Without Prejudice

by Израэль Зангвилл

  3. SOCIETY FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF CELEBRITIES

  "Mankind's available stock of admiration is not large enough for all the demands made upon it," wrote Professor Bain, with the one flash of humour I have noticed in his big treatises. If, as Wordsworth contends,

  We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love,

  a certain number of objects of admiration is indispensable. But the surplusage of celebrities in this age is simply overwhelming. Celebrity is cheap to-day. You may arrive at it by a million avenues. It is almost impossible to keep your name out of the papers. Culture is so catholic that celebrities who in the old days would have been monopolised by esoteric cliques are common property. The paleographer and the coleopterist claim a share of our admiration equally with the serpentine dancer and the record-breaking cyclist, and the judicious editor prints their "interviews" at equal length. We have an impartial acquaintance with the tastes and views of cardinals and comic singers; and the future of the papacy is given almost as much space as Little Tich's talent for water-colour, and his fondness for the 'cello and his baby. Moreover, that coil of cable which makes the whole world kin has burdened us with the celebrities of the universe. When to these are added the celebrities of the past, of every period, country, and variety, the brain reels. Too many cooks spoil the broth, and too many celebrities numb our faculty of wonder. The vivid feeling that is possible when heroes are few fades into a faint reflection of emotion. The celebrity's name calls up not admiration, but only a shadowy consciousness that admiration is due. We never pause to get the emotion. I am afraid the first proceeding of the society will have to be the suppression of the illustrated weeklies, which manufacture celebrities artificially to fill up their pages, and, in order to have pretty pictures, give every actress that makes a little hit a prominence which Shakespeare did not deserve. If there is no celebrity of the week it is necessary to create one, is the editorial motto. If a man is a celebrity you interview him, and if you interview him he is a celebrity.

  You will not believe me (though I don't care a double-blank domino if you don't, for it is true) when I tell you that an opposition society already exists-a society for the manufacture of celebrities. Self-puffery has always gone on in a sporadic fashion, most people sending their own puffs to the papers, and rolling their own logs, on the principle that if you want a thing done well you must do it yourself. But the idea of the society is the organisation of self-puffery. It is done through an association which undertakes (for a fee) to insert anything you choose to send it about yourself in a hundred native papers, and a hundred Colonial, Indian, and American papers, as well as to get special articles written thereon, and to organise press receptions, luncheons, journeys, dinners, etc., etc. O tempora! O mores! What an exposure of the lower journalism! Oh the crush of celebrities there will be when the society has been at work a few years!

  4. THE CHARITY OF CHARITIES

  The begging-letters and circulars are enough to light your fires the whole year, and it is a pity they are not sent to the poor, to whom they would be of more value. Still, not to have the worry of receiving and discriminating among these appeals is another of the many compensations of poverty. There are a thousand varieties of Charity (some beginning at a Home and others going abroad), and the most munificent can support only a few, and perhaps will select the wrong few. And most of these Charities are struggling along painfully, their resources taxed to the utmost by the severe winter and the coal strike; many can scarcely make both ends meet. There is nothing to prevent the weaker dying of want, and our Charities suffering from a heavy mortality. And of course it will be the best and most retiring Charities that will starve to death rather than beg of the first comer, while the brazen Charities will perambulate the streets with strident clamour, rattling full money-boxes.

  Do we not therefore need another Charity? Nay, blaspheme not, nor clench thy purse-strings. One other Charity-just one more-is a social necessity. I would call it "The Charity of Charities."'tisa central bureau of beneficence, to which each doubting philanthropist should send such sums as he knows not how to dispense. The bureau should inquire into the circumstances of each Charity, and grant or refuse relief strictly in accordance with its needs or merits. The Charity Organisation Society is another affair altogether. Perhaps people are afraid of pauperising the Charities assisted, but there is no reason why these should not continue to be self-supporting as far as possible. Such as could not manage to exist in this country could be assisted to emigrate, while every help would be given to exiled or persecuted Charities to gain a sphere of activity in this country. Fortunately, there are always large-minded men among us who will receive any Charity, however despised, with open arms! There would be visitation committees to call at the offices of the Charities, to see that they were not pleading poverty when the officials were drawing big salaries; a loan society to help them over bad times, so as not to destroy their self-respect by doles in aid; while a cookery school for accounts and a sanatorium for those that failed to keep their balance might also be annexes of this grand institution.

  XIX. INDECENCY ON THE ENGLISH STAGE

  [ This protest was dated Jan. 1,1891. Things are rather better now.]

