The Impotence of Satire.—A correspondent has made the admirable suggestion that a new Don Quixote be written to slay the dragon of Capitalism with the pen of satire. The suggestion is unconditionally free; no acknowledgment of its source need be made; but anybody is at liberty to begin on the work at once. Some excellent arguments are adduced why the work should be undertaken. Capitalism has long troubled the land, and its evils are generally admitted. Reason has failed to make any impression on the beast, and sentiment appears almost to be its favourite food. Satire, therefore, is plainly indicated as the appropriate weapon, and at its crack, my correspondent suggests, the beast would dissolve into nothing amidst universal laughter. What more need be said but “Cervantes, forward!”?
Unfortunately my correspondent proceeds to weaken his appeal by affirming that Cervantes himself had Capitalism in his mind when writing certain chapters of the First Book of Don Quixote. In Chaps. 44 and 45 it appears to me, he says, that Don Quixote’s identity as a capitalist is undoubted. Sancho Panza’s identity with the mass of labour is equally undoubted; and the middle classes are represented by a number of ladies and gentlemen, a canon, a judge, and a doctor. These chapters standing by themselves would be a good allegorical explanation of the present financial position. But why of the “present” position, if satire is capable of dissolving Capitalism in laughter? Without questioning the allegorical character of the chapters referred to, which may, for all I dare say, be a perfect anticipation of the economics of Douglas—it is not encouraging to our present-day Cervantes to be told that their proposed method has already been tried by a master only to leave the dragon of Capitalism still to be tickled to death. Now one comes to think of it, not even Chivalry, an even more undoubted object than Capitalism of Cervantes’s satire, really died of the shock, for the very good reason that it was dead before Cervantes rained his laughter upon it. Even Cervantes’s satire killed nothing, and the task to be undertaken for my correspondent is therefore greater than Cervantes’. In the spirit of Squeers, I can only suggest that he who spells window, w-i-n-d-e-r, should clean it. My correspondent, forward!
The power of satire is usually much exaggerated; as a matter of fact, it is one of the least effective of psychological weapons. Almost anything can turn its edge. Juvenal is not reported to have done much more than incur the dislike of his contemporaries; and Swift, the most serious satirist since Juvenal, never effected anything by satire alone. His two most immediately effective pamphlets, the Drapier’s Letters, and the Conduct of the Allies, contained passages of satire, irony, and every other sort of appeal, but neither of them can be called satirical as a whole. Satire, like wit, is effective in small doses given at opportune moments; but, as in the case of wit, sustained satire defeats its own object. It owes what power it wields to the contrast in which it stands to the prevailing mood of the work in which it appears: its unexpected appearance therein. Surprise is the condition of its doing any work at all. Surely if this were not the case the satirical journals of, let us say, Germany or France, would have dissolved in laughter the vices aimed at long before now. But satire is expected of them, is discounted in advance, and positively adds to the attractiveness of the objects satirised. I will not go so far as to say that Cervantes recalled dead Chivalry to life by satirising it, though the crop of romances that followed Don Quixote in England may almost be said to justify the charge; but it can safely be said that a satire directed against Capitalism would lengthen rather than contract the life of the dragon, by adding amusement to its claims to exist.
The “Dial” of America.—The American Dial is perhaps the most fully realised of all the promising literary magazines now current in the world. It is in all probability considerably in advance of the American reading public for whom it is intended, but it is all the better on that account. Culture is always called upon to sacrifice popularity, and, usually, even its existence, in the interests of civilisation; for civilisation is the child of culture, and has in general as little consideration for culture as a human child for its own education. The custodians of culture (or the disinterested pursuit of human perfection) are the adults of the race of which civilisation is the children’s school: and, fortunately or unfortunately, in these democratic days, their function is largely under the control of their pupils. Gone are the times when a Brahmanic caste can lay down and enforce a curriculum of education for its civilisation. Modern civilisations believe themselves to be, and possibly are, “old enough” to exercise their right of selecting their teachers. It cannot be said, as yet, that they exercise their choice with remarkable discretion, but the process of popular self-education, if slow, may at any rate be expected to be sure. In any event there is no use in kicking against the stars. If the forces of culture are to rule modern civilisations, they must do so constitutionally. The days of the dictatorship of the intelligentzia are past.
