Books: Nonsenseorship
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G. G. Putnam >> Nonsenseorship
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They told me that if I visited America I should be regaled privately
with champagne from the huge reserves of private wine-cellars, but
that as a resident I should be forbidden to drink anything that
enlivened me. It was a great shock. I am not yet recovered from it. I
see that I shall after all have to live quietly in England with my
pipe and my abstemious bottle of beer. And yet I should like to visit
America, for it has suddenly become in my imagining an enormous
country of "Don't!" and I want to know what it is like to have "Don't"
said by somebody who is not a woman.
I have always hated the word "Don't." I hated it as a child, and I
hate it still. It is a nasty word, a chilling word, associated with
feelings of resentment, of discipline, of prohibition. Yes, that is
it, of course, Prohibition. I find that it is Prohibition which makes
my throat so dry. I thought it was a human characteristic, when
anybody said, "You're not to do that!" to do it at once in case there
should be any misunderstanding. I should be frightened to say "Don't!"
to anybody, because I feel sure it would precipitate unpleasantness.
Is America so different from the rest of the world that it likes
having "Don't!" said to it? I cannot think that. What occurs to me is
that America has not yet worked out of its system the strain that the
English Puritan fathers brought with them. It is a melancholy thought
to me that it is really ancient English repression that is responsible
for the present state of affairs. I feel very guilty, particularly as
I have seen an article about myself in an English newspaper headed "A
Modern Puritan." It is really I, and people like me, who have caused
the great drink restrictions in the United States. I bow my head.
The truth is, I suppose, that people in the United States take life
more seriously than we do in England. If you read any of the books
which have been written in this country during the ages to show what
sort of community is the ideal--I refer to such works as "Utopia" and
"News from Nowhere"--there is never any difference between them on one
point. All the dwellers in these ideal states appear to be thoroughly
idle. They have practically no work to do at all. All their time is
spent in talk and sylvan wandering, with music and dancing round
maypoles. There is no mistaking the fact that the Englishman's idea of
life is confirmed and justifiable laziness. He wants what he calls
leisure. Charles Lamb, a typically English author, wrote a poem
beginning "Who first invented work?" He came to the conclusion that it
must have been the Devil. The inference is clear. Observation confirms
my view. It is not to be doubted that the average Englishman spends
his life in scheming to make somebody else do the work that lies
nearest to his hand.
Americans must be different. I believe they really like work. And I
will give the Prohibitionists this handsome admission. I also work
much better without stimulants. I mean, much harder. But on the other
hand, I am less happy. Does an American feel happy in his work? Does
the act of work give him a satisfaction which is not felt by an
Englishman? I think that must be the explanation. But on the other
hand there is this question of Puritanism. We tried it in England, and
we had a severe reaction to libertinism. We maintain Puritanism only
in our suburban districts, where there is exceedingly close scrutiny
of all matters pertaining to conduct; and in our theatres. In the
suburbs it does not much matter, although it rather cramps our
suburban style; but in the theatre it drives some of us to
distraction. I will explain why.
Supposing a man wants to write a play, he at once thinks of getting it
produced. An unproduced play is like an unpublished novel: practically
speaking it does not exist. The author can read it, of course, and his
wife can assure him that it is a great deal better than anything she
has seen or read for years; but the author and his wife are both
haunted by the fact that there is a masterpiece which is lying--not
fallow, but unused and sterile. They grow dissatisfied. The savour of
life is lost for them. They develop persecution mania, grow very
conceited, and finally come to believe that only they of all the men
and women alive truly grasp the essentials of life. They say, if this
were the silly muck that most authors write, it would be produced, and
then we should have our car and our servants and diamonds and titles
and all the paraphernalia of happiness. As it is, we are doomed to
silence and poverty, simply because George is too much of an artist to
lower himself by writing what the public wants, and what the censor
will pass. For I have not been outlining the diseased state of mind of
the merely incompetent man who writes something that nobody will look
at. I have been giving details of one of those men who have a moral
message, and who desire greatly to spread it by means of the stage. He
has written, let us say, a play in which the name of God appears, or a
play wherein a young woman has a baby and does not wish to have a
husband. The censor says that there must be no mention of God in plays
performed on the public stage, and that young women who have babies
must either have husbands or come to early graves of their own
seeking. Very well, what happens? I have described the state of mind
of a husband and wife who have a pet child--a play--which is lying
heavy on their minds and hearts and hands. They are ripe for any
temptation of the devil. And it comes. It always comes.
