Slobberdom, Sneerdom, and Boredom
Ben Hecht
It is the custom of inspired opinion to pay little attention to mediocrities, to dismiss them with a shudder. I understand The Little Review to be an embodiment of inspired opinion, an abandonment of mental emotion—Youth. Like some of the people who read it and even some of them who write for it, it flies at the throats of contemporary Chimeras and leaps upon the Pegasi of the moment. It slashes and roars, hates and loves. It never considers the right and never considers the wrong. It does not endeavor to be just and fair. This is at once a great crime and a great virtue. It is criminal to be unjust and it is virtuous to be truthful. To me The Little Review is always both. I sympathize with its spirit and share it. Leave justice to the greybeards. Why should a soul which has the capacity for inspiration quibble in prejudices?
I think, however, that shuddering at mediocrities is a grave error. Evil is the monopoly of the few as well as genius. Hating and loving them are luxuries. Therefore it is that this writing is not composed in the luxurious spirit of The Little Review. My opinion is not an inspired one, my emotion is not an abandonment. I write with a photographic dispassion of the three great divisions of mediocrity—Slobberdom, Sneerdom, and Boredom.
Slobbering is not an art and it is not an evil. It is not even important except as an object of analysis. True, if encountered in print or in the flesh it is likely to have a nauseous effect upon sensitive souls; but then one can easily avoid encountering it. One does not, for instance, have to attend a Walt Whitman dinner. When one hears that a Walt Whitman dinner is to be given on a certain night in the Grand Pacific Hotel all one has to do to remain happy and free from suffering is to stay at home. My friend K—— and I went to a Walt Whitman dinner because we were young and curious and hungry, and because Walt, after all, is a great artist.
The dinner proved to be like most dinners of its kind—a glorious opportunity for saccharine drool at the expense of a great name. Appreciation and love of an artist—a poet—are highly commendable qualities if practiced in private, if put into proper print. It is the same as with love of a woman. But to stand up in a public place, to shed tears of ecstasy, wave one’s arms, pull at one’s hair and strike at one’s bosom—these are, as they always have been, the slobbering methods of egotistical mediocrity. It is simply a prostituting of the emotions.
Mediocrity is not insensible to art. It is very probable that the Rev. Preston Bradley, who insists he is a reformed clergyman, really likes Walt Whitman, feels thrilled with the reading of him. But the joy the Rev. Bradley derives from reading Walt in his library is not enough for him. In fact, it is not a joy at all. It is an irritation. Give the Rev. Bradley an opportunity to show what he thinks of Walt Whitman, to stand up on his feet before three hundred and fifty sympathetic souls and prove what a keen sense of taste and an advanced instinct of culture he (Rev. Bradley) possesses by yawping:
“I love Whitman, I adore Whitman. He is this to me. He is that to me—”
—then and not till then does the Rev. Bradley feel the real joy of appreciation for “good old, dear old, wonderful old Walt.” Give the Rev. Bradley a decent chance to platitudinize, attitudinize, and blatitudinize, and the love he bears old Walt oozes from him in dewy sighs and briny words.
Do not imagine that I am violently indignant with the Rev. Bradley, or wish the reader to be, for his insincerity. It is indeed one of his best qualities. By being insincere, by having no actual ground for his ecstacy, the Rev. Bradley must, perforce, pay a great deal of attention to what he says. He is free to pick out the best words, the best pose, the most arresting and perhaps enlightening point of view. I say he is free to do this, but of course he doesn’t. It is not the fault of his insincerity, however. If the Rev. Bradley were an artist he would profit by it and be great. But why all this talk about such a person as the Rev. Bradley? Surely not because he is deserving of careful censure. The reason is that there were at least three hundred male and female Rev. Bradleys listening to him, slobbering in silence.