There are two kinds of judgment which it is essential for civilisation to acquire: judgment of men and judgment of things. Things are of primary importance, but so also are persons. One is not before or after the other. For instance, culture itself is a “thing” in the philosophic sense; it is a reality in the world of ideas; but of quite equal importance in our mixed world of ideas and individuals, are the actual persons and personalities claiming to embody and direct culture. Hence the transcendent importance of criticism next to creation in both spheres: criticism of personalities and criticism of “works.” The mistaking of a little man for a great man, or the reverse, may easily mean the delay of the work of culture for whole generations. And, equally, the confusion of the objects of culture with the objects of civilisation may spell the ruin of a nation. Few critics realise the magnitude and responsibility of their function, or the degree to which personal disinterestedness is indispensable to its fulfilment. Holding the office of inspectors of the munitions of culture, they are often guilty of “passing” contraband upon the public, and, still more often, of failing to ensure delivery of Culture’s most effective weapons. More seriousness is needed, very much more, in matters of criticism. We must be capable of killing if we are to be capable of giving life.
The Dial is particularly to be praised for its courageous criticism of great dead Americans. America, like Europe, suffers from necrophily, a kind of worship of the dead. Indeed, as a good Injun was synonymous with a dead Injun, a great American writer is usually a dead American writer. All his faults die with him, and only his myth remains, with the result that people who would not have acknowledged the existence of, let us say, Whitman living, will not acknowledge a fault in Whitman dead. For a nation thus under a critical statute of Mortmain, the utterance of what seems like blasphemy is a necessary part of their education. They must know that the dead great, by very virtue of their greatness and the survival of their works, are still alive and active, and that the same kind of criticism must be kept playing on them as upon the living forces. The Dial reviewers show no disposition to shirk this unpleasing duty. One by one, as the occasion suggests, the dead great are given the honour of living criticism, and treated as the immortal present which they are. Since their spirits go marching on, criticism must go marching along with them.
One of the recently so honoured dead in the pages of the Dial has been Whitman; and in an essay on Whitman’s Love Affairs Mr. Emery Holloway throws a fresh light on an old but still obscure subject. His “love affairs” were obviously more matter for criticism in Whitman than in some other writers, since Whitman was pre-eminently an autobiographical writer who sang himself. What, then, does Mr. Holloway find? A little surprisingly—at least to readers who have not already divined Whitman’s secret—that Whitman “suffered” from love, and struggled against it rather as a raw tyro than as the “master of himself” of his poetic fiction. In some private diaries of Whitman, quoted by Mr. Holloway, we are presented with the spectacle of Whitman grappling with his own soul after the manner of saints mortifying the flesh, or, as I would suggest, after the distinctively modern fashion. Instinct was at war with reason, even in Whitman, and, in the end, as usually occurs with modern men, it was reason that won. Mr. Holloway divides Whitman’s works between two periods: the first, in which he sang “untrammelled natural impulses”; and a second, in which he was concerned about democracy and the immortality of the soul; in short, with reason. And between these two periods, or worlds of discourse, Mr. Holloway tells us, was a purgatory, in which Whitman’s soul was tried as by fire. The diaries already mentioned contain some of the records of Whitman’s conflict with himself. Here, for example, is an entry bearing all the marks of a painful resolution. “I must,” he says, “pursue her no more” ... and resolve “to give up absolutely and for good, from this present hour, the feverish, fluctuating, useless, undignified pursuit of 164 ... avoid seeing her or any meeting whatever from this hour forth, for life.” The reader is to be pitied who does not understand, however dimly, what Whitman must have gone through in imagination and reality to confide to the author of Leaves of Grass such a shocking confession. He emerged from the experience with that past behind him, but still, I think, unresolved. For it was not his to reconcile instinct with reason in an epigenesis; he passed from one phase to the next without carrying his sheaves with him. From being within sight of real greatness, he declined to the stature of a great American.
