A Two-Cornered Hat

A Consideration of Mr. Walter Lippmann's Celebrated Taste for Things Political

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

THE disastrous effect of spending one's life writing about politics and politicians is to be observed in the case of the otherwise gifted and estimable Mr. Walter Lippmann. Performing upon me recently in these pages and seeking to give me the coup de grace—a not altogether difficult job, provided only the assassin be possessed of sufficiently sharp discernment—he finds himself left with his pantaloons down by virtue of the circumstance that, try sincerely as he will, he apparently is unable longer to write straightforward, incisive, devastating criticism based upon fact but, like the politicians he admires, only rhetoric as windy as Dr. Roosevelt's, as platitudinous as Dr. Harding's, as petulant as Dr. Borah's, as eloquent as Dr. Coolidge's and as empty as Dr. Heflin's. His writing-table has, against his will, refractorily turned into a soap-box. Hitting on a potentially excellent argument against me and one that, calmly and clearly manoeuvered, might readily find me, in turn, with my own breeches down, he is able to do nothing at all with it, converting it into mere sound and fury and taking out of it all its plain, hard, obvious common-sense.

Mr. Lippmann's objection to me is that I say I do not take any interest in politics but prefer instead to devote myself to artistic concerns. This arouses our friend and makes him as mad as Ed Howe gets when any low banswurst says that Beethoven was a greater man than Henry Ford, or even Cyrus H. K. Curtis.

AND what does Mr. Lippmann do about it? He does exactly what a congressman from Texas or Kansas would do. Instead of quietly proving that politics may be as interesting as art—I will confect the proof for him, if he desires, and so support his professional self-esteem—he adopts the politician's technique and loses much intelligent sympathy by throwing entirely irrelevant pies. In place of arguments showing that I am wrong—he will, incidentally, find a very weak argument of my own in one of my earlier published books that he might hoist me with—he accuses me of being simply a poseur. In place of facts proving that an interest in politics and art may go hand in hand—I shall be glad to give him a whole library to support the contention when in the future he feels like going after some other scoundrel like me—he reflects loftily upon the superior education of a Harvard man like himself as against that of a blockhead who has had only such meagre training as is on tap at some other American university, to say nothing of at the University of Bologna and Heidelberg. Instead of indicating simply, and to the conviction of his readers, the cardinal points of politics* appeal, he takes a cue from the Tenth Ward and gratuitously damages his case by calling names. From a relatively short article I cull the following: "lazy incomprehension", "peasant", "inferior education", "defective imagination", "ordinary mind", "tin-pan emotions", "never-comprehending", "as blandly unconcerned as a dog", "brass", "Philistine", "high disdain", "dumb", "dyspepsia" and "he talks through his hat". Mr. Lippmann is not a man of lazy incomprehension, he is not a peasant, he has had a fairly good if limited education, his imagination is not altogether defective, he has a mind above the ordinary, his emotions are civilized, he is at times comprehending and, so far as dogs go, is, I am informed, housebroken, he has no brass, he is no Philistine, he has a minimum of disdain, he is anything but dumb, he may have many ailments though dyspepsia is not one of them—but he does talk through his hat occasionally.

The trouble with Mr. Lippmann is a simple one. A highly intelligent fellow when he sticks closely to the thing that he knows about —his New York World editorials on politics I commend to your notice—he is lost when he permits himself to stray a bit. Even when confronted with the absurdly easy job of proving that a dramatic critic (a profession that happens to engage a small part of my time) is no person to be tonily sniffish of a political writer (a profession that happens to engage all of Mr. Lippmann's time), he shows himself to be decidedly uncomfortable. The easiness of the job doesn't impress itself duly upon him and he puffs and groans under it, leaning now upon weak attempts at humor, now upon objurgation, now upon strained argument, now upon huge blasts of gas, now upon doubts and backslidings, and now upon conciliatory goosegrease.

Let us see. "I take courage from the fact," he says, "that Mr. Nathan's opinion is at worst a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Were Mr. Nathan a mathematician, I should be overawed if he declared that, in comparison with the austere elegance of mathematical thinking, politics was a sleazy affair."

I AM no mathematician, but if it takes a mathematician to overawe Mr. Lippmann by saying that politics are a sleazy affair, as I saying fail to overawe or even remotely persuade him, let me refer him to no less a one than Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, one of the greatest that France has produced and onetime president of the Academy of Berlin. "I should be impressed," our friend continues, "if Mr. Nathan were ... a Buddhist saint, or a grower of American beauty roses, or a good and not too rapacious dentist." Even Mr. Lippmann will agree that there is no sense in this. Nor can we give it much as belly-busting humor. "I should be impressed," he then goes on, "if Mr. Nathan were an Arctic explorer or the mother of five slim and handsome boys." In other words, Dr. Cook or a farm wife. Mr. Lippmann is sentimental; a good critic must not be sentimental. "But"—with a wallop on the bass-drum—"Mr. Nathan is a theatrical critic! "

Now, while Mr. Nathan does happen to be a theatrical critic and not nearly so admirable a one as Mr. Lippmann all too graciously insists that he is, he can't quite see what that has to do with the case, that is, if Mr. Lippmann wishes to stop talking about growing American beauty roses, raising children and having his teeth filled and to devote himself to a really serious consideration of what he is talking about. Castelvetro, Taille, Ben Jonson, Saint-Evremond, Dryden, Addison, Goldoni, Schlegel, Lessing, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Hazlitt, Freytag, Sarcey, Brunetiere, Coleridge, Lamb, Shaw, Archer, Walkley, Huneker—these were also theatrical critics and some of them took a considerable interest in politics. What has the circumstance of their having engaged in theatrical criticism to do with the case the one way or another? But Mr. Lippmann apparently dislikes the theatre and drama and so takes out his dislike at the expense of rational controversy. Let us observe his method of argumentation.

