Chapter II: Part 2

This society, which is the heart and mind and soul of Zenith, is immensely conservative, immensely conventional, both morally and mentally. It does not belligerently flaunt, or argue in favour of, conventional standards; it accepts them as something settled a long time since. There is a good deal to be said for this--or for a part of it. Indeed, there is a good deal to be said for most of what Zenith does or is. Is not more real freedom to be obtained through accepting certain age-old conventions, such as that of marriage and married fidelity, for instance, and then making the best of them, than through wasting one’s strength in struggling against them, with no adequate substitute to offer? But Zenith accepts too much. It accepts the Steel Corporation, Mr. Gary, the American Legion, the Republican Party, the total wickedness of the I.W.W., the sole responsibility of Germany for the war, and the entire basic system of Capital and Labour as at present existing, though it is willing to concede improvements in detail. But this attitude probably makes for the almost suave charm of this society, which is, after all, the same kind of charm that was to be found in Upper-Middle-Class English society before the war.

These people are amazingly cut off from and ignorant of the vast labouring class. They know that not one of themselves could be elected congressman or mayor or even to membership on the school-board, but they accept the fact coolly and without much resentment as revealing nothing more than the jealousy of the ‘Have-Nots’ for the ‘Haves,’ of those at the bottom for those who have deservedly reached the top. Yet they are democratic among themselves, and, unlike the McKelveys, admit newcomers easily, with no inquiry into their antecedents. They are not really snobbish. Many of the men are employers of labour on a large scale, yet even they seem to be merely exasperated by the increasing difficulties in controlling their men, in much the same way that the women are annoyed by the difficulty of getting and keeping servants. They talk of demagogues, of Red propaganda, of the unwillingness of men to do an honest day’s work, of labour unrest, of Bolshevism--oh, especially of Bolshevism! But among even these employers I could detect no perception that the whole economic system was being seriously questioned, and certainly no perception of the numerical strength and growing unity of the questioners. But it would not be fair to consider this ignorance in the class of people I am describing as confined especially to Zenith or the Middle-West. Where in the world does it not exist?

A lesser fault was that there was no good general conversation. Indeed, there was virtually no general conversation at all. Perhaps this was because the men did not join in. There seemed, in fact, to be a strange separation of men from women in Zenith. The attitude of the men toward the women was delightful--easy, courteous without being deferential in the obnoxious Southern fashion--and the women’s attitude toward the men was equally pleasant. But men and women seemed to have nothing in common. They often did things together, played golf or bridge or tennis or even went on long canoe-trips, but they did not think together. They did not even appear to be united by sex-attraction. One simply did not feel, not ever, the haunting presence of that restless vivifying emotion. Zenith was uncannily, horribly cool. How in the world, I kept wondering, did babies get born here? Still, they did, and their mothers, with quite inadequate help, looked after them admirably. For real amusement the men liked to get off by themselves, have dinner, drink, and play poker or bridge. They were continually giving small parties of this sort in some private dining-room of the Zenith Club. At one which I attended a discussion of wives arose, the model wife being esteemed the one who cheerfully let her husband go out any or every evening. On this same evening a mixed dinner-party was being given in the ladies’ dining-room of the club, and when it was over the young men of that party drifted into our smaller room for a few minutes. They sniffed up rather wistfully the doggy atmosphere that pervades a stag-party and helped themselves to drinks from the bottles on the sideboard. ‘And where are you going now?’ one of us inquired. ‘Up to Jim’s house to play bridge.’ ‘Think of it!’ exclaimed my host pityingly, as the victims to sex filed out. ‘They’re going to Jim’s house--to play bridge--with women!’

This absence of sex-attraction in Zenith gatherings was only one expression of a lack that in course of time seemed to me almost insupportable--the lack of thrill. Everything was too quiet, too even, too reasonable. Nobody seemed ever to feel or think anything passionately. The key was low, pulled down, like the decoration of the houses, which was usually in good taste but so very sober and restrained. These people, I said to myself, must have some emotional outlet; what is it?

Well, the young men, no doubt, found an outlet in business. For it must be remembered that among all these men there was not one professional idler. It was one of the accepted conventions that a man must work. Some of them were idlers by nature and worked, I dare say, as little as possible; most of them worked almost fiercely, though not during such long hours as had the men of their fathers’ generation. And they drank hard at their stag-parties. I heard of one or two disreputable road-houses in the country near-by, so somewhere in Zenith sex-attraction did exist, but it existed as something outside the magic circle. So far as I was able to learn, very few of the young men I knew frequented those places. Their outlet was not women; they seemed strangely uninterested in women; they did not even talk about them at the stag-parties.

