CHAPTER X

MAY I ASK?

MAY I ASK?

Our critics have often assured us that the dollar sign is the symbol of America. I am coming to the conclusion that our more characteristic one is the question mark. I have just typed them side by side on my Corona and have been looking at them. $ and ?. We may read the dollar sign as two parallel lines with a swirl trying to bring them together. One of these lines, as I see it, is expense and the other income. Parallel lines never meet in a Euclidean world. The S imposed on them represents the frantic effort of the individual to refute this geometrical finance. In this respect my present wanderings over a post-war world show me that there is nothing typically American about this symbol. The striving, the manifold tragedy, the wrung soul of an era concealed in this new swastika is universal. In England, France, Italy, Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, Holland, Belgium,—I find it wherever I have lately been, even when the expense line does not, as at home, insist upon describing a hopeless tangential curve away from its parallel. Once, however, one has finally escaped from the smoking room of the liner, landed at Southampton or Havre, Hamburg or Genoa and lost one’s self among the “foreigners,” one does escape from the question mark in its typical American repetitive usage.

One does not, it is true, escape entirely. The mails still function, and a good part of this long sunny afternoon which should have been devoted to work on my book, a stroll in the sunshine, or letters to old friends has been spent in my study typing answers to letters from strangers asking questions which any local librarian or even a little intelligent thought and work on the part of the questioners should have been able to answer for them. “Where can I find such-and-such a quotation?” “Ought I to encourage my son to become a teacher?” “What would be a good list of books to read?” “How can I make my boy take an interest in history?” As I respond as courteously as I can to this constant questioning from my native land, a usual part of my week’s chores, I wonder what sort of minds ask all these and innumerable other questions. (One thing I know, and that is, I shall never be thanked, for it is a sad statistical fact that in ten years of answering questions from American strangers I have never but twice had even the courtesy of an acknowledgement of my reply. But that is beside the present point.)

That I am not alone in my pondering over this American question mark is indicated by another letter, lately received, from a man with a very different type of mind from the correspondents just noted. “A six weeks’ lecture tour,” he writes, “including Texas, California, and Colorado, brings me back to New York with the major impression that all America is asking questions. Healthy mental curiosity is not a thing to be condemned in children, but it is a healthier sign in adults when they occasionally take the trouble to think out the answers for themselves. My limited experience in France has convinced me that the average Frenchman is ashamed to ask a question without volunteering at least part of the answer. In England questions are apt to be either rhetorical or veiled in the form of statements open to correction. I am told the problem is the decay of conversation in America but I doubt whether we ever had any conversations to decay. Sophisticated New York is no exception.”

Questions and converse are closely linked but it is easier in our social history to trace the continuance of the former than of the latter. We have, indeed, an occasional comment, such as that of John Adams who noted in his Diary when passing through New York in 1774 on his way to the Continental Congress that in spite “of all the opulence and splendor of this city, there is very little good breeding to be found” and “no conversation that is agreeable; there is no modesty, no attention to one another. They talk very loud, very fast, and all together.” Alexander Hamilton, not the celebrated statesman but a Baltimore doctor, is the only man I know who tried to report colonial conversations verbatim, as may be found in his little-known but immensely entertaining _Itinerarium_. With almost complete unanimity, however, all travelers for a couple of centuries comment on the, to them, curious American habit of asking questions in every part of the country. It begins as early as 1710, perhaps earlier, and becomes marked as the travel literature rapidly increases after the French and Indian War. It is a habit, therefore, which obviously has a long history behind it and for which the first explanation sought must be an historical one.

The frontier, that omnipresent though often unrecognized influence in so many departments of American life, is probably at the bottom of it. In a sparsely settled section there are two good reasons for putting a stranger through his catechism,—danger and paucity of intellectual interest. Even today, in the remoter parts of the Carolina mountains, to quote a bit of personal experience, the opening of conversation is still stereotyped when a mountaineer meets a stranger on the road. “Howdy.” Then, with no show of diffidence, “what mought your name be?”, and when this has been satisfactorily answered, comes inevitably next, “whar mought you be goin’?”.

