Chapter V (3)

Now, I ask you, did I do wrong? You may say that simple faith is all very well, but a man ought to live in the real world and know his way around. Otherwise he is incapable of handling the existing situation. He is compelled to evade uncomfortable facts. Very true. Quite right. Exactly so. But is it better to be able to face facts at the cost of being a nerveless skeptic, or to be something of a simpleton and yet a wholesome man of action, a man of will and character and pep? What is the good of knowing facts, especially unflattering and unpalatable facts, if it confuses you and upsets you and undermines everything you've been brought up to believe? What's the use? Voltaire may be all right in his way, but is his way the only way? Can we all be Voltaires?

If I stick up for good faith in the character of presidents, I know that there will be a bad comeback. I know the tricks of the skeptic. But even if my opponents use their ugliest arguments, am I therefore to give in to them? I refuse to admit that there is nothing else than to destroy a beautiful faith in the good that is everywhere.

What the skeptics do, of course, is to use the old argument of the war. They say: Yes, your fine brown-eyed trustful young aviator is a typical product of patriotism. And where were the prime examples of patriotism to be found? In Germany. He happens, in your instance, to believe in the divine office of the presidents. But it is much more characteristic of him to be on his knees to the Kaiser. Yet consider how one-sided you are. When he declares himself ready to die for the Kaiser you see the joke. You see the joke when he is pouring out his reverence over the Tsar of Russia or the Tsar of Bulgaria or the King of Greece. But when it comes to an American you say, "Oh, don't let's destroy this beautiful faith! How precious it is, how noble, how commendable! Hands off, please." And you act in the same way toward the Constitution or the Supreme Court. It's magnificent when the Germans come ahead with a perfectly good new constitution, model 1920. But we must stick to the brand of 1789, with the cow-catcher added in 1910. Hail to Our Iron Constitution! And hail to the Old Man's Home down in Washington where they hand out the uncontaminated economics that they themselves lisped at the Knees of the Fathers of Our Country. Straight from the source, these old men got their inspiration, and they are a credit to the early nineteenth century. You think we exaggerate your loyalty? You agree that the simple faith of young Germans and young Turks can be highly dangerous, but do you counsel unquestioned faith for young Americans?

That is the argument, rather ingenious in its way; but hardly likely to fool the intelligent, law-abiding, God-fearing citizen. Because no good American could admit for one instant that the cases are on all fours. America, after all, is a democracy. And when a young man starts out having faith in a democracy he is in an altogether different position from Germans and Turks and Bulgarians and Soviet Russians and people like that. A democracy, whatever its faults, is founded in the interests of all the people. It is unquestionable. Therefore simple faith in it is equivalent to simple faith in a first principle; and you cannot go behind first principles.

That, in the end, is the trouble with the skeptic. He thinks it is very clever to question the things that are of the light in just the same spirit that he questions things that are of the darkness. And of course he goes wrong. He is like a surgeon who cuts away the sound flesh rather than the diseased flesh. He is, in the evergreen phrase, de-structive not con-structive.

And so I am glad that I did not seek to disillusion my fine young aviator. If I had succeeded in disillusioning him, who can tell what the consequences might have been? We know that during the war there were grim duties to be performed by our young men--towns to be bombed where it took excessive skill to kill the men-citizens without killing the women and the children. If I had sapped this boy's faith even one pulsation, perhaps he would have failed in his duty.

You cannot be too careful how you lead people to rationalize. In this world there is rationalism and plenty of it. But is there not also a super-rationalism? And must we not always inculcate super-rationalism when we _know_ we possess the true faith?

THE SPACES OF UNCERTAINTY OR, AN ACHE IN THE VOID[3]

The floor, unfortunately, was phosphorus, so he had to pick his steps with care. But at last he came to a French window, which he opened, and sprang to a passing star. Star, not car. He was a poet, and that is what young poets do.

He had a pleasant physiognomy, as young men go. Unformed, of course--perhaps twenty minutes late and the hall only two-thirds full. But he was no longer young enough to hang his hat on the gas. He was from the East via Honey Dew, Idaho, but he had long resided with an aunt in Nebraska and so was a strong Acutist. He wore gray shirts and a lemon tie. At Harvard--he went to Harvard--he had opened his bean with considerable difficulty and crushed in a ripe strawberry of temperament. So that he could never stop himself when he beheld a passing star.

The motion was full, with significant curves. It made him a little air-sick at first, but he preferred air-sickness. He made no compromise with the public taste for pedestrianism. After a few days that quickly ceased to be solar, he was rewarded. He came to Asphodelia, a suburb of Venus on the main line.

In Asphodelia the poets travel on all-fours, kick their heels toward Mercury, and utter startling cries. In Asphodelia a banker lives in the menagerie, and they feed mathematical instructors through a hole in the wall. This new participant had too much of the stern blood of the Puritan in his rustproof veins to kick more than one heel at a time, but when he observed a gamboling Asphodelian of seventy years he felt a little wishful, and permitted himself a trifling ululation. The local cheer-leader heard him and knew him at once for a Harvard Acutist, and there was joy in Asphodelia.