"A TTENDING a show", he writes, "is much easier than observing the political scene. The whole story is presented at once, and in less than three hours, whereas in politics the show goes on forever, and all that anyone can watch is an episode here and there." Attending a show, to employ Mr. Lippmann's Broadway phraseology, is grantedly easy, but so is attending a debate betwen a couple of politicians at Town Hall. A single show isn't drama any more than the debate is politics; it is simply a symptom as is the latter. If the political show goes on forever, so does the dramatic. In seeing a single show, still to descend to Mr. Lippmann's Rialto argot, one watches only a little episode in the great range of drama, quite as in listening to Dr. Coolidge over the radio one watches in at only a little episode in the great range of politics. Surely, Mr. Lippmann should be able to think up a better argument than this; may I be so presumptuous as to say that I can think up at least three better ones.

"In the theatre," he proceeds, "imagination is aroused with the least possible effort. So most people enjoy the theatre and are bored with politics, not because the theatre deals with more interesting characters and situations, but because it deals with them through a more perfect medium of popular expression." Mr. Lippmann here tries to conceal the truth in abstraction. Since my disinterest in politics, as I have definitely stated and as Mr. Lippmann has duly quoted me at the very beginning of his article, is specifically in the politics of a rabble democracy like that on view at present in the United States, will Mr. Lippmann deny that these American politics enjoy automatically a medium of popular expression quite as perfect as the theatre? Are not the newspapers a beautiful medium of popular expression? Is not a national convention a medium of popular expression that far surpasses the greatest theatre? Is not the White House as good as any Shubert Lusthaus? Is not a State Assembly or Congress as rich in gallery juice as any theatre is in auditorium? As to imagination, which calls for greater effort, let us ask Mr. Lippmann: Hauptmann's The Sunken Bell or—I take Mr. Lippmann's own beloved example—the present debate over naval armaments? The trouble with our friend is that when he thinks of the theatre he thinks of it in its snidest terms, much as if a man arguing against him as to his admiration for politics were to think of politics solely in terms of Big Bill Thompson or some one-horse Southern congressman. Perhaps that is the only theatre that Mr. Lippmann knows, hut I doubt it, for he is, as I have said, an intelligent man. I prefer to believe that he admires good drama and is simply a poor hand at argumentative writing. The theatre may call upon the highest imagination as well as the lowest, even as politics may at times. And, to speak personally, I happen to prefer the imagination that the Greeks, that Shakespeare, that Rostand call upon to the imagination that is called upon by the Messrs. Coolidge, Mellon and Myron T. Herrick. It is a weakness of mine.

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Mr. Lippmann alludes to the "tinpan emotions of the commercial theatre". His allusion is sound. But the commercial theatre interests me no more or no less than the tin-pan emotions of tin-pan politics interest him.

I have made a living ridiculing it, as he knows. "By the sophisticated classes, of whom Mr. Nathan is such an entertaining spokesman, (Ed. note: grazie, grazioso signor), the high debate (over naval armaments) between the greatest empire and the most powerful republic is virtually ignored." It is not ignored, at least by me; I am privy to its various monkeyshines; but I repeat that they do not interest me.

I am sorry. "It takes too much original mental effort to find out what lies beneath the trivial surface of political manoeuvre and political intrigue," continues Mr. Lippmann. "In a play, a creative mind has intervened." Ergo, the works on politics by Mr. Lippmann, he would seem to imply, are in a class apart from such low stuff as one finds in the works of Aristotle, Schlegel, Goethe and Shaw.

"In politics . . . ," thus our friend, "you have perpetually to he on guard

against false arrangements of reality, puncturing rhetoric, deflating legends, destroying ideologies." In plays, it appears, you do not have to. One fears that Mr. Lippmann would make a rotten dramatic critic. "For the spectator and the reviewer the theatre is relatively effortless," thus he again, "because the creative effort has been done in advance. But when Mr. Nathan picks up a newspaper, he is driven, if he is to make head or tail of it, to know much that is not apparent, to disentangle the sense from the nonsense, in short, to do his own creative sweating." While Mr. Lippmann here undoubtedly scores a point if he has the New York World specifically in mind, it seems to me that he is otherwise as careless in his logic as he has been before. The creative effort has been equally done in advance in the instance of the politics of other days and other times, yet are the study of and the deductions from them effortless? Mr. Lippmann lazily confuses the theatre of Anne Nichols with the theatre of Pirandello, Galsworthy, Shaw and O'Neill. There is creative effort,so to speak, and creative effort. The object and effect of the first are to deaden thought and imagination; the object and effect of the second are to awaken and challenge them.

But it is not my purpose to prove either that Mr. Lippmann is right or that he is wrong. I do not care which he is. I simply repeat that, however much it distresses him, I do not care a tinker's dam about American politics as they currently exhibit themselves and that I see no prospect in me of any possible change. I can't help feeling that Mr. Lippmann is simply trying to persuade himself, rather than me, that his life's job isn't as futile a one as he perhaps in his own heart feels it to be. Well, let him buck up. Each man to his own poison. There is something to be said for each of us. At least we are doing the thing that pleases us. And that, as the world goes, is rather an enviable position to be in.