Books: Nonsenseorship
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G. G. Putnam >> Nonsenseorship
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Now the War circulated such another broadsheet in the world. Here is
the official side of it. Marriage is made in heaven. Politicians are
earnest, devoted men. One's own country always fights for Right
without Fear and without Reproach. Millionaires are nearly always
philanthropists. Capitalism is a just, kindly, and reasonable basis
for Society. The General Confession has become the national prayer of
Englishmen. Modern Civilisation is thoroughly healthy and every day it
gets better and better. It is so. It must be so. _What's that?_
You have known a politician. . . . Your friend is married and. . . .
Brother, it is impossible. You must not say so anyway: the whole
fabric of Society will be shaken. You must not think so for a moment.
_You must not think so_. That is the creed of the new censorship.
And very sensible, too. It is an odd thing that the Middle Ages of the
Inquisition were so nonsensical, judged by our standards. Grand
inquisitors cared remarkably little how a man thought provided he did
not say what he thought too publicly. If he went to church once a year
he might be a Jew for all their interference. If he signed the
Thirty-nine Articles he might use a rosary in his own home. If
Columbus thought the world was round, he was welcome to go and see,
but if Galileo said that the Church was wrong for saying the world was
flat, there was nothing for it but to shut him up in prison. It was
all rather stupid, but it was interesting.
For above all things, the limits of censorship were well defined.
Censorship was based on hypotheses. It was conceived that Almighty God
had established St. Peter as a censor of public faith and morals, but
it was not maintained that he was established as the censor of art and
literature and life. There was thus originality in all these affairs.
In a mediaeval town every house was different, in a mediaeval
cathedral no two pillars were alike, and in the dress of a mediaeval
crowd was captured the colours of the rainbow. With an odd result. Men
laughed at the devil in the freedom of their souls. They tweaked his
tail on carven misericords, and in the mystery play he was invariably
cast for the clown.
Further, and in close accord with this, a pleasant feature of the old
Inquisition was that it tried and burnt you for the good of your own
soul, and despite all calumnies and mis-representations on the part of
later writers, that remained to the end the main motive of the rack
and of the stake. Personally I find it hard to suppose that some such
consideration in any way lightened the last hours of the victim, but
at least it enlightens our judgment of the inquisitor. Heresy was to
him, quite honestly, a form of lunacy. Public opinion agreed with him.
It was a species of moral and mental hydrophobia, and the mass of men
no more desired to be converted to heresy than we desire to be bitten
by mad dogs. In their simple souls they abhorred and feared the thing.
They attended an auto-da-fé as an act of faith, piety, and rejoicing.
They might have been a Paris crowd watching the last hours of such a
social pest and terror as Landru, except that it probably occurred to
few of the Parisian sightseers to pray for that murderer's soul.
But the modern Inquisition, the neo-censorship, is out, not to save my
soul, but the souls of my contemporaries. It does not imagine that I
am preaching a hideous thing from which all men will revolt; it
imagines that I am offering them something which they will gladly and
readily accept. It does not judge me and my sayings and doings from
the standpoint of an accredited representative of society, but from
the standpoint of a non-accredited governor of society. It silences me
for fear that I may be followed, not lest I should be damned. It does
not censor me for speaking or acting against an established order in
which everyone believes, but for speaking or acting against an order
in which practically everyone has ceased to believe. "Burn him," cried
Torquemada; "he has spoken what no one thinks." "Bury him," cries your
modern censor; "he has thought what no one speaks."
Thus, today, the point is that you may not think. All the energies of
the censorship are bent towards the prohibition of thought. For one
penny, every morning, even if you are an Englishman in Paris, a daily
newspaper will tell you what to think and castigate you if you think
otherwise. No, it is three halfpence in Paris. But that is the idea.
That is the great conspiracy. Certain news-items are regaled to me,
certain news-items are suppressed, in order that I may not think
amiss. Certain books are refused me, certain plays must not be
produced, certain fashions are taboo, certain things may not be done,
lest, by any chance, I should form the habit of thinking, lest I
should step out of the throng and be myself. Lest I should make a
venture of personal opinion, and be right.