A year or so sufficed him. He grew tired of sleeping in the branches of the cocoanut tree, and the river of green ink wearied him. So when the next star swung around he slipped away from his pink duenna and crept into the lattice-work to steal his passage home.

Thought slid from him like an oscillant leaf. He hung there lonely, in his Reis underwear, aching in the void.

He alighted in the harbor of Rio. When he trans-shipped to New York in ordinary ways, he prepared his Yonkers uncle, and he was met in undue course on Front Street.

"My boy," said his uncle, "what do you want me to do for you? Speak the word. You have been gone so long, and you were given up for lost."

"Only one thing do I want," confessed the former Acutist.

"And what might that be?" the uncle more circumspectly inquired.

"Take me at once to the great simple embrace of wholesome Coney Island."

So, clad in an Arrow collar and a Brokaw suit, the young poet stepped from Acutism on to the Iron Boat.

And what is the moral of this tale, mes enfants?... But must we not leave something to waft in the spaces of uncertainty?

[3] Inscribed to the _Little Review_

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I am sorry now not to have treasured every word that came from my poet. At the moment I disliked to play Boswell; I thought it beneath my dignity. But artists like Arnold Bennett who ply the notebook are not ashamed to be the Boswells of mediocrity. Why should I have hesitated to take notes of William Butler Yeats?

In the Pennsylvania station I had met him, as his host agreed, and I intruded on him as far as Philadelphia. I say intruded: his forehead wrinkled in tolerant endurance too often for me to feel that I was welcome. And yet, once we were settled, he was not unwilling to speak. His dark eyes, oblique and set far into his head, gave him a cryptic and remote suggestion. His pursed lips closed as on a secret. He opened them for utterance almost as in a dream. As if he were spokesman of some sacred book spread in front of him but raptly remembered, he pronounced his opinions seriously, occasionally raising his hands to fend his words. He was, I think, inwardly satisfied that I was attentive. I was indeed attentive. I had never listened to more distinguished conversation. Or, rather, monologue--for when I talked he suspended his animation, like a singer waiting for the accompanist to run down.

It was on the eve of The New Republic. I asked him if he'd write for it, and he answered characteristically. He said that journalism was action and that nothing except the last stage of exasperation could make him want to write for a journal as he had written about Blanco Posnet or The Playboy. The word "journalism" he uttered as a nun might utter "vaudeville." He was reminded, he said, of an offer that was made to Oscar Wilde of the editorship of a fashion paper, to include court gossip. Wouldn't it interest Wilde? "Ah, yes," responded Wilde, "I am deeply interested in a court scandal at present." The journalist (devourer of carrion, of course) was immediately eager. "Yes," said Wilde, "the scandal of the Persian court in the year 400 B. C."

It was telling. It made me ashamed for my profession. I could not forget, however, pillars of the _Ladies' World_ edited by Oscar Wilde which I used to store in an out-house. Wilde had condescended in the end.

Yeats's mind was bemused by his recollection of his fellow-Irishman. Once he completed his lectures he would go home, and a "fury of preoccupation" would keep him from being caught in those activities that lead to occasional writing. His lectures would not go into essays but into dialogues, "of a man wandering through the antique city of Fez." In the cavern blackness of those eyes I could feel that there was a mysterious gaze fixed on the passing crowd of the moment, the gaze of a stranger to fashion who might as well write of Persia, a dreamer beyond space and time.

"And humanitarian writing," he concluded, with a weary limp motion of his hand, "the writing of reformers, 'uplifters,' with a narrow view of democracy I find dull. The Webbs are dull. And truistic."

I spoke of the Irish John Mitchel's narrow antidemocracy and belief in the non-existence of progress, such as he had argued in Virginia during the Civil War. Mitchel, he protested, was a passionate nature. The progress he denied was a progress wrongly conceived by Macaulay and the early Victorians. It was founded on "truisms" not really true. Whether Carlyle or Mitchel was the first to repudiate these ideas he didn't know: possibly Mitchel was.

Yeats's one political interest at that time, before the war, was the Irish question. He believed in home rule. He believed the British democracy was then definitely making the question its own, and "this is fortunate." I spoke of Jung's belief in England's national complex. He was greatly interested. Ulster opposition to home rule he regretted. "The Scarlet Woman is of course a great inspiration," he said, "and Carson has stimulated this. His one desire is to wreck home rule, and so there cannot be arrangement by consent. I agree with Redmond that Carson has gone ahead on a military conspiracy. Personally, I do not say so for a party reason. I am neither radical nor tory. I think Asquith is a better man than Lloyd George--less inflated. He is a moderate, not puffed up with big phrases. He meets the issue that arises when it arises.... I object to the uplifter who makes other people's sins his business, and forgets his chief business, his own sins. Jane Addams? Ah, that is different."

