Roger Coverley on Smart Alecks

A Timely Dialogue Concerning the Morals and Customs of Two Conflicting Generations

WALTER PRICHARD EATON

MY OLD friend Roger Coverley, perhaps should explain, is generally considered by the younger set something of a Tory, more because of his ideas, which he expresses freely and without respect of persons present, than because of his ancestry, concerning which the younger set. trouble themselves very little. It may not be generally known that the famous old Sir Roger de Coverley had a younger brother. Sir Roger never mentioned him, and for good reason. The young scamp was in love with an orange girl at Mr. Cibber's playhouse, and while it was impossible for him to compromise an orange girl, it was easily possible for her to compromise him. That is one disadvantage of a Tory society.

Sir Roger persuaded him to make a voyage to the new world, where presently he further compromised the family by engaging in trade, for which he displayed an inexplicable aptitude. He had the decency to drop the prefix de from his name, married a Philadelphia girl, and bred a son, who bred a son in turn to fight in the Revolutionary War on the rebel side, and who settled after the war in the hills of western Massachusetts, where he acquired several thousand acres of land and erected a fine house and was persuaded, by General Washington himself, to represent his district in Congress, in order to combat the Jeffersonian heresies of unlimited suffrage and equality. He had a son who went to Harvard College— of course—and there imbibed a great deal of ale and Unitarian philosophy. "I like my ale musty and my theology fresh," he told his father, thus considerably easing off the impending reprimand.

LATER this son went to the State senate. converted a large part of the family land holdings into 5% securities and stock in the new paper industry, kept a stable of fine horses, named his eldest son Roger, after his remote uncle, and died in an odour of sanctity pleasantly flavoured with port and a peculiarly potent and pure applejack of which he possessed the secret. Roger, his son, ignored the applejack, but appreciated the 5% securities. He took them, as soon as they were his, to Wall Street, and there mysteriously juggled them about till they had multiplied two- or three-fold. He was presently able to return to the family mansion, build a large addition, have his wife's picture painted by a fashionable French artist, and send Roger, Junior, after his graduation from Harvard, on the grand tour of Europe.

The youth came home with a trunk full of French novels and suits from London and a vague idea that he wanted to be an architect. But when he beheld the style of houses his clients would insist on his building—that was in the 1880's—he changed his mind, which was easier than changing his taste, and considered a literary career instead. When his father suggested that perhaps he couldn't make a living at literature, he replied, quite conclusively, "Fortunately I don't have to."

Certainly he never did. But, in the Mauve Decade, he had a very good time writing critical defenses of Ibsen and Pinero, once even entering into a debate with William Winter who vainly endeavored to overwhelm him with Johnsonian invective. His mill stock led him to an interest in labour problems, and he accepted an appointment on the Minimum Wage Commission, giving much time and energy to the work, and engaging in numerous acrimonious scrimmages with labour leaders, from which both sides always emerged with mutual respect. He has acted for many years as president of the Village Improvement Society. He was—and is—a vestryman of the church, but seldom attends it. He loves horses, and drove a fine pair, till the motors made the roads impossible. Then he bought a large, conservative, expensive car, which he used only when he had to get somewhere, and kept till it was an antique. Whereupon he bought another, of the same make, which he still uses. It has been 160,000 miles, and garage men laugh at it—when he isn't in the rear seat. Nobody laughs when he is.

YOU don't laugh at Roger Coverley. He has an assured and good-natured and aristocratic dignity which few, even in our democratic age, ever presume upon. Imagine, then, my amazement the other afternoon when I called to see him, was sent into the library by a maid who has taken my hat for thirty years, and was greeted with the following extraordinary outburst:—

"Whoops, dearie, I'm glad to see you, you dirty old bum!"

I stammered, too overcome to take his welcoming hand as he rose from his old wing chair by the fire.

Roger's rosy face beamed at me. "How passé you are," he said. "Whoops, dearie, the Board of Health will order you carted off if you're not careful."