The odd thing is that the average man lends himself to the deception
and even plays his part in the great game. Of course he is not
altogether to blame. The psychology of the method is so truly
conceived. It is dinned into him so repeatedly that things are so,
that black is white and white is black, that if you see it in
Bottomley's _John Bull_ it is so, that he honestly comes to
believe the bunkum. For he, too, fears at his heart. He is a
conservative animal. Men used to burn a heretic because they believed
in God; now they censor him out of existence because if they did not
believe in the Northcliffe press they would have nothing whatever in
which to believe. Men used to believe in the Ten Commandments; now
they accept Prohibition because if they did not accept some authority
they would have to govern themselves. Men used to believe the Bible;
now they believe the daily papers because if they did not they would
be compelled to lift up their eyes and look on life.
But Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the whole truth and nothing but the
truth a while ago. "If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what
others think of him, unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the
principles of the majority of his contemporaries you must discredit in
his eyes the authoritative voice of his own soul. He may be a docile
citizen; he will never be a man." And Bernard Shaw was not far out
when, in the Introduction to _Man and Super-Man_, he pointed out
what amiable honest gentlemen the free-booters who built the Rhine
castles were compared with your modern millionaires, newspaper-owners,
and political bosses. The robber-baron risked his neck. The
robber-baron played a game. The robber-baron mostly warred on his own
mates who were also playing the game. But the robber-baron of today
would enslave the souls of men because he has forgotten how else to
enjoy himself.
The net result then is that we are fast abandoning any attempt to
think for ourselves. Not merely is any attempt at original thought or
action cleverly stifled with pillows much as the princes were
smothered in the Tower, but the censors of our freedom shout so loudly
and supply us with mental goods so cheaply that in the end we have no
real mental power of choice left. A million advertisements tell me
that all decent people shave with Apple-Blossom soap, and with
Apple-Blossom soap I shave. A score of papers tell me Germany is
undertaxed and can pay Reparations, and I sit quiet while France
occupies the Ruhr. Or vice-versa, as the case or another may be. Every
child goes to school and every school is under Government control and
every Government teaches that it is good for you to be governed and
for the world that it should govern. A few years ago we were told that
we had to be organised and schooled and managed because the nation was
at war, but the thing is fast becoming a habit, and we have now to be
managed and schooled and organised because the nation is at peace.
It is indeed just here that censorship has gone mad. It must have been
horribly unpleasant to burn at the stake, but at least you had the
satisfaction of knowing that the man who lit the faggots had some
shadow of reason behind him. He had at least an hypothesis. He acted
reasonably in its application. He believed something; he believed it
with some horse-sense; and he acted as the saviour of Society. But
today our censors have nothing behind them. No one supposes them to be
more moral, more charitable, more instructed than other men; still
less does anyone suppose them to be more inspired or dowered with
divine right. They do not defend a faith for which they, too, would
die; they merely bolster up a position because in so doing they find
bread and butter. They do not object to innovators because what they
innovate is bad; they object to innovators because they innovate. They
do not object to us because they believe that we tell lies; they
object because they know that we tell the truth.
This, then, is all very well, but what is the end to be? The
theologians have always said that Almighty God left man free to sin
because He did not want automatons. It is exactly here, however, that
your modern censors improve on the Deity. They do want automatons.
Only automatons will face liquid fire and poison gas. Only automatons
will live in a jerry-built cottage in a modern town and pay heavily
for the privilege. Only automatons will vote correctly at elections
and keep the political business going and allow everything to run on
smoothly for the next war. Only automatons will agree to the
lengthening of skirts from the knee to the ankle. And only automatons
will acquiesce in a system of morality which is not built on divine
revelation or even on social necessity, but on exploded superstitions
and sex domination and the conventions of the propertied classes.
Thus the devil is coming surely hut steadily into his own. We have
already half-accepted an inverted order, allowing that all the good
tunes are his and attributing to him things which he knows well enough
he has no right to call his own. In a few years we shall neither use
tobacco nor the grape, gifts of the good God, nor dance nor choose our
own clothes nor laugh nor think. We shall scurry hither and thither
before the flick of the devil's tail and be ready for the burning. We
shall have sold our birthright of daring for an insipid mess of
pottage: sold our right to choose and to spare, to slay and to leave
alive, to be glad and to be sorry, to be martyrs if we would be, to
explore, to risk, to win. We shall be docile and respectable, and the
standard of our docility and respectability will have been set by men
no better and no worse than we are. We shall be sober by act of
Parliament, and moral--if it be morality--because we have lost the
notion of being anything else. We shall be of no use whatever to God,
and precious small beer for the devil.
