Chapter III: Part 3

It is doubtless wrong for any except the very young to make generalizations, because nobody else believes in them--least of all in the ones he himself makes. But it is great fun, and, paradoxically, the fun increases in direct proportion to the maker’s disbelief, I suppose because his generalizations thus tend more and more to become light-hearted taunts flung, dustwise, in the face of a chaotic universe. Byron enjoyed defying God, which indicated that he had a God to defy; your modern sceptic thumbs his nose at emptiness, which is at least as brave of him. And of all generalizations that such a man can make those about women are the most entertaining to him. For, having by his time of life discovered that, save for a small matter of physical formation, women are almost precisely like men, it becomes for him the more amusing to unearth or invent differences explaining that ‘almost,’ and to magnify them and build them up into something artistic that would be a beautiful explanation of life--if life were only like that. Thus, I do not believe in any of the generalizations that follow, but I think it would be quite pleasant if they were true.

_Why do Men generalize especially about Women?_

But that is so simple. Because of their overweening vanity that will not allow them to admit that a subject on which they spend ninetenths of their thoughts can in itself be other than a rich subject full of mystery and significance. Having briefly settled this, I now go on to my own instructive considerations on women, which begin with an inquiry into

_Their Untruthfulness._

Men are to be found who frequently tell the truth on principle, and those are quite common who habitually tell the truth because, though they would prefer to lie when lying would be advantageous, something prevents them from doing so, they stammer, grow red, and are forced back on truth in spite of themselves. Women only tell the truth when lying is unprofitable, and never on principle. This is because women have not got principles. Men, not they, are idealists; they only pretend to be idealists in eras when that is what men want them to be. They live among facts, and are bored or amused by abstractions, the making of which they tolerantly consider only one more of the childish games, like curling or pinochle, men delight to play at; which, indeed, it is. Men generalize incessantly about women, but women do not generalize about men. They take men individually as they come--if they do. Also they never experience any difficulty in telling a lie; on the contrary, they look more candid then than at other times. This is, again, because they do not see why truth should be any more important than falsehood, because almost their chief preoccupation is to keep men quiet and happy, and because they believe in doing everything as well as it can be done.

_Their Courage._

Every one says that women are braver than men, and perhaps they are, but this is due to their lack of imagination. Suffering to them means simply suffering, whereas to men it means suffering plus the agonized preliminary picture of suffering. A dentist, in whose clutches a woman is notoriously brave, a man a shuddering coward, does not really hurt one a tenth as much as a man beforehand fancies he is going to hurt and at the moment fancies he is hurting. Too much awe is felt (by men) for what women go through at child-birth. Child-bearing is doubtless unpleasant for a woman, but it is infinitely worse for her husband, who sits in an atrocious hospital parlour and conjures up horrors. Women can have six children in six successive years and suffer detriment only to their figure; after the same experience their husbands are grey-haired tottering wrecks.

But let us be thorough. Let us make no assertion about women that we do not investigate. I have mentioned and therefore must consider

_Their Lack of Imagination._

This is akin to their inaptitude for abstractions, but, whereas they despise abstractions, they admire imagination and would like to possess it. But they do not possess it. A woman can readily take a fact and, with her gift of untruthfulness, develop it into another different fact or even into a firework-shower of facts; she cannot, as occasionally a man can do, place it and other facts together and build a cathedral. Women are far better observers than men, but they are never first-rate creative artists, hardly creative artists at all, either in cooking or in dressmaking, in painting or in literature, and (with the exception of Emily Brontë, who was a miracle) those who have come closest to being so were very mannish women. George Sand wore trousers, and Lewes’s unprintable physiological remark about George Eliot is well known. The excuse women give for this--that they have always been held back by men and have only recently begun to come into their own--is, and they know it to be, absurd. Women, at least in western countries, have always done whatever they wished with men. For two centuries they directed the political conduct and even the wars of the leading nation in Europe--and a pretty mess they made of it.

I repeat: women can report but not create. A man’s best work in art is almost always based on what he has imagined rather than experienced (witness, among the great and the near-great, Tolstoy and Stephen Crane); a woman’s, never. Women, since they have a love of facts and an appreciation of form, make quite creditable artists when they stick to what they have observed; when they essay to do more than this they fall heavily to earth. Thus, when Miss Willa Cather confines herself to describing that section of America which she knows at first-hand, we read her with interest; when, in the last part of _One of Ours_, she attempts to throw herself imaginatively into something she has not experienced, the result is so poor and false as to be not ludicrous but painful; the reader actually blushes. Miss Katherine Mansfield, Miss Dorothy Richardson, Miss Stella Benson, Mrs. Edith Wharton, all observe acutely--and do nothing more, and all are quite creditable artists. It is not very important to be a quite creditable artist.

