VOL. LXXXII

HERE are certain fundamental events, spiritual and physiological processes, that happen to every one, and these happen even to Broadway producers, motionpicture stars, gold-digging chorus girls, columnists, flappers, college seniors, recent millionaires, and the youthful sardonicists of the critical world of New York or the world of the immature university. Among these events are being born, dying, and (to every one who survives to fifteen, or, as the psycho-analysists now tell us, who survives beyond a few months), the being attracted by a member of the opposite sex, whether the last take shape merely as the cacodemon of lust or the half angel, half bird we hear about but seldom see. These things happen and there is no avoiding them. In fact, life stripped of its ormolu is so exeeedingly stark that fiction has only nine, or eleven, basic plots-the exact number has never been determined.

But humanity does not like starkness, it is the one thing humanity cannot abide, so artistically and socially, and in all other ways of course, save for narrow interregnums of actual revolution, the history of the human race has been a history of concerted attempts to cover up or deny, by this fashion or that, the common fate. Cromwell tried to do this by prayer and persecution, the playwrights of the Restoration by laughter. The pendulum swings backward and forward and only for the second when it is in the Copyrighted in 1927 in United States, Canada, Printed in New York.

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exact axial position between the two. extremes do we even begin to approach the truth. In other words, the philosophy of the more egregious modern maidens and of Oxford bags is as far removed from reality as the philosophy of vapors and smelling-salts. The atheist is quite as mad as the fundamentalist, and hardboiled youth is only the reverse of softboiled senility.

The examples of these phenomena do not like each other and do not understand each other when they meet, but both have, if they but knew it, an underlying bond of excessive sentimentality. Both are attempting to disclaim life.

Several gentle old ladies of my acquaintance will not mention the word cancer; any number of young, or youngish, people of my acquaintance will not mention the word beauty. The little boys and girls, too frank and modern to be polite, are merely expressing in current terms the bland egotism expressed by their grandmothers and grandfathers through an elaborate subterfuge of courtesy. The Victorians took more trouble over their selfishness, that is all. The exact truth, in this particular instance, would be, of course, simple good manners. Between denying or embellishing a fact because it is supposed to be too ugly, as the Victorians did, and denying a fact because it is supposed to be too pretty, or too banal, as many moderns do, there is intrinsically not the slightest difference. As if facts were ever anything but banal!

Now it happens that just at present we are in an excellent position to study this circular and somewhat wasteful, although and Great Britain by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved.

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inevitable, process, for we are emerging from one well-defined period and, after a few years of actual but, as always, confused and fairly grotesque rebellion, are on the point of entering another period that shows signs of being equally well defined. Having destroyed the lollipops of the Victorians-by no means all of them as yet, but many of them-we have our mouths greedily set for lollipops of our own. Suddenly we have come to the conclusion that we are sophisticated and that, of course, is the exact moment when gold-bricks are likely to be sold to us. The suspicious rustic is seldom in danger.

Hokum and buncombe, the latter distorted into the hideous phrase, "that is the bunk," have been the rallying-cries of the released, those together with "apple sauce," but from the present on we have need to be careful lest these slogans of liberation become the prisoners' songs of our own and the rising generation. Shibboleths are dangerous the moment they lose their original careful interpretation. Freedom, once codified, is tyranny. The Black Mass is just as elaborate, as timetaking, as demanding as the mass it seeks to supplant. It is possible to imagine a future in which embattled monogamists will furnish auto-da-fés for serious and convinced polygamists who will weep and pray over them as Philip of Spain did over his heretics.

Let us see what has happened to us in the last twenty years.

According to our notions the Victorians, and this means in most cases our grandparents, and in many cases our parents, despite their powerful impulses and accomplishments, lived in a world of illusion which it has been our duty-and pleasure to destroy. This fairly well accomplished, we have emerged into the clearer atmosphere of to-day. Possibly. One does not deny the illusions of the Victorians, one merely questions the clearer atmosphere of to-day. Or rather, not of to-day, for the atmosphere actually does seem clearer, but of tomorrow. We have not as yet left altogether the interregnum of revolution, so some of our revolution is still valid, but we are beginning to bow and scrape before the royal feet of new chimeras.