Thus far the opening of the conversational game is evidently a cautious play for safety, so well understood that it is assumed no offence could possibly be taken. What, however, so many of the early American tourists complained of in New England and elsewhere, was the merciless catechising that followed,—questions as to one’s age, married state, one’s relatives, every imaginable detail of a personal sort by which the stranger’s mind, history, circumstances and opinions were ruthlessly explored so long as he continued to submit. The American jaw possesses an idiosyncratic restlessness, which has been the foundation and prime cause of the rise of the Beeman, Adams, Wrigley and other gum fortunes, but I am inclined to trace the source of the second type of American questioning less to the extreme irritability of the maxillary muscles than to a psychological vacuity. The trick of questioning, instead of conversing, which developed among the dwellers in the towns, villages and frontier fringes of colonial America and which so disturbed the horde of French tourists who came to look us over following the Seven Years’ and Revolutionary Wars, and the English who came from 1820 to 1850, was merely the rude effort of a primitive, predatory and half-starved brain to grab at food. The spider simply sucked the blood out of any insect that got caught in his web.

The community mental life of any village or provincial town for most folk in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was hardly stimulating but, as compared with those in Europe, that of the American towns, villages and lonely clearings became a good deal like what the landscape must have looked like after the last great thaw of the Ice Age revealed it under the melted glacier. As I have pointed out elsewhere, a struggle for life under primitive, even savage conditions does not preclude the growth of an artistic and intellectual life, as the arts and mythologies of any primitive people from the African negroes to the Pacific Islanders testify. What saps the white man and empties his mind of all cultural elements when he struggles to subdue a wilderness is the effort to maintain a civilized standard, as far as possible, of material comfort under wilderness opposition. Something has to be jettisoned from his cargo or he sinks. He always naturally elects to throw culture overboard until such time as, the storm weathered, he thinks he may salvage it again. Hard as the life has been in the old lands from which our first immigrants came, English in New England, German in Pennsylvania, there had been many means of self-expression and leisure, and a social consciousness that made such self-expression natural. For example, among other things they brought with them their arts and crafts. They carved the end beams of their houses, painted designs on the overhang, designed, carved and painted their furniture. Little by little all this was dropped. The struggle proved too hard. A negro who lived in a grass hut in the jungle had time to carve wooden sculpture, play music, weave legends, but the white man who wanted in a few years to make a European homestead out of a patch of the American primeval forest had no leisure or surplus energy for anything else. On the other hand, the struggle against new conditions sharpened his wits just at the time that he was throwing overboard everything that they could work on. They began to be ingrowing. In these new communities there was practically no diversification of labor or interest. Everyone was doing everything for himself, and almost all were doing just the same thing. On the voyages across from the old countries in the eighteenth century, the food supply frequently ran out and in some cases the immigrants actually ate each other. In the new communities to which they came, the mental food supply also ran out. There was often no food for conversation. It is not strange that they ate the strangers, mentally.

We thus have developed a working hypothesis as to where the question mark originated in American life. We will now consider its persistence. Why _does_ it persist, and why, in the rich and diversified America of today, does not conversation takes its place?

For one thing, there is the inheritance from the past. The man who lived in a clearing or even a small village with no public library, newspapers, magazines or scarcely neighbors in the eighteenth century had some excuse for not giving his mind good food, and letting it get so starved that it would chew on anything that came its way. There can be literally scarcely an American today who has any such excuse for mental under-nourishment; but habits were formed. The American mind is full of the quaintest and most curious anomalies. In business, for example, it is the most radical and innovating mind (within the limits of the capitalistic system) in existence. Politically it is eighteenth century if not earlier. In the same way, the average American youth of either sex, though self-reliant socially to a marked and even startling degree, intellectually lacks, almost as markedly, all initiative. He, or she, studies his lessons and recites them, even in college, like good little grade boys and girls. The habit of wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and of self-reliance in satisfying it has been lost. The habit of asking questions has persisted. Everyone wants to be told what to read (mark the success of the book-clubs), what he should think, what is good and what is bad. Perhaps the most encouraging part of the Prohibition muddle is that it shows that at least he will kick and balk when told what he must drink. The first factor, then, is that the American mind has behind it no long habit of indulgence in intellectual curiosity, understood in the best sense. Through a long period it got out of the way of being interested in things other than those of the daily environment of work and play, or of the rag-tag and bob-tail of disconnected facts that might turn up with any stranger. There could be no more coherency among these than among the stray items one picks up by glancing through a popular magazine and a village newspaper. They kept the mind from eating into its own fibres, perhaps, but did nothing to train it as an instrument of thought.