But what of the women, the younger women, themselves? They appeared so cool, so reasonable, so sure of themselves, and so gracious, that it seemed an impertinence to be sorry for them. Nevertheless, I was sorry for them--secretly. What outlet did they have? It is true that they had their homes to manage and their children to bring up. But, even with at best inadequate servants--hardly ever more than one, never more than two--and at frequent intervals no servants at all, this took only a small part of their time. Their homes were so well organized, and possessed, too, every known mechanical labour-saving device, from vacuum cleaners to electric stoves. What did these attractive young women do with their spare time? Well, they read, of course, and they gave or attended a great many teas, at which no man was ever present. That could hardly be an emotional outlet. Music, perhaps, was a partial one. As I have said, there was excellent music to be heard in Zenith. There were two concert courses every winter, to which came really great artists--Paderewski, Mischa Elman, famous string quartets, the Vatican Choir. And to these concerts, I feel sure, these young women listened with intelligence and emotion. (Their husbands sat through the concerts patiently). But even so? Zenith is, after all, only a small city. There may have been fifteen concerts in a season. What about the rest of the time? A few young women played exceedingly well, themselves. That might really be an outlet. But most did not play well enough to find satisfaction in playing at all, knowing what they knew of great music. They went in for golf and boating, and they danced a good deal, too--well, but without the grace of abandon. To me, for all their perfection and intelligence, they seemed only half alive.

They _were_ intelligent, more so than their husbands--or perhaps more grown-up. And in a way they were well educated. They knew something about, were interested in, a great many subjects to which their husbands were indifferent--music, Russian dancing, Scandinavian literature, social welfare work, civic improvement, and so forth and so forth. But it is true that they did not know any one thing thoroughly, as their husbands knew their business. Again, I think, that was because they did not know any one thing passionately. ‘What can have been their outlet?’ I asked a woman--not in Zenith. ‘Virtue, perhaps,’ she replied. They seemed sadly wasted, somehow, those delightful young women, and only half alive.

I think, perhaps, that subconsciously they were afraid of coming alive. They filled their days deliberately with pretty, well-ordered, superficial activities. They made existence so pleasant and so full that it disguised the absence of life. A proof of this seemed to appear in their gregariousness. They clung together in everything. If they wanted to study a period of history they did not do it in solitude; they organized a club among themselves to study it. They organized a club or a class or a group for everything. It was as though they huddled together, for comfort--and in fear. Fear of what? Of their individual selves, I fancy. Groups have only a factitious life; real life is in the individual alone. And I think these young women were afraid of real life. So they were, I suppose, failures. But there was something finer in their failure than in their husbands’ narrow success. The young men were aware of but one possible activity in life--business; and threw themselves into it desperately. The young women were aware of a score, and, held back by all the pleasant conventions among which they existed, and, unlike their husbands, by a vague perception of dark troubled depths in the individual soul, threw themselves into none.

But how charming they were, how candid and clear and--oh, decent! I wonder if they would mind if they knew that, even while admiring, some one had found them, and Zenith, a little pathetic.

DISILLUSIONMENT

We can hardly fail to perceive that we are living to-day in a period of profound disillusionment. There is nothing strange about that. Every great war has brought disillusionment in its wake. What is of interest is to examine the nature of the disillusionment and estimate its probable results.

In the first year or two after the Armistice it was a bitter and passionate thing, almost as sharply felt among civilians as among the returned soldiers. Life appeared barren and profitless, religion a mockery, civilization a myth. The young cursed the old for creating such a mess; the old, though not conscious of having deliberately created anything of the sort, were broken-hearted at the spectacle of what some one must have done--and who, then, if not they? Governments were a mirthless laughing-stock. Moral laws were thrown overboard; for if all that moral laws had resulted in was _this_, of what possible value were they? Marriage all but went to smash in favour of a cheap promiscuity. No one believed in anything, no one trusted any one else; life resolved itself into three elemental desires--for food and drink, excitement and the gratification of sex. With all of which unrestraint, there was far less happiness in the world than before. People were ‘fed up’--‘fed up’ even in the midst of their most reckless adventures in gaiety.

This summary of the state of mind in the year of grace 1919 is, of course, exaggerated, but such was undoubtedly the impression one received in any country that had seen the worst of the war.

The reason for the impression and also the reason why it was only a fractionally true impression was that the hubbub was being raised by the articulate minority. As some one has already pointed out, a considerable majority of the world’s inhabitants were not disillusioned by the war, having had no illusions to shed. Life had been hostile to them; they had always been forced to give a great deal to get a very little; they had never had the slightest faith in governments or in human goodness; knowing marriage stripped to its bare essentials, they had always seen it as a fact like any other, never as something sacred and beautiful; they had always been as promiscuous as possible; they had never had the opportunity to dress life up and worship it. Times were either a little harder now or maybe not quite so hard. There was no occasion for all this fuss, though, naturally, they took advantage of it to get as much more for themselves as they could.

No, it was the articulate minority that was upset. But this, though distinctly a minority, is very large. It does not consist of any one class in a rigid social sense, but simply of all the people for whom existence is relatively easy. I do not mean the people who have no worries, are never hard-up, never in danger of bankruptcy, nor even altogether people who do not work with their hands; I mean those whose daily life is not among the hard primitive facts, who have not suffered actual griping hunger, whose mental existence follows some sort of order, whose work is not the deadening physical labour of mines, steel-plants or the most squalid factories, and whose homes, however imperfect, offer something better than the horrible promiscuity of one or two crowded rooms. This class, if you can call it such, sees life altogether differently than the majority beneath sees it, and it is almost solely from this class that come the interpreters of life--the thinkers, the writers, the artists, the journalists. Also the two classes never really touch. The minds of each are alien to the minds of the other. There are to-day many individuals among the minority who are trying to get at and understand the minds of the majority; but they cannot, because the majority live among facts, they among ideas about facts. The attempt is as impossible as for a painted figure to step down from its picture and walk the earth--or vice versa, since I do not in the least mean that ideas about facts are necessarily less real than the facts themselves. In short, one half not only does not but cannot know how the other half lives. This is so true that when sometimes, rarely, a writer of genius, such as Gorki, has struggled up from that great, incoherently muttering sea, the account he gives of life there is to us of the minority, even while it moves us, as strange as though it were indeed an account of life in another element.