The essential error of the Victorians lay not so much in a denial of fact, for that was resorted to only when there was nothing else to be done, as in the assumption that most facts were ugly and therefore needed decoration. Our essential error is likely to lie in a belief that a fact is not a fact unless it is unpleasant and that most facts aren't worth bothering about anyway. With the Victorians facts were corsetted, bejewelled, tightbooted, and long-skirted. In verse they were put into the sonorous rhythms of the iambic pentameter and in prose there was a collusion of delicate evasion. There was even a period when one addressed one's wife as "Mrs." and when the human body was never seen in its entirety, not even by its owner, save by the doctor at birth and the undertaker at death. This, naturally, was unbearable and the forthright and courageous began to attack such a point of view even before it became duly accredited.

Where suppression is the protagonist on the one hand and liberty of thought the protagonist on the other, the primary object of the early revolutionist is to get things said; to use exact words and to state positively and clearly that such and such things exist and such and such things do not. The principal crippling of the Victorian mind lay in the fact that a quarter of the magnificent vocabulary of the English language was not admitted to polite usage. And if you deny words you deny facts, for words follow upon facts and each word expresses a fact. Nowadays, thanks to these early revolutionists, all words, save a very few, are permissible both in print and speech, and that is as it should be, but, having achieved our point, we are on the way to forget once again that nothing-not even words or facts-is in this world removed from the qualifying factors of circumstances and intention, that there is nothing, in short, isolated from its immediate environment.

There is practically nothing that cannot be said if the circumstances and the intention are correct, there is practically nothing that should be said if the cir cumstances and the intention are wrong. The mere desire to shock is as sentimental as the mere desire to suppress. We have

all heard people say God in a way that made our hair creep and we have all heard people use indecency in a way that warmed our hearts. There is not much sense in destroying a fiction if we erect another in its place. To be educated out of reading True Tales into reading, let us say, College Wit, is to be educated out of the kitchen by a circuitous route back to the butler's pantry.

The Victorians did not like to speak of death because they thought death ugly and it affronted their pompous dignity, therefore they called it "passing on," or "facing one's Maker," or "the final moment"-circumlocutions which meant nothing. We do not like to speak of death because it is interrupting and affronts our restless exhibitionism, therefore we say "getting his," or "passing out" or, if we belong to a lower social order, being "bumped off"-circumlocutions which also mean nothing. The fierce intention of the early revolutionists was to get the word death back into the language, that and nothing else, in the same way that their fierce intention was to restore the human body to its frank and commendable reality. But mankind is not content with equilibrium, or even a vague approach to it-for the human body is not yet, of course, restored to its frank and commendable reality-so it leaps numerous unbridged chasms from one pinnacle of nonsense to another. To the Victorian mind the legs of all women were indecent and ugly, to the modern mind the legs of all women are supposed to be decent and comely. In either case the sensitiveminded suffer.

The fact that marriage is not the romantic hypocrisy of the Victorians, with its outer soft syllables and its inner harsh words, its perversions and inversions, its lunatic asylum as the one recourse of the unhappy, does not mean that it is the temporary affair it so often is to-day. The Victorian who lied about marriage and said it was made in heaven was no more soft-headed or sentimental, no farther from the starkness of truth, than the uneasy rebel, the rich idler, or the motionpicture star who lies about marriage and says it is made in Reno. And the essential similarity is proven by the truth that the insane asylum is frequently still the only

refuge. When you mix your categories you end in confusion, just as the artist ends in confusion when he essays to mix his mediums. Marriage is one thing, free love is another, divorce is a third. There is much to be said for and against each one, but when you attempt to achieve free love by means of marriage plus divorce you achieve nothing. You achieve neither the advantages of a wife nor a mistress. Instead, you merely achieve a succession of mistresses with the exigeant rights of a succession of wives. The truth is not even approached. A lady who breaks up a household evades the issue when the breaking ends in another marriage and need not comfort herself with the thought of morality.

But hokum is a much more subtle and permeating essence than is visible in these already well-worn instances. Like the first gas attack during the war it looks at first to the unwarned no more than a creeping yellow mist on the horizon, until, pretty soon, they are strangling to death in its midst. If you fall into the habit of denying all specifications of a certain kind you are all too likely to acquire the habit of proclaiming all specifications of another kind. The brilliance that enables you to perceive that geese are not swans may lead you, unless you are wise as well, into the shadow where all swans look like geese. It is an easy game to play. You choose a noun or an adjective and then you state its antonym. The equipment of most up-to-date critics is simple and light; it consists of a Roget's Thesaurus.