Moreover, to a great extent, America is still provincial and frontier. I am not speaking solely of the international aspect of this. For the most part, it is, of course, utterly ignorant of the rest of the world. I am speaking generally and not of select groups. It is one of the quaint anomalies of which I spoke above, that the nation whose public mind is the least international of any of the great nations, should publish the best journal dealing solely with international affairs. That, however, has nothing to do with the case. The magazine is not self-supporting and has a limited circulation. The editor of several magazines of extremely wide circulation told me that they could publish nothing that did not directly deal with America, that their readers were interested in nothing else. The editor of another magazine, one of the best in the country, told me that, although for his own intellectual satisfaction he did occasionally publish an article on a foreign country, there was no reaction to it among his readers and as far as circulation went the pages might as well have been left blank.

It is not, however, in this sense only that I mean we are still provincial and frontier. In this sense, America is still in the frontier stage and it is becoming questionable if it will ever be anything else. The difference between the Indian and the Englishman was that the Englishman wanted all the physical comforts of old England set up in the wilderness in his own generation as fast as they could be. He measured his own minimum standard of living by that to which he had been accustomed or which he had seen. The attainment of this absorbing all his energy, he let the rest go. Could the first settlers of Boston in 1630 have seen the comfortable town of 1800, they would have believed that a settled, orderly and comely cultural life must surely by then have been attained. The trouble is that America never has attained. This, I well know, is by many considered as a virtue and I am discussing it here only from the standpoint of the main topic of this chapter.

The seaboard was soon comfortably settled, but the frontier kept extending and extending and absorbing the interest and energies of the people. In 1890 even the physical frontier was officially declared closed and ended by the government, but it made no difference, for the people were as busy and worn out as ever settling themselves in a wholly new country, the country of “the high standard of living.” The settlers who two centuries ago had to jettison their cultural heritage and interests in order to cut down trees and snipe at Indians skulking behind those that had not yet been cut, have been replaced by the settlers in the Country of the High Standard who have to jettison their cultural tastes (the heritage has gone) in order to pay rent, get a cook, have two or three bathrooms and a motor car or two in this new frontier country of the Standard. They are just as pressed, hard-working and weary as their forefathers, and from the same reason,—trying to attain a standard of physical well-being to which they think they ought to attain in their own generation in an environment in which the old physical difficulties have merely been replaced by economic ones.

I have not, as yet, had a chance to read Mr. and Mrs. Lynd’s _Middletown_, but it is, I understand, a very careful and not exaggerated study of a town of forty thousand people in the Middle West, yet a review says that it shows that “literature and art have virtually disappeared as male interests.” It is what always happens in any frontier life, and America has replaced the old geographical frontier by the Living-standard one. In the old days, we used to tell critical foreigners that we had been so busy settling and subduing a continent that we had had no time for culture. Well, we have jolly well settled and subdued it. We have roped it, and thrown it, and eaten a good part of it up. But before we had time to get our breath we have gone off on a gold rush to this new land of the High Standard. Because it is on no map, there is no telling how big it is or how long it will take to settle and subdue it. Meanwhile the total energies of a good many of us are absorbed in “sawing wood” like our ancestors and protecting ourselves from the savages under the changed conditions imposed by settling this new country that can be found in no atlas. When the old frontier ended at the Pacific Ocean we had at least some limit set to the physical and mental energy necessary to make it habitable for civilized men, but one wonders to-day, as one swings one’s economic axe and turns one’s back on the shelf of books one would like to have time to read, where in heck is the Pacific Coast of this new country we have started to subdue.

This new country is a rushing, busy, hustling restless one. Not long ago I dined in America with an old friend I had not seen in some years. After dinner we walked into the library to have our coffee before the open fire. After we had sipped it and had a puff or two of our cigars, my host said, with the inevitability of after dinner New Yorkers, “Where do you want to go now?” I suggested that as I had not seen him for a long time I would much prefer to sit just where I was before the fire and talk to him. His reply was, “Thank Heaven. I haven’t had a good talk with anybody in ages.” Last year when home, a New York boy of about seventeen, a thoughtful lad, complained of his inability to find any men to talk with. “They always want to go somewhere or turn on the radio,” he commented. “How is a boy to learn if he can never talk to a man?” At least for ordinary conversation, there used to be the home, the piazza in the evenings or the tramp through the country. The motor car, the small apartment and the rest of the factors in the new high standard have largely done away with such opportunities. But I think that, as far as good conversation, and not mere talk, is concerned, these are surface symptoms, secondary influences.