It was this minority that was disillusioned by the war, and, frankly, I think we deserved to be--though perhaps somewhat less rudely. Not because we had ideas about life, but because we had _such_ ideas--so smooth, so smug, so unrelated to the facts, so inconsistent with what, if we had only looked honestly, we might have seen in ourselves. For example, individually none of us was more than spasmodically happy, none contented; cowardice alone or, at best, habit and lack of initiative restrained each of us from committing the most dastardly acts; selfishness lay at the bottom of our behaviour; honest introspection would have revealed to any one of us a handful of impulsive good deeds to show against a lifetime of petty greedy actions the motives for which had been painstakingly disguised: yet, by and large, we believed, really did believe, that the world was growing steadily better, that there was more good than evil in human nature (by which, if we had been honest and intelligent, each of us could only have meant in the nature of every one save himself), that certain things (of which every one of us was capable) simply were not done by decent people, and that, given the high state of moral progress in the world, wars were unthinkable.

The shock of the awakening (which did not come at its fullest during the war, when thought was suspended, but afterward) was tremendous and painful. And the pain and anger were all the worse for being, even if we recognized it but dimly, directed against ourselves. That was the secret of the wretchedness, the disillusionment, that the reason for feeling ‘fed up.’ We blamed it on civilization or governments or God; at heart we knew it was ourselves who were to blame. Beginning with the hurt recognition that the world was not as we had pictured it, we went on logically to the gloomier recognition that we were not what we had fancied ourselves. This was inevitable. A man who distrusts the honesty of others is a man who secretly does not believe in his own honesty; a man who is afraid to leave his wife and his friend alone together is a man with whom his friend’s wife would not be safe.

The disillusionment, then, was potentially salutary. Stripping men of false ideas and ideals, it forced them to look into their own hearts.

Only potentially salutary, however. In its first results it was sheerly destructive; and this, too, was logical. The great Chicago fire of 1871 was doubtless a good thing in that it wiped out a sordid and ugly city, but the first reaction to it of the inhabitants must have been despair. Despair, at any rate, was the prevailing emotion in the hearts of most thinking members of the minority during the chaotic period that followed the Armistice. All these centuries to work with, and we had achieved--this!

But there are two very noble traits in men, or in the best of them: a fundamental love of truth and a refusal to accept defeat. So presently such men began to shake off despair and to look about them clear-sightedly, like Noah and his companions after they had emerged from the Ark. And their love of truth, burning more clearly now that the lamp was less encrusted with illusions, showed them some very heartening facts: that the thirty centuries of recorded human life were not as barren a waste as all that; that always, as far back as eye could see, even in the midst of war, pestilence and external chaos, some men had laboured patiently, and for no other reward than the satisfaction of their love of truth, to guard and, bee-like, add a few drops to the small store of knowledge transmitted to them; that explorers had charted the earth and its seas, and astronomers mapped the movements of the stars; that to have worked up from nothing more than a few primitive sounds to the indescribable beauty of a Mozart symphony was an achievement beyond all praise. True, men were also beasts. Nothing could justify this war or ever excuse it. It was unmitigatedly evil, a crime without a reason, for which not one or two or a dozen, but all men, were responsible. But there, too, was that other side of men, that grazed divinity. All was not lost, though ten million human lives were. Civilization, many said gravely, might come to an end. Sad, if true, but, at bottom, what of it? It would only be one civilization. Another would follow. For what goes on indestructibly is the steady soul of man, loving truth and never defeated. So I conceive such men as meditating for a little while before going back to their patient work.

These, whether they knew it or not, were themselves among the lonely guarders of the flame. But others besides them, many others among the rest of us, have profited by our disillusionment. Indeed, we have profited more than they, since their lives had always a noble directive never entirely obscured, ours none.

One thing that we have gained is the spirit of wholesome mockery for grandiloquent twaddle. This bubbled up to us perhaps from that great mass beneath, which has moments when it is not inarticulate. In Italy, some time about the weary middle of the war, when, as always, generals, politicians, journalists, and diplomats at banquets never opened their mouths or lifted their pens save to speak or write of ‘the Cause of Liberty, Justice and Civilization’ and all the rest of it, a ribald soldiers’ song suddenly swept the country and set it rocking with tonic mirth, though how the song got about so universally is a mystery, since it could not be sung in public. It had many verses, all equally scurrilous, but it will suffice to quote one, the best known:

_Il General Cadorna_
_Scrisse a la Regina:_
_‘Se vuol veder Trieste_
_Si compri una cartolina.’_
_Ah! Ah! Ah!_
_Ah! Ah! Ah!_

(_General Cadorna wrote to the Queen: ‘If you want to see Trieste, buy a picture postcard.’ Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!_)

The music fitted the words outrageously, and the mocking insolence of those six ‘Ah’s,’ each accented, at the end of every stanza, was ineffable (_do, mi, re; si, re, do_). They were so utterly final--a funeral march for rhetoric.