On the other hand, one could almost wish that all critics of literature were women. The criticisms of even stupid women are worth attention, while those of intelligent women are admirable and suggestive. They have a way of going directly to the heart of the matter. Their preoccupation with facts makes them unerring judges of the truth or falsity of a situation, and their wistful respect for imagination makes them at once aware of even its shadowy presence. Nowhere do they display more clearly than in the criticism of a book

_Their Intuition._

Much nonsense has been written about this by men, who have chosen to consider it something miraculous, outside the laws of nature. It is, of course, nothing of the sort and would not be half so interesting if it were. The gift of intuition is merely the ability to think so swiftly that one’s thought barely grazes the intermediate steps in the process and appears to an outsider, and often even to oneself, to leap immediately from the initial fact to the final conclusion. Far from being contrary to logic, intuition is the most perfect example of logic. The flying thought must keep straight as an arrow to its course, disregarding instantly all irrelevancies. And the fact that women probably do possess the gift more commonly than men is the clearest disproof of the silly accusation that they are illogical. They are, it is true, illogical in argument, but that is because they do not care for or respect argument for its own sake (another silly game) but only as a practical means to an end, so that when it is going against them they shift their ground shamelessly and thereby infuriate or delight their masculine antagonists according to the latter’s emotional attitude toward them.

There are several excellent reasons why women should be more intuitive than men. One is that they are not led astray by imagination or fancy, another that they are more pragmatic, a third that those occupying so-called subordinate business positions (such as stenographers, among whom intuition is amazingly common) have better trained minds than their employers. It is largely a matter of concentration.

_Their Morals._

This is a delicate subject that I would avoid but for its extreme importance.

Men are essentially moral beings. That is, when they behave badly, as they generally do, they always feel that this is not the way to behave--in short, that there _is_ a way to behave. Women have no such conviction. A great number of them, possibly a majority, always behave ‘well’ because they have been trained to do so and have never experienced an emotion strong enough to compel them to break the habit, but there is no personally felt principle behind such virtue. Accordingly, they are at heart neither moral nor immoral, but a-moral. Husbands certainly ‘deceive’ their wives more frequently than wives their husbands, because a man’s opportunities are greater, his risk of detection is smaller, and his punishment, when he is detected, less, but an erring husband has always a sense of guilt that is absent from an erring wife. Marauding lovers themselves are often shocked by their mistresses’ insouciance and total lack of remorse. They would have a woman do wrong for their sake, but they would also have her conscious of wrong-doing. Perhaps this ridiculous desire is in part due to men’s vanity, which would have the sacrifice made for their sake as great as possible. In any case, the desire is disappointed. The one sacrifice that women do not make for men is a moral sacrifice. They have heard much talk about evil, just as a person born deaf may have read much about music, but they have no more real understanding of evil than he has of music. A wicked act is simply one which the doer feels to be wicked. Accordingly, women can, and often do, pass unscathed, unstained and fresh through experiences that would brand men’s faces as evil.

_A Reservation._

It will by this time have become clear that when I write of women I do not usually mean the great sheep-like multitude of women who live their lives through more or less according to the rules taught them in childhood, but cultivated civilized women. This I feel to be not only justifiable but essential. How would it be possible to write of the capacities of women, and then spend one’s time on those in whom such capacities remain latent and unrealized? Not Babbitt but Roosevelt is called the typical American, because in Roosevelt, however rare an example he may have been, one perceives the complete development of characteristics that are innate, but remain undeveloped, in most Americans.

However, it is necessary to bear this reservation (if you can call it that) in mind when reflecting on the foregoing section of this essay; otherwise the reader might be puzzled by the seemingly contradictory existence of numerous noisy ladies engaged in combating Vice. Let them go. Poor things, they are rotten with complexes! thwarted souls, chafing (even though they do not know it) over their own inability to expand, and hating the whole world for their discomfort, as a child hates the table against which he has bumped his head! An excellent subject for a novel, they must be summarily dismissed from a brief essay.

_Their Fastidiousness._

If women are not inhibited by moral law from what men deem wrong-doing, they often are by their fastidiousness--namely, when wrong-doing is at the same time gross and ugly (which is not nearly always the case). They have a genuine and profound appreciation of fineness, suavity and perfection. Neither is this, as men often assume, equivalent to the mere love of luxury. An indigent girl yields to a wealthy Don Juan not because he surrounds her with the comforts of riches but because he surrounds her with smoothness. She obtains a quite different and much finer satisfaction than he from his spacious silent motor car and from the polished restaurants to which he takes her. There is something hypnotic to her in the charm of elegance. The setting means a great deal to women, far more than men recognize. For while it does not matter so very much to them what they do, it matters tremendously how they do it. In this love of perfect setting they are undoubtedly right and centuries in advance of men. An act in itself--any act--is a bare and meagre thing; done fittingly, at the proper time, in a perfectly right setting, it draws upon the richness of a thousand seemly associations. Man’s world is the barren childish world of an African savage; it is hard to understand how women, who are civilized and grown-up, can endure it.