Let's begin.

Discipline, free will; romance, reality; beauty, ugliness; religion, atheism; lyric, vers libre; melody, cacophony; banal, original; Victorian, modern; older generation, younger generation; hypocrisy, frankness. Without intricate, subtle, and hard-minded investigation each one of these terms means just as much as the other and the users haven't as a rule the faintest idea what they are talking about. In real life black fades into white and humanity is delicately shaded, by no means susceptible to sweeping generalizations. But the game of antonyms is fascinating and one distinguished critic is at present conducting a campaign against bird-songs

solely, as far as can be made out, because most people take pleasure in them.

We are creating a most elaborate hokum of our own and the emergence of this can best be seen, perhaps, in our literature and stage, for these two mediums are the first to respond to rebellion and the first to succumb to illusions newly evolved. To the ancient hokum of "Abie's Irish Rose" a section of the advanced stage has responded gallantly, and the hokum of those of the clergy, especially those who conduct columns in the public prints and who settle in a few sentences the fate of the world, is ably matched by the hokum of the radical novelist who says that nothing can be settled at all. The heart of hokum is the denial of the truth and it makes no difference how you deny it. The hokum of radicalism is the twin brother of the hokum of reaction. Both arise from a conviction that every one else save yourself is a fool. The intelligent radical and the intelligent satirist never fall into the error of minimizing the intrinsic worth that must originally have been in the platform of their opponents. They attack not so much humanity-no, not even Dean Swift as the evil ways into which humanity falls. To heap contempt, for instance, upon the so-called "service clubs" per se is not radicalism but class prejudice, since these so-called service clubs are the response to a powerful need of a certain type of human mind. Criticism should be reserved for the absurd and venal practices which overtake such clubs.

No wise religious radical laughs at Jesus Christ, for if he does he shows himself, if nothing else, ignorant of history and the secret places of the heart. Instead, he attacks the base perversions of the church.

It is inconsequent to rest your case upon a thesis implying universal carnal repressions amongst the clergy. Even if this thesis were so it is not overly important save as the crudest kind of preliminary work, weakening the powers of priestcraft. Were all bankers dishonest, that would not prove banking unnecessary. Or, if you believe that most of our sorrows are due to banking itself, then attack the whole capitalistic system, as

Marx did, and do not waste your ammunition on trivialities. As Rebecca West says, to discover and drag out into the limelight of scorn an old lady in Iowa who has read her Bible a hundred times is as if Voltaire had lost his breath deriding the pietistic practices of Breton peasants. Furthermore, the game, within a short time, becomes absolute hokum, for it is so easy that you play it blindfolded and automatically, and what you are trying to do is to convince yourself and others that an entirely natural impulse amongst old ladies is some sort of tortuous mendacity.

All through time old ladies have read their Bibles, or sacrificed to Baal, as an expression of their sense of the near approach of death. What you should do, if you want to do something important, is so to train young women that when they become old ladies they will read their Bibles, or sacrifice to Baal, with some degree of intelligence. To leave a vacuum is merely to create a playground for windy devils. The similarity between a meeting of the average Kiwanis Club and the average gathering of the intelligentsia is appalling, leaving the open-minded spectator open-mouthed with amazement.

Hokum, after all, is largely the failure to react normally. The Victorians failed to react normally because they were under the spell of an elaborate code of evasion, we are beginning to fail to react normally because we are under the spell of an elaborate code of so-called elimination and frankness. We are constantly being called upon to be frank when there is nothing to be frank about. We deride the service clubs, and rightly, because too many of them have an elaborate code of good-fellowship concealing a cold and deadly selfishness. But what is the difference between that and an elaborate code of rudeness concealing an equal selfishness? Furthermore, there are so many mechanical and artificial stimuli nowadays that we are in danger of losing most of our reactions anyway. Stevenson's prayer to be stabbed wide-awake has increased in value. New York might be called the city of lost reactions, as might Paris, as far as that is concerned, or London. When a man is electrocuted his heart jumps repeatedly for several min