Many elements are necessary for good conversation. For one thing there must be a sense of leisure. The talk may last only an hour, but an absence of any sense of hurry is essential. We may get through a business interview in five minutes, like rushing a bucket to a fire, but good talk should be like a stream on which we can float leisurely without knowing what may appear beyond the next bend. In order that there should be bends, however, each mind must have many interests. It is by no means necessary that the major interest of each of the talkers should be the same or even similar. As a rule, indeed, for the best of talk, it is just as well that they should not be. If they are, the talk is too apt to become and stay mere “shop.” The talkers, however, must have backgrounds that afford ample points of contact. One must be able to range over fields of fact and thought without having forever to be adding interpretative footnotes.

It is the lack of this background that accounts in good part for the lack of conversation in America in the European sense, even among the professional and university classes. Too often in America as long as one keeps to a man’s “subject” one may get a good deal that is interesting, even if it is imparted too much like a lecture, but once get off that and one is lost. It is like getting off a road in the dark. In contrast, I well recall an evening spent with a Frenchman, whose “subject” happens to be American history. As we had both written books known to the other on the topic, we started on that, and I very soon found that he was better founded in it than many American professors. There was not a source to which I referred with which he was not well acquainted and which he did not quickly and accurately appraise. Soon the talk wandered to other matters. In a very amateurish way I had been interested in the Minoan civilization of Crete and had been to the Ashmolean Museum to hunt up some pottery. In a casual way he took up the question and discussed the various stages of the civilization and the changes in pottery design; and as we drifted from that to Greece and philosophy and literature, the talk flowed on and on, without effort or pedantry until we found it was one in the morning. He was, of course, a far abler and better educated man than myself, but outside of American history, perhaps, we were both amateurs in all we discussed. What I enjoyed was the breadth of the discussion, the wealth of background he had, the ability to illustrate some point by another in a wholly different field. It is just this that is lacking for the most part in American talk, which is apt to be narrow, professional, and all too often pedantic.

The European mind at its best is both fuller and more flexible than ours, though in many practical ways the American is perhaps the more flexible. It is not simply the number of facts absorbed but the play of mind and the fields covered. We have had our own examples of the scholar in politics, for example—the man of fairly wide interests, such as Wilson, Lodge, Roosevelt, to name three very different types; but they have been, so to speak, practical minds, working in history, law or natural science. We note the intrinsic difference when we run over the English list, Morley, Balfour, Haldane, Smuts and others. In all of them, Morley least, philosophy has been a major interest, and it is in the philosophical outlook that we find another essential factor in good conversation. It cannot be sustained long on mere facts. The philosophy need not—indeed, should not—be technical, but there must be a philosophical attitude, an ability and willingness to see all round a subject and to trace its implications.

Talk, in fact, should never be exclusively technical, any more than it should deal solely in facts. Talk is to facts much like wine to grapes. They should be there as a foundation, but the aroma and full flavor of a rich Burgundy are far from the individual grapes that were crushed in order that the wine might flow and slowly mature. There is one factor that has played a large part in the de-specializing of talk in Europe, and that is responsible for good talk everywhere, which has been curiously lacking in America—woman. Talk is possibly best between socialized, civilized men, but the process of socializing, civilizing and de-specializing them has been largely the task of woman, a task in which she has signally failed in America.

This topic is complex enough to call for a paper wholly devoted to it, but I think it cannot be denied that woman in America has failed in her age-long duty of civilizing her man. She has merely appropriated leisure and culture to herself. Woman has never made anything of culture without man. As a result of the complete social dichotomy in America, the women have developed an anæmic, uncreative cultural atmosphere, and the social life of both sexes has become uncivilized in a very real sense. A broadly humane culture has suffered in the hands of the women until it has come to be regarded as effeminate dilettantism, and the man, engrossed in his office, shop, study or laboratory, leading his social life by talking shop, whether business, art or profession, to his fellow male workers, has narrowed also into specialism and one-track interests. Yet, on the whole, I think today, in spite of all the Women’s Clubs with their papers, the Browning Societies and the rest of the feminine cultural flub-dub, there is more chance for the growth of a genuine cultivated life among the men than among the women of America. Woman having failed to socialize and humanize her man, it may yet be his job to civilize _her_.

