Part 17

For, after all, humanity has an uncanny instinct to avoid truth as long as it can. As we read this book of Mr. Montague’s we had a sudden vision of it selling as well as H. G. Wells does--passing from hand to hand, quoted, sermonized, becoming the fashionable topic of the season. It even made our beloved Santayana seem dim and pale, in a way; for it is so close and actual to our present moods and troubles. But then, with a sigh, we abandoned that vision. Why, if this book were really seized upon, gloried in as it deserves to be, if its eloquent humour and generous brave spirit were really acclaimed.... No, we can’t quite see it! The book is too beautiful, too true.

II

(New York _Herald_, October, 1922)

They don’t come very often, the books that speak so generously and beautifully to the inner certainties of the mind. And when they do, it is desirable not to do them dishonour by words too clumsy or sweeping.

But that Mr. Montague’s _Disenchantment_ has come to us in just the way that it has is a curiously mixed satisfaction and disappointment to the present reviewer. Satisfaction, in that for the past several years I have been saying to every publisher who was going abroad: “Why the devil do you go only to London and nowhere else? Are you aware that there are very exciting centres of literary activity in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham--all sorts of places outside London. Some day” (I kept saying to publishers) “one of the great books will bob up a long way from London. You might remember, for instance, Stevenson and Barrie. Now when you are in England why don’t you go to call on Mr. Montague at the Manchester _Guardian_? He’d know what was going on. Very likely he could tell you of someone who was writing a fine book--someone London wouldn’t know about.”

I take no particular credit for saying this: it was obviousness itself to any one who had noticed Mr. Montague’s earlier books. But the publishers, with their stereotyped habit of calling on a few literary agents in London, and thinking they have then done their possible, paid no attention. One of the odd things about publishers is that they have so little adventurous spirit about spooring for the really fine stuff.

Well, the book, quietly written and published, turned out to be by Mr. Montague himself. Half a year went by, but we in America heard nothing about it. There are always wide and well-polished alleys for the transmission of information amusing or trivial. Comparatively unimportant news spins along the parquet floor, and a crash resounds like that of tenpins tumbling. But humanity, probably with a wise instinct, averts its ear from matters that require meditation. The American publishers, seriatim, had their look at the sheets of _Disenchantment_. All apparently agreed that it was magnificent, but with their cheery assumption of knowledge as to what we want to read opined that it was too British or too full of intricate allusion or too much about the war, of which we were asserted to be weary. Or that the British publisher was asking an unwarrantable price for it; that only a few readers here would appreciate it; that it would be impossible to come clear on the expense.

These are all sound, sagacious reasonings. The one thing our publisher friends did not realize was that it is by publishing, every now and then, a book of this sort that they save their souls. It is an honour to put such a book on one’s list, even if it should prove presently unprofitable.

_Disenchantment_ is an enchanting book. It is an _Anatomy of Melancholy_ in the exact sense. It is a spiritual history of the war: a penetrating, intellectual, richly allusive, wise, sober, and compassionate study of that slow process of disintegrating certainty that marked every mind capable of independent action. People who have never read it probably imagine that the _Anatomy of Melancholy_ is a dismal and grievous work. It is, however, one of the most richly amusing of all books; and it is only fair to say (accepting the danger of being misconceived) that Mr. Montague’s delicious humour makes _Disenchantment_ one of the most witty of contemporary writings. For war, after all, is a human institution and subject to the complexity of all planetary matters. It has, in Mr. Robert Nichols’s great phrase, its ardours and endurances; also its selfishnesses, stupidities, and laughters. It is not to be supposed that men who are pompous and silly and hilarious and craven in business, book reviewing, education and theology will be otherwise when they go to war.

So Mr. Montague, in anatomizing the melancholy that has fallen upon the world, employs, with perfect skill and perfect restraint, every shaft in the quiver of a literary artist. The old devil of herd-poison lingers among us yet: there will be some simple spirits who will think this book bitter, some who will think it blasphemous; some who will maintain that it plays into the hand of Apollyon (whose residence, they will probably insist, is somewhere along Unter den Linden). But there will also be some, and not few I think, who will see in this book the breadth and burning spirit of one who has long gone beyond the conception of war as a merely national matter; who looks upon it as a movement of tragedy among men where the innocent suffer no less outrage than the guilty. And yet even those who may find Mr. Montague’s disrobing of official frailty almost too disturbing will take pleasure in the beauty of his text. Let no one prate to you of the luxuriant splendour of some of our accredited stylists. The deity of prose moves in Mr. Montague’s pages. His savoury marrow of allusion--Shakespeare, for instance, has become part of his actual thinking tissue--will be undigested by some unpracticed readers. He will be, we might say, shrimp to the sundry; but no harm will ensue: the casual reader will merely pay Manchester compliment for what belongs first to Stratford. And Mr. Montague deserves all the compliment that is possible in an uncourtly world.