The devil dresses himself up in the guise of a Sunday play-producing
society. The play is surreptitiously performed in a theatre to which
admission can be obtained only by members banded together for just
such emergencies. It is very badly acted by actors and actresses who
have not been able to spare sufficient time from their daily work to
learn their parts as well as they should have done. The audience comes
full of a smug self-satisfaction at the thought that it is excessively
intellectual and select, and that it alone can appreciate blasphemy or
the vagaries of neurotic young women. It sits intellectually in the
theatre, and watches the play. The author sits intellectually in his
box, and intellectually accepts the plaudits of the audience. He lives
thereafter in a highly intellectual atmosphere. He is driven to become
a member of the secret play-producing society, and to watch other
plays of a character not suited to the requirements of the censorship.
He is morally a ruined man. He will never any more be a decent member
of society, for he has become an intellectual. He has been taught to
despise ordinary human beings, for they do not want to be wicked or
silly, except in the normal humdrum way, and they have not seen his
play and are not members of his play-producing society. He discovers
that the censored is the only good art. He is driven to the reading of
all sorts of Continental drama. He is made into an anti-English
propagandist. He is like the person in the song, who,
"Praises every century but this, and every country but his own."
He has been lost for human kind, and is wedded to intellectualism and
a sense of superiority to others for the rest of his miserable life.
He institutes a new system of censorship of his own. It takes the form
of sneering at and condemning anything that does not conform to his
own ideas. He sniffs at all sorts of innocently happy people who are
inoffensively pursuing their noisy course through life. He begins to
hate noise. He makes a virtue of his abstention from ordinary
pleasures. He speaks condescendingly of the "hoi polloi." As I said,
he is ruined. He is no longer a man that one can talk to with any
comfort, for his sense of superiority is intolerable.
To me there is nothing more terrible than the sense of superiority to
others. It arises, not from merit or the consciousness of merit, but
from sheer tin-like flimsiness of character. It arises from limited
sympathies. The really great man, and the really sagacious man, is one
to whom nothing is contemptible. To him, even the follies of his
fellow-passengers are manifestations of human nature, revelations of
the material from which scholars and politicians no less than
drunkards and inconstants are gradually in course of time developed.
Somebody described "conceit" to me the other day as egotism in which
contempt for others is involved. It was agreed between us that egotism
was normal, since happiness is not to be attained without a sense of
personal utility to the world, and no objection was urged against it.
Vanity was to be tolerated, because it was definitely social--a
recognition of the existence and value of the good opinion of others;
but never sense of superiority. And the sense of rebellion should be
added to this other sense, as equally to be regretted. A young woman
whose incredible acts of folly had spoiled half-a-dozen lives,
including her own, recently encountered a young man whom she had
jilted on the eve of her marriage to another, whom she had also left.
The young man, still smarting under his ill-treatment, reproached her.
He said, "What you want, my dear, is discipline." "Pooh!" she
answered. "I'm _above_ discipline!" The poor young man retired,
unequal to the conversation. But the young woman went on her way,
defiant and self-infatuated, believing that she really was superior to
the opinions of others, the common decencies of conduct, the
inevitable give and take of ordinary life. Driven to folly by lack of
balance, she was learning to justify her folly by the argument for
rebellion. Whether she will ever learn to control her actions I do not
know, but rebelliousness from a fueling that one is too good to be
governed by normal standards is not only arrogant and unsocial. It is
silly. It is, to my mind, a criminal form of silliness. But it is one
very widely accepted by the young and the unimaginative. It must
therefore be recognized and combated.
It springs, perhaps, from disordered shame, which makes children
noisily act in defiance of authority, particularly if there are others
present to overhear. No children are worse-behaved than those who are
over-controlled. The word "don't" at the breakfast-table produces more
acts of violent rebellion than any amount of parental weakness.
Unimaginativeness begets unimaginativeness. Rigidity in one person
creates a counter-rigidity in the other. There is a thwarting upon
both sides, a mutual shackle upon sweetness and understanding. A
wildness of action arises, with loss of affection, respect,
self-respect. And the vicious part of it is that children (we are all
children, for we never grew up in human relations), once they are
embarked upon an evil course, are driven by vanity to continue upon
that course until they are exhausted, going from defiance to defiance;
and ultimately building up a whole sophisticated gospel of axioms
whereby rebellion is given warrant and virtue. The gospel of rebellion
we know to be specious and without justification; but it is essential
to us, as human beings, to maintain self-approval for our acts. If we
cannot do this socially, by comparative standards, we do it
unsocially, by subversion of those standards. Rebels are only prigs
turned upside down or inside out.
The great defect of prohibition is that when it can be enforced by law
it makes rebels who think there is something inconceivably clever in
doing secretly that which the law forbids. They learn to think there
is some subtle merit in evading the law. They encourage others to
break the law, and so develop cliques and finally new and silly
conventions. Or, prohibition has another effect. It makes a whole
class who accept its rulings, and gradually these people, owing to a
peculiarity which all gregarious animals seem to have, begin to
believe that unless all are of their persuasion and of their number
the fault lies with the rebels. First of all they consider themselves
superior to the rebels, and despise them. Then, when they find that
the rebels think that _they_ are the superior class, in defying
the law or the convention, a new set of notions arises, and this set
of notions leads to persecution and to war. You cannot introduce any
restrictive or prohibitive measure without developing fanatical
conceit, narrow-mindedness, and intolerance, both in those who welcome
the measure and in those who seek to ignore and even to defy its
rulings.
The Puritanical attitude is almost wholly repressive, and naturally
invokes force to aid its repressive measures. It did so in England
centuries ago in the matter of the theatre, and we are living among
all the rotten plays which have been written since, and the theatre is
for the most part a place of ignominious diversion. The play-producing
societies have nothing to produce that is worth producing, because the
atmosphere which causes such plays as are written to be produced
privately is not the healthy atmosphere from which masterpieces arise.
It is an atmosphere impregnated with priggishness and a sense of
superiority. It is an atmosphere, if there can be such a thing, of
sterility. The same thing happens in other matters, and I do not feel
at all certain that it may not happen with drink. If you say men are
not to drink you create two new classes. There is of course the
existing class that does not care for drink and is afraid of its
effects to the point of wishing to keep it away from those who do like
drink. That class already flourishes in most communities, and so I do
not place it among any two classes which are created by the
prohibition. The two classes are as follows-the class that submits,
and gradually develops priggishness and self-satisfaction at being in
the majority, and the class that rebels, and gradually develops
priggishness and self-satisfaction at being in the minority. Both
classes are objectionable, and I do not know which is the worse. They
are both inevitable in a world of prohibitions, and if the United
States, to which we are all looking as the real hope for intelligent
civilization, is going to take away our beer and turn us into
supporters of play-producing societies I cannot think what will happen
to the world. Better a wicked world than a virtuous one. Better a
world in which we can hope that there are people worse than ourselves
than a world where we know that there cannot be any better.
A GUESS AT UNWRITTEN HISTORY
[Illustration: H. M. Tomlinson regarding, with not too great enthusiasm,
the Perfect State of the Future.]
H. M. TOMLINSON
That fairly violent scuffling during the years 1914-1918, the opening
skirmishes of the war between Organization and Liberty which our
fore-fathers named so strangely the "War to End War," did not appear
to conclude satisfactorily for the victorious nations, especially
England. Actually it was an excellent ground for the founding of that
Perfect State which, in the centuries that followed, arose on the
lines laid largely by chance and the exigencies of that early
scramble. Yet it is possible the victorious statesmen may not have
guessed that they had done really well. The name by which the war of
those remote years was popularly known is enough to show that the
difficulties faced by those men at the end of the war may have
obscured the good they had done. That name is itself clear evidence of
the not unpleasing credulity and ridiculous but innocent desire of the
people of that time.
After all, those peoples were not so long out of the Neolithic Age.
Their memory was still strong of the freedom of their earlier
wanderings when they could go where they liked, work at what suited
them, eat and drink what pleased them, choose who should be their
chief, and worship in any Temple which promised most personal
benefits. It was, then, natural for them to make so amusing a mistake
in the naming of their "Great War." They not only certainly imagined
they were ending War, but they imagined, too, they had a right to end
it, thinking that not only War, but every other act of the State, was
for their decision. Their Governors, therefore, judged it wise to
allow them this illusion to play with, so to distract their attention
from the reality, which they would have resented. This illusion was
known as Popular Government.
We may laugh at it now, but in those days the directing minds of great
nations found that common illusion no laughing matter. Some who
laughed at it openly discovered they had laughed on the wrong side of
the guillotine. It is usual in this era of science, when control by
the Holy State of the national mass-power, both of body and mind, is
complete, and when national emotion is raised by Press and Pulpit
whenever it is required and put wherever it is wanted, to ridicule the
laxity of the statesmen who directed the nations in that early war. A
little reflection, however, shows us that that laxity is but apparent.
Those statesmen went as far as they dared, and dared a little more
with each success they won. They discovered that control may be gained
by announcing control to be necessary for some quite innocent object,
and then using and retaining the power thus acquired for a real but
undivulged purpose. Sheep, we are aware, never understand they are
securely folded till the completing hurdle of the circuit is in its
place, and then they soon forget it, and begin grazing; for all sheep
want is grass, and perhaps a turnip or two to give content in a
limited pasture.
It would be wrong for us, nevertheless, to blame those early folk for
not understanding, as finely as we do, the true science of government
to be complete and unquestioned mastery. We have learned much since
then. Let us look back to those days for a moment, to get the just
perspective. One of the first significant things we notice is that
those people were free to criticize their politicians--baaing across
the hurdles, as it were. That was why they had to have explained to
them the "Objects of the War." They actually did not want to die. They
were reluctant to go to battle unless they knew why they were going.
True, it was easy enough to find a reason to satisfy them, but it is
necessary for us to remember that they would not submit to mutilation
and death without some reason. Much as their governors may have
desired it, those primitives would not agree willingly to the total
surrender of conscience, individual liberty, and of life, to
"politicians," as the High Priests of the Holy State were then
familiarly named. Individual conscience, therefore, had to be cajoled,
had to be bamboozled, had to be hypnotized; and a man's liberty could
not be taken from him unless he was helpless, or was looking, under
clever political finger-pointing, the other way.
It was this almost intractable matter of personal conscience and
liberty which was the cause of the angry disappointment following the
Versailles Treaty which, illustrating still further the need for
subtle tact in dealing with our hairy forefathers, was called a Peace
Treaty.
What a light is thrown upon those distant days and peoples when that
ancient document, the fragmentary relic of which is now treasured in
the museum at Tobolsk, is examined with even the little knowledge we
possess of the events immediately following it! For a time, we must
believe, humanity then was deliriously bereft. One could almost
believe the moon had a greater pull in those years.
"No more secret diplomacy!" historians tell us was one of the cries
of the soldiers as they went to battle. There is considerable ground,
too, for accepting the amusing traditional tale that even at the end
of the war the then President of the American Republic (mainly
confined at the time to the Western Continent), declared the first
point for the guidance of the Peace Conference must be an open
discussion of the covenant. And the first thing to happen when the war
ended was the closing of the door of the council room by the
peacemakers, who, naturally, were the very men with no other interest
till that moment but the full pursuit of war; yet nobody noticed the
door was shut, though nobody could hear what was going on inside the
room. The faith in their politicians held by the natives of the
backyard communities into which Europe was then divided--on the very
eve, we see now, of the full continental control of international
man-power by consolidated finance--was the measure of their annoyance
when, too late, naturally, the fact that the old shackles from which
they had been promised freedom were noticed to be riveted upon them
several links tighter.
But it is not their faith, so happily youthful, which so reveals their
ingenious minds as their resultant annoyance. That resentment
illuminates the essential fact for us in studying their mentality as
social animals. They really did accept without question, with open and
receptive mouths and eyes shut, what was considered pleasing enough to
fortify them in the trials of warfare. They were, difficult though it
is for us to understand it, too vacant and generous to realize that
the "Objects of the War" were but figments nicely calculated to get
them busy. The figments--we must give credit to the leaders of the
time-were indeed not un-imaginatively conjured up. Those inducing
visions worked. They were accepted readily, and even with delight. It
was sincerely believed that the pleasing dreams were substantial, that
those chromatic vapours evoked by gifted statesmen were veritable
promises of divine favor for meritorious endurance.
From that we can the more easily go with understanding to a study of
the consequences of that attractive faith of undisciplined peoples so
difficult to grasp for modern students, who witness daily the
admirable submission of our own uniform herds to the divine ordinances
of the High Priests of the Sacred Entity the State. Why, we even learn
that the survivors of the not inconsiderable armies returned from the
battlefields of 1918 with the innocent conviction that the gentlemen
of England would keep a bond as faithfully as common soldiers! The
hardest tasks of the statesmen of those days arose out of such
extraordinary expectations, out of the ruinous supposition of the
childish-minded that the honoring of a bond, the fulfilment of a
promise in return for benefits received, is equally incumbent on
everybody!
With that knowledge we begin to realise the difficulties of their
statesmen. A careful computation shows us that in England, where
indeed the lavish promises had been most picturesque, and where the
tough idea of personal liberty took longest to kill, it required just
four years of severe disciplinary measures and dry bread to reduce the
masses generally to a pale, obedient, and constructive spirit. At
first they would not work unless they wanted to, and then only at
their own price. They pointed, when answering their masters, to the
fact that the best-fed people never worked at all, and lived in the
best houses. They refused to cancel the official contracts made with
them, even when ordered to do so by the police. They behaved indeed,
those ex-soldiers, as though it had been _their_ war. Such a
state of mind we in these days really find impossible to elucidate. It
is rather like trying to read the spots on a giraffe. It is as
inscrutable as the once general opinion that the community has a right
to decide upon its own affairs.
Today we have reached that point in the evolution of society when
uniformity is known to be more desirable, because more comfortable
than liberty; and uniformity is impossible without compulsion. A man
with a free and contentious mind is a danger to the community, for he
destroys its ease. He compels his fellows to active thought, if only
to refute him. This is a dissipation of energy, and a local weakening
of the structure of the State. It is historically true that a few men
with ranging and questioning minds have sometimes injected so strong
an original virus of thought that the community has been changed in
form and nature.
It was the mistake of the earlier nations to give little attention to
these troublesome and subversive fellows, who always thought more of
the truth than they did even of the inviolability of the High Priests
of the State. They preferred to die rather than surrender the
out-dated rights of man. Therefore they had to die. The rights of man
cannot be allowed to stand in the way of a nation's perfect
uniformity. It was many centuries before man realized that the only
freedom worth having is freedom from the necessity for individual
thought. Perfectly unembarrassed freedom, freedom in which the mind
may be empty and sunny, and assured happily of not the slightest
interruption from any unsanctioned unofficial idea, became possible to
a community only after the sanitary measures were devised which
sufficed against unexpected epidemics of speculative thinking.
This, we are sadly aware, took time; for the brightly-colored hopes
sent skyward so long ago as 1914, and the vistas discovered as a
consequence by young men whose eyes till then had been resting safely
on the ground, and the daring and lively questioning that was aroused
by the incessant nudging of sleeping minds, coincided, as it unluckily
happened, with the beginnings when the "Great War" ended, of
mass-production and international finance, so developing problems of
government, the solving of which could not be reconciled with any
admission of individual liberty and personal right. It was, therefore,
the elimination of the notion of justice and liberty from common
opinion which occupied statesmen from 1918 onwards.
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