Opinions

by Claude C. Washburn

When the war broke out, European countries, too, suddenly adopted (at first quite sincerely) this black-and-white world; and America’s heart went out to Europe—that is, to the shining white part of it. At last America understood Europe. But as early as 1915 Europeans began to feel that they had made a bitter mistake, and by now they have slipped back into an even more perplexed, shadowy and complicated world than before; and we, who never change, are further away from them than ever.

It is difficult to account for this rigidly consistent attitude of our mind. Our youth will not explain it (our youth being, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, our oldest tradition); neither will puritanism, nor the pioneer spirit, nor even, entirely, our standardization. Perhaps as much as to any one thing it is due to our unquestioning assumption that the business of making a living and better is the single, really important function of a man’s life. (In at least one provincial American city of considerable size the half-page conceded by the morning paper to art, letters and music is entitled ‘In Woman’s Realm’). Now it is difficult enough, heaven knows! to make a living; and, what with the fierceness of competition, to achieve ‘success in business’ may very likely demand every ounce of a man’s energy and almost every moment of his day. But it does not develop more than a very small part of his mind. At the end of an intensely active life the business man is mentally in much the same condition as the workman who for thirty years has made the same automobile part in a factory. Really he is intensely ignorant of life. By which, of course, I do not mean that he is ignorant because he has not read Thomas Hardy or heard a Richard Strauss tone-poem; rather, that he is ignorant of himself. He has not grown up; he is still a child; in any true sense he does not think at all. And his childish spirit is over everything; it and his puerile canons are shared even by the thousands who have not succeeded in business or in so much as making a living. He is so sure of himself; but he is sure of himself just because he does not know himself at all. And as he is, so are we.

This widespread ignorance of self is no doubt fostered by the manifold senseless activities with which our life is encrusted. Telephones, motor cars, radios, phonographs, movies, magazines, and newspapers save us from the leisure that we dread because, not being able to think, we should not know what to do with it. However that may be, ignorance of self is certainly at the bottom of our conception of the world as black-and-white and miracle-spotted. One deep unafraid look into our own hearts, and we should never again see life as so simple, sharp-edged an affair, because we could never again dissociate ourselves from any manifestation of it. That, of course, is exactly what we do at present and have always done, and it leads to many strange and wonderful things—among others, the institution of scapegoats.

Scapegoats are essential in a black-and-white world—to explain the black part; and we have had precisely as long a line of them as of short-cuts to Utopia. At one time, in the golden early days of muck-raking, they were trusts and their founders; and then we read, with a shudder of revulsion, of how Mr. Rockefeller’s face resembled that of an evil bird of prey. For Mr. Henry Ford the Jews are apparently the scapegoats, while to these the very numerous members of the Ku Klux Klan generously add the Negroes and the Catholics. But among our intellectual élite the scapegoats of the moment are undoubtedly Governments and Diplomats.

Gazing with horror upon the wreck to which the recent war reduced the world, these more thoughtful members of our public nevertheless share with the unthinking masses the need of a scapegoat, of something evil completely outside themselves, on which the blame can be laid. It approximates the need of a personal Devil. And so they say: ‘France is a menace to the peace of the world; she wishes to destroy Germany (or to obtain an hegemony over the coal-and-iron industry of Europe); she is cold-blooded and selfish. England’s pretence to greater generosity is a lie; she has annexed two million square miles of German colonies, and would be lenient toward Germany now in the matter of reparations solely because she needs a market for her industrial products.’ (Not to mention what they say of our ex-enemies). By ‘France’ and ‘England’ Americans of this sort do not mean the French and English peoples; they are not, like the Ku Klux Klansmen, childish enough to indict whole races. They mean the governments of England and France; but these they conceive of as flawless entities with a soul—an evil soul. Now it is undoubtedly true that any group, whether it be a mob, a literary circle or a government, does evoke a kind of group-spirit, a sort of soul, which is worse than the soul of any one of the individuals who constitute the group. But this is a pallid thing at best, or worst. The group-entity is but a thought in the minds of the individuals, who alone are real, and very like ourselves. Once one admits this, the whole black-and-white world collapses, and one faces a troubled, obscure, but also infinitely richer and more human world, full of pathetically mixed motives.