This book could only have been written by a man who has been through the scorching and weariness. Its simplicity, its calm, temperate understanding of human weakness, the optical vividness of its narrative passages, the generous sympathy that moulds even its ironies--these are the possession of experience. And it occurs to me to ponder the courage and fortitude of one who could sit down, in the sobriety of retrospect, to write a book recalling beauties and sufferings that most of us would have been glad to let slide into the discard of memory. There could have been only one motive, and only one sustaining power, potent enough to carry the hand through so bitter a task. A love of humanity and a generous hope of humanity’s increase of sanely innocent happiness could beget a book as noble as this; no other emotion could avail.

And still the troubled reviewer feels--this being three months after his reading of the book, and no mere snapped off opinion--that he has not done justice to the subject. For this book is not merely one of the noblest passages of political writing that he knows of, and not merely one of the most clearly and beautifully moving exhibitions of honest thinking. It is a book that is sanative and antitoxic for the present time. He is a shallow observer indeed who does not see, in the post-bellum world, muddy currents of cynicism and discontent; revulsive twitchings, literature no less jangled than politics. Mr. Montague does not disenchant us from any enchantments that were worth keeping. Except the politicians and the ultra-parsonical parsons, we had slipped their leash long ago. He offers a lucid enlarging mirror of truth and sense in which a thoughtful reader may see enlarged and brightly snuffed the small sooty flame of his own natural candle, as William Penn called the inward spirit. He magics us for the moment by his charm and the lovely humanity of his vision into thinking that we, too, can, if we will, be just, liberal, and humane.

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BUDDHA ON THE L

In Frank Shay’s bookshop we found _A Buddhist Catechism_, by Subhadra Bhikshu. We have never known much about the Buddha--so little, in fact, that we thought that was his name. (His name was Prince Siddhartha Gotama.) But we have always felt that he was a kinsprit.

We opened the book at random and the first thing we saw was:

95. _Did not the Buddha give us any information concerning the first beginning and ultimate destiny of the Universe?_

No;

96. _Did he know nothing about it?_

He knew, but he taught us nothing.

There was a subtlety about that that pleased us greatly. It reminded us of a Chinese mandarin of our acquaintance who says that the universe was Dictated but not Signed. Immediately we forked out $1.25 to Frank Shay and took the book. Frank was so pleased to sell a book (business is said to be at a very meagre pulse in Greenwich Village in midsummer) that he at once responded by buying our lunch. We retorted generously enough by buying a copy of Anatole France’s _L’Ile des Pingouins_, which we have been hearing about for ten years or so. We were interested to note that our copy is the “Cent Quatre-Vingt-Sixième Edition.” Considering the book was published only fourteen years ago, that seems good progress.

Coming back downtown on the L we went at Buddha hard and with great satisfaction. We learned that Buddha is not a name but means a state of mind, or Enlightenment. We learned the answers to the following questions:

129. _Why has the upright and just man often so much to suffer here on earth?_

130. _How is it that the wicked and unjust man often enjoys pleasures and honours?_

118. _What is a meritorious action?_

109. _Why is not a layman able to reach Nirvana?_

We can hear you clamouring to know the answers to these exciting questions; they are right here before us; but our duty is not to solve problems, only to propound them.

But you must get it clearly in your minds that the Buddha is not a God. The Buddhist Catechism expressly rejects “a personal God-Creator,” and “distinctly denies the doctrine of a creation out of nothing. Everything owes its origin and development to its own inherent vitalism, or, what comes to the same, its own will to live.” The Buddha was not a God, but “a man far superior to ordinary men, one of a series of self-enlightened sublime Buddhas, who appear at long intervals in the world, and are morally and spiritually so superior to erring, suffering mankind, that to the childlike conceptions of the multitude they appear as Gods or Messiahs.”

This is all tremendously exciting and leads to many pure and thrilling speculations that are much too honourable to pursue here. They would get us into horrible trouble, we feel sure. Indeed we are not at all certain whether both Frank Shay and ourself are not already subject to possible legal duress for vending and discussing so dangerous a book. But a noble analogy occurs to us which we venture with humility. Charley Chaplin is a great comedian. But the simple-minded drama critics are not content to leave it at that. They will have it (although it is now _vieux jeu_) that he is really a Great Tragic Artist. And so the tradition will go down to posterity that he was a Secret Hamlet, an Edgar Poe in clown’s trousers. Charley himself, finding that his intellectual disciples insist upon this, perhaps acquiesces in the idea. Only by doing so, he may feel, can he get his stuff across.