  I am not a young person. Nothing ever brings a blush to my cheek except the rouge-pencil or the exposure of my stealthy deeds of good I can read the Elizabethan dramatists or Rabelais with equanimity, and the only thing that mars my enjoyment of Juvenal is the occasional obscurity of the Latin. I like the immoral passages in "Mademoiselle de Maupih," even if I do not go so far as Swinburne and call it "the holy book of beauty." Ibsen refreshes me like a tonic, and I even believe in Zola. And yet, if I were State censor of the English stage-which fortunately I am not-I should suppress half of our plays for their indecency. The other half I should suppress for their fatuity. But that is another story.

  That vice loses half its evil by losing all its grossness, is a maxim for which the world cannot be too thankful to Burke; for though the point of view be not true, an important aspect of the truth is undoubtedly exhibited. Now, what we get on the English stage is the grossness without the vice-or, to put it more accurately, the vulgarity without the open presentation of the vice. You may mean anything, so long as you say something else. Almost every farcical comedy or comic opera-to leave the music-hall alone-is vitiated by a vein of vulgar indecency which is simply despicable. The aim of the artist is not to conceal art-there is none to conceal-but to conceal his indecencies decently, and yet in the most readily discoverable manner. The successful stage-piece is too often but a symphony in blue. What the English, with their fashion of spoiling French importations, incorrectly term doubles entendres, are almost indispensable items in the fare of some London theatres of good repute. And the references to things sexual are usually as stupid as they are superfluous to the development of the plot or the characters. There is not the shadow of an excuse for their introduction. They are simply silly accretions on the play, quite unimplicated with the spirit of the scene, and losing all meaning in their effort to have two. One can enjoy the sparkle of wit and the rich halo of comedy playing around situations unaffectedly "improper"; even the farces of the Palais Eoyal amuse with the broad foolery of their esprit gaulois; but the English endeavour to make the best of both worlds, the English author who combines the prude and the pimp-for these one can have nothing but contempt. And the measure of one's longing for a sane and virile view and presentation of life will be the measure of one's abhorrence of immorality which has not even the decency to be indecent.

  The French dramatist gives us characters living in "a state of sin" (one of the United States not recognised at the Court of St, James's). The English dramatist conveys the plot, conveys the situations which spring out of the "state of sin," but leaves out the basis on which the whole rests. Thus, instead of situations intelligibly indecent, we get situations unintelligibly indecent. Eros, like an Indian conjuror, is left suspended from nothing. As the English playgoer does not ask for intelligible sit
uations, he is satisfied with the residuum. The dramatist's uneasy striving to account for the behaviour of his personages only renders the latent character of the residuum more glaring.

  The truth is, that everything depends on treatment and atmosphere. Lord Houghton has treated the difficult theme of a mother's and daughter's love for the same man with tenderness and grace; a foreign writer would lay bare and anatomise with more of scalpel and less of sentiment. The former satisfies our aesthetic instincts; the latter would, in addition, appeal to our intellectual curiosity. To the English dramatist the whole story would be tabu; but if the Continental man had got some striking situations out of it, the Briton's soul would hanker after those situations. So he would make the mother a maiden aunt, and give us the familiar spectacle of the aged spinster languishing for matrimony, as incarnated for the nonce in the person of her niece's lover. Miss Sophie Larkin would play the part, and it would be intended to be a comic one. There is more suggestiveness in the conventional stage figure of the amorous old maid than in all Congreve's comedies. And yet what figure is more certain to please, in the whole gallery of puppets? Scenes and characters of this sort you may have by the dozen; but to build a moral play upon an "immoral" basis is to court damnation. To construct a noble piece of work on the basis of "improper" relations between your chief characters is to show the cloven hoof. Once the initial scheme granted, the rest may be as bracing as an Alpine breeze; but the critics will scent brimstone. But to build an immoral play upon a "moral" basis-that way gladness lies. Critics, who would rage at the delineation of a character remotely resembling a human being's, will pat you on the back with a good-humoured smile, and at most a laughing word of reprobation for your azure audacities. Ladies, who, whether they are married or unmarried, are in England presumed to be agnostics in sexual matters, will roar themselves hoarse over farces whose stories could only be told to the ultramarines. Ibsen may not untie a shoe-latchet in the interest of truth, while English burlesque managers may put an army of girls into tights. One dramatist may steal a horse-laugh by a tawdry vulgarity, while another may not look over an ankle. It is the same with literature. We look askance at "The Kreutzer Sonata," but tolerate the vulgar anecdotal indecencies of the sporting journal. The artist's eye may not see life steadily, and see it whole; but it is licensed to wink and ogle at will from behind its blinker. If the artist's "immorality" is the artistic embodiment of a frank Paganism, or is inspired by an ethical or a scientific purpose, he is a filthy-minded fellow. Seriousness is the unpardonable sin. Coarseness can be condoned, if it is only flippant and frivolous enough. In short, the only excuse for indecency is to have none.

