Three Portraits of Gentlemen

Some Significant Figures in Recent Biography and Fiction

EDMUND WILSON, JR.

The Gentleman from San Francisco

THE Gentleman from San Francisco is the first and most interesting of a collection of short stories by the Russian, Bunin (Seltzer). It is one of the most polished and effective satires yet written upon the plutocratic civilization of the twentieth century. Bunin's particularly brilliant idea was to have his whole story take place, not like Babbitt or The Financier, in America itself, but entirely on an ocean liner and in Italy. The point is that the thing which the Gentleman from San Francisco represents is not confined to the United States but is already the real dominating ideal of the Old World as well as of the New!

When the American millionaire goes to Capri, he finds his own world waiting there for him in the shape of an enormous, expensive and gaudy American hotel. He engages an elaborate suite of rooms and proceeds to dress for dinner. As he does so, he wonders whether he can seduce a celebrated dancer now performing at the hotel. Then he sits down exhausted and murmurs, "It's awful! . . . It's awful'", "but without trying to understand or.to know what was awful." He goes down to the reading-room a moment to wait for his wife and daughter, and suddenly falls dead with apoplexy. The hotel people hastily and indecently have his body shipped out for fear of disturbing the pleasure of the other guests and even refuse to allow it to be returned to the suite where he has been staying. The Gentleman from San Francisco goes back dead on the same steamer upon which he has just arrived. And the gigantic vessel becomes a sort of symbol of everything for which the Gentleman from San Francisco stood. It is the modern world itself plunging portentously through darkness and storm, with imitation gayety in the saloon, machinery and slaves in the stokehole and, in the hold, disregarded by everybody, the burden of its dead soul.

I don't know that either Mencken, Lewis or Mrs. Wharton has done anything more remarkable in this vein, considering its length, than this criticism of American ideals by a Russian. We may assume that it has lost little of its brilliance in translation, for the English version appears to have been put in its final shape by Mr. D. H. Lawrence.

The Gentleman from Arezzo

PETRO ARETINO, like the Gentleman from San F'rancisco, died in a stroke of apoplexy—presumably, like that of the other Gentleman, the result of unhealthy habits of living; but instead of dying in a dreary sigh, he died laughing over a bawdy jest. Aretino, like the Gentleman from San Francisco, lived in a world which was unhealthy because it did not know precisely where it was going; but, unlike the Gentleman from San Francisco, he had a good time. That is, I suppose, the fundamental difference between the anarchy of ideals in the Renaissance and the anarchy of ideals to-day. As Mr. Edward Hutton tells us in his admirable new life of Aretino (Houghton Mifflin), the great journalist of the sixteenth century was as unscrupulous, as arrogant, as greedy, as ready to play parties off against each other, as singlemindedly intent upon his own aggrandizement and as content to account to himself for his own conduct without the aid of sanctions outside himself, as any American millionaire; but who would not rather read about Aretino than about, say, E. H. Harriman? Both were tremendous natural forces, uncontrolled by logic or religion, but, in the case of Aretino, his very rogueries were gorgeous. His very disorder was in the grand manner: supporting himself by libel, blackmail and flattery, he kept open house on the Grand Canal, where, surrounded by a household of dishonest servants and a harem of unfaithful mistresses, he entertained the princes and wits of the age, composed political tracts, comedies and poems, and enjoyed, as few of us to-day enjoy things seen, the light and the water of Venice.

Mr. Hutton's account of all this is, I suppose, the first adequate one in English. It is scholarly, precise and wellordered, though it misses a little the spirit of the epoch. One feels continually that the treatment is rather sober for so outrageous a subject and almost longs for the bogus Renaissance ceilings of a John Addington Symonds. Air. Hutton is certainly a little prim; but he is intelligent and that is the main thing.

A Third Gentleman

A THIRD document which supplies us with the portrait of a third significant figure from a third age—the Historic Calamitatum—or autobiography of Abelard (Thomas A. Boyd, St. Paul—an extraordinarily fine translation by Henry Adams Bellows, with a preface by Ralph Adams Cram). Here at last is an ordered society subjected to a definite moral. The Catholic Church and the feudal system of the Middle Ages provided a system which drove the Aretinos underground and made impossible the peculiar tragedy of futility in which the Gentleman from San Francisco collapsed.

The tragedy of Abelard was that he was centrifugal and had to be extinguished; he was apparently infinitely more gifted and infinitely more conscientious than Aretino, yet he didn't have a quarter of Aretino's opportunity to enjoy the exercise of his intelligence and inspiration.

At the first signs of a spirit of free inquiry introduced into philosophy or theology the mediaeval church began to fear for its system and usually destroyed the inquirer for a heretic. This was what happened to Abelard; but even in his heresy he has the logic and the dignity of his age. His very love affair is bathed in a high light of reason. And though one might hesitate a moment before deciding where one would prefer to live—in the hotel of the Gentleman from San Francisco, the palazzo of Aretino at Venice or the oratory built of reeds and stalks where Abelard dwelt alone outside of Troyes, where men came from all over Europe to receive instruction in philosophy and region—one cannot be in doubt for a moment as to which was the most noble.

DORAN is publishing a new limp leather edition of the novels of Hugh Walpole. Jeremy, The Secret City, The Duchess of Wrexe, The Green Mirror,Fortitude and The Prelude of Adventure have already appeared. One hopes The Gods and Mr. Perrin will be included: it is unique not only in being one of the only boarding-school stories ever written which is not dead set on making schoollife seem jolly but also in being perhaps the only one which deals exclusively with the masters instead of with the boys.