It is really very astonishing; at this moment our Employer brings in to us a letter he has had from a publisher, which begins:

_Do you agree with me that there is a need for a book on the fundamentals of public opinion, for a book that will endeavor to define the new profession of public relations counsel, its scope and its functions and its relations specifically to the press and to the public generally?_

A Public Relations Counsel, of course, is simply the post-war name for a Press Agent. But we mustn’t be ribald. The press agent, if conscientious, may contribute a valuable function. We ourself have worked as a free-lance Press Agent for George Fox, Sir Thomas Browne, Herman Melville, Thoreau, Lao-Tse, Pearsall Smith, and various other people who have seemed to us to have the Right Idea. But one of the troubles is that there have been (and always will be) a lot of unauthorized Public Relations Counsels who get the ear of the crowd and limn upon the great canvas of the public a portrait of the Prophet which is very different from what that poor dreamer himself may have wished. Even the humblest of authors has frequently cursed the publisher’s man who writes the copy for his book-jacket. If you want a really pregnant speculation, weigh in your mind how many Public Relations Counsels there have been in the world of religion, and how amazingly they have interpreted and toned down the simple dissolvents of the founders of their creeds.

C. E. Montague, in _Disenchantment_, puts it beautifully:

Ever since those disconcerting bombs [i. e., _the words of Christ_] were originally thrown courageous divines and laymen have been rushing in to pick them up and throw them away, combining as well as they could an air of respect for the thrower with tender care for the mental ease of congregations occupied generally in making money and occasionally in making war. Yet there they lie, miraculously permanent and disturbing, as if just thrown. Now and then one will go off, with seismic results, in the mind of some St. Francis or Tolstoy.

The Buddha, sitting under his Bo Tree (_ficus religiosa_--and it is fairly obvious why so many philosophers have chosen fig trees to sit under; a really lusty fig will bear, according to the New International Encyclopædia, three crops of fruit in a season, thus keeping the eremite well fed; and a fig, L. E. W. says, is what he doesn’t give for the ideas of rival magi) is to us an enviable vision. We wonder how his meditations would have fared if there had been a telephone at the foot of the tree.

The only drawback, as far as we are concerned, to becoming a Buddhist is the vow to abstain from intoxicating liquors. In this respect the Western religions seem to us more liberal. We have meditated long and earnestly on the subject and still have never been able to understand why an occasional exhilarating drink should be contrary to any wise man’s ethic. Indeed, if Nirvana (or Perfect Release from Struggle) is the object of life, we have seen it well attained by three or four juleps or Tom-and-Jerries. The lay Buddhist has to take five vows; the Bhikshus (or Brotherhood of the Elect) take ten. Some of these additional vows required of the Bhikshu are:

_I vow and promise not to eat food at unseasonable times--that is, after the midday meal._

_I vow and promise not to dance, sing light songs, frequent public amusements, and, in short, to avoid worldly dissipation of every kind._

_I vow and promise not to wear any kind of ornament, nor to use any scents or perfumes, and, in short, to avoid whatever tends to vanity._

_I promise and vow to give up the use of soft bedding and to sleep on a hard, low couch._

These, we admit, present some difficulties. Frequenting “public amusements” offers too many opportunities for quibble. In one sense every possible mingling with the world is a public amusement. If there is anything more amusing than a smoking car full of men or a Broadway pavement at lunch time we don’t know what it could be. Sleeping on a hard, low couch is easy enough--we can sleep anywhere with equal satisfaction, even on the floor. The queer thing that we always notice about every kind of moral code is that, sooner or later, it begins to lose sight of the distinction between essentials and non-essentials. Such matters as intoxicating drink and public amusements should not be (for the Western philosopher) subject to prescriptive legislation. The individual may very rightly impose restraints upon himself in non-essential matters; but to lay them upon him from above is to stultify the whole purport of ethics--which, if we understand it, is to encourage and develop a worthy personal will. And the Buddhist Catechism recognizes this in a very potent phrase--“Every one of us must become his own redeemer.”

But Buddhism seems to have a firm grasp on one very essential and valuable idea, which is comparatively rare among religions. Thus the Catechism:

43. _Does Buddhism teach its followers to hate, despise, or persecute non-believers?_

Quite the reverse. It teaches us to love all men as brethren, without distinction of race, nationality, or creed; to respect the convictions of men of other beliefs, and to be careful to avoid all religious controversy. The Buddhist religion is imbued with the purest spirit of perfect toleration. Even where dominant, it has never oppressed or persecuted non-believers, and its success has never been attended with bloodshed. The true Buddhist does not feel hatred, but only pity and compassion for him who will not acknowledge or listen to the truth, to his own loss and injury only.