And now the next division of mediocrity. Mr. Clarence Darrow was another of the talkers. Mr. Darrow sneered. Mr. Darrow sneered at Homer, Euripides, Shakespeare, Dante, Landor, Whittier, Tennyson, Milton, Kipling, and Heine because they didn’t write as good old Walt wrote. Because they wore fetters in their art and insisted on making the last word in the first line rhyme with the last word in the third line. They were weak, ignoble creatures, these copybook writers, said Mr. Darrow; they insisted on using a singular subject with a singular predicate and believed that a violation of such procedure was a sin. One of the things you learn in your school text books on physics is that a gentleman by imposing a pencil-point before his eye can obscure his vision of the Colossus. The idea seems apropos in the case of Mr. Darrow. Mr. Darrow by imposing his soul upon the figures of the world’s big men can obscure them entirely for himself and evidently his sympathizers. After he had concluded three hundred and fifty persons, every one present so far as I could see except my friend K—— and myself, stood up and sneered with Mr. Darrow. They passed him a rising resolution of love and cheered him three times, omitting, however, the customary tiger.
The greatest trouble with Mr. Darrow was his sincerity. He didn’t slobber any more than a public speaker has to in order to have a public to speak to. But his sneers were deep and earnest. They were entirely intellectual, the intellectual essence of mediocrity. All of us sneer, of course. The sneer is the one great American characteristic. When I told a man in the office in which I work that I had attended a Walt Whitman dinner he sneered at me.
“Fourflushers,” he said. “I can’t see how you put that highbrow stuff over. A lot of long-haired, flea-ridden radicals, ain’t I right? I wouldn’t let my wife associate with a bunch like that.”
(This is my office friend’s highest conception of manly virtue,—a thoroughly American one,—being careful of whom his wife associates with.)
Then my office friend went on to assert that Whitman was undoubtedly an immoral, not to say degenerate, party, that he “got by with his stuff because it was raw,” and that everybody who professed any admiration for him was a suspicious character and one he “would think twice about before inviting to his home” (where his wife is).
It is rather a complicated matter, this sneering business; and after attending a Walt Whitman dinner I don’t know whose sneers disgust me more, Mr. Darrow’s or my friend’s. They are both, however, identical in spirit, the spirit of mediocrity and sincerity when sincerity becomes, as it most always does, the cloak for ignorant convictions and bigoted fanaticism.
And now we come to the third and last condition—boredom. Among the speakers at this memorable dinner was Mr. Llewellyn Jones. Mr. Jones is a critic of literature by profession if not qualification—although I do not say it, really. Of all the orators at good old Walt’s memorial gabfest Mr. Jones was the least offensive. He said nothing that shocked the taste or violated one’s innerself or harrowed one’s soul. I don’t, of course, remember what Mr. Jones did say. One never does, not only in the case of Mr. Jones but in the thousands like him. They occupy time and space and leave them empty. Not for them the sneer or the slobber. Mr. Jones wouldn’t sneer for the world. And as for slobbering Mr. Jones has too much good taste and discretion for that. Not that he is above them. His fear of them, his apparent uncertainty in distinguishing between these two characteristics and the characteristics of inspired opinion, indicate this plainly enough.
So to be safe Mr. Jones resorts to the time-honored entrenchment of mediocrity. He barricades himself behind the bulwarks of boredom. He discharges no cannon, he commits no sins, he makes no false steps or takes no false flights. He is boredom incarnate, the eternal convention in the arts whether he deals with Nihilism, radicalism, or stands pat on the isms of the past. Mr. Jones never gets anywhere, I repeat. I speak of all the Joneses. Nobody derives anything from him—from them—except ennui. He, they, never offend, never elate. He, they, are always Mr. Jones.
Listening to the Joneses is as elevating an experience as watching the water blop-blop out of the kitchen hydrant. And this idea leads me back to where I started—The Little Review.
