Appearances Part 10

The Mollycoddle engenders ideas, and the Red-blood exploits them. The Mollycoddle discovers, and the Red-blood invents. The whole structure of civilisation rests on foundations laid by Mollycoddles; but all the building is done by Red-bloods. The Red-blood despises the Mollycoddle; but, in the long run, he does what the Mollycoddle tells him. The Mollycoddle also despises the Red-blood, but he cannot do without him.

Each thinks he is master of the other, and, in a sense, each is right.

In his lifetime the Mollycoddle may be the slave of the Red-blood; but after his death, he is his master, though the Red-blood know it not.

Nations, like men, may be cla.s.sified roughly as Red-blood and Mollycoddle. To the latter cla.s.s belong clearly the ancient Greeks, the Italians, the French, and probably the Russians; to the former the Romans, the Germans, and the English. But the Red-blood nation _par excellence_ is the American; so that, in comparison with them, Europe as a whole might almost be called Mollycoddle. This characteristic of Americans is reflected in the predominant physical type,--the great jaw and chin, the huge teeth, and predatory mouth; in their speech, where beauty and distinction are sacrificed to force; in their need to live and feel and act in ma.s.ses. To be born a Mollycoddle in America is to be born to a hard fate. You must either emigrate or succ.u.mb. This, at least, hitherto has been the alternative practised. Whether a Mollycoddle will ever be produced strong enough to breathe the American atmosphere and live, is a crucial question for the future. It is the question whether America will ever be civilised. For civilisation, you will have perceived, depends on a just balance of Red-bloods and Mollycoddles. Without the Red-blood there would be no life at all, no stuff, so to speak, for the Mollycoddle to work upon; without the Mollycoddle, the stuff would remain shapeless and chaotic. The Red-blood is the matter, the Mollycoddle the form; the Red-blood the dough, the Mollycoddle the yeast. On these two poles turns the orb of human society. And if, at this point, you choose to say that poles are points and have no dimensions, that strictly neither the Mollycoddle nor the Red-blood exist, and that real men contain elements of both mixed in different proportions, I have no quarrel with you except such as one has with the man who states the obvious. I am satisfied to have distinguished the ideal extremes between which the Actual vibrates. The detailed application of the conception I must leave to more patient researchers.

One point more before I close. This Dichotomy, so far as I can see, applies only to man. Woman appears to be a kind of hybrid. Regarded as a creature of instinct, she resembles the Red-blood, and it is to him that she is first attracted. The hero of her youth is the athlete, the soldier, the successful man of business; and this predilection of hers accounts for much of human history, and in particular for the maintenance of the military spirit. On the other hand, as a creature capable of and craving sympathy, she has affinities with the Mollycoddle. This dual nature is the tragedy of her life. The Red-blood awakens her pa.s.sion, but cannot satisfy it. He wins her by his virility, but cannot retain her by his perception. Hence the fact, noted by a cynic, that it is the Mollycoddle who cuckolds the Red-blood. For the woman, married to the Red-blood, discovers too late that she is to him only a trophy, a scalp. He hangs her up in the hall, and goes about his business. Then comes the Mollycoddle, divining all, possessing and offering all. And if the Red-blood is an American, and the Mollycoddle an European, then the situation is tense indeed. For the American Red-blood despises woman in his heart as profoundly as he respects her in outer observance. He despises her because of the Mollycoddle he divines in her. Therefore he never understands her; and that is why European Mollycoddles carry off American women before the very eyes of the exasperated Red-blood. "Am I not clean?" he cries. "Am I not healthy? Am I not athletic and efficient?" He is, but it does not help him, except with young girls. He may win the body; but he cannot win the soul. Can it be true then that most women would like two husbands, one Red-blood, the other Mollycoddle, one to be the father of their children, the other to be the companion of their souls? Women alone can answer; and, for the first time in history, they are beginning to be articulate.