I am very far from meaning that good talk must deal with Shakespeare and the musical glasses. What I mean is that good conversation is something quite different from obtaining verbal instruction. We may get an amazing amount of interesting information from a specialist discoursing on his subject, but so can we from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Good talk affords, perhaps, the best instruction in the world, but it is not the instruction of a text book. A scientist who knew all there was to know about the common house-fly might give us an extremely interesting evening, but if it were solely limited to the objective aspects of this one subject it obviously would not be good conversation in any civilized sense. For that, as we have said, a wide background of knowledge and experience, and a completely de-specialized attitude of mind are required.

There is, perhaps, one other point about American talk that may be noted. There seems to be rather a widespread fear that to indulge in intelligent conversation is to make one’s self suspect in a nation of go-getters and he-men. The dominance of business interests and the business type undoubtedly has much to do with this; but tracing it back, I think we meet the influences of both the frontier and of the American woman again. He-men, of course, are at a premium on the frontier. Moreover, the experience to be derived in a frontier life, if intensive, is extremely narrow. Like a small farm, it may be a good place to start from but it is intellectually killing to remain on it. Not only does the frontier stunt the intellectual life but it makes it suspect. A frontier is essentially democratic, and in all democracies, it is damning to be highbrow. In this respect the influence of the frontier has been deeply felt in American life since the days of Andrew Jackson. But if for this reason good conversation is more or less taboo, so it is for another. By failing to civilize her man and make him a part of any real social life, woman has, as we have said, feminized American culture and conversation to such an extent as to make anything beyond shop-talk appear as effeminate. For this double reason a certain atmosphere has been created in America that is inimical to good talk. There are, of course, many men who can talk well under the right conditions, but the social atmosphere in America all too often does not provide them. Thus Henry Adams, when teaching at Harvard, in spite, as he said, of the “presence of some of the liveliest and most agreeable of men who would have made the joy of London or Paris,” found that Cambridge offered only “a social desert that would have starved a polar bear.” Even Russell Lowell, William James, the Agassiz’s, John Fiske and Francis Child could not make it blossom.

Conversation is distinctly a social art, and it can flourish only where society itself has come to be something of a practised art. It cannot succeed, any more than an orchestra can, with one or two competent players amid a lot of others with no ear for music. One has got to be able to count upon all the members of the group having a certain background and attitude, even when the major interests and occupations of every member of the group are different. For various reasons, the old type of society, in which, from a social point of view, such counting upon could be made with certainty, is breaking down everywhere, but in America the social mixture has always been more heterogeneous than in Europe. I am not speaking in a snobbish sense, any more than it would be snobbish to object to a saxophone and a bass drum taking part in a piece prepared solely for strings. The mental backgrounds, even when there are any that deserve the name, of any ordinarily gathered group of men in America are so different that within their circumscribed spheres they offer but narrow range for talk to wander in. It is continually being brought up against this wall and that. When the right group gets together in America there can be as good talk as anywhere; but it rarely happens, and for the most part even those capable of it have learned to hold their tongues and play safe.

Coming back to what seems to me to be the main point the question mark is likely to continue to be the symbol of the United States so long as its men remain frontiersmen, so long as they continue to devote all their time and strength to subduing a wilderness instead of living in it, whether the wilderness is one of woods and Red Indians or of the stony fields of ever increasing economic wants. If the new land of the High Standard proves to be illimitable, with a frontier retreating further and further ahead of each succeeding generation, the question mark, sign of hungry and empty frontier minds, is not soon to be replaced by civilized conversation. The discussion of an endless succession of things, motors, radios, aeroplanes, or of facts, is not conversation. A full mind, a philosophic outlook, a disinterested interest so to speak, a broad and varied background, are not frontier products. Here and there in America a settler has decided that he will move no further, that he will content himself with the patch he has already cleared, and begin really to live instead of always getting ready to. He has ceased to be a frontiersman and begun to build the next stage of civilization. His talk is apt to be good. Conversation will begin when we cease to expand and begin to concentrate. I read today in a European newspaper that “what Denmark thinks today, Europe thinks tomorrow.” Look for little Denmark on the map, and think that over. But, you say, “May I ask...?” Go to!