To the Innermost
Margaret C. Anderson
The popular translation of that dangerous term, individualism, is “selfishness.” Self-dependence is a pompous phrase, and self-completion a huge negation. The average mind seems never to grasp the fact that individualism and democracy are synonymous terms; that self-dependence is merely the first of one’s intricate obligations to his universe, and self-completion the first step toward that wider consciousness which makes the giving-out of self valuable.
I am always feeling that some one will point out to me, with the most embarrassing justice, the obviousness of observations like these. But invariably, after a resolve to keep to those high levels which stretch out beyond the boundaries of the accepted, some one engages me in a discussion—some one who still believes in the antique theory that life proceeds for the sake of immortality, or that a woman must choose between her charm and the ballot; and I emerge therefrom convinced that the highest mission in life is the dedication of oneself to the obvious, and that a valiant preaching of truisms is the only way to get at the root of intellectual evils. It has its fascinations, besides: to convince a reactionary (not that I’ve ever done it) that renunciation is not an ultimate end, or that truth is a good thing for all people, is better than discovering a kindred soul. And so I proceed, without further apology: that human being is of most use to other people who has first become of most use to himself.
It is the war that has emphasized so overwhelmingly the triviality of trivial things. Out of such utter dehumanization one has a vision of the race which might emerge—a race purified of small struggles, small causes, small patriotisms; a race animated by those big impulses which have always made up the dreams of men. And then would come the more subtle personal development: a race of human units purged of small ideals and ambitions, cleansed to the point where education can at least proceed with economy—that is, without having to destroy two ounces of superstition to produce one ounce of knowledge. And at the foundation of such a race structure, I believe, will be a corner stone of Individualism—or whatever you may choose to call it. What it means is very simple: it is a matter of heightened inner life.
Our culture—or what little we have of such a thing—is clogged by masses of dead people who have no conscious inner life. The man who asked, “Did you ever see an old artist?” put a profound question. People get old because they have no vision. And they have no vision because they have no inner life. Of course, any sort of inner life is impossible to the man or woman who must be a slave instead of a human being. And this brings us, of course, to a discussion of economic emancipation—which I shall not take advantage of; because I want to talk here not of what the individual should have done for him, but of what he might very well do for himself. There are so many slaves whose bondage can be traced to no cause except their refusal or their inability to come to life; and the significance of the fact that spiritual resourcefulness is most rare among those persons who have the most leisure to cultivate it need not be emphasized even in an article devoted to the apparent.
Human weakness is reducible to so many causes beside that much-abused one of “circumstance.” We talk so much nonsense about people not being able to help themselves. The truth is that people can help themselves out of nine-tenths of all the trouble they get into. (We’ll leave the other tenth to circumstance.) If they could only be made to realize this, or that if they are helped out by some one else they might as well stay in trouble! To be dragged out is more desirable than starving to death, because it is more sensible, and because people are so sentimental in their attitude toward receiving that one welcomes almost any emergency which drives them to accepting aid with grace and honesty: anything to teach a man that he need not smirk about taking what he himself would like to give without being smirked at! But in spite of this, one must help himself to anything which is to be of positive value to him; and must learn that personality gets what it demands. However, this begins to sound like a pamphlet from East Aurora....
As a result of our shabby thinking on the subject of self-dependence we have lowered our standards of the exceptional to an alarming degree. We call that person exceptional who does what almost any one might do—but doesn’t. For instance:
The average girl of twenty in a conventional home hates to be told that she must not read Havelock Ellis or make friends with those dreadful persons known vaguely as “socialists,” or that she must not work when she happens to believe that work is a beautiful thing. She is submerged in the ghastly sentimentalities of a tradition-soaked atmosphere—and heaven knows that sentimentalities of that type are difficult to break away from. It takes not only brains, but what William James called the fundamental human virtue—bravery—to do it. And so the girl gives up the fight and moans that circumstances were too much for her. The next stage of her development shows her passing around gentle advice to all her friends on the noble theme of not being “hard” and living only for oneself; how one must sacrifice to the general good—never having had the courage or the insight to find out what the general good might really be. Thus are our incapacities extended. The girl who did break away she regards secretly as remarkable—which is not necessarily true. It is not that the second girl is remarkable, but that the first one is inadequate.
