Chapter IV

In the next room I sat and read, a pleasant warmth of parental protection in my heart. And then Ernest began to cough. It was no light childish spasm, but a deep racking cough that froze my blood. There had been a little cold in him when he came. I had taken him out into the raw December air. I had overexerted him in my thoughtless haste. Visions of a delirious and pneumonic child floated before me. Or what was that dreadful thing called croup? I could not keep my thought on my book. That racking cough came again and again. Ernest must be awake and tossing feverishly. Yet when I looked in at him, he would be lying peaceful and rosy, and the cough that tore him did not disturb his slumbers. He must then be in a state of fatigue so extreme that even the cough could not wake him. I reproached myself for dragging him into the cold. How could I have led him on so long a journey, and let him play with a strenuousness such as his days never knew! I foresaw a lurid to-morrow: Ernest sick, myself helpless and ignorant, guilty of a negligence that might be fatal. And as I watched him, he began to show the most alarming tendency to fall out of bed. I did not dare to move him, and yet his head moved ever more perilously near the edge. I relied on a chair pushed close to the bed to save him. But I felt weary and worn. What an exacting life, the parent’s! Could it be that every evening provided such anxieties and problems and thrills? Could one let one’s life become so engrossed?

And then I remembered how every evening, when we went to bed, we used to ask our mother if she was going to be home that evening, and with what thankful security we sank back, knowing that we should be protected through another night. Ernest had not seemed to care what became of me. Having had no home and no parents, he had grown up into a manly robustness. He did not ask what you were going to do with him. He was all for the moment. He took the cash and let the credit go. It was I who felt the panic and the insecurity. I envied Ernest. I saw that contrary to popular mythology, there were advantages in being an institutional orphan, provided you had been properly Binet-ed as of normal intelligence and the State got you a decent boarding-mother. How much bringing up Ernest had escaped! If his manners were not polished, at least they were not uncouth. He had been a little shy at first, nodding at questions with a smile, and throwing his head against the chair. But there was nothing repressed about him, nothing institutionalized, and certainly nothing artificial.

His cough grew lighter, and as I looked at his yellow hair and the angelic flush of his round cheeks, I thought of the horrid little puppets that had been produced around me in conventional homes, under model fathers and kind and devout mothers. How their fears and inhibitions contrasted with Ernest’s directness! His bitter mood at going to bed had a certain fine quality about it. I recalled the _camaraderie_ we had established. The box of lemon-drops, only half-exhausted, stared at me from the pocket of his little sweater. I became proud of Ernest. I was enjoying again my vicarious parenthood. What did that obscure and tangled heredity of his, or his most problematical of futures, matter to him or to me? It was delightful to adopt him thus imaginatively. If he turned out badly, could you not ascribe it to his heredity, and if well, to your kindly nurture and constant wisdom? Nothing else could be very much thought about, perhaps, but for the moment Ernest seemed supremely worth thinking about. There would be his education. And suddenly it seemed that I did not know very much about educating a child. It would be too absorbing. There would be no time for the making of a living. Ernest loomed before my imagination in the guise of a pleasant peril.

And then morning came. As soon as it was light Ernest could be heard talking and chuckling to himself, with no hint of delirium or pneumonia, or the bogies of the night. When I spoke he came running in in his bare feet, and crawled in with me. He told me that in spite of my valiant chair he had really fallen out of bed. He did not care, and proceeded to jump over me in a vigorous acrobatic way. He did not even cough, and I wondered if all the little sinister things of childhood passed so easily with the night. It was impossible to remember my fears as he tossed and shouted, the perfection of healthiness. Parenthood now seemed almost too easy to bother with.

Ernest caught sight of my dollar watch on the chair, and I saw that he conceived a fatal and instantaneous passion. He listened to its tick, shook it, ogled it amorously. He made little suggestive remarks about liking it. I teased him with the fact that he could not tell time. Ernest snorted at first in good-natured contempt at the artificial rigidity of the process, but finally allowed himself to be persuaded that I was not fooling him. And my heart swelled with the generosity which I was about to practise in presenting him with this wonderful watch.

But it suddenly became time to dress, for my parental day was to end at nine. And then I discovered that it was as hard to get Ernest into his clothes as it was to get him out of them. It was intolerable to him that he should leave his romp and the watch, and he shouted a No to my every suggestion. A new parental crisis crashed upon me. What a life of ingenuity and stratagem the parent had to lead! To spend half one’s evening persuading a sleepy and bitter little boy to take off his clothes, and half the morning in persuading a vivid and jubilant little boy to put them on again--this was a life that taxed one’s personal resources to the utmost. I reasoned with Ernest. I pointed out that his kind friend was coming very soon, and that he must be ready. But Ernest was obdurate. He would not even bathe. I pointed out the almost universal practice of the human race of clothing themselves during the early morning hours. Historic generalizations had no more effect on Ernest in the morning than they had had in the evening. And with a sudden stab I thought of the watch. That watch I knew would be an Aladdin’s lamp to make Ernest my obedient slave. I had only to bribe him with it, and he would bathe, dress, or do anything which I told him to do. Here was the easy art of corruption by which parents got moral clutches on their children! And I deliberately renounced it. I would not bribe Ernest. Yet the mischief was done. So intuitive was his mind that I felt guiltily that he already knew my readiness to give him the watch if he would only dress. In that case, I should miss my moral victory. I could not disappoint him, and I did not want to bribe him inadvertently.

