or in art, where it might be lifted into rhyme and colour, as youth, when let alone, is usually eager to have it. Those who have the very vitality most needed for the true life of the mind will be shame-faced and 69 secretive and furtive about those very impulses, which, if they but understood them, did them the most credit. Consequently the intellectual life of the nation will be left to the colourless, the timid, and the weak. It will be a period of preciosite and dilettantism in a bad sense that is, a period arising not as a kind of reaction to too sturdy vitality (like the fin de siecle period in the France of Baudelaire and Verlaine) but from a shrinking before the facts of life. It will be thin and brittle, like an eggshell easily cracked, but an eggshell without an egg, either rotten or sound, inside it, an eggshell covering an intellectual void. 70 A QUESTION of MORALS THE unsuspecting foreigner in these parts might plausibly imagine that the "Make Your Own" signs increasingly displayed in our grocery shops are one side of a jovial campaign by manufacturers of ciga- rette paper to get smokers to roll their own. And if he picks up one of our weekly sporting papers, attracted by the girls in the one-piece bathing suits on the cover, he will, when he reads the following advertisement, be impressed at our regard for na- tional hygiene: STILLS! STILLS! We can furnish you a Pure Copper Distilling Outfit, com- plete and ready for use that is ideal for the home, garage or laboratory. This is the most practical still ever devised and will last a life-time. Capacity, one gallon. Suitable for distillation of any kind of liquid. It has plenty of space for boiling and with a slow fire will produce distilled liquids at the rate of two quarts an hour. Auto-owners need them to distil water for batteries. Distilled water is the best safeguard against "flu," fevers and other diseases. There is never any mention of alcohol as such, and the foreigner must know that this is a prohibi- tion country where intoxicating liquors are forbidden not by any mere local-option mandate, but by the supreme law of the land. The native American may put his tongue in his cheek and look knowingly out of the corner of his left eye when he reads this sum- 7 1 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL mons to a sanitary life; in fact, he often emits loud guffaws. The foreigner, of course, will have to at- tribute such performances to our peculiar sense of humour; on the surface, these are all excessively moral and law-abiding advertisements, and he ought to be duly impressed. He usually is. Indeed our surface-morality is the most impressive thing about us; it might be said to be our peculiar contribution to the ethical schemes of the world. Nowhere as in America and Great Britain has the technique of the formal and public adherence to virtue been so highly developed. When Mayor Gay- nor tackled the problem of prostitution in New York City, with his customary frankness and gift for le mot juste, he coined the phrase "the outward sem- blance of order and decency." It was brutal but revealing. For if there is one common characteristic of Anglo-Saxon morality, wherever and whenever it appears, it is this: On no account admit anything, on no account be found out, on no account let any- thing become public. If Germany had not been so unsophisticated in international diplomacy, she would never have admitted that she did wrong in violating the neutrality of Belgium; the proper attitude was to have pointed out the special moral benefits which accrued to Belgium in particular and the world in general, by her action. Anglo-Saxon diplomacy has long since learned the trick of acting the role of a shocked saviour of civilisation, whenever it is up to some exceptionally underhanded deal, and al- though we are comparatively new at the game, we have taken our elementary course of instruction under 72 A QUESTION of MORALS the Wilson regime. But at all costs, the outward semblance of order and decency must be preserved. Although, in defiance of certain Constitutional Amendments, the negro is robbed of his suffrage rights in the South, we must always be sure to speak of how the Civil War freed the slaves, and never refer to Lincoln except as the Great Emancipator. Although, in defiance of a later Constitutional Amendment, liquor is still made, sold and consumed, we must always speak of the prohibition issue as closed; or, as Mr. Bryan has phrased it, as dead as slavery. Although in no country is what is euphe- mistically termed sexual irregularity more widely practised than in America, we still continue to ideal- ise our women on the covers of our popular maga- zines; and although in no country is the conversa- tion of men alone more direct and vulgar, we still subsidise organisations whose sole task is to deodour- ise our books and plays and moving-pictures. In- deed, cynics have said that we are too anasmic in our impulses to take natural waywardnesses simply and frankly, and we are compelled to make them pub- licly forbidden in order to render them secretly at- tractive. But this sharp dichotomy between profession and practice, which is so characteristic of Anglo-Saxon morality and which other civilisations invariably term hypocritical, does not, in our opinion, spring from any native weakness of impulse towards the world, the flesh and the devil. On the contrary, those impulses are too often embarrassingly vigor- ous, and the public prohibition of any open manifes- 73 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL tation of them is a symbol of our fear of letting our- selves go. Our morality system has become a me- chanical device for protecting us against ourselves; it is the handiwork of terror. Rather does the dichotomy between profession and practice spring from a false conception of the good life; from an elementary but persistent confusion of real ethical values. If that confusion were merely a mistake in thinking, a mere intellectual defect of our tempera- ment, there would be no particular point in being upset about it. But unfortunately it is of very great practical importance. Increasingly our civilisation is becoming hysterical, because of the inner strain which this false dualism produces; increasingly the younger generation is being poisoned in its attitude towards the joyous things of life; increasingly we are all losing the capacity for trusting ourselves. More and more our civilisation is becoming not a civilisa- tion of free men but of moral cowards. Now, the false conception which has brought about this unpleasant state of things really goes back to the doctrine of original sin, especially to Calvin. If the early i8th century romanticists erred in believing that mankind was a goddess in petticoats, the mod- ern Puritans, who set the tone of our Anglo-Saxon morality, more certainly err in believing mankind a devil in a strait-jacket. But the problem is really neither one of taking off the petticoats nor multiply- ing the chains on the strait-jacket; the quarrel over the question of whether man is naturally good or naturally bad, is futile and unreal. Man is naturally a bundle of different dispositions; and the ethical 74 A QUESTION of MORALS problem, so far as it can be said to exist at all, is how to focus the chief of those dispositions on ob- jects which shall bring about the greatest amount of harmony among these dispositions rather than the greatest amount of disharmony. This has a sus- piciously simple sound, yet as a matter of fact not even an approach to the problem can be made as long as the doctrine persists that what one really wants to do must in the nature of things be evil. That is the contemporary Anglo-Saxon official doctrine, and it is not merely false, but positively dangerous. What one wants to do can be adjudged good or bad only by virtue of the consequences; in itself, such a want or desire has only a subjective and flickering meaning; one can not even define it in ethical terms until it has been projected outward into the objective world and there set in motion. True restraint, to sum up the whole objection, comes not from the eternal No of negation and passivity, but from the eternal Yes of affirmation and activity. It springs not from the checking of desire but from the abun- dance of it. This is hard doctrine to make clear, for it runs directly counter to social conventions and normal ethical assumptions. Nietzsche, for example, strug- gled long to make this conception understand- able; as when he said in his "Anti-Christ" that the real sin was to give out of a sense of charity, when the only truly ethical way was to give out of an abundance. Yet even he, for all the sharp vividness of his epigrams and the flashing insight of what some one has called ecstatic common-sense, never fully 75 succeeded; and we ourselves are only vain enough to hope that we can throw out a suggestion or two. In the simple case of robbery, for instance, the man who does not pick my pocket because he is terrified at the thought of a possible prison-sentence, would hardly, even in Anglo-Saxon countries, be thought an object of high ethical approval. So far as any ques- tion of moral praise or blame goes, it will apply only to the man to whom such an action would never nat- urally occur, even under the stress of great want and hardship. Here we can begin to see that it is not so much a problem of struggling against our desires, as a problem of what desires we have. Yet apply the parallel further, to chastity, for instance: The chastity which is the by-product of timidity, fear of adventure, terror of disease, shrinking from social penalties is it not precisely this kind of chastity which the sanctions of our society tend to produce in the normal young man? One could hardly deny it. Nor could one deny that chastity of this kind is morally not worth a great deal, that in fact it is somewhat despicable. The only kind that has any real ethical value is that which comes naturally as a by-product to some other more absorbing passion or interest. Here once more one can say that true re- straint comes not from the checking of desire but from the abundance of it; not from any denial of life, but from some deeper sense of life's richness and fulness. However, this is a conclusion from the gen- eral course of Anglo-Saxon morals, large enough to need a treatise to itself. AU-DESSOUS de la MELEE "EvEN what is best in American life is compulsory the idealism, the zeal, the beautiful unison of its great moments," writes George Santayana in his new book, "Character and Opinion in the United States." And this perceiving and discriminating critic goes on to imply that in the intellectual life of this country, too, the dice of thought is loaded; loaded in favour of Protestant morality. Now, in spite of the sound justice in this obser- vation and who would have the temerity to chal- lenge it? the chief compulsion in our intellectual life, as it actually exists to-day, might be described as the moral obligation to be optimistic. In a pros- perous, expanding, self-confident, Western civilisa- tion such as our own, this unspoken compulsion has, of course, a certain utility-value. The tone of ordi- nary social intercourse could hardly rest on any other set of assumptions without unsettling the whole fabric of relationships. But this command to be optimistic