Sketch Maritime
From the Smart Set, March, 1920, pp. 48–49
The Pennsylvania Railroad this side of Wilmington. To the left the Delaware River. Somewhere below Chester there passes a British tramp-steamer—a hideous monster in the new style, with the engine and funnel directly over the propeller—a dirty drab in color—squat and waddling like a corn-stuffed hog—a clumsy machine manned by greasy men in overalls. This is the heir of the Viking ships, the caravels and galleons, the lordly four-masters, the windjammers, the clippers. This is the successor of Drake’s Golden Hind—a tub full of union men. And think of her work in the world: to pile up money for the holders of first and second preferred stock, to haul cattle and baled hay, to ply endlessly between Cardiff and Philadelphia.
Penguin’s Eggs
From the American Mercury, Sept., 1930, pp. 123–24.
A review of THE WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard; New York, 1930
The journey that Mr. Cherry-Garrard describes was made during the Antarctic Winter of 1912; it took but a month, covered but 100 miles, and was no more than a minor incident of Captain Robert F. Scott’s successful (and fatal) dash to the South Pole. Nevertheless, it is probable that few travellers, ancient or modern, have ever met with greater difficulties or suffered greater agonies than Cherry-Garrard and his two companions, both of whom afterward perished with Scott.
The tale as he tells it—and he is a very candid and persuasive narrator—is really quite appalling. In a temperature that sometimes dropped to seventy-five degrees below zero, with dreadful hurricanes blowing, the three dragged their sleds across the glassy glaciers and tumultuous shore-ice of the Antarctic coast. To one side of them was the frozen sea: to the other loomed the sinister cone of Mt. Erebus, 13,350 feet high. They had no dogs or other transport animals. They had no shelter save a small tent. For thirty days and nights they struggled and suffered, shivered and shook. They fell into crevasses, were blinded by the whirling snow, and got lost in the trackless wastes. Horrible frost-bites tortured them. They went without food for days and saw their small supply of oil reduced to a few pints. But still they battled on, and at the end of their Dantesque month they were once more back at Scott’s base—three shaking, speechless and dreadful caricatures of men. And to what end? For what purpose did they risk their lives so heroically? They did it because they wanted to get some eggs of the Emperor penguin. They came back with three.
Mr. Cherry-Gerrard, I suspect, is quite conscious of the futility of the adventure. More, there is reason to believe that he has his sly opinion about the whole enterprise of Polar exploration, though he himself is one of its shining ornaments and escaped sharing Scott’s fate only by a hair. Certainly there is a plain touch of irony in his argument that such exploits as the one he describes so graphically are useful (and even necessary) to the progress of science. First he shows, on the authority of Professor Cossar Ewart of Edinburgh (whoever he may be: I can’t find him in the reference-books) that the eggs of the Emperor penguin are enormously valuable—that they throw light upon the origin of all birds. And then he shows, on his own far safer testimony, that when he went to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington to get a receipt for those he had brought home at such cost he found that no one took any interest in them, and that he himself was regarded as a nuisance. Was the joke here on the English as scientists, or on Cherry-Garrard as hero? Perhaps it was on both.
These penguin eggs, however much the pundits at South Kensington may disdain them, were yet the most valuable scientific baggage brought home from the Antarctic by the Scott expedition. Scott himself, struggling back from the Pole and freezing to death within eleven miles of a secure and even comfortable camp, had nothing save thirty pounds of fossils, none of them very interesting. They were recovered when his body was found, and are probably at South Kensington today, keeping company with the eggs. The other members of the party took endless meteorological observations, but there is no evidence that they discovered anything save what was already palpable to their five senses, e.g., that it was very cold in such latitudes, that the Winter storms were most unpleasant, and that the glaciers kept on moving. Not all their observations were sufficient to save Scott and his four companions from death. They went to the Pole fully expecting, on the assurance of the expedition’s scientific staff, to find mild Summer weather, and were undone by a tremendous blizzard. Moreover, their medical experts helped them no more than their meteorologists. At least one of them seems to have died, not of the blizzard, but of scurvy. Mr. Cherry-Garrard says, indeed, that he now believes the expedition’s ration was grossly inadequate. Yet it had been planned very carefully, and was based upon Scott’s experience on the Discovery expedition, upon more than a year of preparatory work, and upon the unanimous counsel of his medical men.