There was another consideration which dismayed me. Even if Ernest should prove amenable to reason or corruption, where was my ability to reconstruct him? Unbuttoning a sleepy and scarcely resisting little boy in the evening was quite different from constructively buttoning a jumping and hilarious one in the morning. And time was flowing dangerously on. Only a sudden theory of self-activity saved me. Could Ernest perhaps dress himself? I caught him in one of his tumbles and asked him. His mind was too full of excitement, to be working on prosaic themes. And then I shot my bolt. “I don’t believe you know how to dress yourself, do you?” To that challenge Ernest rose. “Hurry!” I said, “and see how quickly you can dress. See if you can dress before I can!” Ernest flew into the other room, and in an incredibly short time appeared quite constructed except as to an occasional rear-button, washed and shining, self-reliant, ready for the business of the day. I glowed with the success of my parental generalship. I felt a sense of power. But power gained in so adroit and harmless a way was safe. What a parent I would make! How grateful I was to Ernest to be leaving me at this height!

I gave him the watch. Though he had longed, the fulfillment of his desire struck him with incredulity. The event awed him. But I showed him how to wind it, and seemed so indifferent to its fate that he was reassured as to my sincerity. He recovered his poise. He sang as he ate his breakfast. And when his guide and friend came, amused and curious, he went off with her as unreluctantly as he had come, proud and self-possessed, the master of himself. He strutted a little with his watch, and he politely admitted that he had had a good time.

I do not know whether Ernest ever thought of me again. He had been an unconscious artist, for he had painted many new impressions on my soul. He had been sent to me to test my theories of parenthood, but he had driven away all thought of theory in the obsession of his demands. How could I let him go so cheerily out of my door? It wasn’t at all because I minded having my time absorbed, for I like people to absorb my time. Why did I not cling to him, buy him from his protector, with a “Dear boy, you shall never leave my pleasant rooms again”? Why did I not rush after him down the street, stung by a belated remorse? I was conscious enough that I was missing all the dramatic climax of the situation. I was not acting at all as one does with tempting little orphan boys. But that is the way life works. The heart fails, and the vast and incalculable sea of responsibility drowns one in doubt. I let him go with no more real hesitation than that with which he went.

The later life of Ernest I feel will be one of sturdy self-reliance. That all the aspects of his many-sided character did not become apparent in the short time that I held him was clear from the report I heard of a Christmas party to which he was invited a few weeks later. Ernest, it seems, had broken loose with the fervor of a modern Europe after its forty years of peace. He had seized chocolate cake, slapped little girls, bitten the hand of the kind lady who fed him, and ended by lying down on the floor and yelling in a self-reliant rage. Was this the effect of a day with me? Or had I charmed and soothed him? I had a pleasant shudder of power, wondering at my influence over him.

The next I heard of Ernest was his departure for the home of an adopting family in New Jersey, from which he was presently to be shipped back for offenses unknown. My respect for Ernest rose even higher. He would not fit in easily to any smug conventional family life. He would not rest adopted until he was satisfied. I began to wonder if, after all, we were not affinities. He had kept the peace with me, he had derived stimulation from my society. Should I not have called him back? Shall I not now? Shall I not want to see him with me again? I wonder.

ON DISCUSSION

Graham Wallas, in his “Great Society,” wrote few more interesting sentences than that in which he remarked the paucity of genuine discussion around him, the lack of skill in meeting each others’ minds which Englishmen show when they talk together. Particularly in this country where mere talk is always contrasted unfavorably with action is discussion rare. The only way we can justify our substitution of talking for acting is to talk badly. And we like to talk badly. To put into talk the deliberate effort which action demands would seem an insufferable pedantry. Talk is one of the few unspecialized talents still left in a mechanical world. The plain man resents any invasion of this last preserve of freedom. He resents the demand that skill and effort be put to work in raising talk into real discussion where points are met and presuppositions are clarified and formulations made. So conversation is left to grow wild as a common flower along the wayside of our personal contacts.

Yet this lack of art in discussion is not really due to lack of desire. An inner need drives talk into something more formal. Discussion is popular, and because it is popular it needs, in spite of the plain man, a certain deliberate technique. One often stumbles on groups which have met not because some problem has seized them all and will not let them go until it is satisfied, but because they have felt a general craving for talk. They find that their mental wheels will not rotate without some corn to grind. In the revelation of what each person thinks it important to discuss, one gets the attitude of his mind and the color of his governing philosophy. Such a group is a kind of kindergarten of discussion. Ostensibly equal and sympathetic in background and approach, they show in very little time the startling diversity of their actual equipment and mental framework. A score of people all doing apparently the same quality of work in the professional world, all enjoying a popular reputation, all backed by a college education, all reacting constantly to each other in the intersecting world of journalism, art, teaching, law, will often be found to show a lack of mental sympathy so profound that one wonders how such people can smilingly continue to seem to be living in the same world. They are using the same words, but they are not using the same meanings, and because they are not conscious that it is really meanings which they should be exchanging, the discussion is apt to lose itself feebly as in desert sands. What really emerges from most discussions, you find, is an astonishing array of philosophical skeletons-in-the-closet which stalk about the room unchallenged. Their owners are quite unconscious of this fatal escape. Yet it takes little wit to discover rigid platonists discoursing with pragmatists, minds whose first operation in thinking is always to fix a moral judgment contending with remorseless realists. Ideals are discussed when one man means by an ideal a measuring-stick for human conduct, another a social goal towards which he works. Concepts emerge which to half the company represent a mental vacuum, and to the other half imply a warm blow of virtue. World-philosophies which might be recognized are shabbily ignored. The feeble sparring of their distorted shadows is taken for discussion, and the company separates with a vague feeling of having occupied itself for an evening with something profitably mental.