And is there no way of escape? There truly is, Let any man ask the
first censor that he sees by what authority he is censoring and who
gave him that authority. Let him ask by what standards he is judging
and in whose interests, and let him tell him what he thinks of his
standards and interests. Let him say BOO and see how foolish the goose
can look. Laugh, for Neo-Puritanism cannot stand laughter. Much else
it can stand, but not that. Don't argue; the old enemy is mighty good
at words. Don't hit; there are few of you strong enough. But laugh,
laugh honestly, and go on laughing, for it is the only invincible
weapon in the world. There is no more merry music either, and it is
the melody for--Men.
THE UNINHIBITED FLAPPER
[Illustration: Helen Bullitt Lowry watching Puritanism set the
Flapper free.]
HELEN BULLITT LOWRY
Two generations ago the girl was "damned." One generation ago she was
"ruined." Now, according to the best authorities and her own
valuation, she has just played out of luck.
So that for the reformers and prohibitionists, the censors and the
woman's club resolutionists! Their bi-product is Miss Twentieth
Century Unlimited, the one uninhibited creature in a Volsteaded
civilisation. Controls--of liquor and of birth--have given us The
Flapper. The official reformers, reinforcing the sagging inhibitions
and corsets of the nineteenth century, were just the final impetus
needed to drive her out into the open.
The flapper is released from the strangle hold that is throttling the
rest of us. If somebody makes a law for her, she promptly and blithely
breaks it, the pocket flask for the moment being the outward and
visible sign of the spirit--and spirits--of her wide-flung rebellion.
It is the milepost between the time that was and the time that is,
that flask, and to it we owe the single standard of drinking.
A half generation ago the sub-debs did not indulge in anything more
relaxing than coca cola. And even first and second year debbies did
their drinking from glasses issued by the hostess, not in triplicate.
If a young man of the period imported a flask from the outside, that
young man was promptly dropped from polite society, no matter how
stringent was the shortage of dancing beaux. They called a flask a
"bottle of whiskey" in those days.
Wild oats were reserved for the boys at college. If you were of Eve's
sheltered sex, you really had to become a member of the Fast Young
Married Crowd before you could get a look in. That Fast Young Married
Crowd was the first to come out of the biological fastnesses of the
Mid-Victorian era into the cocktails and jazz of our Mid-Victrolian
period.
Moral: You had to keep yourself the kind of a girl you'd been told a
man wanted to marry, if you ever wanted to join in a cocktail party
and slide down the banisters uninhibited--as rumor had it the Fast
Young Married Crowd was doing on its orgies. Over the border of
matrimony lay the mysteries of the gay wild life.
In that era before our morals were legislated, being "that kind of a
girl" was a trying responsibility. There was an approved technique
that every wise virgin had to master. It consisted of letting each
man, on whom she conferred her favors, think that she really was in
love with him. She called it "being engaged." And,--if perchance she
came to possess a harem of fiancés,--remember that the young things of
the period were not so well able to conduct their own courtings as our
present-day emancipated flappers. They still had to depend on what the
tide washed in. They still did their picking from those that picked
them--and sorted 'em over at their leisure.
Then, too, a half generation ago, we had not read our Freud. We did
not know the jargon of sex. Both man and girl were apt to call "in
love" the emotion which our present-day young things frankly call
something else. Thus came it that the petting parties of the period
operated under the left wing of a near-engagement.
Yet there was a weakness to the system. Each fiance had the lordly
impression that he "possessed" the lady of his choice. And the minute
the male feels that he possesses a woman, he can get all the
psychology of "riding away" and leaving her. Our Freudian flappers are
better strategians. Man simply can't labor under the impression that
he possesses a young person, if her lingo is calling the once sacred
kiss just a "flash of pash." Applied slang is a great leveller of
romance.