Following its faithful treatment of the Whitman myth, the Dial examines the case of Mark Twain. It is undoubtedly a pathological case, and not only Mark Twain but America was the victim in it. A nation suffers the fate of its great men; as is their odyssey so is the odyssey of the nation to which they belong. Does a great man in any nation become corrupt; does he succumb to falsehood and to the morality of the herd? Even so his nation is on the downward path. On the other hand, does he maintain his integrity, even though his life should pay for it? There is a sign that his nation also will battle through. From this point of view, Mark Twain presents the spectacle both of a tragedy and a portent. Nobody can read his works without realising the essential truthfulness of the man, his marvellous capacity for intellectual honesty, his unerring perception of the norm of things. Mark Twain, permitted and encouraged to pass free judgment upon American and human life, might have been one of the cultural forces of the new world; he was one of God’s best gifts to America. We know, however, what America did for Mark Twain; it slowly but surely emasculated him in the supposed interests of the female (not the feminine) in the American soul. Under the influence of his wife who, as he said, not only “edited everything I wrote, but edited me,” under the similar influence of all that was bourgeois in America—Mark Twain consented to “make fun” of everything he held dear. Talents and powers which it is spiritual death to trade, Mark Twain prostituted for the amusement of a people whose deepest need was high seriousness. As Mr. Lovett says, Mark Twain “flattered a country without art, letters, beauty or standards to laugh at these things.” The judgment is severe, but it is just; and Mark Twain, I believe, would be the first to acquiesce in it.
That he preserved, in the back of his mind, his spiritual vision and knowledge, there can be no doubt. He sinned not only against the light, but in the light. One or two revealing phrases in his works have escaped the censorship of the female American he married. “In our country,” he said, “we have three unspeakably precious things: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the prudence never to practise either.” It must be admitted that this is a “snag” in the smooth current of a work of amusement; it betokened the existence of depths and danger. But it is nothing to the remarks let off in conversation on the rare occasions when the censor was absent. “I’ve a good mind,” he once said to a friend, “to blow the gaff on the whole damned human race.” It is tragedy, indeed, that he never did. We have the gaff blown on us all too seldom, and usually by men whose idiosyncrasies and abnormalities allow us to ignore them. Mark Twain was such a normal man that his blowing of the gaff could not possibly have been attributed to a neurotic complex derived from infantile suppression: it would have been the judgment of man upon Man. His failure to bestow this inestimable gift upon America and the world we owe to America, and if, as I have said, a nation suffers the fate of its great men, we may be sure that America will pay for it.
America Regressing.—Just when we in Europe were beginning to envy America her promise, contrasting it with the winter of our own discontent, “the authorities” (as one might say the furies, the parcæ or the weird sisters) have descended upon our unfortunate but deserving friend, the Little Review, and suspended its mail service on account of its publication of a chapter of Mr. James Joyce’s new novel, Ulysses. That such an absurd act of puritanic spleen should be possible after and before years of world-war is evidence that spiritual meanness is hard to transcend; and it confirms the justice or, at least, the apprehension expressed in Mr. Ezra Pound’s bon mot that the U.S.A. should be renamed the Y.M.C.A. Not only is the Little Review perfectly harmless; would to heaven, indeed, that it were, or could be otherwise, for never can any good be done by something incapable of doing harm; but the Ulysses of Mr. James Joyce is one of the most interesting symptoms in the present literary world, and its publication is very nearly a public obligation. Such sincerity, such energy, such fearlessness as Mr. Joyce’s are rare in any epoch, and most of all in our own, and on that very account they demand to be given at least the freedom of the Press. What the giant America can fear from Mr. Joyce or from his publication in the Little Review passes understanding. Abounding in every variety of crime and stupidity as America is, even if Ulysses were a literary crime committed in a journal of the largest circulation, one more or less could not make much difference to America. But Ulysses is no crime; but a noble experiment; and its suppression will sadden the virtuous at the same time that it gratifies the base. America, we my be sure, is not going to “get culture” by stamping upon every germ of new life. America’s present degree of cultural toleration may ensure a herb-garden, but not a flower will grow upon the soil of Comstock.