His lectures he would not discuss but he spoke a good deal of audiences. In his own audiences he found no one more eager, no one who knows more, than an occasional old man, a man of sixty. He was surprised and somewhat disappointed to find prosperity go hand in hand with culture in this country. In the city where the hotel is bad there is likely to be a poor audience. Where it is good, the audience is good. In his own country the happiest woman he could name was a woman living in a Dublin slum whose mind is full of beautiful imaginings and fantasies. Is poverty an evil? We should desire a condition of life which would satisfy the need for food and shelter, and, for the rest, be rich in imagination. The merchant builds himself a palace only for auto-suggestion. The poor woman is as rich as the merchant. I said yes, but that a brute or a Bismarck comes in and overrides the imagination. He agreed. "Life is the warring of forces and these forces seem to be irreconcilable."

It could cost an artist too much to escape poverty. I spoke of the deadness of so much of the work done by William Sharp and Grant Allen. He said it was Allen's own fault. He, or his wife, wanted too many thousand dollars a year. They had to bring up their children on the same scale as their friends' children! And he kindled at this folly. "A woman who marries an artist," he said with much animation, "is either a goose, or mad, or a hero. If she's a goose, she drives him to earn money. If she's mad she drives him mad. If she's a hero, they suffer together, and they come out all right."

Phrases like this were not alone. There was the keen observation that the Pennsylvania station is "free from the vulgarity of advertisement"; the admission of second hand expression in Irish poetry except in The Dark Rosaleen and Hussey's Ode; a generalization on Chicago to the effect that "courts love poetry, plutocracies love tangible art." Not for a moment did this mind cease to move over the face of realities and read their legend and interpret its meaning. Meeting him was not like Hazlitt's meeting Coleridge. I could not say, "my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge." But the Yeats I met did not meet me. I remained on the periphery. Yet from what I learned there I can believe in the sesame of poets. I hope that some one to-day, nearer to him than a journalist, is wise enough to treasure his words.

"WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE"

Last night I woke up suddenly to the sound of bombardment. A great detonation tore the silence; an answering explosion shook it; then came a series of shots in diminishing intensity. My windows look out on a rank of New York skyscrapers, with a slip of sky to the south. In the ache of something not unlike fear, I thrust out my head to learn as quickly as I could what was happening. No result from the explosions was to be seen. The skyscrapers were gaunt and black, with a square of lost light in a room or two. The sky was clean-swept and luminous, the stars unperturbed. Still the shots barked and muttered, insanely active, beyond the blank buildings, under the serene sky.

I heard hoarse cries from river-craft. Could it be on the river? Could it be gun practice, or was there really an interchange of gun-fire? A U-boat? An insurrection? At any rate, it had to be explained and my mind was singularly lively for three a. m.

Long after your country has gone to war, I told myself, there remains, if you have sluggish sympathies, what may fairly be called a neutrality of the imagination. You are aware that there is fighting, bloodshed, death, but you retain the air of the philosophic. You do not put yourself in the place of Americans under fire. But if this be really bombardment, shell-fire in Manhattan? I felt in an instant how Colonel Roosevelt might come to seem the supreme understander of the situation. An enemy that could reach so far and hit so hard would run a girdle of feeling from New York to the remotest fighters in Africa or Mesopotamia. To protect ourselves against the hysteria of hatred--that would always be a necessity. But I grimly remembered the phrase, "proud punctilio." I remembered the President's tender-minded words, "conduct our operations as belligerents without passion," and his pledge of sincere friendship to the German people: warfare without "the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them." Here, with the Germans' shell-fire plowing into our buildings and into our skins? Here, meeting the animosity of their guns?

Becoming awake enough to think about the war, I began to reason about this "bombardment," to move from the hypnoidal state, the Hudson Maxim-Cleveland Moffett zone. The detonations were continuing, but not at all sensationally, and soon they began to shape themselves familiarly, to sound remarkably like the round noises of trains shunting, from the New York Central, carried on clear dry November air. Soon, indeed, it became impossible to conceive that these loud reverberations from the Vanderbilt establishment had ever been so distorted by a nightmare mind as to seem gun-fire. And my breathless inspection of the innocent sky!

But that touch of panic, in the interest of our whole present patriotic cultural attitude, was not to be lost. It is the touch, confessed or unconfessed, that makes us kin. If we are to retain toward German art and literature and science an attitude of appreciation and reciprocation, without disloyalty, it must be in the presence of the idea of shell-wounds German-inflicted. Any other broad-mindedness is the illusory broad-mindedness of the smooth and smug. It is Pharisaical. It comes from that neutrality of the imagination which is another name for selfish detachment, the temperature of the snake.

A generation less prepared than our own for the mood of warfare it would be difficult to imagine--less prepared, that is to say, by the situation of our country or the color of our thought. To declare now that New York has made no provision for the air-traffic of the future is not to arouse any sense of delinquency. No greater sense of delinquency was aroused ten or fifteen years ago by the bass warnings of military men. It is not too much to say that Lord Roberts and Homer Lea were felt to have an ugly monomania. In that period Nicholas Murray Butler and Elihu Root and Andrew Carnegie were thinking in terms of peace palaces. Colonel Roosevelt had tiny ideas of preparedness, but he was far more busy enunciating the recall of judges--and he earned the Nobel Prize. Few men, even two years ago, believed we would be sending great armies to Europe in 1917. In the first place, men like Homer Lea had said that the United States could not mobilize half a million soldiers for active service in less than three years. And in the next place, we still felt pacifically. We had lived domestic life too long ever to imagine our sky black and our grass red.

Because of this mental unpreparedness for war, this calm enjoyment of an unearned increment of peace, there was never a greater dislocation of standards than our recent dislocation, and never a greater problem of readjustment. For England, at any rate, there was a closeness to the war that helped to bring about an alignment of sentiment. But here, besides the discrepancies in the entailment of services, there are enormous discrepancies in sentiment to start with, and policies still to be accepted and cemented, and European prejudices to be suppressed or reconciled. Misunderstanding, under these circumstances, is so much to be looked for, especially with impetuous patriots demanding a new password of allegiance every minute, that the wonder is not at how many outrages there are, but how few.

Most of these outrages fall outside the scope of literary discussion, naturally. "Let the sailor content himself with talking of the winds; the herd of his oxen; the soldier of his wounds; the shepherd of his flocks"; the critic of his books. But there is one kind of outrage that requires to be discussed, from the point of view of culture, if only because there is no ultimate value in any culture that has to be subordinated to the state. That is the outrage, provisionally so-called, of mutilating everything German; not only sequestering what may be dangerous or unfriendly and vindictive, but depriving of toleration everything that has German origin or bears a German name. The quick transformation of Bismarcks into North Atlantics, of Kaiserhofs into Cafe New Yorks, is too laughable to be taken seriously. The shudderings at Germantown, Pa., and Berlin, O., and Bismarck, N. D., are in the same childlike class. But it is different when an Austrian artist is not permitted to perform because, while we are not at war with Austria, she is our enemy's ally. It is different when "the music of all German composers will be swept from the programmes of scheduled concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra in Pittsburgh. 'The Philadelphia Orchestra Association wishes to announce that it will conform with pleasure to the request of the Pittsburgh Association. The Philadelphia Orchestra Association is heartily in accord with any movement directed by patriotic motives.'" It is this sort of thing, extending intolerance to culture, that suggests we have been surprised in this whole matter of culture with our lamps untrimmed.

In a sense we, the laissez faire generation, have been unavoidably surprised--so much so that our "proud punctilio" has been jogged considerably loose. So loose, in fact, that we have given up any pretension to being so punctilious as soldiers used to be. It used to be possible, even for men whose hands dripped with enemy blood, to sign magnanimous truces; but science has made another kind of warfare possible, and the civilian population of the modern State, totally involved in a catastrophe beyond all reckoning, falls from its complacency into a depth of panic and everywhere believes that the enemy is inhuman in this war.

Were such beliefs special to this war, hatred might well go beyond the fervor of the Inquisition, and the hope of exterminating the Germans as a people might be universally entertained. But no one who has read history to any purpose will trust too far to this particular emotionality of the hour. To say this, in the middle of a righteous war, may sound unpatriotic. But, if hatred is the test, what could be more traitorous and seditious than Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other.... The prayers of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the Providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that _he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came_, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet,... so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." It is, perhaps, like quoting the Lord's Prayer. And yet it is the neglected wisdom of a man who had gleaned it from long meditating fratricidal war.

But, you may say, Prussia has always been outside humanity. We are engaged in a war foreordained and necessary, a natural war. A war inescapable, yes, but not inevitable. Let the plain testimony of hundreds of books speak.... To ask for such discriminations as this is, however, scarcely possible. It is too much, in the face of superstitions, anxieties, and apprehensions, to expect the attitude of culture to be preserved. In peace-time we are allowed to go outside our own state to enjoy any manifestation of the seven arts; and such violent nationalism as attacked The Playboy of the Western World in New York is at once called "rowdy" and "despicable." But in time of war it is part of its morality, or immorality, that culture must be subordinate to clamor, and that even national sculpture must become jingoistic, making railsplitters neatly respectable and idealizing long feet. How far this supervision of culture goes depends only on the degree of pressure. It may go so far as to make the domination of political considerations, state considerations, paramount in everything--precisely the victory that democracy, hoping with Emerson that "we shall one day learn to supersede politics by education," has most to fear.

It is in war itself, with its enmity to so much that is free, that one must seek the opposition to enemy culture, not in the culture that is opposed. Must one, on this account, think any peace a good peace? To do so is to show an immunity from the actual which is not to be envied. It is only necessary to imagine New York bombarded, as many French and English and Belgian and Russian towns have been bombarded since the beginning of the war, to realize the rush of resistance that is born in mankind, expedient for government to recruit and to rally to the end. But for the man who has partaken of democratic culture this "end" involves democracy. All character and all spirit cannot be absorbed in the will to cure the homicidal enemy by his own poison. The only course open to the man who is still concerned for democratic culture is to remember the nobility of Lincoln's example--by concentrating on the offenses rather than the persons that cause the mighty scourge of war, to avoid the war-panic and war-hatred which will enrage our wounds.

WAR EXPERTS

"War is not now a matter of the stout heart and the strong arm.
Not that these attributes do not have their place and value in
modern warfare; but they are no longer the chief or decisive
factors in the case. The exploits that count in this warfare are
technological exploits; exploits of technological science,
industrial appliances, and technological training. As has been
remarked before, it is no longer a gentleman's war, and the
gentleman, as such, is no better than a marplot in the game as
it is played."

---- Thorstein Veblen in _The Nature of Peace_.

Across a park in Washington I followed the leisurely stride of two British officers. Their movement, punctuated by long walking-sticks, had a military deliberation which became their veteran gray hairs. They were in khaki uniforms and leather leggings, a red strip at the shoulder marking them as staff officers. Amid groups of loitering nurses and tethered infants and old men feeding pop-corn to the birds they were as of a grander race of men. After a pang of civilian inferiority I asked who they were and learned that one of them was simply a Canadian lawyer--and that, being a judge advocate, he was obliged to boot and spur himself in his hotel bedroom every morning and ride up and down the elevator in polished leggings, for the good of the cause. Never in his life had he heard a machine-gun fired. Never had he flourished anything more dangerous than his family carving knife. On inspection his companion looked similarly martial. The only certain veteran in the parklet was a shrunken old pensioner feeding tame robins on the grass.

Part of the politico-military art is window-dressing of this description. It excites the romantic populace, composed of pedestrians like myself, and serves to advertise the colors. It suggests a leonine order of values from which the shambling citizen is debarred. But back of the window-dressing, the rhetoric of costume and medal and prepared ovation and patriotic tears, there is a reality as different from these appearances as roots are different from flowers. If I had ever supposed that the gist of war was to be derived solely from contemplating uniformed warriors, I came to a new conclusion when I overheard the cool experts of war.

These experts, such of them as I happened to overhear, had come with the British mission to America, and they were far other than the common notion of lords of war. The most impressive of them was a slight figure who reminded me externally of the Greek professor in Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara. Before the war he had been a don at Cambridge, a teacher of economics, and he retained the lucid laboratory manner of an expert who counts on holding attention. It was not in him, as it is in so many older pooh-bah professors, to expect a deference to personal garrulity; but one gained an impression that no words were likely to be wasted on vacuous listeners by a person with such steel-gray eyes.

From London, since the beginning of the war, this concentrated man had gone out of Paris, to Rome, to Petrograd, to join counsel with various allies on the science of providing munitions. It would never have occurred to any pork packer to employ this fine-faced, sensitive, quiet-voiced professor to work out the economic killing of cattle. Yet almost as soon as he had volunteered in England he began on the task of adapting industry to slaughter, and there was no doubt whatever that his inclusive mind had procured the quick and effective killing of thousands of human beings. It was a joy, strange to say, to listen to him. He was one of those men whom H. G. Wells used to delight in imagining, the sort of man who could keep cool in a cosmic upheaval, his mind as nimble as quicksilver while he devised the soundest plan for launching the forces of his sphere. There was no more trace of priesthood in him than in a mechanic or a chauffeur. He deliberated the organizing of America for destructiveness as an engineer might deliberate lining a leaky tunnel with copper, and there was as little pretension in his manner as there was sentiment or doubt. His accent was cultivated, he was obviously a university man, but he had come to the top by virtue of mental equipment. "Mental equipment" means many things, but plainly he was not of those remote academicians who go in for cerebral scroll-saw work. He managed his mind as a woodman manages an ax. The curt swing and drive and bite of it could escape no one, and for all his almost plaintively modest demeanor he had instant arresting power. It was he and a few men like him who had made it feasible for amateur armies to loop round an empire a burning rain of steel.

This master of munitions was not the only schoolman who had demonstrated brains. There was another professor, this time the purchaser of guns. He had come to his role from holding the kind of position that Matthew Arnold once had held. A meager figure enough, superficially the scholastic-dyspeptic, he had shown that the bureaucracy of education was no bad beginning for ordering a new department with small attention to the tricks, of merchandise, but with every thought as to technological detail. The conversation that went about did not seem to engage this man, except as it turned on such engrossing topics as the necessity for circumventing child labor. For the rest he was as a soft silent cloud that gathered the ascending vapors, and discharged itself in lightning decision which made no change in the obscurity from which it came.

Under a lamp at night on Connecticut Avenue I saw one late-working member of the mission stop wearily to fend off American inquisition. A training in the Foreign Office had given this distinguished exile a permanent nostalgia for Olympus--and how Olympian the British Foreign Office is, few Americans dare to behold. The candidature to this interesting service of a great democracy is limited to a "narrow circle of society" by various excellent devices, the first of which is that official conditions of entry fix the amount of the private means required at a minimum of L400 a year. "The primary qualification for the diplomatic service," says one friendly interpreter of it, "is a capacity to deal on terms of equality with considerable persons and their words and works. Sometimes, very rarely, this capacity is given, in its highest form, by something which is hardly examinable--by very great intellectual powers. Ordinarily, however, this capacity is a result of nurture in an atmosphere of independence. Unfortunately, it is scarcely too much to say that the present constitution of society provides this atmosphere of independence only where there is financial independence. In a very few cases freedom of mind and character is achieved elsewhere, but then a great price, not measurable by money, has to be paid for it--how great a price only those who have paid it know.... The 'property qualification' is operative as a means of selecting a certain kind of character; no readjustment of pay could be a substitute for it. Undoubtedly, as thus operative, it imposes a limitation, but the limitation imposed is not that of a class-prejudice or of a mere preference for wealth--it is a limitation imposed by the needs of the diplomatic service, and those needs are national needs." Out of such a remarkable background, so redolent of "the present constitution of society," my exiled diplomat took his weary stand before prying writers for the press. They wanted to know "the critical shrinking point." They wished to discuss the "maximum theoretic availability." He had no answer to make; he merely made diplomatic moan. In the heavy dispatch box that he set at his feet there were undoubtedly treasured figures, priceless information for Germany in her jiu jitsu of the sea. That dispatch box might have been solid metal for any effect it had on the conversation. He was a kind of expert who took interrogation with pallid mournfulness; who punctuated silence with, "Look here, you've got hold of absolutely the wrong man.... Hanged if I know.... My dear sir, I haven't the very faintest idea."

And yet this member of a caste was only coming through because he too was paying a technological price. Wheat and nitrate and ore and rubber--there was nothing his country might need which did not occupy him, staff officer of vital trafficking, throughout numbered nights.

There were a few business men on the mission--mighty few considering their lordship in times of peace. Most of the dominant figures either from Oxford or Cambridge, there was one other intellectual who stood out as rather an exception to the prevailing type. He was an older man whose nature brimmed with ideas, a Titan born to laughter and high discourse and a happy gigantic effervescence. If a reputation brayed too loudly at him, he named its author an ass. If liberalism were intoned to him, he called it detestable and cried to knock the English _Nation's_ head against the _Manchester Guardian's_. Yet he was distinguished from most of his colleagues as a radical who afforded wild opinions of his own. To the organization of his country he had contributed one invaluable idea, and each problem that came up in turn he conducted out of its narrow immediate importance into the perspective of a natural philosophy. Not fond of a prearranged system, he irked more than the run of his countrymen at the stuffiness of badly bundled facts. With a great sweep of vigor he would start at the proposition of handling war industry, for example, on a basis not inadequate to the requirements; and out of his running oration would come a wealth of such suggestions as spring only from a cross-fertilizing habit of mind.

These are a handful of England's experts in wartime. They do not bear the brunt of the fight, like the soldiers, but the roots of the flower of war are in just such depths as employ these hidden minds.

OKURA SEES NEWPORT

Okura was sent to me by Jack Owen, a friend of mine in Japan. Jack said that Okura was taking two years off to study democracy, and would I steer him around. I was delighted. I offered Okura his choice of the great democratic scene, with myself as obedient personal conductor. He was very nice about it in his perfect silver-and-gray manner, and he asked if we could begin with Newport. I suspected a joke, but his eye never twinkled, and so to Newport we went.

The dirty little Newport railway station interested Okura. So did the choked throat of Thames Street, with its mad crush of motors and delivery wagons and foot passengers, and the riotous journey from the meat market to the book shop and from the chemist's to the Boston Store. I explained to Okura that this was not really Newport, only a small sample of the ordinary shopping country town, with the real exquisiteness of Newport tucked away behind. Okura clucked an acceptance of this remark, and our car wove its difficult way through the narrow lane till we returned to Bellevue Avenue.

The name Bellevue Avenue had to be expounded to Okura. He expected a belle vue, not a good plain plutocratic American street. When I told him what to expect, however, he was intensely occupied with its exhibition of assorted architecture, and he broke into open comment. "So very charming!" he cried politely. "So like postcards of Milwaukee by the lake!" I enjoyed his naive enthusiasm and let it go.

