The pity is that a book of so many merits should be spoiled by so transparently silly a point of view. The job of interpreting and accounting for the morons who now swarm in the United States, consuming its substance and menacing its future, is not going to be done by college dunderheads, disguised as “trained experts,” or by political mountebanks at Washington, or even by wizards writing in the reptile press; it is probably going to be done, if it is ever done at all, by novelists. It needs imagination as well as information; it calls for men who can distinguish clearly between what fools believe and what is really true; it demands a kind of wisdom that is not the common wisdom. Here Mr. Steinbeck fails miserably. He reduces an immense complex of hidden causes and baffling effects to a mere problem in kindergarten morals. He tries to account for the collapse of a culture—and even the simian society of Arkansas share-croppers was based on a kind of culture—by finding a villain miles away, and blaming him. This is the sort of blah one hears from many otherwise sane people in wartime; it is heard only from the excessively credulous in the days of presumable normalcy. It is the lollipop on which bogus Liberals, New Dealers, and members of the “I-am-not-a-Communist—but” Society feed.
What is needed is a full-length investigation of the share-cropper and his allied anthropoids by someone with a novelist’s sharp eye for the apparently inconsequential but enormously significant fact, and a scientific freedom from childish prepossessions and flimsy theories. This year of prosperity sent its benefits to even the back-waters of the country, and encouraged the wholesale proliferation of marginal people. The years of scarcity are shoving more and more of them over the line, and they emerge from their wallows bellowing for succor.
But can any conceivable succor really restore them to self-sustaining? I begin to doubt it seriously. Life becomes tighter and more exigent than it was in the Golden Age, and it will probably go on growing tighter and more exigent for years to come. To nurse it back into people who are clearly unfit for it is simply to encourage the multiplication of their botched and hopeless kind. That idiotic process is now under way in the United States, and on an appalling scale. The problem before the house is to find some way to reverse it. A solution will never be reached by a resort to puerile sophistries, and sentimentalities by the New Deal out of the Uplift, with music by Karl Marx.
XVII. PLAYWRIGHTS AND POETS
George Bernard Shaw
From THE ULSTER POLONIUS, PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES, 1919, pp. 181–90.
Partly reprinted from the Smart Set, Aug., 1916, pp. 138–40
A GOOD HALF of the humor of Mark Twain consisted of admitting shamelessly to vices and weaknesses that all of us have and few of us care to acknowledge. Practically the whole of the sagacity of George Bernard Shaw consisted of bellowing vociferously what every one knows. I think I am as well acquainted with his works, both hortatory and dramatic, as the next man. I wrote the first book ever devoted to a discussion of them, in any language or in any land,* and I read them steadily and eagerly for long years. Yet, so far as I can recall, I never found an original idea in them—never a single statement of fact or opinion that was not anteriorly familiar, and almost commonplace. Put the thesis of any of his plays into a plain proposition, and I doubt that you could find a literate man in Christendom who had not heard it before, or who would seriously dispute it. The roots of each one of them are in platitude; the roots of every effective stage-play are in platitude; that a dramatist is inevitably a platitudinarian is itself a platitude double damned. But Shaw clung to the obvious even when he was not hampered by the suffocating conventions of the stage. His Fabian and other tracts were veritable compendiums of the undeniable; what was seriously stated in them was quite beyond logical dispute. They excited a great deal of ire, they brought down upon him a great deal of amusing abuse, but I have yet to hear of any one actually controverting them. As well try to controvert the Copernican astronomy. They are as bullet-proof in essence as the multiplication table, and vastly more bullet-proof than the Ten Commandments or the Constitution of the United States.
Well, then, why did the old boy kick up such a pother? Why was he regarded as an arch-heretic almost comparable to Galileo, Nietzsche or Simon Magnus? For the simplest reasons. Because he practised with great zest and skill the fine art of exhibiting the manifest in unexpected and terrifying lights—because he was a master of the logical trick of so matching two apparently safe premises that they yield an incongruous and inconvenient conclusion—above all, because he was a fellow of the utmost charm and address, quick-witted, bold, limber-tongued, persuasive, humorous, iconoclastic, ingratiating—in brief, a Celt, and so the exact antithesis of the solemn Saxons who ordinarily instruct and exhort us.
