A Writer's Notebook Read online

  It is natural enough that Americans should resent it when Englishmen in America criticise, and the retort is obvious: “If you don’t like the country why don’t you go away?” They don’t make it; they brood in dudgeon. But what is hard is that when they criticise England, and you don’t take offence, but are quite likely to agree with them, they ascribe it to your conceit. They take it as an affront, for they think you don’t care. And you don’t.

  Of late I have been asked two or three times to write for the French papers and magazines that have come into existence in England and America since the fall of France. I have refused, but not from ill will, for I owe a great deal to France: it was France that educated me, France that taught me to value beauty, distinction, wit and good sense, France that taught me to write. I have spent many happy years in France. I have refused because I thought the sort of articles they wanted me to write would only be of disservice. A number of distinguished writers have since done what I would not do. To my mind they have written to no purpose. They have told the French that for long they were the most civilised people in Europe and that their culture was matchless; they have spoken of the grandeur of their history, the greatness of their literature and the superexcellence of their painting; they have told them that they live in a beautiful and fertile country and that Paris is an enchanting city that all the world has loved to visit. The French are only too well aware of all that. It has been their undoing, for it has caused them to conceive a grossly exaggerated opinion of themselves. At the beginning of the nineteenth century France was the richest and most highly populated country in Europe; the Napoleonic wars drained her wealth and decimated her people. For more than a hundred years now she has been a second-class power masquerading as a first-class one. It has been a double misfortune to her; first because it led her to pretensions she lacked the resources to maintain, and secondly because it caused the greater powers to fear ambitions which she could never in point of fact have realised. The war has made manifest what only the very astute saw. Let her face the truth and decide what she will do about it. She can resign herself to being a richer Spain, a more spacious Holland, or a resort place as delectable as Italy; but if that does not suffice her and she desires once more to become a first-class power it is in her own hands. She has a productive country, advantageously situated, and a quick-witted, brave and industrious people. But she must cease to depend upon the prestige of her past greatness; she must abandon her self-complacency; she must face facts with courage and realism. She must put the common welfare above the welfare of the individual. She must be prepared to learn from peoples she has too long despised that a nation cannot have strength without sacrifice, efficiency without integrity, and freedom without discipline. She were wise to turn a deaf ear to these gentlemen of letters, for it is not flattery that can help France, but truth. She alone can help herself.

  I was surprised when a friend of mine told me he was going over a story he had just finished to put more subtlety into it; I didn’t think it my business to suggest that you couldn’t be subtle by taking thought. Subtlety is a quality of the mind, and if you have it you show it because you can’t help it. It’s like originality: no one can be original by trying. The original artist is only being himself; he puts things in what seems to him a perfectly normal and obvious way: because it’s fresh and new to you you say he’s original. He doesn’t know what you mean. How stupid are those second-rate painters, for instance, who can’t but put paint on their canvas in a dull and commonplace way and think to impress the world with their originality by placing meaningless and incongruous objects against an academic background.

  I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me. I would now except shaving. I am amazed when I see busy men, who tell you their time is valuable, expose themselves on six days a week to the long, tedious and elaborate operation that American barbers have made of it.

  I daresay it is very pleasant to be a member of a devoted and united family, but I have a notion that it is no help to the grown man when he goes out into the world. The mutual admiration which is common in such a family gives him an erroneous idea of his own capacity, and so makes it more difficult for him to cope with the rough-and-tumble of life. But if it is no more than disadvantageous to an ordinary man, to an artist it is fatal. The artist is a lone wolf. His way is solitary. It is to his own good that the pack should drive him out into the wilderness. The extravagant praise of doting relations for work that at best only shows promise can only injure him, for being persuaded that he has done well, he will not seek to do better. Self-complacency is the death of the artist.

  It has not a little puzzled me to notice how greatly the spirit of adventure seems to have declined in this country. For after all it must have been the spirit of adventure that peopled it. I know that great numbers were driven out of Europe by poverty, but many more stayed at home and endured their poverty; it was the adventurous who emigrated. I know that great numbers came so that they might enjoy religious or political freedom; they too must have had the spirit of adventure, for many more remained who were prepared to compromise with conditions that irked them. I know that of those who left the settled seaboard to make themselves homes in the Middle West many went with their families, but thousands upon thousands of men, young, middle-aged or old, went by themselves. They flocked to the minefields of Nevada and California. When Horace Greeley said: “Go West, young man,” what was he doing but appealing to the young man’s spirit of adventure? I have talked to a good many of these lads who are going to the war. Most of them go because they are obliged to, many from a sense of duty, but I have not found one who looked upon it as a thrilling adventure. You would think that their only ambition was to be left in peace in their own home town and get a job in an office or a store where they would be safe from risk.

