The Invisible Censor Part 7

That, in the end, is the trouble with the skeptic. He thinks it is very clever to question the things that are of the light in just the same spirit that he questions things that are of the darkness. And of course he goes wrong. He is like a surgeon who cuts away the sound flesh rather than the diseased flesh. He is, in the evergreen phrase, de-structive not con-structive.

And so I am glad that I did not seek to disillusion my fine young aviator. If I had succeeded in disillusioning him, who can tell what the consequences might have been? We know that during the war there were grim duties to be performed by our young men-towns to be bombed where it took excessive skill to kill the men-citizens without killing the women and the children. If I had sapped this boy's faith even one pulsation, perhaps he would have failed in his duty.

You cannot be too careful how you lead people to rationalize. In this world there is rationalism and plenty of it. But is there not also a super-rationalism? And must we not always inculcate super-rationalism when we _know_ we possess the true faith?

THE s.p.a.cES OF UNCERTAINTY OR, AN ACHE IN THE VOID

The floor, unfortunately, was phosphorus, so he had to pick his steps with care. But at last he came to a French window, which he opened, and sprang to a pa.s.sing star. Star, not car. He was a poet, and that is what young poets do.

He had a pleasant physiognomy, as young men go. Unformed, of course-perhaps twenty minutes late and the hall only two-thirds full.

But he was no longer young enough to hang his hat on the gas. He was from the East via Honey Dew, Idaho, but he had long resided with an aunt in Nebraska and so was a strong Acutist. He wore gray shirts and a lemon tie. At Harvard-he went to Harvard-he had opened his bean with considerable difficulty and crushed in a ripe strawberry of temperament.

So that he could never stop himself when he beheld a pa.s.sing star.

The motion was full, with significant curves. It made him a little air-sick at first, but he preferred air-sickness. He made no compromise with the public taste for pedestrianism. After a few days that quickly ceased to be solar, he was rewarded. He came to Asphodelia, a suburb of Venus on the main line.

In Asphodelia the poets travel on all-fours, kick their heels toward Mercury, and utter startling cries. In Asphodelia a banker lives in the menagerie, and they feed mathematical instructors through a hole in the wall. This new partic.i.p.ant had too much of the stern blood of the Puritan in his rustproof veins to kick more than one heel at a time, but when he observed a gamboling Asphodelian of seventy years he felt a little wishful, and permitted himself a trifling ululation. The local cheer-leader heard him and knew him at once for a Harvard Acutist, and there was joy in Asphodelia.

A year or so sufficed him. He grew tired of sleeping in the branches of the cocoanut tree, and the river of green ink wearied him. So when the next star swung around he slipped away from his pink duenna and crept into the lattice-work to steal his pa.s.sage home.

Thought slid from him like an oscillant leaf. He hung there lonely, in his Reis underwear, aching in the void.

He alighted in the harbor of Rio. When he trans-shipped to New York in ordinary ways, he prepared his Yonkers uncle, and he was met in undue course on Front Street.

"My boy," said his uncle, "what do you want me to do for you? Speak the word. You have been gone so long, and you were given up for lost."

"Only one thing do I want," confessed the former Acutist.

"And what might that be?" the uncle more circ.u.mspectly inquired.

"Take me at once to the great simple embrace of wholesome Coney Island."

So, clad in an Arrow collar and a Brokaw suit, the young poet stepped from Acutism on to the Iron Boat.

And what is the moral of this tale, mes enfants?... But must we not leave something to waft in the s.p.a.ces of uncertainty?

Inscribed to the _Little Review_

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I am sorry now not to have treasured every word that came from my poet.

At the moment I disliked to play Boswell; I thought it beneath my dignity. But artists like Arnold Bennett who ply the notebook are not ashamed to be the Boswells of mediocrity. Why should I have hesitated to take notes of William Butler Yeats?

In the Pennsylvania station I had met him, as his host agreed, and I intruded on him as far as Philadelphia. I say intruded: his forehead wrinkled in tolerant endurance too often for me to feel that I was welcome. And yet, once we were settled, he was not unwilling to speak.

His dark eyes, oblique and set far into his head, gave him a cryptic and remote suggestion. His pursed lips closed as on a secret. He opened them for utterance almost as in a dream. As if he were spokesman of some sacred book spread in front of him but raptly remembered, he p.r.o.nounced his opinions seriously, occasionally raising his hands to fend his words. He was, I think, inwardly satisfied that I was attentive. I was indeed attentive. I had never listened to more distinguished conversation. Or, rather, monologue-for when I talked he suspended his animation, like a singer waiting for the accompanist to run down.