The average man of thirty-five slaves all day in an office and comes home at night to wheel the baby around the block and fall asleep over the newspaper. He has lost any feeling of rebellion, simply because he feels that he must. His permanent attitude is that all men are more or less in the same condition (or should be, if they’re well-behaved), and that to part with a vision after college is what any man of sense must do. His neighbor with an eye on something beyond an office desk and a go-cart is a dreamer or a fool; if the neighbor makes good with his dream, then he is a remarkable man of extraordinary capabilities. Which is not necessarily true, either; the dreamer has simply scorned that attitude which has been so aptly epitomized as “the second choice.”
There are as many phlegmatic radicals as there are conservatives; and there is no type among them more exasperating than the one that is content to sit around and be radical—and be nothing else. The lazy evasiveness of the “revolutionary” with his the-world-owes-me-a-living air positively sicken me. Why should the world owe anybody anything except a protection against that lack of struggle which cramps one’s intellectual muscles so hideously?
And then there is that most unpleasant type of all—the man who boasts of how he will use his chance when he gets it. He always gets it, of course; but he doesn’t know it. And when it comes out boldly and takes him by the ear he becomes terrified and slips back under the cover of things as they are. His is the most unattractive kind of intellectual cowardice, because it involves so many lies; it is simply a rapid sequence of boasting and fright and refusing to meet the truth.
Here they all are—the uncourageous company of the second choice: the half-people, the makeshifts, the compromisers, the near-adventurers. How pale and ambling they look; how they crawl through the world with their calculating side looks, ready to take any second-rate thing when the first-rate one costs too much. Oh, it is a sad sight!
We must be more brave! We must be more fine! We must be more demanding! The saddest aspect of the whole thing is that choice is such a tiny element in the process of becoming. It is after one has chosen highly that his real struggle—and his real joy—begins. And only on such a basis is built up that intensity of inner life which is the sole compensation one can wrest from a world of mysterious terrors ... and of ecstasies too dazzling to be shared.
Souls are weighed in silence, as gold and silver are weighed in pure water, and the words which we pronounce have no meaning except through the silence in which they are bathed.—Maeterlinck.
A Letter from London
Amy Lowell
August 28, 1914.
As I sit here, I can see out of my window the Red Cross flag flying over Devonshire House. Only one short month ago I sat at this same window and looked at Devonshire House, glistening with lights, and all its doors wide open, for the duke and duchess were giving an evening party. Powdered footmen stood under the porte-cochère, and the yard was filled with motors; it was all extremely well-ordered and gay.
I watched the people arriving and leaving, for a long time. It was a very late party, and it was not only broad daylight, but brilliant sunshine, before they went home. They did have such a good time, those boys and girls, and they ended by coming out on the balcony and shouting and hurrahing for fully ten minutes. How many of those young men were among the “two thousand casualties” at the Battle of Charleroi, of which we have just got news?
Devonshire House is as busy this afternoon, but it is no longer gay. In the yard is a long wooden shed, with a corrugated iron roof; there are two doors on opposite sides, like barn doors, and black against the light of the farther door I can see men sitting at a table, and boy scouts running upon errands. The yard is filled with motors again, and there is a buzz of coming and going. Yesterday a man brought a sort of double-decked portable stretcher, with a place above and below, and a group stood round it and talked about it for a long time. For this is the headquarters of the Red Cross Society. So, in one short month, has life changed, here in London.
A month ago I toiled up the narrow stairs of a little outhouse behind the Poetry Bookshop, and in an atmosphere of overwhelming sentimentality, listened to Mr. Rupert Brooke whispering his poems. To himself, it seemed, as nobody else could hear him. It was all artificial and precious. One longed to shout, to chuck up one’s hat in the street when one got outside; anything, to show that one was not quite a mummy, yet.
Now, I could weep for those poor, silly people. After all they were happy; the world they lived in was secure. Today this horrible thing has fallen upon them, and not for fifty years, say those who know, can Europe recover herself and continue her development. Was the world too “precious”, did it need these violent realities to keep its vitality alive? History may have something to say about that; we who are here can only see the pity and waste of it.
