The Crow's Nest Part 7

I'm not sure that I agree that that's Hardy's philosophy. It's fair enough to say that Hardy's stories, and still more his poems, paint chiefly the gloomy and hopeless situations in life, just as Mark Twain and Aristophanes painted the comic ones. But Mark Twain was very far from thinking the world was a joke, and I doubt whether Hardy regards it at heart as so black.

He has written--how many books? twenty odd?--novels and poems. They make quite an edifice. They represent long years of work. Could he have been so industrious if he had found the world a chamber of horrors? He might have done one or two novels or poems about it, but how could he have kept on if he had truly felt the whole thing was hopeless? He kept on, because although sorrows move him he does not feel their weight. He found he could have a good time painting the world's tragic aspects. He is somehow or other so const.i.tuted that that's been his pleasure. And he has wanted his own kind of pleasure, just as you and I want our kinds.

That's fair.

I like to think that the good old soul has had a lot of fun all his life, describing all the gloomiest episodes a person could think of. If a good, gloomy episode comes into his mind while he's shaving, it brightens the whole day, and he bustles off to set it down, whistling.

Somebody once asked him if he were as pessimistic as his writings would indicate, and he replied that it wasn't safe to judge a man's thoughts by his writings. His writings showed only what kind of things he liked to describe. "Some authors become vocal before one aspect of life, some another." (Perhaps not his exact words but close to it.) One aspect of life may impress you, yet leave you in silence; another may stimulate you into saying something; but what does that prove? It merely shows what you like best to talk about, not your philosophy. A cat whose life is princ.i.p.ally peace and good food and warm fires makes hardly any noise about those things--at most a mere purr. But she does become vocal and wildly so, over midnight encounters. If another cat so much as disputes her way on a fence-top, her tragic shrieks of anguish will sound like the end of the world. Well, Hardy has spent his life in what was chiefly a peaceful era of history, in a liberal and prosperous country; and he personally, too, has had blessings--the blessing of being able, for instance, to write really good books, and the blessing of finding a public to read and admire them. Is any of this reflected in his themes, though? Does he purr? Mighty little. No, he prefers looking around for trouble in this old world's backyards; he prowls about at night till he comes upon some good hunk of bleakness, and then he sits down, like the cat, to utter long-drawn-out wails, which give him strange, poignant sensations of deep satisfaction. They give us quite other sensations but he doesn't care. In the morning he canters back in, pleased and happy, for breakfast, and he basks in the sun, blinking sagely, the rest of the day. And we say, with respect, "A great pessimist; he thinks life is all sorrow."

The princ.i.p.al objection to pessimists is they sap a man's hope. As some English writer has said, there are two kinds of hope. First, the hope of success, which gives men daring, and helps them win against odds. That isn't the best sort of hope. Many deliberately cultivate it because it makes for success, but that is an insincere habit; it's really self-hypnotism. It may help us to win in some particular enterprise, yes; but it's dangerous, like drug-taking. You must keep on increasing the dose, and blind-folding your reason. Men who do it are buoyant, self-confident, but some of their integrity is lost.

The best kind of hope is not about success in this or that undertaking.

It's far deeper; hence when things go against you, it isn't destroyed.

It is hope about the nature and future of man and the universe. It is this hope the pessimists would disallow. That's why they repel us. Some lessen our hope in the universe; others, in man.

Buffoon Fate

Suppose that a lot of us were living aboard a huge ship. Suppose the ship didn't rock much, or require any urgent attention, but kept along on an even keel and left us free to do as we liked. And suppose we got into the habit of staying below more and more, never coming up on deck or regarding the sea or the sky. Just played around below, working at little jobs; eating, starving, quarreling, and arguing in the hold of that ship.

And then, maybe, something would happen to call us on deck. Some peril, some storm. And we'd suddenly realize that our life between decks wasn't all. We'd run up and rub our eyes, and stare around at the black waters, the vast, heaving waves; and a gale from far s.p.a.ces would strike us, and chill us like ice. And we'd think, "By Jove, we're on a ship! And where is our ship sailing?"