_Their Maturity._

It is banal to say that men never grow up, but one should not be afraid to make a banal remark if it also happens to be true, and this, alas, is true without qualification. Men are hopeless babies. Not only do they delight in primitive things, but their whole attitude toward life is immature and absurd. They expect a great deal from life, and are hurt when they do not get it. You see them looking out at life with wide pained eyes, in precisely the same way a child looks out of the window at the rain that is spoiling his holiday.

Women expect a great deal less from life--once they have passed their spoiled girlhood, when they expect to receive everything and give nothing. They become disillusioned very early--as soon, in fact, as they have recognized men’s essential blundering stupidity and weakness. How else could it be with them, who know that they depend on men, yet know what men are? How can a woman look up to some one who, instead, looks up to her in the most infantile manner? The cave-man ideal is a very young girl’s ideal; the cave-man at home must be as helpless a baby as any other man. If a man has a canker on his tongue he fancies it a cancer; if he has catarrh from over-smoking he fancies it tuberculosis; if some little thing goes wrong with his house it appears to him an international catastrophe. Respect creatures of this sort? Lean on them? Broken reeds! Be kind to them, indulge them, pet them back into equanimity, yes; lean on them, no.

However, the disillusionment induced by a perception of men’s sorry nature is not sufficient to account for women’s mature attitude toward life. Indeed, one would expect it to result in their becoming embittered, soured, exasperated; whereas all civilized women are mellow, amazingly tolerant and--oh, just grown-up! I think this is because they do not start with ideals, see them go smash, and try wretchedly to build up other ideals from the fragments; because they do not believe in abstractions but only in facts. A man rejects the innumerable facts that will not fit into his abstractions; a woman rejects no facts at all. This makes her world far richer than his. And if it is not glorified, neither is it falsified, by the radiance of an ideal. A woman, in short, since she accepts everything, comes to know a vast deal more about life than a man. At the same time she is calmer about it. She does not credit this mass of material with any hidden meaning, and therefore does not worry herself irascible by trying helplessly to find one. Some scraps of the material are pleasant, some disagreeable, and it is all very interesting, so the more of it the better--only there is nothing to get excited about. I confess to admiring this attitude extremely. Theoretically it may be less noble than the masculine attitude, but it gets far better results, even on character, since it cultivates kindliness, tolerance and sympathy, grown-up virtues rare to find among idealists.

This matter (now, I trust, clear) of the respective youth and maturity of the sexes reveals a number of gross popular misconceptions. For example: a good many elderly women are attracted to young men, and all elderly men are attracted to young girls (though some of them conceal it). The former phenomenon is popularly considered ludicrous and pathetic, the latter something satyr-like, disgusting and corrupt. As a matter of fact, the two judgments should be reversed. There is, if just as much, no more sensuality in an elderly man’s feeling for a young girl than in a young man’s. He simply feels what he has always felt. He is still the callow sentimentalist that he was at twenty; he has not grown up. On the other hand, an elderly woman’s feeling for a young man is a thrilling incestuous combination of sensuality and motherliness.

_The Unanswerable Riddle._

It has always pleased men, who are simply incorrigible, to find women (of whom they are apt to speak as ‘woman’) mysterious. I once knew a man who asserted that there was nothing more mysterious about women than about men (and God knew there was nothing mysterious about them!) except that every once in a while they went temporarily mad, at which moments no sensible man would pay any attention to them, insanity being without interest. There is something to be said for this simple estimate; still, women do seem to me to have one profound secret of which no explanation appears. Puzzled, I return to it again and again. How, in heaven’s name, can they put up with men--and why do they?

They do not need to. By now, vast multitudes of women have demonstrated that even in an economic world organized exclusively by men they can hold their own with the latter, and they have stripped from the puerile business of making money much of the silly hieratic pretence of importance with which men surrounded it. Almost any competent stenographer is dispassionately aware that she could run her employer’s business quite as well as he runs it, frequently better. And yet women continue to marry. Why do they? Any one who has tried both, knows that it is far easier, as well as more agreeable, to go to a nice, clean, quiet office for the day than to run a house, even with the supposed assistance of a servant or two; while, as for having a home, a woman could have one quite as well without a man, since she must make it in any case.

There is no difficulty in understanding why a man marries. He gets a great deal for his money--a home, a housekeeper, some smoothness, a little fineness, the convenient inexpensive satisfaction of his sexual desires, a kind mature companion to spoil him and protect him against the harsh buffets of a world eternally different than he childishly and sentimentally fancies it.

But a woman? What does she get in return for marriage? Nothing, so far as I can see, save the satisfaction (at moments not of her choosing) of _her_ sexual desires. Surely it cannot be for this alone that women marry. That would be like buying a whole house for the sake of one picture in it. In fact, in this matter women have, potentially, an immense advantage over men. Men, the childish dreamers, will (everywhere save in pure America) follow unknown attractive women about the streets of a city for hours, murmuring compliments from time to time, hoping against hope for some response. It is pathetic. But think of the field that would be open to women if they chose to behave in this manner! Even venal professionals are not without some success. The entire male sex would be at the service of a really ‘nice’ woman; for who ever heard of a man rejecting any woman’s advances, however indifferent he might be to her? His vanity would not let him. A man can have only an inconsiderable fraction of the women he desires; a woman could have any or all of the men who pleased her--and with the minimum of effort. She could select a lover at just the moment when she desired a lover. Equally, if she desired a child she could select a promising father for the child, and, supposing the combination not to work out so well as she hoped, could next time select another. True, at present such behaviour might be looked at askance by the most meticulous; but women could alter this attitude to a sensible one at any time they pleased.