is more subtly pervasive. Art and litera- ture wither in too persistently fruitful a sun, yet in America they must keep for ever in this prosperous noon-day glare. Indeed, it is becoming necessary to exert considerable imaginative effort even to en- visage the free-functioning, disinterested intelligence or the curious and nonpartisan sensibility, responsive alike to grief and joy. 77 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL Walking through any of the chief streets of New York City one of these brilliant October days by far the most glorious month in New York's calendar, when the very air is electric with energy and life one finds it hard to think of a man deliberately cutting himself from all this effulgence of life, yet the afternoon newspapers tell of MacSwiney's death in headline after headline on the sun-flecked stands. How can one deliberately die when there are these blue waters of the Hudson, these eager, bright, girl- ish forms, the towering strength of these buildings still to be seen and responded to? It is like sending a funeral cortege through a carnival street, gay with flags and bunting. What inner light serene can have the power to make all these physical beauties black and miasmatic beside a more enduring radiance? These are disturbing questions for Americans. We shrug our shoulders and walk briskly up the Avenue. Our life is not like that; we have so many things to live for, so many fine things. It is this mood we seek to perpetuate in our litera- ture and our art, although of course it is but one mood out of the many that life gives us, and perhaps the one not most permanent. No matter; our editors, our playwrights, our artists, our philos- ophers and sociologists must keep it going, must make it eternal. It is the mood of progress, of idealism, of conviction that things matter; the mood of zealous success. It is the American intellectual compulsion, strong and unquestioned. Our young men from college come into the world with an opti- mistic assumption so firmly entrenched that even 78 AU-DESSOUS de la MELEE senseless war, pestilence, or famine could hardly withstand it. It is a kind of by-product of the ma- terialistically triumphant machine-era, buttressed by a falsely Darwinian theory of the inevitability of progress, flattered by the philosophers, secured by the naivete of a youthful people still certain, not only that human happiness is attainable, but actually existent. That is why the Oriental, with his implac- able Eastern tolerance, seems to have a curiously amused expression in his eyes when he talks to us a bit as if he were talking with impetuous children, who were yet to learn the vanity of all things. And he smiles even broadly when he reflects that Chris- tianity, in essence an Eastern, un-worldly religion, is officially our faith. Intellectually speaking, of course, there are no a priori reasons to justify optimistic conclusions about the world we live in or pessimistic either, for that matter. It is a question of the evidence. But al- though the one sure fact in life is death and dissolu- tion, the bias of our thought is always conditioned by the will-to-live. We shrink back in fright from, too ruthless a view of our own frail mortality; we neglect when we do not despise the man who would constantly recall it to us; we cling with pathetic eagerness to mystical nostrums and superstitions that assure us of our eternal continuance. We dare not face the prospect of annihilation. This boundless faith, this complacency about what life has to offer us, naturally comports very well with the physical opportunities of our existence. It rein- 79 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL forces, as it were, our national prosperity. It makes for clean cities, cheerful countenances, health. Our very funerals are pageants, for we will not let our- selves know the meaning of grief. We will not be- lieve that sorrow and suffering may come through any other agency than our own remedial weaknesses; there is nothing in the nature of the world itself that makes them inevitable. But art and literature can not flourish in such an atmosphere. They are strange flowers that can not blossom in too rich a soil, nor can they flourish when the soil is too poor. Our American soil is far too rich; it can produce only lush, quick-growing, quick- dying vegetation. Compare, for instance, the very best of our serious novels with, say, Dostoievsky's "Possessed," or "Crime and Punishment" (books, by the way, which the younger generation of Amer- ican writers seems just to be discovering.) It is as if we had been living only half a life; we are sud- denly taken au-dessous de la melee, as it were, to the rich, dim, uncertain, fantastic world but none the less real underlying that of the ordinary, thin crust of everyday consciousness. It is a world where the values we most cling to in public become utterly meaningless; where pain has an introspective value; sorrow, a perceptive illumination of experience which make their cost disproportionate to their intrinsic worth. But our own literature and art have not yet ceased to be in the battle ; they have not yet learned how to get below the surface of things. Nor will they 80 AU-DESSOUS de la MELEE until our optimistic compulsion has been destroyed, until in the world of the spirit and of the mind we find that there is one moral obligation and only one : to tell the truth as we honestly see and feel it. Then only will our intellectual life be truly free. 81 COMMON SENSE About FRANCE ONE of the saddest results of any new interna- tional alliance is the propaganda-literature which in- evitably accompanies the diplomatic marriage. Something of the sort was discernible in England as early as the beginnings of the Entente, back in King Edward's time. From despising French characteris- tics, popular sentiment swung over to imitating them, ending, when the war came, in positive adulation ; as Mr. Dell says, "frivolous" and "immoral" France became "a sort of hermaphrodite deity made up of Joan d'Arc and M. Clemenceau." But this change of opinion was mild compared with the violent up- rooting of old prejudices and the complacent ignor- ance of France when we ourselves entered the war. On the French side, the worst kind of chauvinist propagandists M. Bergson is a case in point al- though, as a matter of fact, he is not fundamentally French in his point of view were sent to America to convince us of the eternal justice of her cause, and in spite of a few temporary aberrations about French militarism and the like, they seem to have captured Mr. Wilson securely. On our side, equally stupid and uninformed publicists and journalists invaded the coasts of our unsuspecting ally, and sent home glowing accounts of la belle France and the immortal poilu. Camouflage became a popular word. Then, 82 COMMON SENSE About FRANCE without mercy, came the books histories of France, explanations of the Alsace-Lorraine quarrel, the deep-dyed villainy of M. Cailloux, the martial vigour of the Frenchman coupled with a complete lack of the military spirit, feuilletons, apologetics, trav- elogues for the Chautauquas, in short, a very de- pressing flood of print. Perhaps all the more depressing since although it is nowhere more difficult to make two races under- stand each other than when introducing Anglo- Saxons and Latins to each other, at the same time we most need to know the better qualities of the French people. Our civilisation, and this is even truer of America than of England, can learn more from France than from almost any other country. Yet we cannot learn anything at all unless, along with our being made acquainted with her great qualities, we are at the same time made acquainted with her weaknesses. In this respect, indeed, the French are particularly open to misunderstanding. The first thing to learn is that there is not merely one homo- geneous France; there is the France of the peasant, of the proletariat, of the bourgeoisie. And there is Paris and the various provincial regions. Not only that, in the individual Frenchman there are para- doxical opposites which are extremely hard to recon- cile : for example, closeness, even stinginess, side by side with great generosity; high intelligence, scep- ticism, and rationality, coupled with a rather childish love of fine phrases and the tendency to run after la gloriole; a deep contempt for politicians coincident with a mystical readiness to lay down one's life for 83 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL la patrle; a deep conservatism in the major things along with a fine iconoclasm towards historical tradi- tions and what are known in other countries as the conventions; an unerring fineness of taste in artistic things at the very moment when they shock their Anglo-Saxon brethren by a frankness at the facts of life. But beneath all these contradictions run two unending streams of French character, intellectual sincerity and the readiness to face facts, the two points, in truth, on which these people can teach us the most. Perhaps nowhere is this basic French good sense better illustrated than in a contrast be- tween President Wilson and M. Clemenceau. Equally with the President, the former French Premier's conception of la victorie was sentimental and romantic, utterly divorced from economic reali- ties. But when it was all over, when he had got what, as he confessed, he had waited forty years to obtain, did the French Premier indulge in rhodo- montade about the heart of the world being broken, if the treaty were not immediately ratified? He did not. His French good sense reasserted itself. He coolly stated that the "victory" was only a Pyrrhic victory after all. I know of no recent book which gives a better pic- ture of the French people as they really are, both of their lovable and unpleasant qualities, nor of the economic and political and intellectual life of present day France than that by Mr. Robert Dell, "My Second Country." The author is peculiarly equipped for his task. His early boyhood love for France led him in time to 84 COMMON SENSE About FRANCE make it his second country, and for many years he was the Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, which post he held during the war almost to the end, when his exposure of the Austrian peace offer of 1917 made him persona non grata to M. Clemenceau, who was instrumental in bringing about his expulsion, which now will probably soon be if it has not already been rescinded. He is thor- oughly acquainted with all classes of French people, and those impulsive critics who have taken umbrage at some of his strictures on French institutions and methods ought to recall his own words in his intro- duction to this book: The more I know the French people the fonder I become of them. Like all human beings, they have the defects of their qualities, but they have one quality which makes them the most charming people in the world to live with they understand the art of living. Mr. Dell's criticisms spring not from malice but from deep affection and from the desire to see the best in French life endure; possibly, also, from an honesty before facts which sooner or later comes to be second nature with all who spend many years among the French people. Yet this temperamental sympathy and intelligent, discriminating liking, are not his only equipment. He has as well