Of course, all forms of human attempt to unscrew the inscrutable are fascinating and full of interest. The Westerner, however, is a bit troubled when he finds “Love of life on earth” listed among the “ten fetters” which, according to the Buddha, prevent the soul from receiving full freedom and enlightenment. That seems, to our earth-bound and muddied conceptions, a shabby doctrine. Even the most timid tincture of good manners suggests that a life so exciting, so amusing, so painful, so perplexing, and so variously endowed with unearned beauty and amazement deserves at least a courteous gratefulness on our part. Mr. C. E. Montague (if you will allow us to quote him once more), explains what we mean:

Among the mind’s powers is one that comes of itself to many children and artists. It need not be lost, to the end of his days, by any one who has ever had it. This is the power of taking delight in a thing, or rather in anything, everything, not as a means to some other end, but just because it is what it is.... A child in the full health of his mind will put his hand flat on the summer turf, feel it, and give a little shiver of private glee at the elastic firmness of the globe. He is not thinking how well it will do for some game or to feed sheep upon.... No matter what the things may be, no matter what they are good or no good for, there they are, each with a thrilling unique look and feel of its own, like a face; the iron astringently cool under its paint, the painted wood familiarly warmer, the clod crumbling enchantingly down in the hands, with its little dry smell of the sun and of hot nettles; each common thing a personality marked by delicious differences.

It is this sensuous cheerfulness in mere living, apparently, that the Buddhist would have us cast away. You remember Rupert Brooke’s fine poem _The Great Lover_. Western students may be pardoned for wondering whether “Love of life on earth,” whatever that life’s miseries, ills, and absurdities, is not too precious to be tossed lightly aside.

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INTELLECTUALS AND ROUGHNECKS

I

We look forward with keen interest to reading _Civilization in the United States_, the work of thirty-three independent observers commenting upon various phases of the American scene. So far we have only glanced into it, and have already found much that looks as though it needed contradiction. It is obviously going to be a gloomy book, rather strongly flavoured with intellectual ammonia. Of course, it is a healthy thing that some of our Intellectuals are so depressed about America. It is a good thing for a nation, as it is for an individual, occasionally to go home at night cursing itself for being a boob, a numbskull, and a mental flounder. But we feel about some of our Extreme Intellectuals as we do about the Physical Culture restaurants. The people in these restaurants eat nothing but vitamines and plasms and protose; they live in an atmosphere of carefully planned Scandinavian hygiene; yet most of them look mysteriously pallid. And some of our most Conscientious Brows, in spite of leading lives of carefully regulated meditation, don’t seem any too robust in the region of the wits.

However, we shall study this book with care. It contains articles by a number of people whom we admire specially. What we have been wondering is whether among its rather acid comments it gives any panoramic picture of the America we see daily and admire--an America which, in spite of comical simplicities and tragic misdirections of energy, seems to us, in vitality, curiosity, and surprising beauty, the most thrilling experiment of the human race.

In one article in this book we find the following:

Everything in our society tends to check the growth of the spirit and to shatter the confidence of the individual in himself. Considered with reference to its higher manifestations, life itself has been thus far, in modern America, a failure. Of this the failure of our literature is merely emblematic. Mr. Mencken, who shares this belief, urges that the only hope of a change for the better lies in the development of a native aristocracy that will stand between the writer and the public, supporting him, appreciating him, forming as it were a _cordon sanitaire_ between the individual and the mob.

Well, our confidence in ourself is not yet wholly shattered, in spite of the grinding horror of American life. We feel confident enough to venture that this theory is dubious. Greatness in literature does not need to be protected from the insanitary infection of the mob. How Charles Dickens would have roared at such a timid little bluesock doctrine! Great writers do not need any clique of private appreciators or supporters. They are not produced by plaintive patter about ideals and the pride of the “artist.” They arise haphazard, and they carry in them an anger, an energy, and a fecundity that deny all classroom rules. And the mob, heaven help us! is the ground and source of their strength and their happiness. Nothing can “check the growth of their spirit,” because the spirit is big enough to turn everything to its own inscrutable account. You might as well say that Shakespeare couldn’t write great plays because the typewriter hadn’t been invented.

Of course, if by “a native aristocracy that will stand between the writer and the public,” we are to understand an efficient service of tactful office boys and mendacious telephone girls to keep the chance caller from cutting the mortal artery of Time, we applaud. But we fear that is not meant.

When we get weary of upstage comments about literature we go aloft and have a talk to the fellows in the composing room (who, by the way, are all reading _Moby Dick_ nowadays). There is no priggishness in their criticism. They have the sound, sober, sincere instinct--as when one of them tells us, with magnificent insight, that _Moby Dick_ is “Hamlet stuff.” When professional connoisseurs can teach us as much as the composing room can about the human values that lie behind literature, then we will mend our manners.