"The County Court will order you committed to Northampton," I replied. "How do you get that way?"

"Ah, that is better!" cried Roger. "'How do you get that way' is almost fresh. Not quite. It bounces a bit. But it will do."

"Roger, what is the matter?"

He gestured to his desk, and the floor beside his chair. There I saw copies of what I recognized as the latest and most sophisticated books and magazines.

"I've been getting myself up to date, old friend," he answered. "I've even been to New York and seen the latest plays, as part of the process." He shuddered a little here. Then he picked a green covered magazine from the pile and fingered it. "It was," he added, "a cold day for Roger when the Mercury went down."

"That," said I, "is a terrible pun. You had better not try to make smart cracks, but tell me, in the plain English you and I still understand, what all this means!"

"Joe," said he tragically, "Joe, it means I'm all wet. You are very probably all wet, too."

"No, I'm very dry," said I.

Roger rang for the maid. "And now," I prodded presently, clinking the ice in my glass, "tell me how come."

"Joe," he said, "I'm seriously depressed by the current worship of the Smart Aleck. He lords it over our drama, our literature, and our life. The youngsters kowtow to him from instinct, the elders from cowardice. And the worst of it is, the Smart Aleck has kidded himself into believing, actually, that he isn't a Smart Aleck, but a saviour. His mission is to 'debunk' our society. He wraps his Messianic robes about him and wise cracks for the Lord . ."

"That sounds well," I said, "but I don't know what it means."

"What are two of the most successful plays in New York?"

"I'm sure I don't know," I answered. "Two the police tried to close up, I suppose."

NO, they are Broadway and The Road to Rome. Broadway is entirely written in a kind of horrible underworld patois, worse than pidgin English, and it's supposed to be funny. As a matter of fact, it is funny, and technically as clever as the Devil. That's the terrible Smart Aleckism of it. The authors have lifted the lid on a sink-hole actually as depressing as Gorky's Night Refuge—and they make us laugh. They are so pleased with tossing this horrible language about, and flinging oaths at the audience, with being as they think realistic and up-to-the minute, that they never sense the real terror of their theme—"

"Perhaps they do," I interrupted. "Perhaps they rely on their audiences being as intelligent as you are, and hence capable of making the interpretation."

"Humph!" said Roger. "Then there's The Road to Rome—an intelligent piece of work artistically ruined by Smart Aleckism. We are asked to believe that Hannibal was converted from his purpose and Rome saved by a strumpet; not that she was really intended as a strumpet, but the author was so filled with the gospel of 'frankness' that he couldn't help making her one. There have always been decent reticencies, and when life and literature cease to observe them, at the instigation of the Smart Alecks, women become strumpets and art a bawdy peep show for the Yahoos."

"You sound," said I, "a little like the late William Winter."

The aristocratic purple veins beneath Roger's eyes perceptibly swelled. "Not at all! Not at all!" he snapped. "Winter objected to any recognition of the facts of life. I object to making a joke of 'em, when they are serious matters. I object to dragging our drama back to the age of Wycherley in tone, and down to the level of Tin Pan Alley in style—and then calling that progress. I object to the Smart Aleck assumption that you've achieved a realistic advance by causing every second character to say 'Jesus'. You haven't; you've merely achieved a lapse back into a bawdy past."

(Continued on page 100)

(Continued from page 48)

"But," I said, "after all, Broadway plays don't cut much ice in the national life. Aren't you getting more excited than necessary?"

"Oh, they're only a symptom," he answered. "The same thing is everywhere. Here is a magazine, the Four Gospels of Smart Aleckism, with a sneer at the church on almost every page—"

"Yes, I've read it, but it doesn't sneer so much at the church, does it, as at certain aspects of Fundamentalism which it—and you and I, too— consider ridiculous?"

