Chapter III: Ideas (1)

_I. MEN_

1. RANDOLPH BOURNE

A girl friend of his mother snatched him away from the wise arms, to hug and coddle him; let him slip and dropped him from the balcony where they were standing. This is the origin of the sad mutilations with which Randolph Bourne went through life. The tale has the true depth of a legend. The affection of a young woman, clumsy with unskilled love; the desire to share, to help, perhaps—and as aftermath, the lifetime of agony and visible disgrace. This is the sort of irony that Randolph relished, and bore with him through the world. Beholding him, one felt that his deformity somehow was not the profane traditional one: it was rather the stigmata of some miscarried loveliness.

He was very deformed. Not alone was he dwarfed and hunchbacked: his face was twisted, he had a tortured ear, his color was sallow and his breathing was audible and hard. He walked in a cape that hid him. He took a chair for the first time in your presence, let fall the black shroud about him, and revealed a form so mangled that you despaired ever to find sufficient ease for the sort of conversation his immediately brilliant mind demanded.

But the magic of Randolph Bourne was not separate from his poor body, and at once you knew this. This is why, in writing of his splendid spirit, it is meet to dwell upon his misery. Within half an hour, your discomfort was gone—so miraculously gone that your mind was prone to look about for it. But whenever, in the future, awareness did return of the grotesque shape in which this spirit was imprisoned and was doomed to walk, it was intellectual altogether: the mind needed to stir the senses with the thought of it, while the senses moved in full ease within his presence.

It was Randolph’s eyes and hands that brought about the wonder. The hands were exquisite, gentle, quiet. They seemed made for such clear profundities as the playing of Bach: they bespoke his style—the caress of his ruthless understanding. And they flowered from his body with the inevitable irony of all his being. The eyes were penetrant, studious. There was a reticence in them, after the adventure, not before it. You knew from them that Randolph Bourne was wise, and that he had withdrawn some subtle spirit of himself forever from gross contacts: that he had learned to see and to experience without the ill-focused turmoil of too close contacts. So surely consonant were his hands and eyes with what he said, that the body became a sort of Christian _Lest Ye Forget_—a sign to thrust you back into the humiliating coil of life, from the high freedom of his discourse.

All of him had this counterpoint. His spirituality was shrewd; his warmth was ironical and measured; his gaiety was leashed; above all, his direct caustic wit was barbed with a general indulgence. The body had forced on him this complex economy of emotion. And there ensued from it a splendor of free energy for every challenge of liberty, for every accolade of the creative life. This little man, indeed, so celled in a crushed body that even breath was hard, became a rounded athlete of the spirit, as none, perhaps, of us who have survived him. The loss of Randolph Bourne is a shadow that lengthens....

_1925_

2. CHARLES CHAPLIN

a.

Chaplin’s eyes are a blue so darkly shadowed that they are almost purple. They are sad eyes; from them pity and bitterness look out upon the world. They are veiled: while the man moves forward with irresistible charm, his eyes hold back in a solitude fiercely forbidding. No one who sees the eyes of Chaplin can feel like laughing. They are the one part of the man which does not show in his pictures.

For fifteen years these eyes have looked out on Hollywood. Much nonsense has been written about this suburb of Los Angeles, which is itself a suburb of the country. America reviles it as an indecent stranger somehow lodged in its midst, or romanticizes it into a scene from the “Arabian Nights.” But, of course, Hollywood is no worse a place than any provincial city of our land; nor better. Hollywood’s producers are typical money men; its directors are typical professional men; its actresses and actors are typical girls and boys. Its army of mechanics, craftsmen, engineers, are the usual American sort: grime them up a bit, lower their wages, and they would fit in to your town garage. Hollywood’s swarm of aspirants buzzing about the lots are typical floating seed of the American jungle: the wastrel seed that finds no soil to root in, whether it rots near home or blows away. Only in one respect is Hollywood unusual: its girls are really as fair as all girls would like to be.

Hollywood is the perfect mirror of banal American success. Ordinary souls dream extraordinary dreams—in the way of ordinary souls. And in Hollywood the dreams come true. Here is uncounted money, here is glamour, here is the exact mechanical production of that ideal to which success means a show. And Chaplin, with those frightening eyes of his, which almost no one ever sees, looks out upon this world, his home since he was twenty-four. There is another world which he looks in upon: the grey, grinding London of his childhood. He loves the London slums; for these slums were his and they are in his heart. But on his mother’s side the blood of Chaplin is half gypsy. Through her, whom he brought from England to live near him on the Coast, yet another world lives in him: a world of meadows and irresponsible laughter.

In the city of success he carries with him the taste of the London slums. But even there he was not at home: even for that sad past which formed his body and his mind he has a grim, ironical refusal—since there, too, the gypsy in him was a stranger.