enormous intellectual vitality; his style is of firm texture one feels he would be an incomparable raconteur and has acquired something of the incisive clarity, com- bined with subtlety and wit, so characteristic of the best French prose. He can be gay without being 85 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL meaninglessly vivacious, and profoundly critical without being portentous. For example, discussing the fact that the majority of French Catholics are not really religious in spirit at all, but look upon the Church as a convenient social and political institu- tion (in later years, unhappily as the best ally of reaction), he remarks: The Franciscans in the Middle Ages started the convenient theory that one heard mass in a Franciscan church, if one arrived before the 'lie, missa est/ with which it concludes, and thereby filled their churches to the detriment of the parish churches and the indignation of the secular clergy. This theory must still have partisans in France, for on any Sunday morning one may see large numbers of men arriving at the Madeleine just before the end of the eleven o'clock High Mass. They wait at the bottom of the church to watch the women go out, and very agreeable acquaintances, I am told, have often been made in this way. The English Catholic is a very different person from the Catholic of a Catholic country: he takes the whole thing seriously, as ^Eneas Piccolomini (afterwards Pius II) said with con- temptuous pity of the Irish of his day. The Catholic of a Catholic country at any rate in France and Italy is al- ways exercising his ingenuity to sail as near the wind as possible to get around the laws of the Church or to dis- cover the least that he can possibly do to comply with them. He has the valuable aid of the moral theologians, who have, for instance, decided in France that a water-fowl is fish and may, therefore, be eaten on a day of abstinence. So the wealthy French Catholic, whose delight it is to dine as sumptuously as he possibly can on a Friday without break- ing the laws of the Church, eats wild duck with a clear conscience. Politically, Mr. Dell is a Socialist, but this classi- fication should be taken with reservations. Nothing is more confusing to the foreign observer in France 86 COMMON SENSE About FRANCE than the various political divisions; one ought, in- deed, to be provided with an advance terminology before attempting to pass judgment, and Mr. Dell furnishes this in his excellent chapter, "Socialism, Syndicalism, and State Capitalism." The latter term, indeed is what is called in France and Belgium etatisme, for which no adequate English word exists. The French from their sad experience with State monopolies tobacco, matches, the postal service, purchase of the Western Railway are disillusioned about the kind of nationalisation which would be under the control of a government bureaucracy; monopolies are in essence the same whether under capitalistic or socialistic control; they have the con- sumer at their mercy and end inevitably in economic slavery. It was partly the result of the experience with State monopolies, partly disgust with parlia- mentary palliative reforms, which led to the Syndi- calist revolt in France in Mr. Dell's opinion a healthy corrective of mere parliamentarianism and a step in the right direction towards preparing the proletariat to use power "if and when it could get it." Syndicalism, in a word, can never come to terms with State Socialism, but, according to this author, "its differences with Revolutionary Socialism are entirely concerned with questions of method and can easily be adjusted especially now when the majority of Socialists in France have abandoned all hope of effecting anything important by parliamentary action." This contempt of parliamentary methods arises not merely from scepticism about political democ- 8? AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL racy, but as much from the stupidity of the bour- geoisie which exercises an administrative dictator- ship, increasingly galling not alone to the city prole- tariat but as well to the peasant who more and more must find that a policy of protection, favouring the farmers, will not enable him in the long run to com- pete with foreign agricultural competition on modern lines. The scandal of import duties on food when France cannot produce enough for herself cannot last forever. Yet, as Mr. Dell admits in his chapter, "Small Property and Its Results," it is still doubtful in case of a revolution whether the peasant would throw his influence on the side of the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie. In the latter class our author finds the real hope of a revolution which will unseat the present bourgeois dictatorship as the old ancien regime was upset when it blindly refused to make the necessary concessions. Indeed, in Mr. Dell's opinion it is doubtful if any concessions now can save the bourgeoisie; France is rushing headlong to financial bankruptcy, if the present policy of mili- tary expansion and attempt to make France a great industrial nation is persisted in as it unfortunately seems to be persisted in. Of course one does not have to agree with all this, but it is a relief to have the facts put so cogently and to find a writer who is not afraid to risk his intellectual reputation by stat- ing what he considers to be the possibilities. At all events, the reader is given ample material to make his own judgments. But whatever one's agreement or disagreement with Mr. Dell politically or economically, there will 88 COMMON SENSE About FRANCE be few to challenge his cultural judgment. The true France, he says echoing the words of their greatest writer of the I9th century, is the France of Voltaire and Montesquieu, the sceptical, the rationalist, the anti-religious, the intellectualistic France. France may have her romantic reactions her Rousseaus and Chateaubriands and her modern Bergsons and mystics but she always goes back to the older tra- dition. With the disillusion resulting from the war and the ensuing peace, the younger France is ready for a rationalistic revival. " '// le faut, tu ne sauras pas' say religion and patriotism. They reply: 'We will not; we will know.' ' And if that spirit con- quers, France may yet return, repudiating her pres- ent leaders, to her true role the leader and the originator, in the Western world, of civilised ideas and the art of living. OVERDONE LONDON, 6 Aug. According to the latest information the British Government has accepted the Bolshevik note in- sisting on a separate peace with Poland and promising to attend the London conference subsequently on the condi- tions they have laid down. The truth is, Premier Lloyd George had no option, for any proposal to go to war for the Poles against Russia would have been repudiated by the country. The Labour party, to make sure no such enter- prise can be undertaken, has summoned an urgent confer- ence of trades-union and other bodies to meet in London Monday, and in the meantime has issued a manifesto pro- testing in the strongest terms against the support of Poland. From the New York World, 7 August, 1920. With one suggestive aspect of this dispatch the frank assumption regarding the location of power, even political power, in the modern State we are not here concerned. There is another equally sug- gestive aspect. This news-item is not hidden away in an obscure corner of the paper, nor Is it under a correspondent's signature, when a certain margin of editorial interpretation of the news is considered ad- missible. It is an anonymous "straight" news-item printed on the first page, right hand edge or feature- column. It is not a dispatch recording the specific words of unimportant foreign ministers or obscure but hopeful Generals. It is meant to be a simple statement of the actual facts, without propaganda- bias one way or the other. It is meant to be report- ing and nothing but reporting. The World did not 90 OVERDONE shudder with editorial horror at this perverse affec- tion of the mass and file of British labour for the suc- cess of the Bolsheviki against Poland and bury the dispatch beneath department store advertisements it set it down as a fact, and as an important fact. In this instance at all events, whatever the editors of the newspapers may have thought, they conceived of their function as one of giving their readers the news. They went on the democratic assumption that their readers could form their own opinions for themselves if they wanted to. They evidently suspected that the public might be somewhat tired of propaganda. The truth is, the public is extremely tired of it. Propaganda has been overdone. It has been so much overdone that even those who would most like to employ it are somewhat dubious of its efficiency at the present moment. Nothing could be more amusing or naive than many of the special dispatches from Washington of the same week in which this dispatch was printed. The hard facts of the situation are that the bulk of people in the United States are heartily sick of Europe and all its works at the present time; that, ostrich-like as it may be (as a few excited bankers are trying now to convince us), they would like to forget the late affray and get back as far as possible "to normal," that the sending of troops to Poland on a large scale "is unthinkable." The people of the country are not the least little bit frightened by the "menace of bolshevism" at the present moment. The menace of the- Hun was so overworked during the war, the menace of the Red was so far overdone during the year following the 91 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL armistice, that it takes a powerful lot of preparation and publicity to start any new menace as a going con- cern. This is distressing to the statesmen at the head of the Government, embarrassing in fact. "The preservation of the Polish independence," says a dispatch from Washington to the New York Times of 7 August, "is the immediate concern of President Wilson and his principal advisers. But they are em- barrassed by their inability to take any positive action that will turn the scales in Poland's favour." "Em- barrassed" is eminently correct. In one sense, it is literally true as one Associated Press item of that week stated, that the peril to civilisation is greater to-day than in August, 1914; but oddly enough the people of America cannot seem to get at all het up about it. What the gigantic intellects who are running the foreign affairs of this nation have unwittingly stum- bled over is a law which, in the psychology of sensa- tion, is generally known as the law of diminishing returns. Apply a strong stimulus frequently and the reaction to it becomes progressively weaker; apply it long enough, and all reaction disappears. Indeed, when pushed a I'outranoe, it suddenly induces a re- action the exact opposite of what normally is to be expected. In America, the menace-stimulus has been applied about to a point where almost all reaction has disappeared; in France, in England, but above all in Italy it has been laid on so generously that the present reaction of the mass and file of those re- spective nations has undergone the inevitable psy- chological transformation from terror to positive, 92 OVERDONE affection. In their enthusiasm at what they thought to have discovered as the infinite docility