Diplomats, the choicest scapegoats to-day, are accused, not without justice, of playing callously with the lives of millions; using them like pawns on a chess-board is, I believe, the accepted figure. But what else, given the power, should we ourselves do, who live equally among abstractions, and are capable of reading the account of an earthquake in Colombia and then turning without emotion to the history of the latest movie scandal in Los Angeles? I do not say that we ought to feel emotion in learning that thousands have been killed in an earthquake. The lack of imagination displayed in our failure to do so is doubtless a necessary protective trait. Without it, to read any newspaper would be anguish; and we should, like those imaginative persons called cowards, die many times before our death. The intensest suffering of Jesus, the Man, must have been not His crucifixion, but His lifelong sympathy for the suffering of others. It is only this lack of imagination, plus the tradition in which they are bred, that makes diplomats what they notoriously are. There has been a good deal of amateur diplomacy of late years; yet one is not aware of any great improvement on the old, either in results or in methods.

Here, suddenly, however roundabout the way may have seemed, we find ourselves back at the subject of self and knowledge of self. We (and by ‘we’ I no longer mean only ‘we Americans,’ whose world, after all, is but a little more crudely black-and-white than that of other peoples)—we lack the imagination to project ourselves into others’ lives chiefly because we know so little about ourselves. We may feel pity, even shed tears, at the sight of a man crushed by a motor car, because we have all felt physical pain; but we remain cold toward the feelings of a man caught in embezzlement, because we are unaware of the latent possibility of embezzlement in ourselves, given sufficiently impelling circumstances.

Yet even were we gifted with imagination, we could learn directly almost nothing of other people. There is a wall that shuts us off. We can know so infinitely little about any of them that it is a wonder we trouble to divide such strangers into friends and enemies; and, indeed, as one grows older he finds his enmities dwindling to indifference, and his friendships fading or congealing into mere habit. In that very imperfect book, L’Enfer, Barbusse’s observer, watching (with a desperate, almost sick desire to get inside other people’s lives), through the hole in his chamber wall, what takes place in the room beyond, perceives only the impenetrable loneliness of the individual—in birth, in death, even in love.

We are always being told that we should go directly to life for real knowledge, not get it at second hand from books. And this is no doubt true enough for certain impressions. What it means to be hungry, for instance, cannot be learned from the printed page; nor can vivid impressions of nature be gained in that way. But I suspect that we can learn more about other men and women from books than from direct intercourse with them. In a book the writer has, presumably, set out to say something long meditated, and has deleted all excrescences in the saying. Such chatter as we indulge in, and listen to, when, instead, we talk directly with our neighbours!—aimless, pointless, its rare bright spots extinguished in a sea of words! Read the court stenographer’s record of any trial, where, at least, the questions and answers are supposed to be held rigidly to a certain subject, and then consider what the dictagraph report of any purposeless conversation would be like! But that is by the way. The important point is that one learns a little about others from books because from any worthwhile book one learns a little about oneself. Just as surely as in a novel, an essay, or a poem the writer reveals himself, so surely do I in reading it reveal myself, weighing the author’s opinions, likening them to or contrasting them with my own, and, to the extent of that self-revelation, perceiving his. Thus, it is better to read difficult books than easy ones, not as puritanism teaches, because whatever is unpleasant is good for us, but because the fact that a book is difficult for me means that in my response to it I am forced down into obscure and unknown regions of myself. On the other hand, there are for every one, I suppose, certain books that he is permanently unable to read, certain authors who remain for him as unknowable as any one met in flesh-and-blood. I, for example, simply cannot read Lavengro or get to know Borrow. Nowhere in me is there any response to his thoughts and emotions. It is true that I feel a vivid distaste for his style, which perhaps ought to be something to start on; but it does not seem to be enough to melt my icy indifference to the man and his work. I can learn nothing of myself from Lavengro, and so I can learn nothing of Borrow. It is a pity. My world might be by just so much the richer, less black-and-white.

Given this profound isolation of the individual, his inability to learn of others except through learning of himself, it is hard at first to understand men’s passion for gregariousness. But if you will listen to almost any conversation you will presently note that each individual in the loquacious group is but asserting his own opinions, the more blatantly the less he knows what they really are. In primitive circles this is done frankly, often with every one talking at once: ‘What I say is——,’ ‘Now my notion is——,’ ‘Well, now, just listen to me——.’ It is as though all were shouting: ‘How black-and-white the world is!’ Among more civilized persons there is greater suavity, a pretence of listening to others’ opinions while awaiting an opportunity to express one’s own. But it is only a pretence. Still, there is something in civilization. For in very, very civilized circles conversation becomes a dainty game. Nothing really felt is ever said, and ideas are played with as amusing toys; which is both sensible and delightful.