This counterpoint of sympathy and denial is our first clew to the man. The drawing room of his house is packed with bibelots, pictures, bric-a-brac, sent him by the admiring splendor of the world. Here are tributes from Chinese mandarins and from the royalty of Europe. And here, too, on the wall, hang a few colored lithographs of Whitechapel and Wapping. Chaplin loves to take these from the wall. They depict streets that are like some cold inferno, in which the people stir slowly like souls stripped of all save the capacity to suffer. Watch his eyes as he looks at this picture of his childhood world. They are at once too soft and too hard. The emotions of understanding and of refusal are separate in them. In this room I once sat with Chaplin while the Comte de Chasseloup exhibited to us what are perhaps the most terrible photographs in the world: close-ups in progressive detail of tortures and executions which he had collected in China. We looked on the deliberate process of men being carved alive—as a butcher quarters a calf. We saw faces black with the horror of their pain, and then white with the relief of death. And in Chaplin there was the same counterpoint of feeling. His eyes took in the tremendous pity of these portrayals of man’s way with man. Suddenly his eyes hardened; he jumped up, and his mouth was cruel. “There’s humanity for you! By God, they deserve it. Give it to them! That’s man. Cut ’em up. Torture ’em! The bastards!”... The pity he had felt was intolerable to him. He summoned hardness to wipe it out: to save himself from this danger of being overwhelmed. Chaplin does not wish to give himself to any emotion, to any situation, to any life. Life draws him too terribly for that. Whatever he feels must immediately arouse its opposite; so that Chaplin may remain untouched—immaculate and impervious in himself.

With this same reserve he moves through Hollywood. He is no recluse. His secret apartness is far subtler than that. He frequents the Coconut Grove at the Ambassador, where the slightly decayed youth of the Coast ferments in dance. He sits for hours in the smoke of his friend Henry Bergman’s restaurant on the crowded boulevard. He goes to parties—to those of his friend Marion Davies at her Beach House, to those of William Randolph Hearst at his ranch. And wherever he goes he is the life of the crowd. He acts, he mimics, he plays, he insists on amusing and on being seen. But always there is the same immediate wavering away from the life about him and from the effect he produces. He does not give himself nor does he really take. Above all, he does not aggressively refuse any advance or emotion. He is noncommittal.

_Intactness_—this is the principle that best explains the balance of opposites in feeling, conduct, thought, which he sets up. He is like an atom that must journey alone through the world. The atom moves an intricate course, swerving here and there, myriadly attracted, myriadly repelled, seeming to give, seeming to respond—always remaining free and alone. A direct refusal of the world about him would mean a definite relation with it. This is not Chaplin’s game. If the world draws him, he responds—passive. His course has been swerved, but he is uncommitted. He resolves every force with its opposite. Emotionally this means that he frustrates in himself every impulse of utter giving or of utter taking. He remains unpossessed and ultimately unpossessing. But this deep frustration is the key to his profound success. Do not pity him for it. He is no pitiable creature.

With sure instinct Chaplin has guided his personal life through channels where he would be always alone. He loves the world he lives in, and despises it. He does not want to change it: no man is farther from the fervor of the prophet, and yet few men have done so much to show it up as ridiculous and worthless. He does not want another world. He uses this one, just as it is, in order to ensure his aloneness. But, were he really alone, he would meet in the silence of himself some acceptance which would prove his unity with the world. So he courts the world, and dwells in it, in order to frustrate such a possible self-encounter.

There was a time when Chaplin seemed to me a kind of fallen angel: an angel cursed by God with all human feelings and with the inability to fulfill them: cursed with the gift of evoking laughter and love and with no power to take laughter and love to himself. But this was a sentimental error. The inordinate tenderness of the man, his gentility and grace, are checked by his native rejection of the self-bestowal to which such qualities must lead. Hardness and ruthless egoism are as primal in him as the generous emotions. He refuses to be lost in any synthesis of love. He must remain the atom of himself. And in his perfect poise _between_ the forces of the world—the poise of opposites—this is what he remains. And this is what he wants.

What he wants, Chaplin has infinite resources for getting. The shrewd technique of his art is but a phase of the same art in his life. This is the man who, when he was first approached with an invitation to enter pictures—untried and unknown—jacked up the initial offer of seventy-five dollars a week to twelve times that figure. “I saw they were anxious,” he explained to me. “When I said to them, ‘I think I’ll study philosophy; I don’t care for acting,’ I saw them go white. That’s how I knew what I was worth.” And this is the man who, three years later, when Mary Pickford, Fairbanks, Griffith, Hart and himself were in danger of being shamefully exploited by the business end of the game, gathered them all together into “United Artists” and preserved a fair portion of the treasure to the men and women who were doing the work. Chaplin is endowed with consummate powers for connecting with the world. “I’d make a great banker,” he once told me. He is intelligent, so intelligent that he intuitively grasps the abstruse currents of modern thought, esthetic, political, even philosophic. He is sensitive, so exquisitely that the gamut of human joy and pain plays endless responses within him. And he is passionate and earthy, a lover of good food and of women and of racy words. All these gifts naturally conspire to make him one with the world. Yet there is in him this dominant need to be one only with himself, to submit to no marriage, to let himself be lost in no union, to which his mind and sense impel him. What, in this diathesis, can he do? He can keep on moving. He can make his life a constant journey through the inconstancy of impressions which, if he dwelt with them, would bind him. He can make of his life an _escape_.

b.