So little expectation of war was there, so academic the “conversations” between the powers seemed, that on the Friday, preceding the declaration of war, we went down to Dorchester and Bath for a week-end outing. It was rather a shock to find the market-place at Salisbury filled with cannon, and the town echoing with soldiers. The waiter at the inn, however, assured us that it was only manœuvres. But the next day our chauffeur, who had been fraternizing with the soldiers, told us that it was not manœuvres; they had started for manœuvres, but had been turned round, and were now on their way back to their barracks.
As we came back from Bath, on Monday, we were told that gasolene was over five shillings a can. That was practically saying that England had gone to war. But she had not, nor did she, until twelve o’clock that night. When we reached our hotel we found a state bordering on panic. There was no money to be got, and all day long, for two days, people (Americans) had been arriving from the Continent. Without their trunks, naturally. There was no one to handle trunks at the stations in Paris. These refugees were all somewhat hysterical; perhaps they exaggerated when they spoke of disorder in Paris; later arrivals seemed to think so. But we are untried in war—war round the corner. It is a terrifying nightmare which we cannot take for reality. Or could not. For it is now three weeks since the war burst over us, and already we accustom ourselves to the new condition. That is perhaps the most horrible part of it.
But that first night in London I shall never forget. A great crowd of people with flags marched down Piccadilly, shouting: “We want war! We want war!” They sang the Marseillaise, and it sounded savage, abominable. The blood-lust was coming back, which we had hoped was gone forever from civilized races.
But the Londoners are a wonderful people. Or perhaps they have no imagination. London goes on, and goes on just as it did before, as far as I can see. I understand that the American papers, possibly taking their cue from the German papers, say that London is like a military camp, that soldiers swarm in the streets, and that its usual activities are all stopped. It is not true. “Business as usual” has become a sort of motto. And it is as usual,—perhaps a bit too much so. The mass of the people cannot be brought to realize the possibility of an invasion. In vain the papers warn them, they believe the navy to be invincible. And Heaven grant that it is!
When, that first week of the war, bank holiday was extended to four days instead of one; when the moratorium was declared, which exempted the banks from paying on travellers cheques and letters-of-credit; and when, to add to that, so many boats were taken off, and there were no sailings to be got for love or money, something closely approaching a panic broke out among the Americans. And what wonder! They felt caught like rats in a trap, with the impassable sea on one side and the advancing Germans on the other. For Americans have not been brought up with the tradition of England’s invincibility at sea. They have heard of John Paul Jones and the “Bonhomme Richard.” And they have imagination. I was told that one woman had killed herself in an access of fear, and I have heard of another who has had to be put in an asylum, her mind given way under the strain. Many of these people had no money, and they could not get any; they came from the Continent and had to find lodgings, and they could offer neither money nor credit. The Embassy had no way of meeting the strain flung upon it. The Ambassador is not a rich man, and the calls for money were endless. Finally some public-spirited American gentlemen started a Committee, with offices at the Hotel Savoy, to help stranded Americans. And the work they have done has been so admirable that it is hard to find words to describe it. The Committee cashes cheques, gets steamship bookings, suggests hotels and lodgings, provides clothes, meets trains. I cannot write the half it does, but it makes one exceedingly proud. I do not believe that there is an American in London who has not helped the Committee with time or money, or been helped by it.
Perhaps the panicky ones have all been cared for and gone home, or perhaps man is a very adaptable animal. But we who are still in London have settled down and accepted things. The town is not like a camp, but still regiments of soldiers in khaki pass along fairly often. And during the few days when it was my duty to meet trains at Victoria Station, no train from the South Coast either arrived or left without its quota of soldiers. We motored down to Portsmouth last Sunday, and we were stopped at the entrance to the town and asked to prove that we were not Germans. It was not a very difficult task. Portsmouth is swarming with soldiers, but until we reached it, the only evidence of changed conditions was the strange absence of cyclists and motor-cyclists on the roads.
