PALEFACE THE PHILOSOPHY OF THft « MELTING-POT * By WYNDHAM LEWIS LONDON CHATTO & WINDUS 1923 PRINTB* IN UltKAT BRITAIN BV T 4ND A 4 ONsI A III > L1I> AT JIIK IMVI-RsITY Pill ss b DIN HI KCill PREFACE P ART II of this essay was written during a visit to the United Stales (summer 1927): siiK*e it#> first appearance in Enemy So. J it lias been somewhat modified and other material has been incorporated in it. Tlv* pari entitled ‘A Moral Situation 5 and the passages coming beneath the lulling A Model Melting-pot 5 have been written during the last few months, and are published here for tin* first tune. For w T hut our white skin is worth, symbolically or otherwise, it is in America that its destinies are to- day most clearly foreshadowed : the essential un^ versahty of the problems provided for the Palefaces of America by the mdian factor m Latin America, by the Negro in North America and the West Indies, and by the proximity of Asia to the western shores of the United States, makes the ir attitudes in faee of them of some moment to Europeans. And though there is no White Man’s Burden in Europe at present, the isolation of Europe is rather artificial; and so, politically, even, the* cpiestions lightly touched upon in this book are not insignificant. In other respects, humanly, and artistically, there is an inexhaustible fund of simple amusement m consciousness of pig- ment. Colour is not perhaps so fundamental a thing as form, but it is, beyond dispute, m many respects of more immediate importance to men. Gentlemen prefer blonde's, for instance — that w r as a question of pigment , and what a popular subject it proved ! But gentlemen prefer, as far as their PALEFACE own persons are concerned, sunburn and a certain swarthiness. How fymnctte, however, would the masculine mind suffer gentlemen to become, in a search forOie virile? — is it possible for gentlemen to be too ‘ dago 9 and too ‘dark ,? And then there must be a certain number of blond gentlemen. But ultimately whiteness is, in a pigmentary sense, aristocratic, pefnaps — the proper colour for a ‘gentleman and blackness irretrievably prole- tarian. May not this be an absolute, established 1 m our senses? Then the dispute about cuticles would be seen to be another facet of the general assault upon privilege. Whiteness of skin if, like ermine, it is a symbol of rank, must be suspect to the democrat . The most humble Babbitt possesses something en\i- able, to which, besides, intellectually and socially, he has no right — namely his ‘pale ’ face. Bui I need not insist: colour is not only controversial, it is for the human being of symbolical importance — it is able to dw r arf stature, put intelligence in the shade, challenge quartermgs: pallor and divinity are quite possibly m some way associated m our human eyes WYNDHAM LEWIS CONTENTS PART I A * MORAL SITUATION* •1. TIu* Future of the Palt face Position page 3 2. If the Redskin were in our Position 4 * 3. ^TIk* Etlues at the Rasis of the Colour Question 7 4. The Cause of ‘God and the People ’ 8 5. Passing ‘the point beyond which there seems no longer to be either good or e\ il ’ 10 6. ‘Every man both by law and common sentiment is recognized as basing a “suum” ’ 12 7 Our World has become an almost purely Elftiial Place 15 8. Esprit de Peau 17 9. IIow sou must beware of too much sprit de pean' It) 10 The While m Lin same Roat as t he Hlack 22 11. The Paleface, that "negation of colour,’ as seen by Du Bois 27 12. The Black, and the Paleface Widdlcclass Democratic Ideal 48 18. A German Vision of Black rmu* White 40 14. White Phobia in France 52 15 The Effect of the Pictures of the White Man's World upon the East 58 1C. Final Objections to me as ‘Champion’ 67 Conclusion 70 vn PALEFACE PART II PALEFACE « Introduction page 97 Suction I. Romanticism and Complexes 1. The Paleface m cives Ihe Dubious Pre- sent of an ‘Inferiority Complex* 118 2 While Hopes with a ‘Complex’ 111 8. The opposite v Supi norit v Complex' •• tlirust at the same lime upon the Un- willing Mack • 11G k The Nature of Mr, Mencken's Responsi- bility 118 5. Wlial is 4 Change ’ or 4 Protore ss,' and ai r they One or Many? 119 0 From White Settler to Poor City- White 124 7 "Aimncana’ of Mencken 127 S. ‘Complexes’ as between Whites 187 9. The American Rnby 189 10 Was Walt Whitman the Fatlur of t lie* American Rabv ? 140 11. The Healthy Attitude ot tin American to Ins " Rabvlon ' 1 12 12 Sherwood Amleison 148 18. Th< KssentialRomantieismol theRetum to tlie 4 Se\aire’ and the ‘Primitn e’ 111 1 k Possessed by ‘a Dark Demon’ 1 4G Sec tiun ll : The ‘ Inferiority Com pi ex ’ or in * Romantic White, anl> Student Suicides 1. Romance oil its Last (Physical) Legs 149 Vill / CONTENTS 2. The Consciousness of One Branch of Humanity is the •Annihilation, oi Another Branch page 153 3. When the ‘Consciousness’ or Sout of a Racc.is Crushed, the Race Collapses 155 4. Dr. Berman and the Suicide Epidemic • among the Whites of the United Slates 1 57 5. Races similarly rumc/1 l>v the White • Man 101 6. Behaviourist ‘ Summer Conversation ’ ICG 7. # Race or Ideas? ICO Section III: ‘Love? Wiiat IIo! Smell- ing Strangeness’ 1. ‘We Whites, creatures of spii it.’-- D II. Lawrence 174 2. Mr. Law rcnce.i Follow ci of the Bergson- Spcngltr School 17C 3 Spengler and the ‘Musical’ Conscious- ness 178 4. Communism, Feminism, and the Un- conscious found in the Mexican Ind- ian by Mr. Lawrence 180 5. The Indian a ‘Ditliyranibic Spectator’ 184 G. The Under- Parrot and t he Over-Dog 186 7. Evolution, a la Mexicamc: (genre cata- clvsnnque, a la Marx) 187 8. Race or Class Separation by means of ‘Dimension’ 192 9. An Invitation to Suicide addressed to the White Man 193 10. ‘Spring was coming on fast m Southern Indiana’ 197 IX PALEFACE • | 1 1 . ‘ Torrents of Spring 5 ‘ page 200 12. The Dread of Stxual Impotence 203 13. The Manner of Mr Anderson 201. 11. ‘Rrfltal Realism’ turn the Sophistica- tion of Freud 207 15 The Black Communism ol Anderson 200 10 ‘Whul ho* Smelling Strangeness’ 211 17 Tlit* - P<»( lie’ Indian 212 IS The Mississippi and the Manufacture!* 21 1* 10. Passages Irom Poo) H htfr !?I0 20. The* Conti adiet ion between the Com- munist Kmotionalitv of Mr. Anderson and Ins impulses to countei the Machine Vge 210 21. White \SentimentaliU 222 22. l I \ms1i I was a Nigger" 223 23 "The* Kid 225 21. The* Fanfods 232 25 •(Jnc , is J and the Noble Redskin 233 20. Machine s emits Men 235 27. Ilenn For«l and the 'Pool White ’ 230 Conclusion 1. The* While Machine and its Complexes 238 2. 4 Interim it} / and njtlulriwd 4 Rack m mu d the mcasuicriK nts of' cranial index, o( lip brain and <\r, m which \hc Boi/oi 4 in\< sligalor" will indulge, t lie high scientific plane in shoil upon which so much of I Ins matter is gushed forth. But tin re are strict limits to mv ability to help, and these I must now deline. Meantime I again publish and foretell that the tune will come (and that lmmediateh) w r hcn, upon the dail\ ‘starn d and red-billed ' appearance before the footlights oi some indignant righteous figure (his facecorkt d to look black) despatched by Mr. Knopf or Mi. Mencken oi Mi. Plomcr to abuse and ridicule the aiuhenee (squatting beneath lun., pale both w T it h natural pigment and with equally understandable alarm), and to tell them what a lousy lot they are, an extremely pah figure will either arise from among the speetalois and dramatically approach the stage, or else will <»ppiar out of a trap, -*p defend from the ceiling, or merely stalk fiomthr wings, and w ? c shall h.ear w'hat we shall hear. § ! 2 If the Redshn* *r in our Position. This fiist csmu, entitled A ‘ moral situation is de\oted to showing the part played by the puritan IF THE REDSKIN WERE IN OUR POSITION • morality m the present situation. T do not of course mean that without that hui*h, double-fan d and doublo-edgod. deeply sentimental rode the world- scene would not ha\< changed d»astieall\? What I do mean is that tin* transformation of on; society, consequent upon the technical limmphs of sea nee, would have been combated perhaps m a moie rational at mosplu te -not, as at picsinl, thick with a mcdimal gloom ol bloodshot iightcoiiMiess. Historically, tlu lniseha f that lesidesm unbridled moral righteousness can be* described as follows.-- Having wiped out 01 subjugated all peoples who had not had tlu* advantages of a elmstian training in gentleness, humilitv, and othei-worldhness, the pmitan Pali faces ot \nu rini and Kuiojh* iiatuialJv win very eimtnte ami tiled to make lip for it to those who were lift. Quantities of edilSmg hooks (which were translated into all language's) w*ie pro- duced, pointing out what a bc«»sl the* Paleface was. Then were just a ft w Pale laces who tried te> blull it out and announc* d soundly that they were ‘blond beasts' —but such sc i tancs abuse d both their brother Palefaee*s and tlieir imported Pale (ialilcuu’ (iod into the* bargain sotli.d made ne> dilfercnce. There is no especially sc'ntimental or <*\t*n mis- guided uuncim lit of ('mancipation today, anywhere* m the world, that the' typical protest ant moralist can oppose, on an} lexical ground Foi /eg/e ullu he is committed to e\cry sentimental moral value what- ever. 1 do not #of course mean that w'e* should behave like* Redskins, but it is not quite pointless to note that wen the Redskins where todav the Whites are, technically paramount in a mixed population, 5 PALEFACE no ‘Colour Question 5 could ‘possibly have arisen. The supreme beauty significance and limitless superi- ority of the copper shin, that of Choctaw or Blnck- foot, over skins of all other colours, would be a settled axiom and doctrine no hipt of any other point of \ic\\ would ever pass the se\ere red lips of tin Red legislators and then fellow ltedskins. Also, the Redskin being notoriously taciturn, there would not be much even of that : then 1 would be ntJ’neod of ' i f palaver, of course, whatever. -In short, it is con- science that makes cowards, or saints, or just senti- mental pinky-pinky little* Palefaces of us, that is the truth of the mat ter: and yet we are as harsh as evei with each other, m business and in private life, and there is home chance that we may wipe each other completely out — where, with the disappearance of the White skin, the Colour question would auto- matically cease. A question is lying m wait for nu : ‘Are you not then upon the sick 1 of conscience —you despise the Christian ethic ? 1 Hut it is to that I wished to lead, and I answer promptly- ‘Oh no — you have quite mistaken my meaning You expect too much of me, or too little, according to the point of view. Th< “principle of an absolute* value m the human person as such," of wlumvn i itt or order. I am eager to advance But you ? I only question if you fully understood the nature of your chnstian sacri- fice. If )ou do not understand it, then it is useless and you ar<* nurclj a fool. When a person as it were selfishly immolates himself, in response to some very tawrlrv emotional appeal, we call it a senti- mentality. Aie jou sure that your asceticism (or 6 THE ETHICS OF THE COLOUR QUESTION humanitarianism, radicalism, or liberalism^ is not of that kind?’ m If you want to know the answer to these questions of mine, see whether my further analysis outrages or annoys you or not. Then vou will know r . § 3. The Ethics at flic Basis oQlhe Colour Question . . Tiik European political leaders have been almost fantastically sensitive to ethical considerations m their policies from time to time — they have seldom acted too brutally without afterwards acting too gt ntlv, to restore t lie Christian balance. This hyper- sensitive condition induced by their proteslant Christian training, ol kirk and sunday-school, has had its good and bad side, m the sequel: but as statesmanship, upon the old jingo basis, it w r as in- d< fensible. So having isolated in the present situation m which our society finds itself the principal motive power, that which gi\es it the colour that it has though not the form, we can proceed to an examina- tion of those ethical principle* at their source. For this purpose I will take the very useful Prolegomena to Ethics of T. H. Green. (Green was a celebrated Oxford moral philosopher, issuing from the revolu- tionary philosophy of Hegel, rather earlier than Bradley and Bosanquet ) I had better say at once that it is a book that appears to me almost typically unintelligent. It is indeed representative of that blight that morals have insinuated under the skin of most Europeans. The sheer sentimentalism of this revolutionary piotestant moralist is nevertheless a 7 PALEFACE ver> i ntt Testing medium through which to look at the objects of our present concern. One reason for this is that it Mas the characteristic atmosphere 1 of anglo-sa^on life, during many years, during which the events of today \v ere being prepared, throughout the world. • § 4. The Can sc of 'Gob and the People: In speaking of the conscientious perplexities of* the religious mind, when it linds tin teaching of its dogma in conflict with the interest of the; Stale, Gro«‘»i "writes . ‘the same ditlicult\ . . . in earlier days must have 1 occurred to Quakers and Anabaptists, wheie the law derived trom Scnpl mv seemed eont rudietory to that of the state, and to those earl} Christian* for whom the law which they chsobe\cd in icfusmg to sacrilicc retained any authority. In still earlier tunes it may have aiiseii m the form ol that con- flict bit ween the laws of the fanuh and the law of the State, presented in the AnUgont . Noi is the ease really dilfcreni when the liiodcm citizen, in his capacity as an oilicial or as a soldier, is called upon to help in putting down some revolution- ary movement which yet presents itself to Ins inmost cornu tmn ii> tilt. ( aud< ui ‘ God and the People ! M ’ Green goes on to consider what must be the atti- tude of the philosopher m this painful situation — in which God, or conscience, is upon one side, appar- ently, and the State, or the organized authority at any given moment, upon the othei. lie concludes 8 THE CAUSE OF GOD AND THE PEOPLE ’ that the philosopher,. hv the effect of his* teaching beforehand upon the minds oft lie effective minority, may have ^>me useful influence in the moment of crisis. fc In preparation for the times when conscience is thus liable to be divided against itself, much practical set vice inav bo rt ndcicd by a philosophy which, without depreciating the authority of con- science as such, can explain t hi origin of its con- flicting deliverances, and, without pronouncing unconditional]^ for eithei, can direct the soul to the true md. . . .* The counsel of such a philosopher as he has been considering might ‘have its effect upon the few who lead the many, m pripanng the mind through years of meditation for the da\s when prompt practical dt cision is requited’* that is the point. In anv ‘conflict between pm ate opinion and au- thority,’ Gm n’s counsel would always be on the side of the individual and his independent conscience. And indeed to the lull-blooded claims of such a * con- science ’ to make a waste-land of our life, Green would set positively no bounds at all. TCver\ year ‘conscience’ must weigh more heavily upon us, as Christian men, he uihrms Evciy fresh star that swum into our ken is a fiesh burden -—never a new delight, alwa\s an added nightmaie. Reflection upon the load sir have to carry m comparison with the lighthearted Hellene of Antiquity, pro- vides Green with a long series of dismal reflections, inviting us to an ideal of mechanical and colourless asceticism. PALEFACE » § 5. Passing "the poittf, beyond which there seems no longer to be either good or exnU To pas*, the barrier described above by Aristotle into a non-etlneal region is not part of the asceticism of tins particular kind of morale!, lor lus c willing- ness to endure even unto complete self-renunciation, even to the point of forsaking ail possibility of pleasure,’ is envisaged by Green in the most cheer-* less manner, m a kind of paroxysm of middleeiass nineteenth-century christian-duty, that is calculated to make the flesh creep far more thoroughfy than could any self-imposed rigours of the gvmnosophist. ‘To an ancient Greek a society composed of a small group of freemen, having recognized claims upon each other and using a much larger body of men with no such recognized claims as instru- ments in their service, seemed the only possible society. In such an order of things those calls could not be heard which evoke the sacrifices constantly witnessed m the nobler lives of Christ- endom, sacrifices which would be quite other than they are, if they did not involve the renunciation of those “pleasures of the soul” and “unimxcd pleasures,” as they were reckoned in the Platonic psychology, which it did i'*>t he irt, or conscience, to bkuue you, 1 beheve. 