The life, then, of this first master of the motion picture, is motion. His art is the treasured essence of his life. The theme of the Chaplin picture is Chaplin himself, in relation (opposition) to the world. He journeys through it, immeasurably roused, solicited, moved—yet aloof, yet intactly alone. The form of the Chaplin film is his own body, set off by the world: his body made into a mask behind which the man, all intact, goes slyly and painfully on his impervious journey. And the plot of the Chaplin film is merely some sequence of episodes in this constant opposition of himself journeying through life and never fused within it.

Of course, it is not as easy as it sounds. Precisely because his work is the incarnation of his life mood, of his life journey, its birth is a delicate issue. In the beginning there is the atomic Chaplin, cast in some role that will motivate his passage through the required number of reels. But that passage—as pawnbroker’s assistant, circus fool, convict pilgrim, fireman, seeker of gold, tramp, janitor, country bumpkin, etc.—that passage must be blocked out with events. Each foot of the film is an event, an encounter between Chaplin and the world. Since the art is to be the essence of his life, it, too, like his life, must be completely _fleshed_; and must breathe! From each encounter, either with another person or with some inanimate object like a brickbat, there must rise visible and palpable the personality of the entire journey. So each event of the film must be a work of art in itself. And there must be sequence, breathing, flowing, mounting. Each event must rise into the next until the mass of events becomes a plastic music where each episode is a note. The whole tale is a motion of events to represent the journey of the man—his escape, intact, through the myriad mass of life.

The mood of the tale, being intimately Chaplin’s own, is carried within him. What he must wait for is the precise scale of episodes that will form the mood. Even when the events have come to him (the particular stunts of the film), they must be weighed and measured. Where do they fit in? Do they fit in at all?

This period of gestation is painful and long. Chaplin lies abed an entire morning. He broods, measuring the tentative “body” of his tale by the inner sense of what he wants. This sense is infallible, but it is inarticulate save as the completed picture will be its articulation. Chaplin does not know, he has no words for saying, the exact timbre and gamut of physical actions that will express this particular body of his life journey. The picture will be his knowing.... Meantime, several miles away, his studio awaits him. It is a charming lot, several acres in size. Here lives Kono, the remarkable Japanese factotum who manages Chaplin’s personal journey through life, who serves as a kind of intelligent oil against the inevitable frictions of the inevitable encounters with stranger and friend. Here wait his general staff: Alf Reeves (who has been with him since music-hall days), Harry Crocker, Carl Robinson, Henry Bergman, Henry Clive, Roland Totheroh—possibly the director Harry d’Arrast, who once worked with him in Crocker’s present place and who remains his chum. All these men are distinguishably sweet, sensitized, intelligent, aloof in the crass Hollywood world. (That world is full of workers who carry on after they have left him, bearing the stamp he gave them—Menjou is a celebrated instance.)

The staff all feel the tension of their chief. The strain, indeed, is so great that there are men in the “industry” who could not stand it. At last, possibly around noon, Chaplin arrives. The instant has come when he is ready. He has dropped into his clothes, stepped into the limousine which waits all morning at the door, with the engine throbbing. He is hatless, tieless, and his vest is open. But the clothes are the most dapper product of the London tailor. He wears them, at work, like a gypsy. Even in this detail there is the meeting of the Chaplin opposites. Gypsy and exquisitely groomed young gentleman delete each other: leaving, as ever, merely Chaplin.

He joins his crowd in the little bungalow on the lot, where lunch is served and where he has his dressing rooms. Tentative moments of the film are brought up, altered, discarded, readjusted. Chaplin paces, his face hard, his mouth half open, his eyes far off in himself. Infinitesimal details are studied, rehearsed, discussed; gags, postures, meanings, properties, business. Walking up and down, the little man holds in his head the film’s inexorable rhythm, the inner logic of its growth. As the ideas fly back and forth, in words and mimicry, Chaplin brings them to the measure in himself: rejects or accepts.

There may be months of this. Nothing seems to be going. The corps of workers champ and chafe. Chaplin moves with his preoccupation through his habitual life: parties, dinners, wanderings about town, swift flights with friends, long hours alone. At last certain scenes, having withstood the critical pause, seem certain. Carpenters and plasterers get busy. Sets rise on the lot. Chaplin wanders about among the hammers, alone or with his group: judging, silent, suddenly exasperated, lost in a new angle of vision—giving sharp orders that destroy the work of weeks. A shot that cost a long journey to location (and $50,000) will be ruthlessly scrapped. Later a scene will be repeated a literal hundred times; and, if the fifty-ninth time was right, each detail of it will be so clear in Chaplin’s eye that he will reproduce it for the camera. Finally, a thousand feet of photography will be collapsed into a yard so pregnant with the essence of the event that it will move, intact like the man himself, through all the world.

This perfect consciousness of Chaplin as craftsman would, of course, be less conspicuous in any other place. (In Paris, for instance, where men work with words and with pigment as Chaplin does with human masses, his métier is understood as merely the highest form of a common practice.) But Hollywood is a usual American town—not a capital of artists. And the studios of Hollywood confine their precision and consciousness to problems of mechanics and finance. They are monuments of esthetic vagueness, intellectual nullity, artistic hit-or-miss. The usual story, to begin with, is an externalized contraption put together by the combined shrewdness of half a dozen wholesalers parading as writers, scenarists, directors and producers. The actors have no accurate technique. The directors have no conscious control. In such a combination the chance artist is helpless and lost. When a scene is “pretty good,” it is shot. And the result is the kind of flat approximation that feeds the dreams of the millions. But by the time Chaplin gets ready to rehearse a scene its precise place in the architectonic of his tale has been measured, even as the theme itself has been measured in his life. And as he rehearses, he knows what happens. I mean that he knows the interplay of muscle, mass, space, and their focal value as the camera lens will catch it. He is no expert in photography. In his especial choreography he is supreme.