The truth is that the scientific value of Polar exploration is greatly exaggerated. The thing that takes men on such hazardous trips is really not any thirst for knowledge, but simply a yearning for adventure. But just as an American business man, having amassed a fortune, always tries to make it appear that he never had any desire for money, but only wanted to set up an orphan asylum or get time to study golf, so a Polar explorer always talks grandly of sacrificing his fingers and toes to science. It is an amiable pretension, but there is no need to take it seriously. Admiral Byrd actually took his armada South in order to be the first man to gape at the South Pole from an airship: the rest was no more than lagniappe. I am ready to venture that the whole scientific fruits of his enormously costly expedition were no greater than lowly zoölogists pluck every Summer at Wood’s Hole. As for Lindbergh, another eminent servant of science, all he proved by his gaudy flight across the Atlantic was that God takes care of those who have been so fortunate as to come into the world foolish.
* He lived, retired, until July 7, 1947.
XI. MAKING A LIVING
The Professions
From the Smart Set, Jan., 1922, pp. 46–47
THE DIGNITY of the learned professions, always assumed in discussions of them, succumbs quickly to analysis. What, realistically described, is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? In brief, he gets a living by convincing idiots that he can save them from a mythical Hell. It is a business, at bottom, almost indistinguishable from that of selling Texas oil stocks. As for a lawyer, he is simply, under our cash-register civilization, one who teaches scoundrels how to commit their swindles without risk. As for a physician, he is one who spends his whole existence trying to prolong the lives of persons whose deaths, in nine cases out of ten, would be a public benefit. The case of the pedagogue is even worse. Consider him in his highest incarnation: the university professor. What is his function? Simply to pass on to fresh generations of numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant and, for the most part, untrue. His whole professional activity is circumscribed by the prejudices, vanities and avarices of his university trustees, i.e., a committee of soap-boilers, nail-manufacturers, bank-directors and politicians. The moment he offends these vermin he is undone. He cannot so much as think aloud without running a risk of having them fan his pantaloons.
There was a time when the profession of arms was honorable, but that is surely no longer true in America. The corps of officers of the United States Army seems to be fast sinking to the estate and dignity of a gang of longshoremen. One never picks up a newspaper without reading of the arrest of some officer or ex-officer for an offense involving dishonor. Not long ago one of them was hanged for murder. A few days later another one, in prison for the same crime, asked for a pardon on the ground that, in the region where he was brought up, murder was not regarded as criminal. Swindles, defalcations, rowdyism, drunkenness, extortions, cruelties—such offenses are so common that they pass almost unnoticed. Some time ago, I ventured the guess that the democratization of the officers’ corps was to blame—that the introduction into it, by competitive examination, of youths unaccustomed to the amenities
of civilization had destroyed the spirit left in it by Washington and Lee. But perhaps there is a more profound cause. Democracy, I daresay, is fundamentally opposed to that fine tradition of caste, that conscious superiority to ordinary temptations and ordinary aspirations, which makes the officer and gentleman. Warfare, as carried on by democracies, is inevitably polluted by the moral rages of inferior men. It converts itself into a sort of gang-fight, with bawling, yelling and biting in the clinches. Above all, it rejects the old ideal which prescribed an unimpassioned and chivalrous view of the enemy. Thus it grows less and less attractive to the old type of soldier. The general of tomorrow will be far more the evangelist and rabble-rouser than the gallant knight. And his officers, departing more and more from the type of Prince Eugene, will come closer and closer to the type of the Y.M.C.A. secretary.