and sug- gestibility of the mob, the propaganda-experts of the modern political Governments lost sight of the sound old Greek maxim that to be continuously effective, what is necessary is moderation in all things. But they have been intemperate in their stirring up of hate, and are beginning to pay the penalty. They might have learned a lesson from the French Revolu- tion but they did not. They might have remembered that the excessive and necessary loving of every citizen, those curious comrade-festivals in Paris where every one fell on every one else's neck and wept from sheer unadulterated affection, were the inevitable preliminary to the Terror and the guillo- tine. The publicity hate-experts made fools of them- selves during the war and after, and the present benefit inures to Lenin and Trotsky. These latter, indeed, seem to have been extremely wary of falling into the same trap themselves, for whenever their more excitable apostles in other countries have too loudly sung the praises of the Bolshevik regime they have adroitly contrived to put on the soft pedal with rather a severe dose of unpleasant facts. They seem to have sensed that nothing would be ultimately more damaging to their prestige than a too rosy pic- ture of Utopia by their idolaters in other lands. Yet this practical revelation that there are psycho- logical limitations to one kind of propaganda, when overdone, gives no warrant whatever for sentimental optimism about the native good sense of the masses of people. Common sense still remains the most un- 93 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL common thing in the world; only geniuses seem to have a permanent monopoly of it. What has been revealed is that propaganda, to work all the time, has to be more sophisticated and skilful than the kind employed by the crude paid attorneys of the Allied nations and America. There, too, they may have to take a lesson in method from Moscow. The present state of affairs does not reveal that propaganda per se is ineffective, but only that it demands a subtler technique than customarily displayed. In a contest of wits in this matter the Bolsheviki may win; indeed, at the present time, they seem in a fair way of doing just that. For they have learned the great practical advantage of letting their opponents overdo things. From the humanistic point of view this present propaganda-battle has certain amusing aspects. But the ultimate danger goes much deeper. It is no genuine comfort that here in America for example the great mass of people are really sick to death of idealistic phrases, and are suspicious of all "hate- drives." This is merely the indifference of exhausted gullibility. It is a fact that what we know as West- ern civilisation is in the crucible; that it actually may be destroyed within this generation, as it rapidly is being destroyed in certain parts of Central Europe to-day. It seems also a fact to us, even if Orientals might plausibly look quizzical, that Western civilisa- tion has built up certain graciousnesses, expanded certain humane traditions, developed certain cultural amenities, which it would be a pity to have swept away in a bitter civil war over economic adjustment. But we are so tired of propaganda and lies and par- 94 OVERDONE tisanship, so sick of newspaper-filth, that we prefer to avoid looking at the facts, prefer to be sceptical of all attempts at assessment. If we were not the victims ot six years of just this kind of propaganda- battle, we should be busy thinking over our own civilisation, trying and assessing it, searching for its genuine values. We should be busy devising ways and means of preserving what we then thought might bear the ultimate test of the disinterested mind. Instead we are just drifting, letting the blind forces of events carry us where it will, even if it be to destruction. For the one important loss of the war and the peace has been the loss of our greatest spiritual possession, intellectual integrity. We have so poi- soned the environment that only the cynic or the paid attorney can survive without too great difficulty. The command now is, be indifferent to everything or be paid by somebody. We do not want, we do not welcome, we shall shortly cease even to understand, the disinterested mind. We suspect, and for the most part rightly suspect, everybody of having some secret axe to grind. We take nobody at his face value. We smell an ulterior purpose in everything. We have arranged things so that very soon intellectual integrity will become a positive disability, and the person possessing it a fit subject for the psychopathic ward. This is a mood far worse than active intoler- ance or positive error. It is a mood of low intel- lectual vitality; it is the aftermath of six years of overdoing. 95 A DILAPIDATED SCARECROW THERE is sound good sense in Mr. Owen Wister's plea that Americans forget to be self-righteous in judging England; after all it is a trifle absurd for us to call her a land-grabber with our own treatment of the native Indians and Mexicans a matter of histori- cal record, and with our petty South American im- perialisms to mock all our fine pretensions about self- determination. There is also sound good sense in his plea that we should remember that, except for a few misunderstandings such as during the Civil War and the war of 1812, England has generally stood on our side in international quarrels, not, as Mr. Wister himself is careful to point out, because she loved us more, but because she loved other nations less. Yet in saying this much about Mr. Wister's new book, "A Straight Deal or The Ancient Grudge," 1 one has said about all that can be said in favour of it. And even these two very sensible ob- servations of Mr. Wister's are irrelevant to the cen- tral problem the problem of how an Anglo-Ameri- can war, the likelihood of which is treated all too frivolously by contemporary journalism, can be avoided. It is quite true we have nothing to be particularly self-complacent about when we compare ourselves 1 "A Straight Deal, or The Ancient Grudge." Owen Wister. New York. The Macmillan Company. 9 6 A DILAPIDATED SCARECROW with England; in fact, when we survey the domestic scene in both countries to-day the balance in favour of a tolerable civilisation inclines sharply towards England. The vivid realisation of this unpleasant truth does not, however, help matters a particle. However much intelligent people in both countries may understand their own nation's defects and how- ever much the late war may have created a bond of sympathy between snobbish Americans like the author of this book, and upper-class Englishmen the common people of England and of the United States remain densely ignorant of each other. The contacts of the late war did nothing to improve their comprehension; Mr. Wister himself must be acutely aware of this, otherwise he would not have written this hysterical and rather silly book. In a word, the great majority of the populations of both countries still remains exploitable material for war, and the fondness of Mr. Wister for English manners and the admiration of the New York Times for the mentality of Lord Curzon will have no more ultimate effect on the course of events than the amenities exchanged between the Kaiser and the late King Edward dur- ing their friendly visits before the war had on Anglo-German relations. England to-day is an expanded imperialism, and in the nature of things we have become a rapidly ex- panding one. Unless imperialism is killed at its source in both countries, a conflict of interests must inevitably develop, and our common language and common traditions, upon which Mr. Wister lays so much sentimental emphasis, will only serve to give 97 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL that conflict fratricidal fury. Confronted with this situation, the author's counsel is worse than nega- tive. It is well enough to ask us to bury the hatchet, but supposing the hatchet refuses to stay buried? It is well enough to ask us to condone England's actions toward Ireland and to sing the praises of Ulster, but supposing civil war develops within the British Empire over the Irish question? It may be granted that we are perfectly willing on both sides to let the past bury its dead, but events are developing inexor- ably in spite of all this fine display of goodwill, and we in this country will sooner or later be forced, whether we like it or not, to adopt a definite policy towards them. We can not neglect the facts of Brit- ish imperialism any more than we can neglect the facts of our own. It is not that Mr. Wister neglects these facts, it is merely that he has nothing to sug- gest or rather that he has only one thing to sug- gest, and that suggestion is pitifully childish. He implies that perpetual fear and perpetual hatred of Germany should forever bind the people of the United States to the people of the British Empire, and that whatever differences might develop between us should be composed in the face of the common enemy. To put it bluntly, Mr. Wister has far to go be- fore he recovers from the panic psychology of the war, and British Tories could ask for no better propagandist than this honest and simple soul who seems still to regard the threat of the spread of German Kultur as the supreme menace to the civil- ised world. For the myth of the rampant German 98 A DILAPIDATED SCARECROW devil is well understood by English imperialists, even if it is not by Mr. Wister, as a first-class dust-raiser to hide unpleasant things going on in India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Ireland, and other sections of the globe where the beneficent authority of the British Colonial Office holds sway. Mr. Wister is the vic- tim of economic innocence and of a sincere admira- tion, which does him credit, for English civilisation. But the world of modern imperialism, modern labour, modern industrial exploitation seems to exist for him scarcely more realistically than for the youngster at Eton thinking only of boating and cricket. His book is a painful confirmation of the growing suspicion that in the interests of interna- tional peace the instinctively academic literary mind should be forbidden to express itself on political matters on pain of the immediate destruction of all it has ever written. 