All organic life has a commanding, individual rhythm: the beat of a heart, the slant of a mind, the indecipherable stir of cells must go with that rhythm. Such an organic rhythm besets the consciousness of Chaplin, incarnating his subjective mood into a story. At the beginning, he knows the rhythm only. He has to grope for the episodes to flesh it. But when he finds his episodes he knows what he wants. And at the moment of shooting a scene he knows how to recall what he wants. And he can do this because, from the twist of a leg to the flicker of an eye, he knows how everything is done.

c.

All this, however, has not explained what it is that Chaplin is doing. His work may be the incarnation of his personal escape from those trammels of life to which his sensitivity and capacity for love expose him; his way of escape may be shrewd with all the shrewdness of his cockney-gypsy genius; and the esthetic expression of that journey of his soul may be done with consummate craft. Yet the inward value of the entire adventure is not yet clear.

We can best approach the significance of Chaplin’s art by considering another constant presence (besides himself) in his meditations on the story, in his conferences with Crocker and d’Arrast, in his rehearsals, in his final prunings, acceptances and rejections. That other presence he always alludes to by a simple name. He calls it “they.” “They” is the public. “They” collaborates unceasingly with Chaplin. “They” has the final veto over even Chaplin himself.

Of course, a similar “they” seems to preside over all the lots of filmland. But in the usual studio there are a number of men pawing over the platitudes of the human race in the deliberate effort to concoct from them a pattern which the public will pay for. Chaplin, too, is a child of the theatre. And there is no theatre without a “box” in front. But in the studio of Chaplin there is, most really of all, a man of the people—a cockney, a gypsy, a music-hall fellow—who looks into the eyes of the world as into a mirror, in order to see _himself_ more objectively and sharply. So it is that, coming to Chaplin’s public, we return to the man. By means of this reflection we can see at last, in clarity, how he manages his escape and what it is which, behind the mask of “funny-legs,” goes its immortal journey into the heart of the world.

Chaplin looks upon the world of today. He sees failure: poverty, agony, disease, chaos, fear, pitiful passion, pitiful love. He sees success: deceit, garishness, tinsel, boast, disillusion. He sees his own past in London—his mother in the drab uniform of the poorhouse. He sees his own victorious present. He sees and feels too much. He is afraid of being lost in this world. There is a kernel of him that is neither this success nor this failure: a core in the man that can dance its own life if only it may remain alone. That is why he must escape; why he must look on all the invading world as an enemy and must hate it. Chaplin is a hard and princely fellow: his brow is strong, and his jaw and his mouth. But the modeling about his temples is girlishly tender, and the deepest spirit in his eyes is a retreating terror. He is afraid for that core in him of grace and loveliness and youthful dance. To protect it, he will fight—he will employ all his skill, all his hardness.

Now consider Chaplin’s public, which is the modern world. In each breast live grace and loveliness and wistful dream. But in the common man that personal treasure of each heart cannot remain intact. Family, business, law and war invade it. All civilization becomes a foe, trampling on this secret heart, dispersing its dream, bruising and breaking its love.

Chaplin, who has striven to keep it whole for himself, has made his fight for the world. Here, in his films, the grace and beauty of the human “atom” are visible once more. Behind the mask of Chaplin—behind the swinging cane, the ambling, painful feet, the tight drawn coat, the cocky derby hat—marches the common loveliness of man—marches and journeys as it must through a hated modern world—dissociate from social forms, shabby, despised, pitiful, poor; yet miraculously intact and miraculously triumphant.

Rousseau, I suppose, perfected this tragicomedy of the modern world, with its dualistic conflict between beauty and civilization, between love and man’s habitual life. Marvelously gifted, he gave to the world its rationale for the impulse to creep back into a mythic childhood, to worship the self at the expense of the towering forms about it. As Mr. Lardner might say: “Jean Jacques started something.” Charles Chaplin has finished it. (Even the cut of his comic coat recalls the romantic century—the age of Alfred de Musset.) The cult of loveliness at war with the sobrieties of life could beget no greater art than this journey of Chaplin carrying beauty untouched through an atmosphere of heavy institutions, of brickbats and policemen. French intellectual, London clerk, Chinese coolie, Mexican peon, Park Avenue child, in the common distress of their submission to a world too full of money to leave room for singing and for dancing, can gaze together at this secret triumph which Chaplin has enacted for them. His song explodes their oppressive world. His primitive refusal to “grow up” in the “respectable way” becomes the modern spirit of revolution.[1]

d.