IX

ADVERTIs.e.m.e.nT

The last two days and nights I spent in a railway train. We pa.s.sed through some beautiful country; that, I believe, is the fact; but my feeling is that I have emerged from a nightmare. In my mind is a jumbled vision of huge wooden cows cut out in profile and offering from dry udders a fibrous milk; of tins of biscuits portrayed with a ghastly realism of perspective, and mendaciously screaming that I needed them--U-need-a biscuit; of gigantic quakers, multiplied as in an interminable series of mirrors and offering me a myriad meals of indigestible oats; of huge painted bulls in a kind of discontinuous frieze bellowing to the heavens a challenge to produce a better tobacco than theirs; of the head of a gentleman, with pink cheeks and a black moustache, recurring, like a decimal, _ad infinitum_ on the top of a board, to inform me that his beauty is the product of his own toilet powder; of cod-fish without bones--"the kind you have always bought"; of bacon packed in gla.s.s jars; of whiz suspenders, sen-sen throat-ease, sure-fit hose, and the whole army of patent medicines. By river, wood, and meadow, hamlet or city, mountain or plain, hovers and flits this obscene host; never to be escaped from, never to be forgotten, fixing, with inexorable determination, a fancy that might be tempted to roam to that one fundamental fact of life, the operation of the bowels.

Nor, of course, are these incubi, these ghostly emanations of the One G.o.d Trade, confined to the American continent. They haunt with equal pertinacity the lovelier landscapes of England; they line the route to Venice; they squat on the Alps and float on the Rhine; they are beginning to occupy the very air, and with the advent of the air-s.h.i.+p, will obliterate the moon and the stars, and scatter over every lonely moor and solitary mountain peak memorials of the stomach, of the liver and the lungs. Never, in effect, says modern business to the soul of man, never and nowhere shall you forget that you are nothing but a body; that you require to eat, to salivate, to digest, to evacuate; that you are liable to arthritis, blood-poisoning, catarrh, colitis, calvity, constipation, consumption, diarrhoea, diabetes, dysmenorrhoea, epilepsy, eczema, fatty degeneration, gout, goitre, gastritis, headache, haemorrhage, hysteria, hypertrophy, idiocy, indigestion, jaundice, lockjaw, melancholia, neuralgia, ophthalmia, phthisis, quinsey, rheumatism, rickets, sciatica, syphilis, tonsilitis, tic doloureux, and so on to the end of the alphabet and back again to the beginning. Never and nowhere shall you forget that you are a trading animal, buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market. Never shall you forget that nothing matters--nothing in the whole universe--except the maintenance and extension of industry; that beauty, peace, harmony are not commercial values, and cannot be allowed for a moment to stand in the way of the advance of trade; that nothing, in short, matters except wealth, and that there is no wealth except money in the pocket.

This--did it ever occur to you--is the real public education every country is giving, on every h.o.a.rding and sky-sign, to its citizens of every age, at every moment of their lives. And that being so, is it not a little ironical that children should be taught for half an hour in school to read a poem of Wordsworth or a play of Shakespeare, when for the rest of the twenty-four hours there is being photographed on their minds the ubiquitous literature of Owbridge and of Carter?

But of course advertis.e.m.e.nt cannot be interfered with! It is the life-blood of the nation. All traders, all politicians, all journalists say so. They sometimes add that it is really, to an unprejudiced spirit, beautiful and elevating. Thus only this morning I came across an article in a leading New York newspaper, which remarks that: "The individual advertis.e.m.e.nt is commonly in good taste, both in legend and in ill.u.s.tration. Many are positively beautiful; and, as a wit has truly said, the cereal advertis.e.m.e.nts in the magazines are far more interesting than the serial stories." This latter statement I can easily believe; but when I read the former there flitted across my mind a picture of a lady lightly clad reclining asleep against an open window, a full moon rising in the distance over a lake, with the legend attached, "Cascarella--it works while you sleep."