All the time, however, it is these fundamental philosophies which are the real antagonists, and not the concrete ideas which are the subjects of discussion. A good discussion passes rapidly into an examination of those presuppositions. It is more interested in charting out the minds of the other talkers than in winning small victories or getting agreements. Good discussion is a kind of detective uncovering the hidden categories and secret springs of emotion that underlie “opinions” on things. It seeks that common background and store of meanings in which alone diverse opinions can really meet and operate. We can no longer tolerate reasons which are only retrospective props for action that was really impulsive in its origin. No more should we tolerate in discussion that stubborn voicing of attitudes which seem axiomatic to the speaker only because he has never examined the structure of his own thought. It is popular nowadays to welcome the expression of every new attitude. But a discussion should be tolerant and hospitable only after the ground has been cleared. You must be very sure that what you have to deal with is a real attitude and not a counterfeit. Discussion remains mere talk if it remains content with the expression of an “opinion” and does not put the expressor to immediate cross-examination to discover in the name of what Weltanschauung the opinion came.

Discussion should be one of the most important things in the world, for it is almost our only arena of thinking. It is here that all the jumble of ideas and impressions that we get from reading and watching are dramatically placed in conflict. Here only is there a genuine challenge to put them into some sort of order. Without discussion intellectual experience is only an exercise in a private gymnasium. It has never been put to the test, never had to give an account of itself. It is some such motive that impels people to discussion; though they are too often content with the jousting of pasteboard knights. But a good discussion is not only a conflict. It is fundamentally a coöperation. It progresses towards some common understanding. This does not mean that it must end in agreement. A discussion will have been adequate if it has done no more than set the problem in its significant terms, or even defined the purpose that makes such a setting significant. You turn up things in your mind that would have remained buried without the incision of some new idea. The effort to say exactly what you mean, sharpening your idea to the point that will drive home to others, is itself invigorating. A good discussion tones up your mind, concentrates its loose particles, gives form and direction. When all say exactly what they mean, then for the first time understanding--the goal of discussion--is possible.

Discussion demands a mutual trustfulness, a mutual candor. But this very trustfulness makes discussion vulnerable. It is particularly open to the attack of the person who sees in the group a forum. The physical signs of such a misinterpretation are familiar. The eye becomes slightly dilated, the voice more orotund. The suggestion develops into an exposition, the exposition into an apologia or recrimination. Discussion is slain. Another enemy is the person who sidetracks a sentence and then proceeds in a leisurely way to unload its freight into his own wagon. But in a good discussion the traffic is kept constantly moving in both directions along a rather rigid line of track, and the freight arrives somewhere. Some people have a fatal gift of derailment. Wit is perhaps the most common means. Discussion has no greater enemies than those who can catch an idea and touch it off into a puff of smoke. Wit should salt a discussion but not explode it.

Good discussion is so important that those who set about it may be rather pedantic and self-conscious in their enterprise. One may acutely realize himself as being, for the time, primarily a mind. He renounces the seeming of personal advantage in an argument. He sincerely and anxiously searches his intellectual stores in order to set down exactly what he thinks in just the proportions and colors that he thinks it. He studies what the others say, and tries to detect quickly the search for advantage or the loose use of terminology. He insists that words and phrases have meanings, and if they carry no meaning to him, he searches indefatigably until he has found the word that does carry over the full freight of significance intended.

The rewards for such pedantry are found in a tone of clear thinking. A good discussion increases the dimensions of every one who takes part. Being rather self-consciously a mind in a group of minds means becoming more of a person. Ideas are stale things until they are personally dramatized. The only good writers of opinion are those who instinctively reproduce the atmosphere of discussion, whose sentences have the tone of discussion with themselves or with an imagined group. The impulse for discussion is an impulse towards the only environment where creative thinking can be done. All the more reason why an instinct for workmanship should come in to insure that thought does not lose itself in feeble sparring or detached monologue.

THE PURITAN’S WILL TO POWER

To the modern young person who tries to live well there is no type so devastating and harassing as the puritan. We cannot get away from him. In his sight we always live. We finish with justifying our new paganism against him, but we never quite lose consciousness of his presence. Even Theodore Dreiser, who has always revolted from the puritan clutch, finds it necessary now and then to tilt a lance against him. If there were no puritans we should have to invent them. And if the pagan Mr. Dreiser has to keep on through life fighting puritans, how much more intrigued must we be who are only reformed puritans, and feel old dangers stirring at every aggressive gesture of righteousness? For the puritan is the most stable and persistent of types. It is scarcely a question of a puritanical age and a pagan age. It is only a question of more puritans or less puritans. Even the most emancipated generation will find that it has only broken its puritanism up into compartments, and balances sexual freedom--or better, perhaps, a pious belief in sexual freedom--with a cult of efficiency and personal integrity which is far more coercive than the most sumptuary of laws. Young people who have given up all thought of “being good” anxiously celebrate a cult of “making good.” And a superstition like eugenics threatens to terrorize the new intelligentsia.