99 BIGOTRY and CLASS- CONSCIOUSNESS BEFORE any age can establish a fire-and-burglar- proof claim to enlightenment, it ought first to be sure whether it has really done away with obscurantism or merely altered its mode. A good place to begin in- quiry is with the tacit modern assumption that bigotry belongs to the dark ages. Because religious toleration seems to have been finally won for man- kind, because a purely religious war to-day would be an anachronism, it is generally assumed that whatever our defects may be, bigotry is not among them. We may be guilty of occasional puritanical excesses, but everybody recognises and laughs at them. There may be a few fanatics, a few cranks, a few bigots, even, amongst us, yes; but bigotry as a significant force within society this is not of the world of 1921. It is a dangerous assumption. The deep irrational impulses in men making for bigotry have merely shifted their mode of attack. The bigot is to be found among the reactionaries, on the one hand, and among the violent revolutionists, on the other. Between them, in bitter fact, the world of our time is being led to as deadly and wasteful a conflict of the classes as was ever produced by rival religious sects in the Middle Ages; and from what we have already observed of the clashes of the Whites and the Reds 100 BIGOTRY and CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS in the Europe of the past three years the conclusion is irresistible that this modern warfare is every bit as atrocious and as dehumanising as any of the struggles of the I4th or I5th centuries, in so far as religious bigotry has been abandoned, we appear only to have transferred its force to what, for want of a better name, we may call economic bigotry; and it is an open question whether the latter is not more inimical to the peace and well-being of society as a whole. Happily we can now see, from our good vantage point in history the manner in which religious bigotry arose and the manner of its waning. The analogy between its rise and the rise of modern class-warfare is very striking; the suggestion comes spontaneously that the manner of its disappearance may contain, some hints for our own increasingly class-torn society. Religious bigotry arose because men denied that they had common ideals. Not to believe in a given essential doctrine was not merely to be eccentric in one's theology, it was to put oneself outside the pale of human existence. If one did not express an ideal in the established mode and manner of a sect, your community of interest in the ideal itself was ignored or denied. This is the characteristic of bigotry. The simple, obvious idea which began the era of religious toleration was only that we were worshipping the same God, some under one name and form, some under another; but all aspiring to essentially very much the same thing. Men suddenly realised that religiously George Gordon, in the preface to one of those strange volumes of confessions that show how 101 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL anxious the American writer is to explain himself, remarks : We flatter ourselves that our lives are interesting . . . but they are not. Not even to us, if I am to believe those who make our novels. I appealed to some thirty to tell me of their doings, their ways of work and play; and the an- swers with few exceptions came in diverse individual words : There is nothing to tell. Now if a man can make nothing out of himself . . . but we are here to make something of ourselves, for the joy of nations and the good of humanity. It would not have proved anything if, having said that they could make nothing of themselves, the men who make our novels had entered into no further details: one might then have been able to imagine that they were perhaps hiding a light under their bushels. But, alas, they have innocently revealed their heights and depths, and Mr. Gordon is justified in his comment: they and their lives are dull, dull, dull. It is because they are the victims of ignorance, chiefly. They have never sufficiently lived into the creative life to know its satisfactions, the satisfaction of registering one's individuality in the midst of the herd, of making one's life tell. Otherwise they could never have been bribed by the herd's rewards. The darkness that enfolds them for that is the heart of the matter is, indeed, Cimmerian. Mrs. Atherton, that operatic soul who, from time to time, darts across the American horizon, like a comet run- ning amuck, really seems to believe that she is a great genius: how can she help it when no one has ever effectively told her that she is not one? And think of Mr. Rupert Hughes ! Mr. Hughes recently 102 BIGOTRY and CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS began an autobiographical sketch with a vindication of Henry Fielding, assuring us that those who read Fielding in his own day "took him as a mere enter- tainer." Mr. Hughes, as I remember, did not say in so many words that he was another Fielding, but he certainly implied it. And why should he not be con- vinced of it, when the newspapers are always telling him how patriotic he is? Our criticism has much to answer for: indeed, of all the facts of our life that are responsible for the limbo of the magazines, our criticism is the most responsible. May one mention two or three instances in point? The author of "Literature in the Making," a collection of reprinted interviews with various popular American writers which had some vogue two or three years ago, ob- served, referring to his heroes, in the preface : They knew that through me they spoke ... to all the literary apprentices of the country, who look eagerly for precept and example to those who have won fame by the delightful labour of writing. They knew that through me they spoke ... to the critics and students of literature of our own generation and, perhaps, of those that shall come after us. How eagerly would we read, for instance, an interview with Francis Bacon on the question of the author- ship of Shakespeare's plays, or an interview with Oliver Goldsmith in which he gave his real opinion of Dr. John- son, Garrick and Boswell! A century or so from now, some of the writers who in this book talk to the world may be the objects of curiosity as great. Why should Mr. Rupert Hughes distinguish between himself and Fielding when American criticism does not do so? How, when this is the normal mode of our criticism, can American writers ever discover 103 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL what the literary life truly is? And this is the normal mode of American criticism. Glance, for another example, at Mr. Grant Overton's preface to "The Women Who Make Our Novels" : An effort has been made to include in this book all the living American women novelists whose writing, by the customary standards, is artistically fine. An equal effort has been made to include all the living American women novelists whose writing has attained a wide popularity. The author does not contend, nor will he so much as allow, that the production of writing artistically fine is a greater achievement than the satisfaction of many thousands of readers. Which is the greater achievement, a paper balloon or a dish of stuffed peppers? Why is a mouse when it spins? And what is the ethic of a criticism that at once confirms the barbarous taste of the public and convinces the author that he has nothing to learn about himself? Mr. Overton had two birds in his bush, and he has killed them both with one stone. And criticism is supposed to be the art of bringing life! Limbo, the place of lost souls; the world of the magazines, of this accepted American literature of ours, is nothing else or less. And our criticism will continue to merit contempt until it develops in itself powers of redemption. 104 SCIENCE and COMMON SENSE THE two do not necessarily go together; indeed, it is often the scientist and no one else who would profit most from the possession of that assessing and dis- criminating quality which, since antiquity, has been described by the term good, or common, sense. Even if we admit that the late war was hardly worth the price, we can still turn to excellent account some of its salutary by-products, and one of the most salutary was the illuminating discovery that scientists, intel- lectuals, professors, the men of light and leading, were fully competent to make just as big fools of themselves as the less learned fry; in fact, bigger. To not a few competent observers this discovery has been extremely painful, and some of them have gone so far as to suggest that the world would be better off and the ordinary man considerably happier, if modern education were thrown overboard, bag and baggage. Theoretically, we must confess, this prop- osition has considerable attractiveness; but as there is small chance of its being put into effect, any dis- cussion of its advantages has approximately as much value as a nominating speech at a political conven- tion. Whether we like them or not, we have got to put up with modern science and modern education, and we might as well make the best of them. Our chief concern, if we care a penny about any genuine 105 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL humanism, is to see to it that we are not frightened or intimidated by them. For the truth is we have got to do much more than merely put up with them. Every age seems to have its peculiar measure of superstitions and follies, and our own age, which we may make roughly coincident with the rise of machine-technology, has made science a fetish. It is probably true that the Middle Ages were priest-ridden, but that fact gives us no warrant for looking down upon them with pity. We are a little worse off, if anything, for where religious big- otry has collapsed we have replaced it with bigotry of a different kind. We are science-ridden; and it requires no great powers of perception to see that science rampant rampant medicine in particular is every bit as tyrannical, and is considerably more absurd than the arrogant religions of the past. As the ordinary man of all times and ages appears to have a congenital itch for something or somebody he can bow down to and reverence, and as the ordinary man of this industrial era of the machine-shop and the motor-tractor appears to have found it increas- ingly difficult to bow down to and reverence the tribal god of a pastoral people (Thorstein Veblen has adroitly exposed this state of affairs), he has selected science for his ultimate source of authority. From the point of view of efficiency, increased production, and material wealth this conversion has considerable to be said in its favour, but from the point of view of the humanist, it is profoundly disquieting; pre- cisely because it is more humiliating to see the human soul shiver before blue prints, laboratories, and tech- 106 SCIENCE and COMMON SENSE nical experts than to see it shiver before a God of Vengeance and a future Hell. Unfortunately the war did not cure the ordinary man of this habit. The spectacle of the scientist judging ultimate and larger questions of public policy with every bit as much recklessness and stupidity as he himself, has failed to impress him. But to the humanist who wishes to resist the con- temporary irrational mob-fear before the fetish of science, the spectacle does suggest certain corrective reflections. These reflections spring really from a proper understanding and definition of intelligence. Perhaps the saddest of popular fallacies is that which, for want of a better name, one may call the compensatory fallacy, the nai've belief that a man may be genuinely excellent in one thing and horribly stupid in everything else, the specialist par excellence, and yet, on the whole, decidedly merit being called an intelligent man. This is an age of specialisms, too often unrelated specialisms, and there is even something disreputable, like jack-of-all-trades, in the very phrase, "the all-round man," although as a mat- ter of fact the most valid definition of the all-round man would be the intelligent man. For the hardest point to make clear to the popular mind is that above a certain minimum point specialisation per se is no criterion of intelligence whatsoever; that a man may be a first-rate specialist in a particular field and yet be fundamentally an ignoramus. The ordinary citizen seems to see this point clearly enough when it is