10
Have we covered all the cases? Obviously not. It is no more possible to deal with all the authors who go wrong than it is to call all the sinners to repentance. But sin is primarily a question between the sinner and his own conscience, and the errors of authors are invariably questions between the authors and the public. The public is the best conscience many an author has; and the substitution of a private self-justification for a public vindication has seldom been a markedly successful undertaking in human history. Yet there is a class of writers for whom no public vindication is possible; who affect, indeed, to scorn it; who set themselves up as little gods. They are the worshippers of Art. They are the ones who not only do not admit but who deliberately deny a moral purpose in anything; who think that a something they call pure Beauty is the sole end of existence, of work, of life, and is alone to be worshipped. It is a cult of Baal.
For these Artists despise money, and in despising money they cheapen themselves and become creatures of barter. They sneer at morality and reject it; immediately the world disappears: “And the earth was without form, and void.” They demoralize honest people with whom they come in contact by demolishing the possibly imperfect but really workable standards which govern normal lives—and never replacing them. What is their Beauty? It is what each one of them thinks beautiful. What is their Art? It is what each cold little selfish soul among them chooses to call Art. What is their achievement? Self-destruction. They are the spiritual suicides, they are the moral defectives, they are the outcasts of humanity, the lepers among the workers of the world. For them there can be neither pity nor forgiveness; for they deny the beauty of rewarded toil, the sincerity of honest labor, the mystical humanity of man.
Of them no more. Let us go back in a closing moment to the contemplation of the great body of men and women who labor cheerfully and honorably, if rather often somewhat mistakenly, to make their living, to do good work and make the world pay them for it, yet leaving with the world the firm conviction that it has had a little the better of the bargain! These are the authors who “go wrong,” and with whose well-meant errors we have been dealing, not very methodically but perhaps not unhelpfully. Is there, then, no parting word of advice we can give our authors? To be sure there is! When our authors are quite sure they will not go wrong, they may go write!
A BARBARIC YAWP
II
A BARBARIC YAWP
IT was the handy phrase to describe Walt Whitman: The “barbaric yawp.” In its elegant inelegance the neatly adjectived noun was felt to be really brilliant. Stump speakers “made the eagle scream”; a chap like Whitman had to be characterized handily too.
The epigrammatic mind is the card index mind. Now the remarkable thing about the card index is its casualty list. People who card index things are people who proceed to forget those things. The same metal rod that transfixes the perforated cards pierces the indexers’ brains. A mechanical device has been called into play. Brains are unnecessary any more. The day of pigeonholes was slightly better; for the pigeonholes were not unlike the human brain in which things are tucked away together, because they really have some association with each other. But the card index alphabetizes ruthlessly. Fancy an alphabetical brain!
Epigrams are like that. A man cannot take the trouble to think; he falls back on an epigram. He cannot take the trouble to remember and so he card indexes. The upshot is that he can find nothing in the card index and of course has no recollection to fall back on. Or he recalls the epigram without having the slightest idea what it was meant to signify.
But this is not to be about card indexes nor even about epigrams. It is to be a barbaric yawp, by which it is to be supposed was once meant the happy consciousness and the proud wonder that struck into the heart of an American poet. Whitman was not so much a poet as the chanteyman of Longfellow’s Ship of State. There was an hour when the chanteyman had an inspiration, when he saw as by an apocalyptic light all the people of these United States linked and joined in a common effort. Every man, woman and child of the millions tailed on the rope; every one of them put his weight and muscle to the task. It was a tremendous hour. It was the hour of a common effort. It was the hour for which, Walt felt, men had risked their lives a century earlier. It was a revealed hour; it had not yet arrived; but it was sure to come. And in the glow of that revelation the singer lifted up his voice and sang.... God grant he may be hearing the mighty chorus!