1 fmd it impossible to rescue myself from that initial error. 14 • OUR WORLD ALMOST PURELY KTJIK'AL « • • §7. Our Wo? Id has become a?? mlmost /h/iy/;/ .Ethical Place . • The ‘moral situation’ which m those quotations from Green I h^\c, 1 hope, biought clearly before jou, is the moral situation that underlies all tin questions that arc agitating us today, — The funda- mentals of this situation aro # cloaih explained to \ou by these quotations lroin Gun u. It is ‘a moral situation/ that is the essential point: our world has become an almost puielj ethical place. But since the time of Green much progress has been made — lie would scarcely recognize it. (If he came to life again I .shudder to think of the sheer avoirdu- pois of miserable duty that would be added to his already staggering load.) There is the same ‘moral situation/ but men’s capacity to harm and interim wdh some extent (the devil or villam- of-thc-piccc being now of course the o\erbearmg, stupid, wicked Paleface as seen by the conventional revolutionary tract) by the excesses of the anti Whites — not, I am afraid, from what I have called cspiit who arc out of work and without the proper requirements for animal life. Against the 23 PALEFACE t London parks at night penniless people lie huddled in their hundreds. Our streets both day and night swarm with every variety of beggar. « All these are White People, and they rule the world, suffering to a man from 1 superiority ’ complexes. It is a paradox : for they have a strange wav of testifying to their superiority! Bv turning to the 'more prosperous levels of the community' you wifit find equally many evidences of overweening mastery — only there the t\rahnous Paleface is mciely more restrained — lie ijoes not Hmg himself down upon the pavement to sleep on a winter night to show his ‘mastery,’ lie has other and subtler ways. If there is mastery, at all events, let us confess that it is verv skin-deep: employment is obtained and held under more exacting conditions than be- fore, there is everywhere more anxiety and less freedom. On this last head let me quote from the Daily Telegraph , a paper that cannot be accused of ‘bolshevist’ propensities, surely. MOST GOVERNED NATION ‘THIRTY YEARS' CHANGE * Oi i’a vv a , uni ay ‘Sir William Clark, British High Commissioner, addressing the Institute of Professional Men and Civil Servants of Canada, went on to say: “ l lt is lairly ,*aie to say that thirty years ago Great Britain was less governed than almost any country m Europe, but now its inhabitants are more thoroughly inspected, controlled, and ad- 24 MOST GOVERNED NATION ministered from the cradle to the grave than those, perhaps, of any other natidh.” ’ It is nothing, of course, to be ‘inspected and con- trolled. ’ 13ut masters are not overlooked, numbered like sheep, inspected and hectored for minor dis- obedience. We are in Europe barelv ten years away from an unexampled War (both m losses, duration and m aimlessness) of the* most consummate barbarity; and wi*arc told on all hands m our ‘capitalist * Press that we are well on the way to another one, which will be far worse. In the last war (Mr. Citizen is informed) the noble airmen of the various countries were only able to bomb to bits a mere handful of citizens (owing to the regrettable backwardness of the man of science — after all an air-force officer or a munition magnate cannot bo expected to know anything about chemicals himself — he cannot make* the bombs, nor improve the planes to carry them!) — but in the next jolly old flare-up (the next ‘Great Adventure * m other words) millions of people, it is confidently expected, will be wiped out in a single night of fairly successful bombing. Nov/ as very few people today are thoroughly taken in by jmgo cries and sudden accounts of the detestable characters possessed by all Frenchmen, or Germans, or Russians or whatever it may be (followed by a peremptory order to massacre all these villains and devils), it is not easy for them to feel very perfectly top-doggy or to enjoy as fully as they might wish the sensation that they are ‘the roof and crown of things/ The gilded palaces in which 25 PALEFACE the Million drinks its tea or sees Ramon Novarro or Dolores Costello, give\hem a little that feeling, but not altoget her. And not being quite irrational, they do see berfbath this luxurious gilding, for which they pay their sixpenees. in glimpses (between the cracks of some foolish film, between the lines of somedrivel- ling article), a ‘ moral situat ion ’ that has little enough comfort to satisfy the philosopher from whom I have quoted. May not, you ask yourself* as you watch him, this Master of the World find himself in the end, abject and leaderlcss, a herd whose pale skin is a standing reproach — an emblem of tyranny instead of an emblem of privilege — driven madly hither and thither in gigantic wars that have at length become completely meaningless? If this apocalyptic picture sounds to your ears sensational or far-fetched, I can only say that you forget very quickly what was called at the time ‘Armageddon.’ With these circumstances (of enormous disaster so close behind us and of a most uncertain future — to judge by Naval-Pacts and the rest of what we are told in our papers) featured for once properly, as they deserve, well in the forefront of our mind, is it possible to listen very patiently to tales of ‘our’ oppression of the Black, the Yellow or the Red? They are doubtless * oppressed, all of them, just as we are — if you must talk about oppression: but that we is a thing that today sticks deeper and deeper m our throats. ‘Our Indian Possessions* is not a phrase that even the stupidest Englishman would employ today: and whoever Indians have to deal with — and no doubt they have to deal with somebody — it is not with vs. 26 MOST GOVERNED NATION I have been accused* for my Palejace , of a desire to keep under my heel the population of Bcjigal, by my friend Paul and my friend Sage (as I have been accused for my remarks on Mother India eff a desire to rescue India from Paleface dominion and its abuses). I have answered those gentlemen else- where, however. In addressing my brother Pale- faces, at the start, and in using, possibly, an us or a we (as # one Paleface to anotlier), it may really have been* assumed, of course, that I was implying that ‘our’ interests, if there are such things, possess a beautiful coherence and simplicity that m fact is far from the case. Were there readers who assumed that I intended to say that the ‘Palefaces ’ should be given for ever and for ever softer beds, nicer and warmer clothes, better roofs over their heads, and more pocket-money than their Black, Yellow, and Red brothers ? 1 hope at all events that now I shall have succeeded in disabusing any one of such a belief. But in a further section I will be engaged in eradicating even more thoroughly such a mis- conception from the casual mind. § 11. The Paleface , that 1 negation oj coloutS as seen by Du Bois. To the European who has not followed at all the sociological controversy peculiar to the Publics of America, some of the point of what I have written may quite well be# lost, for the ‘problem’ that cer- tainly exists as between the inhabitants of Europe (that ‘small cape’ tacked on to Asia) and the great continents inhabited by the ‘coloured’ peoples, or 27 PALEFACE shared with the Whites, is not a matter of everyday interest.. The europPan Press resounds with the disputes of the alsatian Separatists, the roumaman or tyroleftn minorities, the frontier squabbles of Fascist Italy with France or Svntzerland, and of course with dog-racing and the explosion of gas- mains, but it is strictly the europea n scene of the moment that is reflected, and all other parts of the world arc shut out, they have no news-valu&. This is far more so today than when what happened in America or Asia mattered immeasurably less* to the average European. It may under these circumstances be as well to select a book or two, and by means of a fc w extracts show that this ‘problem’ is at least an extremely exciting one to many people, and that books dealing with it are able to command a wide public. The books of Mr. Plonier the 1 South African novelist are no doubt known to all South Africans, and m Eng- land they have received some attention, so 1 will not take them, but rather make my selection from amencan lists. ‘The Negro in Borzoi Books’ (as the Knopf ad- vertisement runs) is very prominent, and it is Mr. Knopf, the Now York publisher, who in his sponsor- ing of the Awn icon Mercury and his constant featur- ing of Negro subjects has done more than any one else to bring this sort of agitation to a head. In The Autobiography of an eu'-enlouud Man , in The Fire in the Flint, Flight, Wooing? •/ Jezebel , PctUjjer, The Weanj Blues, Fine Clothes Jar the Jew , Negro Drawings, Fo'mchaday , Lily, Lady Luck , The Wild- cat , The American Negro, Quicksand, and The Sailor’s 28 THE PALEFACE, THAT ‘NEGATION OF COLOUR’ • Return , you have throughout the theme of Black versus White as a Icit mohv— or at all event* that of the sad lot <5f the Negro in the White World. It has never been my privilege to meet Mr. Knopf, and I can hazard no opinion as to what actuates him m this matter: but T have no reason to suppose that Jt has been anything but a compassionate sense of the Negro's sufferings, coupled with an intelligent dislike of that certain shallow' eoeksureness shown bv many Palefaces, both of which fet lings, if they are hit, I share willi him. He has certainly been instrumental, however that max be, in improving the Negro’s position a great deal in the North, and m reducing on all sides the cocksureness I have just mentioned. Hut both the important Review that lias had his support, and the books he has published, have adopt'd often an exceedingly partisan and bellicose attitude. And it is that which mud in the end, if persisted in, call out the White Hopes, to whom I referred at the commencement of this book. There is however a \ ohmic entitled Dark Pnnecss, by W. E. B. Du Bois, published b\ llarcouit Brace, which suggests itself to me as the best tiling of the sort to quote lrom of any, m order to provide* the uninitiated White reader with some idea of the character and intensity of this movement. Dark Princess is a novel: it describes the adventures of a negro doctor, named Matthew Towns. It is a novel of tlie best-seller type, from that point of view in the same category as say Van Vechtcn. It is written I belie ve by a Negro, w r hich is of course to start with better for a book than being written 29 PALEFACE by Van Vechten (the author of Nigger Heaven — so well known that there could be no object in quoting from it). A rather fiery political purpose informs the DarJf Prince&s, and it combines the charactci- lstics of one of the cheaper films, with a violent political tract, but m tins case, T believe, quite a sincere political tract. Matthew Towns is a negro medical student m New York. After two years at a medical School he wishes to register for obstetrics. The ‘Dean’reVuses to allow him to do this. In the course of an alterca- tion the Dean remarks, ‘Well, wlial did you expect ? Juniors must have obstetrical work. Do you think white women patients are going to have a nigger doctor delivering their babies ? ’ Towns throws his certificate and other documents in the face of the Dean: after that he leaves America, naturally m a very savage state of mind. In a Berlin Cafe, where he is sitting very home- sick for the Dark World from which he has become exiled, his eyes suddenly fall upon a beautiful and romantic figure — a dark figure — in short, upon one of his own land. This event is described as follows. ‘First and above all came that sense of color: into this world of pale Yellowish and pinkish parchment, that absence or negation of color, came suddenly a glow of golden brown skin.’ (This World of pale vcllowish and pinkish parch- ment* is our World, the White \W>rld ; m language of tlus sort in fact our poor World is always de- scribed — m a most disrespectful and wounding manner.) 30 THE PALEFACE, THAT NEGATION OF COLOUR * The eyes of the dark, the ‘colorful’ apparition are ‘pools of night,’ they have * beautiful depths ’ (you could imagine yourself in the midst of a story by D. H. Lawrence, almost). Matthew pulls himself together. ‘Here — here in Berlin, and a few tables away, actually sat a radiantly beautiful woman. bnd she was colored.' But out of that circumambient world of ‘pale yellowish and pinkish parchftient’ conies a figure, one tvith a pinkish parchment face — in short, VVhite — an American White. This pasty ‘negation of color’ attempts to thrust himself upon the beautiful dark apparition. Towns follows them outside, and as the dark lady is about to enter a taxi, he hits the pinkish parchment mask ‘right betw'ecn the smile and the ear.’ Exit the White World. Matthew' Towns springs into the taxi. After a little con- i ersation he finds he is in the presence of an Indian Princess. H.R.1I. The Princess Kautilya of Bwodpur, India,’ it transpires, is one of the leaders of an organ- ization for arming all the Coloured Peoples, in Asia, America, and Africa, against the Whites. He is invited to a dinner, at which Coloured leaders from all parts of the world arc present. Here is the de- scription of the guests. ‘ Ten of them sat at the t able. On the Princess’ left was a Japanese, faultless in dress and manner, evidently a man of importance, as the deference showm him and Uic orders on his breast indicated. He was quite yellow, short and stocky, with a face which was a delicately handled but perfect mask. There w r ere two Indians, one a man grave, 31 PALEFACE haughty, and old, dressed richly in turban and embroidered tunic?, the other, in conventional dress and turban, a young man, handsome and alert, Vhose eyes were ever on the Princess. There were two Chinese, a voung man and a young w'oman, he in a plain but becoming Chinese cos- tume of heavy blue silk, she in a pretty dress, hglf Chinese, half European in e ffect. An Egyptian and his wife came next, he suave, talkative, and polite — just a shade 1 too talkative and a btt too polite, Matthew thought; his wife a big* hand- some, silent woman, elegantly jeweled and gowned, with much bare flesh. Beyond them was a cold and rather stiff Arab who spoke seldom, and then abrupt 1\ These were the guests of the Princess Kantilya — who turns to Towns and remarks, ‘“You will note. Mi. Towns, that we represent here much of the Darker World. Indee d, when all our circle is pre- sent, wo lepresent all of it, save your world of Black Folk/’ 4 All the darker world except the darkest,” said the Eg\ptian/ As to the 1 deportment of tins Dark, conspiratorial company, it left nothing to be desired, from the standpoint of the most exacting Paleface traditions. Indeed, after they ‘had eaten some delicious tidbits of meat and vegetables’ and been ‘served with a delicate sou p’ (the service and ciusinc are thoroughly european, only more magnificent, of course, than anything known to the Gourmets Club in Paris — there are ‘des 1 runs normandes ’ at t he right moment in the ‘collation,’ only deeper holes than any Palc- 32 * HE PALEFACE, THAT ‘NEGATION OF COLOUR ’ * face ever dug, and a<* to the caviare — ! !) — hut after the first ‘tidbits of moat 5 Towns becomes more and more thunderstruck al ‘the case and fluency with which most of this company used languages, so easily, without groping or hesitation, and 'with light sure shading, 5 and the manner m which ‘they talked arf*in French, literature in Italian, politics in Ger- man, and everything m clear English.’ For my # own part 1 must confess that, in reading Dark Princess, I was somewhat abashed, myself, to remark 4 hat these Dark plotters were as familiar with ' Vorticism' — my invention — as w r ith chop- sticks. But I was flattcied, too, of course: whereas Towns grows less and less elated as the meal goes on. ‘ u Pan -Africa,” says the Princess, “belongs logically with Pan-Asia; and for that reason Mr. Towns is welcomed tonight bv you, I am sure, and by me especially. lie did me a seivicc iv- 1 was returning from the New Palace.’ ‘They all looked interested, but the Egyptian broke out : ‘ “Ah, Your Highness, the New Palace, and what is the fad today? What has followed ex- pressionism, cv bism, futurism, vortieism ? I con- fess myself at sea. Picasso alarms me. Matisse sets me aflame. But I do not understand them. I prefer the classics.” ‘"‘The Congo,” said the Princess, “is flooding the Acropolis. There is a beautiful Kandinsky on exhibit, and .*>mc lovely and startling things by unknown newcomers.” “Metis, ’ replied the Egyptian, dropping into French— and they were all off to the discussion, c 33 PALEFACE save the silent Egyptian woman and the taciturn Arab. ‘Here again Matthew w as puzzled. These per- sons 'easily penetrated worlds where he was a stranger. Frankly, but for the context lie would not have known whethrr Picasso was a man, a city, or a vegetable. lie had never heard of Ma- tisse. Lightly, almost carelessly, as lie thought, lus companions leapt to unknown subjects. Yet they knew. They knew art, books, and litera- ture, polities of all nations, and not newspaper polities merely, but inner currents and whisper- ings, unpublished facts.’ The european culture of this gathering of dusky principals is m brief nothing short of staggering — they can mix Picasso with a ‘tidbit of meat’ and impale ‘ Futurism ’ on l lie wav to a potato: but at a certain point in the ceremony Matthew Towns ‘left the piquant salad and laid dowm Ins fork slowly.’ For he detected what is described as ‘a color line within a color line/ It was the Japanese who had made him leave ‘ the piquant salad/ The Japanese has east a doubt upon the honour- able capacity of the american Negro. But the Princess says that in Moscow' she has heard such accounts of the Negro as to make her m fact sit up. ‘‘‘You see, Moscow' has reports/’ she says, 1 careful reports of the w r orld’s masses. And the report on the Negroes of America was astonishing. At the tune, I doubted its truth: their education, their work, their property, their organizations; and the odds, the terrible, crushing odds against 34 THE PALEFACE, THAT ‘NEGATION OF COLOUR’ which, inch by inch 4 and Ijeartbreak by heart- break, they have forged their unfalterifig way upward. If the report is true, they arc # a nation today, a modern nation worthy to stand beside any nation here." 4 “But can wc put any faith m Moscow ?” asked *the Egyptian. “Are \\c n*>t keeping dangerous eompajiy and leaning on bryken reeds?” V‘ Well,” said Matthew , 4 if they are as sound in everything as in tins report from America, they’ll bear listening to.” ‘The young Indian spoke gently and e\enly, but with bright eyes. ‘ “Naturally,” he said, one can see Mr. Towns needs must agree with the Bolshevik estimate of the lower classes.” It is m this manner that Towns meets with 4 a prejudice within a prejudice.’ The ‘lower classed amongst Coloured people air, li seems, the Negroes. The Negro is racially a sort of Proletariat , it becomes evident, and is treated a little ‘de haut en bas # by these brilliant asiatie conversationalists, plotting world-w'ar by the side of the Spree, m the heart of a White capital. ‘The Congo is Hooding the Acro- polis'' — c\cn the Pimeess had said that, indicating that the Congo Black was considered by her in some way a come-down for the White Overlord, in whose blood symbolically w r as that of Praxiteles — a very different thing fronfa Congo Black. Still, the Prin- cess is a bit of a Bolshie — it is evident from the start that she docs not share' with her fellow-Asiaties that inveterate aristocratism of the Hindu, which 35 PALEFACE makes him such an uncomfortable customer in some ways. ‘ “Wc American Blacks,” said Matthew Towns, “are very common people. My grandfather was a whipped and driven slave; my father was never really free and died in fail. My mother plows and washes lor a jiving. We come out of the depths — the blood and mud of battle. And from just such depths, I take it, came most of the worth-while things m this old world. If they didn’t — God help us.” ‘The table was very still, save for the very faint clink of chma as the servants brought in the creamed and iced fruit. ‘The Princess turned, and he could feel her dark eyes full upon him. ‘ “ I wonder — I wonder,” she murmured, almost catching her breath. ‘The Indian frowned. The Japanese smiled, and the Egyptian whispered to the Arab.’ The party does not break up till after midnight. ‘It started on lines so familiar to Matthew that he had to shut lus eyes and stare again at their sw r arthy faces: Superior races — the right to rule — born to command — inferior breeds- -the lower classes — the rabble. How the Egyptian rolled off lus longue Ins contempt for the “r-r-rabblc” ! How contemptuous w T as the young Indian of in- ferior races! But how hutnorous it was to Matthew to see all tables turned ; the rabble now was the white workers of Europe; the inferior races were the ruling whites of Europe and 36 • THE PALEFACE, THAT ‘ NEGATION OF COLOUR ’ America. The superior races were yellow and brown.’ Matthew at least is comforted to find ‘all the tables turned.’ It is pleasant to hear l he White Workers of Eifrope and America described as the ‘rabble/ and the White Rulers as the members of ‘an inferior race.’ But it is disagreeable to lind the American Negro discriminated against by people so very little lighter than himself. Dar\ 1 J ) nicvHS is a long book, tins is only the begin- ning. It takes you baek to America and you pass with Towns through a series of revolutionary adventures, lie loses faith in the Princess, whom he loses sight of: he becomes steward oil a railway and is almost lynched by me mbers of the Ku Klux Klan, on their way to a great Clan rail} at Chicago. lie suffers prison, he makes lepoi Ls on the revolutionary poten- tialities of Ins people, and so forth. At length he is mated with the "Dark Princess’ and all is well: he is eventually hailed as the "Messenger and Messiah of all the Darker Worlds/ Everything ends upon a Hosanna. A few isolated quotations will show how useful this book is to sum up all this literature, which al- ready is so considerable in bulk, and which will of course become year by year of more importance. This first quotation is from a letter written by the ‘Dark Princess’ to Matthew Towms; she has told him how luckv h<; is really to be in America, where his ‘ “feet are further within the secret circle of that power that . . . rules the world. That” [she 37 PALEFACE goes on] “is the advantage that your people have had. You are wofkmg within. They are stand- ing here m this technical triumph of human power and can use it as a fulcrum to lift earth and seas and stars. ‘ “ But to be m the center of po\f ‘er is not enough. You must be free and able to act. You are npt free m Chicago nor*New York. But heie in Vir- ginia you are at the edge of a black wortd. The black belt of the Congo, the Nile, and the Ganges reaches by way of Guiana, Haiti, and Jamaica, like a red arrow, up into the heart of white America. Thus I see a mighty synthesis : you can work in Africa and Asia right hero in America if you work in the Black Belt. For a long time 1 was puzzled, as I have written you, and hesitated; but now I know. I am exalted, and with my high heart comes illumination. I have been sore bewildered by this mighty America, this ruthless, terrible, intriguing Thing. My home and heart is India. Your heart of hearts is Africa. And now I see through the cloud. You may stand here, Mat- thew — here, halfway between Maine and Florida, between the Atlantic and the Pacific, with Europe m your face and China at your back; with in- dustry in your right hand ynd commerce in your left and the Farm beneath your steady feet: and yet be in the Land of the Blacks.” * Here are a few extracts fronj letters that con- stantly pass between Matthew and the Dark Princess. ‘“Revolution must come, but it must start from within. We must strip to the ground and 88 t HE PALEFACE, THAT 1 NEGATION OF COLOUR ’ fight up. Not the colored Farm but the white Factory is the beginning; And the white Office and the Street stand next. The white artisan must teach technique to the colored • farmer. White business men must teach linn organization; the scholar mdst teacli him how to think, and the .bank ,*r how to rule.” * This third extract is from a Jet ter of the Princess Kautilva m which she tells Matthew of the meeting of the Central Committee and l he nature of their deliberations. ‘ “I did not — I could not tell you all, Matthew, until now. The Great Central Committee of Yellow, Brown, and Black is finally to meet. You are a member. The High Command is to be chosen Ten years of preparation are set. Ten more years of final planning, and then five years of intensive struggle. In 1052, the Dark World goes free — whether m Peace and fostering Friendship w r ith all men, or m Blood and Storm — it is for The in — t hr Pale Masters of t oday — to say. ‘ “We are, of course, in factions — that ought to be the most heartening thing m human conference — but with enemies ready to spring and spring again, it scares one. 4 “One group of us, of whom I am one, believes m the path of Peace and Reason, of co-operation among the best and poorest, of gradual emancipa- tion, seil-rule, eyid w r orld-widc abolition of the color line, and of poverty and war. ‘“The strongest group among us believes only m Force. Nothing but bloody defeat m a world- 39 PALEFAcfe wide' war of dark against # white will, in their opin- ion, ever beat sciAc and decency into Europe and America and Ausiralia. They Iiuac no faith m mere* reason, in alliance w r ith oppressed labor, white and colored; in liberal (bought, religion, nothing ! Pound their arroganct* into submission, they civ: kill them; conquer them; humiliate them . . . Last fught twenty-live messengers had a pi cli mi nar\* conference in this r6om, with ancient ceremony of wine and blood and Itre. I and my Buddhist priest, a MohammedaivMullah, and a Hindu leader of Swaiaj, were India; Japan was represented by an artisan and the blood of the Shoguns; young China was there and a Lama ot Thibet; Persia, Aiabia, and Afghanistan; black men from the Sudan, East, West, and South Africa, Indians from Central and South America, brown men from the West Indies, and — yes, Mat- thew, Black America was there too. Oh, you should have heard the high song oi consecration and triumph that shook these rolling lulls! 4 “We came in every guise, at my command when around the world I sent the symbol of the nee dish; we came as laborers, as cotton pickers, as peddlers, as fortune-tellers, as travellers and tounsts, as meulictiits, servants. A month we have been gathering. Three days we have been awaiting you — in a single night we shall all fade away and go, on foot, bj boat, by rail, and air- plane. The Day has dawijed, Matthew — the Great Plan is on its way.’” Have you read Uncle Tom’s Cabin ? It was a 40 •the paleface, t^at negation OF COLOUR ’ book that was reputed.to have put the spark to the gunpowder, and to have precipitated the American Civil War. If you are disposed to dismiss the soit of Film-farrago 1 have been quoting, \oi*nmst at the same time recall that Mis. Hcechei Stowe was as a novelist nef better than l)u Hois. I do nol in- deed mean that any single book toda\ could ha\e the same effect that Uncle Tom's Cabin had in a simpler time, with fewer books. Hut hundreds of sueh*books as Dark Princess , accompanied by Films and plays, might reasonably bei xp< ct< dtolia\esonie such effect — a particular consciousness being evolved by this mass of books and plays, that is t he point. That the Whites, on their side, are being given a certain consciousness — this dual process is what I have been discussing: for the Coloured Peoples are urged to develop a consciousness of supenoiity, and the same book seeks to lorce upon the Paleface a corresponding sense of in/t run ////. It is this that is unfortunate: the mere reversal of a superiority- -a change in its colour nothing mine— rather than its total abolition. So far it has been found an easier matter to make the Paleface put his tail between his legs than it has to provide the Negro or Coolie with a ‘superiority complex.’ The Negro is not really interested and is much too happy-go-luckv to approach these matters with the same earnestness as his mentors. As to the people of the East, their traditions are not propitious fcr # such a transformation, it is only indirectly that they can be worked upon, though m the end, and with the changing conditions of their life, it will be accomplished. 41 paleface! < The Kegro it would seem is the despair of the pro- pagandist. In the kook from which I have just been quoting there is a Coloured meeting in Atlanta, of local Black ‘Radicals/ and one of them exclaims at the end of it — ‘You couldn’t get one nigger m a million to fight at all, and then they M sell each other out/ The trouble of course is that the ‘nigger’ js of much the same stuff as the White, he wants to be left alone: above all* he wishes to identify himself with his Paleface neighbour as far as possible, not to be put in opposition, and so m confront. # He has much more in common with Babbitt than with the Coloured Intellectual. The moment a Negro develops anv purpose and ambition m life, his one idea, it seems, is to transform himself into the nearest approach to a White member of the respect able imddlcclasshis colour handicap will allow. Matthew Towns, while a coloured porter on a train, found that the Coloured passengers he tried to befriend resented lus zealous attentions. Thus: ‘His colored passenger did “not care” to be brushed ... he glanced at her again. 4 “Anything I can do for you?” he asked. 4 “Aren’t you a college man ? ” she asked, lather abruptly. 4 “I uas,” he answered. ‘She regarded him severely. “I should think then you ’d be ashamed to be a porter,” she said. ‘He bit lus lips and gathered up her bags/ It is a lip-biting business to go to the rescue of your fellow ‘skin/ either Black or White. I am sure that any one would have the same experience 42 ' THK PALEFArE DEMOCRATIC IDEAL who attempted to go to the help of the Paleface. All this is exceedingly disappointing from the stand- point of the propagandist; and indeed one cannot help sympathizing with him m tins respect* for the middleclass ideal of the Paleface is not a very high one, in the first Instance : anil then the conversion of 'millions of Negroes into coffee-coloured Babbitts is not an exceedingly stimukfting picture for the revolutionary mind, nor for tJie intelligent person of whatever political opinion. § 12. The Black, and the Paleface Middleclass Demo- cratic Ideal. I will next quote a few passages from Quicksand (Knopf, 1028) by Nella Larson. The following dia- logue occurs between the Coloured girls who aie teachers in a Coloured College. ‘Margaret laughed. “That's just ridiculous sentiment, Helga, and you know it. But von haven’t had any breakfast, yourself. Jim Va>lo asked if you were sick. Of course nobody knew You never teJl anybody anything about yourself. I said I’d look ui oil you ” ‘ “Thanks awfull}," Ilelga responded, indiffer- ently. She w r as watching the sunlight dissolve from thick orange into pale yellow. Slowdv it crept across the room, wiping out m its path the morning shadows. She wasn’t interested m what the other was saying. ‘ “If you don’t Jiurry, you ’ll be late to your first class. Can I help you?” Margaret offered un- certainly. She was a little afraid of Helga. Nearly every one was. 48 PALEFAdE * ‘“No. Thanks all tfyc same.” Then quickly m another, warmtr tone : ‘'I do mean it. Thanks, a thousand tunes, Margaret. I ’ii> really awfully grateful, bill —you see, it’s like this, I’m not going to be late to niv class. I’m not going to be there at all.” ‘The visiting girl, standing in relief, like *>ld walnut against tfte bulf-eolorcd wall, darted a quick glance at IF'lga. Plainly she w&s curious. But she only said formally: “Oh, then you aie sick.” For something there was about Helga which discouraged questionings. ‘No, Helga wasn't siek. Not physically. She was merely disgusted. Fed up with Naxos. If that could be called sickm ss. The truth was that she had made up her mind to leave. That very day. She could no longer abide being connected with a place of shame, lies, hypocrisy, cruelty", servility, and snobbishness. “It ought,” she concluded, “lo he shut down by law.” * The manner of writing here and the dialogue of Helga and Margaret is a good example of what might be called Ihi conversion into ‘ old walnut,* as it were, of the White middleclass democratic ideal, of ladyhkeness and gciilltiiidiiluics*. The colour- adjustment required, to the formulas of the worst type of sentimental fiction of the Whites, ends in absurdity and pathos. The ‘visiting girl, standing m relief, like old walnut, against the buff-colored wall,’ is a sad, uncomfortable parody of a Family Herald sort of scene. It is the ‘Thanks awfully’ that comes from Helga, and all the rest of the ortho- 44 THE PALEFACE DEMOCRATIC IDEAL dox Paleface technique* that makes the ‘walnut’ adjustment ridiculous. But the hcrSine of this hook is described as aware of this type of confusion, and all that is huifhhating m it for the Ncgjo. In the ensuing passage Ilelga is reflecting about the' dress-problem as it concerns till' Negro. ‘Turning from the window, her gaze' wandered contemptuously over the dufl attire of the women workers. Drab colors, mostly nav> blue, black, browfl, unrelieved, sax e for a scrap of white or tan about the hands and necks. Fragments of a speech mad* by the dean of women floated through her thoughts — “Bright colors are xmlgar” — “Black, grav, brown, and navy blue are the most becoming culms for colored people” — “Dark- complected people shouldn’t xvear yellow, or green or red.” — The dean was a woman from one of the “first families” — a great “race” woman; she, Helga Franc, a despised mulatto, but something mtuiti\ r e, some unanalyzed driving spirit of loyalty to the inherent racial need for gorgeous- ness told her that bright eolors were fitting and that dark-complexioned people should wear yel- low, green, and red. Black, brown, and gray were ruinous to them, actually destroyed the luminous tones lurking in their dusky skins. One of the loveliest sights Ilelga had ever seen had been a sooty black girl decked out m a flaming orange dress, whfch a horrified matron had next day consigned to the dyer. Why, she wondered, didn’t some one write A Plea for Color l ‘These people yapped loudly of race, of race 45 PALEFACE consciousness, of^ace pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naive* spontaneous lauglftcr. Harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty m the race they had marked for destruction.’ It would be easy to say to Miss Nella Larson (who is I believe not a Paleface) that in her novel she was full of 4 race-consciousness * but that she had ‘sup- pi cssed its most delightful manifestations’ and pro- duced too orthodoxly Palcfaeed an article: but I should not say that myself to that particular writer, for she seems to grasp many of the difficulties on both sides of the Colour dispute and to have suffered herself considerable And perhaps it may be as well to add, at this point, that all books dealing with Negroes are not purely propagandist, and that, as with other things, a small percentage arc even intelligent and so useful. § 18. A German Vision of Black versus White . In England there is no equivalent at all for such a book as Dark Princess . The mixture of the Op- penheim detective-story and Woild-Pobtics does not occur, m the field of station- bookstall literature in which books of that order exist; the British Public remains imperial and parochial, Publicschool- bovish and domestic, mvetcrately non -political. It would be worth no mystery-spifmer’s while to deal with such a theme. In Germany it is a different mat ter* Dark Pi uicess would be much goute by the German — it should be translated. In France also, 46 GERMAN VISION OF RLACK VERSUS WHITE with certain differences, the sensational 'World *- book flourishes. A novel alrilost identical with Dark Princess may be cited, as my germamc illustration: lti Atlantis by Hans Domnjik. Tins is one of a series of ad- venture-novels dealing with the Future — m the first lidlf of the next century the scene is laid. You must imagine a World-political picture of half a century fience m which Russitf and Asia are treated as non-existent. It is supposed that the three principal World-Powers at that time arc the United States of Europe, the United States of America, and the empire of the Negro Emperor, Augustus Sal- vator, whose capital is Timbuctoo. The story opens m Timbuctoo, and there is the Negro Emperor at a great Circus, adulated bv the dense black masses of his "Coloured’ subjects; and there likewise are two Germans in a box, one a great industrialist, the other an engineer. The Emperor Augustus, with the object of tapping some world-shaking source of power, has driven a gigantic shaft into the earth to a depth of fiOOO metres. The german engineer m the box is employed in t Ins undertaking. These t w o excellent Hamburgers occupy the same box by pure chance, though of course the engineer is familiar with the name of the great industrialist, his Lands - mann . But in another part of this vast assembly may also be observed the villain of all that is to ensue, namely Guy Rouse, the american super- capitalist, m whos<* ‘stahlhartcn grauen Augon’ all the most ruthless and detestable — yet admirable Cdas war ein Maim, cm Mann von aussergewohn- licher Grosse ... die verkorpertc Macht des 47 PALEFACE Goldcs’ ruminates romantically Augustus) charac- teristics of transatlantic super-capitalism can be clearly detected. • The Heroes in tins german book are strangely enough (from the standpoint of an anglo-saxon reader) the two Germans. The villain is (as every European today would take as a matter of course) the American: but I am afraid that the Negro Em- peror is not painted Vo black as lie shoufcl be — in- deed he turns out to be a sort of Matthew Towns, installed as Kaiser at Timbuctoo, instead of as Maharajah at Bwodpur — but actuated, on all occa- sions, by motives so noble and unusual that he is reminiscent of one of the great saviours of humanity : even the Whitest reader would not, I feel sure, con- sider that Tredrup, the german engineer, was quite justified m destroying as he did (in defence of the White Race) this Dark Deliverer's life-work — for Tredrup event uall> comes back and blows up the gigantic shaft, and so saves the White Race; it is inevitable. Tredrup is strongly pro- White — as strongly pro- White m fact as the hero of an anglo-saxon book is always anti-White, or rather pro-anything that is not the same colour ns himself: but Atlantis is writ- ten for a public incapable of that (pernaps senti- mental) detachment which is such a feature of the enghsh and amcncnn tradition, whether popular or learned. — Indeed when present at the All-Black Circus, it is as much as Tredrup, the honest Ham- burger, can do to contain himself, when above all called upon to witness the White lady Circus-rider kissmg her hand to the Black audience ‘Schwein- 18 GERMAN VISION OF BLACK VERSUS WJHITE erei verdammte ! * he cwlaims. # ‘Man mochte am liebsten deni ganzen Dreck den Rueken kehren! Mussen die armen Ludci hur ihr wcisses Flcisch zu Schau stellen . . . und dann nodi nut Kusshsmdcr dafur danken . ! ’ (It is interesting 1 o note that in llu> Black Metropolis the performers most fa\- omVd by the Blaek Public aij 1 White 1 , just as in the greatest metropolis of the Paleface World today the performers tend mfire and more to be Black.) The trtie goal of the Negro Kmpeioi is laid ban 1 in a soliloquy, which ensues upon a \isit from Mr. Rouse, the american areli-villam Augustus Sal- vator talks to himself liist about Mr. Bouse. Mi Rouse (though Augustus cannot help admiring him) ' is blind, he think** ‘Ersiehl mcht die Grenzen, die IcderMacht gezogen smd. Bn lteakhon musskom- mcn . ti- chnstian vein: the Black, on the other hand, will devour books about % Wh it e nuddleelass prosperity, where all the characters will be slightly yellow. But the Black will say fiercely that lie is -a better man than the White because he is more dignified in his amusements (pointing to his waltzes, his Shake- speare Repertory Theatre, etc.). The White will in- sist that hr is the belter man, because he is not so emotional and jazzy as the Black, and because he is responsible for Shakespeare, Moliere, and so on. (I am a little indebted to Herr Donnnik for this pic- ture.) Long before sueii a state of affairs as that came to pass, the races would, in practice, have inter- married and their habits would have become identi- cal. But it is no part of my business hero to draw pictures of a problematical futiue, but only to study the problems of behaviour at the present tune, as they apply betw < *en Paleiaces a ud Coloured ’ people. § 15. The Effect of the Pictures oj the White Man's World upon the East . Instead of quoting something from Close’s book, % The Revolt of Asia , to show how the Black versus White problem is prolonged into and all over the 58 THE WHITE MAN’S WORLD ANI) THE EAST • East, I will take a few pages from Mr. Aldous Hux- ley’s Jesting Pilate . Air. lluxley goes to an open- air Cinema in Java and these are Ins impressions and reflections (necessarily curtailed). ‘Fifty yards away we found an open-air picture 1 show. A crowd, as fishily dumb as the young ’ dancers, stood or squatted in front of an illumin- ated screen, across which there came and went, m an ^epileptic silence, the hwnan fishes of a cinema drama. And what a drama ! We arrived in t ime to sec a man in wluit the lady novelists call faull - less evening dress,” smashing a door with an axe, shooting scvcial other men, and then embracing against her will a distressed female, also m even- ing dress. Meanwhile anothei man was hurrying from somewhere to somewhere else, in motor-cars that tumbled over precipices, in trains that vil- lains contrived io send full tilt into livers — m vain, however, for the hurrying voung man always lumped off the doomed vehicles m the nick of time and immediately found another and still more rapid means of locomotion. . . . ‘The violent imbecilities of the story flickered m silence agamst the background of the equatorial night . In sJcnce the Javanese looked on. What were they thinking 9 What were their private comments on this exhibition of Western civiliza- tion? . . . The crook drama at Tunis is the same as the crook drama at Madras. On the same evening, it may 4>e, in Korea, m Sumatra, m the Sudan, they are looking at the same seven soulful reels of mother-love and adultery. The same fraudulent millionaires are swindling for the diver- 59 PALEFACE sion of a Burmese audience in Mandalay, a Maori audience in New Zealand. \ Over the entire globe the producers of Hollywood arc the missionaries and propagandists of white civilization. . . . What is this famous civilization of the white men which Hollywood reveals? The*e are questions which one is almost ashamed to answer. The world into which the cinema introduces the subject peoples is a world of silliness and criminality. When its inhabitants are not stealing, murdering, swindling or attempting to commit rape (too slowly, as we have seen, to be often completely successful), they are being maudlin about babies or dear old homes, they are being fantastically and idiotically honour- able m a manner calculated to bring the greatest possible discomfort to the greatest possible num- ber of people, they are disporting themselves m marble halls, they are aimlessly dashing about the earth’s surface in fast-moving vehicles. When they make money they do it only m the most dis- creditable, unproductive and socially mischievous way — by speculation. Their polities are matters exclusively of personal (generally amorous) in- trigue. Their science is an affair of secret recipes for making money — recipes which are always getting stolen by villains no less anxious for cash than the scientific hero lumself. Tlicir religion is all cracker mottoes, white-haired clergymen, large-hearted mothers, hard, Bible-reading, puri- tanical fathers, and young girb who have taken the wrong turning and been betrayed (the rapes, thank goodness, are occasionally successful) kneel- ing with their illegitimate babies m front of cruci 60 THE WHITE MAN’S WORLD AND THE EAST fixes. As for their art — it gonsists in young men in overalls and larg^ ties painting, m cqck-lofts, feminine pbrtraits worthy to figure on the covers of magazines. And their literature is the flatu- lent verbiage of the captions. ‘Such is tlTc white man’s world as revealed by ■ the films, a world of crooks and half-wits, morons and sharpers. A crude, immature, childish world. A world without subtlety, without the smallest intellectual interests, innocent of art, letters, phil- osophy, science. A world whcie there are plenty of motors, telephones and automatic pistols, but in which there is no trace of such a thing as a modern idea. A world where men and women have instincts, desires and emotions, but no thoughts. A world, in brief, from which all that gives the modern West its power . . . has been left out. . . . White men complain that the atti- tude of the membeis of the eoloured races is not so respectful os it was Can one be astonished? ‘What astonishes me is that the attitude re- mains as respectful as it does. Standing m the midst of that silent crowd of Javanese picture fans, 1 was astonished, when the performance at- tained its culminating imbecility, that they did not all w r itli one accord turn on us with hoots of derision, with mocking and murderous violence. I was astonished that they did not all rush in a body through the town crying “Why should we be ruled any longer by imbeciles?” and murder- ing every white man they met. The drivelling nonsense that flickered there m the darkness, under the tropical clouds, was enough to justify 61 PALEFACE any outburst. . . v The coloured peoples think a great deal less of us than ‘diey did, even though Ihcv may be too cautious to aet on fheir opinions . . . the share of Hollywood m lowering the white man's prostigi is by no meam inconsiderable. A people whose own propagandists proclaim it to lie montall\ and nioially deficient, cannot expect to be looked up to. if lilms were realh Irue to life, the whole of Europe, and America would deserve to be handed o\er as mandated territories to the Basulos, the Papuans and the Andaman pygmies. Fortunate 1\, they art' not true. . . . But l he un- tutored mind of the poor Indian does not know it. He secs the films, he thinks they represent West- ern ieaht\, lie cannot see why he should be ruled by cimimal imbeciles. As wc turned disgusted from the idiotic spectacle* and threaded our way out of the crowd, that strange, aquaimm silence of the Javanese was broken by a languid snigger of derision. Nothing more. Just a little laugh. A weird or two of mocking comment m Malay, and then, once more, the* silence as of fish. A few more \cars of Hollywood’s propaganda, and per- haps we shall not get out of an Oriental crowd quite so easih / There* is more than a touch m this narrative, I know, of the sort of conventionality you would ex- pect from its agreeably discursive author. But nevertheless he has not a political u\c to grind and is a more reliable witness probably than Mr. Close. — The sentimentality of outlook is of course apparent in his interpretation of ‘the strange aquarium sil- 62 THE WHITE MAN'S WORLD AND THE EAST • enc c* of the Javanese: it i\ t unlikely 1 hat the javancse, maon, tuiusiaik or hmdu pictui e-goers are either equipped, or disposed, to view the ‘imbecility* of the White Man’s Film quite as Mr. Iluxht would have us believe— for all their ‘impassible oriental* lislmiess and their traditional, but todav quite non- ( xistcnt, wisdom. It is unlikely l hat, unless it were repeatedly pointed out to them, th<> would sec' anything discreditable m thc«cthics of Hollywood, or be very critical of the abject intelligence dis- played, or be averse to the violence and cruditv of the action. In short, Mr. Huxlcv , I think, romanti- cises his ‘OticntaT— there is a little too much turban and grease-pamt, too much ‘Garden of Allah,’ in the picture. When however that has been discounted, % and when you allow for the fact that in every corner of the East the russian agent is busy whispering against the Whites — those overbearing bourgeois interlopers — this account of a Picture-show in Java is not without its instruction. As to Mi. Huxley’s account ol the sort of Film m question, that, we can all agree, is accurate enough, and it is after all just from those standards that it is important to rescue the Untutored Mind of the Poor Indian, or the over- susceptible Neg**o. If the Negro, as dreamed of by Alain Locke , is to become a reality, lie can find no better w r ay of proving his ‘cultural’ qualifications than by turning lus back altogether upon the White Man’s World as it exists at present. I have mentioned Alain Locke, and before ter- minating this section of my book I will turn to a debate which figured m the Forum about six months ago. Alam Locke is a negro intellectual and he 63 PALEFACE presented the ease for the Negro m that debate very ably. .Mr. Lothrop Stoddard answered, with equal ability, for the White Man, telling his dark opponent that White America would never depart from its policy of the * Colour-Line.’ I will not here enter into the manv interesting issues brought to light by this debate, but will confine myself to a few ob- servations upon the arguments adxanccd by the Black debater. Mr. * Locke shows with excellent pointedness how the White World is confronted with ‘ an increasing social dileinu iu and self-contradiction,’ for the simple reason that the Negro Question is not merely the Negro Question, but is ‘much more, and even more seriously, the question of democracy.’ And of course in so far as the dogma, not necessarily the practice, of the Soviet is merely a violent form of democratic belief, the more ‘radical’ the Ameri- can or any other Democracy becomes, the more such a question as the Negro Question becomes strictly the rule in vour system of belief, or you must ‘capit- ulate,’ as Mr. Locke invites the White Man to do. But Mr. Locke also has another no less seemingly powerful argument: ho msists that the White Man cannot dance every night to negro music, and throng to Parties and Emveiar Joneses, and continue to be haughty where the Negro is concerned. ‘Prejudice, moreover, as wholesale generaliza- tion of social inferiority and cultural incapacity . . becomes, as a matter of course, more con- trary to tact with every dcca l< —yes, with every day. . . . Apart from the injustice and reaction- ary unwisdom, there is tragic irony mid imminent social farce m the acceptance by “ White America’ 61 TIIE WHITE MAN’S WORLD AND THE EAST * of the Negro’s cultural gifts, jvlule at the same time withholding cultural recognition, the reward that all genius merits and even requires.’ » The ‘cultural 5 present that the Negro ha* made to White America, and through America to the whole White World, can be sumpied up m the word ‘jazz.’ It % is a very popular present and White people everywhere have tumbles! over each other to pick it up, and it has almost superseded every other form of activity. But what it is impossible not to ask is whether it deserves quite so large a ‘reward 5 as Mr. Locke claims for it. The White arts that the Paleface has turned awav from m order to cultivate these Black arts, w ere certainly as good as the latter: nnd all that the ‘Afroamcriean 5 has succeeded m supplying is the aesthetic medium of a sort of frantic proletarian sub-conscious, which is the very negation of those far greater arts, for instance, of other more celebrated ‘Coloured 5 races, such as the C hinese or the Hindu. The Chinese or the llmdu would never have been captivated by nor even paid any attention at all to that sort of inferior Black art. But the White ha*: and it v s* very unreasonable of linn still to dc ny social equality to the Negro: about that there can be no question at all, under the cir- cumstances. (It is only the circumstances that ought never to be there.) The other ‘cultural 5 lights mentioned by Mr. Locke are, for example, Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson. That black nightingale and that ex- cellent actor are handsome presents to our civiliza- tion: and if the Negro community has not had a e 05 PALEFACE band of distinguished philosophers, men of science, and poets to point to, it is, I am sure, merely be- cause the Negro has not had the opportunity ol pro- ducing 1 them: there is no race that is not able to produce distinguished philosophers, men of science, and remarkable poets, m profusion. Where Mr. Locke is mistaken, ip my opinion, is m talking about the ‘cultural’ gifts of the Negro to the White up-to- date, and as already handed over. What Mr. Locke might say with great reason is somewhat as follows: ‘Although the Blacks have produced nothing but a barbarous, melancholy, epileptic folk-music, worthy only of a patagonian cannibal; and although this sort of art has been fastened upon the White World, as a result of a given set of circumstances, that is no reason at all why the White Man should look down upon all Negroes, or should too lightly assume that, given equal opportunities, Ihc Negro would not produce something that would put the foolish jazzing White in the shade.’ That would be unanswerable, I think. Mr. Locke, again, writes: ‘Successful peoples are rated, and rate themselves, in terms of their best. Racial and national prestige is, after all, the product of the exceptional few/ In order to have grasped that highly undemocratic truth Mr. Locke must have risen far above the level of the average Pale- face. When lie says that ‘it is not in the interests of democracy itself to allow an illiterate, unprogres- sive White man the convictionrthat lie is better than the best Negro/ one is not so sure of the soundness of his purely democratic principles. — The general impression that lus article made upon me was that 66 FINAL OBJECTIONS TO ME AS ‘CHAMPION’ • he stressed too much the ‘cultural/ m rather too resounding a way, which left him open to to.o pro- found a retort. *And the 'democratic 5 basis seems to me as things stand an impossible one for argimient. At this point I will return from my consideration of the evidence provided by a series of books, both in Europe and America, to the mam current of my argument.^ § 16. Final Objections to me as "Champion" The German philosophers of the beginning and the middle of the last century have perhaps provided us with the best example of ‘internationalism 5 of any people in modern times, that is, such men as % Goethe or Schopenhauer. Schopenhauers father gave him the name of ‘Arthur 5 because Aithur is the same (lie argued) in all europcan tongues— at least it is not cxclusn ely german. (It is intei estmg to note that the ‘Arthur Press’ r< eeived that name for a reason of a similar order.) And Schopenhauer himself never ceased to entici/e Ins countrymen for their german-ness. .Nietzsche alter linn did the same. Goethe before him was quite as confirmed an ‘internationalist, 5 in the sense that he always advocated a universal language of Volapuc for Europe, and hoped for a confederacy of states and an abolition of fionticrs. — Today w r e are, with Fas- cism, with Tnsh, Czech, Catalan, Macedonian, Indian, Russian, Turkish, Polish, etc. etc., national- ism (which invariably takes the form of abolishing every local custom and becoming as like everybody as possible), at the other pole to that attitude of mind 67 PALEFACE so common a century ago. This appears to me very regrettable indeed. 1 should like everybody to be imbued with the spirit of internationalism, and to keep all their local customs. I have, in addition to my often expressed desire for a universal state, another craVing, up till now unexpressed (that is publicly). I would, if I were able to, suppress all out-of-date discrepancies of tongue, as well as of skin and pocket. I desire to speak Volapuc, to put it shortly. I cannot ’help it, it is if you like a crank, but I should like to speak, and write, some Volapuc, not english — at all events some tongue that would enable me to converse with everybody of whatever shade of skin or opinion without ail interpreter — above all that no shadow of an excuse should subsist for a great Chemical Magnate to come hissing in my car: ‘Listen! That low fellow 5 (magnates alwavs speak in such lofty terms, partly for fun) ‘says tk ja” — I heard him! Here is a phial of deadly gas. Just throw it at him, will you? lie won't say “ja” any more, once he’s had a sniff of that ! ’ But this is not the end of the matter, where my many disqualifications arc concerned. I am actu- ally conscious of the many difficulties that must beset any honest Palelace, called to the defence of his skill. Although people of a lightish complexion have overrun the globe, they have, he would be compelled !u confess, taken with them, and stolidly, irresistibly, propagated a ciwjjzation which is ex- ceedingly inferior to many civilizations found by them m full-swing, possessed by people of dark, or ‘Coloured’ complexion. 68 FINAL OBJECTIONS TO ME AS ‘CHAMPION’ • So, confining ourselves to * skins/ if thi* Paleface is told that he has been foolishly arrogant — his * superiority * af the best a very temporary material or technical one — he cannot iind much to Answer. Further, the charge lias to be met of having imposed a rotten, materialist civilization upon all sorts of people with great cruelty oftcn, # of ha\mg wiped out races of \;pry high quality, such as the Indians of North America, 111 the name pf a God who was all compassion: so he is convicted of hypocrisy of the ugliest, of the ‘civilized* kind, on top of everything else. How can the White Man confront these charges? As an Anglo-Saxon he cannot point to America and England today, and claim that spectacle as a justi- fication of his dominion. What is he to do? If a timid man, as the Paleface often is, all those vindic- tive pointing fingers will put him quite out of coun- tenance. Now I of course can find him the necessary argu- ments to dispose of lus passionate critics, and I am only too glad to, for his opponents are a stupid erew for the most pari —just ‘to amuse myself* I would help my Paleface. But all the same I recognize that Ins case is dangerously open to attack. Beyond this, as an artist I am convinced that all the very tinest plastic and pictorial work has come out of the Orient, and that Europeans have never understood the fundamental problems of art m the way the Indian, Persian, or Chinese have done. These hasty remarks will have served, nothing more, to define the nature of my disqualifications for the role of White deliverer. 69 Conclusion AS to the definition from the Institutes , /% quoted by Green, and all that deeper argu- 1 % ment of a view of hfe m which the principle of the ‘common good 9 expands so that it includes all that we decide to recognize mystically* as possess- ing a spiritual essence, however remote in time and place, and as to the ‘notion that there is something due from every man to every man,’ 1 will hazard the following remarks, which will serve as a Conclusion to this introductory essay. In Rome what constituted ‘abnormality 9 was the being oil her a slave, a stranger or a minor (of whatever age) within the potestas of some head of a' family. A slave and, originally, a stranger, a ‘pere- grmus, 9 was legally a ‘thing,’ coming under the ‘jus quod ad res pert met. 9 The absolute legal roman \ persona was only enjoyed, I suppose, by the eldest male of a roman family. But originally the status of a non-Roman was as ‘abnormal 9 as that of a slave. All animals were naturally ‘things 9 — a lion in the forest or a wild bee was a ‘res nullius, 9 but a watch-dog or a sla\e was not "wild, 9 so could not be affected to another person than his owner by cap- ture — though if you felt like it you could acquire a lion, for it (as we still say) was a ‘thing 9 not en- tangled legally with a ‘person. 9 You would then become its unique entanglement, and it would cease to be wild, but would remain a thing. To be normal was to be free in the roman state, but it is now generally supposed that the ‘slave 9 in 70 CONCLUSION TO PART I Antiquity, although outside the law of persons, was nevertheless not treated as a tiling by his master to any greater extent than let us say a drapery assistant or a charwoman is treated as a thing. Th(; female slave, of an averagely humane roman citizen, did not call herself ip ‘lady’ but a ‘slave’; there prob- ably the difference ended. It is unlikely that there was any contemptuous disability attached to her state to compare with that of the Victorian ‘skivvy’ or ‘slavey.’ If the choice # Iay between being a ‘slavey* and a ‘slave/ in fact, any rational person would prefer to be a \slave’ I should think— without ambiguity, sentimentality or, m a word, offence. What I am attempting to get at here is that very important factor of "sentimentality’ m the relations of human beings, especially as that applies to the wholesale reform of those relations, at present in progress all over t he world. It is the verbal problem, really; and the history of ‘sentiment’ is one of the survival of words, after the fact they symbolize has long vanished. It is possible under certain condi- tions to have a person as a slave in the most effective sense — to make him work himself to the bone, live upon crusts of bread, call you ‘sir’ or even ‘lord/ and be in short entirely at your disposal, and yet for you to have no legal right whatever over him, indeed for him technically to be ‘free and equal’ — even for you to be, ostensibly, his servant. We are all accus- tomed to this situation as illustrated in the expres- sion ‘servant of the Public,’ for instance. ‘Dictator- ship of the Proletariat’ affords another example. In such cases a minority governs a majority, often with an iron hand, either telling the majority that 71 PALEFACE it is its ‘servant/ or, in the other case, telling the majority or Proletariat that it, the Proletariat, is sovereign, paramount, and engaged' all the time in ruling f itself. These (and many similar instances will no doubt readily occur to you) are all matters simply of words : and what 1 am describing is of course the sort of government that we call today a ‘democracy’ — eithef with elective representatives or with a small body of people who are kind enough to ‘dictate’ to it. But m all cases it is government by words. 1 Everything that the word ‘democracy’ implies, however, wc get from l lie Romans and the Greeks. And in spite of the fact that all the circumstances of physical life and of our present society have suffered an absolute change, yet in our institutions we still perpetuate these ultimate distortions of a law framed for a political body in every respect different fiom our own. The roman body was compact and efficient, if nothing else, and is not to be despised. Bui either we should retrace our steps and acquire that body (which is impossible) or else adjust our laws for those vast, sprawling, dreamy polyp-organ- isms we call nations, but so that those laws will enable such degraded organisms to issue once more as a formal structure of some kmu, somewhat highoi than at present. If, again, wc cannot all be ‘free’ in the roman sense, or be ‘persons’ as were all Roman Citizcus, then should we use their words? It is impossible not to question the propriety of that : for not until we cease to call ourselves free shall we be able to recognize how unnecessarily servile w r e have be- 72 CONCLUSION TO PART I • come. The word ‘free’ is merely, as it were, a magical counter with which to enslave us, it is full of an electrical property that has been most male- ficent where the European or American is concerned. But beyond that I suggest that very few people can be ‘free’ unfier anv circumstances, or equally yoti may say that very few people can be ‘persons,’ still to crpploy the roman terminology, but in this case abstractly. It is the ‘democratic ’ conceit that is at fa hit, is it not? — it seems as though it were the love of fine words that has undone us, as much as anything. That is where the ‘sentimentality' comes m and plays its destructive part. (It is that ‘lady’ in char-lady that has given us a false security and made us blind to the novel facts upon which , we must at last concentrate our gaze and recognize that we are beset.) If people managed to resist those verbal blandishments, they would, it is true, be sadder (at first) but also wiser. That is of course the ideal — to be wiser; anil no one can accuse me in this of indulging in a verbal blandishment with my w'ord ‘wise,’ for who on earth, in a general way, ever w r anted to be wise ? ‘ Free,’ yes : but never wise. But in saying that very few 7 men are able to be ‘free,’ or very few to be ‘persons,’ one must I sup- pose be prepared for every hair upon the body of the true democrat (or doctrinaire of the dictatorship of Demos) to bristle. ‘Ah! that is very nice indeed, that is charming!’ he says: ‘in a nation of fifty million people there jjre to be a handful of “great” persons (according to your aristocratic plan and whatever you may mean by your mystic of the person ) — that is to say. at any one time, a statesman 73 PALEFACE or two, a poet or t\vo, a man of science or two, and so on, and no more. But what of the rest of the community? — where do they come # m? Are they not to f havc an equal share in the statecraft, art, science and all that constitutes a civilized state?’ In the first place the plan is, of course, not mine at all, but nature’s. ‘Nature’ has repeatedly been interrogated, often angrily, upon this very point — it is a burning question. Why does not nature pro- duce a dense mass of Shakespeares or Nektons or Pitts? That has been the idea; and mrians have been considered and plans worked out for assisting nature m this respect. But it is conceivable that nature after all may usually produce as many as are needed of these ‘persons,’ and that this ratio may be according to some organic law that wc arc too stupid, or too conceited to grasp. It is always possible that nature may not desire a structureless, horizontal jelly of a society, as does the modern democrat, but a more organic affair. A ‘moral situation,’ it may even be, does not enter into the comprehension of that legislator or creator which wc habitually call ‘nature.’ Just the correct number of Shakespeares, Newtons and the rest may have been regularly supplied to us, and overcrowd- ing at the top (a top and bottom being perhaps part of this hierarchical, non-moral, creative intention) have been guarded against. But wc will return from tins region of idle specula- tion to that of practical politics. It is not disputed by anybody that we have evolved a very mechanical type of life, as a result of the discovery of printing and its child, the Press — the Cinema. Radio and so 74 CONCLUSION TO TART I for Hi, and the immense advances in the technique of Industry. ^Thcre is much less differentiation now, that is, between the consciousness of the respective members of a geographical group, and between the various groups ^or peoples, than before machines made it possible for everyone io mould their miud upon the same cultural model /in the way that they all subject themselves to the emotional teaching of a series of{ilms, for instance*, alj over the surface of the globe). t The more fundamentally alike nations become, the more fiereelv ‘nationalist* is their temper: but also the more impersonal they grow (m the nature of things, m a more intensely organized routine of life), the more they talk of freedom, and of their ‘person- ality.’ Both these paradoxes of the present age are, I believe, the merest habits. There is very little sign that the majority of people desire to be ‘persons’ m any very important sense: their conversation about ‘developing their personality ’ is a sentimental habit, merely, it would seem. If they were cured of this habit nothing would ever be heard of their ‘personality* again. But government on a demo- cratic pattern entails an insistence upon these myth- ical ‘personalities’ on the part of their rulers : so the habits remain and flourish. It is impossible to bring them up-to-date, for they arc too chrono- logically absurd to do that with. And the same system requires that some purely sentimental and unreal notion of ‘freedom’ should, at all costs, be sustained. (It is like the cry La Patrie est en danger! There w r as once a ‘country,’ that was culturally and 75 PALEFACE I racially intact, and* so susceptible of being put in ‘danger’; and in consequence the martial cry still evokes a situation that is dead, and people flock to defend 'that grinning corpse or historical spectre.) Only a person can be susceptible of a right — that is not a roman law but, a universal one. Wlnt is ‘ due from every one to every one ’ (in the words of Green) is either (1) a merely sentimental cliche — and that is what it generally amounts to in contemporary demo- cracies ; or it is (2) an entirely non-scntimental com- pulsion — namely that that is due to merit, to per- sonal character or to personal ability. There is nothing else ‘due’ from one person to another. Another and more exact way of staling this would be to say — There is nothing ‘due’ at all from one person to another : but there are persons who attract, or compel, those services spoken of by Green, de- scribed by him as mysterious debts on account of which all truly moral men are constantly denying and impoverishing themselves (of the things of the mind as well as of the body — m order to be ‘the poor in spirit’) so that they may adequately render what ‘is due from even one to every one.’ Bui this some- thing m fact is ‘due’ not because the object of it is ‘human,’ nor because the skin m question is wrhitc or black: it is ‘due’ because m some way we re- cognize an entity with superior«claims to ours upon our order, kind or system : as I see the matter, that is the only ground for an obligation that exists. The sentimental, ort he moral, elements, have no part in it. 76 CONCLUSION TO PART I This obligation that all men aje under to personal power or to the vital principle that resides m persons, is apt to be bitterly resented. What the ‘puppet’ owes to the ‘person’ (to make use, as m the Art of Being Ruled , of Goethe’s terminology) is the cause of many heart-bur nrtigs and revolts, and is, where that is possible, withheld. This is the case more than ever wherp an aggravated ‘moral situation’ exists, as at present. Indeed a ‘moral situation ' is essen- tially a revolutionary situation, in the most frivolous sense, wlien for a time the unreal and purely senti- mental values, in a dissolving society, get the upper hand. The Power to whom the direction is being transferred dare not yet openly announce itself (this is, I suppose, somewhat the case m Russia), there is •only one Master-principle visible, above the surface, still ostensibly effective, and that is weak. So the puck flings itself upon it, and all for the moment is confusion. For what is the essence of a ‘moral situation’? It is of course, and always has been (since those day* when, to be the curse of the West, ‘morals’ were first invented), a situation in winch a society loses its organic structure and disintegrates into its indi- vidual components — into its millions of individual units. This may in itself be desirable ; but it natur- ally isolates or disconnects for the time all that is most powerful and exposes it to attack. As this society becomes, instead of an organic whole, a mass of minute individuals, under the guise of an Etluc there appears the Mystic of the Many, the cult of the cell, or the worship of the particle ; and Inc dogma of ‘ what is due from everybody to everybody ’ takes 77 PALEFACE the place of the natural law of what is due to char- acter, to creative genius, or to personal power, or even to their symbols. I do not need to point out how intense this mys- ticism of the Monad or ‘the Many’ has become, nor how it has resulted everywhere in Wholesale aggres- sion, aimed at anybody, either in the past or present, possessing those ‘great’ qualities to whigh ‘some- thing is due ’ from everybody. (The dail^j bchttle- ment of or the personal attacks upon, in books or in the Press, the ‘great men’ of our literary Pantheon is one of the obvious signs of this sansculottist tem- per.) It is almost as though the duty of the truly moral man was as much to destroy what he regards as ‘great’ (or possessed of the enjoyment of the powers and delights of the mind) as to deny himself such enjoyment: and a sentimental value for what is little or ineffective, or merely distant, or incom- prehensible, must be eagerly professed. * 1 will now apply my&elf to the question of how we arc to define (1) a person; (2) the term ‘human’; and (3) the conception ‘the common good,’ those terms of critical importance that we have been up till now using without much definition. The idea ‘person’ I associate essentially with the idea of ‘organization.’ What wc could say was ‘due’ to what is highly organize^! on the part of what is less highly organized — that is the principal char- acter of this obligation. If I were working this out more thoroughly here, I should have to go into the 78 CONCLUSION TO PART I question of how I understood this version of the law of persons and the law of things, insisting that in every case our fiuman Laws must be m the nature of a ‘law of things/ For it is upon that basis that I should naturally think of it. All that is ‘due*’ from one creature to another is, as f should describe it, m reality due to God, whose ‘things’ vwe arc — onlv the fictions as it were of that Person.^ would be best for pie to recall here (since the existence of a spiritual power or God, or any reference even to that power, is involved for most people with the sickliness of some debased ethical code) the unsentimental nature of this obligation I am supposing to exist. And this character of compulsion, this intellectual character, applies as •much to what is fc duc’ to God, as to what is ‘due’ elsewhere: and what is exacted from us else- where is an expression merely of a more absolute dependence. So our dependence or our independence is, I should say, an organic phenomenon, a matter of concentrations and dispersions, which we familiarly regard as the ‘personal’ attributes, when they be- come highly concentrated. As to political inde- pendence, or political ‘freedom/ it has very little to do with personality, and so, in a fundamental sense, very little to do with independence. Political independence is the gift of a society, whereas inde- pendence of character, or the being a person, is a gift of nature, to put it shortly . That gift is held for our natural life, irrespe ctive of function. A person can only be ‘ free ’ m the degree m which he is a ‘ person ’ : and if the most potentially effective and the wisest 79 PALEFACE members of a given goeiety are obscured or rendered ineffective, then it can only mean that that society is about to perish, as an organism,* for it cannot survive in a condition in which what is most vital in it is obscured or not permitted to function. How it is that wc are able to say that only a person can be susceptible of &nght is because no sentimental value is attached here to the word ‘right ’ : because, in short, the law we are presupposing is a non-moral law. Every ethical system has those ‘rights,’ in- fested with sentiment: but such mere systematizing of expansion-impulses is not worthy of the name of law. Does being susceptible of a right mean anything else than being a creature who has recognized his willingness (or whose willingness is assumed) to abide by a set of rules, said to be for the ‘common good" of the community, and who so conies to form part of a certain social system? That is all that ‘human’ meant for an early Roman or a Greek. A stranger was ‘abnormal,' susceptible of no rights, and no more 1 human ’ than a wild bee or a lion in the forest. — To be beneath the same law — that is to be ‘normal.’ and to lie c human’: let that be our definition. In the modern nation— and this is of course the case particularly with America— the working of this principle is very easy to follow. The ‘ Frenchman * as the ‘American " is a person beneath the same law as all other ‘Frenchmen* and ‘Americans’ — though he 80 CONCLUSION TO PART I may by birth and training be acliussian, who emi- grated upon the Revolution, a Spaniard or Italian, a Polish Jew or an African cx-slavc. ‘Human ’ in the same way is a term describing anybody beneath the same law as ourselves — it is a term of the same order as ‘American’ or as ‘Russian.’ • k But aty the natural leaders today in the White world arc strictly speaking outlaw's. They air in an ‘abnormal ’ position. (Some are intelligent enough to realize this, but others still believe that they arc* functioning, or that it is still possible to function, traditionally.) • I, for example, am an outlaw. I am conspicuous for im clear appreciation of that fact. What can I possibly mean by saving that the best individuals of the curopcan race arc outlaws? 1 mean of course that we are now m the position of local tribal chiefs brought within a wider system, which has gathered and closed in around us: and that the tax t or tradition of our races wlucli it is our function to interpret, is being superseded by another and more universal norm, and that a new tradition is being born. (Of this more universal norm there areas yet no accredited interpreters — for the Soviet leaders arc too involved in opportunist polities to lay claim to that position. I am perhaps the nearest approach to a priest *>f the new' order.) The reason wt are outlaw's then is that there is no law to which w t c can appeal, upon w T hich w r c can rely, or that it is w r orth our w'hilo any longer to interpret, 81 v PALEFACE / oven if we could. JVe, by birth the* natural leaders of the Whitt European, are people of no political or public consequence any more, quite natuially. Even, we are repudiated and hated because the law we represent has failed, not being as effective as it should have been or well-tlioughi-out at all, I am afraid ; having been foolishly and corruptly adminis- tered into the bargain. There is not one of us (ex- cept such a venerable and ineffective figure as Shaw, for instance) who is m a position of public Eminence; nor will a single one of us, who is wort lianyt lung, ever be allowed to attain to sueli a position. We, the natural leaders m the World we live in, are now private citizens in the fullest sense, and that World is, as far as the administration of its traditional law of life is concerned, leaderless. I T nder these circum- stances, its soul in a generation or so will be extinct, as a separate 1 unit it will cease to exist . It will have merged in a wider system. Speaking, simply m order to make quite clear what I mean, about myself, if I wore a politician, like Shaw, a man of platforms and cameras, I should be very disappointed in the face of this situation. But there are many reasons why ll suds me epute well to be deemed a public life, to be treated as a dangerous outlaw still to lilustrat' my argument by limans of personal statement: I elo not desire personal notoriety (anel that is really all that is at stake), I would rather slip a book I had written into the hands of the Public than \ would make a thou- sand speeches : my abilities, and my interests, again, do not he in the economic or the political field at all, but in that of the arts of expression, the library and 82 CONCLUSION TO PART I the theatre. But, far more important than any- thing else is the fact that I do not happen to regret the norm that is being superseded and rather lind my sympathies on the side of the more mmersal norm which is (a^ I see the situation) to take its place. 