  Unfortunately, practical considerations are so involved with artistic that it may be imprudent to accord the artist as wide a charter as he would wish. The ideals of sincerity and honesty may in the present social environment be so potential for harm that it is for the common interest that they should not be gratified. This may be so, though I do not believe it. But whether it be so or not, of one thing I am certain,-and that is that the half-hearted dallying with things sexual is wholly an evil; that the prurient sniffing and sniggering round the subject is more fraught with peril to a community, more debasing to the emotional currency, more blighting to the higher sexual feelings of the race, than the most shameless public repudiation of all moral restraints. Evil cures itself in the sunlight; it grows and flourishes in the darkness. Vice looks fascinating in the gloaming; the morning shows up the tawdriness and the paint.

  XX. LOVE IN LIFE AND LITERATURE

  Love! Love! Love! The air is full of it as I write, though the autumn leaves are falling. Shakespeare's immortal love-poem is playing amid the cynicism of modern London, like that famous fountain of Dickens's in the Temple gardens. The "largest circulation" has barely ceased to flutter the middle-class breakfast-table with discussions on "the Age of Love" and Little Billee and Trilby-America's "Romeo and Juliet"-loom large at the Haymarket. Mr. T. P. O'Connor, forgetting even Napoleon, his King Charles's head, is ruling high at the libraries with rechauffes of "Some Old Love Stories," and the "way of a man with a maid" is still the unfailing topic of books and plays. One would almost think that Coleridge was to be taken "at the foot of the letter"-

  All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame.

  But alas! suffer me to be as sceptical as Stevenson in "Virginibus Puerisque." In how many lives does Love really play a dominant part? The average taxpayer is no more capable of a "grand passion" than of a grand opera. "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart." Ay, my Lord Byron, but 'tis not "woman's whole existence," neither. Focussed in books or plays to a factitious unity, the rays are sadly scattered in life. Natheless Love remains an interest, an ideal, to all but the hopeless Grad-grinds. Many a sedate citizen's pulse will leap with Romeo's when Forbes-Robertson's eye first lights upon the Southern child "whose beauty hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear." Many a fashionable maid, with an eye for an establishment, will shed tears when Mrs. Patrick Campbell, martyr to unchaffering love, makes her quietus with a bare dagger.

  For the traces left by Love in life are so numerous and diverse that even the cynic-which is often bad language for the unprejudiced observer-cannot quite doubt it away. There seems to be no other way of accounting for the facts. When you start learning a new language you always find yourself confronted with the verb "to love"-invariably the normal type of the first conjugation. In every language on earth the student may be heard declaring, with more zeal than discretion, that he and you and they and every other person, singular or plural, have loved, and do love, and will love. "To love" is the model verb, expressing the archetype of activity. Once you can love grammatically there is a world of things you may do without stumbling. For, strange to say, "to love," which in real life is associated with so much that is bizarre and violent, is always "regular" in grammar. Ancient and modern tongues tell the same tale-from Hebrew to street-Arabic, from Greek to the elephantine language that was "made in Germany." Not only is "to love" deficient in no language (as home> is deficient in French, and Geist in English), but it is never even "defective." No mood or tense is ever wanting-a proof of how it has been conjugated in every mood and tense of life, in association with every variety of proper and improper noun, and every pronoun at all personal. Not merely have people loved unconditionally in every language, but there is none in which they would not have loved, or might not have loved, had circumstances permitted; none in which they have not been loved, or (for hope springs eternal in the human breast) have been about to be loved. Even woman has an Active Voice in the matter; indeed, "to love" is so perfect that, compared with it, "to marry" is quite irregular. For, while "to love" is sufficient for both sexes, directly you get to marriage you find in some languages that division has crept in, and that there is one word for the use of ladies and another for gentlemen only. Turning from the evidence enshrined in language to the records of history, the same truth meets us at any date we appoint. Everywhere "'Tis love that makes the world go round." It is dizzying to think what would have happened if Eve had not accepted Adam. What could have attracted her if it was not love? Surely not his money, nor his family. For these she couldn't have cared a fig-leaf. Unfortunately, the daughters of Eve have not always taken after their mother. The statistics of crime and insanity testify eloquently to the reality of love, arithmetic teaching the same lesson as history and grammar. Consider, too, the piles of love at Mudie's! A million story-tellers in all periods and at all places cannot have all told stories, though they have all, alas! told the same story. They must have had mole-hills for their mountains, if not straw for their bricks. There are those who, with Bacon, consider love a variety of insanity; but it is more often merely a form of misunderstanding. When the misunderstanding is mutual, it may even lead to marriage. As a rule Beauty begets man's love, Power woman's. At least, so women tell me. But then, I am not beaut
iful. It must be said for the man that every lover is a species of Platonist-he identifies the Beautiful with the Good and the True. The woman's admiration has less of the ethical quality; she is dazzled, and too often feels, "If he be but true to me, what care I how false he be."