He wanted to know who lived on the avenue, and I told him all the names I could think of. He had heard many of them, the samurai of America being known to him as a matter of course, and he picked up new crumbs of information with obvious gratitude.

"Vanderbilt? Oh, yes." That was old. So were Astor and Belmont.

After a while Okura wrinkled his brow. "I do not see the McAlpin mansion."

"The McAlpins? I have never heard of them," I murmured indulgently.

"But that is one name I think I remember correctly," Okura answered with visible anxiety. "The Bellevue-Astors, the Bellevue-Belmonts, the Bellevue-Stratfords? Please forgive me, I do not understand. Are not the McAlpins also Bellevue-McAlpins?"

It was hard to convince Okura that this was not a Valhalla of hotel proprietors, but at last he got it straight. We went back again as far as the Casino, and I took him in to see the tennis tournament.

Unknown to Okura, I was forced to take seats up rather far--well, to be frank, among the Jamestown and Saunderstown people. But happily we had Newport in the boxes right below us. Some of the ladies sat facing the tennis, some sat with their backs to it, and a great buzz of conversation reverberated under the roof of the stand and billowed on to the court. On the court two young men strove against each other with a skill hardly to be matched in any other game, and occasionally, when something eccentric or sensational happened, a ripple passed through the crowd. But the applause was irregular. People had to be watched and pointed out. It was important to note which human oyster bore the largest pearl. The method of entry and exit was significant, and significant the whole ritual of being politely superior to the game.

Okura was fascinated by the game, unfortunately, and there was so much conversation he was rather distracted.

"I hope it does not annoy you?" I asked him.

"Oh, not at all, thank you very much. It is so democratic!"

At this point the umpire got off his perch, and came forward to entreat the fine ladies.

"I have asked you before to keep quiet," he wailed. "For God's sake, will you stop talking?"

"How very interesting," murmured Okura.

"Yes," I said, "the religious motif."

"Ah, yes!" he nodded, very gravely.

Later on his compatriot Kumagae was to play, and we decided to return to the tournament; but first we took ourselves to Bailey's Beach.

Bailey's Beach is a small section of the Atlantic littoral famous for its seaweed. The seaweed is of a lovely dark red color. It is swept in in large quantities, together with stray pieces of melon-rind and other picnic remnants, and it forms a thick, juicy carpet through which one wades out to the more fluid sea. By this attractive marge sit the ladies in their wide hats and dresses of filmy lace, watching the more adventurous sex pick his way out of the vegetable matter. In the pavilion of the bathhouses sit still less adventurous groups.

It took some time to explain to Okura why this beach, once devoted to the collection of seaweed for manure, should now be dedicated to bathing. But he grasped the main point, that it was a private beach.

"Forgive me," he said, "I see no Jews."

"That's all right," I answered. "You are studying democracy. There are no Jews here. None allowed."

"Oh!" he digested the fact. Then his eye brightened. "Ah, you have your geisha girls at the swim-beach. How very charming!"

"No," I corrected him. "Those are not our geisha girls. That is the 'shimmy set.' You know: people who are opposed to the daylight saving act and the prohibition amendment."

"Oh, I understand. Republicans," he nodded happily.

As the Servants' Hour was approaching at Bailey's Beach, and as I had no good explanation to give of it to Okura, I thought we might walk along by the ocean before lunch. Okura was entranced by the walk, and by the fact that it ran in front of these private houses, free to the public as to the wind. Once or twice we went down below stone walls, with everything above hidden from us, but this was exceptional. Okura thought the walk a fine example of essential democracy.

"And what are those long tubes?" he asked, as we gazed out toward Portugal.

"Sewer pipes," I said bluntly, looking at the great series of excretory organs that these handsome democratic mansions pushed into the sea.

"Are they considered beautiful?" asked Okura.

"Quite," I told him. "They are one of the features provided strictly for the public."

"So kind!" said the acquiescent Japanese.

We went to lunch with a friend of mine whose plutocracy was not entirely intact, and but for one instructive incident it was an ordinary civilized meal. That incident, however, shall live long in my memory because of my inability to interpret it to Okura.

We had just finished melon, the six of us who sat down, when the third man was called to the telephone.

He came back, napkin in hand, and said to his hostess, "I'm awfully sorry, I've got to leave."

His hostess looked apprehensive. "I hope it's nothing serious?"

"Oh, not at all; please don't worry," he responded, plumping down his napkin, "but I've just had a message from Mrs. Jinks. She's a man short and she wants me to come over to luncheon. So long. Awfully sorry!"

"What did that mean, please?" Okura inquired, as we hurried back to see Kumagae play.

"Do you mean, democratically?"

"Yes."

"I give it up," I retorted.

"But Mr. Owen said you would want to interpret everything democratic to me," Okura ventured on, "and is there not some secret here hidden from me? I fear I am very stupid."

Democratically, I repeated dully, I could not explain.