1 am a man of the ‘transition,’ wi none of us can help being that— T ha\e#io organic function m this society, naturally, since this society lias been pretty throughly dismantled and put out of com- mission; though, of course, if >011 ask me that, I would prefer a soeiety 111 wlneh I was beneath a law, wlneh I eoidd illustrate and mteipret. But 1 have no desire to walk into the Past. 1 am content to think a world-law will be better than a huv for Tooting Bee, and politically speaking to leave the matter there. But these various circumstances tend to make me a sort of extremist : for since w hat we have lost was not absolutely to be despised, and should be bitterly regretted if nothing is put in its place as good as it ; and seeing liow T many chances there ahvays are that after wholesale destruction no one will ha\e the genius or the bonne volonlc even to do anything but batten upon the rums and call that the ‘New -world,’ 1 am what is calle d a ‘ bitter ’ critic of all those symp- toms of the interregnum that suggest a compromise or a backsliding or a substitution of opportunist romantic policies (prepared to follow t very sinuosity of the landscape, rather than build spectacular escapes) for a policy of creative compulsion. The reasons, then, that 1 should give for not re- garding as a tragedy the fact of the personal eclipse of all that is most intelligent m the Western com- 83 PALEFACE munitics, and the filling apart of those communities m the mass (as they grope their way back to an un- consciousness), are as follows. Our political dis- organization is our own doing, is it not? it has been at our own hands, as socialists, liberals, radicals, or artists, and not at the hands of another and hostile organism, that we have been overcome: or it has come about through physical necessity, in’the person of our revolutionary Science, all terrestrial .societies being called upon to coalesce into a vastor unit — namely a world-society. If this can be effected with- out more violence and confusion than the human organism is able to endure, it should be the reverse of a misfortune, T think I am right in believing. But there are extremely few people m the Avorld at this moment who regard the situation m this' light. That is a very great pity and likely to in- volve a great deal of uolcnce and confusion. The remnants of our Western Governments, in the grip of a network of financial groups, or War and Trade Trusts, are behaving as though wo Avere called upon to revert to a super-feudalism and the Dark- Ages, and the Communists tend to play up to every gesture of violence and to allow their doctrine to be con- verted into a proletarian imperialism (this must be taken as nothing more than an impression of one not more informed than the next and merely judging from report). flow these remarks affect the questions to be can- vassed in Paleface is as follows. The anti-Paleface campaign has all the appearance of attacks upon a disintegrating oiganism, by some other intact and triumphant organism: it has very much too human 84 CONCLUSION TO PART I and personal a flavour. What seems to infply is that the White World is ‘finished/ that it is a cul- ture or political organism that is going to pieces under assaults from without and from within, quite on the traditional, historical. Decline and Fall pattern. And the Revolt of Asia, the Dari Pt meess , and such books, suggest that it is the "Coloured Races,* or m the non-European, telio have done it or are doing it, and arc to be the beneficiaries of a reversal <|f political power. That is whv the tact- less assaults of the Borzoi lug guns have to be checked and are certain m the end to cause a dis- turbance and make it worth somebody’s while to take up the cause of the ‘Paleface.’ That cham- pionship is a title that is going begging, 1ml for the . moment only. As good little revolutionaries, at all events, we Palefaces have to claim our revolutionary rights — that is mv message m Paleface. We ask nothing better than to go o\er into the reformed world order, am I not right? but we will not be pushed over, no, nor barked at as we go by the Big Borzois and other mongrels, or m short, march out to a chorus of Dark laughter. That, if I understand my fellow Palefaces, is the position. We arc somewhat touchy about the legend of our despotisms, this is as much our Revolution as anybody else’s. Indeed, it is wc who have made it possible. It is more ours, we can claim, than anybody clsc\>. The White component in the world-combination will be of exactly the same importance, as shown by the revolutionary- weighmg-in machine, as every other: but we will not be so gratuitously revolutionary as 85 PALEFACE to alfow the Paleface interest to weigh less that is the idea. Even a White revolutionary has his rights, that is rnv meaning in Paleface . But I nm ‘purely and simply amusing myself/ as Paul would say. I have no official position, White, Ited or Black, nor do I covet one. America has been called the ‘ Melting- FoV — it is where more than anywhere else the world-state is being prepared, m a big preliminary olla podnda. I have called this book a Philosophy of the Melting- Pot: so theie is no occasion to explain how it is that America is the scene I have chosen for my mam illustrations. The outlaws like myself w ho arc preparing the new Law and the new Norm have a very heavy respon- sibility It is their business to detach themselves entirely from the specific interests of the human component or group from which they have come, whether Paleface, Negro, Indian or Jew. That i'* why you find me , m Paleface , m a position of defence where my poor downtiodden Paleface brothel is concerned. And because a certain short-sighted cockiness in the Paleface makes him sometimes scorn my assistance and causes him to be blind to the novel dangers of his situation, I do not for that reason abandon my impartial ministrations. The new Law will effectively take shape, it is very likely, in the continent of America, for the same reason that the metropolitan position of Rome caused the jus gentium to lx* developed practically 8C CONCLl SION TO PART I th'T** her tin elsewhere, m^hc ordinary fcoursc of the d:i’ ! y routine of the Praetor Pcreginuis — In R.ane the magistral appointed to deal with the eases m which foreigners were invoked (and to whom the roman code was not applicable) was the Praetor Ptrcgrinfls. As Rome grt w in importance, foreigners trorn all quarters of the world made their appearance; and Hie Praetor Peregruuis had forced upon him what w s to some extent a constant exer- cise 4 in*les of 1 lie jus gentium w r eie linaily incorporated m '»» roman system, which would benefit by acquiring a more universal applicability. The well-known though disputed identification by Sir Henry Maine of the jus gentium with the jus naiuralv ('jus naturale is jus gentium seen m the light of th< Stoic Philosophy') may serve to em- phasize still more the significance of this juristic evolution, consequent upon the meeting and traffick- ing of nations. We are in a world in w r hich we are all in some sense outlaw's, at the moment, for our traditions 87 PALEFACE have Sill been too sharply struck at and broken and no new tradition is j^et born. Some such process as occurred in the administration of thfc Praetor Pcre- grmus is occurring today in every quarter of the globe — there is no country that is not in that sense metropolitan. Meantime, we art, technically, in an ‘inhuman 9 situation. This is a very delicate position. It is nccdssary, I think, m consequence, to insist a little upon the essential (though imperfect) humanity of any ill-treated and threatened &roup — such, for instance, as the Palefaces — who so recently were 1 he rulers of the world, and who are, as a result, looked at somewhat askance, in the new dispensa- tion, and perhaps hustled, on occasion. As to the ‘common good, 9 what can be said briefly on Hint head, in connection with the things we are discussing, is as follows. No successful human society could be founded upon a notion of the ‘common good 9 which at- tempted to weigh out to everybody an equal amount and kind of ‘good. 9 The ‘pleasures of the mmd, 9 for instance (which Green denied himself), cannot be equally distributed unless you have a community composed of standard minds, turned out according to some super-mechanical method. It is exactly that sort of regularity or quantitative fixity that it is necessary to avoid, for the sake of the mutual satisfaction of the members of*any social group. The ‘common good 9 can only mean organic ‘good, 9 the functional 'good 9 belonging to some social 88 CONCLUSION TO PART I organism. There cannot be any ‘good’ comnton to an unorganized mob of ‘things.’ It is only when a mob of things *is organized, and has become pos- sessed of persons (interpreting and administering its laws and its tradition) that it can be said to have a ‘common good.’ »A ‘common good’ is, m short, an expression of the law of ‘normal’ beings (m the jur- istic sense.of beings beneath a Common law), and it reduces itself, in the end, to the proper working of their paH’Cular law — where that law is healthy and effective, operating m a naturally dosed system. A society is formed, in the first instance, it might be said, by the secretion of some spiritual quiddity (which is the germ of the norm or law) by some single powerful family, or group of active families. Jt is this norm, a« it matures and acquires the strength of habit, that holds them together. From tilt start that norm is incarnated in the chiefs and leaders of the group, and becomes personal, as it were. It is to those leaders that everything is ‘due’ on the pari of the other members of the gioup. For Green, however, the ‘common good* would mean something entirely different from the laws of this organic complex of relationships. For him the ‘good’ had become a (falsely) personal ‘good,’ and human society was conceived as a horizontal egal- itarian plane of equal and undifferentiated ‘persons.’ There were no ‘things’ in this world at all — except ‘lower animals,' stones and trees. For him, as a typical ninctccnth-ccntury revolutionary moralist, until every man, woman and child (but especially every woman and child), m the entire world, had been accommodated with all the ‘pleasures of the 89 PALEFACE mind*’ of Plato, G*?en could know no peace. And (to turn from the pleasures of the mind of Plato to things about which there is at any time likely !o be more trouble) if one individual had a wireless set, or a Bentley or a Morris-Oxford, then everybody must have them — quite irrespective oPthc fact that it is evident to any fairly intelligent and observant 'per- son today that the possession of these machines is not spiritually of very great advantage to the aver- age man, and so such possessions can hajrdly be re- garded as eligible for a position among that aggregate of things we agree to call the ‘common good.’ The ‘common good’ can, then, only be defined, in a general way, as the law of any social organism. But perhaps any social organism is too sweeping: for a society can be so low in the vital scale that it is. incapable of realizing anything that can properly be described as a ‘good’ at all. Most of our Western democracies are rapidly reaching that biologic level. So it must be the law\ I think, of a fairly active and perpendicular--- a well-proportioned, elastic, orderly — society. — As for the indefinite expansion of the idea of the ‘good,’ or of the ‘human’ without limit of time or place — so that any number of units may be embraced by a law that is unique — there again the emotional or sentimental expansi venose of the protestant moralist seems to me to be at fault, and to provide for us, m place of a well-built society, an emotional chaos. That type of feeling must to my mind result m social ideas that are at once meta- physically impossible and foolish, or, from the stand- point of the engineer or the artisl , in structures that will be disgustingly unsatisfactory or else quite 90 CONCLUSION TO PART I meaningless — a sort of rainbow-bridge, of crude and stupid tint, stretched from nowhere to nowhere. I do not wish*to seem loo severe ot even perhaps a trifle roman, but I must pursue my analysis of this type of ethics a step further, for else the word ‘human’ will be left up m the air, I am afraid, or get mixed up with Green’s lowest animals/ And yet the ‘ JSe suis Itomam — je suis liunimn’ of Maui- ras is a formula for the proveneal countryside — and a very g?od one — rather than for the american ‘Melting-pot/ into which we all must slip (and, in my view, should slip, although I say so without any dogmatism). , Outside what would popularly be regarded as the ‘human’ norm, he all the other forms of the animal •creation. In older to know what we really mean by * human/ we cannot escape considering that ir- rational world ; any more than in considering what appears on the face of it the ‘human’ world, can we help discriminating between the rational and the irrational. There* is no question but that a dog, for instance, of a charming character, is more worthy, m the abstract, of our interest and sympathy, than are very many men, both Paleface and Coloured. If you isolate that particular ‘lower animal, ’and that inferior man, then the animal is the more k human ’ — gentler, better, and more rational. To that pro- position, I am sme, I shall have* no difficulty in receiving your assent (although if the Borzois are listening, they no doybt will bark, for they will per- ceive that this might raise difficulties for them). A deer or a horse is a nobler creature physically, perhaps, than many men; and some individual 91 PALEFACE horses and deer would be superior spiritually to them. Yet those animals could not be said to come within a human canon, or to be themselves ‘human’ : and therefore there is nothing ‘due ’ from us to them or vice versa— or only a sentimental something, which is m its purest state thtft something that Green, or the primitive Christian, seizes upon, exag- gerates, transfers to men, and proceeds Jo convert into the peculiar property of man, calling it ‘love* and the ethical sense. But indeed it i$ most un- reasonable when the ‘lower animals’ are excluded from such ’ human ’ canons. Ethics as conceived by the author of the Pro- legomena 1o Ethics, whom I have chosen for my illus- trations m this essay, should be entirely confined, perhaps, to questions regarding our relations to animals, other than men. The science of Ethics altogether might find its true r61o in the regulation of such relationships. Dogs, horses, eats and cows arc the natural, and the true, clients of the moral philosopher, I believe. As such, the exercise of ethical emotions would give rise to very grave problems indeed : and they would involve questions very much more difficult to meet than those raised by the purely human variety of ethical speculation: we should immediuUly be confronted with the pro- blem of the pork-cliop and the mutton-cutlet, in fine, or of the draught-horse. And I need not point out to the reader possessed of an acute political eye what repercussions this newly demarcated ethical science would have in the world of revolutionary publics. Tn a flash everything would be m an uproar. 92 CONCLUSION TO PART I I believe the problem of the ‘mutton -cutlet ’"will yet come into it £ own, and become one of first-class political importance. — But of all neglected problems of that order, the Paleface problem is to my nimd the first on the list — if only because, m that instance, we ourselves are the mutton-chop. I am sorry to terminate this part of my cssqy upon this sordid animal no£c. 9fi PART II PALEFACE * OK LOVE? YVIIAT1IO! SMELLI\£ STIi A \ OENKSS ’ I c There is something direct . brutal , and fine m the nature of l Incas . It is not quite an accident that in our games he is always t Ik* Indum, iclulc I am the despised White , the Paleface .' A Story 'Telle?' s Story . She? wood Anderson . 1 1 7 cent ojten to the movie studios and watched Hit men and thi women at work. Children, play- ing with dreams — dreams of an hnoic kind of despeiado eon boy, doing good deeds at the busi- ness end of a gun— dreams oj an ever-virtuous womanhood walking amid x tee - American dreams — Anglo-Saxon dreams' — (Ibid.) 4 The Indian way of consciousness is difjneni from and Jatal to our way of consciousness . Our way of consciousness is different pom and fatal to the Indian .' Mornings in Mexico. I). II. Lawrence. 