For obvious reasons there was all too little of this spirit awake during the war; now, since the war, it blows freely through the air and is one of the healthiest results of disillusionment. It makes men read their newspapers sceptically and glance back to see where a dispatch came from before accepting it as truth; it causes them to look with an ironic eye on politicians, governments, philanthropists, institutions of learning, and all other institutions, on everything and every one professionally noble; it supplies readers for such irreverent publications as the _American Mercury_, and makes satirical novels, like _Babbitt_, actually popular. It reveals the grosser forms of credulity as precisely that. Held to be something dreadful, the Ku Klux Klan would wax in strength, but people find it ridiculous; it is doomed. Even before the ‘Protocols’ were exposed as forgeries an amazingly large number of people were unable to swallow them; they were too silly. The _Saturday Evening Post_, the _Red Book_ and the others go on their tawdrily romantic way, but I doubt extremely that the millions who read the stories they contain accept these as anything save sheer senseless relaxation, since the same millions read and take to their hearts the comic strips--_Mr. and Mrs._, _The Gumps_, etc.--which are so sordid, so blowzy, so disillusioned, in both drawing and captions, as to make _Babbitt_ appear by comparison a lilting romance and Mr. H. L. Mencken a blood-brother of Mr. Harold Bell Wright. In short, though it is still possible to ‘get away with’ a good deal of nonsense, it is not possible, even in America, the most sentimental nation under the sun, to ‘get away with’ anywhere near as much as once upon a time.

But there is more behind all this than a mere spirit of sceptical mockery; clean and salty as it is, that spirit is only a part of something bigger. The truth is, I think, that people have grown up--part way up, at least. The incredible childishness of a decade ago is gone--I trust, forever. It is not only that we accept less than before, but that we are more level-headed both in accepting and rejecting. A questioning coolness is abroad. Perhaps we expect less of life; certainly we are less enthusiastic over it. That crass optimism about everything, not openly to share which used to make an American taboo, no longer soars and screams. It still lives, but with a broken wing, fluttering clumsily like a hen. A good thing! There was nothing noble in it. At bottom it represented only a desire not to be troubled, and was popular for the same reason that the man is popular who, in response to an inquiry as to his health, grins and shouts: ‘Fine! Fine! Never better!’

What a load of sentimentality has gone overboard with our illusions!--sentimental notions about happiness, about country, about life, about love. That amazing convicton, for example, that the only thing of real importance in a woman was her chastity. Overboard. Drowned a mile deep, as it deserved to be for the cheap and insulting notion it was. In its long day it must have righteously infuriated thousands of women--possibly more those who happened to be chaste than those who happened not to be. Its loss signifies not more accent on the sex-relation, but less, helping to put the relation where it belongs, as merely one of a number of facts. An immense step has been taken toward an honester, decenter understanding between men and women. And a score of other sentimental notions are gone, too, or tottering. The visualizing of the United States as a benevolent disinterested Uncle Sam, a bit homely, a bit awkward, but strong and infinitely kind, like the hero of a Cape Cod melodrama; and of France as a Jeanne d’Arc in glittering armour, eyes shining, face aglow, shedding her life-blood for Liberty--hum ...! Mr. E. M. Forster has recently written a very remarkable novel in which he punctures, dispassionately, but once for all, the Kipling legend of the English in India as public school demi-gods; yet in both England and America the book has sold by tens of thousands and met with almost unanimous praise.

Quite possibly a little that was fine and true has gone overboard with the rubbish, but most of the destruction was salutary. And it has served, it seems to me, to bring those two classes, the dumb majority and the articulate minority, closer together than ever before. In a sense it is not a real closeness; for, as I have said, the two can never touch, one living among facts, the other in a picture of facts. But at least the picture now bears some relation to the facts, is by way of becoming what it must become to be of any value--an interpretation of them. This, surely, is something to the credit of our disillusioned period.

It is a puzzling period to study, and would still be so, I think, even were we not in the midst of it. It questions everything, all once accepted premises. Yet it is not like other great periods of change--the Reformation or the Romantic Revival, for instance. They were, in one way or another, periods of revolution, when men brushed aside the past, sure that they had found something better--sure because they felt young and fresh. The present period is not young and fresh; it is very, very tired. And so, despite the obvious and extensive social changes that it has already witnessed, it is not in spirit revolutionary. It questions everything--governments, nationality, economics, religion, human nature, life itself--but it is not young enough or fresh enough to discard recklessly. People question and wonder, yet vote overwhelmingly for the Republicans in America and the Conservatives in England.

Phenomena such as these and others more distressing are frequently cited as evidence that ours is a period of discouraging reaction. I do not agree. The bitter intolerance displayed by such movements as Fascismo--or, for that matter, Fundamentalism--is, to my thinking, a good sign, rather than a bad. It means that violent intolerance is to-day forced back where it belongs--to the outskirts, to the extreme Right or the extreme Left. It is violent and domineering because it dares not be otherwise; it represents only an inconsiderable fraction of the whole, and is afraid. At the moment when I write this, Fascismo still governs Italy, but it has against it probably eighty per cent. of the population, and governs by force alone, suppressing its most dangerous enemies, muzzling the press, forbidding political gatherings, dissolving societies, outraging the constitutional rights of individuals. Such tyranny signifies fear--fear based on the certain knowledge of the Fascisti that they and their policies do not represent the country.