exemplified in such a case as that of the eight-year-old Polish boy who defeats twenty 107 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL French chess experts simultaneously, yet who longs to ride on the blue pigs at the fair at Neuilly. But when it comes to the professor, or the instructor with a degree, the application of the parallel never takes place. Yet the bald fact is that our universities shelter many well-crammed, narrowly disciplined, ex- pert specialists who by any proper intelligence-rating come perilously near becoming morons. They do incalculable harm to the impressionable youths who are taught by them, and of course they never really advance their own particular field by original work. One of the most important problems facing modern university-administration is the problem of prevent- ing these essentially unintelligent men from getting technical training. The waste of intelligence in the modern world, the misapplication and misuse of it, the fostering of unintelligent passivity, is really appalling. The ratio of the highly intelligent to the less intelligent and merely stupid, is roughly one to ten; the real problem of modern education is to discover ways and means to make that ten per cent get the technical training. For then, being intelligent men and not mere special- ists, they will be in a position to see their own spe- cialty in its proper perspective, to realise that its methodology may be wholly inapplicable to another set of facts, to relate it in a humanistic way to the rest of the body of knowledge. All first-rate origi- nal, creative, or valuable intellectual work is done in this fashion and no other. What one has to come back to again and again is the simple proposition that a high degree of intelli- 108 SCIENCE and COMMON SENSE gence means a high power of correlation. But even this statement is open to misunderstanding. A high degree of intelligence is not merely the ability to correlate everything in terms of one methodology; the attempt to strait-jacket all the facts of this world and the next in terms of one method is not intelli- gence at all, it is merely ingenuity. It is, of course, the favourite game of modern philosophers, but a more fundamentally ignorant body of men than modern philosophers it would be hard to find in a year's travel. To correlate means strictly that; to put in intelligible terms the relations between several sets of facts, to assess a number of different method- ologies in terms of common sense and wide judg- ment. It is no accident that during the war in Eng- land and the phenomenon was to a certain extent paralleled in other countries the physicists and chemists were on the whole intolerant and harsh in their attitude toward Germany and the war in gen- eral, whereas the biologists, the botanists, and anthropologists, again on the whole, were tolerant and enlightened. This might have been expected al- most a -priori. The set of facts with which chemists and physicists customarily deal, requires a much less flexible and much more unimaginative methodology than the set of facts coming within the range of those studying living organisms and human beings. Again in modern psychology, without attempting to raise any thorny epistemological problems, it is fairly ob- vious to common sense that the scientist is dealing with twa essentially different sets of facts : on the one side, the physiological and chemical reactions of the 109 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL human body; on the other, the life of consciousness to which these reactions are so intimately related. Yet much unadulterated balderdash and sophistical humbug is written on psychology, just because of the frantic attempts to cram both sets of facts within the framework of one methodology. Unending are the disquisitions on consciousness being just one aspect of "response" seen from a different angle, and so on. The desire for a monistic view in a jangled, plural- istic world must be very deep in all of us ; for it can drive even intelligent men to the topmost heights of absurdity. A good deal of modern psychological writing is pathetic proof of how deep that desire is. The proposition that the real criterion of intelli- gence is in the degree of power of correlation is hardly a new one; but it needs to be restated with considerable emphasis just now when science was never subdivided into so many specialisms and when we have allowed the perfectly healthy concept of the all-round man to acquire a mysterious stigma. Other ages were more sane. Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, and Shakespeare were probably regarded by their contemporaries as fairly level-headed, all-round men; yet that fact can hardly be said to have tar- nished their intellectual reputation. To-day we mock at the all-round man simply because it is so devilishly difficult to be one. The temptations to fly off into erratic specialisation are too multifarious and too compelling. Yet in his heart no one knows better than the scientist himself that no really creative work will be done by him even in his own field until he can rise above his specialty and survey it objectively; no SCIENCE and COMMON SENSE until, in a word, he can apply common sense to his technical problem when the technical resources are exhausted. The humanist has a perfectly valid case for his assertion of the supremacy of the all-round point of view; and never ought he to press it more boldly than to-day. He ought not to be timid about assert- ing that if a man has learned really to think straight on one subject, the chances are ten to one that he will think straight on most others, for the essence of thinking straight is always the same. Now, more than ever before, we ought to be especially wary of the specialist who makes an egregious ass of himself nearly every time he expresses any opinion on any subject other than his own. It is an odds bet that if we examined such a person more carefully, we should find that in his specialty he was doing his work solely by rote and formula ; rote that he has unintelligently assimilated and formula that he does not fully com- prehend. in ROOTS of ANTI-BRITISH FEELING Now that our participation in the amalgamated society of imperial freebooters otherwise known as the League of Nations seems to have been ad- journed sine die, the present is a salutary time for reflection upon certain of the causes of anti-British feeling in America, for it is this feeling as much as anything else, which is responsible for the present odd state of affairs. A great deal of nonsense has been talked on both sides of the debate. Some people afflicted with an over-romantic imagination see the white race com- mitting suicide through an Anglo-American war, sim- ply because so many of our doughboys, after billet- ing in merry England, came home breathing rage and defiance at all "lime-juicers." Yet even these roman- ticists are considerably nearer to reality than are the timid liberals, who, during the war, prated about our liberties and independence being protected by the British Fleet, and whose chief emotion, when any- thing like a "break" with England was suggested (whether to enforce our neutrality, to prevent our mails from being tampered with, or what not) , re- sembled that of a child afraid to go home in the dark. In general, no spectacle is more amusing than the way in which one nation's estimate of another is 112 ROOTS of ANTI-BRITISH FEELING formed by the Artful Dodgers of publicity, but in particular, no spectacle is more pathetic than the fashion in which we and the British learn about each other. It must be painfully confusing to the clerk of Upper Tooting to hear alternate voices from America, one telling him that he is the Lord of Creation, and the other that he is the Scum of the Earth. It is almost equally confusing to the good citizen of Terre Haute, Indiana, to receive the com- pliments graciously enunciated by His Royal High- ness, the Prince of Wales, and at the same time to learn of the cheerful yet libelous lucubrations of Mr. Horatio Bottomley, M.P. Now the truth is, neither group of self-appointed leaders of public opinion represents the prosaic facts. Both the 'phobes and the 'philes merely add to the general confusion and misunderstanding, and indeed as is usually the habit of all extreme propagandists either pro or anti play into each other's hands in doing so. To those who can rise above the astig- matism of editorial opinion it ought to be fairly ob- vious that the anti-British feeling in America is traditional and runs deep. On the other hand, no one can be long in England without becoming aware of the islander's almost instinctive feeling of superiority to those from "the States," and as for Canada the anti-American attitude of most Canadians is pro- verbial. Many of the causes of this ill-will (on both sides) are legitimate, and many are not. I have no desire to pose as a moral censor, and point out which is which rather I shall attempt here only to put down AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL the facts, with as little personal bias as possible. One does this the more readily inasmuch as a true alliance between the United States and Great Brit- ain, or a union with her in a fellowship of all peo- ples, is the goal of all those who honestly desire in- ternational concord. But such an alliance or such a fellowship can never be more than a farce if it be fostered merely by excessive adulation; on the other hand, excessive vituperation can not ultimately pre- vent it, when common interest and common respect for the same international purposes make it possible. Indeed a real friendship between the two countries can come to reality only after many of us on both sides of the water have ruthlessly done what we can to cut some sort of path through the jungle of mis- conceptions in which we now seem to be lost. During the war official propagandists did their level best to turn that jungle into a swamp. One would think, after reading some of the "revised" school histories, that the Declaration of Independ- ence was only a temporary aberration, and that the Red-coats at Bunker Hill were merely Prussian mer- cenaries ingeniously placed there to foster bad feel- ing between ourselves and the "Mother Country." Yet for all this no "gob" walked into the American Bar at Liverpool without the chip of 1776 on his shoulder, nor, after a drink or so, did he fail to make clear that what we had done then we could, against all comers, easily repeat. Not even the war- time flood of British propaganda could wash out that century-old attitude. The generation that went to the war had not forgotten that we became a nation ROOTS of ANTI-BRITISH FEELING by successful revolution against the tyranny of Brit- ish rule. When Americans talk about Ireland or Egypt or India remaining "within the frame-work of the Brit- ish Empire" and assume that theirs is the proper American attitude they are like people denying their own parentage. They are not Americans at all; they are belated Colonials. For if the United States of America means anything, it means the assertion of national independence; we can under- stand the term "Self-governing Dominions" (the adjective gives us the clue), but we can under- stand better the desire for complete political free- dom, especially in a case where English rule is in- volved. It