For times have changed since it was good form for a maid to avoid the
crass mention of sex. With prohibition has come such an outburst of
Get Moral Quick legislation that the reaction is now being felt
throughout the length and breadth of the flapper. The legislators
would lengthen the skirts to protect the defenceless male from a
chance thought of legs and the like. Whereat the flapper retaliates by
conversing pretty ceaselessly about--well, say associated subjects.
Last season the writer, being of the genus Successfully Single, woke
up with a start to realize that two desirables had toyed with her
hook--and retreated. One of them had even exited, uttering a fatal
accusation about a "trammelled soul." Such a warning calls for a
taking of stock. And this is what I found: Because of the flappers and
the way they run shop, the whole technique of the man game has
changed. My method, alas, had become as out of style as a pompadour
Gibson hat. Where once girls pretended to know less and to have
experienced less than they actually had, now they pretend to more.
Therein lie all the law and the social profits. Therefore Rule One of
these dauntless rebels reads: It is not an insult but a compliment for
an admirer to explain that his intentions are frankly carnivorous.
To my ten-year-old technique had still been clinging the cobwebs of
the past, when even Launcelot's intentions were painted as slightly
honorable. But now--the shades of Alfred Lord Tennyson help us!--it
has become the smart procedure to take Man's bold bad intentions right
out into the conversation and pretend to be tempted by them.
The truth of the matter is that those pseudo-engagements of the
fox-trot decade really were furnishing a charge account psychology.
Man could close his eyes and whisper, "Some day, my own," and still go
nicely on a _Ladies' Home Journal_ cover design of "Under the
Mistletoe." But, when our flapper is not even pretending to him that
she is going to marry him, and when he is not even pretending to
himself that he is going to marry her--well, the whole sex game has
then been put on a frank cash and carry basis.
Mark well, however, these worldly-wise young things of this the third
year of our Prohibition are not necessarily less virtuous technically
than their own crinolined grandmothers. Only these days they are not
bragging about their virtue.
"And have all the men afraid of you, for fear they'll be responsible
for teaching you something," explains one practical miss. "Men like to
find you in stock, ready-taught. We know how to take care of
ourselves--so we let them think what they want." In short, the whole
new game, as the earnest disciple from the half generation ago learned
it, is not to reveal the dark secret that you abide by the Ten
Commandments. Man must not suspect that you are unattainable. He must
just think that he has not attained you--yet. If you want to compete
with the flappers, you've got to play by the flapper rules. Check your
conversational inhibitions!
And if by chance there be any inhibitions left over, Prohibition has
obligingly introduced new opportunities for privacy, that will help
you check them too. When a couple strays off now from group formation,
there's a perfectly good alibi available of finding a sheltered spot
for a drink. Where once it really wasn't good form to go to a man's
hotel room, now it is the national custom for the owner of hootch to
register a casket for his jewel--and then invite the young things in,
one by one. A flapper these nights can retire to that hotel bedroom
for an hour in the middle of a dance. The girl is not "talked about,"
and the place is not "pulled." Even the house detective knows that she
is innocently drinking a drink.
Thus has this rebel young generation forced out into the open country
with it all the contented young women in their late twenties and early
thirties, who may not have been feeling rebellious at all. And the
wives of forty-five also, to compete all over again for their own
husbands. For "poaching" on the wifely preserves has become the
favorite flapper sport!
"Married men," having been forbidden to unmarried young persons for
three chaste generations, our flappers, bi-product of inhibition, are
promptly appropriating the husbands. This one item of the flapper raid
on the married men has done more than the entire twentieth century put
together to change the smug structure of American society, and bring
us back to normalcy.
Before 1865 no Southern belle considered herself worth her salt unless
all the courtly old married men in the country kissed her hand and
competed with the young blades for her quadrilles. But when black
persons stopped buttoning up the shoes of the Quality, America entered
upon her 1870's, her sombre brown stone fronts, and her cloistered
husbands. The money for doing society had simply passed into the hands
of the descendants of Miles Standish and Priscilla, who carried their
consciences into their sober mansions with them. The Age of Innocence
was upon us, and has clung close ever since.