"Ah—that's just the point!" cried Roger. "That's just the difference between Smart Aleckism and rationalism! It does sneer at the whole church, ft hears the word 'church', and all it can think of is a lot of idiotic but rather pathetic anti-evolutionists in Tennessee. The entire contribution of the church to Western civilization, the foundation of America, on the religious stability of the Puritans, the whole psychological mystery of Man, who has always demanded some sort of religious outlet, is ignored. The Smart Aleck thinks he is debunking religion by sneering at it. But it happens to be considerably larger and more important than he is, and ultimately for every deluded youth he persuades to join in his laughter, there will have to be payment. The church, democracy, everything, needs rationalistic criticism. But sneers are not criticism. The caperings of adult sophomores are not criticism, as they scribble on fences or shout from street corners things they would have been spanked for saying in our day."

"Oh, Roger, your day, please," I protested. "I know the magazine you mean, and a lot more literature like it, and it would lose me my standing with the new generation if I were to oppose them."

"There you are!" he fumed. "There you are! A coward like all the rest! You probably also worship youth, admire women of fifty who try to look twenty-five, think that nobody has any sense or ideas if he's over thirty, and are so afraid somebody will suspect you belong to the Rotary Club and the First Baptist Church that you take one of Sinclair Lewis's novels to bed with you. Lewis, there's a Smart Aleck. He defies God to strike him dead in Kansas City and interprets God's preoccupation with more important matters elsewhere as a proof against Divinity. Here's his latest book. I've read it. I've read 'em all. There's some extraordinarily good reporting in them, too. But their great 'discoveries' are those of the Smart Aleck. First he discovered that the American small town is a small town, and not nearly so up-to-date as Paris. Then he discovered that the average man is an average man, who wants a good income, a house in a 'solid Buick neighbourhood', and can't see or feel much beyond his petty personal affairs; and he got terribly mad about this. Now he has discovered that cheap revival preachers are occasionally drunken and lecherous louts, in whom the gift for gab does duty as spiritual inspiration. Marvellous, marvellous! Only most of us knew it all before, and having an old fashipned virtue called sympathy, we didn't burst forth in raucous satire. As to the latest discovery, what of it? This Smart Aleck plainly means to imply that all ministers are lechers, all churches canting and ridiculous, all religion a sham. That is drivelling nonsense. The trouble is with him, as with all Smart Alecks, that he doesn't really know the thing he is attacking, doesn't understand it, hasn't the necessary sympathy and seriousness to criticise it effectively. As a result no real thought will follow his onslaught, only ignorant passions and recriminations. They've begun already. He is as irrational in his way as the veriest Hell-fire-and-damnation revivalist—and with far less excuse".

"Hasn't there always been overstatement in all attacks on old, established, and slightly worn out things?" 1 mildly suggested, while Roger was getting his wind. "Wasn't Voltaire, perhaps, called a Smart Aleck. I'm sure your friend G. B. Shaw has been."

"Voltaire, Shaw!" Roger snorted. "Maybe they overstated, but they understood. They had sympathy for the common man, and complete grasp of the historical meaning of what they attacked. And always they used their wit not only to clear the ground but to lay a new cornerstone. Shaw is the most religious man in Europe; he is the prophet of Creative Evolution. He has never been a Smart Aleck because he has never invited tin? admiration of his juvenile disciples by jeering at his fellow men, but by telling ids fellow men how to live richer lives—"

"Roger, you ought to be a preacher yourself," said I.

The old chap nodded. "Sometimes I'd like to be", he declared. "Now, I have a great fondness for my fellow men, even the Rotarians and reformers. People, especially dull people, are led nowhere by brutal, ignorant, unsympathetic sneers, by the attitude of the Smart Aleck which has now captured our literature. They are only confirmed in a sullen opposition. It isn't the fashion any more, but I still believe in 'sweet reasonableness', just as I believe in the melodies of Mozart and the usefulness to the community of a good grocery store, a sound bank, and a well run garage, even if it takes a Rotary Club to keep 'em so."