The article from which I have quoted is interesting not only as ill.u.s.trating the diversity of taste, but as indicating the high degree of development which has now been attained by what is at once the art and the science of advertis.e.m.e.nt. "The study of advertis.e.m.e.nt," it begins, "seems to have a perennial charm for the American public. Hardly a month pa.s.ses but some magazine finds a new and inviting phase of this modern art to lay before its readers. The solid literature of advertis.e.m.e.nt is also growing rapidly.... The technique of the subject is almost as extensive as that of scientific agriculture. Whole volumes have been compiled on the art of writing advertis.e.m.e.nts. Commercial schools and colleges devote courses of study to the subject. Indeed the corner-stone of the curriculum of a well-known business college is an elective upon 'Window-dressing.'" That you may be under no misapprehension, I must add that this article appears in what is admittedly the most serious and respectable of the New York newspapers; and that it is not conceived in the spirit of irony or hyperbole. To the American, advertis.e.m.e.nt is a serious, important, and elevating department of business, and those who make it their speciality endeavour to base their operations on a profound study of human nature. One of these gentlemen has expounded, in a book which has a wide circulation, the whole philosophy of his liberal profession. He calls the book "Imagination in Business";[4] and I remark incidentally that the use of the word "imagination," like that of "art," in this connection, shows where the inquirer ought to look for the manifestation, on this continent, of the aesthetic spirit. "The imaginative man," says the writer, "sends his thought through all the instincts, pa.s.sions, and prejudices of men, he knows their desires and their regrets, he knows every human weakness and its sure decoy." It is this latter clause that is relevant to his theme. Poets in earlier ages wrote epics and dramas, they celebrated the strength and n.o.bility of men; but the poet of the modern world "cleverly builds on the frailties of mankind." Of these the chief is "the inability to throw away an element of value, even though it cannot be utilised." On this great principle is constructed the whole art and science of advertis.e.m.e.nt. And my author proceeds to give a series of ill.u.s.trations, "each of which is an actual fact, either in my experience, or of which I have been cognisant." s.p.a.ce and copyright forbid me to quote. I must refer the reader to the original source.

Nowhere else will be found so lucid an expression of the whole theory and practice of modern trade. That theory and practice is being taught in schools of commerce throughout the Union; and there are many, I suppose, who would like to see it taught in English universities. But, really, does anyone--does any man of business--think it a better education than Greek?

Footnotes:

[Footnote 4: _Imagination in Business_ (Harper & Brothers).]

X

CULTURE

Scene, a club in a Canadian city; persons, a professor, a doctor, a business man, and a traveller (myself). Wine, cigars, anecdotes; and suddenly, popping up, like a Jack-in-the-box absurdly crowned with ivy, the intolerable subject of education. I do not remember how it began; but I know there came a point at which, before I knew where I was, I found myself being a.s.sailed on the subject of Oxford and Cambridge. Not, however, in the way you may antic.i.p.ate. Those ancient seats of learning were not denounced as fossilised, effete, and corrupt. On the contrary, I was pressed, urged, implored almost with tears in the eye--to reform them? No! to let them alone!

"For heaven's sake, keep them as they are! You don't know what you've got, and what you might lose! We know! We've had to do without it! And we know that without it everything else is of no avail. We bl.u.s.ter and brag about education on this side of the Atlantic. But in our heart of hearts we know that we have missed the one thing needful, and that you, over in England, have got it."

"And that one thing?"

"Is Culture! Yes, in spite of Matthew Arnold, Culture, and Culture, and always Culture!"

"Meaning by Culture?"

"Meaning Aristotle instead of Agriculture, Homer instead of Hygiene, Shakespeare instead of the Stock Exchange, Bacon instead of Banking, Plato instead of Paedagogics! Meaning intellect before intelligence, thought before dexterity, discovery before invention! Meaning the only thing that is really practical, ideas; and the only thing that is really human, the Humanities!"

Rather apologetically, I began to explain. At Oxford, I said, no doubt the Humanities still hold the first place. But at Cambridge they have long been relegated to the second or the third. There we have schools of Natural Science, of Economics, of Engineering, of Agriculture. We have even a Training College in Paedagogics. Their faces fell, and they renewed their pa.s.sionate appeal.

"Stop it," they cried. "For heaven's sake, stop it! In all those things we've got you skinned alive over here! If you want Agriculture go to Wisconsin! If you want Medicine, go to the Rockefeller Inst.i.tute! If you want Engineering, go to Pittsburg! But preserve still for the English-speaking world what you alone can give! Preserve liberal culture! Preserve the Cla.s.sics! Preserve Mathematics! Preserve the seed-ground of all practical inventions and appliances! Preserve the integrity of the human mind!"