In the old days Charles Chaplin worked not less meticulously, but a good deal faster. His theme has always been the exact transcription of the mood of his life. But when his life was simpler, the bridge to his work was more immediate. It was easier for the man to remain impervious, intact, virginally himself. The instinctive operation of his will had found no invasion too bruising or too tiring for him to repel. But he has had to pay the toll of his way; and that toll has grown great. It is hard to sustain one’s solitude when one is so full of eagerness as Chaplin; and when, precisely because the world loved his aloneness, the world has done everything to destroy it. His recent struggles, not so much against the clamor of the public as against his own human need for that peace and love which can be gained only by some union with another, have made him conscious of himself. Consciousness and weariness have stood between him and his journey—slowing him and slowing his work, which is the expression of that journey. His hair has turned grey, and his beautiful face is lined.

“The Circus” marks the crisis. The terrible year[2] that separated its first-made scenes from the last brought a new somberness into his art. The picture on which he is at work at present is the most meditative, the most complex, the darkest story he has ever imagined. A progress like that which distinguishes the end of “Don Quixote” from its rollicking outset is manifest in his work. Chaplin is still alone; still intact. But the fight he has had to wage in order to remain so has worn him. It is the natural destiny of so passionate a man to lose himself. Thus far Chaplin has refused this death. It would mean, indeed, the death of his old gay art. It might mean the birth of a new tragic artist.

Meantime the circumstances of his career in Hollywood have conspired to perfect his solitude. Here was an artist whose theme was an essential motion: the pantomimic medium of the motion picture was there to express him. But now the motion-picture industry of Hollywood decides to talk. Chaplin, whose excellence made him solitary enough, finds himself almost literally alone.

A little more entirely than he may have dreamed, he is having his way. He is alone in his great house, alone with his few friends, who love him but who cannot really reach him. He is alone among his professional comrades, who, unlike him, have abandoned the silent picture. Chaplin has reached a goal. A goal is an end. An end can be also a beginning.

_1929._

3. D. H. LAWRENCE

Lawrence lived his entire life in a transition. Hence his painful and irascible temper: hence also his illuminations, exquisite and unbearable as direct contact with a nerve.

One world he had left: the world of plural “facts.” He was no dupe of the parade of detailed separatenesses that clutter mortal eye. He knew that this world of things, this matter-of-fact and practical world of commonplace, was false; for he had left it for a truer. But that other world he never quite attained: the world of unity and wholeness, whereof all things are momentary foci. He was close enough to this world to be pulling away from the other: but he was not of it sufficiently to accept the world of “things” in the transfigured sense that makes things real. He was close enough to the true to win from it vision and power to illumine the “things” he fought; close enough to create a vision of them as an artist. Yet he was not of the true world of organic oneness so deeply as to incorporate himself within it and thereby to be at peace with the many.

He was always striving to organize himself in wholeness: and always failing, and always furious and exacerbated by his failures. These failures are his life, and are his books. The characters of his stories are never wholly persons in the sense of either world: the passion of the writer of his books is never wholly either illumination of his characters as organic bodies or life within the characters themselves.

Lawrence was exiled from the moderate pace of things that enact their part in the Whole unconsciously. This blessed naturalization he had left forever. He could never share the peace of the clod which knows not its share in the Life it enacts. Nor could he accept the clod, from within the realm of the conscious Life itself. The ecstasy of knowing himself part of the Whole was never quite natural for him; he never assimilated it into the processes of living. To possess that ecstasy, he had to deny the lineaments of life: he had to seek extraordinary moments. The true ecstasy of knowing the many common things of the world as the common features of life’s oneness was never his.

He was imprisoned in transition. And he frantically strove to incorporate himself entirely in the world of truth by lopping off his attachments to the separatistic world that dragged him. Thus his denial of “mind,” of tenderness and pity, of the feminine as contradistinguished from the female. These were qualities that seemed to hold him back near the world of “many-ness” which he hated as false. He was neither strong enough nor clear enough to know that it was his failure to fuse these qualities into wholeness, rather than the intrinsic qualities themselves, that thwarted him and kept him divided.

_1930_

4. HERBERT CROLY

Most men are set and long past growing before they are forty. This is true of the conspicuous and successful, no less than of the common. They have contrived, from their first impacts with the world, some attitude, trick or gesture; it works; they stick to it until they are repetitive as machines. Herbert Croly was a growing man until he was stricken; and the rate of his growth kept on accelerating with the years. This rare capacity, which toward the end transfigured him, was his true genius.

If we analyze the nature of his growth, we come close to the man, and understand what made him so sound and beautiful a being. And the first trait upon which we come is his humility. Herbert Croly was authentically humble. Not humble with the inverted pride of a Franciscan or of a character of Dostoevski’s—because of raging lusts intolerable to himself which he had to flay into their opposite lest they drive him mad. Herbert Croly’s humility came from a true sense of himself in the world—a sense of true proportion. In the years when I knew him, at least, he never seemed to be looking upon himself alone: always, he felt and saw and thought himself within a texture that was the world. From this proportion came sobriety and humility; and from this organic contact with life’s sources, a springlike energy that kept him growing.