Every new generation, in fact, contrives to find some new way of being puritanical. Every new generation finds some new way of sacrifice. Every new triumphant assertion of life is counter-balanced by some new denial. In Europe this most proud and lusty young generation goes to its million-headed slaughter, and in America the social consciousness arises to bewilder and deflect the _essor_ towards life. Just when convention seemed to be on the run, and youth seemed to be facing a sane and candid attitude towards sex, we find idealistic girls and men coming out of the colleges to tell us of our social responsibility to the race. This means not only that our daily living is to be dampened by the haunting thought of misery that we cannot personally prevent, but that our thirst towards love-experience is to be discouraged and turned aside into a concern for racial perfection. That is, we are subtly persuaded against merely growing widely and loving intensely. We become vague and mystified means toward nebulous and unreal ends. This new puritanism will not let us be ends in ourselves, or let personality be the chief value in life. It will almost let us sometimes. But it always pulls us up somewhere. There is always a devil of inhibition to interpose before our clean and naïve grasping of life. (You see, my puritanism takes the form of a suspicion that there may be a personal devil lurking in the universe.)

This is why the puritan always needs to be thoroughly explained and exposed. We must keep him before our eyes, recognize him as the real enemy, no matter in what ideal disguise he lurks. We must learn how he works, and what peculiar satisfactions he gets from his activity. For he must get satisfaction or he would not be so prevalent. I accept the dogma that to explain anybody we have to do little more than discover just what contentment people are getting from what they do, or from what they are permitting to happen to them, or even from what they are flinging their will into trying to prevent happening to them. For, if life is anything positive, it is the sense of control. In the puritan, of course, we have the paradox how he can get satisfaction from ruggedly and sternly subjecting himself and renouncing the world, the flesh and the devil. There is a popular superstition that the puritan has an extra endowment of moral force, that he reverses the natural current of life, that he resists the drag of carnality down towards hell, that his energy is thrown contra-satisfaction, that this control is a real straddling of the nefarious way. But, of course, it is just this superstition that gives the puritan his terrific prestige. In the light of the will-to-power dogma this superstition fades. The puritan becomes just as much of a naturalistic phenomenon as the most carnal sinner. Instincts and impulses, in the puritan, are not miraculously cancelled, but have their full play. The primitive currents of life are not blocked and turned back on their sources, but turned into powerful and usually devastating channels. The puritan is just as much of a “natural” man as you or I.

But we still have to explain how this lustful, headstrong creature called man, spilling with greed, could so unabatedly throughout the ages give up the primitive satisfaction of sex and food and drink and gregariousness and act the ascetic and the glumly censorious. How could an animal whose business was to feel powerful get power from being in subjection and deprivation? Well, the puritan gets his sense of power from a very cunningly organized satisfaction of two of his strongest impulses,--the self-conscious personal impulses of being regarded and being neglected. The puritan is no thwarted and depleted person. On the contrary, he is rather a complete person, getting almost the maximum of satisfaction out of these two apparently contradictory sentiments,--the self-regarding and self-abasing. The pure autocrat would feed himself wholly on the first, the pure slave would be only a human embodiment of the second. But the pure puritan manages to make the most powerful amalgam of both.

What we may call the puritan process starts with the satisfaction of the impulse for self-abasement (an impulse as primitive as any, for in the long struggle for survival it was often just as necessary for life to cower as it was to fight). It is only the puritan’s prestige that has attached moral value to self-sacrifice, for there is nothing intrinsic in it that makes it any more praiseworthy than lust. But its pragmatic value is immense. When the puritan announces himself as the least worthy of men, he not only predisposes in his favor the naturally slavish people around him, but he neutralizes the aggressive and self-regarding who would otherwise be moved to suppress him. He renounces, he puts on meekness, he sternly regiments himself, he makes himself unhappy in ways that are just not quite severe enough to excite pity and yet run no risk of arousing any envy. If the puritan does all this unconsciously, the effect is yet the same as if he were deliberately plotting. To give his impulses of self-abasement full play, he must, of course, exercise a certain degree of control. This control, however, gives him little of that sense of power that makes for happiness. Puritan moralists have always tried to make us believe in this virtue of self-control. They forget to point out, however, that it does not become a virtue until it has become idealized. Control over self gives us little sense of control. It is the dreariest of all satisfactions of the will to power. Not until we become _proud_ of our self-control do we get satisfaction. The puritan only begins to reap his satisfaction when the self-regarding impulse comes into play.

Having given his self-abasing impulse free rein, he is now in a position to exploit his self-regard. He has made himself right with the weak and slavish. He has fortified himself with their alliance. He now satisfies his self-regard by becoming proud of his humility and enjoining it on others. If it were self-control alone that made the puritan, he would not be as powerful as he is. Indeed he would be no more than the mild ascetic, who is all abnegation because his self-regarding mechanism is weak. But in the puritan both impulses are strong. It is control over others that yields him his satisfactions of power. He may stamp out his sex-desire, but his impulse to shatter ideas that he does not like will flourish wild and wanton. To the true puritan the beauty of unselfishness lies in his being able to enforce it on others. He loves virtue not so much for its own sake as for its being an instrument of his terrorism.

The true puritan is at once the most unselfish and the most self-righteous of men. There is nothing he will not do for you, give up for you, suffer for you. But at the same time there is no cranny of your world that he will not illuminate with the virtue of this doing of his. His real satisfaction comes not from his action of benevolence but from the moral of the tale. He need not boast about his renunciation or his altruism. But in any true puritan atmosphere that pride will be prevalent. Indeed, it is the oxygen of that atmosphere. Wherever you come across that combination of selfless devotion with self-righteousness, you have the essence of the puritan. Should you come across the one without the other you would find not the puritan but the saint.