Dazzling the Public
From the Smart Set, May, 1920, p. 35
The tendency of all men to magnify their trades by escamoterie is beautifully displayed in the case of the railway conductors. The work that a passenger conductor does is so simple and so trivial that any average eighteen-year-old boy could learn it in a week. Moreover, the notion that he carries an enormous responsibility, that the lives of his passengers depend upon his skill and diligence, is fully ninety-nine per cent, buncombe: all of the actual responsibility is upon the locomotive engineer. Nevertheless, the passenger conductors of the land, by parading before the public in florid uniforms and with heavy frowns upon their faces and by treating it in general as a German field-marshal must be expected to treat a mob of Socialist barbers, have so far convinced it of their importance that it consents readily to outrageous railway fares in order that they may be paid preposterous salaries, out of all reasonable proportion to their services. Of late the thing has gone even further. On many of the larger railways the conductor no longer deigns to collect tickets in person. Instead he stalks through the train with a so-called auditor, or adjutant, attending him, and this adjutant does all the actual work. And for this pompous parade the conductor is paid as much as a captain in the Army. In Europe the train conductor is paid probably one-fourth as much, and does ten times the work. He takes tips, but he earns them. A passenger who fees him may expect to get some service from him. He looks after windows, hears complaints politely, and even helps with the baggage. An American conductor would be staggered by any suggestion that he do such things. His sole duty is to enforce the notion of his stupendous dignity, to cow the boobery with his august and judicial mien, to keep up the grotesque farce that has made him what he is.
The Puppet’s Pretension
From the Smart Set, Dec., 1912, pp. 157
Genius is altogether too fine a word to apply to stage players, just as it is too fine a word to apply to opera singers, fiddlers, piano thumpers, college professors, and other such retailers of better men’s ideas. A first-rate actress, true enough, may be measurably better than a mere interpreter, a phonograph in skirts, a sentient marionette; she may actually add a valuable something to the thing created by the dramatist. But that something, after all, is no more than a good painter adds to a house. It is the architect and not the painter that creates the house, and in the same way it is the dramatist and not the actress that creates the character the actress plays. Creation is an act of the highest cerebral centers. It takes out of any man who attempts it the best that is in him. When it is essayed by a true genius it takes out of him the best that is in the human race. But interpretation is usually as much a physical as a psychic matter. An actress with only one eye would be in worse case than an actress with only one cerebral hemisphere; a Mischa Elman with defective hearing and clumsy thumbs would simply cease to exist as a Mischa Elman. And yet Lafcadio Hearn, with only one eye, created words of undoubted genius, and Ludwig van Beethoven, with defective hearing, and Richard Wagner, with clumsy thumbs, each revolutionized the art of music. The test of a genius is that he creates something great and different. The test of an interpreter is that he does not reduce that greatness to the commonplace and that differentness to rote. The one is greatest when he gives us most of himself; the other is greatest when he best effaces himself.
The Emancipated Housewife
From IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN, 1918; revised, 1922, pp. 120–22
The American housewife of an earlier day was famous for her unremitting diligence. She not only cooked, washed and ironed; she also made shift to master such more complex arts as spinning, baking and brewing. Her expertness, perhaps, never reached a high level, but at all events she made a gallant effort. But that was long, long ago, before the new enlightenment rescued her. Today, in her average incarnation, she is not only incompetent; she is also filled with the notion that a conscientious discharge of her few remaining duties is, in some vague way, discreditable and degrading.
To call her a good cook, I daresay, was never anything but flattery; the early American cuisine was probably a fearful thing, indeed. But today the flattery turns into a sort of libel, and she resents it, or, at all events, does not welcome it. I used to know an American literary man, educated on the Continent, who married a woman because she had exceptional gifts in this department. Years later, at one of her excellent dinners, a friend of her husband tried to please her by mentioning the fact, to which he had always been privy. But instead of being complimented, as a man might have been if told that his wife had married him because he was a good lawyer, or surgeon, or blacksmith, this unusual housekeeper, suffering a renaissance of usualness, denounced the guest as a liar, spilled soup on his waistcoat, ordered him out of the house, and threatened to leave her husband.
This disdain of offices that, after all, are necessary, and might as well be faced with some show of cheerfulness, takes on the character of a cult in the United States, and the stray woman who attends to them faithfully is laughed at as a drudge and a fool, just as she is apt to be dismissed as a “brood sow” if she favors her lord with viable issue. One result is the notorious villainousness of American cookery—a villainousness so painful to a cultured uvula that a French hack-driver, if his wife set its masterpieces before him, would brain her with his linoleum hat. To encounter a decent meal in an American home of the middle class, simple, sensibly chosen and competently cooked, becomes almost as startling as to meet a Y.M.C.A. secretary in a bordello, and a good deal rarer. Such a thing, in most of the large cities of the Republic, scarcely has any existence. If the average American husband wants a sound dinner he must go to a restaurant to get it, just as if he wants to refresh himself with the society of charming and well-behaved children, he has to go to an orphan asylum. Only the recent immigrant can take his ease and invite his soul within his own house.