Instead, they elect to marry. Oscar Wilde was wrong to call ‘woman’ ‘a sphinx without a secret.’ Women have their secret, and this is it.

_Ministering Angels._

Well, marry they do and will probably continue to do despite my advice. It offers a field for useless but entertaining conjecture. Do they marry because they like to try everything? Or because they are sorry for men? Or because it requires more energy to repel a man’s repeated advances than is worth devoting to anything, either good or bad? At any rate, one thing is certain: unless they marry very, very young, it can hardly be because they expect much of marriage. They cannot fail to know that they must give a great deal and receive very little.

What they do give is amazing. It makes me feel almost as reverently toward them as Charles Dickens in his emotional moments. They are so very kind to men. They habitually smooth out all those difficulties, such as servant troubles, baby troubles, household difficulties, difficulties of the kitchen, which men fatuously call ‘the little problems of existence,’ not seeing that they are gigantic as compared with their own meagre business troubles. They are extraordinarily gentle with their husbands in illness or even in fancied illness, rarely showing any resentment at the impatience with which _they_ were treated when _they_ were ill. They put up with a turbulence, grossness and lack of all sense of what is seemly, that outrages their fastidiousness; they put up with men’s bragging, with men’s vanity, with their ridiculous assumption of gravity and importance (precisely like that of children dressed up in their parents’ clothes). In company they listen to their husbands relate the same, same, same jokes, and, instead of shrieking, smile, as though that were the first time they, too, had heard those jokes. They cajole and caress men out of infantile bad tempers, the logical cure for which would be a spanking. Themselves liking to eat little and delicately, they allow--nay, assist--men to eat much and grossly, and they watch the creatures’ mood change, in the process, from irascibility to mellow tenderness, and merely smile pleasantly, with scarcely perceptible irony. Have I really said that they are not artists? They are consummate artists to endeavour to work in such a hostile medium, to work with such material. But, no, they are not artists; for they do not do anything with the material, not really, not anything permanent. Still, that is not their fault, either. No one could, not even God.

Ah, well, it is not possible that women endure all this, do all this (both so unnecessarily), out of altruism, sheer self-sacrifice. Earth is not heaven. They must have some obscure, if probably simple, reason. In the meantime men flourish and grow fat.

LEGEND

Under the influence of that gentle optimism which once upon a time suffused the world with a warm twilight glow, I used to believe that in the very long run truth would out, and that accordingly history was an exact science. Conceding cheerfully that a veracious history of our own period or of other periods close behind it was impossible, I yet took it for granted that, given time enough, falsehoods and misconceptions would be weeded out and documented objective truth established. This condition, I assumed, had already been perfectly achieved in the history of the various western nations up to about the period of the French Revolution, which still lay in a sort of gradually clearing penumbra.

Now that the attractive twilight glow has given place to a bleak grey light (whether or not of dawn I have no idea, but, if so, of a singularly unpleasant November dawn), I have begun to question, among other things, that comfortable belief. And, questioned, it seems to me to reveal at once certain lacunae and incongruities that make it appear extremely dubious and lead me to wonder that I ever accepted it so unthinkingly.

For example, while, judging from the past, anything like a definitive history of the late war will probably not be written for two hundred years or so, from tendencies apparent even to-day it is already possible to predict that such a history will deal with the struggle coolly as the result of clear-cut national rivalries, largely economic. Thus history has explained earlier wars, and thus it is, as yet gropingly, preparing to explain this one.

Now any man who at maturity lived through the period from 1914 to 1918 must be aware that such an explanation, however fully documented, will not be a complete and truthful explanation of the war. In retrospect the war will seem, from its results, to have been an inevitable, coldly logical affair; but the fact remains that it was not that, as we who witnessed it know. To begin with, many hundreds of thousands of young men went willingly into the war, though aware that they were going to almost certain death. That is simply not done in behalf of an economic conflict. A considerable proportion of those young men went to war because they believed with all their heart that they were to fight for an ideal. That final history will doubtless ignore their emotional attitude. To-day, when it is not yet possible to ignore the attitude, the tendency among interpreters of the war is to discount it as of no importance, to brush all these dead thousands aside as deluded--mere tools of the real forces that brought on the war. But unless one is to adopt the absurd belief that economic laws, nationalistic rivalries and so forth, are objective things with a life of their own, instead of what they obviously are--expressions of the minds of men assembled in groups, it is clear that if these thousands of young men were deluded they must have been deluded by some person or group of persons.

