Taking Things By and Large

OLIVER WAKEFIELD

The War Is Responsible for the Loss of a Writer and the Gain of a Book

I ADMIT that when the man in a high place disappears the loss to society is greatly exaggerated. It may be true, as some say, that nobody is indispensable, and the rule, for aught I know, may be doubly true of the highly placed. Certainly the calm way in which the waters close over the ever-active leading citizen is very reassuring as to the splendid self-control of the survivors. Grief never unmans the board of directors and the assistantsuperintendent seldom breaks down. The horrid gashes according to the lamentations of the newspapers in all those committees and boards and trusteeships and noble public enterprises from which the "compelling personality" has been withdrawn seem to close up next day like little wounds that heal by first intention. It may be that Emily Dickinson was right when in her naively pompous way she said "The bustle in the house the morning after death is solemnest of industries enacted upon earth;" but I doubt it. Where there is bustle there is consolation. One does not bustle when in pain. And it is certainly not true of the bustle in a business house the morning after or even in the House of Representatives. Blessed are dead men's shoes on all the little social hill-tops to the climbers a little way below.

But while I admit the force of these familiar reflections on the comparative slightness of the inconvenience caused by the disappearance of the socially important, there is one exalted station in regard to which such mitigating thoughts are of no avail. I do not refer to the presidency of the United States, in spite of a natural shrinking from the thought of Vice-President Marshall as the only refuge in a world in flames. I refer of course to the "Conning Tower" in the New York Tribune from which a certain Mr. F. P. Adams has recently departed— gone for a soldier, so they say. This is not a matter which can be taken lightly, like an interview with George H. Perkins, or the fall of a European cabinet.

Not that I or any other normal reader of the "Conning Tower" was always pleased with it. On the contrary, the readers of the "Tower" very frequently disagreed with it. Even more frequently they disagreed with one another. I have read aloud to my friends the things that I liked in the column conducted by Mr. F. P. A. and they have sworn at me; on the other hand, I could have killed them for the sort of things they chose. A mass meeting of the readers of that column would probably have been followed by many arrests for mayhem. Certainly it did not please us all the time; but that does not console us for its discontinuance. The weather does not please you all the time, but it does not follow that you do not wish any weather at all. Every sort of creature read it all the way from bloodless, book-bitten literary critics down to prognathous baseball anthropoids, and everybody's turn came round at intervals. For everybody he died and came to life again. He seemed a sort of specialist in resurrection. I have myself given the column up for dead—or worse than dead—a dozen times, and then after three days gone back to it for gloomy confirmation, to find in it about the liveliest, wittiest, and most subtly fashioned English verse I had read for half a life time. You never could count on it for anything— not even for being deadly dull. That was the main difference between the "column" and almost any pillar of society.

IT might be improbably bad and it might be improbably good but it was almost always improbable. Which is saying a good deal, when you come to think of it, antecedent improbability being an essential element of masterpieces, as it is of companionable men. As he was never on the level of our expectations, being either much above or much below them, there was always something of a jolt either way, and we owe him not only the vivacity of the pleasures we should not otherwise have had but the vivaqity of the oaths we should not otherwise have uttered. And inasmuch as the tinge of individuality in an American humorous writer is so very rare that to replace the man who has it is almost impossible, whereas bank presidents, cabinet officials, chairmen of Senatorial committees, and vicepresidents of almost anything fairly pullulate, it seems as if some substitute might have been found. An entire regiment of college presidents, for example, would probably have done as much damage to the Germans as a single Mr. F. P. Adams and they would surely be doing less damage to us by their absence.

I do not insist that the bombardment of Mr. F. P. Adams would be in all respects equivalent to the bombardment of the Rheims Cathedral, but I do insist that vandalism in the present war has gone already far enough and that a government that should permit the cannonading of F. P. A. would be guilty of the grossest literary carelessness. There must be bureaus in the navy department where imitations of Horace are just as relevant to the purposes of war as much of the work that is being done there.