"But the Smart Alecks approve of Mozart, too", said I. "Or, anyway, of Beethoven. I saw the other day that George Antheil, composer of the Ballet Mécanique scored for 16 mechanical pianos, 8 xylophones, 4 bass drums and an airplane propeller, has endorsed Beethoven heartily".

"That was nice of him", said Roger. "Has Beethoven been heard from? Six out of eight of the Smart Aleck critics will probably some day christen this new composer George Ant-hill, and consider that they have delivered a profound judgment on his music. The public will throw a fit over the esoteric vibrations of the airplane propeller, and then mercifully forget it for the next cacophony emitted by some Smart Aleck too lazy or insincere to seek for beauty in order. A season or two ago they were raving over a fat man who played classic music with a jazz hand, which is exactly the same as listening to Al Jolson recite the Ode to a Nightingale in coon dialect. Bah! And a year ago, in literature, they were babbling about Michael Arlen, an Armenian who rewrote Marie Corelli in pidgin English, flavoured with gaudy sex—"

(Continued on page 102)

(Continued from page 100)

"Your metaphors are getting a little mixed," I hazarded.

"Alas, no doubt they are! My avuncular ancestor, who was as you may recall a friend of Mr. Joseph Addison, transmitted to me, unfortunately, a love for the niceties and even the elegancies of speech, and the barbarities of modern prose, based on the argot of the underworld and the ignorant immigrant, so affect me that I become quite muddled. Addison—now there waswriter!"

"Still, you must admit his play, Cato, was dreadfully dull, and Broadway isn't."

"Not was" said Roger. "In its day it was what you would elegantly call a 'wow'. It may be dull today—two centuries later. But in two centuries—even two decades—nobody will be able even to understand Broadway. The Smart Aleck, by writing in slang, writes in water. Enduring speech is standard speech; it is aristocratic, not—"

"Ah!" I interrupted. "Now we have it! What you really mean, Roger, is that you are a nice, comfortable, well-bred old Tory, mentally geared to 19th century rationalism, but not 20th century democracy."

"And just what is 20th century democracy, pray?" he asked, fixing his pale blue eyes upon me.

"Something neither you, nor I, comprehend," I answered. "Something that belongs to a world of universal motor cars, prosperity, and second generation aliens. We belonged to a world that rode behind horses—"

"Thank God!"

"Now the aliens' sons stop for gas at a garage run by an ex-Yankee-farmer, and lie has to unscrew the tank cap for 'em, too. The new literature is of them, for them, even by them, and we don't come in at all."

Here Roger emitted a snort.

"And," I continued, "maybe what you call Smart Alecks are merely men young enough or shrewd enough to sense this new and crude and not very beautiful democracy, and to try to give it expression. Of course there will be excesses—there are bound to be—"

"What you say may all be very true," Roger cut in. "But don't forget that Democracy didn't begin with the invention of the Ford car and night clubs, though maybe, God help us, it will end there! Nor did the English language begin when Mrs. Feitlebaum learned the word 'gradually' at Ellis Island! Even my uncle's friend, Mr. Addison, didn't invent it; he merely perfected it."

"No, I'd say, rather, he froze it."

"Then you, too, are a Smart Aleck!" Roger fumed.

"Smart Aleck, or Tory, does a man have to be one or the other? Is there no middle ground?" I asked.

"The man who takes the middle of the road will get hit by the cars coming both ways," my friend answered. "You'd better stay on my side."

He pushed the decanter toward me. "By the way, that was put in the wood in 1896," he added.

"I'm on your side!" said I. "Here's how! "

We smacked our lips. The late afternoon sun came through the windows and rested benignly on the rows of books which lined the walls, and on the fine, proud, pink face and ivory-white moustache of my old friend. His collie came into the room, laid a cool muzzle in our hands and then plumped down on the hearth rug. Outside on the village street a child shouted. We both sighed peacefully, and sipped our drinks.

"The Tories have their virtues," said Roger. "Admit it, old friend."

"They have." I answered, "aged in the wood."