The other day I was waiting on a street corner. I was going to cross over and buy a paper. (The papers bring out new editions all day long, and in taxis, on buses, walking along the street, every one is reading a paper.) Suddenly I heard someone shout my name, and there were Richard Aldington and F. G. Flint. They were in excellent spirits; Richard Aldington had just been down to put his name on the roster of those willing to enlist. Flint cannot enlist; he is already serving his country in the Post Office, and sits all day long in the most important and most dangerous building in the world next to the Bank of England. It is guarded by soldiers and surrounded by bomb-nets, but London is full of spies! I thought of the exquisite and delicate work of these two men in the Anthologie Des Imagistes, and it seemed barbarous that war should touch them—as cruel and useless as the shattering of a Greek vase by a cannon ball. I remembered the letters of Henri Régnault I had read, long ago. I remembered how he gave up his studio in Algiers and came back to fight for France, and died in the trenches. We read of these things, but when we find ourselves standing on a street corner talking to two young poets who are preparing to face the same experiences—Well! It is different!
This is one side. There is, unhappily, another. Something that one feared, and is not glad to see. There is not that realization that there should be of the danger England is in, nor that rush to defend her that one associates with the English temper. They are not enlisting as they should, and that is the bare truth of the matter.[1] And there is a certain hysteria beginning to show, which is terribly un-English, as “English” has hitherto been. The appeal to men to enlist has become almost a scream of terror. The papers are full of it, in editorials, in letters from private persons. And still the Government delays to declare general mobilization. Instead, it adopts measures which seem positively childish. Lord Kitchener asks the taxi-cabs to carry placards urging enlistment, and when some of the union cab-drivers refuse, the papers solemnly urge a patriotic public to boycott the placardless cabs. And all England is supposed to be under martial law! Could anything be more miserably humorous? It is hard to imagine Wellington asking favors of cabmen, and, when he was refused, begging the populace to punish the offenders. The following advertisement in this morning’s Times illustrates the enthusiasm and the apathy which are rife at the same time:
Doctor’s wife, middle-aged, will undertake to perform the work of any tramway conductor, coachman, shop-assistant, or other married worker with children, provided that worker will undertake to enlist and fight for his country in our hour of need. All wages earned will be paid over to the wife and family.—Apply Mrs. Lowry, 1, Priory-terrace, Kew Green, S.W.
Perhaps one of the saddest evidences of a changed England is Mr. H. G. Wells’s letter to Americans in The Chronicle of August 24th. For an Englishman to implore a foreign country to do or not to do anything, is new. Englishmen have not been used to beg weakly, with tears in their eyes. Whatever one may think of Mr. Wells’s contention in this letter, the tone in which it is written is a lamentable evidence of panic. Panic has never been an English trait, and neither has whining servility. And the Americans are the last people in the world to be moved by it. We are a just people, and we admire valor. I think Mr. Wells need not have stooped to ask us for justice or sympathy.
After all, it purports little to point out the spots on the sun. England is still the mother-country of most Americans, even if that was a good while ago. And we love her. She has given us not only our blood, but our civilization. Since this war broke out she has harbored us and kept her ships running for us. In Paris, one must get a permit from the police to stay or leave. In England, one is free and unmolested. England has always been the refuge of oppressed peoples. Does she need to ask our sympathy now that she is, herself, oppressed? Neutral we must be, and neutral we shall be, but we are not a military nation, and despotism can never attract us.
Every American would rather a bungling democracy than the wisest despot who ever breathed.
[1] This condition has somewhat improved since above was written.
Cause
Helen Hoyt
As the surprise of a woman
When she knows that she is pregnant,
Is the surprise of a murderer
Beholding that he has killed.
That so small a moment of time,
That so slight an act should suffice!
No plan, no purpose, ordained what befell,
Only the wild urging blood and muscle
And swift desire.
These,
In an instant,
Beyond retraction,
Could set in motion all the long inexorable processes of life:
All the long inexorable processes of death.
Could establish that which may not be effaced,
Which alters the world.
New Wars for Old
Charles Ashleigh
The Mob, by John Galsworthy. [Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.]
I confess to a certain disappointment at this play. Not that it is a bad play. It would be hard for Galsworthy to write badly. But, both dramatically and philosophically, it might have been better, and, judging by Galsworthy’s previous work, could easily have been better. Justice, Strife and The Pigeon, for instance, are immeasurably superior to this play.