The puritan then gets the satisfaction of his will to power through the turning of his self-abasement into purposes of self-regard. Renunciation is the raw material for his positive sense of power. The puritan gets his satisfaction exactly where the most carnal of natural men gets his, out of the stimulation of his pride. And in a world where renunciation has to happen to us whether we want it or not, the puritan is in the most impressive strategic position. In economy of energy he has it all over the head that is bloody but unbowed. For the puritan is so efficient morally that he can bow his head and yet exact control both out of the bowing and out of the prestige which his bowing gives him, as well as out of the bowing which he can enforce on others. The true puritan must become an evangelist. It is not enough to renounce the stimulus to satisfaction which is technically known as a “temptation.” The renouncing must be made into an ideal, the ideal must be codified, promulgated, and, in the last analysis, enforced. In the compelling of others to abstain, you have the final glut of puritanical power. For in getting other people to renounce a thing you thereby get renewed justification for your own renouncing. And so the puritan may go on inexhaustibly rolling up his satisfactions, one impulse reinforcing the other. The simultaneous play of these two apparently inconsistent personal impulses makes the puritan type one of the stablest in society. While the rest of us are longing for power the puritan is enjoying his. And because the puritan is so well integrated he almost always rules. The person whose satisfactions of control are more various and more refined is on the defensive against him.

The puritan gets his sense of power not in the harmless way of the artist or the philosopher or the lover or the scientist, but in a crude assault on that most vulnerable part of other people’s souls, their moral sense. He is far more dangerous to those he converts than to those he intimidates. For he first scares them into abandoning the rich and sensuous and expressive impulses in life, and then teaches them to be proud of having done so. We all have the potentiality of the puritan within us. I remember suffering agonies at the age of ten because my aunt used to bring me candy that had been wickedly purchased on the Sabbath day. I forget whether I ate it or not, but that fact is irrelevant. What counted was the guilt with which the whole universe seemed to be stained. I need no other evidence of the irrational nature of morality than this fact that children can be such dogged little puritans, can be at the age of ten so sternly and intuitively righteous.

The puritan is a case of arrested development. Most of us do grow beyond him and find subtler ways of satisfying our desire for power. And we do it because we never can quite take that step from self-abasement to self-regard. We never can quite become proud of our humility. Renunciation remains an actual going without, sacrifice a real thwarting. If we value an experience and deliberately surrender it, we are too naïve to pretend that there are compensations. There is a loss. We are left with a vacuum. There _is_ only depression and loss of control. Our self-regard is not quite elemental enough to get stimulation from wielding virtue over others. I never feel so degraded as when I have renounced. I had rather beat my head rhythmically and endlessly against an unyielding wall. For the pagan often breaks miraculously through the wall. But the puritan at his best can only strut outside.

Most of us, therefore, after we have had our puritan fling, sown our puritan wild oats as it were, grow up into devout and progressing pagans, cultivating the warmth of the sun, the deliciousness of love-experience, the high moods of art. The puritans remain around us, a danger and a threat. But they have value to us in keeping us acutely self-conscious of our faith. They whet our ardor. Perhaps no one can be really a good appreciating pagan who has not once been a bad puritan.

THE IMMANENCE OF DOSTOEVSKY

It is impossible not to think of Dostoevsky as a living author when his books come regularly, as they are coming, to the American public every few months. Our grandfathers sixty years ago are said to have lived their imaginative lives in anticipation of the next instalment of Dickens or Thackeray. I can feel somewhat of the same excitement in this Dostoevsky stream, though I cannot pretend that the great Russian will ever become a popular American classic. Yet in the progress from Dickens to Dostoevsky there is a symbol of the widening and deepening of the American imagination. We are adrift on a far wider sea than our forefathers. We are far more adventurous in personal relations, far more aware of the bewildering variousness of human nature. If you have once warmed to Dostoevsky, you can never go back to the older classic fiction on which we were brought up. The lack of _nuance_, the hideous normality of its people begin to depress you. When once you have a sense of the illusion of “character,” when once you have felt the sinister, irrational turn of human thoughts, and the subtle interplay of impression and desire, and the crude impingement of circumstance, you find yourself--unless you keep conscious watch--feeling a shade of contempt for the Scott and Balzac and Dickens and Thackeray and Trollope who were the authoritative showmen of life for our middle-class relatives. You relegate such fiction to the level of “movie” art, with its clean, pigeon-holed categories of the emotions, and its “registering” of a few simple moods.

You will, of course, be wrong in any such contempt, because these novelists show a bewildering variety of types and a deep intuition of the major movements of the soul. Dickens teems with irrational creatures, with unconventional levels of life. But you can scarcely contradict me when I say that neither Dickens nor his readers ever forgot that these human patterns were queer. His appeal lies exactly in the joyful irrelevance with which we take all these lapses from the norm, in the pitiful tears which we can shed for human beings done so obviously as they should not be done by. In reading these familiar novelists we never lose our moral landmarks. No matter how great the deviations a character shows, we are always conscious--or could be conscious if we liked--of the exact amount of that deviation. The charm of that nineteenth-century fiction, as in the work of belated Victorians like Mr. Chesterton, lies in that duality between the sane and the insane, the virtuous and the villainous, the sober and the mischievous, the responsible and the irresponsible. There is no falsification in this. These novelists were writing for an epoch that really had stable “character,” standards, morals, that consistently saw the world in a duality of body and spirit. They were a reflection of a class that really had reticences, altruisms, and religious codes.