is really a pity that Mr. William Ran- dolph Hearst has such a bad name (not that he doesn't deserve it, of course) ; for his bitter anti- English editorials have really much more national good political sense in them than have all the apolo- getics of liberal journals of opinion. It is this na- tional sense of his which partly explains why Mr. Hearst in general is such a good political prophet, and the lack of it why the "intellectuals" are usually such bad ones. All this may be very unpleasant read- ing, but I see no use trying to blink the facts, how- ever disagreeable they may be. The traditional iso- lation of the United States, to which we are now reverting after our late rather disastrous experiment in search of the international Holy Grail, is a reflec- tion of some of our early idealism as much as it is the product of mere selfishness and national indiffer- ence. It is not merely that we decline to meddle AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL in the affairs of other nations; there are also certain schemes to which we refuse to be a party and the British scheme of Crown Colony exploitation is one of them. The case of Ireland dramatises the whole situation for Americans. It may seem grotesque that a legis- lative body could one day pass a law making it a crime even to think of any new form of government, and on the very next day officially welcome Mr. De Valera, who most assuredly is thinking of little else; such a sequel of events would be grotesque, except in Albany, New York, U. S. A. Those cynics are wide of the mark who point sneeringly to the large Irish vote, which has to be placated now and again. Naturally the politicians keep a weather eye on the Irish vote, but the important thing which the cynics seem not to take into account is that there is that Irish vote to keep a weather eye upon. Even during the war public opinion was tolerant of those who platformed against English rule of Ireland and even allowed a draftee to register with his draft board as born in "the free Irish Republic." To-day, in these piping times of bolshevist hysteria, it is safe to say that Jim Larkin would never have been given free residence in Sing Sing, if he had contented him- self with preaching political independence for Ireland instead of rocking the international boat with peculiar ideas of the economic rights of the working classes. The plain fact is that American sympathy for Irish independence is traditional and quite natural; and our politicians, legislators, and judges are terribly afraid of it. English liberals, of course, are quite 116 ROOTS of ANTI-BRITISH FEELING aware of all this, and see in the abandonment of coercion in Ireland a good Instrument for bringing about better Anglo-American relations. English trade union leaders too might do well to consider the American attitude seriously; our own trade union leaders include many Irish-Americans who would be far more ready to believe in the internationalism of British labour if it would bring itself to endorse realistically Irish nationalistic claims. Meanwhile Englishmen must reconcile as best they can the paradox of a nation eagerly buying bonds of the yet mythical Irish Republic while permitting the loan of money, raised by its own Liberty Bonds, to be used to pay the heavy expenses of quartering a British army in Ireland. Again, British relations with the Far East, with China particularly, have hardly been of the kind to increase our admiration of British imperial achievements. For reasons difficult to analyse, the American attitude towards China is an example of one of our best international traditions, just as England's Chinese record has been perhaps one of her worst. I say difficult to analyse because beneath the acts of ostensible friendship on the part of this country towards China there has been a curious yet genuine affection. We can generally "get along" pretty well with the "Chink," and has not every American city of any size its Chinese restaurant where "chop suey" is the basic dish? (It's of no con- sequence that the Chinese know nothing of that dish at home; it has become a symbol to us.) Our na- tional record in China has been relatively decent, 117 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL excepting of course the lamentable exploits of the present Administration, the Lansing-Ishii episode in particular; we are the founders of the "Open Door" policy, and of all Western nations the Chinese trusted us the most. It is perhaps worth the English lib- eral's attention that the popular mind in this coun- try is not altogether ignorant of his country's record in the matter of the opium trade; that British efforts to tie up China commercially and financially make no popular appeal to us; and furthermore, that tales of barbarity and oppression in India sooner or later reach the ears of shocked American audiences; that the war-time alliance between this country and Japan has been fundamentally an unnatural one, and that English interests can hardly expect it to remain per- manent. Of course, an Englishman can legitimately defend himself against all this with a tu quoque, referring to our own imperialistic adventures in Latin-Amer- ica and elsewhere, and from the point of view of abstract principle there is really not a fig to choose between us. We are brothers under the skin. But unfortunately Anglo-American relations are not helped by thus having the pot call the kettle black; and after all, our own imperialism is a comparatively recent growth, it is not spectacular, it has not become part of our national tradition. In the process of cleansing our respective national records of their stains England, for purely historical reasons, will have to begin the contest in generosity. And through causes largely not of our own making, America's record so far has actually far fewer stains upon it, 118 ROOTS of ANTI-BRITISH FEELING For example, one of the neglected roots of anti- British feeling in this country is to be found in Eng- land's attitude towards Turkey. Historically Eng- land has had to play, just as she is playing to-day, the role of physician to the ever-convalescent Sick Man of Europe. The control of Constantinople is regarded as vital to the safety of the British Empire, and no sentimental humanitarianism about Turkish atrocities can mitigate that stern fact nor, it may be added, can the most vehement protests of English liberals move their Foreign Office to change its pol- icy on this point. But the United States has no "vital interest" in Constantinople or in the break-up of the Turkish Empire. On the contrary, most Americans naively believe it would be a "good thing" if the Turk were kicked out of Europe bag and baggage, and, indeed, nobody in this country except perhaps the cigarette-makers, who would be somewhat at a loss for attractive advertising pictures, would care if he were kicked off the face of the earth. Foreigners ought to know that the culture and moral tone of America is set by the prosperous Middle West in happy conjunction with the Methodist Episcopal Church whose recent resolution by the way, against recognition of the Irish Republic should be taken with a grain of anti-Catholic salt and up and down this fair land the Turkish infidel is regularly stormed against from rural pulpits. That England should be the staunchest protector of this unfortunate heathen is disquieting to many Puritan American consciences. At bottom, America is a narrow- minded, bigoted, Protestant Christian country, and 119 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL we have no use at all for those nations which do not believe with us that the world ought to be made over in our own image. Englishmen, in particular, seem blissfully unaware of this condition. Let them take fair warning; if it ever does come to a war between us, here in this mentality of ours will be one of the explanations of the fanatical fervour with which it will be waged. Naturally, in saying this I do not mean to speak in any alarmist sense. The fact is of course that we can go far in our quarrels with England before it need ever come to blows. But a danger lurks in the very elasticity of our attitude; and the danger is that it can be abused. A large part of the latent anti- British feeling in America to-day is a direct conse- quence of what are felt to be the humiliations of the late war we feel that we didn't get much out of the affair except high prices, bad debts, and prohibition. It irritates us to think of the Englishman taking his own personal liberty so much for granted; if we are going to be miserable, we want him to be miserable too. And many estimable Americans are distinctly annoyed at the spectacle of England getting away with everything that's not tied down. As M. Fri- bourg indelicately observed in a recent issue of Le Petit Parisien, England got the lion's share of the spoils of the peace treaty: "An empire with close to 19,000,000 square miles, peopled with 422,000,- ooo of inhabitants, I imagine is worth our atten- tion." How can those great captains of the Amer- ican oil industry have felt when they read in the same newspaper of England's acquiring all the Per- 120 ROOTS of ANTI-BRITISH FEELING sian concessions and that the United States had been graciously offered the lemon of a mandate over Ar- menia. Our shipping and commercial men too have none too pleasant recollections of the manner in which our benevolent neutrality, before 1917, was abused to the point of our mails being opened and our business dealings scrutinised. And there are a good few of us who do not relish the sight of English secret service agents being used as witnesses in trials of American citizens the whole sorry business was rather overdone during the war, and it shows neither good judgment nor good taste for the same activities to be continued now. In short, Englishmen should be aware that even a free horse can be ridden to death. Not every Administration will be as sub- servient to British interests as the soon-to-be-deceased Administration has been during the last eight long years. Besides these more or less minor irritations, the real basis of anti-British feeling in America, is, as it always has been, the Englishman himself. In "Why Men Fight" Bertrand Russell speaks of the hot hatred of the Germans "on account of our pride." He goes on, . . . the Germans are maddened by our spiritual immobility. At bottom we have regarded the Germans as one regards flies on a hot day: they are a nuisance, one has to brush them off, but it would not occur to one to be turned aside by them. Now this Englishman's feeling that other nations really don't count is, of course, far less strong in its manifestation towards us than towards any other 121 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL foreigner. But it is replaced by an unconscious snob- bery, which is perhaps worse ; it is at any rate more exasperating. No one who has ever travelled on a British steamship going, let us say, to Cape Town, can have failed to observe the subtle line of social demarcation between the Englishman and the Colo- nial. It crops out in the most unexpected ways, but it is always there, and the Colonial is made to feel very definitely that he is an inferior. The English- man assumes his superiority as naturally as he as- sumes the fact of the British Empire. Similarly, in his attitude towards