A lesser but quite genuine advantage in living abroad is the wider variety of one’s surroundings. I have lived in half a dozen different cities or villages, besides those in which I have merely sojourned for a short time, and each place had its own special flavour. To respond to the stern austere beauty of the Syracusan plain and then to the blurred softness of Taormina, to the dainty toy-like perfection of Lake Orta and then to the breathless magnificence of Garda, is to draw from every side of one’s nature. But there is also a wider human variety. One can know more kinds of people here (I am writing now of Italy, where I have lived longest) than at home. For example, in America I and all my friends are barred from even superficial acquaintance with men who work with their hands. This, no doubt, is chiefly because America has become an industrial country, and it seems especially hard for members of other classes to know industrial labourers anywhere. But in Italy, except in a few large cities such as Milan and Turin, industrial workers do not form a separate homogeneous class. There is this young man, who is the son of your or some one else’s gardener, or that, who is cousin to the peasant family at the foot of your hill. Besides which, Italy is largely an agricultural country. The peasants are in some ways odd inscrutable people, yet one does, with reservations, get to know those who live near-by—as well, perhaps, as in America one gets to know one’s neighbours, the insurance man, and the banker. (As far as that goes, a peasant’s mind does not seem to me any more inscrutable than a banker’s). But there is still another difference. In America manual labourers are mostly of foreign birth, so that it is doubly hard to get to know them. How can I get in touch with a Finn? His language, his antecedents, his manner of thought, all are strange to me. In the small and delightful town of southern Minnesota where my father lived as a young man, there appears to have been at that time a very agreeable community life. The farmers in the country round about were of one blood with the town-dwellers—chiefly of New England origin, Anglo-Saxons all, save for a slight mixture of Germans; and the professions in the town were recruited from among the sons of farmers. I don’t know whether the townspeople had a feeling of social superiority to the farmers; probably they had. But there was no gulf between them; they were of the same race and understood one another. To-day the townspeople remain principally Anglo-Saxon, but the country round about is farmed by Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns. The townspeople do not understand them nor they the townspeople. And you get the condition that Mr. Sinclair Lewis depicted, if rather too gloomily, in Main Street. In his unconvincing portrayals of a Scandinavian servant and a Scandinavian labour agitator one felt him straining, unavailingly, for a comprehension which he lacked the knowledge to attain.
In Italy peasants are of one race with the doctors, lawyers, land-owners, and provincial aristocracy (as distinguished from that of the great historic families in, for instance, Rome, which are cosmopolitan in their way of living, and so mixed in blood through intermarriage with foreigners that they are by now almost as American, English, French, or Austrian as Italian). It is perhaps impossible to know the peasants intimately, but it is not difficult to know them fairly well; and such knowledge adds greatly to one’s experience. I think there are times when all of us feel impatient at knowing none but those who work with their brains and only think about or traffic in the things that other men have grown or built with their hands. This is a feeling easily capable of exaggeration. Carried too far it leads to the foolish belief, not uncommon to-day, that only those who work with their hands and create the physical wealth of the world are of value in it—which, of course, would reduce all life to mere existence. But perpetual contact with the earth does make for sanity and for something not far removed from wisdom. I esteem the Italian peasants, especially those of Tuscany, as highly as any class of men with which I am acquainted. They are calm but alert; they are, I believe, in the main, kindly; they are tenaciously attached to the land; they work indefatigably; they have an infinitely deeper and truer culture than, for example, the supposedly higher class of shopkeepers, and, especially, a serenity approaching fatalism, that leads them to regard all governments with indifference and consider wars in much the same way as they consider earthquake or drought. There is a splendid permanence about them. Acquaintance with them is the best antidote I have found to that desperate apprehension of universal meaningless chaos that every man must so often feel to-day—to what Mr. Bernard Shaw so well expressed when he said it sometimes seemed to him that this world must be a place used by the other planets as an insane asylum.