Wars, plagues and famines are the storms that make us run up on deck.

They s.n.a.t.c.h us up, out of our buying and selling and studying, and show us our whole human enterprise as a ship, in great danger.

We want to scurry back below, where it's lighted and smaller. Down below where our toys are. On deck it's too vast, too tremendous....

We want to forget that the human race is on an adventure, sailing no one knows where, on a magical, treacherous sea.

We have fought our way up from being wild, houseless lemurs, or lower, and little by little we have built up our curious structure--of learning, of art, of discovery--a wonderful structure: at least for us monkey-men. It has been a long struggle. We can guess, looking backward, what our ancestors had to contend with--how the cavemen fought mammoths, and their tough sons and daughters fought barbarism. But we want to forget it. We wish every one now to be genial. We pretend that this isn't the same earth that our ancestors lived on, but quite a different planet, where roughness is kept within bounds and where persons wear gloves and have neat wooden doors they can lock.

But it's the very same earth that old Grandpa Caveman once wrestled with, and where old Grandma Cavewoman ran for her life twice a week.

We've varnished the surface.

But it's still wild and strange just beneath.

In a book called "The War in the Air," by H. G. Wells (1907) he pictures the world swimming along quietly, when bang! a war starts! And it spreads, and takes in East and West, smashes cities, stops everything.

And one of the young men in the story looks around rather dazed, and says in a low voice: "I've always thought life was a lark. It isn't.

This sort of thing has always been happening, I suppose--these things, wars and earthquakes, that sweep across all the decency of life. It's just as though I had woke up to it all for the first time.... And it's always been so--it's the way of life."

So that's what we need to get used to, that it's _that_ kind of a ship.

We ought to have a sense of the adventure on which we're all bound.

It's not only war--not by a long shot--that gives men that sense. Great scientists have it. Great sailors. You can sort out the statesmen around you, the writers, the poets, according to whether or not they ever have been up on deck.

Theodore Dreiser has, for instance; Arnold Bennett has not. Charles d.i.c.kens did not, and that's why he is ranked below Thackeray. Compare James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist" with George Moore's "Confessions," and if you apply this criterion, Moore takes a back seat.

There's one great man now living, however, who has almost too much of this sense: this cosmic adventure emotion. And that man's Joseph Conrad.

Perhaps in his youth the sea came upon him too suddenly, or his boyhood sea-dreams awed too deeply his then unformed mind. At all events, the men in his stories are like lonely spirits, sailing, spellbound, through the immense forces surrounding the world. "There they are," one of them says, as he stands at the rail, "stars, sun, sea, light, darkness, s.p.a.ce, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which man seems to have blundered unbidden. Or else decoyed."

We all have that mood. But Conrad, he's given to brooding. And his habit at night when he stands staring up at the stars is to see (or conjure up rather) a dumb buffoon Fate, primeval, unfriendly and stupid, whom Man must defy. And Conrad defies it, but wearily, for he feels sick at heart,--because of his surety that Fate is ign.o.ble, and blind.

It's as though the man told himself ghost stories about this great universe. He feels that it ought to have a gracious and powerful master, leading men along fiery highways to test but not crush them, and marching them firm-eyed and glorious toward high goals. But instead there is nothing. The gray, empty wastes of the skies beyond starland are silent. Or, worse, their one sound is the footfall of that buffoon Fate.

The way to meet this black situation, according to Conrad, is to face it with grim steady courage. And that's what he does. It's stirring to discover the fineness of this man's tragic bravery. But when I get loose from his spell, and reflect, independently, I ask myself, "After all, is this performance so brave?"

We must all weigh the universe, each in his own penny-scales, and decide for ourselves whether to regard it as inspiring or hollow. But letting our penny-scales frighten us isn't stout-hearted.