There was nothing, I suppose, superficially brilliant or arresting about him. He was in cool fact what Whitman romantically sang: a “divine average.” By which I mean that he was a man whose pre-eminence came from the purification and exaltation of those traits that made him most like others. With the shining talents of the market place he was not lavishly gifted. The talent he had is rare in any mart: the passion for growth, the moral, intellectual powers needed for growth, and a courage in devotion to the life of growth that served him in his long fight as sudden illumination serves the romantic hero.

How differently shrewd he was from the shrewd men with whom he deliberately consorted, and whom he ruthlessly noted while, for the most part, they took scant note of him. This world of atomic egos, bursting with pride and will, and disappearing into the darkness of the mass, after their brief explosion. And Herbert Croly, beginning in the mass, groping his obscure way through a sense of brotherhood and life, into true personality, into wisdom. His first impulse was to accept. And this alone marked him off from his intellectual generation, and made his discoveries far more potential. He had a sympathy for the commonplace. His humility, deriving from his sense of proportion, made him instinctively, even intellectually, share. Here, his “averageness” ceased. For what he accepted and shared he weighed with the same quiet ruthlessness that he brought to bear upon himself. That is why, at the end, he had won a deeper vision of his world than had any of his fellows. He had begun by letting himself be part of it, refusing nothing. From within, he had scrutinized, purified—inexorably judged.

Yet, if in this spirit, temper, method, he was different from the New York in which he worked, it was because he carried on so purely an American tradition. It is true, of course, that he did not come of old American stock, both his parents having been born in Europe. But it is also true that in the making of Americans lineage is the least factor. The immigrant is potentially American: that is why he came: he is brother in spirit, if not in blood, of Roger Williams or of Franklin. Moreover, the land itself stamps the child more deeply than do his fathers. Thus, despite the European background of Herbert Croly, there was much of the Puritan about him, a great deal of the pioneer. He trekked our continent of the modern spirit “on foot,” slowly and laboriously blazing his way through the American chaos. He understood creatively and creatively served it, because he had given himself to it; and this he had done because—like Emerson, like Whitman, like Thoreau, like all its deepest critics—he had faith in it.

These homespun traits, almost exactly transposed from the plane of the American forefathers, reveal the nature of his ideological growth. The man who, twenty years ago, wrote “The Promise of American Life” had been essentially one who accepted the intellectual pattern of the hour. Herbert Croly was thinking in terms, then, of government commissions with ideals of knight-errantry, of moral agencies somehow working out through legislative bodies. His way of facing the problem of the good life at that beginning would have been familiar enough to Gladstone or to Burke. But, having accepted the pattern, he applied to it a sincerity of penetration rare in any hour. His book, instead of following, became the test—and the destroyer—of its own pattern. He was feeling his way; and all of his career may similarly be termed a feeling of his way.

This trait gives the quality of his style; it lacked charm and ease because it was a process rather than a conclusion. It never flowered; it burrowed and made roots: whatever energy it evolved from its growth turned downward into deeper roots instead of blooming upward. From the standpoint of English, this is a grave defect. A written style should be a fruit, not an embryology for some future fruitage. But from the standpoint of the promise of American life, the style, like the man himself, was the very substance. His words portrayed the passage of the author slowly, circuitously through the jungle of half-decayed surmise which is the heritage of our generation. The ultimate light of what he wrote was the consequence of that passage. His words might be said to have ended with light, in contrast to most modern words which begin with glitter and end in darkness.

This book of 1910 began with a certain premise: America has the political technique and the human equipment to fulfill itself. The book studies the equipment—institutional, personal—turns back on its premise, and rejects it. The book does not conclude; it institutes. While the author writes, he grows: instead of ending, he changes. At the finale, he is free of the pattern of his hour, truly free since he has first accepted it and lived it through.

More than once, he espoused causes that seemed contradictory to the essence of the man as I later came to know him. Thus his acceptance of the War, his sponsorship of the Progressivism of Roosevelt, his apparent dedication to the Pragmatism of John Dewey. But to condemn him for this was to misjudge him by standards that did not apply. Herbert Croly was not a prophet; he was an experimental and emergent force within the body politic—the force that energizes prophecy and must precede it: he personified the gradual principle of detachment within the process of his time. He was not espousing these causes that were, indeed, denials of his essence, so much as living through them, and as growing through them. By his acceptance of the War, of the noisy and supine Progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt, of the spiritually prostrate Pragmatism of John Dewey, he was—in his own way—getting beyond them. And his humble method is, to me, the only possible promise of our nation, which, too, having accepted these false positions, with a self-knowledge and a humility like Herbert Croly’s may also get beyond them.

His ultimate refusal was significant because he had lived through what he rejected. Herbert Croly went through a gamut of faiths in political reform; that is why his final doubts about the political method and his convictions on psychological and religious re-education were important. He was well versed in the instrumentalisms and technological credos of his day; that is why his recognition of the nuclear spiritual force within the person and beyond the reaches of pragmatic methods was important. He knew the principles and methodologies of modern engineering; that is why his transposition and application of them to the problem of the person were important, and why his ultimate religious interest—emergent from a practical participation in the affairs of our day—was so convincing and potential.