But if one thing should be apparent by now to any one who lived through those four trying years, it is that the war had no villain or villains responsible for it. There were, indeed, fierce economic and other rivalries between the groups of men called nations, but no one, literally no one, intended or devised that catastrophe. The peoples blundered into war. It was a vast, senseless, chaotic mêlée. History may, and doubtless will, write it down as something clear and logical; in truth it was neither one nor the other. People rather fortuitously but none the less rigidly assembled in groups were at odds with people assembled in other similar groups, about trade, world markets, the congestion of population, and the like; but they were far less clearly so than history is going to give them credit for being, and their being so was only half the story. The other half was emotion. Neither, given the bewilderment over the war, when it came, of positively every one save the regular army officer (whose mind, if you can call it that, is not subject to bewilderment), can I believe that within each comprehensive national group smaller groups of people pulled strings and, callously exploiting the majority, deliberately brought on the war for their own advantage. The result may prove to be the same as though they had done that, but they simply did not. They were as bewildered and upset and emotional as the others. History, I begin to perceive, cares really only for results--with, perhaps, neat, post-factum causes; and that is why I grow sceptical of it, since a result without its causes--all of them--is not truth and lacks significance.

Presumably, then (still judging by the past), what we are going to have a couple of centuries hence is a cold, neat, logical, definitive history of the World War, with, running along beside it, a body of literature patriotically chronicling, exalting and deforming its episodes of heroism. And never the twain shall meet, any more than East and West, Highbrow and Lowbrow, mind and matter. And which of the two will be the falser it is hard to say. The former will not explain truly why people made the war, and the latter will _not_ tell what they truly felt. Each will fail even in its own chosen province. A novel like _War and Peace_ may be written that will come amazingly close to the real truth, but the historians will sniff at it because some of its facts are inaccurate and because it is a novel, and the addicts of the patriotic literature will detest and condemn it because it does not picture their ancestors as heroes, but as bewildered mediocre individuals like themselves.

It is only of late that I have begun to distrust history, but this patriotic literature I have, ever since I was old enough to think, disliked and found depressing. Depressing because it is so sweet, wide-eyed and simple, giving always somehow the effect of being written in words of one syllable; because it attributes to the men whose deeds it recounts the minds of children--not real children, at that; and because it would reduce the obscurely motivated happenings of this rich, confused, infinitely interesting world to the insipid level of a Sunday-School story or a play by Schiller. However, it is not very important. Despite its use of real names, people can hardly accept it as real--that is, as in any way related to their own lives. And I should not have devoted even a paragraph to it but for one thing that it does, from which comes its only strength and in which lies its only danger. This is: to attempt to exploit legend.

A legend, like a gigantic shadow with blurred edges, forms about every man who has been of great importance in his day. For that matter, a legend forms about every significant period in history, too. There is a Greek legend and an Italian Renaissance legend, just as there is a Socrates legend and a Leonardo legend. But the personal legend is the less vague and the more important. When a man’s influence on his fellows is impressive, and often when it is not, a legend grows up about him, even during his lifetime. There was certainly a Roosevelt legend long before Roosevelt’s death, and there is already a Coolidge legend to-day. For the most part these legends eventually fade, flicker and go out (there was even a Blaine legend once upon a time), but when a man’s existence has modified that of millions and left an impress on events, his legend grows and solidifies, rather than diminishes, as the years pass. Until finally it becomes so strong that it alone has life; you cannot possibly get at the vanished individual for the impenetrable legend surrounding his memory.

‘Surrounding his memory’ is perfectly accurate; for the legend is not equivalent to the memory. It is, indeed, something quite different, as some of those who knew the dead hero intimately often struggle in vain to show us. Yet in their struggle there is a kind of perplexity; even these intimates become submerged by the legend, and get it all mixed up with their personal memories, so strong it is. The best example of which is to be found in the reminiscences of old men who actually knew Lincoln, since rarely about any one so recently dead has a permanent legend formed so compactly. It is as impossible to know what Lincoln truly was as to know what Washington or Napoleon was. No amount of newly unearthed documents can alter the legend or shake it.

For this is the strength of legend: that it is not thought, but feeling. When I know a man well I do not think of him as having dark hair, a straight nose, rather small eyes, and a stoop. His presence or the mention of his name produces in me a certain sensation that, so far as I am concerned, _is_ the man. My like or dislike for him, my opinion of his character, may be affected by what others tell me about him; but that sensation nothing can alter. It is of precisely the same kind as the sensation given me by a certain odour or a certain melody. It is unmistakable.

Something like this, legend gives. One says Lincoln, and a feeling, a sensation, springs up in the mind.

This emotion, this legend, the patriotic Sunday-Schoolish brand of literature attempts to exploit, and history attempts to ignore.

The former effort is, I have suggested, not without danger. (To what? Oh, I suppose, to truth, to sanity of mind). It would employ a strong, universally felt emotion for the purposes of a chronicle as falsely innocent as a fairy-tale. One might compare the effect of such exploitation to that of a moving-picture in colours. The colour values are all wrong, not thus do grass and a red gown look in sunlight; but there the grass actually is, waving, and through it in her false red gown actually walks the heroine. It is confusing. Even so, I do not think the danger very serious for any one with enough of a mind to be worth saving. The point of all this twaddle, plausible as the stuff may at first appear, is too naïve, too utterly unlike any conceivable expression of the reader’s own psychology.

The deliberate and persistent attempt of history to ignore legend is another and graver matter.

That the attempt should be made is perhaps natural. Legend is pure feeling, and historians distrust feeling, noting contemptuously how unfounded it usually is and how wide of the mark its conclusions more often than not appear to them, whose business it is to examine facts. Also, their minds being trained to weigh and measure, they are not interested in anything that cannot be weighed and measured.

All the same, they are wrong. Whether or not legend is something we should be better without, it exists. You cannot ignore something that is. And legend exists as solidly as the Battle of Waterloo. You cannot get through it or around it or behind it, and therefore you cannot dismiss it.

I admit that if I were an historian I should probably want to. Not only should I be disdainful (as I am, even without being an historian) of the tawdry foundationless legends spawning all about me, with their cheap slogans (‘Keep Cool with Cal!’), and apt to forget that the death-rate among legends is higher than that among Jews in Poland, but I should feel despairingly that to let oneself in for legend, to concede the necessity of considering feeling, would make the writing of history an enterprise too gigantic to be possible; and so, very likely, it is.

Nevertheless, history written, as it is, without knowledge and due consideration of emotion begins to appear to me a colossal falsehood. Men’s acts are three-fourths the product of emotions, and, no matter how false the emotions may have been, without intimate acquaintance with them you cannot rightly understand men’s behaviour. As for dismissing legend, the attempt would be insolent if it were not so hopeless. Legend has swayed more minds than has fact. Indeed, half the time it is legend that produces facts. The Napoleonic legend has had a hundred times more effect in shaping actual events than ever, for all his greatness, had Napoleon himself (who, moreover, exploited his own legend consummately). Dismiss it? ‘Wake Duncan with thy knocking!’

How legends arise would be a curious and fascinating study, very far from being so simple as one may at first fancy, with his attention focussed on the standardization of thought achieved by the daily press; for legends sprang up equally, and endured, long before printing was invented. But this is a side issue that the unfortunate historian may leave to some one else. Legend itself, once it is firmly established, he has no right to disregard. It is too important--I mean, actually important in its practical results.

To get an idea of _how_ important, observe what happens when a legend blows up. A perfect example of that phenomenon occurred not long since. With the discovery of the semi-official murder of Matteotti in Rome, and the revelations that followed, the Mussolini legend exploded and was gone, utterly. It had to go. Either Signor Mussolini was himself among the criminals or he was helpless against the machinations of a corrupt and evil clique. In either case, the legend of the ‘Duce,’ the super-man, the benevolent tyrant, wisely, righteously and firmly governing Italy for her own good, became untenable. There remained only Mussolini, the man. And, with the collapse of that legend, the whole strength, other than physical, of Fascismo evaporated. Yet it was only a silly little legend that, even left undisturbed, could not have lasted fifteen years.

In the last sentence you may discover an indication that, for my part, I distinguish between the value of ephemeral legends and that of legends which endure. So, in truth, I do. If the Mussolini legend and the Coolidge legend appear to me absurd aberrations that we should have been better without, tried and established legends, like the Lincoln or the Washington legend, seem to me of great value; I am not at all upset by the impossibility of getting through or behind them. They are, I fancy, of more importance than the men about whom they grew up. Not Lincoln himself, but that glowing Lincoln legend, sways multitudes, and sets, above all the cheap facts of actual politics, a standard of what, at his best, a President of the United States may and should be. There really is, incongruously and almost incredibly, a rough fundamental idealism displayed by a good many men in American public life, and, better, demanded of them by the mass of American citizens, that is largely due to the solid permanence of that legend. Not for anything would I see the legend vanish; which is fortunate, since it never will.

If I am right in this, that in the long run it is not a man but his legend that affects events and the natures of other men for good or evil, then it is of no importance that we cannot penetrate through it to the man himself and learn whether or not his legend falsifies his character. Nevertheless, the problem is a fascinating one, partly because it is insoluble, but chiefly, I fancy, because hidden in its depths lies that eternal question: ‘What is truth?’

My own undocumented theory is that an enduring legend does not falsify the individual about whom it has formed. When a man falls in love with a woman he has an exalted perception of her as something rare and wonderful, yet perfectly definite, concrete, individual. From no one else could he receive that particular sensation. When he was in love before, he received one, equally sharp, from another woman; but it was not this sensation. If it were, I should agree with those who consider the poor creature merely deluded. Since it is not, I am inclined to believe that he has obtained a fleeting glimpse of truth. Not the average daily truth about the person worshipped, but an unrealized and unrealizable yet more significant truth--a vision of what that person might become at her best and truest. Presently the emotion fades and is gone, either utterly or to return but faintly for an instant now and then, ever so rarely; but it was surely, in its moment, too sharp and clear a fact to have been without significance. It was actually, I fancy, a sort of intensification of the personality glimpsed, together with a stripping away of everything unessential.