  Values. It is natural to hesitate when one comes to believe that a theory such as that values are absolute and independent of our minds is erroneous, when one knows it has been held by so many great philosophers. One would have thought that if values really were absolute and independent of our minds, the human race would have discovered by this time what they are and, taking them for granted, never think of wavering in their allegiance to them. But what values are esteemed depends on circumstances. They can change from one generation to another. The values prized by the Greeks of the Homeric age are not the same as those they prized in the Peloponnesian War. They differ in different countries. I don’t know that the non-attachment of the Hindus has ever been held to be a value by the Europeans, nor that the humility which Christianity has regarded as a value has ever been regarded as such by the believers in other faiths. In my own lifetime I have seen values lose their worth. When I was young the conception of a gentleman had value; now not only what it stood for, but the word itself have become vaguely objectionable. Outside lavatories you will often see Ladies on the door of one, but Men on the door of another. If all that I hear and read is true the value of chastity in the unmarried woman has in the last thirty years become negligible in Anglo-Saxon countries. It is still important in Latin ones. But it is dishonest to assert that if moral values are not absolute they must depend on prejudices or preferences. It is admitted that language has grown up in response to biological needs. Why should moral values not have grown up in the same way? Does it not look likely that they have been developed in the evolution of the species because they were essential to its existence? If this war has shown anything it has shown that unless a nation cherishes certain values it will be destroyed. They are no less real because they have come to be cherished owing to their necessity for the survival not only of the state, but also of the individual.

  When the war is won I passionately hope that we shall not be so foolish as to think it has been won because we possess virtues that our enemies lack. It will be a great error if we persuade ourselves that we are victorious because of our patriotism, our courage, our loyalty, our integrity
, our disinterestedness; they would have availed us nothing unless we had had the power to produce great armaments and the means to train vast armies. Might has won, not right. All you can say of the virtues mentioned is that unless on the whole a nation practises them it will, as the example of France has shown, neglect or refuse to provide the instruments of defence which will enable it to repel a foe. It would be silly to deny that our enemies have some of the same virtues as we; they have at least courage, loyalty and patriotism. They have certain values that are different from ours; it is long odds that if they had achieved the world domination which was their ambition, in a hundred years these values of theirs would have been no less unquestioningly accepted than the values we cherish now are accepted by the unthinking in our countries. It is a cruel saying that might is right, and all our prejudices lead us to deny it, but it is true. The moral is that a nation must make very sure that it has the might to defend its own conception of right.

  Aldous in the first of his Seven Meditations says: “God is. That is the primordial fact. It is in order that we may discover this fact for ourselves, by direct experience, that we exist.” What a fool he makes out God to be!

  It is a tough job those philosophers have who want to rank Beauty as one of the absolute values. When you call something beautiful all you mean is that it excites a specific state of feeling in you, but what that something is depends on all manner of circumstances. What sort of an absolute is it that is affected by personal idiosyncrasy, training, fashion, habit, sex and novelty? One would have thought that when once an object was recognised as beautiful it would contain enough of intrinsic worth to retain its beauty for us indefinitely. We know it doesn’t. We get tired of it. Familiarity breeds not contempt perhaps, but indifference; and indifference is the death of the æsthetic emotion.

  Beauty is a value, whatever its object may be, but it is only an essential value if it exalts the soul and so enables it to accept or to be in a fit emotional state to accept more important values. But what the dickens is the soul?

  Certain sensations occasioned by external causes have the power to produce in you what is known as the æsthetic emotion. But the odd thing about æsthetic emotion is that it may be produced by art of indifferent quality. There is no reason to suppose that it is less sincere, less genuine and less productive in the person who gets it from Balfe’s Bohemian Girl, say, than in him who gets it from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

  The theorists of art who decide that the absolute of beauty is what is generally held to be beautiful by a sensitive, educated and cultured taste are arrogant. Hazlitt was certainly a man of cultured, educated and sensitive taste; yet he put Correggio on a level with Titian. When they give examples of such artists as in their opinion have produced works whose beauty may be considered absolute they are apt to mention Shakespeare, Beethoven (or Bach if they are highbrows) and Cézanne. They are perhaps safe in the first two (or three) but how can they be certain that Cézanne will produce the same effect on succeeding generations as he does on ours? It may well be that our grandchildren will look upon him with the same cool indifference as we now look upon the painters, at one time so greatly admired, of the Barbizon School. I have seen in my own lifetime too many reversals of æsthetic judgment to place confidence in contemporary opinion. A thing of beauty is not, as Keats said, a joy for ever; it is a thing that excites in us a peculiar emotion at a particular moment, and if it does that it gives us all that beauty can give. It is absurd to despise people who don’t share our æsthetic opinions. We all do.