Yet people have not risen up _en masse_ and turned them out. No, and this, too, is characteristic of the period. It lacks the ardent juvenile faith in Utopias essential to drive multitudes to action. Instead, people ask coolly: ‘What have you got, to put in place of what we so unsatisfactorily have?’ But it is also a rather mature, almost wise period, saying: ‘Let the Fascisti rave. Whom the Gods would destroy....’

The Republicans and the Conservatives must watch their step closely. In neither case was the large majority obtained a loving endorsement. A tired period but an extremely clear-eyed one, as periods go, with less belief than usual in miraculous panaceas, but with still less in all things being for the best. It is not a romantic period, though it is full of superficially romantic events; there is no youth in it and small enthusiasm. But it is a period out of which more of permanent value may come than if it were.

SOPHISTICATION

My text is from Michael Arlen’s _The Green Hat_ (iv. i. 116) and from Ford Madox Ford’s _Some Do Not ..._ (II. i. 196; ii. i. 215).

_Lady Pynte liked young men to be Healthy and Normal; Mrs. Ammon
preferred them to be Original. Lady Pynte liked Boys to be Boys;
Mrs. Ammon didn’t mind if they were girls so long as they were
Original. Lady Pynte insisted on Working For the Welfare of the
People at Large and Not just for Our Own Little Class, she played
bridge with a bantering tongue and a Borgia heart, she maintained
that the best place to buy shoes was Fortnum and Mason’s, and if
she saw you innocently taking the air of a sunny morning she would
say: ‘You are not looking at all well, my good young man. Why don’t
you take some Clean, Healthy exercise? You ought to be Riding.’
That was why one maintained a defensive alliance with one’s haddock
rather than do the manly thing and dance with Lady Pynte. She would
say one ought to be riding, and for four years I had hidden from
Lady Pynte the fact that I did not know how to ride. I simply did
not dare to confess to Lady Pynte that I could not ride. I had
already tried to pave the way to that dénouement by confessing that
I came from the lower classes, but she did not appear to think that
any class could be so Low as that._

* * * * *

_Being near Tietjens she lifted her plate, which contained two cold
cutlets in aspic and several leaves of salad; she wavered a little
to one side and, with a circular motion of her hand, let the whole
contents fly at Tietjens’ head. She placed the plate on the table
and drifted slowly towards the immense mirror over the fireplace._

_‘I’m bored,’ she said. ‘Bored! Bored!’_

* * * * *

_‘If,’ Sylvia went on with her denunciation, ‘you had once in our
lives said to me: “You whore! You bitch! You killed my mother. May
you rot in hell for it” ... you might have done something to bring
us together.’_

_Tietjens said:_

_‘That’s, of course, true.’_

And my subject is--what else with such a text?--Sophistication.

Not sophistication in the original unencrusted meaning of the word, but in the overlaid current understanding of it--an emotional rather than an intellectual condition. It is a condition very hard to define, since it is emotional, yet sufficiently easy to recognize--and admire. To be sophisticated you must be _blasé_; you must be witty; you must not take anything, especially vice, very hard; you must be gay and casual about problems that unsophisticated people are earnest about, though you may (here you are reaching rarefied heights of sophistication) be as earnest as you like about things that average people consider trivial. You must show familiarity with the world of High Society, but also amused disdain for it; you must know, and prove that you know, everything about ordering a dinner in such places as Ciro’s (Monte Carlo), the Ritz (Paris), and the Café de Paris (Biarritz). You should also be able to let fall--now and then, very carelessly, merely because you cannot at the moment think of the English word--a French or an Italian or even a German word or phrase; but it is not excessively important that you should do this correctly or even appropriately; the effect will be the same anyway. Among contemporary writers Carl Van Vechten and Ronald Firbank are sophisticated; and so is Michael Arlen, and so is Ford Madox Ford (_né_ Hueffer).

There is one small drawback to sophistication: it is impossible without an audience. One cannot pleasurably, perhaps not possibly, be sophisticated all alone by oneself. One cannot think of a man getting into an unshared bed as sophisticated--I mean to say, of course, after his valet has left him. Fiction is full of people marooned on desert islands; but only one writer, M. Jean Giraudoux, has ever thought of thus marooning a sophisticated character. It was a delicious and fantastic idea, which made _Suzanne et le Pacifique_ an irresistibly funny book.

This disadvantage, however, is not grave, since sophisticated people are rarely alone, even at night, and in public are sure of an admiring audience. We all admire sophistication in real life, and we admire it still more in novels. This is partly because it is never quite so perfect and finished in the former as in the latter, but chiefly because there is a touch of envy in our admiration for sophistication in life, whereas we share flatteringly in that displayed in a novel. We, too, love Iris Storm fastidiously and consider Sylvia Tietjens’ complicated vices with tolerant weariness. We, too, are of the _haut monde_ and are very offhand about it. We, too, have lived very, very hard and exhausted everything and have come to look with a mellow amusement on all intensities. It is delightful.