These later phases of his growth were clear only to those who personally knew him. He spoke of two books that he was going to write: a sequel to “The Promise of American Life” and an intimate record of his own evolution. I do not know if any part of these works was ever set down. But I feel that the quality of the man and the form of his spirit were best revealed to his friends. At night, within the shadows of his bookshelves, a release came to Herbert Croly. He was morbidly sensitive. He spoke so low that when one ate with him in a restaurant it was difficult to hear what he said. Yet to have raised his voice in a public place, one felt, would have been an outrage to the nature of this man who was, without doubt, the deepest publicist of his generation. In his own occult way, Herbert Croly had embraced the world. A kind of dogged heroism through the years had driven him to accept the crass contacts of politics and journalism. For that was the method of his philosophy: his knowing was action. But now, in the stillness of his room, his knowing became words. What he said had a luminous strength, like wine kept long. For these were words aged in the cellar of himself. The exquisite perceptions had grown strong in secret. His eyes glowed, at such times, with his words. He was relaxed. A flame burned from the hard wood of his reticence.

Like an old wine, this strength of Herbert Croly’s was not aggressive. It did not come to you; you had to find the means of taking it. He had none of the prophet’s and mystic’s need of self-assertion or of liberation from the trammels of his time. His method was always the same humble one: to work in the substances of the day, to live his day, and slowly to go on emerging without separation from the day’s humble matters.

Some men synthesize the actuality of their time. Such a one was Theodore Roosevelt, once Croly’s friend. Another kind, more rare and more precious, synthesize not the day’s actuality, but its promise. Such was Herbert Croly. But even within this group, he was unique. These men are likely to be at odds with their hour, and quite aloof. Their method of revelation is often the prophetic attitude which refuses all participation with the actuality which they transcend. But Herbert Croly synthesized American promise by his acceptance of the American fact. He did not intuit his promise, he distilled it from the facts themselves. He was very far from the conventional prophet or mystic. His exquisite nerves grappled with the iron and blood of the twentieth century. What could come of this embrace of an almost feminine spirit with a body in which plunged a billion horsepower? The spirit of the man remained undriven, clear; it became the record of a slow revelation.

If we translate his career into terms of our national destiny, how does it read? America runs the gamut of political credos. America sets up its external technologies and worships in them its own infantile power. America swears by the machine, and patterns from it arts and folkways. Under high-sounding slogans of pragmatism and instrumentalism, America submits to the hour—to all the miseries and tyrannies of a caste clad in the immediacy of the hour. But America will, from its experience, return unto itself; learn that there is no substitute for the strength and value that reside secretly in man, and that there is no conduit to mastery of the world other than mastery of self. America will again hear the voices of the fathers who came to create a dwelling place, not for gilded slaves of the machine, but for man—a world made new, not by mechanical proliferation, but by the growth of the spirit of man and woman.

Such was the progress of Herbert Croly, who moved through the American jungle to find himself, and in himself projected what must be the destiny of his country, if that destiny be salvation. The promise of American life has had no truer form than this life.

_1930_

5. SIGMUND FREUD

a.

The nineteenth century in Northern Europe was a time of Titans struggling to create worlds of their own. The medieval Catholic world had crumbled: simple or timid souls still lived in it, but for several hundred years the strongest spirits had been engaged in tearing it to pieces. This destruction was, of course, creative; was, indeed, largely the cultural work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in astronomy, geography, physics, economics, mysticism and esthetics. But it was work of pioneering or analysis, rather than of synthesis. And it bequeathed to the eighteenth century, not a new world for the whole man to live in, but a miscellany of abstract, mutually discordant principles with which to begin to build it. These principles were known as laws: there were the laws of mathematics, of mechanics, of biology, of the natural and the economic man. They were all based upon the law of reason, and this was religiously believed in. The destructive centuries had not invented the faith in reason; that faith was a legacy of the Catholic world which reason, by shifting its premise, undermined. Reason, to be hypostasized, requires an unchallenged premise; in Catholic theology this premise was the revelation of the Bible; now it was to be the revelation of the human senses or of the original rightness and divinity of man. With such instruments, abstract and confused, the forerunners of the nineteenth century (Kant, Rousseau, Blake, etc.) strove to create a cosmos of their own to replace the glorious fertile world of St. Francis, Aquinas, Dante.

The period of great romantic art was ushered in; and it had many forms. In philosophy, there were Schopenhauer, Hegel, Spencer, Comte; in the novel, there were Balzac and Dostoevski; in music, there were Beethoven, Moussorgsky, Wagner; in painting, there were Delacroix, Ingres, Cézanne; in the sciences, there were Marx and Darwin. All these men, despite immense distinctions, were of one family. They were in touch with objective reality, masters of inquiry, often discoverers in the fields from which they mined their materials. But their constructions, unlike the worlds of the great Catholic creators right down to Bach, Descartes, Racine, were the embodiments of the personal will of their creators. There is, here, no contradiction; nor were these nineteenth-century worlds less “real,” because personal, or of less social use. Man is not an isolated atom. The genius who erects a world in the image of himself—if his self-search be deep and his self-mastery strong—will produce a work of universal nature. The more profound the subjective impulse, the more complete the command over objective nature in order to fulfill it. That is why the scientific realism of a Cézanne qualitatively equals that of a Darwin; why a poet like Wagner portrays the reality of Middle Europe; why an economist like Marx may write as emotionally as Isaiah; and why we find in the solipsistic verse of a Rimbaud prophecies, which science has fulfilled, of the nature and behavior of the atom.