A somewhat similar intensification and stripping away it is at least possible that legend, an enduring legend, gives. Seizing on the individual’s essentially personal dreams, evil or good, divined beneath a few of his inadequate acts, and exaggerating, or perhaps only intensifying, them, legend gives us these as the man. Probably that was not the way the individual appeared to himself. Probably no other individual ever saw him like that, unless, for a moment, his passionate lover or his passionate enemy. Yet that, says legend confidently, is what he was.

TRUTH AND FICTION IN ITALY

There is in most contemporary Italian fiction a limpness, flaccidity--I hardly know what to call it--which at its least offensive expresses a feeble despair, and at its worst becomes a whine. It is not the expression of a rugged pessimism; there is nothing rugged about it. Rather, it reveals a lack of vitality, a thin-bloodedness, the spirit one is accustomed to think of as ‘womanish,’ though, as a matter of fact, the women writers of Italy appear less guilty in this respect than the men. Grazia Deledda and even Annie Vivanti show more virility than most of their confrères, and there is gusto in the slap-stick prose of Matilde Serao, despite its appalling sentimentality. But Marino Moretti, a fine and sensitive writer, is only too clear an exponent of the fault, Panzini himself often succumbs to it, and even the late Federico Tozzi, cut off by early death from what promised to be real achievement, was far from guiltless.

Clear as the fault appears to me, and arousing, as it does, an exasperated distaste, it is difficult for me to make it clear to any one else. This is because it is at bottom the result of an attitude of mind, a conventionally accepted attitude of mind, rather than anything more definite. It is easy to lay an accusing finger on the concomitants, the specifically annoying tricks and habits that go with it (more obviously, of course, in third-rate writers, such as Teresah or Luciano Zuccoli): the tender mournful contemplation of something small and helpless, the employment of pity for its own sweet sake, the abuse of diminutives (‘he took her poor, emaciated, little hand in his’), etc., but the thing itself, the spirit behind all this, remains elusive, and will remain so until we have got at its source.

Whatever this may turn out to be, the characteristic is doubly obnoxious: it is obnoxious not only in itself, but also because it grossly misrepresents Italian life and the Italian spirit. It is true that there is a vast deal of sentimentality loose in Italy, always readily on tap, as it were, but this national sentimentality is a hearty thing, a wasted by-product of exuberant life, like the sticky yellow foam churned up by a tumultuous sea; not thin-blooded, careful, and mauve-coloured, like that of the printed page.

Italy is overflowing with life, perhaps even lawless with it; for the race is too much alive, individual by individual, to permit of successful organization, still less of being standardized either in behaviour or thought. The foreigner who has come to know Italy will have encountered various national traits that displease him as conflicting too much with those of his own country, but nowhere in the whole peninsula will he have found the grey devitalized dullness of Anglo-Saxon suburbia or the poetic musical languor popularly ascribed to the Italian race--why, I have no idea, unless because Neapolitans frequently sing at night and because _dolce far niente_ is the one Italian phrase with which all foreigners are acquainted. Misled in advance by a prolific and incredibly wayward literature, the foreigner, like a reversed Columbus, expects to find Cathay and instead discovers the New World. There are in Italians old, old traits that suddenly crop out at unexpected moments, there are roots that go down into an unfathomable past, but the spirit of the race is young, vivid, almost raw. Foreigners unacquainted with Italy were surprised by the phenomenon of Fascismo. No one with any knowledge of Italy can have been surprised either by Fascismo or by the sturdy opposition to it.

Nothing, in short, can be falser than the conception of Italy as a country of dreamers and idealists. On the contrary, the people, by and large, are matter-of-fact, hard-headed and practical; they like American bathrooms, central heating and the early operas of Verdi; I often wonder that no American business-man has had the acumen to open a branch five-and-ten-cent store in Italy. A full-blooded corkscrew at two lire, a hearty can-opener at one lira, would sell and sell and sell. Italians of my acquaintance fairly pore over the advertisements in the _Saturday Evening Post_; they would love the Sears-Roebuck catalogue.

Then, in the name of consistency, why this mournful emasculated prose?

Well, it is a long story. I think at bottom it goes back to the schools. At Harvard I went through a number of courses in English composition, in each of which I had to write a one-page theme every day and a three-page theme once a fortnight. It took me years to recover from the discipline, and I have an almost guilty feeling that even now when I have learned to write in my own way a Harvard professor would still cover my pages with red marks; but at least we were urged to write simply. Our rhetorical passages were ruthlessly stricken out; we were held down, even contemptuously, to a positive bareness of expression. ‘Say what you have to say, if anything, in as few words as possible’ was the message (only the word would never have been allowed) dinned into our ears. I still think it an excellent training.