A Refuge

WHEN your strength gives out in the middle of some article in the New Republic on diplomacy and war, and you despair of your mind's capacity, and find yourself completely in the mental lurch, outstripped, outclassed, highbrowbeaten; when you feel like the celebrated gentleman who on reading Sordello after an illness said, "My God, the body is restored, but the mind is gone forever"; when this forlorn moment comes around next week, as it will if you see the next week's issue, get the little book called La Guerre, Madame... by M. Paul Geraldy, and read it through in half an hour. Not one problem does it solve; not one suggestion does it make for the advancement of civilization. It is devoid of political philosophy and apparently unconscious of a single current of progressive thought. In fact it is hopelessly old-fashioned, being nothing more than a miniature of the war in the manner of a classic— irresponsible, gay and a little sentimental—and in words which have the lucidity of crystal. But it reminds the badly muddled modern intellect, fallen behind, out of breath, from the vanguards of regeneration, that it can perhaps find something to fall back upon, even among contemporaries, even among the young for a respite—before the next exhausting, forward, modem plunge to the immediate salvation of humanity.

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Club Harmonies

"TWO souls with but a single thought"—appalling picture of conjoint mental destitution. People nowadays are wondering how Tennyson could ever have supposed that such a state of things was endurable. And if two hearts ever did beat complacently as one, it seems incredible that even a Mid-Victorian should have thought that this condition had any advantage over the state of merely solitary self-satisfaction. If on stirring about we met only our own opinions, why move? Surely the ideals of social intercourse have altered. Yet there are club corners where the standards of mental unity are still completely Tennysonian. There are club groups who are, conversationally, so unanimous that they seem not to be composed of separate men. The group seems, rather, a single monstrous middle-aged club member on twelve legs—soliloquizing in anecdotes, for everything not anecdotal is taboo, on account of the danger of diversity. Should the question of throwing college professors out of the window be agitated, for example, the monster might, after some incoherent noises, split in two, six of the legs going off in indignation, perhaps never to return. There are members to whom the simple words "birth control" must never be spoken, even if you have no desire to control a birth. There are many members with whom a few words on the subject of Colonel Roosevelt would make subsequent intercourse almost as constrained as if you had pulled each one of them by the nose. Conversation is a study in avoidance: In many a club comer it moves on tiptoe as in a sickroom lest an opinion should be jarred. Our personal political convictions are like inflammatory rheumatism. And the queer thing about it all is that while the sole legitimate passion left to any man in his middle age —that is to say a passion that is at all fiery—is his curiosity; many of us members seem always to be at our very hottest when endeavoring to avoid acquaintance with one another's thoughts.

I have myself just quarreled with a member fatally. Enraged by some not very luminous remark of mine, based, I believe, on a Bible text about rich men and the eyes of needles, he called me an anarchist from Greenwich Village. He did so with opprobrious intention, and though I did not recognize the opprobrium, I did recognize the intent. A coldness has since ensued. Yet if I had ever behaved in an anarchic manner in Greenwich Village, I believe I should be rather pleased, for the recollection of a little turbulence in a career which in retrospect seems to me somewhat too mild, would be on the whole acceptable. Indeed nothing happened on either side but the coldness will continue for all time. What man ever forgives the wounded pomposities of his middle age?

A War Note

Reading a dozen recent books of war impressions affords a rather slim basis for a generalization, but somehow the English ones always seem more selfconscious and more sentimental than the French. There is one which I am sure no Frenchman would have written. I shall not mention the title, for the writer is at the front, and one does not like to find fault even with the literary taste of men who are under fire. Captain Jones, let us call him, has, if we may judge from his book, but one idea about the war. The war exists for the purging of his own soul and the expansion of his moral nature. But for the war, he tells the reader every little while, he would never have attained his higher self. There is hardly a trace of that grim hatred of war as a huge human blunder that you find so often in the Frenchmen's notes. On the contrary the war seems desirable, for otherwise what might not have happened to his soul? I have yet to find a Frenchman who regarded the war merely as the means of his own spiritual ascension.