Dostoevsky appeals to us to-day because we are trying to close up that dualism. And our appreciation of him and the other modern Russians is a mark of how far we have actually gone. It is still common to call this fiction unhealthy, morbid, unwholesome. All that is meant by this is that the sudden shock of a democratic, unified, intensely the mind that thinks in the old dual terms as to be almost revolting. What becomes more and more apparent to the readers of Dostoevsky, however, is his superb modern healthiness. He is healthy because he has no sense of any dividing line between the normal and the abnormal, or even between the sane and the insane. I call this healthy because it is so particularly salutary for our American imagination to be jolted out of its stiltedness and preconceived notions of human psychology. I admit that the shock is somewhat rough and rude. “The Idiot”, which I have read only once, remains in my mind as a stream of fairly incomprehensible people and unintelligible emotional changes. Yet I feel that when I read it again I shall understand it. For Dostoevsky has a strange, intimate power which breaks in your neat walls and shows you how much more subtle and inconsequent your flowing life is than even your introspection had thought. But for all his subtlety he is the reverse of anything morbidly introspective. In his work you get the full warm unity of emotional life without losing any of the detail of the understanding analysis of the soul.

This astounding mergence Dostoevsky actually seems to achieve. That is what gives him the intimate power which distinguishes every story of his from anything else you have ever read. Again he contrasts with the classical novelists. For they are quite palpably outside their subjects. You are never unaware of the author as telling the story. He has always the air of the showman, unrolling his drama before your eyes. His characters may be infinitely warm and human, but the writer himself is somehow not in them. “Wuthering Heights” is the only English story I think of that has something of the fierce, absorbed intensity of Dostoevsky. In the great Russian you lose all sense of the showman. The writer is himself the story; he is inextricably in it. In narratives like “The Double” or “A Gentle Spirit” immanence could go no further. The story seems to tell itself. Its strange, breathless intimacy of mood follows faithfully every turn and quirk of thought and feeling. Its tempo is just of that inner life we know, with its ceaseless boring into the anxious future and its trails of the unresolved past. These stories follow just that fluctuating line of our conscious life with its depressions and satisfactions, its striving always for a sense of control, its uneasiness. In Dostoevsky’s novels it is not only the author that is immanent. The reader also is absorbed. After reading “Crime and Punishment” you are yourself the murderer. For days the odor of guilt follows you around. The extravaganza of “The Double” pursues you like a vivid dream of your own.

Such stories, however fantastic the problems of the soul, get deeply into us. We cannot ignore them, we cannot take them irresponsibly. We cannot read them for amusement, or even in detachment, as we can our classics. We forget our categories, our standards, our notions of human nature. All we feel is that we are tracing the current of life itself. Dostoevsky is so much in his stories that we get no sense of his attitude toward his characters or of his criticism of life. Yet the after-impression is one of rich kindness, born of suffering and imperfection, and of a truly religious reverence for all living experience. Man as a being with his feet in the mud and his gaze turned toward the stars, yet always indissolubly one in feet and eyes and heart and brain! If we are strong enough to hear him, this is the decisive force we need on our American creative outlook.

THE ART OF THEODORE DREISER

Theodore Dreiser has had the good fortune to evoke a peculiar quality of pugnacious interest among the younger American intelligentsia such as has been the lot of almost nobody else writing to-day unless it be Miss Amy Lowell. We do not usually take literature seriously enough to quarrel over it. Or else we take it so seriously that we urbanely avoid squabbles. Certainly there are none of the vendettas that rage in a culture like that of France. But Mr. Dreiser seems to have made himself, particularly since the suppression of “The Genius,” a veritable issue. Interesting and surprising are the reactions to him. Edgar Lee Masters makes him a “soul-enrapt demi-urge, walking the earth, stalking life”; Harris Merton Lyon saw in him a “seer of inscrutable mien”; Arthur Davison Ficke sees him as master of a passing throng of figures, “labored with immortal illusion, the terrible and beautiful, cruel and wonder-laden illusion of life”; Mr. Powys makes him an epic philosopher of the “life-tide”; H. L. Mencken puts him ahead of Conrad, with “an agnosticism that has almost passed beyond curiosity.” On the other hand, an unhappy critic in _The Nation_ last year gave Mr. Dreiser his place for all time in a neat antithesis between the realism that was based on a theory of human conduct and the naturalism that reduced life to a mere animal behavior. For Dreiser this last special hell was reserved, and the jungle-like and simian activities of his characters were rather exhaustively outlined. At the time this antithesis looked silly. With the appearance of Mr. Dreiser’s latest book, “A Hoosier Holiday,” it becomes nonsensical. For that wise and delightful book reveals him as a very human critic of very common human life, romantically sensual and poetically realistic, with an artist’s vision and a thick, warm feeling for American life.