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In America, beneath the fevered surface, the jazz, the wild rush hither and thither, the absence of contemplation, the divorce-fed looseness of the married relation, there is, I think, a monotony, a dull-eyed prosiness, against which all those surface things are perhaps but a reaction. People do not read poetry (as all do in Italy); which is not an indication of poor literary taste (since in Italy, as elsewhere, the mass of people prefer bad poetry to good), but of either an inability or a disinclination to feel vividly. The undergraduates of our great universities are not, as in France or Italy, uncritical rebels against all accepted conventions of life and letters, but for the most part as conservative as their parents, caring little about politics save to accept indifferently the Republican Party, caring nothing at all about either old currents or new among the arts. Would students at our universities ever riot because of the execution of a Francisco Ferrer? Inconceivable! They become violently excited about sports, as do students abroad; but that, again, is a surface excitement which does not affect beliefs about life. Defeat in the annual football game would hardly impel undergraduates at Harvard or Yale to risk their lives in passionate protest.
This greyness follows Americans throughout their life and is due, I think, to our over-complication of and concentration upon the surface facts of existence. No matter what one does with existence, it remains a dull thing. Radios, motor cars, telephones, vacuum cleaners—they are all infinitely dull because they are all surface things that do not trouble the heart or the brain. Existence is dull, but life, underneath it, is a wild and thrilling adventure. What one does is nothing; what one believes and feels is everything. ‘After all,’ said William James, ‘the most important thing about a man is what he thinks about the universe.’ But if he does not think about it ...? For all its feverish activity, America does not seem to me to have the fever of living. I know of nothing more desolate than the exceedingly well done stories in the most widely read of our magazines, which, to judge from its immense circulation, must almost literally be ‘in every home.’ They are virtually all about the facile success in business of handsome young men with Arrow Collar souls. This tawdry shirking of life is, I believe (and I wish I did not believe it), the mental attitude of most Americans. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has revealed it with a clear, terrible perfection, Mr. Sinclair Lewis has satirized it tumultuously in terms of itself (and has thereby, ironically, become popular), and numerous others have revolted against it with futile bitterness. But there it is. And there, perhaps, it must remain till some great national disaster sweeps away at one stroke the glittering surface rubbish and the worship of it, and turns men’s thoughts inward upon the emotions and desperately evolved convictions that are real life and thrilling. The potentiality, the potential life, is there; it must be. We are men and women like other men and women. Life must be struggling beneath the choking surface. Women bear children in agony. Men love, toil, suffer hardships. It is only that our thoughts are directed elsewhere. It may be that if all our press, all our monthly and weekly magazines, and everything else that carries advertisements were wiped out for a single month, we should begin to live. For advertisements are responsible for no small part of the mischief. They waken our sense of romance or of beauty or of charm and then try to convince us that these feelings, which belong to life and have nothing to do with existence, can be thoroughly satisfied by cake made with a special kind of baking powder or by somebody’s chocolates or by perfume with an exotic name. Thus belittling the emotion they conjure up, they make us smile sheepishly at it—and then, in a half-hope, buy the chocolates or the perfume. They deliberately confuse our sense of values. They depict beauty as a genial strumpet for sale to any one at a reasonable price.