  "The Stage is more beholding to Love than the life of man," says Bacon. The "Daily Telegraph" is perhaps even more "beholding" to it. The ingenuity with which this great organ raises the cloyless topic every silly season under another name, is beyond all praise. No conclusion will ever be arrived at, of course, because "Love" means a different thing with each correspondent, and it is difficult to lay down general truths about a relation that varies with each of the countless couples that have ever experienced it, or have fancied they experienced it. The set theme of a newspaper correspondence always reminds me of a nervous old lady crossing the roadway: she runs this way and that way, gets splashed by every passing wheel, jumps back, jumps forward again, finds temporary harbour on a crossing-stage under a lamp, darts sideways, and ends by arriving in another street altogether. So that the heading of a correspondence is scant guide as to what is being discussed under it; and no one would be surprised to find a recipe against baldness under the title of "The Age of Love." But then "The Age of Love" is an absurd and answerless question. Experience shows that all ages fall in love-and out again; so that, to quote the pithy Bacon again, "a man may have a quarrel to marry when he will." Octogenarians elope, and Mr. Gilbert's elderly baby died a blase old roue of five.

  Romeo's passion was a second, not a first, love: he had already loved Rosaline. Juliet's first-and only-love came to her only eleven years after she had been weaned, "come Lammas." Save that the "Age of Love" may be said to be "Youth"-for Love aye rejuvenates-there is nothing to be said. Wherefore the German gentleman who protested against the cliches of novel-writers in the matter of the eternity of passion was well within the wilderness of the subject. The cliche metaphor, by the way, is itself becoming a cliche , so stereotyped do we grow in protesting against the stereotyped. Germans are, perhaps, not the best authorities on passion: they are too sentimental for love and too domestic for romance. Still, our German is justified in his complaint: the love-scenes in our novels and dramas correspond very little to human nature. In works of pure romance this is no drawback to artistic beauty; but in much modern work purporting to mirror contemporary life, the love-making has neither the beauty that springs from idealisation, nor that which springs from reality. Property-speeches and stock-sentiments still do duty for what really takes place in modern love-making. We have played with the traditional puppets so long that we have come to believe they are alive. They may have been alive once-when life was more elemental; they still exist, perchance, in those primitive conditions which are really the past surviving into the present. But in no field of human life is there greater need of fresh observation than in this of love. The ever-increasing subtlety and complexity of modern love have not yet found adequate registration and interpretation in art. Art always seems to me a magic mirror in which the shapes of the past are held long after they have passed away. The author of to-day looks not into his heart-but into the mirror-and writes. Primitive Love found its poet in Longus the Greek, with his "Daphnis and Chloe"; but who has given us Modern Love? Not Meredith himself, despite his sonnets; though "The Egoist" is a terrible analysis of a modern lover, as saddening as the "Modern Lover" of George Moore. The poets are ill guides to love. Their passions are half-fantastic, if not of imagination all compact. Shelley's "Epipsychidion" was the expression of a passing mood; Tennyson's "Come into the Garden, Maud," a lyric exaltation that must have died down when Maud appeared, and could in any case scarce have survived its fiftieth rewriting; Rossetti's interpretation of "The House of Life" is as purely individual as Patmore's "Angel in the House"; Swinburne sings of phantasms; we can no more take our poets for types of modern lovers than we can accept Dante or Petrarch as representatives of the mediaeval lover. These poets used their goddesses as mystic inspirers. Dante was not in love with Beatrice, the daughter of Portinari, but with his own imagination: she married Simone as he Gemma, and thus he was still able to worship her. The devotion of Petrarch to Laura did not prevent his having children by another lady. If we turn to modern prose-writers, we fail to find any really subtle treatment of Modern Love. Henry James himself shrinks from analysing it, even allusively and insinuatingly. Zola's handling of the love-theme is as primary as Pierre Loti's, for Zola has the eye for masses, not for individual subtleties. Tolstoi, informed by something of the rage of the old ascetics, is too iconoclast; Maupassant's stories sometimes suggest a cynicism as profound as Chamfort's or that old French poet's who wrote: