Post Impressions Part 15

He thought for a moment.

"But yes," he said. "When I think of New York and its architecture I am more than ever convinced that there is no such a thing as predestination, that your American architect is emphatically a free agent."

"This seems so very true," I murmured.

"Recently," he went on, "when I was the guest of your most hospitable countrymen there was a sharp controversy regarding the appropriateness of the architect's design for a memorial to be erected to your immortal Lincoln in the national capital. There were critics who professed to be shocked by the incongruity of placing a statue of Lincoln, the frontiersman, the circuit-rider of your raw Middle West, the teller of most amusing anecdotes, amusing, but--somewhat Gothic, shall I say?--putting a statue of this typical American inside a temple of pure Grecian design. Such critics, in my opinion, were in error. They made the same mistake of concentrating on the specific use, instead of searching after the broad meaning. Lincoln was an American. His monument should be American in spirit. And I contend that it is the American spirit to put a statesman in frock coat and trousers inside a Greek temple. For that matter, what structural form is there which one might call typical of your country, outside of your skysc.r.a.pers?"

"There is the log cabin," I said, "but that would hardly bear reproduction in marble. And there is the baseball stadium, but somehow that sounds rather inappropriate."

"So I should earnestly advise you," continued M. Bergson, "not to waste time in studying what your architectural types ought to be, but to build as the fancy seizes you. In the course of time the right fancy may seize you. If anything, avoid striving for perfection. Continue to mix your styles. It is not essential to cling to the original plans once you have started. Change your plans as you go along. Avoid the spick and span. If your foundations begin to sag a little before the roof is completed, so much the better. If the right wing of your building is out of line with the left wing, let it go at that. If your interior staircases blind the windows, if your halls run into a _cul-de-sac_, instead of leading somewhere, let them."

"But that is precisely the way we build our State Capitols," I said.

"Then you are to be congratulated on having solved the problem of a national style," said M. Bergson.

XXVII

INCOHERENT

A topsy-turvy chapter of no particular meaning and of little consequence; whether pointing to some divine, far-off event, the reader must determine for himself.

He came into the office and fixed me with his glittering eye across the desk. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances I should have found his manner of speech rather odd. But it was the last week of the Cubist Exhibition on Lexington Avenue, and a certain lack of coherence seemed natural. He said:

"Is there a soul in things we choose to describe as inanimate? Of course there is. Can we a.s.sign moral attributes to what people usually regard as dead nature? Of course we can. Why don't we do something then? Take the abandoned farm. Doesn't the term at once call up a picture of shocking moral degradation? We are surrounded by abandoned farms, and do nothing to reclaim them morally. But I have hope. That is the fine thing about the spirit of the present day. It abhors sentimentality. It is honest. It recognises that before we can do away with evil we must acknowledge that it exists. Look at the wild olive! Look at the vicious circle! Look at Bad Nauheim!"

"Are you sure it's me you wished to see?" I asked. "Because there's a man in the office whose name sounds very much the same and the boys are apt to confuse us. He is in the third room to your right."

"It doesn't matter," he said. "The main thing is that the present uplift does not go half far enough. Just consider the semi-detached family house. Can anything be more depressing? There are happy families; of them we need not speak. There are unhappy families; but there at least you find the dignity of tragedy, of fierce hatreds, of clamour, of hot blood running riot in the exultation of excess--Swinburne, you know, Dolores, Faustina, Matisse, and all that. But a semi-detached family, a home of chilly rancours and hidden sneers, too indifferent for love, too cowardly for hate, a stagnant pool of misery--can you blame me?"

"I do not," I said. "Far be it from me to censure the natural antipathy for real estate agents which surges up--"

"Thank you," he said. "That is all I wish to know." He rose, but turned back at the door. "Of course," he said, "there is the other side of the picture. Not all nature is degenerate. There are upright pianos. There are well-balanced sentences. There are reinforced-concrete engineers. I thank you for your courtesy." And he went out.

I had no scruples in directing my visitor to the third floor from mine on the right, because that room is occupied by the anti-suffragist member of the staff. Between editions he reads the foreign exchanges with a fixed sneer and polishes up his little anti-feminist aphorisms.

These he recites to me with a venomous hatred which Charlotte Perkins Gilman would have no trouble in tracing back to the polygamous cave man. He came in now and sat down in the chair just vacated by my somewhat eccentric visitor.

"Mrs. Pankhurst," he said, "is completely justified in a.s.serting that the leaders may perish, but the good fight will go on. There are plenty of frenzied Englishwomen to carry the torch. The practice of arson, you will observe, comes natural to woman as the historic guardian of the domestic fire. We have great difficulty in preventing our cook from pouring kerosene into the kitchen range. Instinct, you see."

"But look at the other side of the question," I said.

"That doesn't concern me in the least," he replied. "Of course you will say there is the hunger strike. But what does that prove? Simply that another ancient custom of the submerged cla.s.ses has become an amus.e.m.e.nt of the well-to-do. We are all copying the underworld nowadays. We have borrowed their delightfully straightforward mode of speech. We have learned their dances. We are imitating their manners. Now we are acquiring their capacity for going without food. Not that I think the hunger-strike is altogether a futile invention. Practised on a large scale it will undeniably exercise a beneficent influence on the status of woman. Modern fashions in women's garments have already reduced the expenditure on dress material to an insignificant minimum. When the wives of the middle and upper cla.s.ses have learned to be as abstemious with food as they are with clothes, it is plain that the economic independence of women will be close at hand."

"You are a.s.suming that the sheath-gown is less expensive than the crinoline," I managed to interject.

"I consider your remarks utterly irrelevant to my argument," he said.

"Mind you, I don't deny that forcible feeding is a disgusting business as it is carried on at present. But that is because it is being misdirected. If the British Government were to apply forcible feeding in Whitechapel and among the human wreckage that litters the Thames Embankment, I am confident that the problem of social unrest would be speedily disposed of."

He, too, turned back at the door.

"Mark my word," he said, "it won't be long before the manhood of England a.s.serts itself, and then look out for trouble! You know, even the earth turns when you step upon it."

But sometimes you find yourself wondering whether it is really (1) the solid earth we tread to-day, or whether it is (2) on clouds we step, or whether (3) we walk the earth with our heads in the clouds, or whether (4) we are standing on our heads on earth with our feet in the clouds.

It isn't an age of transition, because that means progress in one direction. It isn't revolution, because revolution is an extremely clear-cut process with heads falling and the sewers running red with blood; whereas the swollen channels to-day run heavy with talk chiefly.

It isn't a trans.m.u.tation of values, because we have no single accepted standard of exchange. It isn't a shifting of viewpoints, because it is much more than that.

It is a shifting of the optical laws, of the entire body of physical laws. Pictures are painted to be heard, music is written to be seen, pa.s.sion is depicted in odours, dancing aims to make the bystander lick his chops. Mathematics has become an impressionist art, and love, birth, and death are treated arithmetically. Grown men and women clamour for the widest individual freedom, and children, if you will listen to the Princeton professor, should render compulsory service to the State. We are in full revolt; in revolt toward State Socialism, toward Nietzsche, toward Christian idealism, toward the paganism of the Latin Quarter and Montmartre, toward university settlements, toward the cabaret. Are we in a fog? Are we in the clouds striving toward the light? Well, I haven't the least doubt that the mist will roll away and leave us in man's natural position, his feet planted solidly on earth, his face lifted to the sun. But for the moment it's puzzling.

XXVIII

REALISM

(AFTER A-N-LD B-N-ETT)

In the dining-room of her little apartment, from the windows of which one might catch a glimpse of the Place de la Revolution on a clear day, Madame Lafarge was laying the table for supper. She had folded the table-cloth in two. With outstretched arms she held the four ends of the beautifully laundered piece of napery between the thumb and middle-finger of either hand. Suddenly she released two of the corners of the white cloth, transferring her grip with practised deftness to the two other corners, and whipped the flapping sheet across the table with a confident gesture that emphasised the vigour of her ample bosom. The further end of the cloth wrinkled. Perfect mistress of herself, Madame Lafarge walked around the table and patted the offending creases into an unblemished surface. She was extremely proud of her finger-nails, upon which she spent fifteen minutes twice a day.

From the china-closet at one end of the room, Madame Lafarge brought forth two plates, which she placed on the table at either end of a perfect diameter. This diameter she bisected with four salt and pepper casters of cut-gla.s.s topped with silver elaborately chased in the bourgeois style. While arranging the spoons she happened to look at the clock and noticed that it was a quarter past five. M. Lafarge would be leaving his shop behind the Palais Royal in half an hour. He would stop at the tobacconist's for his semi-weekly bag of fine-cut Maryland and would probably call at the cobbler's for Madame's second best shoes which she was having resoled for the third time; they would last out the winter. That would bring her husband home within an hour. In another half hour it would be time to put the cutlets on the fire. As she walked into the kitchen she wondered whether there was quite enough flour in the sauce. A heavy sauce made M. Lafarge toss about in bed.

Outside, on the Place, they were guillotining Marie Antoinette....

XXIX

ART

(WHEN EMMY DESTINN SANG IN THE LION CAGE)

First Lion: I'm nervous. Aren't you?

Second Lion: Not in the least.

First Lion: Then why do you keep your tail between your legs?

Second Lion: I always do that when I'm thinking.

First Lion: What I want to know is, what do they want to go and put her in the cage for? The place is crowded as it is and there isn't enough raw beef to go around.

Second Lion: Maybe she is a new kind of beef.