Interesting, is it not? These gentlemen, no doubt, were not typical Canadians. But they were not the least intelligent men I have met on this continent. And when they had finally landed me in my sleeping-berth in the train, and I was left to my own reflections in that most uncomfortable of all situations, I began to consider how odd it was that in matters educational we are always endeavouring to reform the only part of our system that excites the admiration of foreigners.

I do not intend, however, to plunge into that controversy. The point that interests me is the view of my Canadian friends that in America there is no "culture." And, in the sense they gave to that term, I think they are right. There _is_ no culture in America. There is instruction; there is research; there is technical and professional training; there is specialisation in science and industry; there is every possible application of life, to purposes and ends; but there is no life for its own sake. Let me ill.u.s.trate. It is, I have read, a maxim of American business that "a man is d.a.m.ned who knows two things." "He is almost a dilettante," it was said of a student, "he reads Dante and Shakespeare"!

"The perfect professor," said a College President, "should be willing to work hard eleven months in the year." These are straws, if you like, but they show the way the wind blows. Again, you will find, if you travel long in America, that you are suffering from a kind of atrophy. You will not, at first, realise what it means. But suddenly it will flash upon you that you are suffering from lack of conversation. You do not converse; you cannot; you can only talk. It is the rarest thing to meet a man who, when a subject is started, is willing or able to follow it out into its ramifications, to play with it, to embroider it with pathos or with wit, to penetrate to its roots, to trace its connexions and affinities. Question and answer, anecdote and jest are the staple of American conversation; and, above all, information. They have a hunger for positive facts. And you may hear them hour after hour rehearsing to one another their travels, their business transactions, their experiences in trains, in hotels, on steamers, till you begin to feel you have no alternatives before you but murder or suicide. An American, broadly speaking, never detaches himself from experience. His mind is embedded in it; it moves wedged in fact. His only escape is into humour; and even his humour is but a formula of exaggeration. It implies no imagination, no real envisaging of its object. It does not illuminate a subject, it extinguishes it, clamping upon every topic the same grotesque mould. That is why it does not really much amuse the English.

For the English are accustomed to Shakespeare, and to the London cabby.

This may serve to indicate what I mean by lack of culture. I admit, of course, that neither are the English cultured. But they have culture among them. They do not, of course, value it; the Americans, for aught I know, value it more; but they produce it, and the Americans do not. I have visited many of their colleges and universities, and everywhere, except perhaps at Harvard--unless my impressions are very much at fault--I have found the same atmosphere. It is the atmosphere known as the "Yale spirit," and it is very like that of an English Public School.

It is virile, athletic, gregarious, all-penetrating, all-embracing. It turns out the whole university to sing rhythmic songs and shout rhythmic cries at football matches. It praises action and sniffs at speculation.

It exalts morals and depresses intellect. It suspects the solitary person, the dreamer, the loafer, the poet, the prig. This atmosphere, of course, exists in English universities. It is imported there from the Public Schools. But it is not all-pervading. Individuals and cliques escape. And it is those who escape that acquire culture. In America, no one escapes, or they are too few to count. I know Americans of culture, know and love them; but I feel them to be lost in the sea of philistinism. They cannot draw together, as in England, and leaven the lump. The lump is bigger, and they are fewer. All the more honour to them; and all the more loss to America.

Whether, from all this, any conclusion is to be drawn about the proper policy to be pursued at our universities, is a question I will not here discuss. Culture, I think, is one of those precious things that are achieved by accident, and by accident may be destroyed. The things we do to maintain it might kill it; the things we do to kill it might preserve it. My Canadian friends may be quite wrong in their diagnosis of the causes that engender or destroy it. But they are right in their sense of its importance; and it will be an interesting result of imperial unity if we find, to our astonishment, that the Dominions beyond the seas rally round exactly those things in England which we expect them to declare effete. The Rhodes scholars go to Oxford, not to Birmingham or Liverpool. And it is Cambridge that peoples the universities of the Empire with professors.

