The Invisible Censor Part 8

Because of this mental unpreparedness for war, this calm enjoyment of an unearned increment of peace, there was never a greater dislocation of standards than our recent dislocation, and never a greater problem of readjustment. For England, at any rate, there was a closeness to the war that helped to bring about an alignment of sentiment. But here, besides the discrepancies in the entailment of services, there are enormous discrepancies in sentiment to start with, and policies still to be accepted and cemented, and European prejudices to be suppressed or reconciled. Misunderstanding, under these circ.u.mstances, is so much to be looked for, especially with impetuous patriots demanding a new pa.s.sword of allegiance every minute, that the wonder is not at how many outrages there are, but how few.

Most of these outrages fall outside the scope of literary discussion, naturally. "Let the sailor content himself with talking of the winds; the herd of his oxen; the soldier of his wounds; the shepherd of his flocks"; the critic of his books. But there is one kind of outrage that requires to be discussed, from the point of view of culture, if only because there is no ultimate value in any culture that has to be subordinated to the state. That is the outrage, provisionally so-called, of mutilating everything German; not only sequestering what may be dangerous or unfriendly and vindictive, but depriving of toleration everything that has German origin or bears a German name. The quick transformation of Bismarcks into North Atlantics, of Kaiserhofs into Cafe New Yorks, is too laughable to be taken seriously. The shudderings at Germantown, Pa., and Berlin, O., and Bismarck, N. D., are in the same childlike cla.s.s. But it is different when an Austrian artist is not permitted to perform because, while we are not at war with Austria, she is our enemy's ally. It is different when "the music of all German composers will be swept from the programmes of scheduled concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra in Pittsburgh. 'The Philadelphia Orchestra a.s.sociation wishes to announce that it will conform with pleasure to the request of the Pittsburgh a.s.sociation. The Philadelphia Orchestra a.s.sociation is heartily in accord with any movement directed by patriotic motives.'" It is this sort of thing, extending intolerance to culture, that suggests we have been surprised in this whole matter of culture with our lamps untrimmed.

In a sense we, the laissez faire generation, have been unavoidably surprised-so much so that our "proud punctilio" has been jogged considerably loose. So loose, in fact, that we have given up any pretension to being so punctilious as soldiers used to be. It used to be possible, even for men whose hands dripped with enemy blood, to sign magnanimous truces; but science has made another kind of warfare possible, and the civilian population of the modern State, totally involved in a catastrophe beyond all reckoning, falls from its complacency into a depth of panic and everywhere believes that the enemy is inhuman in this war.

Were such beliefs special to this war, hatred might well go beyond the fervor of the Inquisition, and the hope of exterminating the Germans as a people might be universally entertained. But no one who has read history to any purpose will trust too far to this particular emotionality of the hour. To say this, in the middle of a righteous war, may sound unpatriotic. But, if hatred is the test, what could be more traitorous and seditious than Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same G.o.d; and each invokes his aid against the other.... The prayers of both could not be answered-that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the Providence of G.o.d, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that _he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came_, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living G.o.d always ascribe to him?

Fondly do we hope-fervently do we pray-that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pa.s.s away. Yet,... so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as G.o.d gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan-to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." It is, perhaps, like quoting the Lord's Prayer. And yet it is the neglected wisdom of a man who had gleaned it from long meditating fratricidal war.

But, you may say, Prussia has always been outside humanity. We are engaged in a war foreordained and necessary, a natural war. A war inescapable, yes, but not inevitable. Let the plain testimony of hundreds of books speak.... To ask for such discriminations as this is, however, scarcely possible. It is too much, in the face of superst.i.tions, anxieties, and apprehensions, to expect the att.i.tude of culture to be preserved. In peace-time we are allowed to go outside our own state to enjoy any manifestation of the seven arts; and such violent nationalism as attacked The Playboy of the Western World in New York is at once called "rowdy" and "despicable." But in time of war it is part of its morality, or immorality, that culture must be subordinate to clamor, and that even national sculpture must become jingoistic, making railsplitters neatly respectable and idealizing long feet. How far this supervision of culture goes depends only on the degree of pressure. It may go so far as to make the domination of political considerations, state considerations, paramount in everything-precisely the victory that democracy, hoping with Emerson that "we shall one day learn to supersede politics by education," has most to fear.