The theme of the play is the protest of an upper-class statesman against a war of conquest with a small nation in which his country is engaged. His wife and family are all normally patriotic and his stand estranges them. His governmental position is lost, as is also his parliamentary membership. Sir Stephen More makes a magnificent stand for his ideal. His courage and consistency result in his death at the hands of the victory-drunken mob. And yet,—I was left cold.
It must have been my realization of the futility of his cause which killed my warmth; and yet I am an admirer of forlorn hopes and their leaders. It was, perhaps, more the artificiality of his espousement of peace, and the grounds for this espousement, which failed to move me.
To begin with, More belongs to the class which really benefits by war: the monied, aristocratic and governing class. To such people patriotism is a natural and inevitable source of action, as it is rooted in their very substantial stake in the country. Love of the fatherland, which has given them so much, and the duty of fighting its wars, or of encouraging others to fight them, is a very vital and vigorous thing in them. Against this, More had nothing to advance but a very negative propaganda: an appeal to the strong to act “honorably” by pitying and sparing the weak (a perfectly sickening reason); and the invoking of a hazy abstract idea of “justice” which has about as much power to influence men’s actions as a policeman has to maintain morality.
More was a member of the imperial class; and he became a “Little Englander.” He was a member of a soldierly class; and he became an advocate of peace for peace’s sake. He opposed a cloudy concept of conduct,—utterly unrelated to the facts of life,—to a deep-rooted instinct founded on the material benefit of his own class. And this was the reason of his failure. He had nothing grippingly affirmative to give the people, and he should have realized that to appeal to the rulers was hopeless.
A great, popular, full-blooded thing like war must have a great, popular, full-blooded thing to counteract it. Also, we must remember that the life of the masses of people is not such a beautiful and colored thing that death on the battle-field is such a very dreadful alternative. Painting the horrors of war,—its sordid and unheroic side,—is not enough. Nothing could be more sordid and unheroic than the gray existence of the factory hand. A new, full gospel of affirmation, revolt, and militancy must be set against the war-passion. The spirit of conflict is good; it is essential to continuity; it is the breaker of old forms and the releaser of new life. It can, however, be directed along newer and more gainful channels than that of international market-struggles.
The people who can stop wars are the people who fight wars. And they can stop them by the divinely simple method of refusing to fight; and by refusing to provide food, clothing, and transportation to any that do fight. The worker operates industry and can shut off supplies if he will. Anyone who preserves a faith that the governors may end war is sustaining himself with a straw.
But if the people, the mass of producers, are to stop war, they must first be stirred; and a negative pacific preaching will never stir them. Only a call to a greater and more vital war can move them.
Such a war exists. It is the hand-to-hand struggle against exploitation, against the economic bondage which has fettered the minds and bodies of the larger portion of the race for ages past. This conflict is affirmative: it calls for courage, endurance, and comradeship. Also it is true, because it has its roots in the biological basis of life—love and hunger. The stir of passion is in it: the passion of hate and the passion of love, and also the love of a good fight; and without these elements there is no war worth the while.
But all this, it seems, More did not realize. And, had he realized it, he could have done but little. He was too removed from the “mob” to speak their tongue, too far from them to share their feeling, too alien for his words to gain a foothold in the crannies of their being.
The mob that killed More had made More, and all others of his kind. The despised mob had fought his battles on the field of war and on the field of industry. For the one they killed they had nurtured thousands. Inchoate and all but inarticulate, in this mob is the divine stuff out of which shall be formed the master-people to come, when once they decide to fight their own war instead of that of their task-masters.
Nothing, not even conventional virtue, is so provincial as conventional vice; and the desire to bewilder the middle classes is itself middle-class.—Arthur Symonds.
Ante-Bellum Russia
Alexander S. Kaun
The effects that the European War will have—and is having already—on the internal conditions in Russia are merely conjecturable, considering the fact that since the first week in August we have had no sterling news from the embroiled countries. I believe that a study of the pre-war situation in Russia, of her recent moods and aspirations, will enable us to venture a guess or two as to the potential results of the present imbroglio. The forthcoming is by no means an attempt to exhaust the problem: it is barely a bird’s-eye view of contemporary Russian reality as reflected in life and literature.