Turn to his “Man and Superman,” perhaps the greatest of all his plays, and you will see the whole Shaw machine at work. What he starts out with is the self-evident fact, disputed by no one not idiotic, that a woman has vastly more to gain by marriage, under Christian monogamy, than a man. That fact is as old as monogamy itself; it was, I daresay, the admitted basis of the palace revolution which brought monogamy into the world. But now comes Shaw with an implication that the sentimentality of the world chooses to conceal—with a deduction plainly resident in the original proposition, but kept in safe silence there by a preposterous and hypocritical taboo—to wit, the deduction that women are well aware of the profit that marriage yields for them, and that they are thus much more eager to marry than men are, and ever alert to take the lead in the business. This second fact, to any man who has passed through the terrible years between twenty-five and forty, is as plain as the first, but by a sort of general consent it is not openly stated. Violate that general consent and you are guilty of scandalum magnatum. Shaw was simply one who was guilty of scandalum magnatum habitually, a professional criminal in that department. It was his life work to announce the obvious in terms of the scandalous.
What lies under the common horror of such blabbing is the deepest and most widespread of human weaknesses, which is to say, intellectual cowardice, the craven appetite for mental ease and security, the fear of thinking things out. All men are afflicted by it more or less; not even the most courageous and frank of men likes to admit, in specific terms, that his wife is fat, or that she decoyed him to the altar by a transparent trick, or that their joint progeny resemble her brother or mother, and are thus trash. A few extraordinary heroes of logic and evidence may do such things occasionally, but only occasionally. The average man never does them at all. He is eternally in fear of what he knows in his heart; his whole life is made up of efforts to dodge it and conceal it; he is always running away from what passes for his intelligence and taking refuge in what pass for his higher feelings, i.e., his stupidities, his delusions, his sentimentalities. Shaw devoted himself brutally to the art of hauling this recreant fellow up. He was one who, for purposes of sensation, often for the mere joy of outraging the tender-minded, resolutely and mercilessly thought things out—sometimes with the utmost ingenuity and humor, but often, it must be said, in the same muddled way that the average right-thinker would do it if he ever got up the courage. Remember this formula, and all of the fellow’s alleged originality becomes no more than a sort of bad-boy audacity, usually in bad taste. He dragged skeletons from their closet and made them dance obscenely—but every one, of course, knew that they were there all the while. He would have produced an excitement of exactly the same kind (though perhaps superior in intensity) if he had walked down the Strand bared to the waist, and so reminded the shocked Londoners of the unquestioned fact (though conventionally concealed and forgotten) that he was a mammal and had an umbilicus.
Turn to a typical play-and-preface of his hey-day, say “Androcles and the Lion.” Here the complete Shaw formula is exposed. On the one hand there is a mass of platitudes; on the other hand there is the air of a peep-show. On the one hand he rehearses facts so stale that even suburban clergymen have probably heard of them; on the other hand he states them so scandalously that
the pious get all of the thrills out of the business that would accompany a view of the rector in liquor in the pulpit. Here, for example, are some of his contentions:
(a) That the social and economic doctrines preached by Jesus were indistinguishable from what is now called Socialism.
(b) That the Pauline transcendentalism visible in the Acts and the Epistles differs enormously from the simple humanitarianism set forth in the Four Gospels.
(c) That the Christianity on tap today would be almost as abhorrent to Jesus, supposing Him returned to earth, as the theories of Nietzsche.
(d) That the rejection of the Biblical miracles, and even of the historical credibility of the Gospels, by no means disposes of Christ Himself.
(e) That the early Christians were persecuted, not because their theology was regarded as unsound, but because their public conduct constituted a nuisance.