Can you imagine what a thorough contempt a kitchen hydrant would have for a fountain rising from the rocks, for a brook gurgling down the hillside, or a strong river capering to sea? It wouldn’t exactly sneer at them. Mr. Jones doesn’t. But it would feel moved to spirited reproof. How juvenile it is to gurgle, the hydrant would say, how vain and foolish it is to rise from the rocks, how upsetting it is to be continually capering to sea. I do not claim any super-intelligence in the matter of hydrants. But Mr. Jones and all the Joneses do say, and I have enough intelligence to understand them if not to sympathize with them, that The Little Review is young and idiotic and given to unnecessary emotions and so forth. All of which is true, looked at from the elevation of a kitchen sink. “Why don’t you,” remonstrates the hydrant to the brook, “blop blop with me?”
An afterthought: at this Whitman dinner there was one among the speakers who sustained a dying faith in Walt, humanity, and vers libre in general. He was Carl Sandburg who read a free verse poem of his own on Billy Sunday.
It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.—Whitman.
The Death of Anton Tarasovitch
A Short Story of the Present War
Florence Kiper Frank
Anton Tarasovitch lay dying. He lay in a pleasant cornfield whither he had dragged himself in the heat of the afternoon, for a shelter against the merciless sun. But now it was evening and the stars were out, and dying was not now so bad an affair as it had been in the dust and the blinding sunlight. True, the pain was at times terrible, but at other times it made one only light-headed, so that oneself or the part that was Anton Tarasovitch seemed to be a different thing altogether from the body of Anton Tarasovitch which lay beneath It shot to pieces, while It fluttered and hovered above.
He had not been lying for many hours in the Austrian cornfield. He knew that by the progress of the sun downward—downward until it made the long summer shadows that he loved in the fields at home; downward until it brought a breath of coolness and a gray light that had brushed out the clear distinction of shadows and sunlight; downward until it was gone forever and a few stars burned quietly in the sky overhead. It was the last sunset that Anton Tarasovitch was to see in this world. But time had no longer any meaning for Anton Tarasovitch. Lying on one’s back, so, and waiting to die, a minute can seem all there is of the world, and then an hour can be burned up like a minute, while one faints into unconsciousness, before one is slowly dragged back again to the thought, “I am I”—the thought that makes the world for each man, that creates for him the stars and the shadows and the sun sinking downward.
Yes, Anton Tarasovitch knew that now—that it was this thought that made the world. And when he stopped thinking it, the world would again be nothing. Down! down! down! one would plunge, and then the world would be nothing. But it would exist still for other men. Yet how could that be? Tomorrow the sun would come up again into the sky just as every day it had come up in the fields at home, making the long shadows that he had so loved in the mornings and in the evenings. Tomorrow other men would see the sun—many other men would see it. But if Anton Tarasovitch did not see it——! In vain he struggled to create for himself a universe in which there would be no Anton Tarasovitch. Well, he was not clever enough to understand such matters. Men in universities and men who wrote books had figured them out and knew all about them. But how was he, who had never been to a University, who had not been to school even, to understand!
Yet this much he understood—that he was dying for his country. This the general had told them, and he had known always, since a boy, that it was a brave and fine thing to fight for one’s country and to die if need be. Anton Tarasovitch was dying that his country might be saved.
Yet it was strange that the big Russia had need of him, just one common peasant. The great Russia had so many men that were strong and powerful, men with uniforms that glittered—men that were much cleverer and braver than Anton. Why should the country have need of him? Sasha needed him, and the children. Sasha needed him in the fields and she needed him in her heart too. She had often called him the light of her heart, in the strange words—so different from the words of other women—that Sasha often used. And he knew by her face that she needed him. She didn’t have to tell him so. He knew by the kindling of her face, as of a curtain behind which suddenly a candle appears. So her face would light up when she saw him. Sasha would mind greatly if she never saw him again.