I have needed to speak of these nineteenth-century Titans, because Sigmund Freud, whose work dates from the 1890’s, is the last of their line. To understand him, we must know his family. It was a family of men moved to replace, by their own work, the broken synthesis of Catholic Europe. They were all absolutists, seeking in some genetic principle of unitary vision the pattern that God supplied in the old order. The law may have been progress and reason or (as in Dostoevski and Rimbaud) their denial; may have been will or (as in Schopenhauer) its overcoming; it may have been some genetic rule like the survival of the fittest, sexual selection, Aryan-Lutheran supremacy, class struggle, etc. Always there was implicit in the texture of these men’s constructions an absolute rationalism, or the nullification of reason; a faith in the sufficiency of the senses as a report of truth, or total rejection. These worlds, risen from an abstract and absolute law, were built of materials preponderantly personal—more idiosyncratic, indeed (although the work were a book on economics), than the love lyric of any medieval poet who accepted his immersion in a common cosmic pattern.

The twentieth century will be different: its creative work will be to reconcile and integrate apparently contradictory laws by the aid of supersensory dimensions. It will be the relativistic age, in which the discoveries of the absolutists of the nineteenth century—Nietzsche and Marx, Dostoevski and Darwin, Rimbaud and Spencer—will be worked together for the making not of worlds, but of _the world_, and not less personal because socially pragmatic. To this new era, barely ushered in by men like Bergson, Whitehead, S. Alexander, André Gide, Franz Kafka, etc., Freud does not belong. But in the perspective of cultural history, he will be seen as a contemporary of Darwin, Schopenhauer, Dostoevski, Marx; and he may be known, by the fecundity of his work, as their equal.

b.

Freud began as a physician; as one seeking to heal human ills. But he found, in the dark places of the human heart, a world as personal, tragic and universal as the world of Dostoevski. The psychological system of Freud is, first of all, a great human drama. Here, in the arcana of the soul, are complex organisms: the superego, dwelling place of the fathers—conscience and tradition; the id, hinterland of the immense accumulations of instinct, habit, appetite; and between them the ego, where lives the individual will. These organisms are interacting units, from whose clash rise devious characters with strange names: cathex, complex, sex-urge, death-urge, neurosis, fixation or repression or sublimation of libido. They are all filled with the life of action; they make lyric and epic conquests of the objective world; they also interlock in secret combat or in more terrible alliance, giving forth the gamut of emotions from horror to ecstasy, and producing the many mansions of human deed from pastoral beginnings when the infant offers its prized excrement as a gift to its mother, to heights where men make philosophies and religions.

This world of Freud has complex unity. Among the welter of symptom, dream, and cultural act move the “heroes”: the radical urge for life (sex and self-preservation) and the masochist-sadist hunger, born of life, for the return to death. And like all the esthetic constructions of the nineteenth-century Titans, this world has a personal savor. “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Freud’s pivotal work, in its revelation of a passionate individual nature may be compared with the “Confessions” of Rousseau (the father of the century), with Dostoevski’s “Notes from Underground,” with Volume I of “Capital,” with Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Idea,” and with “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” A man is speaking. He is building a system from his discoveries and observations by the use of a legitimate instrument of science. But first and last, _a man_ is revealing himself. And only less intensely is this true of all Freud’s books. Whether he writes of the genetic sources of Da Vinci’s art (in “Leonardo da Vinci”) or of a savage totem (in “Totem and Taboo”) or of a slip of the tongue (in “Psychopathology of Everyday Life”), he brings himself to the construction. While with healing hand he touches the lesions of a soul, he is really carrying to these dark places a flame from his own Promethean nature.

Most men solve their inner conflicts by forgetting about them (with the magic of ready-made solutions or of drugs, sexual, mechanical, alcoholic, patriotic); some men need to create a world of their own to solve them. Marx, suffering within himself the lesion of social injustice, created a world that mankind will use as a rationale of cure for its social diseases. The humbly religious Darwin, agonized by an age of “Enlightenment” that had dissevered him from God only to marry him with chaos, forecast a biological order where the human species could begin again to find the peace of integration between its lowest and its highest parts. Freud also makes answer to a personal conflict.

He is a man who accepts the dogma of nineteenth-century science. “There is no other source of knowledge,” he says, “but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations, in fact, what is called research ... and no knowledge can be obtained from revelation, intuition or inspiration.” This is pure eighteenth-century rationalism. Thus armed, he goes down into the irrational depths of the soul, a chaos to be conquered. His highway is the dream; and the Freudian technique of dream interpretation by word and thought associations and by the use of symbols is one of the mightiest acts of the imagination. The domain where the dream has led him, which he calls the id, is a jungle of the lusts of human organs aprowl like wild beasts among the tropical trees and swamps of primeval habit. But Freud will not surrender to this phantasmagoric and miasmic world; he will draw forth from its flux, by means of reason, energy for the three-dimensional world of reasonable practice, and this limited world he will insist to be the one reality. It is a struggle between uneven forces, and the consequence is a psychological design (called “real”) that is drenched with the passionate and heroic will of its author.