Unluckily for me, I do not know any sophisticated people in real life. I have jealously seen them about, in restaurants and places, but I do not know them--or perhaps I should say that they do not know me. But I know sophistication in novels, none better. The sophisticated novelist must be very sophisticated indeed to satisfy my fine trained taste. Any momentary lapse into ingenuousness, and I am on him like a wolf. Thus, among the writers I have mentioned, and among others whom I have not, I salute most especially Mr. Michael Arlen; and this because, more perfectly than the others, he knows how a sophisticated novel should be written: to wit, in a _baroque_ and decorative prose. Mr. Firbank and Mr. Van Vechten may also know this; but they lag far behind Mr. Arlen in turning their knowledge into achievement. They do not discover such felicities as: ‘ ... and over the breast of her dark dress five small red elephants were marching towards an unknown destination’; or, ‘The stormy brittle sunlight, eager to play with the pearls and diamonds of Van Cleef, Lacloche and Cartier, aye, and of Tecla also, chided away the fat white clouds, and now the sun would play with one window of the Rue de la Paix, now with another, mortifying one, teasing another, but all in a very handsome way.’ There you have the authentic manner for sophisticated prose.

The reason why the authentic manner is _baroque_, even _rococo_, heavily encrusted with ornament, is a melancholy reason. (‘That was a gloomy reason,’ Mr. Arlen would say). It is that there is a certain lack of body in sophistication. To eschew the passions--or perhaps not to eschew them, but to smile at them--to be polished, suave and unobtrusively superior, is delightful, but limits one a bit. Emerson’s assertion that the exclusive man excludes no one but himself is doubtless an exaggeration; but it is certainly true that the exclusive man does also exclude himself. The technique of sophistication in literature is even more exacting than the technique of the drama. Let no one fancy it easy to write sophisticatedly. It is extremely difficult. A considerable proportion of the writers in two continents is attempting it; yet one can count the successes on the fingers of two hands. There is no mistaking the genuine article in sophistication, for the very simple reason that the false is always ludicrous, sometimes violently so, sometimes faintly. English, French and American bookshops, and once a week the _Saturday Evening Post_, are half full of hilarious attempts at sophistication. It would be a mistake to deplore them; they add to the gaiety of nations. If you care for clear laughter with no malice beneath it, and must give up one book or the other, which would you sacrifice, _Alice in Wonderland_ or _The Rosary_?

Sophistication in literature, then, as (I presume) sophistication in real life, is immensely difficult of attainment; it demands a special skillful technique, a wary sense of humour and a narrow selection of material. Therefore, as I have already suggested, its manner becomes of great importance. To avoid a lurking sense of impoverishment you must be provided with decorative flowers to pluck by the wayside. The luxuriously appointed cruise around the world on the _Arabic_ (22,000 tons) is not enough; you need those side-excursions to Capri, the Balearic Islands and the foot-hills of Java. Once again I salute Mr. Michael Arlen. His is _the_ manner. One can be sophisticated without it--Mr. Ford is, and M. Paul Morand--but how much better to have it!

Let us turn now to the two novels from which I have taken, almost at random, my text. The novels themselves I selected with considerable care; for, while their sophisticated qualities of course overlap, there are certain examples of sophistication in _The Green Hat_ that are wanting in _Some Do Not ..._ and a few in the latter book that one will not find in the former. Moreover, the two books are done in very different manners.

What, except any one of a score of others from the same book, could give a more admirable condensed example of sophistication than the passage I have quoted from _The Green Hat_? The narrator introduces you to two ladies--for no reason at all except your amusement and his own. One lady has a title, the other has not. Excellent! He--I have to call him ‘he’ because I do not remember that his name is once mentioned in the book--pokes good-humoured fun at both, but more especially at the one with a title, and then goes on innocently (_innocently!_) to reveal the fact that he comes from the lower classes and does not know how to ride. You will go far to find a rarer expression of sophistication. For--do you not see?--the narrator, at his ease in the homes of the great, is smiling at class, is actually smiling at riding. This is, by consummate inversion, raising snobbishness to a fine art. And all in such high spirits.

You do not get the high spirits in the two passages I have quoted from a rather long marital conversation in _Some Do Not ..._ (you will look for them in vain in that novel); but you are given a very pretty example of sophistication nevertheless. Sylvia Tietjens is of a most awfully good family, and her husband of an even better one. People in society are not, by plebeians, supposed to throw things at one another. Sylvia does throw something--a plate of food--at her husband. Good! Moreover, it hits him. But observe! He does not upset the dining-room table and hit her back. He remains perfectly calm. And as for Sylvia, she drifts slowly towards the enormous mirror over the fireplace (good touch, that!) and remarks that she is bored! bored! Here, too, you are high in the scale of sophistication. For it is obvious that to commit a breach of manners, to do something that simply is not done, and then only to feel bored, is far more sophisticated than to break one of the ten commandments, usually the seventh, in the same spirit. Also I call your attention in passing to the contents of the plate that Sylvia threw--two cold cutlets in aspic and a few leaves of salad. At once elegant and efficient.