He was dying because it was a glorious thing to die for one’s country—for the White Tsar, the little Father. You died to protect your country, so that your great country might live forever. But if you weren’t there to know that it lived forever!—now why couldn’t he think of the world without Anton Tarasovitch in it? Why did he land against a black wall every time he tried to think of tomorrow without Anton Tarasovitch?
It was needful that he die to save his country. What if, to the general, he were only one of thousands and to Sasha and the children all of life—nevertheless, if every man should think that, then there would be no one at all to save the country. It was rather clever of him to figure it out so, especially with the fire in his side that made his head so light and his thoughts fly off from it and refuse to anchor down for more than a minute. It was clever of him to reason it out—Anton Tarasovitch who had never been to a University—that if every man should say to himself, “O, I don’t count. Just one more or less!”—then there would be no army at all to fight the Tsar’s battles.
Yet he was not fighting or dying now to save Sasha. Nor was he dying to save his children even in the years to come. That wouldn’t be bad—to die so that years afterwards, even though it might be many years afterwards, one’s children would prosper and would live more happily. That would be a sort of living when one was dead, because one’s children were in a way oneself in different bodies. But he couldn’t see how Maxim and Ignat and Sofya and Tatya would at any time be better off because he was dying right now. He couldn’t see but that the land would be poorer and that they would have to work harder because he and the other peasants were dying for the Little Father and for their country.
But if he couldn’t figure out just what people he was saving, at least he knew against what men he was fighting. He was fighting against the Austrians. The Austrians were a horrible people who spoke a language one couldn’t understand at all. When you tried to understand them, you couldn’t understand a word they were saying. He had known an Austrian once—a big blonde fellow who had stayed a few days at their little village. One day Anton had been walking with the tiny Tatya on the road that led to the market and they had met the Austrian, who had stopped and had given Tatya a flower out of his button-hole. Anton remembered Tatya’s crows of delight. The Austrian had smiled at her, a nice, friendly smile, and Tatya had grabbed for his hand as children will, even when the people they grab at are Austrians.
Tatya had seemed to like the Austrian. And Anton had had to confess to himself that he wasn’t a bad fellow. But he must have been pleasant only because of Tatya. No one could help being pleasant to Tatya. The Austrian had been for a moment friendly because of her. At heart he was a hateful fellow. All Austrians were hateful. They all hated the Tsar and the Fatherland and they all hated him, Anton, because he was a Russian.
There must be some Austrians lying in this cornfield now, wounded as he was wounded. But he could see no one. Flat on his back, he could see only the stars which were thick now against the sky. And he began to think that this was a cruel thing—that a man should be alone when he was dying. Even when a chap was just ill, he wanted someone to take care of him. Once when Anton had been ill of a fever he had been just like a baby, so weak and helpless. He had cried then because the milk that Sasha had brought him had been too hot for his tongue and had burned him. It was silly for a big man to cry, but that was the way you became when you were sick—weak and silly. He had never in his life cried when he was well. When men were well they were never silly.
Women—women were different! Five times had Sasha been so ill that it was terrible—four times for the children that were living and once for the little one that had died. Sasha had almost died too that time. She had been so white and so hopeless looking for weeks after! But in all the times she was ill she had not complained as much as he had, that one month that he was sick with the fever. That must be because women were used to pain. The good God had so ordained it. For every life that they brought into the world they had to suffer, not only at the time, but for months before and then for years afterward.
They were strange creatures, were women. If a child became ill or died, its mother suffered again, just as the day she had borne him. At least so Sasha had suffered when the baby had died—and other women that he had seen in the village.
Birth was a strange thing now! He had never really thought of it before, but wasn’t it a strange thing that each time a person was born into the world, there should be pain and the long months of waiting. Then in one second an Austrian shell could blow away the body that some woman had waited for and had carried in her own body. In one second—why, so he had been waited for—he, Anton Tarasovitch. Now wasn’t that wonderful!—and he had never until this minute really thought of it. He, Anton Tarasovitch, had been carried in the body of his mother and had been born in pain and in rejoicing. Why, it was like a miracle! And he had thought so lightly of it, had just taken it for granted that he should be born and that she should love him.