XI

ANTaeUS

I saw to-day some really remarkable landscapes by an American artist.

So, at least, they seem to me. They have, at any rate, a quality of imagination which one does not expect to find in this country. "One does not expect"--why not? Why, in this respect, is America, as undoubtedly she is, so sterile? Artists must be born here as much as elsewhere.

American civilisation, it is true, repels men of reflection and sensitiveness, just as it attracts men of action; so that, as far as immigration is concerned, there is probably a selection working against the artistic type. But, on the other hand, men of action often produce sons with a genius for the arts; and it is to be supposed that they do so as much in America as elsewhere. It must be the environment that is unfavourable. Artists and poets belong to the genus I have named "Mollycoddle"; and in America the Mollycoddle is hardly allowed to breathe. Nowhere on that continent, so far as I have been able to see, is there to be found a cla.s.s or a clique of men, respected by others and respecting themselves, who also respect not merely art but the artistic calling. Broadly, business is the only respectable pursuit; including under business Politics and Law, which in this country are only departments of business. Business holds the place in popular esteem that is held by arms in Germany, by letters in France, by Public Life in England. The man therefore whose bent is towards the arts meets no encouragement; he meets everywhere the reverse. His father, his uncles, his brothers, his cousins, all are in business. Business is the only virile pursuit for people of education and means, who cannot well become chauffeurs. There is, no doubt, the professorial career; but that, it is agreed, is adopted only by men of "no ambition." Americans believe in education, but they do not believe in educators. There is no money to be made in that profession, and the making of money is the test of character. The born poet or artist is thus handicapped to a point which may easily discourage him from running at all. At the best, he emigrates to Europe, and his achievement is credited to that continent. Or, remaining in America, he succ.u.mbs to the environment, puts aside his creative ambition, and enters business. It is not for nothing that Americans are the most active people in the world. They pay the penalty in an atrophy of the faculties of reflection and representation.

Things are different in Europe, and even in England. There, not only are artists and men of letters honoured when they are successful--they are, of course, honoured at that stage in America; but the pursuit of literature and art is one which a young man need not feel it discreditable to adopt. The contemporaries of a brilliant youth at Oxford or at Cambridge do not secretly despise him if he declines to enter business. The first-cla.s.s man does not normally aspire to start life as a drummer. Public life and the Church offer honourable careers; and both of them have traditional affinities with literature. So has the Law, still in England a profession and not a trade. One may even be a don or a schoolmaster without serious discredit. Under these conditions a young man can escape from the stifling pressure of the business point of view. He can find societies like-minded with himself, equally indifferent to the ideal of success in business, equally inspired by intellectual or aesthetic ambitions. He can choose to be poor without feeling that he will therefore become despicable. The att.i.tude of the business cla.s.ses in England, no doubt, is much the same as that of the business cla.s.ses in America. But in England there are other cla.s.ses and other traditions, havens of refuge from the prevalent commercialism. In America the trade-wind blows broad, steady, universal over the length and breadth of the continent.

This, I believe, is one reason for the sterility of America in Art. But it is not the only one. Literature and Art in Europe rest on a long tradition which has not only produced books and pictures, but has left its mark on the language, the manners, the ideas, the architecture, the physical features of the country. The books and the pictures can be transplanted, but the rest cannot. Thus, even though in every art the technical tradition has been interrupted, there remains in Europe what I will call the tradition of feeling; and it is this that is absent in America. Art in Europe is rooted; and there still persists into the present something of the spirit which fostered it in the past. Not only is Nature beautiful, she is humanised by the works of Man. Politics are mellowed by history, business tempered by culture. Cla.s.ses are more segregated, types more distinct, ideals and aims more varied. The ghost of a spiritual life still hovers over the natural, shadowing it with the beat of solemn wings. There are finer overtones for a sensitive ear to catch; rainbow hues where the spray of life goes up. All this, it is true, is disappearing in Europe; but in America it has never existed. A sensitive European, travelling there, feels at once starved and flayed.