The second passage, too, is admirable. The words ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ are not popularly supposed to be addressed by a gentleman to his wife; nor is the wish that she may rot in hell. Yet when Sylvia suggests to her husband that, to ensure their mutual happiness, he ought to have addressed her in this manner, he says reasonably: ‘That’s, of course, true.’ Which is all the more to his credit in that for twenty pages his uniform has been dripping with oil from the salad that hit his shoulder.

Here, too, you perceive, you get inversion. These characters outrage, and thereby show themselves above, the conventions. They always react to stimuli in the opposite way from which average people react. They are violent when we should expect them to be well-bred, and serene when we expect them to be violent. Another example: to ingenuous people the disease called syphilis is a shameful thing, to be considered with horror and never to be mentioned aloud; to average people it is an aesthetically disgusting malady and therefore not an available subject for conversation. But the characters in sophisticated novels talk about syphilis as carelessly as though they were talking of a family-tree.

But is there not in this, you may by now inquire, just a little monotony? Once the trick is apparent, is it not almost as wearisome to watch a man invariably do the unexpected thing as to watch him do the expected? There is. Oh, it is! It is more wearisome. Because when the expected thing is done for any reason more emotional than mere habit it is significant of something other than individual dullness; it has roots that penetrate down into the dark earthy past of a whole race. Whereas to do invariably the unexpected thing, in order to show oneself superior and startle an audience, is significant of nothing at all; beneath such behaviour is emptiness.

Emptiness, indeed, yawns beneath the literature of sophistication. There is no probing of truth below the glitter. There cannot be, since the glitter is achieved through a superior disregard for truth. One would not mind this if the literature of sophistication set out only to be elegant amusing nonsense. (And I ought, in justice, to say here that if Mr. Ronald Firbank were somewhat more amusing, his contribution to such literature might fulfil that requirement). But too often it pretends to be investigating truth. And this pretence, even though in some cases it signify only a crowning sophisticated inversion, is impertinent and annoying.

_The Green Hat_ lies open before me at the page of press comments which the publisher has seen fit to append. I read: ‘_The Green Hat_ is the novel of the year.’ ... ‘The most memorable novel I have read during the past year.’ ... ‘I call it the finest novel of the last five years.’ ... ‘Heavens! what a lot that man knows about men and women--especially women.’

If after this broadside one feels slightly giddy one should not hold it against Mr. Arlen, who of course is not responsible and who distinctly calls _The Green Hat_ a romance; but one would have thought that even reviewers might have had a little more insight than this into what they had pleasurably read.

For, leaving on one side the delightful manner of the book, consider the material of which it is cleverly built. What and whom have we got here? The identical material of those interminable melodramas which the French (probably in an impotent attack on the tyrants of their national life) call ‘literature for concierges,’ and which in England was dear to the hearts of Ouida’s public. A glossy world of high society; some one (just as in _Under Two Flags_, and in how many other long-forgotten romances) assuming, for quite inadequate reasons, some one else’s sin and suffering bravely as an outcast until a third person blurts out the truth (the original touch being that in _The Green Hat_ the victim is the heroine instead of the hero, that she suffers from a husband’s syphilis instead of from a brother’s embezzlement, and that she dies at the end of the book); the cruel father separating youthful lovers who never, never forget one another (though, for the sake of modernity, during their separation the heroine, not the hero, leads a scandalous life--which, mind you, is never described, since its reality would have been squalid) and come together at last, when, in a final triumphant burst of renunciation, the heroine surrenders her lover to his wife and commits suicide. Sheer melodrama, as false, as quite properly false, as _Scènes de la Vie de Bohème_ or _Scaramouche_--precisely that sort of thing, in fact. And the characters: can you _see_ Hilary, or Guy, or Napier, or Venice? Have they three dimensions? Can you walk around them? Of course not. You’re not (I give Mr. Arlen credit for intending) supposed to be able to. And Iris, the radiant, the well-beloved, what is Iris? What but a very young man’s dream of a woman--experience plus innocence, a prostitute with the soul of a virgin? Go back a generation and you will find her in Mr. Le Gallienne’s _The Quest of the Golden Girl_.

Well and good. I have no objection to any of this. I enjoyed the book immensely. But, please, let us not take it for something else than it is.

I know almost nothing about Mr. Arlen, I have never even seen his photograph; yet I feel a pleasant personal liking for him. He provided me with an amusing book couched in a delightful style; and I do not for a moment believe that he himself takes it more earnestly than I do or considers it anything other than an agreeably up-to-date fairy-tale. If I have pointed out that the material of which it is constructed appears to me melodrama, not drama, sentimentality, not sentiment, artifice, not life, it is only because I wished to express my opinion that this is true of all the literature of sophistication, which--not here, but elsewhere--frequently presents itself as something more significant.

A reading of _Some Do Not ..._ does not leave me with a similar affection for its author. I cannot escape the feeling that Mr. Ford takes that book hard! hard! and that in it he set out to write a masterpiece.