He would like to make it up to her in some way now. But it was too late. She had been dead for very many years now and he also was dying. Well, he could tell her about it when he saw her with the saints in Heaven.
Heaven! He would go there, of course, because he had always, since a boy, been obedient and had done just what the priests had told him. He ought to think now about Heaven. But somehow he did not care to think about it, and the strange part was that it did not trouble him that he did not care. Even if he woke tomorrow in Heaven, he would not be the same Anton. He might live forever, but that wouldn’t be the same thing as waking up in the morning with Sasha at his side. He tried to think what “forever” meant, and he fetched up against the same black wall that he had when he had tried to think of a world without Anton Tarasovitch to know himself in it. Forever! ever! ever! No stopping! On and on! But that would be horrible. No! no! he couldn’t bear that. One could do nothing, nothing, to get out of it. Even if one could be blown to pieces with a gun, say a thousand years from now, in Heaven, one’s soul would gather itself together again and go on and on, forever and forever.
No, he mustn’t think about it. If he thought about it any more, he would lift his hands and strangle himself, so as to be able to stop thinking about it. Now he would think about Sasha. When he thought about her, he could feel her right next to him. He couldn’t see her face exactly, nor could he see her standing there. And yet it was as if she really were there, and he could see her. That was the way it was when you loved a person. She was, as it were, in you, or at least right next to you, and yet she was separate from you, too.
He had liked life with Sasha. He didn’t know until now how much he had liked it. True, it was a hard life they had lived together. One was on the go every minute—in bad weather when the frost stung and to walk even a mile became an agony; and in good weather one was constantly on the go, when it might perhaps have been pleasant to sit under the trees and play with the children. But life was good, for all that. Of course, if they could have saved money—only a little money—it would have been better. But the little money they could save had had to go for the taxes. The taxes were for the Fatherland, the priest had told him. The taxes were paid so that when the need came, Anton would be able to die for his country. But there was something confusing about that. Life would be better if it were not for the taxes, and the taxes were paid so that he might—no, that was bewildering. With the fire in one’s side and in one’s brain, how could one think clearly about so difficult a matter? Besides, there were many matters of that sort that he, Anton Tarasovitch, was not clever enough to think about. One left such things to the priests, who were good men, and to the clever men at the universities.
The stars were sometimes a long way off now and sometimes very near to him. But neither near nor far away did they seem to care about him. They were the only things he could see in the world and they did not seem to care about him. Undoubtedly they had seen many men dying. He knew about the stars! A young teacher who had come to the village when he was a boy had talked about them and Anton had never forgotten.
The young teacher had not stayed long in the village. He was “dangerous,” they said, and Anton heard afterwards that he had gone to America. It gave one many thoughts to listen to the teacher. He had said that the stars were worlds, just like our own earth—the earth that Anton knew the good Christ had come down to save. Anton, who was just a boy, had wanted to ask him if Christ had had to save all these worlds that were stars. But that was only one of the many confusing thoughts one had in listening to the young teacher. One felt strange in listening to him, as if the world weren’t solid at all, but were flowing like a river. * * *
Anton felt very sorry for himself, lying there under the stars that did not care for him. He began to cry—silly, weak tears that tasted of salt as they touched his mouth. It was only at times that he knew that he was crying. At other times the soul of him entirely left his body and went shooting up and up, to be recaptured only with a struggle.
The two of them—the burning body and the light soul—would have held together better, he knew, if someone could grip his hand tightly. At least that was the way they had done in the fever. When Sasha had gripped his hand, as if by a miracle he had been restored for a moment to a complete man, and was no longer two pieces—a body below and a soul that went fluttering above it.