"But," pressed Okura, "'the world has been made safe for democracy.' I want so much to understand it. I fear I do not yet understand Newport."

And he looked at me with his innocent eyes.

THE CRITIC AND THE CRITICIZED

It is the boast of more than one proud author, popular or unpopular, that he never reads any criticism of his own work. He knows from his wife or his sorrowing friends that such criticism exists. Sometimes in hurrying through the newspaper he catches sight of his unforgettable name. Inadvertently he may read on, learning the drift of the comment before he stops himself. But his rule is rigid. He never reads what the critics say about him.

Before an author comes to this admirable self-denial he has usually had some experience of the ill-nature and caprice of critics. Probably he started out in the friendliest spirit. He said to himself, Of course I don't profess to _like_ criticism. Nobody likes to be criticized. But I hope I am big enough to stand any criticism that is fair and just. No man can grow who is not willing to be criticized, but so long as criticism is helpful, that's all a man has a right to ask. Is it meant to be helpful? If so, shoot.

After some experience of helpful criticism, it will often occur to the sensitive author that he is not being completely understood. A man's ego should certainly not stand in the way of criticism, but hasn't a man a right to his own style and his own personality? What is the use of criticism that is based on the critic's dislike of the author's personality? The critic who has a grudge against an author simply because he thinks and feels in a certain way is scarcely likely to be helpful. The author and the critic are not on common ground. And the case is not improved by the very evident intrusion of the critic's prejudices and limitations. It is perfectly obvious that a man with a bias will see in a book just what he wants to see. If he is a reactionary, he will bolster up his own case. If he is a Bolshevik he will unfailingly bolshevize. So what is the use of reading criticism? The critic merely holds the mirror up to his own nature, when he is not content to reproduce the publisher's prepared review.

The author goes on wondering, "What does he say about me?" But the disappointments are too many. Once in a blue moon the critic "understands" the author. He manages, that is to say, to do absolutely the right thing by the author's ego. He strokes it hard and strokes it the right way. After that he points out one or two of the things that are handicapping the author's creative force, and he shows how easily such handicaps can be removed. This is the helpful, appreciative, perceptive critic. But for one of his kind there are twenty bristling young egoists who want figs to grow on thistles and cabbages to turn into roses, and who blame the epic for not giving them a lyric thrill. These critics, the smart-alecks, have no real interest in the author. They are only interested in themselves. And so, having tackled them in a glow of expectation that has always died into sulky gloom, the author quits reading criticism and satisfies his natural curiosity about himself by calling up the publisher and inquiring after sales.

For my own part, I deprecate this behavior without being able to point to much better models. Critics are of course superior to most authors, yet I do not know many critics who like to be criticized. It does not matter whether they are thin-skinned literary critics or the hippopotami of sociology. They don't like it, much. Some meet criticism with a sweet resourcefulness. They choke down various emotions and become, oh, so gently receptive. Others stiffen perceptibly, sometimes into a cautious diplomacy and sometimes into a pontifical dignity that makes criticism nothing less than a personal affront. And then there is the way of the combative man who interprets the least criticism as a challenge to a fight. The rare man even in so-called intellectual circles is the man who takes criticism on its merits and thinks it natural that he should not only criticize but be criticized.

The pontifical man is not necessarily secure in his ego. His frigid reception of criticism corresponds to something like a secret terror of it. His air of dignity is really an air of offended dignity: he hates being called on to defend himself in anything like a rough-and-tumble fight. He resents having his slow, careful processes hustled and harried in the duel of dispute.

To hand down judgments, often severe judgments, is part of the pontifical character. But the business of meeting severe judgments is not so palatable. As most men grow older and more padded in their armchair-criticism, they feel that they become entitled to immunity. The Elder Statesmen are notorious. The more dogmatic they are, the more they try to browbeat their critics. They see criticism as the critic's fundamental inability to appreciate their position.

If you are going to be criticized, how take it? The best preparation for it is to establish good relations with your own ego first. If you interpose your ego between your work and the critic you cannot help being insulted and injured. The mere fact that you are being subjected to criticism is almost an injury in itself. You must get to the point where you realize the impregnability of your own admirable character. Then the bumblings of the critic cannot do less than amuse you, and may possibly be of use. He is not so sweet a partisan as yourself, yet he started out rather indifferent to you, and the mere fact that he is willing to criticize you is a proof that he has overcome the initial inhumanity of the human race. This alone should help, but more than that, you have the advantage of knowing he is an amateur on that topic where you are most expert--namely, yourself. Be kind to him. Perhaps if you are sufficiently kind he may learn that the beginning of the entente between you is that he should always start out by appeasing your ego.

BLIND

He was, in a manner of speaking, useless. He could tend the furnace and help around the house--scour the bath-tub and clean windows--but for a powerful man these were trivial chores. The trouble with him, as I soon discovered, was complete and simple. He was blind.