It is unnecessary to go on. Could any one imagine a more abject surrender to the undeniable? Would it be possible to reduce the exegesis of a century and a half to a more depressing series of platitudes? But his discussion of the inconsistencies between the Four Gospels is even worse; you will find all of its points set forth in any elemental treatise upon New Testament criticism. He actually dishes up, with a heavy air of profundity, the news that there is a glaring conflict between the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew i, 1–17, and the direct claim of divine paternity in Matthew i, 18. More, he breaks out with the astounding discovery that Jesus was a good Jew, and that Paul’s repudiation of circumcision (now a cardinal article of the so-called Christian faith) would have surprised Him and perhaps greatly shocked Him. The whole preface, running to 114 pages, is made up of just such shop-worn stuff. Searching it from end to end with eagle eye, I have failed to find a single fact or argument that was not as obvious as a wart.
Nevertheless, this preface makes bouncing reading—and therein lies the secret of the vogue of Shaw. He had a large and extremely uncommon capacity for provocative utterance; he knew how to get a touch of bellicosity into the most banal of doctrines; he was forever on tiptoe, forever challenging, forever sforzando. His matter might be from the public store, even from the public junk-shop, but his manner was always all his own. The tune was old, but the words were new. Consider, for example, his discussion of the personality of Jesus. The idea is simple and obvious: Jesus was not a long-faced prophet of evil, like John the Baptist, nor was He an ascetic, or a mystic. But here is the Shaw way of saying it: “He was … what we call an artist and a Bohemian in His manner of life.” The fact remains unchanged, but in the statement of it there is a shock for those who have been confusing the sour donkey they hear of a Sunday with the tolerant, likable Man they profess to worship—and perhaps there is even a genial snicker in it for their betters. So with his treatment of the Atonement. His objections to it are time-worn, but suddenly he gets the effect of novelty by pointing out the quite manifest fact that acceptance of it is apt to make for weakness, that the man who rejects it is thrown back upon his own courage and circumspection, and is hence stimulated to augment them. The first argument—that Jesus was of free and easy habits—is so commonplace that I have heard it voiced by a bishop. The second suggests itself so naturally that I myself once employed it against a chance Christian encountered in a Pullman smoking-room. This Christian was at first shocked as he might have been by reading Shaw, but in half an hour he was confessing that he had long ago thought of the objection himself, and put it away as immoral. I well remember his fascinated interest as I showed him how my inability to accept the doctrine put a heavy burden of moral responsibility upon me, and forced me to be more watchful of my conduct than the elect of God, and so robbed me of many pleasant advantages in finance, the dialectic and amour.
A double jest conceals itself in the Shaw legend. The first half of it I have already disclosed. The second half has to do with the fact that Shaw was not at all the wholesale agnostic his fascinated victims saw in him, but an orthodox Scotch Presbyterian of the most cocksure and bilious sort—in fact, almost the archetype of the blue-nose. In the theory that he was Irish I take little stock. His very name was as Scotch as haggis, and the part of Ireland from which he sprang is peopled very largely by Scots. The true Irishman is a romantic. He senses life as a mystery, a thing of wonder, an experience of passion and beauty. In politics he is not logical, but emotional. In religion his interest centers, not in the commandments, but in the sacraments. The Scot, on the contrary, is almost devoid of romanticism. He is a materialist, a logician, a utilitarian. Life to him is not a poem, but a series of police regulations. God is not an indulgent father, but a hanging judge. There are no saints, but only devils. Beauty is a lewdness, redeemable only in the service of morality. It is more important to get on in the world than to be brushed by angels’ wings.