If I were to tell myself ghost stories until I was trembling, and then, with my heart turning cold, firmly walk through the dark, my courage would be splendid, no doubt, but not finely applied. Conrad's courage is splendid--it is as great as almost any modern's--but it isn't courageous of him to busy it with self-conjured dreads.

The Wrong Lampman

It is odd, or no, it's not, but it's note-worthy, that Shaw has had few disciples. Here is a witty, vivacious man, successful and keen: why isn't he the head of a school of other keen, witty writers? He has provided an attractive form--the play with an essay as preface. He has provided stock characters, such as the handsome-hero male-moth, who protests so indignantly at the fatal attraction of candles. He has developed above all that useful formula which has served many a dramatist--the comic confrontation of reason and instinct in man. Yet this whole apparatus lies idle, except for the use that Shaw makes of it. It is as though Henry Ford had perfected an automobile, and then no one had taken a drive in it, ever, but Henry.

The explanation that Shaw's is too good a machine, or that it takes a genius to run it, is not sufficiently plausible. The truth probably is that his shiny car has some bad defect.

It has this defect certainly: in all his long arguments, Shaw has one underlying a.s.sumption--that men could be perfectly reasonable and wise if they would. They have only to let themselves; and if they won't, it's downright perversity. This belief is at the center of his being, and he can't get away from it. He doesn't hold it lightly: he's really in earnest about it. Naturally, when he looks around at the world with that belief in his heart, and sees men and women making blunders which he thinks they don't need to, he becomes too exasperated for silence, and pours out his plays. Sometimes he is philosophic enough to treat his fellows amusedly; sometimes he is serious and exacerbated, in which case he is tiresome. But at heart he is always provoked and astonished at men for the way they fend off the millennium, when it's right at their side.

He may have inherited this att.i.tude from those economists, who flourished, or attempted to flourish, in the generation before him--those who built with such confidence on rationalism in human affairs. Man was a reasonable being, they said and believed; and all would be well with him, therefore, when he once saw the light. To discover the light might be difficult, but they would do all that for us, and then it would surely be no trouble to man to accept it. They proceeded to discover the light in finance, trade, and matters of government; and Shaw, coming after them, extended the field into marriage, and explained to us the rational thing to do in social relations. These numerous doses of what was confidently recommended as reason were faithfully swallowed by all of us; and yet we're not changed. The dose was as pure as these doctors were able to make it.

But--reason needs admixtures of other things to be a good dose. Men have learned that without these confirmings it's not to be trusted.

The turn that psychology has taken during the last twenty years has naturally been unlucky for Shaw as a leader, or influence. He appears now as the culminating figure of an old school of thinkers, instead of the founder of a new. And that old school is dead. It was so fascinated by reason or what it believed to be such (for we should not a.s.sume that its conceptions, even of reason, were right), that it never properly studied or faced human nature.

Civilization is a process, not a trick to be learned overnight. It is a way of behavior which we super-animals adopt bit by bit. The surprising and hopeful thing is that we adopt it at all. Civilization is the slow modification of our old feral qualities, the slow growth of others, which we test, then discard or retain. An occasional invention seems to hasten things, but chiefly externally; for the internal change in men's natures is slower than glaciers, and it is upon the sum of men's natures that civilization depends. While this testing and churning and gradual molding goes on, some fellow is always holding up a hasty lamp he calls reason, and beckoning the glacier one side, like a will-o'-the-wisp.

Shaw's lamp of reason is one that has an extra fine glitter; it makes everything look perfectly simple; it shows us short-cuts. He recommends it as a subst.i.tute for understanding, which he does not manufacture.

Understanding is slow, and is always pointing to the longest way round.

Shaw has studied the ways of mankind, but without enough sympathy. It is unlucky, both for him and for us, this is so. Sympathy would have made him humorous and wise, and then what a friend he'd have been to us.

Instead, being brilliant and witty, he has left us unnourished.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Which shall the Future belong to--man or the insects?]

The Seamy Side of Fabre