This book gives the clue to Mr. Dreiser, to his insatiable curiosity about people, about their sexual inclinations, about their dreams, about the homely qualities that make them American. His memories give a picture of the floundering young American that is so typical as to be almost epic. No one has ever pictured this lower middle-class American life so winningly, because no one has had the necessary literary skill with the lack of self-consciousness. Mr. Dreiser is often sentimental, but it is a sentimentality that captivates you with its candor. You are seeing this vacuous, wistful, spiritually rootless, Middle-Western life through the eyes of a naïve but very wise boy. Mr. Dreiser seems queer only because he has carried along his youthful attitude in unbroken continuity. He is fascinated with sex because youth is usually obsessed with sex. He puzzles about the universe because youth usually puzzles. He thrills to crudity and violence because sensitive youth usually recoils from the savagery of the industrial world. Imagine incorrigible, sensuous youth endowed with the brooding skepticism of the philosopher who feels the vanity of life, and you have the paradox of Mr. Dreiser. For these two attitudes in him support rather than oppose each other. His spiritual evolution was out of a pious, ascetic atmosphere into intellectual and personal freedom. He seems to have found himself without losing himself. Of how many American writers can this be said? And for this much shall be forgiven him,--his slovenliness of style, his lack of _nuances_, his apathy to the finer shades of beauty, his weakness for the mystical and the vague. Mr. Dreiser suggests the over-sensitive temperament that protects itself by an admiration for crudity and cruelty. His latest book reveals the boyhood shyness and timidity of this Don Juan of novelists. Mr. Dreiser is complicated, but he is complicated in a very understandable American way, the product of the uncouth forces of small-town life and the vast disorganization of the wider American world. As he reveals himself, it is a revelation of a certain broad level of the American soul.

Mr. Dreiser seems uncommon only because he is more naïve than most of us. It is not so much that his pages swarm with sexful figures as that he rescues sex for the scheme of personal life. He feels a holy mission to slay the American literary superstition that men and women are not sensual beings. But he does not brush this fact in the sniggering way of the popular magazines. He takes it very seriously, so much so that some of his novels become caricatures of desire. It is, however, a misfortune that it has been Brieux and Freud and not native Theodore Dreiser who has saturated the sexual imagination of the younger American intelligentsia. It would have been far healthier to absorb Mr. Dreiser’s literary treatment of sex than to go hysterical over its pathology. Sex has little significance unless it is treated in personally artistic, novelistic terms. The American tradition had tabooed the treatment of those infinite gradations and complexities of love that fill the literary imagination of a sensitive people. When curiosity became too strong and reticence was repealed in America, we had no means of articulating ourselves except in a deplorable pseudo-scientific jargon that has no more to do with the relevance of sex than the chemical composition of orange paint has to do with the artist’s vision. Dreiser has done a real service to the American imagination in despising the underworld and going gravely to the business of picturing sex as it is lived in the personal relations of bungling, wistful, or masterful men and women. He seemed strange and rowdy only because he made sex human, and American tradition had never made it human. It had only made it either sacred or vulgar, and when these categories no longer worked, we fell under the dubious and perverting magic of the psycho-analysts.

In spite of his looseness of literary gait and heaviness of style Dreiser seems a sincere groper after beauty. It is natural enough that this should so largely be the beauty of sex. For where would a sensitive boy, brought up in Indiana and in the big American cities, get beauty expressed for him except in women? What does Mid-Western America offer to the starving except its personal beauty? A few landscapes, an occasional picture in a museum, a book of verse perhaps! Would not all the rest be one long, flaunting offense of ugliness and depression? “The ‘Genius,’” instead of being that mass of pornographic horror which the Vice Societies repute it to be, is the story of a groping artist whose love of beauty runs obsessingly upon the charm of girlhood. Through different social planes, through business and manual labor and the feverish world of artists, he pursues this lure. Dreiser is refreshing in his air of the moral democrat, who sees life impassively, neither praising nor blaming, at the same time that he realizes how much more terrible and beautiful and incalculable life is than any of us are willing to admit. It may be all _apologia_, but it comes with the grave air of a mind that wants us to understand just how it all happened. “Sister Carrie” will always retain the fresh charm of a spontaneous working-out of mediocre, and yet elemental and significant, lives. A good novelist catches hold of the thread of human desire. Dreiser does this, and that is why his admirers forgive him so many faults.

If you like to speculate about personal and literary qualities that are specifically American, Dreiser should be as interesting as any one now writing in America. This becomes clearer as he writes more about his youth. His hopelessly unorientated, half-educated boyhood is so typical of the uncritical and careless society in which wistful American talent has had to grope. He had to be spiritually a self-made man, work out a philosophy of life, discover his own sincerity. Talent in America outside of the ruling class flowers very late, because it takes so long to find its bearings. It has had almost to create its own soil, before it could put in its roots and grow. It is born shivering into an inhospitable and irrelevant group. It has to find its own kind of people and piece together its links of comprehension. It is a gruelling and tedious task, but those who come through it contribute, like Vachel Lindsay, creative work that is both novel and indigenous. The process can be more easily traced in Dreiser than in almost anybody else. “A Hoosier Holiday” not only traces the personal process, but it gives the social background. The common life, as seen throughout the countryside, is touched off quizzically, and yet sympathetically, with an artist’s vision. Dreiser sees the American masses in their commonness and at their pleasure as brisk, rather vacuous people, a little pathetic in their innocence of the possibilities of life and their optimistic trustfulness. He sees them ruled by great barons of industry, and yet unconscious of their serfdom. He seems to love this countryside, and he makes you love it.

Dreiser loves, too, the ugly violent bursts of American industry,--the flaming steel-mills and gaunt lakesides. “The Titan” and “The Financier” are unattractive novels, but they are human documents of the brawn of a passing American era. Those stenographic conversations, webs of financial intrigue, bare bones of enterprise, insult our artistic sense. There is too much raw beef, and yet it all has the taste and smell of the primitive business-jungle it deals with. These crude and greedy captains of finance with their wars and their amours had to be given some kind of literary embodiment, and Dreiser has hammered a sort of raw epic out of their lives.