Americans, the average English- man assumes, probably unconsciously, that we are still Colonials, rather capricious Colonials to be sure, and with peculiar, amusing ways of our own, but still Colonials. America has hardly become a definite national entity in his consciousness; we do not, quite literally, exist as a rival nation or as an important factor in his world. We both speak the same lan- guage ; we have the same traditions of law and civili- sation; we are of one colour and blood; we are all Anglo-Saxons and is it not an Anglo-Saxon world? The Englishman regards an alliance with us, at all events common action with us, as perfectly natural, if not indeed, inevitable with England doing the directing. I shall not stress this point because Amer- icans understand it only too well; it would make us angry, if it did not make us laugh. After all, Eng- lishmen are hardly to be blamed for not seeing the point. Our own snobs with money have flattered them to the top of their bent. Yet nationally we are of the mood of Mark Twain when he wrote U A Con- 122 ROOTS of ANTI-BRITISH FEELING necticut Yankee"; it is still true that we regard our- selves as the salt of the earth. And while I do not seek to pass any judgment on these respective claims to superiority, I may perhaps point out that no genuine Anglo-American entente cordiale can come into existence until England has accepted the fact of America, as, after four horrible years, she had to accept the fact of Germany. It is because I for one want that acceptance to come without the bloody intrusion of war, and because so many of my own friends are Englishmen, that I commend to the liberal Englishman's attention these few unpalatable truths. The present condition of things is altogether un- natural. The British Empire to-day is to a great extent an historical accident. The leadership of the Anglo-Saxon world, if that world is not to be de- stroyed in futile fratricidal strife, by the nature of sheer hard economic fact belongs henceforth to America and not to England. A war between the two countries would mean the irretrievable defeat of England (there is nothing of jingo pride in this) and her relegation to the comparative importance of a Scandinavian country. England's present control over alien populations is as the best minds of Eng- land have admitted transitory and introductory to their complete self-government. Her imperialistic exploits are in a state of unstable equilibrium. The British Isles are not economically self-sufficient. They are not financially self-sufficient. Without the open or tacit support of the United States England would to-day be bankrupt. She can not compete with 123 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL us industrially (for which fact, if she were wise, she would thank Heaven) she has not the natural re- sources with which to do so. Her present appear- ance of great power comes from the possession of privilege the privilege of exploitation and priv- ilege in this sense is being irrevocably done away with. In a word, England in the terms of realistic economics must shortly cease to be the tail that wags the Anglo-Saxon dog. No American in his right mind wants his own country to don the toga of the greatest power of the twentieth century (we admit we are the most moral!), yet it would be far more sensible for us to make such pretensions than for England to do so. I shall of course be accused of inconsistency for saying that we in America have no desire to meddle in other people's affairs, and at the same time ad- mitting that we want to reform the world. But this is only the inconsistency of the facts. Imperialisti- cally, we have little taste and less tradition for med- dling in other people's affairs; in that sense we really do believe in self-determination because we have had such good luck with it ourselves, probably. Tdealistically or morally, as you will, it is the sad truth that we should like to see the world made over in the image of Kansas. We want to justify our civilisation, but we have little desire to extend it by force or as the clever historian said of Brit- ain's way in a fit of absent-mindedness. We want other peoples to agree with us; we don't particularly want them to become part of us. Englishmen ought to undergo a transvaluation of 124 ROOTS of ANTI-BRITISH FEELING values. What the world needs is not the British Empire but English civilisation. Far from having nothing to learn from England, America, with the rest of the world, has everything to learn from her justice, a vivid sense of personal and civil rights, the infallible expediency of free speech, political good sense, the whole art of compromise, sportsmanship, and good taste. America can take care well enough of the materialistic task of seeing that the Anglo- Saxon world continues to exist; to England is re- served the more important job of proving that Anglo- Saxon civilisation is worth existing. If I were giving any advice to liberal Englishmen, it would be this: Forget your Empire and remember your poets; the Empire isn't worth a damn I 12$ PROGRESS versus INDUSTRIALISM WHEN Mayor Hylan of New York indignantly repudiated the recent census-estimate that the Island of Manhattan had actually decreased in population since 1910, he was but giving expression, in its most nai've form, to the popular fallacy about progress which dates back to Darwin. Rationally one might welcome the fact that there are fewer people on this crowded island such a fortunate development would give those of us who are left a little more space to move around in, which would be particularly grate- ful in the hot spells. But the Mayor feels that the honour of the city has been somehow impugned; fewer people means retrogression, the hands of the clock are being turned back in a word, we are not progressing. The popularisation and spread of the doctrines of evolution have given the common concept of progress an odd twist. To-day progress means specifically the lapse of time. Select any two types of civilisation you wish, and to the ordinary man that type which is chronologically the later is automatically the higher. It must be so; otherwise what meaning would there be in evolution? and evolution is still a modern idol. The idea has insinuated itself into our liberal termin- ology, "forward-looking" for example, although here again rationally, if present tendencies continue, the 126 PROGRESS versus INDUSTRIALISM person interested in true human progress will be in- creasingly compelled to look backward. It is diffi- cult nowadays to win acceptance for the older con- cept of progress as a closer approximation to an ideal of happiness and human projection. Progress, properly, is a qualitative and not a quantitative con- cept. Mayor Hylan to the contrary notwithstand- ing, the man who is really interested in progress does not care how many people there may be on the earth. He is interested rather in the kind of people they are, and in the kind of lives they lead. Progress does not connote the piling up of tools and material, but rather the uses to which these things are put. It implies a set of ends, or values, in terms of which institutions and tendencies may be appraised. From this point of view, the series of phenomena which we loosely group under the word industrialism may be either an aid or a hindrance to true human progress. In point of fact, up to the present time it has been an hindrance. With the ever-accelerat- ing development of modern industrialism, we have reached a point when we must turn sharply around and re-examine all our old assumptions. The recent war, which came very near to destroying the social order so far as Central Europe is concerned, was in the deepest sense a revolt against the repressions and discipline of an iron industrialism. Human nature simply could not stand the inner strain; and it went to pieces; scientifically and methodically, if you like, but none the less actually. So, too, in ancient Sparta the discipline of the citizen for the good of the State reached its perfection almost sim- '127 AMERICA and the YOUNG INTELLECTUAL ultaneously with the appearance of those inner re- hellions that finally destroyed it. When industrial- ism, which makes productive efficiency possible, be- comes dehumanised, as it is to-day, the human ani- mal rebels with disastrous results, precisely because modern productive efficiency and militancy of the old, male, predatory, buccaneering sort are at bot- tom incompatible. Modern nationalistic wars with their inevitable conscription of the entire citizenry and regimentation of the entire resources of the State are far too high a price to pay for the correction of the evils of a rigid peace-time industrialism. Yet they are the price we shall continue to pay, even if in the end they destroy us utterly, so long as indus- trialism continues on its present lines of develop- ment. When, somewhere back in biological history, liv- ing organisms diverged into two streams of tendency one developing into that gorgeous instinctive liv- ing mechanism, the ant, and the other developing into man it is fairly safe to say that nature (not even with a capital N) could hardly have anticipated our modern factory-system. Yet the development of the ant has been much more compatible with that system than the development of man. The ant has reached a point where it has no period of infancy whatever; a few seconds after emerging into the air, its structure complete in every way, it sets to work upon its allotted task an ideal arrangement for factory workers ; no bother about childhood or edu- cation or natural laziness or even sex, for the ants very sensibly keep their workers neuter. Moreover, 128 PROGRESS versus INDUSTRIALISM there are no unemployment-difficulties among these highly developed ants; within the limits of their in- tricate social structure, each member has his definite task to perform; in fact his body is physiologically built for his task and he sets to work without a moment's hesitation or awkwardness. We can watch in the evolution of the ant, specialisation from the human point of view to the wth degree, and habit made inflexible not merely through repe- tition and self-control, but actually carried over into the physiological structure and "set." It is no para- dox that among the ants, of all living creatures, pure parasitism has reached its most perfect development. Not only do certain tribes of ants deliberately go out to capture slaves, or steal the eggs of their neigh- bours and bring up the next generation as slaves, but in some cases they are so thoroughly developed that they actually can not eat their own food. These delicate creatures have to be fed through the mouth by other ants specially trained for that purpose; and they will die of starvation if left alone even in the midst of plenty. Here, indeed, is epicureanism in extremis, and to an imaginative mind there are not lacking certain analogies to modern industrialism and conspicuous waste among humans, upon which it would, perhaps, be painful to dwell. But man took a different road from the ant, and as we at present know him, of all living creatures, he has the longest relative period of infancy, ap- proximately one-third of his natural life. Our mod- ern habit-philosophers and disciplinarians too often forget the full implications of this simple fact, just 129 AMERICA