In Italian schools, beginning with the most elementary, training in composition is diametrically the opposite. There is a model (and such a florid model!) for everything. Shall a sunset be described? (‘No!’ they would have said in an American school). Manzoni (who is never forgotten for a moment) has done this in just the right way on page 9007 of _I Promessi Sposi_. Base your description on his. Never, so far as I can learn, is the child told to describe, as well as he can, exactly and only what he sees. If Manzoni, however, were the only model, imitative Italian prose might be less rhetorical than it is and might contain some reflected vigour; but there are, to mention only two others, Silvio Pellico (who had a love affair in prison with a spider) and De Amicis, who wrote some tolerable books but who also wrote _Cuore_. _Cuore_ is given to every child as soon as the unfortunate creature is able to read, and as soon as he is able to write he is taught to copy its sentiments and style. There are more, and more nauseating, tears shed in _Cuore_ than in all the _Elsie_ books put together. Compared with it, _Immensee_, which, I am told, no German can, or anyway could some years ago, read without weeping, is as stony as the dictionary. I know of no other book so obscene as _Cuore_. No, I withdraw that statement. There is one worse book. It was written by some Englishwoman, is called _The Story of Pigling Bland_, and is about a dear little pig who fell in love with a dear little girl-pig, and gave her peppermints, and watched over her when she fell asleep; but I do not think that it is used as a text-book in English schools.

There are models even for letters to be written by a child to its parents. These are the sentiments the child should have; this is the way they should be expressed. I know a charming and intelligent woman who has a daughter of eighteen--like most Italian young girls, almost indistinguishable from American girls of her generation: hard, _chic_, slangy, fast, but without ever losing her head, not an ounce of tenderness in her. ‘See what a delightful letter Elena has written me from her school,’ said the mother proudly to me one day. I read the letter, aghast. ‘Beloved Mamma ... I think of you always, always ... I dream of the hour when we shall be reunited and I can press you again to my heart.’

Given this methodical corruption of minors, it is not strange that the prose style of the average mature Italian and of Italian journalism should be hopelessly verbose and weighted with rhetorical emotional platitudes that do not express the genuine feelings of the writer. For example, boxing matches have become very popular in Italy of late, and there is little perceptible difference between the Italian crowd at one of these and the crowd at an American fight. There is the same doggy masculine smell, the same blue haze of smoke drifting across the glare of the arc-lights above the ring, the same fierce excitement--nothing, in short, that could possibly have come out of _Cuore_. Such was the audience at a recent match in Milan when Bruno Frattini, the Italian champion, was defeated on points by Ted Lewis. But the newspaper account in the _Ambrosiano_ next day! ‘Could it be that Bruno, our Bruno, was defeated? For a moment we were silent, dazed. Our eyes were full of tears.’ I wish I had kept that reporter’s story. It was worth translating in full--only it would have demanded ten pages.

Here in this absurd instance, perhaps because it is so absurd, we somehow get a flash of insight into the origin of the problem. For even with a comment on school training I did not go deep enough. The real problem is to discover why mature, fairly intelligent Italians permit that kind of training to continue, and approve of its results. This, I think, is the answer: to an Italian life is pragmatic, art academic. The Italian takes life as it comes, with no theories about it, with no belief in its having a meaning; but for the printed word he has hard and fast rules. He does not think of art as an interpretation of life; he thinks of it as something quite separate. (But if you ask me why this should be true, I confess that I am beyond my depth and do not know--unless it is simply that the average Italian is too sceptical and matter-of-fact to believe any interpretation of life possible). Nowhere--not even in the America of ten years ago, where the majority of people struggled, as they must always struggle everywhere, to make a difficult living, but read sunny fairytales by Myrtle Reed and Eleanor Porter--nowhere have life and art been kept so distinct as they are still kept in Italy. It is grateful (especially to a writer) to discover that in Italy more esteem is felt for an author than for a millionaire, but it is saddening to discover, a little more gradually, that this is not because the author is held to know more about life than the millionaire, but that, instead, he is worshipped as the priest of an esoteric cult with a well-established ritual.

Here, however, it becomes necessary to point out a significant contrast between the Italian and the American attitude toward the arts. However far from considering them an interpretation of life, Italians have for the arts neither contempt nor kindly toleration, but a genuine reverent love. Literate Italians are passionately devoted to all the arts, and illiterate Italians to at least one--music. So that, in a sense, the arts do form an important part of virtually every Italian’s life--but a shut-off separate part. From this derives a tyranny over the arts, that could not possibly exist in America or England, where people do not feel strongly enough about them to desire to tyrannize over them. An American or an Englishman will listen timidly to music that he does not understand, or timidly read (or claim to have read) a book that he finds incomprehensible, or timidly and gravely walk through the halls of a picture show which, so far as he can see, reveals only insanity. For ‘people who know’ may presently announce that all these things are works of genius, and then where would he be if he had laughed at them or protested? And, anyway, what does it all matter? The Italian will throw aside the book with a curse, laugh with uproarious contempt at the pictures, and hiss the music into silence. He ‘knows what he likes.’ It is what he was brought up on; and that, and nothing else, is art. And it all matters to him very much indeed.