It is in war itself, with its enmity to so much that is free, that one must seek the opposition to enemy culture, not in the culture that is opposed. Must one, on this account, think any peace a good peace? To do so is to show an immunity from the actual which is not to be envied. It is only necessary to imagine New York bombarded, as many French and English and Belgian and Russian towns have been bombarded since the beginning of the war, to realize the rush of resistance that is born in mankind, expedient for government to recruit and to rally to the end.

But for the man who has partaken of democratic culture this "end"

involves democracy. All character and all spirit cannot be absorbed in the will to cure the homicidal enemy by his own poison. The only course open to the man who is still concerned for democratic culture is to remember the n.o.bility of Lincoln's example-by concentrating on the offenses rather than the persons that cause the mighty scourge of war, to avoid the war-panic and war-hatred which will enrage our wounds.

WAR EXPERTS

"War is not now a matter of the stout heart and the strong arm.

Not that these attributes do not have their place and value in modern warfare; but they are no longer the chief or decisive factors in the case. The exploits that count in this warfare are technological exploits; exploits of technological science, industrial appliances, and technological training. As has been remarked before, it is no longer a gentleman's war, and the gentleman, as such, is no better than a marplot in the game as it is played."

---- Thorstein Veblen in _The Nature of Peace_.

Across a park in Washington I followed the leisurely stride of two British officers. Their movement, punctuated by long walking-sticks, had a military deliberation which became their veteran gray hairs. They were in khaki uniforms and leather leggings, a red strip at the shoulder marking them as staff officers. Amid groups of loitering nurses and tethered infants and old men feeding pop-corn to the birds they were as of a grander race of men. After a pang of civilian inferiority I asked who they were and learned that one of them was simply a Canadian lawyer-and that, being a judge advocate, he was obliged to boot and spur himself in his hotel bedroom every morning and ride up and down the elevator in polished leggings, for the good of the cause. Never in his life had he heard a machine-gun fired. Never had he flourished anything more dangerous than his family carving knife. On inspection his companion looked similarly martial. The only certain veteran in the parklet was a shrunken old pensioner feeding tame robins on the gra.s.s.

Part of the politico-military art is window-dressing of this description. It excites the romantic populace, composed of pedestrians like myself, and serves to advertise the colors. It suggests a leonine order of values from which the shambling citizen is debarred. But back of the window-dressing, the rhetoric of costume and medal and prepared ovation and patriotic tears, there is a reality as different from these appearances as roots are different from flowers. If I had ever supposed that the gist of war was to be derived solely from contemplating uniformed warriors, I came to a new conclusion when I overheard the cool experts of war.

These experts, such of them as I happened to overhear, had come with the British mission to America, and they were far other than the common notion of lords of war. The most impressive of them was a slight figure who reminded me externally of the Greek professor in Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara. Before the war he had been a don at Cambridge, a teacher of economics, and he retained the lucid laboratory manner of an expert who counts on holding attention. It was not in him, as it is in so many older pooh-bah professors, to expect a deference to personal garrulity; but one gained an impression that no words were likely to be wasted on vacuous listeners by a person with such steel-gray eyes.

From London, since the beginning of the war, this concentrated man had gone out of Paris, to Rome, to Petrograd, to join counsel with various allies on the science of providing munitions. It would never have occurred to any pork packer to employ this fine-faced, sensitive, quiet-voiced professor to work out the economic killing of cattle. Yet almost as soon as he had volunteered in England he began on the task of adapting industry to slaughter, and there was no doubt whatever that his inclusive mind had procured the quick and effective killing of thousands of human beings. It was a joy, strange to say, to listen to him. He was one of those men whom H. G. Wells used to delight in imagining, the sort of man who could keep cool in a cosmic upheaval, his mind as nimble as quicksilver while he devised the soundest plan for launching the forces of his sphere. There was no more trace of priesthood in him than in a mechanic or a chauffeur. He deliberated the organizing of America for destructiveness as an engineer might deliberate lining a leaky tunnel with copper, and there was as little pretension in his manner as there was sentiment or doubt. His accent was cultivated, he was obviously a university man, but he had come to the top by virtue of mental equipment. "Mental equipment" means many things, but plainly he was not of those remote academicians who go in for cerebral scroll-saw work. He managed his mind as a woodman manages an ax. The curt swing and drive and bite of it could escape no one, and for all his almost plaintively modest demeanor he had instant arresting power. It was he and a few men like him who had made it feasible for amateur armies to loop round an empire a burning rain of steel.

This master of munitions was not the only schoolman who had demonstrated brains. There was another professor, this time the purchaser of guns. He had come to his role from holding the kind of position that Matthew Arnold once had held. A meager figure enough, superficially the scholastic-dyspeptic, he had shown that the bureaucracy of education was no bad beginning for ordering a new department with small attention to the tricks, of merchandise, but with every thought as to technological detail. The conversation that went about did not seem to engage this man, except as it turned on such engrossing topics as the necessity for circ.u.mventing child labor. For the rest he was as a soft silent cloud that gathered the ascending vapors, and discharged itself in lightning decision which made no change in the obscurity from which it came.

Under a lamp at night on Connecticut Avenue I saw one late-working member of the mission stop wearily to fend off American inquisition. A training in the Foreign Office had given this distinguished exile a permanent nostalgia for Olympus-and how Olympian the British Foreign Office is, few Americans dare to behold. The candidature to this interesting service of a great democracy is limited to a "narrow circle of society" by various excellent devices, the first of which is that official conditions of entry fix the amount of the private means required at a minimum of 400 a year. "The primary qualification for the diplomatic service," says one friendly interpreter of it, "is a capacity to deal on terms of equality with considerable persons and their words and works. Sometimes, very rarely, this capacity is given, in its highest form, by something which is hardly examinable-by very great intellectual powers. Ordinarily, however, this capacity is a result of nurture in an atmosphere of independence. Unfortunately, it is scarcely too much to say that the present const.i.tution of society provides this atmosphere of independence only where there is financial independence.

In a very few cases freedom of mind and character is achieved elsewhere, but then a great price, not measurable by money, has to be paid for it-how great a price only those who have paid it know.... The 'property qualification' is operative as a means of selecting a certain kind of character; no readjustment of pay could be a subst.i.tute for it.

Undoubtedly, as thus operative, it imposes a limitation, but the limitation imposed is not that of a cla.s.s-prejudice or of a mere preference for wealth-it is a limitation imposed by the needs of the diplomatic service, and those needs are national needs." Out of such a remarkable background, so redolent of "the present const.i.tution of society," my exiled diplomat took his weary stand before prying writers for the press. They wanted to know "the critical shrinking point." They wished to discuss the "maximum theoretic availability." He had no answer to make; he merely made diplomatic moan. In the heavy dispatch box that he set at his feet there were undoubtedly treasured figures, priceless information for Germany in her jiu jitsu of the sea. That dispatch box might have been solid metal for any effect it had on the conversation.

He was a kind of expert who took interrogation with pallid mournfulness; who punctuated silence with, "Look here, you've got hold of absolutely the wrong man.... Hanged if I know.... My dear sir, I haven't the very faintest idea."

And yet this member of a caste was only coming through because he too was paying a technological price. Wheat and nitrate and ore and rubber-there was nothing his country might need which did not occupy him, staff officer of vital trafficking, throughout numbered nights.

There were a few business men on the mission-mighty few considering their lordship in times of peace. Most of the dominant figures either from Oxford or Cambridge, there was one other intellectual who stood out as rather an exception to the prevailing type. He was an older man whose nature brimmed with ideas, a t.i.tan born to laughter and high discourse and a happy gigantic effervescence. If a reputation brayed too loudly at him, he named its author an a.s.s. If liberalism were intoned to him, he called it detestable and cried to knock the English _Nation's_ head against the _Manchester Guardian's_. Yet he was distinguished from most of his colleagues as a radical who afforded wild opinions of his own. To the organization of his country he had contributed one invaluable idea, and each problem that came up in turn he conducted out of its narrow immediate importance into the perspective of a natural philosophy. Not fond of a prearranged system, he irked more than the run of his countrymen at the stuffiness of badly bundled facts. With a great sweep of vigor he would start at the proposition of handling war industry, for example, on a basis not inadequate to the requirements; and out of his running oration would come a wealth of such suggestions as spring only from a cross-fertilizing habit of mind.

These are a handful of England's experts in wartime. They do not bear the brunt of the fight, like the soldiers, but the roots of the flower of war are in just such depths as employ these hidden minds.

OKURA SEES NEWPORT

Okura was sent to me by Jack Owen, a friend of mine in j.a.pan. Jack said that Okura was taking two years off to study democracy, and would I steer him around. I was delighted. I offered Okura his choice of the great democratic scene, with myself as obedient personal conductor. He was very nice about it in his perfect silver-and-gray manner, and he asked if we could begin with Newport. I suspected a joke, but his eye never twinkled, and so to Newport we went.

The dirty little Newport railway station interested Okura. So did the choked throat of Thames Street, with its mad crush of motors and delivery wagons and foot pa.s.sengers, and the riotous journey from the meat market to the book shop and from the chemist's to the Boston Store.

I explained to Okura that this was not really Newport, only a small sample of the ordinary shopping country town, with the real exquisiteness of Newport tucked away behind. Okura clucked an acceptance of this remark, and our car wove its difficult way through the narrow lane till we returned to Bellevue Avenue.

The name Bellevue Avenue had to be expounded to Okura. He expected a belle vue, not a good plain plutocratic American street. When I told him what to expect, however, he was intensely occupied with its exhibition of a.s.sorted architecture, and he broke into open comment. "So very charming!" he cried politely. "So like postcards of Milwaukee by the lake!" I enjoyed his nave enthusiasm and let it go.

He wanted to know who lived on the avenue, and I told him all the names I could think of. He had heard many of them, the samurai of America being known to him as a matter of course, and he picked up new crumbs of information with obvious grat.i.tude.

"Vanderbilt? Oh, yes." That was old. So were Astor and Belmont.

After a while Okura wrinkled his brow. "I do not see the McAlpin mansion."

"The McAlpins? I have never heard of them," I murmured indulgently.

"But that is one name I think I remember correctly," Okura answered with visible anxiety. "The Bellevue-Astors, the Bellevue-Belmonts, the Bellevue-Stratfords? Please forgive me, I do not understand. Are not the McAlpins also Bellevue-McAlpins?"

It was hard to convince Okura that this was not a Valhalla of hotel proprietors, but at last he got it straight. We went back again as far as the Casino, and I took him in to see the tennis tournament.

Unknown to Okura, I was forced to take seats up rather far-well, to be frank, among the Jamestown and Saunderstown people. But happily we had Newport in the boxes right below us. Some of the ladies sat facing the tennis, some sat with their backs to it, and a great buzz of conversation reverberated under the roof of the stand and billowed on to the court. On the court two young men strove against each other with a skill hardly to be matched in any other game, and occasionally, when something eccentric or sensational happened, a ripple pa.s.sed through the crowd. But the applause was irregular. People had to be watched and pointed out. It was important to note which human oyster bore the largest pearl. The method of entry and exit was significant, and significant the whole ritual of being politely superior to the game.

Okura was fascinated by the game, unfortunately, and there was so much conversation he was rather distracted.

"I hope it does not annoy you?" I asked him.

"Oh, not at all, thank you very much. It is so democratic!"

At this point the umpire got off his perch, and came forward to entreat the fine ladies.

"I have asked you before to keep quiet," he wailed. "For G.o.d's sake, will you stop talking?"

"How very interesting," murmured Okura.

"Yes," I said, "the religious motif."

"Ah, yes!" he nodded, very gravely.

Later on his compatriot k.u.magae was to play, and we decided to return to the tournament; but first we took ourselves to Bailey's Beach.

Bailey's Beach is a small section of the Atlantic littoral famous for its seaweed. The seaweed is of a lovely dark red color. It is swept in in large quant.i.ties, together with stray pieces of melon-rind and other picnic remnants, and it forms a thick, juicy carpet through which one wades out to the more fluid sea. By this attractive marge sit the ladies in their wide hats and dresses of filmy lace, watching the more adventurous s.e.x pick his way out of the vegetable matter. In the pavilion of the bathhouses sit still less adventurous groups.

It took some time to explain to Okura why this beach, once devoted to the collection of seaweed for manure, should now be dedicated to bathing. But he grasped the main point, that it was a private beach.

"Forgive me," he said, "I see no Jews."

"That's all right," I answered. "You are studying democracy. There are no Jews here. None allowed."