It is not only his feeling for these themes of crude power and sex and the American common life that makes Dreiser interesting. His emphases are those of a new America which is latently expressive and which must develop its art before we shall really have become articulate. For Dreiser is a true hyphenate, a product of that conglomerate Americanism that springs from other roots than the English tradition. Do we realize how rare it is to find a talent that is thoroughly American and wholly un-English? Culturally we have somehow suppressed the hyphenate. Only recently has he forced his way through the unofficial literary censorship. The vers-librists teem with him, but Dreiser is almost the first to achieve a largeness of utterance. His outlook, it is true, flouts the American canons of optimism and redemption, but these were never anything but conventions. There stirs in Dreiser’s books a new American quality. It is not at all German. It is an authentic attempt to make something artistic out of the chaotic materials that lie around us in American life. Dreiser interests because we can watch him grope and feel his clumsiness. He has the artist’s vision without the sureness of the artist’s technique. That is one of the tragedies of America. But his faults are those of his material and of uncouth bulk, and not of shoddiness. He expresses an America that is in process of forming. The interest he evokes is part of the eager interest we feel in that growth.

THE USES OF INFALLIBILITY

Few people read Newman to-day. The old anxious issues have been drowned in a flood of social problems, and that world of liberal progress which to him was the enemy at the gates has long ago broken in and carried everything before it. Newman’s persuasive voice sounds thin and remote, and his ideas smell of a musty age. Yet that title of his, _Apologia Pro Vita Sua_, always intrigues one with its modern and subjective sound. It is so much what all of us are itching to write. Its egotism brushes with a faint irony that absorption in the righteousness most emphatically not ourselves with which Newman’s life was mingled. In that call upon him to interpret his life, one feels an unquenchable ego which carries him over to these shameless and self-centred times. Fortunately placed for a week in a theological household, I plunged into the slightly forbidding pages of the wistful cardinal. What I found in him must be very different from what he found in himself or what anybody else found in him at the time. Newman in 1917 suggests less a reactionary theology than subtle and secret sympathy with certain veins of our modern intellectual radicalism. The voice was faint, but what I heard made Newman significant for me. For it implied that if faith is eternal, so is skepticism, and that even in the most pious mind may be found the healthy poison of doubt.

Superficially seen, Newman appeared to have abolished doubt. His faith was more conservative than that of the orthodox. He surrendered all that Victorian life for the narrowest of obscurantisms. The reasons he found for his course only riveted him impregnably to the rock of unreason. What my mind fastened on, however, was the emotional impulse that led him to his tortuous way. One detected there in him that same sinister note one feels in Pascal. It is a reasonableness that eats away at belief until it finally destroys either it or you. It is an uncanny honesty of soul which, struggling utterly for faith, saves it only by unconsciously losing it. For if you win your way through to belief by sheer intellectual force, you run the risk of over-reaching your belief. You do not know that you have passed it, but you have really dispensed with its use. If you are honest in mind and religious in temperament, you find yourself reduced to the naked reality of religion. You are left with only the most primitive mysticism of feeling. You are one with the primitive savage group. Ineffable feeling, ecstatic union with the universe,--this is your state. The more religious you become, the more you tear the fabric of your dogma. Belief is only for the irreligious. Intellectuality in religion, under the guise of fortifying faith, only destroys its foundations. Newman’s approach towards the certitude of dogma was really only an approach towards the certitude of mysticism. When he thought he was satisfying his intellectual doubts, he was satisfying his emotional cravings. Intending to buttress dogma, he only assured for himself the mystic state.

How far he really attained mysticism is a fascinating problem for the reader of the _Apologia_. Popular impression is probably right that he bore to his incredibly lengthened age a pathos of uneasiness and sadness. But popular impression is probably wrong in ascribing this to lingering remorse or regret. If there was any uncertainty, it was not for having left his Anglican position, but for not having seen the thing wholly through. Intellectuality still clung around him like a cold swathing garment. He probably never attained that pure mysticism which his soul craved. One has the impression that Newman’s pathos lay in the fact that he never quite became a saint. The official world seemed to hang about him hamperingly. One wonders sometimes if he could not almost as easily have become a wan sweet pagan as a saint. The tragedy of Pascal was that intrinsically he was a pagan. The kind of Christianity to which he drove himself was for him the most virulent form of moral suicide. The terrible fascination of his _Pensées_ lies in that relentless closing in of the divine enemy on his human “pride,” which might have been, with his intellectual genius, so lusty an organ of creativeness and adventure. It was not disease that killed him but Christianity. Pascal is an eternal warning from the perils of intellectual religion.

Dogma did not kill Newman, but it did not save him. He was not a pagan, but he never became a saint. He never quite got rid of dogma. And that is what so fascinates us in his religious technique. For his _Apologia_, is really a subtle exposure of infallibility. It shows us what the acute intellectuality of a mystic finds to do with dogma. The goal towards which he tends is the utter bankruptcy of articulate religion. And involved in it is the bankruptcy of institutional religion. It is a religious bankruptcy that acts like modern commercial bankruptcy. All material assets are relinquished, and you start again in business on the old footing. You throw over your dogma but keep the mystic experience, which can never be taken away from you. In this way the Catholic Church becomes, or could become, eternal. Newman shows a way just short of relinquishment. He uses infallibility to liquidate his intellectual debts, and then becomes free of his creditors.