  It looks as though the physical characteristics of a race, and with them the ideal of beauty, can change within a generation or two. The beautiful Englishwoman of my youth had an ample bosom, a small waist and massive hips. She gave the promise of having many children. Now she is slim, her hips are slender, her breasts small and her legs long. Is it possible that she is admired for these traits because economic circumstances have made large families undesired, and that her approximation to the male figure pleases owing to its suggestion of sterility?

  If you can go by pictures and photographs the American of the last century was gaunt and lanky, with marked features, a big nose, a long upper lip, a thin mouth and an aggressive chin. You would have to go far now to find anyone who resembled the Uncle Sam of English cartoonists. The American of today is plump, round-faced, and his small features are a trifle muzzy. He does not wear well. You can see any number of beautiful young persons in America; you do not see many who retain their good looks in middle age.

  I have been reading Santayana again. It is a very pleasant exercise, but after you have finished a chapter and stop to ask yourself whether you are the better or the wiser for having read it you hardly know what to answer. He is commonly praised for his fine phrases, but a phrase is fine when it elucidates a meaning; his too often obscure it. He has great gifts, gifts of imagery, of metaphor, of apt simile and of brilliant illustration; but I do not know that philosophy needs the decoration of a luxuriance so lush. It distracts the reader’s attention from the argument and he may well be left with an uneasy feeling that if that were more cogent it would have been stated in a manner less elaborate.

  I think Santayana has acquired his reputation in America owing to the pathetically diffident persuasion of Americans that what is foreign must have a value greater than what is native. So they will offer you with pride French Camembert regardless of the fact that their own home-made product is just as good, and generally much better, than the imported. To my mind Santayana is a man who took the wrong turning. With his irony, his sharp tongue, common-sense and worldly wisdom, his sensitive understanding, I have a notion that he could have written semi-philosophical romances after the manner of Anatole France which it would have been an enduring delight to read. He had a wider culture than the Frenchman, a wit as keen, a less circumscribed horizon and an intelligence of a more delicate calibre. It was a loss to American literature when Santayana decided to become a philosopher rather than a novelist. As it is he is most profitably read in the little essays which Pearsall Smith extracted from his works.

  Humility is a virtue that is enjoined upon us. So far as the artist is concerned, with good reason; indeed, when he compares what he has done with what he wanted to do, when he compares his disappointing efforts with the great masterpieces of the world, he finds it the easiest of virtues to practise. Unless he is humble he cannot hope to improve. Self-satisfaction is fatal to him. The strange thing is that we are embarrassed by humility in others. We are ill at ease when they humble themselves before us. I don’t know why this should be unless it is that there is something servile in it which offends our sense of human dignity. When I was engaging two coloured maids to look after me the overseer of the plantation who produced them, as a final recommendation, said: “They’re good niggers, they’re humble.” Sometimes when one of them hides her face with her fingers to speak to me or with a little nervous giggle asks if she can have something I’ve thrown away, I’m inclined to cry: “For heaven’s sake don’t be so humble.”

  Or is it that humility in others forces upon us the consciousness of our own unworthiness?

  But why should man be humble when he comes face to face with God? Because God is better and wiser and more powerful than man? A poor reason. No better than that my maid should humble herself before me because I’m white, have more money and am better educated than she is. I should have thought it was God who would have cause to be humble when he reflects upon what an indifferent job he has made in the creation of a human being.

  I don’t know why critics expect writers always to do as well as they should have done. The writer seldom does what he wants to; he does the best he can. Shakespearian scholars would save themselves many a headache if when they come across something in the plays that is obviously unsatisfactory, instead of insisting against all reason that it is nothing of the kind, they admitted that here and there Shakespeare tripped. There is no reason that I can see to suppose that he was not well aware
that the motivation in certain of the plays is so weak as to destroy the illusion. Why should the critics say that he didn’t care? I should have said that there was evidence that he did. Why should he have put into Othello’s mouth those lines beginning That handkerchief did an Egyptian to my mother give … unless it was because he was aware that the episode of the handkerchief was too thin to pass muster? I think it would save a lot of trouble to conclude that he tried to think of something better, and just couldn’t.