It was on the eve of The New Republic. I asked him if he'd write for it, and he answered characteristically. He said that journalism was action and that nothing except the last stage of exasperation could make him want to write for a journal as he had written about Blanco Posnet or The Playboy. The word "journalism" he uttered as a nun might utter "vaudeville." He was reminded, he said, of an offer that was made to Oscar Wilde of the editorship of a fashion paper, to include court gossip. Wouldn't it interest Wilde? "Ah, yes," responded Wilde, "I am deeply interested in a court scandal at present." The journalist (devourer of carrion, of course) was immediately eager. "Yes," said Wilde, "the scandal of the Persian court in the year 400 B. C."

It was telling. It made me ashamed for my profession. I could not forget, however, pillars of the _Ladies' World_ edited by Oscar Wilde which I used to store in an out-house. Wilde had condescended in the end.

Yeats's mind was bemused by his recollection of his fellow-Irishman.

Once he completed his lectures he would go home, and a "fury of preoccupation" would keep him from being caught in those activities that lead to occasional writing. His lectures would not go into essays but into dialogues, "of a man wandering through the antique city of Fez." In the cavern blackness of those eyes I could feel that there was a mysterious gaze fixed on the pa.s.sing crowd of the moment, the gaze of a stranger to fashion who might as well write of Persia, a dreamer beyond s.p.a.ce and time.

"And humanitarian writing," he concluded, with a weary limp motion of his hand, "the writing of reformers, 'uplifters,' with a narrow view of democracy I find dull. The Webbs are dull. And truistic."

I spoke of the Irish John Mitchel's narrow antidemocracy and belief in the non-existence of progress, such as he had argued in Virginia during the Civil War. Mitchel, he protested, was a pa.s.sionate nature. The progress he denied was a progress wrongly conceived by Macaulay and the early Victorians. It was founded on "truisms" not really true. Whether Carlyle or Mitchel was the first to repudiate these ideas he didn't know: possibly Mitchel was.

Yeats's one political interest at that time, before the war, was the Irish question. He believed in home rule. He believed the British democracy was then definitely making the question its own, and "this is fortunate." I spoke of Jung's belief in England's national complex. He was greatly interested. Ulster opposition to home rule he regretted.

"The Scarlet Woman is of course a great inspiration," he said, "and Carson has stimulated this. His one desire is to wreck home rule, and so there cannot be arrangement by consent. I agree with Redmond that Carson has gone ahead on a military conspiracy. Personally, I do not say so for a party reason. I am neither radical nor tory. I think Asquith is a better man than Lloyd George-less inflated. He is a moderate, not puffed up with big phrases. He meets the issue that arises when it arises.... I object to the uplifter who makes other people's sins his business, and forgets his chief business, his own sins. Jane Addams? Ah, that is different."

His lectures he would not discuss but he spoke a good deal of audiences.

In his own audiences he found no one more eager, no one who knows more, than an occasional old man, a man of sixty. He was surprised and somewhat disappointed to find prosperity go hand in hand with culture in this country. In the city where the hotel is bad there is likely to be a poor audience. Where it is good, the audience is good. In his own country the happiest woman he could name was a woman living in a Dublin slum whose mind is full of beautiful imaginings and fantasies. Is poverty an evil? We should desire a condition of life which would satisfy the need for food and shelter, and, for the rest, be rich in imagination. The merchant builds himself a palace only for auto-suggestion. The poor woman is as rich as the merchant. I said yes, but that a brute or a Bismarck comes in and overrides the imagination.

He agreed. "Life is the warring of forces and these forces seem to be irreconcilable."

It could cost an artist too much to escape poverty. I spoke of the deadness of so much of the work done by William Sharp and Grant Allen.

He said it was Allen's own fault. He, or his wife, wanted too many thousand dollars a year. They had to bring up their children on the same scale as their friends' children! And he kindled at this folly. "A woman who marries an artist," he said with much animation, "is either a goose, or mad, or a hero. If she's a goose, she drives him to earn money. If she's mad she drives him mad. If she's a hero, they suffer together, and they come out all right."

Phrases like this were not alone. There was the keen observation that the Pennsylvania station is "free from the vulgarity of advertis.e.m.e.nt"; the admission of second hand expression in Irish poetry except in The Dark Rosaleen and Hussey's Ode; a generalization on Chicago to the effect that "courts love poetry, plutocracies love tangible art." Not for a moment did this mind cease to move over the face of realities and read their legend and interpret its meaning. Meeting him was not like Hazlitt's meeting Coleridge. I could not say, "my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge." But the Yeats I met did not meet me. I remained on the periphery. Yet from what I learned there I can believe in the sesame of poets. I hope that some one to-day, nearer to him than a journalist, is wise enough to treasure his words.

"WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE"

Last night I woke up suddenly to the sound of bombardment. A great detonation tore the silence; an answering explosion shook it; then came a series of shots in diminishing intensity. My windows look out on a rank of New York skysc.r.a.pers, with a slip of sky to the south. In the ache of something not unlike fear, I thrust out my head to learn as quickly as I could what was happening. No result from the explosions was to be seen. The skysc.r.a.pers were gaunt and black, with a square of lost light in a room or two. The sky was clean-swept and luminous, the stars unperturbed. Still the shots barked and muttered, insanely active, beyond the blank buildings, under the serene sky.

I heard hoa.r.s.e cries from river-craft. Could it be on the river? Could it be gun practice, or was there really an interchange of gun-fire? A U-boat? An insurrection? At any rate, it had to be explained and my mind was singularly lively for three a. m.

Long after your country has gone to war, I told myself, there remains, if you have sluggish sympathies, what may fairly be called a neutrality of the imagination. You are aware that there is fighting, bloodshed, death, but you retain the air of the philosophic. You do not put yourself in the place of Americans under fire. But if this be really bombardment, sh.e.l.l-fire in Manhattan? I felt in an instant how Colonel Roosevelt might come to seem the supreme understander of the situation.

An enemy that could reach so far and hit so hard would run a girdle of feeling from New York to the remotest fighters in Africa or Mesopotamia.

To protect ourselves against the hysteria of hatred-that would always be a necessity. But I grimly remembered the phrase, "proud punctilio." I remembered the President's tender-minded words, "conduct our operations as belligerents without pa.s.sion," and his pledge of sincere friendship to the German people: warfare without "the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them." Here, with the Germans' sh.e.l.l-fire plowing into our buildings and into our skins? Here, meeting the animosity of their guns?

Becoming awake enough to think about the war, I began to reason about this "bombardment," to move from the hypnoidal state, the Hudson Maxim-Cleveland Moffett zone. The detonations were continuing, but not at all sensationally, and soon they began to shape themselves familiarly, to sound remarkably like the round noises of trains shunting, from the New York Central, carried on clear dry November air.

Soon, indeed, it became impossible to conceive that these loud reverberations from the Vanderbilt establishment had ever been so distorted by a nightmare mind as to seem gun-fire. And my breathless inspection of the innocent sky!

But that touch of panic, in the interest of our whole present patriotic cultural att.i.tude, was not to be lost. It is the touch, confessed or unconfessed, that makes us kin. If we are to retain toward German art and literature and science an att.i.tude of appreciation and reciprocation, without disloyalty, it must be in the presence of the idea of sh.e.l.l-wounds German-inflicted. Any other broad-mindedness is the illusory broad-mindedness of the smooth and smug. It is Pharisaical. It comes from that neutrality of the imagination which is another name for selfish detachment, the temperature of the snake.

A generation less prepared than our own for the mood of warfare it would be difficult to imagine-less prepared, that is to say, by the situation of our country or the color of our thought. To declare now that New York has made no provision for the air-traffic of the future is not to arouse any sense of delinquency. No greater sense of delinquency was aroused ten or fifteen years ago by the ba.s.s warnings of military men. It is not too much to say that Lord Roberts and Homer Lea were felt to have an ugly monomania. In that period Nicholas Murray Butler and Elihu Root and Andrew Carnegie were thinking in terms of peace palaces. Colonel Roosevelt had tiny ideas of preparedness, but he was far more busy enunciating the recall of judges-and he earned the n.o.bel Prize. Few men, even two years ago, believed we would be sending great armies to Europe in 1917. In the first place, men like Homer Lea had said that the United States could not mobilize half a million soldiers for active service in less than three years. And in the next place, we still felt pacifically.

We had lived domestic life too long ever to imagine our sky black and our gra.s.s red.