Nothing nourishes, and everything hurts. There is natural beauty, but it has not been crowned and perfected by the hand of man. Whatever he has touched he has touched only to defile. There is one pursuit, commerce; one type, the business man; one ideal, that of increasing wealth.

Monotony of talk, monotony of ideas, monotony of aim, monotony of outlook on the world. America is industrialism pure and simple; Europe is industrialism superimposed on feudalism; and, for the arts, the difference is vital.

But the difference is disappearing. Not that America is becoming like Europe, but Europe is becoming like America. This is not a case of the imitation that is a form of flattery; it is a case of similar causes producing similar results. The disease--or shall we say, to use a neutral term--the diathesis of commercialism found in America an open field and swept through it like a fire. In Europe, its course was hampered by the structures of an earlier civilisation. But it is spreading none the less surely. And the question arises--In the future, when the European environment is as unfavourable to Art as the American, will there be, in the West, any Art at all? I do not know; no one knows; but there is this to remark. What I am calling commercialism is the infancy, not the maturity of a civilisation. The revolution in morals, in manners, and in political and social inst.i.tutions which must accompany the revolution in industry, has hardly yet begun its course.

It has gone further in Europe than in America; so that, oddly enough, Europe is at once behind and in front of this continent, overlaps it, so to speak, at both ends. But it has not gone very far even in Europe; and for generations, I conceive, political and social issues will draw away much of the creative talent that might have been available for Art. In the end, one may suppose, something like a stable order will arise; an order, that is, in which people will feel that their inst.i.tutions correspond sufficiently with their inner life, and will be able to devote themselves with a free mind to reflecting their civilisation in Art.

But will their civilisation be of a kind to invite such reflection? It will be, if the present movement is not altogether abortive, a civilisation of security, equity, and peace; where there is no indigence, no war, and comparatively little disease. Such society, certainly, will not offer a field for much of the kind of Art that has been or is now being produced. The primitive folk-song, the epic of war, the novel or play inspired by social strife, will have pa.s.sed irrecoverably away. And more than that, it is sometimes urged, there will be such a dearth of those tense moments which alone engender the artistic mood, that Art of any kind will have become impossible. If that were true, it would not, in my opinion, condemn the society. Art is important, but there are things more important; and among those things are justice and peace. I do not, however, accept the view that a peaceable and just society would necessarily also be one that is uninspired. That view seems to me to proceed from our incurable materialism. We think there is no conflict except with arms; no rivalry except for bread; no aspiration except for money and rank. It is my own belief that the removal of the causes of the material strife in which most men are now plunged would liberate the energies for spiritual conflict; that the pa.s.sion to know, the pa.s.sion to feel, the pa.s.sion to love, would begin at last to take their proper place in human life; and would engender the forms of Art appropriate to their expression.

To return to America, what I am driving at is this. America may have an Art, and a great Art. But it will be after she has had her social revolution. Her Art has first to touch ground; and before it can do that, the ground must be fit for it to touch. It was not till the tenth century that the seed of Mediaeval Art could be sown; it was not till the thirteenth that the flower bloomed. So now, our civilisation is not ripe for its own Art. What America imports from Europe is useless to her. It is torn from its roots; and it is idle to replant it; it will not grow.

There must be a native growth, not so much of America, as of the modern era. That growth America, like Europe, must will. She has her prophet of it, Walt Whitman. In the coming centuries it is her work to make his vision real.

CONCLUDING ESSAY

The preceding pages were written in the course of travel and convey the impressions and reflections of the moment. Whatever interest they may have depends upon this immediacy, and for that reason I have reprinted them substantially as they first appeared. Perhaps, however, some concluding reflections of a more considered nature may be of some interest to my readers. I do not advance them in a dogmatic spirit nor as final judgments, but as the first tentative results of my gropings into a large and complicated subject. I will ask the reader, therefore, be he Western or Oriental, to follow me in a spirit at once critical and sympathetic, challenging my suggestions as much as he will, but rather as a fellow-seeker than as an opponent bent upon refutation. For I am trying to comprehend rather than to judge, and to comprehend as impartially as is compatible with having an att.i.tude of one's own at all.