Yet it is not the problematic value to others of the knowledge these expatriated Americans acquire nor their slight influence upon international relations that appears to me their real importance, but what they have, quietly and almost unconsciously, done with themselves. The few individuals of this sort whom it is my privilege to know seem to me more fully developed, rounded, and, especially, grown-up than they could possibly have become except through this way of living. I have even now more friends, if vastly fewer acquaintances, in America than in Europe, but not one among them is as mature and mellowed as are these expatriates. They have, the latter, a tolerance, an illusionless sympathy for mankind and an insight into human motives. They see men solely as individuals.
Take, for example, my friend Etheredge (that is not his name). In a way it is not fair to do this, since, to my mind at least, he is so very much more of a person than any of the few other expatriates of this sort whom I know as to be uncharacteristic. Nevertheless, he could not have become what he seems to me to be without his many years of living abroad, and also there is something to be said for taking not the average but the finest exceptional result as a study of a type.
I first met Etheredge fourteen years ago, shortly after he had come to live in Europe. He happens to be a painter (as also is his wife), but I am not myself capable of judging as to whether he is a good painter or not. Some of his pictures (which become increasingly abstract) move me; some do not. I have heard supposedly competent critics say that they were very good indeed, and others, equally expert, that they were very poor. To tell the truth, I do not care in the least which they are. By all American Standards Etheredge would, I suppose, be accounted a failure, since he can hardly ever sell his pictures, and then for a wretched price. And for that, too, I do not care in the least. It is in his personality that Etheredge seems to me really important.
Even fourteen years ago, at thirty, he had an arresting personality. There was something at once quiet and eager about him, as though he were questioning everything without quarrelling with anything, which struck me as rare. But I should not at that time have set him down as a success. He had not yet found himself. He was not yet sufficient to himself. Now, after fourteen years, he is. I know no one else who is so completely rounded a personality, who accepts so simply the external world and is so little troubled by it. He has built around himself a wall not of indifference but of acceptance, against which waves break unavailingly, within which he lives with his whole self, serenely, gently and richly.
All this that I feel about Etheredge I express badly. I cannot successfully put it into words. I make him sound smug and even selfish, whereas he has come very near to abolishing self—and thus has grown the more. The best I can do is to give up the attempt at portrayal and fall back on a few tangible results. Thus, I am not alone in my estimate of Etheredge. Quiet and unassuming though he is, people of distinction gravitate toward him. He has, to my knowledge, exerted a profound influence on three creative artists of international fame and upon a number of other individuals of even greater sensitiveness and fineness of character if of less effective talent. Again, if financial disaster were to overtake me to-morrow, Etheredge would, I know, share with me whatever he has. But it is not that which is of importance (he was always generous), but the fact that, though his income is very small, this would honestly seem to him now no hardship, of no importance. Yet again, neither he nor his wife has ever made a single sacrifice to comfort. They continue to live in one after another of the most inaccessible places in all Italy—places with no water, places with no light, places with toilet facilities straight out of the Stone Age. To plan a Tour of Discomfort I could hardly do better than enumerate the villages where they have lived. If this were ever for them an act of heroism, if they ever gave an impression of struggling bravely against heavy odds for the sake of the Higher Life, I should consider such behaviour with distaste. But they never do. They simply ignore the discomfort. All that mattered to them was that each of these places was a place of singular beauty and interest. They liked living in them. And, whether I have made you feel Etheredge as important or have failed to do so, it must, with this, surely be apparent that his kind of development would be all but impossible in America.
There are things about Etheredge that exasperate me at times. I cannot, for instance, understand both his and his wife’s failure to learn the language. Their Italian is distressing. Now Italian shopkeepers and servants are no worse than those or other countries—if anything, I think, a little better, being capable of extraordinary acts of generosity toward suddenly impoverished clients—but undoubtedly their dominant thought in the presence of strange and presumably wealthy foreigners living, heaven knows why, in their midst, and with difficulty stammering mistakenly a few phrases of the language, is that the Lord has delivered these into their hands. Accordingly, Etheredge and his wife have been the victims of a long series of minor frauds and peculations. I do not know why this should annoy me, but it does. It does not annoy them; they disregard it.
Similarly, I am at times annoyed by Etheredge’s indifference to the social movements that swirl madly around us all. It is, for instance, impossible for me to watch the progress of Fascismo coolly. I feel grudging admiration for the machine, resentment at the suppression of free speech, bitterness at the cynical pretence of constitutionalism. I cannot, in other words, keep Fascismo out of my life, any more than I can keep out the problems of international relations, German indemnities and the war debts. Etheredge can. He scarcely, I believe, thinks about these things at all; certainly he does not think about them passionately.
In this, I know at heart, I am wrong and he is profoundly right. For it is on my part, and would be on his, a waste of energy to puzzle and think and fume over these questions. Neither he nor I is fitted to cope with them; neither of us can have the faintest influence upon them. And, indeed, gigantic though they loom above the world to-day, they are but ephemeral phenomena. Beneath, far beneath, lies the only truth—the perplexed, troubled, struggling, human soul. Only contact with individuals can have significance, either to them or to oneself. To such relationships and to the beliefs and questions arising from them Etheredge devotes his fine unwasted strength.
The influence he exerts is deep but not wide, and its necessarily narrow range is, in my saner moments, the only thing I hold against him. Here, I think, is a man of rare sympathy, insight and character. Must his influence be exerted only upon the small number of individuals whom he can personally know? Well, of course, there are his pictures, at which he works with intense and persistent energy. They must to some extent express his personality, and if the critics who call them good are in the right they will doubtless some day reach a wider circle than that of personal acquaintanceship. But, even so, comparatively few will see them, and of these only a small proportion be able to understand clearly the fine spirit they express. Another insoluble problem.
But, as I meditate upon it, I have a sudden happy suspicion that here, too, I am in the wrong, still believing despite myself in widespread movements, organization and the like. Perhaps, after all, the finest and most hopeful thing about an apparently sorry world is that over its surface are sparsely strewn men and women of matured developed charm or intelligence or perception, who exert unconsciously the influence of their personality on those in immediate touch with them. Why expect or ask for more than this? And, certainly, if some of these can only attain full self-development through living in another country than their own, for their sake we can well afford to disregard the larger number of silly snobs and rose-garden idlers that such a life creates.