From that fatal day on to 1917 each oncoming debutante was taught by
her mother to give unto the genus, married man, her most impersonal
manner, lest she provoke his "undesirable attentions." If poaching was
done, it was from behind a tree. Unmarried girls knew that their place
was not in somebody else's home in those days. The wives could protect
their preserves by the simple expedient of "talking about" any
unmarried young female caught on the married reservations.
And so it came to pass that the pick of the men were posted, because,
as fast as a callow youth gets worth marrying, somebody promptly
marries him. The Fast Young Married Crowd was a closed corporation and
played exclusively within itself; the female of the species had to
compete only with females of equal tonnage. The only sylph-like
temptation that a husband could encounter was a dissolute person whose
reputation had already been ruined--and she didn't count, because
nobody invited her to parties anyway. A wife could get as fat as she
wanted to in those days.
Even today that same leisurely life might exist for the wives. Even
today the wives might be resting their feet under the bridge tables,
secure in the consciousness that no bobbed haired young poacher was
daring to dance with their husbands, if they had just let prohibitions
enough alone--if they had only not been swept away by the high sport
of gossiping about our Wild Young People, which struck the country in
the summer of 1920. This gossip was an intrinsic phase of the virtue
wave which always immediately precedes a crime wave.
The wives just at this point, instead of sitting tight, made the
strategic mistake of turning the full force of the ammunition of
gossip, which should have been saved for defending husbands from
poachers, into an offensive attack on the flapper's lip stick, on her
cigarettes, and on her petting parties. Whenever two or three wives
were gathered together, their topic was our Wild Young People. That
summer, too, saw the launching of that now seasoned romance about the
checking of corsets. The resolutions at clubs were being resolved. The
preachers were sermonizing. The up-state legislators were drafting
bills against flappers' smoking cigarettes.
Human nature can be pushed just so far. Instead of reforming, the
young things apparently decided one might as well lose a reputation
for stealing a husband as for smoking a cigarette. The whole arsenal
for combating poachers blew up.
To make matters worse, in the excitement of the virtue wave our Wild
Young People had been attacked as a group instead of as individuals.
That was the second mistake. The whole strength of gossip consists in
selecting one member of the clan for calumny, to stand out disgraced
and alone among her exemplary sisters. Because the flappers had been
gossiped about _en masse_, the whole reason for not being
gossiped about had ceased. The poacher of that half generation ago had
been the kind of a girl who stalked her game alone.
But, when all the girls in town are seeking to steal your husband,
what are you going to do about it, if you are a woman of forty-five
with a heaviness around the hips and a disinclination to learn the
camel walk? Nor can you get the poachers off the scent by crossing the
trail with an eligible bachelor. Logically, the young things should
have enough sense to ignore a preempted husband and attend to the
serious business of getting themselves husbands. But they haven't.
They seem to prefer the husbands of the other women. And curiously,
the more they engage in this exotic sport of poaching, the less keen
they become about owning a property for somebody else to poach on.
The real interstate joke on Puritanism is that the flapper, who flaps
because Puritanism has driven her to it, will automatically bring
about its cure. The whole vitality of Puritanism rests on the
unswerving principle of letting not thy right hand know what thy left
hand doeth, if thy left hand is doing something it shouldn't.
Puritanism could not last out a week-end without the able assistance
of the standardized double life.
And that is just what the flappers refuse to respect. They are even
insisting on being taken along on the parties, which, by all the rules
of Rolf and Comstock should be confined to man's double life. Where
the chorus lady was once the only brand that had the proper and
improper equipment to jazz up an evening, now mankind has come to
prefer the flapper, who drinks as much as the Broadwayite, is just as
peppy and not quite so gold-diggish.
"It is so simple," smiles Barbara nonchalantly blowing her smoke
rings. "You old dears set man an impossible standard. As he had always
to be pretending holy emotions whenever he was around you he just
naturally had to get away half the time, to rest the muscles of his
inhibitions. Why, you funny old things actually drove man into his
double life, just as you made all of his best stories have two
editions, one for a nice girl and one for--well say one not so nice.
Our crowd has done more than all of your silly old social hygiene
commissions to bring nearer the single standard--by going part way to
meet him."
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