The word ‘beauty’ is at a discount to-day. One is wary of employing it. The trouble is that in the ’nineties of the last century a very loquacious group of aesthetes made a silly cult of the conception and thereby so cheapened the word itself that even after thirty years it has not quite recovered. This sort of thing always happens when an adjective is turned into a noun. (Not, of course, that this had not happened to the word ‘beautiful’ long before the eighteen-nineties—only never quite so hard). As an adjective it modified facts and was thus related to life; as a noun it is credited with an existence of its own and is thus divorced from life. ‘A beautiful woman’ or ‘a beautiful landscape’ means something very real and fairly definite, but ‘beauty’ all alone by itself means nothing at all, or is at best an abstraction to be used for convenience’ sake, and very carefully, in the midst of earthy life-giving facts. Repeatedly employed, it nauseates the hearer and reveals a lack of genuine feeling in the person who employs it. Where the quality belongs, that the word too often mars, is in life itself; it has no god-like existence of its own. There is no occasion to mention it in a low reverent voice or to turn it into a thin cult. But as just this has been so frequently done I have needed all this apologetic introduction before venturing to say that one of the reasons for which I live in Italy is the varied but almost universal beauty of the landscape that encircles me in nearly any part of that country. I trust it may be evidence of my cultless honesty in the matter when I say that I am not in a perpetual state of thrill about my surroundings (though, to be quite truthful, there do come rare, brief, and unexpected moments of lifting delight in some sudden touch of loveliness), but, rather, feel this quality of beauty in them as something friendly, breathed in with the air. Often, because of long familiarity with the landscape about me, I am not consciously aware that it is beautiful. Nevertheless, the fact that it is so is never quite forgotten. If, though with every possible advantage of space, leisure and friends, I had suddenly to live in Patterson, New Jersey, or in Superior, Wisconsin, something of tremendous importance would seem to me to have disappeared from my life, and a background of serenity that enables me happily to do the little that I can do as well as is possible for me would become a background to be at any moment consciously subdued before I should be able to achieve anything at all.
‘But all these things.’ a quite justifiably impatient reader might by now object, ‘are no better than theories. You, who are by way of being a writer, like and are able to live abroad, and it amuses you to depict this as advantageous. But is it really? Let us have facts. Discarding those degenerate rose-garden Americans, are there others to whom living abroad has been of actual benefit?’
Well, if by ‘benefit’ is meant actual benefit to achievement, I honestly cannot say. I know, or know of, a number of American writers and painters who live in France or Italy, and I cannot truthfully claim that I think any of their work as good as the best that is being done by some in America itself. But that, unfortunately, proves nothing. Their number, of course, is very small compared with the number of those at home, and among these last only a handful are achieving work of consequence. The significant question (which it is quite impossible to answer) is whether these transplanted Americans are painting better pictures or writing better books than, given the limitations of their talent, they would have been able to write or paint had they stayed at home.
If, on the other hand, the word ‘benefit’ is to be taken in a wider sense than simply that of creative achievement, I can at once answer the question in the affirmative, without (thank heaven!) having to confine myself to artists and authors. One does not come readily to know these expatriates of the best sort. They are isolated individuals who value their isolation. (It is the rose-garden people who at first acquaintance press you, with a pathetic wistfulness, to come to tea or dinner at their villas). But some, to my good fortune, I do know, and I hear quiet rumours of others—individuals scattered here and there, not all of them by any means writers, painters or composers, but solitary absorbed students of this or that period or local fragment of a period, or even only (only?) of the intense modern life about them. Useless? I do not think so. Being, necessarily, of independent means (though it is astounding on how slender an income they are often content to live), it is not essential for them to go on making money. Yet that, if they had remained in America, is probably what the force of public opinion would have compelled them to do. Instead of studying the development of the Commedia dell’ Arte or the annals of the Medici or the history of the Risorgimento or the development of co-operatives in pre-Fascista Italy, they would have been selling bonds or juggling with real estate. It is not probable that one would have found them useful members of more serious professions, since it was precisely for that study of the Commedia dell’ Arte or co-operatives that their minds were really fitted. And even if the bits of curious knowledge that they dig up are of no external value, or, though of some small value, are not passed on to others, individuals of this sort are not without use both to their adopted country and to the one they have deserted. In their infinitesimal way they help toward the distant mutual understanding of two races. They spin one thin spider’s thread across the Atlantic. For they respect and partly understand the people among whom they live, and are respected and partly understood by these. Some day, if the world lasts that long, a vast number of such threads, entwined, will make a cable that will bind two countries together as no governmental treaties or commercial agreements or grandiloquent speeches by distinguished momentary guests will ever bind them. It is not without significance that on the outbreak of the war Americans living in Germany sided with the Germans, Americans in France with the French. It indicated that through daily intercourse such Americans had begun to see into the hearts of another people, and had found them individuals like themselves. Given enough of this peaceful interpenetration among all nations, war would surely become more difficult.