Honest Toil
From the Smart Set, April, 1922, pp. 47–49
As I grow older, old tastes and enthusiasms fade miserably into memories—yellowed leaves fluttering from the dying tree. An observation mellow with platitude, and yet every man, as he makes it for himself, must be filled with a Goethean melancholy, a kind of dismayed wonder. Am I actually the same mammal who, in the year 1894, was a baseball fan, and knew all the players without a score-card? It seems incredible—some outrageous fable out of history, like that about Washington and the cherry tree. I can imagine nothing more dismal today than a baseball game, or, for that matter, any sort of sport. The taste for it, the capacity for rising to its challenge, is as extinct in me as, say, the desire for immortality. I have absolutely no yearning to exist as a wraith for all eternity, and by the same token I have absolutely no yearning to play golf. Not long ago, when too much work at the desk—chained to a stool and a spittoon like a bookkeeper—brought me to a professor of internal medicine, and he prescribed more exercise, I turned to laying bricks to avoid the unbearable boredom of golf, tennis, and all the rest of it. In laying bricks there is at least some obvious intelligibility. One makes something, and it is there to look at and mull over after it is done. What is there after one has played a round of golf?
When I was a
boy, bricklayers always fascinated me. No other mechanics wore such a lordly and distinguished air. Even in those days they got a great deal more money than other workingmen, and showed it in their manner. At noon, when the carpenters and tinners sat down in their slops to devour stale sandwiches out of tin cans, the bricklayers took off their white overalls, went to the Dutchman’s at the corner, and there dined decently on Linsensuppe and Sauerbraten, with large horns of lager to flush their esophagi. Bricklayers were the only workmen who had recognized gangs of slaves to serve them, to wit, the hod-carriers. In those far-off times, in the city where I lived, all hod-carriers were colored men—usually great, shiny fellows with immense knots of muscles in their legs and arms. The Irish had already become lawyers, city detectives, saloonkeepers, gang bosses, and Todsaufer for breweries. These colored men, in Summer, liked to work with their chests bare. Swarming up the ladders in long files, each with his heavy hod on his shoulder, they made an exotic, Egyptian picture. One could fancy them descended in a direct line from the Nubians who carried the hod when Cheops built his pyramid. The bricklayers, forever cursing them fluently, but all the same palpably friendly to them, fitted into the fancy perfectly. The mason is the one workman who has resisted all change. He does his work today as he did it in Babylon, with deft hand and sharp eye. Compared with him, all the other mechanics of our time are upstarts: put him alongside the plumber, the structural iron worker, or the electrician. Moreover, what he does endures. The carpenter? A blower of soap bubbles, a maker of millinery! But the brick walls of Babylon stand to this day.
Laying bricks in my garden wall (to the great disquiet of my neighbor’s dog) I learned a number of things worth knowing. One (discovered almost instantly) was this: that there is much more to a handicraft than the simple exercise of muscle. To lay bricks decently one must be careful, calculating, far-seeing, alert, a bit shrewd. Distances must be figured out very accurately, else there will presently appear a gap that no conceivable brick will fit. One deals in hard and immovable lines, precise distances, mathematical levels. A wall that leans, save when age has pushed it over, is a wall that must come down. There can be no easy compromises with the plumb-bob, no rough and ready evasions of the plan. A week or two of hard effort left me with a respect for bricklayers vastly transcending my old admiration. I knocked off a day and went out to watch a gang of them laying the front wall of a somewhat elaborate moving-picture theatre—a complex maze of arches, cornices, pilasters. I had, even by this time, some professional comprehension of their problems. I stood gaping in the hot sun as they solved them—quickly, ingeniously, perfectly. But that, after all, was an easy job. The hardest of all, I have been told, is to lay the wall of a sewer manhole. It is all curves—and they do not all run the same way. The men who tackle it do it wholly by the eye. It is as difficult, in its way, as playing Bach.
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