If only he could touch someone’s hand now—anyone’s hand—the hand of a human being! To be all alone with the cruel, flickering stars up above, that was no way to die—snuffed out into the darkness. That was no way for any man to go, even though he were just a peasant. But Anton knew himself important now, almost as important as a general. He knew himself important, with a strange, tremendous importance. He was as important as almost anyone in the world, and he was dying alone in the darkness.
Then he remembered that there must be other men in the cornfield. He had thought of that before, and afterwards he had forgotten. If there were other men here—even one other man, an enemy—he would find that comrade and they would die together.
Slowly, painfully, inch by inch he dragged himself. The stalks were like an impenetrable thicket. They entangled him as snares or a forest of swords set about him. He dragged himself on his palms, inch by inch, butting away the cornstalks.
An Austrian was lying on his back, gazing upward. He was dead now, but Anton did not know it. There was a wound in his neck, and the flies had begun to gather.
Anton gave a sob as he saw the Austrian. One more effort and he would be near enough to touch him. Perhaps the Austrian would grip his hand—hard—as Sasha had gripped it.
The hand of the Austrian did not grip hard when Anton touched it. It fluttered a little, however—Anton was sure of that. So Anton covered the hand with his own, and with his own hand gripped hard, as Sasha had gripped the hand of Anton.
And so died Anton Tarasovitch, looking up at the stars.
Art as it appears without the artist, i. e., as a body, an organization (the Prussian Officers’ Corps, the Order of the Jesuits). To what extent is the artist merely a preliminary stage? The world regarded as a self-generating work of art.—Nietzsche.
Rupert Brooke
(A Memory)
Arthur Davison Ficke
One night—the last we were to have of you—
High up above the city’s giant roar
We sat around you on the generous floor—
Since chairs were lame or stony or too few—
And as you read, and the low music grew
In exquisite tendrils twining the heart’s core,
All the conjecture we had felt before
Flashed into torch-flame, and at last we knew.
And Maurice, who in silence long has hidden
A voice like yours, became a wreck of joy
To inarticulate ecstasies beguiled.
And you, as from some secret world now bidden
To make return, stared up, and like a boy
Blushed suddenly, and looked at us, and smiled.
RUPERT BROOKE, MCMXIV
To a West Indian Alligator
(Estimated age, 1957 years)[2]
Eunice Tietjens
Greetings, my brother, strange and uncouth beast,
Flat-bellied, wrinkled, broad of nose!
You are not beautiful—and yet at least
Contentment spreads your scaley toes.
The keeper thwacks you and you grunt at me,
Two hundred pounds of sleepy spleen.
He tells me that your cranial cavity
Will just contain a lima bean.
How seems it, brother, you who are so old,
To lie and squint with curtained eye
At these ephemera, born in the cold,
These human things so soon to die?
You were scarce grown, a paltry eighty years,
Too young to think of breeding yet,
When Christ the Nazarene loosed the salt tears
Which on man’s cheeks today are wet.
Mohammed rose and died—you churned the mud
And watched your female laying eggs.
Columbus passed you—with an oozy thud
You scrambled sunward on your legs.
So now you doze at ease for all to view
And bat a sleepy lid at me,
You eat a little every year or two
And count time in eternity.
So, brother, which is wiser of us twain
When words are said and meals are past?
I think, and pass—you sleep, yet you remain,
And where shall be the end at last?
[2] I cannot vouch for the science of this. It is “Alligator Joe’s” estimate.
Villon’s Epitaph[3]
Witter Bynner
I who have lived and have not thought
But gone with nature as I ought,
Letting good things occur,
And now amazed and cannot see
Why death should care so much for me.
I never cared for her.
Scarron’s Epitaph[3]
Witter Bynner
He who now lies here asleep
None would envy, few would weep:
A man whom death had mortified
A thousand times before he died.
Peaceful be the step you take,
You who pass him—lest he wake.
For his first good night is due.
Let poor Scarron sleep it through.
[3] From the French of François Villon.