The Powder of Sympathy

by Christopher Morley

I

We look forward with keen interest to reading Civilization in the United States, the work of thirty-three independent observers commenting upon various phases of the American scene. So far we have only glanced into it, and have already found much that looks as though it needed contradiction. It is obviously going to be a gloomy book, rather strongly flavoured with intellectual ammonia. Of course, it is a healthy thing that some of our Intellectuals are so depressed about America. It is a good thing for a nation, as it is for an individual, occasionally to go home at night cursing itself for being a boob, a numbskull, and a mental flounder. But we feel about some of our Extreme Intellectuals as we do about the Physical Culture restaurants. The people in these restaurants eat nothing but vitamines and plasms and protose; they live in an atmosphere of carefully planned Scandinavian hygiene; yet most of them look mysteriously pallid. And some of our most Conscientious Brows, in spite of leading lives of carefully regulated meditation, don’t seem any too robust in the region of the wits.

However, we shall study this book with care. It contains articles by a number of people whom we admire specially. What we have been wondering is whether among its rather acid comments it gives any panoramic picture of the America we see daily and admire—an America which, in spite of comical simplicities and tragic misdirections of energy, seems to us, in vitality, curiosity, and surprising beauty, the most thrilling experiment of the human race.

In one article in this book we find the following:

Everything in our society tends to check the growth of the spirit and to shatter the confidence of the individual in himself. Considered with reference to its higher manifestations, life itself has been thus far, in modern America, a failure. Of this the failure of our literature is merely emblematic. Mr. Mencken, who shares this belief, urges that the only hope of a change for the better lies in the development of a native aristocracy that will stand between the writer and the public, supporting him, appreciating him, forming as it were a cordon sanitaire between the individual and the mob.

Well, our confidence in ourself is not yet wholly shattered, in spite of the grinding horror of American life. We feel confident enough to venture that this theory is dubious. Greatness in literature does not need to be protected from the insanitary infection of the mob. How Charles Dickens would have roared at such a timid little bluesock doctrine! Great writers do not need any clique of private appreciators or supporters. They are not produced by plaintive patter about ideals and the pride of the “artist.” They arise haphazard, and they carry in them an anger, an energy, and a fecundity that deny all classroom rules. And the mob, heaven help us! is the ground and source of their strength and their happiness. Nothing can “check the growth of their spirit,” because the spirit is big enough to turn everything to its own inscrutable account. You might as well say that Shakespeare couldn’t write great plays because the typewriter hadn’t been invented.

Of course, if by “a native aristocracy that will stand between the writer and the public,” we are to understand an efficient service of tactful office boys and mendacious telephone girls to keep the chance caller from cutting the mortal artery of Time, we applaud. But we fear that is not meant.

When we get weary of upstage comments about literature we go aloft and have a talk to the fellows in the composing room (who, by the way, are all reading Moby Dick nowadays). There is no priggishness in their criticism. They have the sound, sober, sincere instinct—as when one of them tells us, with magnificent insight, that Moby Dick is “Hamlet stuff.” When professional connoisseurs can teach us as much as the composing room can about the human values that lie behind literature, then we will mend our manners.

The more we think about it, the more we are staggered by the statement that American life “tends to check the growth of the spirit.” To us the exact opposite seems true. American life as we see it all round us seems to be crying aloud for a spirit great enough to grasp and express it. It seems the most prodigious and stimulating material that any writer ever had for his contemplation. It is a perpetual challenge to the imagination—a challenge that hardly any one since Whitman has been great enough, or daring enough, to deal with; but to say that it stunts the spirit can only be valid as a personal opinion. It is to say that a hungry man going into a restaurant loses his appetite.