To begin with, there is the style. We have often been told that Mr. Ford is a master of style; and so, in truth, he is. But of what use is style all alone by itself? The style of _Some Do Not ..._ is the grand style, simple, sonorous, purged of affectation, well suited to such a novel as _War and Peace_; but it is not the right style for _Some Do Not_.... Indeed, in my opinion, no style is the right style for that novel. _Some Do Not ..._ has for me all the defects of the literature of sophistication, with none of its virtues. It is false and pretends to be true; it is artificial without being witty; it is romance without glamour; it is essentially literary; it is without any more sense of humour than that required to keep it from becoming ridiculous; it has not a touch of spontaneity; it is as dreary as it is well done.

In a negative way the thing is perfect--ever and ever so careful. Mr. Ford introduces an incredible Irish priest by saying that he ‘had a brogue such as is seldom heard outside old-fashioned English novels of Irish life’--thereby protecting himself from the start; he would have been incapable of writing ‘across the _breast_ of her dark _dress_’; and it goes without saying that in his creditably meagre use of foreign words he adopts none of the original spellings that star Mr. Arlen’s romance (_aristocracie_, _giggolo_, and the like). Mr. Ford’s prose is compact, sober, and restrained. But, since this is true, it becomes the more important to discover what it is all about.

I am unable at present to obtain a copy of _If Winter Comes_ (one of the advantages that I neglected to chronicle in the essay on Living Abroad); but I am struck by the similarity between the plot of Mr. Hutchinson’s novel, as I remember it, and that of _Some Do Not ..._ Mark Something-or-Other was a man whom the world in general regarded with indifference as a failure, and for whose excellent work somebody else was always getting the credit, but whom a few really fine spirits reverenced. So was Christopher Tietjens. Each was unhappily married, though (_If Winter Comes_ not being a sophisticated novel) Mark’s wife was merely stodgy and insensitive to her husband’s whimsical sweetness (bless her heart! she had all my sympathy), while Christopher’s Sylvia was--oh, dear me! Each hero loved another lady, really appreciative and good, who was eager to sacrifice, in Mark’s case her husband (unappreciative devil _he_ was, too!), in Christopher’s her virginity. Each hero refused the gift. (‘Some do not’ ... do that kind of thing). In neither case did the hero’s wife--or any one else except those few fine spirits--believe in the refusal. Each, instead of getting himself profitably _embusqué_, slipped off unassumingly to the war and was badly hurt. Each slipped back home again to take up modestly and wearily the old round--a good deal hampered in this by all those _embusqués_ who had pushed ahead in the meantime. Each, for no obvious reason, became a social pariah, was slandered and fairly hounded by the world in general--but not, of course, in the sophisticated novel, to the point of general hysterics reached in _If Winter Comes_. The endings, naturally, are different. Mark’s wife divorces him, the other lady’s husband is conveniently killed in France, and the lovers are felicitously united; Christopher Tietjens’ wife does not divorce him, he will not become Valentine’s clandestine lover, and he slips off again, even more unassumingly than before, to the war--presumably to be killed.

Here, as unmistakably as in _The Green Hat_, we have the artificial stuff of melodrama. Hardly, since Richardson’s _Pamela_, has such feverish importance as in _Some Do Not ..._ been attached to the question of whether a man and a woman will or will not have sexual relations. The last two hundred pages of the book are virtually devoted to this problem, and to its answer--‘Some do not.’ Personally, I didn’t care in the least. Let them, if they wanted to, or not, only, for heaven’s sake, let them and every one else stop talking about it! What possible difference could it make to me?

I am aware that I have written about Mr. Ford’s novel in an insufficiently cool manner; but the truth is (as you may have guessed) that the book exasperates me. All this cheap sensationalism masquerading as a serious study of life! _If Winter Comes_ was atrocious, but it was too silly to be excessively annoying. By the time one reached the piled-up anguish of the court-room scene one was in the best of spirits. But _Some Do Not ..._ is too carefully done to be silly. Its material is that of any ten-twenty-thirty melodrama; but its style is that of _Madame Bovary_. It arouses the same distaste as in the fairy-tale the vulgar servant wench who had dressed herself up as the princess.

Even so, I have perhaps not accounted adequately for my conviction that _Some Do Not ..._ is fundamentally false. The stuff of melodrama sometimes is the stuff of life, as it is sufficient to read the daily press to discover; and occasionally a great genius builds up truth out of just such material. He does this, of course, by creating real characters. Once a character comes alive, the most improbable things may happen to him, and no one cares--or doubts them. But Mr. Ford is not a genius, and his characters are not real. He describes them neatly and pungently; he even visualises them for us, until they stand out as sharply as the waxwork figures at Madame Tussaud’s. But that is the end of it. They will not come to life. And even if Mr. Ford were the genius that he is not, they could not come to life in that stifling atmosphere of sophistication, where effect is everything and one eye is always on an audience. But then, if Mr. Ford were a genius he would not give us that atmosphere; he would have something too important to say to trouble with anything so small, superficial and glittering as sophistication.

The truth about the literature of sophistication is, I think, that, since it is at bottom a form of showing off, it can have no dealings with truth. In his choice of material the sophisticated writer selects what is false--not, like that occasional genius, for some other reason than its falsity, or for no reason at all, but precisely because it is false, and therefore sure of an easy effect. There is tawdriness in this, of course. I wonder whether there is not a trace of still another quality. Children especially delight in showing off. Can it be that there is something a little ingenuous in sophistication?

MEDITATIONS ABOUT WOMEN