Here Shaw ran exactly true to type. Read his critical writings from end to end, and you will not find the slightest hint that objects of art were passing before him as he wrote. He founded, in England, the superstition that Ibsen was no more than a tin-pot evangelist—a sort of brother to General Booth, Mrs. Pankhurst and the syndics of the Sex Hygiene Society. He turned Shakespeare into a bird of evil, croaking dismally in a rain-barrel. He even injected a moral content (by dint of herculean straining) into the music dramas of Richard Wagner—surely the most colossal sacrifices of moral ideas ever made on the altar of beauty. Always the ethical obsession, the hall-mark of the Scotch Puritan, was visible in him. His politics was mere moral indignation. His aesthetic theory was cannibalism upon aesthetics. And in his general writing he was forever discovering an atrocity in what was hitherto passed as no more than a human weakness; he was forever inventing new sins, and demanding their punishment; he always saw his opponent, not only as wrong, but also as a scoundrel. I have called him a Presbyterian. Need I add that he flirted with predestination under the quasi-scientific nom de guerre of determinism—that he seemed to be convinced that, while men may not be responsible for their virtues, they are undoubtedly responsible for their offendings, and deserve to be clubbed therefor?.…
And this Shaw the revolutionist, the heretic! Next, perhaps, we shall be hearing of St. Ignatius, the atheist.
Ibsen the Trimmer
From the Smart Set, Oct., 1911, pp. 151–52
Ibsen, like his German disciples, never quite achieved the thing he set out to do. Always there was a compromise, and the practitioner vetoed the reformer. You will find in every one of the great Norwegian’s plays, from the beginning of the third act of “A Doll’s House” onward, a palpable effort to shake off the old shackles—but you will also hear those old shackles rattling. In “Hedda Gabler” Sardoodledom actually triumphs, and the end is old-fashioned fifth-act gunplay. In “The Master Builder” and “Ghosts” logic and even common sense are sacrificed to idle tricks of the theater; in “The Wild Duck” and “Rosmersholm,” as in “Hedda Gabler,” there are melodramatic and somewhat incredible suicides; and in “John Gabriel Borkman,” as Shaw wittily puts it, the hero dies of “acute stage tragedy without discoverable lesions.” The trouble with the conventional catastrophes in these plays is not that they strain the imagination, for Ibsen was too skillful a craftsman to overlook any aid to plausibility, however slight, but that they strain the facts. They are not impossible, nor even improbable, but merely untypical. In real life, unfortunately, for the orthodox drama, problems are seldom solved with the bare bodkin, else few of us would survive the scandals of our third decade. The tragedy of the Oswald Alvings and Hedda Gablers and Halvard Solnesses we actually see about us is not that they die, but that they live. Instead of ending neatly and picturesquely, with a pistol shot, a dull thud and a sigh of relief, real tragedy staggers on. And it is precisely because Brieux is courageous enough to show it thus staggering on that Shaw places him in the highest place among contemporary dramatists, most of whom think that they have been very devilish when they have gone as far as Ibsen, who, as we have seen, always made a discreet surrender to the traditions
—save perhaps, in “Little Eyolf”—before his audience began tearing up the chairs.
Edgar Lee Masters
From THE NEW POETRY MOVEMENT, PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES, 1919, pp. 88–89
There is some excellent stuff in “The Spoon River Anthology” and parts of it—for example, “Ann Rutledge”—seem likely to be remembered for a long while, but what made it a nine-days’ wonder in 1915 was not chiefly any great show of novelty in it, nor any extraordinary poignancy, nor any grim truthfulness unparalleled, but simply the public notion that it was improper. It fell upon the country at the height of one of the recurrent sex waves, and it was read, not as work of art, but as document. Its large circulation was mainly among persons to whom poetry qua poetry was as sour a dose as symphonic music. To such persons, of course, it seemed not only pleasantly spicy, but something new under the sun. They were unacquainted with the verse of George Crabbe; they were quite innocent of E. A. Robinson and Robert Frost; they knew nothing of the Ubi sunt formula; they had never heard of the Greek Anthology. The roar of his popular success won Masters’s case with the critics, at first very shy. His undoubted merits in detail—his half-wistful cynicism, his capacity for evoking simple emotions, his deft skill at managing the puny difficulties of vers libre—were thereupon pumped up to such an extent that his defects were lost sight of. Those defects, however, shine blindingly in his later books. Without the advantage of content that went with the anthology, they reveal themselves as volumes of empty doggerel, with now and then a brief moment of illumination. It would be difficult, indeed, to find poetry that is, in essence, less poetical. Most of the pieces are actually only tracts, and many of them are very bad tracts.
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