4 The consciousness of one branch of humanity is the anmhilaiioji oj the consciousness oj another branch. That is. the life oj the Indian, his stream of conscious being , is just death to the While man — (Ibid.) INTRODUCTION I N the following essay I quote very fully and examine at considerable length passages from Mr. D. H. Lawrence, Mr. Sherwood Anderson, and other writers using popular tjarratne to present ideas and Vven religions. That so much careful attention, should be given to artists in lietion, or to works written, it is felt, m the lirst instance, to amuse, may seem strange to some people. It is not usual to honour them in this way. Weic it the analysis of the conditions favourable to a virus, of some definite ‘ social problem ’ (wit h t he accompany - ing statistics, references to philosophic and socio- logical treatises, and so on), it would not appear at all strange to devote a great deal of space to a minute examination ol things that were in thcniscLes, pei- haps, not very important or interesting. What I wish to stress, then, is that these essays do not come under the head of 'literary criticism ’ They are written purely as investigations into con- temporary states of mind, as these are displayed for us by imaginative writers pretending to give us a picture of current life ‘as it is lived,’ but who in fact give us much more a picture of life as, according to them, it should be lived. In the process they slip in, or thrust in, an entire philosophy, wln< h they derive from more theoretic fields, and which is usually not at all the philosophy $>f the sort of people they por- tray. The whole of Paleface , in fact, deals with and is intended to set m relief the automatic processes by which the artist or the writer (a novelist or a poet) G 97 PALEFACE obrains lus formularies: to show how the formulas lor lus progress are issued to him, how he gets them by post, and then applies them. According to present arrangements, in the pre- sence of nature the artist or w r ritcr is almost always aprionst, we suggest. Further, he tends to lose Ins powers of observation (which, through reliance upon external nature, in the classical ages gave him free- dom) altogether. Yet observation must be the only guarantee of Ins usefulness, as much as of his inde- pendence. So he takes Ins nature, m piacticc, from theoretic lields, and resigns himself to s< e only what conforms to his syllabus of patterns, lie deals with the raw life, thinks he sees arabesques in it ; but m fact the arabesques that lie 1 secs more often than not emanate from lus theoretic borrowing, lie has put t hem there. It is a naturc-for-techmcal-purposcs of which lie is conscious. Scared} anj longer can he be said to control or be even in touch with the raw at all, that is the same as saving he is not in touch with nature • he rather dredges and excavates things that are not objects of direct perception, with a science he has borrowed ; or, upon the surface, ob- serves only according to a system of opinion which hides from him any but a highly selective reality. The mere fact- with the artet or interpreter of nature — that lus material is living, exposes him to the temptation of a drowsy enthusiasm for paradox, since ‘life’ is paradox (sprinkled over a process of digestive sloth), and all men live, actually, upon the amusement of surprise. fc What man is this who arrives? A beautiful, a wonderful stranger!’ they say and all strangers are wonderful or beautiful. 08 INTRODUCTION TO PART II ‘ What will the day bring forth ? f There will be some pleasant novelty* at least of that we can be certain ! — a novelty with whose appearance we have had nothing to do.’ ‘Life’ is nof-knowing: it is the surprise packet : so, essentially unsoloctivc, if nature can be so arranged as to yield him as it wen a system of surprises, the artist will searccjjv take the trouble to look bclfind them, to detect the principle of their occurrence, or to refleet that for ‘surprises,' for the direct life of nature, they are a little over-dramatic and particularly pat. So he automatically applies the accepted formula to nature; the corresponding accident manifests itself, like a djinn, always with an imposing clatter (since it is a highly selective ‘acctdc lit ’ that undci stands its part): and the artist 1 s perfectly satisfied that nature lias spoken. He does not see at all that ‘nature’ is no longer there. You are merely describing, you may say r , the fam- ous ‘subjective 9 ehaiaeter of this time, in your own way and a little paradoxically. If I could surprise anybody into examining with a purged and renewed sense what is taken so much for granted, namely our subjecti\ity T ’ — though who or what is the subject or Subject? — 1 should have justilied any method whatever. But I am anxious to capture the atten- tion of the reader in a way r to which he is less accus- tomed, a less paradoxical way. In Western countries the Eighteenth -century man and the Puritan man are perhaps the most marked types that survrvc, disguised of course in all sorts of manners, and differently combined. We have learnt to live upon a diet of pure ‘fun,’ we are sensa- tionalist to the marrow. Ours is a kind of Wembley- 09 PALEFACE life of raree-showsj of switchbacks and watershoots. We observe the gleeful oyc of Mr. jBertrand Russell as he appears suspended for a moment above some formal logical precipice. Or there is Mr. Roger Fry in the company of his friend, Mr. Bell, sustaining delightedly shock after shock trom the handles of some electric machine, or m oilier words from the unceremonious wgour of some painting which, charged with a strange zeal, outrages in tprn all the traditional principles of his English training and his essential respectability. Then there arc the round- abouts for the Peter Pan chorus, swings for exhibi- tionists, mantle grottoes and the lecture-tents of the gymnosophists. Oh it is a wild life that wc live in the near West, between one apocalypse and another! And the far West is much the same, wc are told, hi a word, we have lost our sense of reality. So wc return to the central problem of our ‘subjectivity,’ which is what wc have m the place of our lost sense, and which is the name by which our condition goes. Elsewhere I have described this in its great lines as the transition from a 'public to a piivate way of thinking and feeling. The great industrial machine has removed from the individual life all responsi- bility. For an individual business adventurer to succeed as lie could in the first days of industrial expansion, will to-morrow be impossible. It is evidently m these conditions that you must look for the solid ground of our ‘subjective’ fashions. The obvious historic analogy is to^be found in the Greek political decadence. Stoic and other philosophies set out to provide the individual with a complete substitute for the great public and civic ideal of the 100 INTRODUCTION TO PART II happiest days of Greek freedom : *with their thoQght we are quite at home. I will lake the account of these circumstances to be lound m Cairtl. ‘Even in the time of Aristotle a great ehangt was passing o\ er the public life of Greece, by which all its ethical traditions weie discredited . . . Ii> till* victories of Philip and Alexander the city states of Grocer were reduced to the frank of subordinate municipalities m a great military empire, and, under t[ie dynasties founded by Alexander’s generals, they became the plaything and the pnze of a conflict between gi eater powers, which they could not substantially influence ... we may fairly saj that it was at tins period that the diu- sion between public and private life, which is so , familiar to us but w as so unfamiliar to the Greeks, was iirst dctisn cly established as a fact. A private non -pohl leal life became now, not the exception, but the rule, not the abnormal choice ol a few recalcitrant spirits, like Diogenes or Aristippus, but the inevitable lot of the great mass of man- kind. The* individual, no longer finding Ins happi- ness or misery closely associated with that of a community . . . was thrown back upon lm own resources. . What Rome did was practical!} to pulverize the old societies, reducing them to a collection of individuals, and then to hold them together by an external organization, military and legal ... its effect (that of roman power) was rather to level and disintegrate than to draw' men together .’ — (Evol %f Theology.) There is not much resemblance, outwardly, be- 101 PALEFACE tw£6n the pulverization by one central power, sucli as that of Rome, and the pulverization of our social and intellectual life that is being effected by general industrial conditions all over the world. But there is, in the nature of things, the same oppressive re- moval of all personal outlet (sufficiently significant to satisfy a full-blooded business or political Ambi- tion) m a great public life of indnulual enterprise: and, in the West, at the same time, through the agency of Science, all our standards of "existence have been discredited. Many people protest against such an interpretation of what has happened to us in Europe and America* they do not see that it has happened, they say that at most ‘there may be a danger of’ it: vet every detail of the life of any individual you choose to take, in almost any career, testifies to its correctness. As to what is at the bottom of this immense and radical translation from a free public life, on the one hand, to a powerless, unsatisfying, circumscribed private life on the other, with that we are not here especially occupied. But, the answer lies entirely, on the physical side, with the spectacular growth of Science, and its child. Industry. The East is in process of being revolutionized, however, in t lie same manner as the West T ct me quote Mr. Russell: ‘The kmd of difference that Newton has made to the world is more easily appreciated where a Newtonian civilization is brought into sharp con- trast with a pro- scientific culture, as for example, m modern China. The ferment m that country is the inevitable outcome of the arrival of Newton 102 INTRODUCTION TO PART II upon its shores. ... If Newtctn had never liwd, the civilization of China would have remained un- disturbed, and I suggest that v r e ourselves should be little different from what we were in the middle of the eighteenth century.’ — (ltadto Times , April 8th. 1028.) • If you substitute Science for NeA'ton (for if Newton ‘had never lived’ somebody else would) that ex- plains our condition. We have been thrown back wholesale from the external, the public world, by the successive waves of the ‘Nevvlonian’ innovation, and been driven down into our primitive private mental ca\cs, of the unconscious and I he primitive. We are the cave- men of the new mental wilderness. That is the description, and the history of our par- ticular ‘subjectivity.’ In the arts of formal expression, a ‘dark night of the soul’ is settling down. A kind of mental lan- guage is m process of invention, flouting and ovei- ruling the larynx and the tongue Y to the origins ol its im- pulses and the nature and history of the formulas with which it works; 01 else it is committed to be- coming a zealous parrot of systems and judgments that reach it from the unknown. In the latter cast* m (dfeet what it does is to bestow authority upon a hypothetic something 01 someone it has never seen, and would be at a loss to describe (since m the ‘sub- jective’ there is no common and visible nature), and 103 PALEFACE progressively to su! render its faculty of observation, and so sever itself from the external field of im- mediate truth or belief — for the Anly meaning of ‘nature’ is a nature possessed m common. And that is what now lias happened to many artists: they pretend to be their own authority, but they are not even that It would not be # easv to exaggerate the naivete with which the average artist or \mtcr to-day, de- prived of all central authority, body of knowledge, tradition, or commonly accepted system of nature, accepts what he receives m place of those things. He is usually as innocent of any saving scepticism, even of the most elementary sort, where his subject- ively-possessed machinery is concerned, as the most secluded and dullest peasant abashed with metro r politan novelties; only, unlike the peasant, he has no saving slirew r dness even: and this is all the more peculiar (and therefore not generally noticed, or if recognized, not easily credited) because he is phy- sically m the \ cry centre of things, and so, it w r ould be supposed, ‘knowing,’ and predisposed to doubt. Listen attentively to auy conversation at a cafe or a tea-table, or any place where students or artists collect and exchange ideas or listen to one rising — or equally a risen — wTiter or artist talking to another — from this theie are very few people that you w T ill have to except: it 1* astonishing how% m all the heated dogmatical arguments, you will never find them calling m question the vfcry basis upon w r hich the v moveinent’ they are advocating rests. They are never so 1 radical ’ as that. Not that the direo- 104 INTRODUCTION TO PART II tion they are taking may not b% the right one, but they have not the least consciousness, if so, why it is right, or of the many alternatives open to them. The authority of fashion is absolute in such cases: whatever has by some means introduced itself and gamed a wide crowd-acceptance foi sav two years and a half, is, itself, unassailable. Its appli- cation, oi*ly, presents alternatives. The world of fashion for them is as solid and unquestionable as that large stone against which Johnson hit his foot, to confute the Bishop of Cloyne. For them the tune-world has become ail absolute, as it ha^ lor the philosopher m the background, feeding them with a hollow assurance. But this suggestionabihty, directed to other objects, is shown everywhere by the crowd. The confusion would be more intense than it is, even, if everv small practitioner of art or letteis started examining, m a dissatisfied and critical spirit, everything at all, you might at this point object. And, if that is the case, why attempt to sow distrust of the very ground on winch they stand, among a herd of happy and ignorant technicians entranced, not with ‘mind,’ but with ‘subjectivity*? Was not the man-of-science of thirty years ago, m undisturbed possession of all his assumptions as regards the 'reality' he handled so effectively, happier and brighter, and so perhaps more useful than las more sceptical successor toda\ ? This argument would carry more weight, if the opinions to which it deferred were not so fanatically held. It is very difficult to generalize like that: sometimes it is a good thing to interfere with a som- 105 PALEFACE nambulisl and of course sometimes not. You have to use your judgment. The kind of screen that is being built up between the reality and us, the ‘dark mglil of the soul 5 into which each individual is relapsing, the intellectual shoddiness of so much of the thought responsible for the ifrtisCs reality, or ‘nature’ today, all these things seem to point to* the desirability of a ncV and if necessary shattering criticism of ‘modernity/ as it stands at present. Having got so far, again, we must sustain pur revolu- tionary impulse. It is an unenterprising thought indeed that would accept all that the ‘Newtonian 5 civilization of science has thrust upon our unhappy world, simply because it once had been different from something else, and promised ‘progress/ though no advantage so far lias been seen to ensue from its, propagation for an v of us, except that the last vestiges of a few superb civilizations are being stamped out, and a million sheep’s-heads, m London, can sit and listen to the distant bellowing of Mussolini; or in situations so widely separated as Wigan and Brighton, listen simultaneously to the bellowing of Dame Clara Butt. It is too much to ask us to accept these privileges as substitutes for the art of Sung or the- philosophy of Greece. — It is as a result of such considerations a* th'^e f hnf n now revolution is already on loot, making its appearance first under the aspect of a violtnt reaction, at last to biing a steady and growing mass of criticism to bear upon t hose innovations t hat Mr. Russell would term ‘ Ncw- toman/ and question their rijfht to land upou the shores of China, and do there what they are said to be doing. 100 INTRODUCTION TO PART II In the arts of formal expression tins new impulse has already made its appearance But the deep eclipse of the exlreme ignorance in w Inch most tech- nical giants repose, makes the pointing of the new day, m those places, very slow and uncertain. — Really the average of our artists and writeis could be regarded under the figure of nvmphs, who all are ravished periodically by a paiftheon of unknown gods, who appear to them lirst m oik form then in another. These arc evidently d< lties w ho speak m a scientific canting and abstract dialect, mainh, m the moment of the supreme embrace, to these hoi and boLhercd rapt, intelligences: and all the rather hybrid creations that ensue lisp m the accents of science as well. But is it one god, assuming many different lorms, or is it a plurality of disconnected celestial adventurers? That is a disputed point but I incline to the belief that one god only is responsible for these various escapades. That is immaterial, however, for if it is not one, then it is a colony of beings very much resembling one* another. So then, before discussing at all the pros and cons of the ‘subjective’ fashion, it is necessary to recog- nize that it is not to the concrete material of art that w T e must go for our argument : that is riddled with contradict orv assumptions. Most dogmatically ‘sub- jective,’ tclling-froni-thc-mside, fashionable method — ■whatever cist it may be and whether ‘well-found* or not — is ultimately discovered to he bad philo- sophy -that is to sav # it takes its oiders fiom second- rate philosophic dogma. Can art that is a reflec- tion of bad philosophy lie good art? I should say 107 PALEFACE that you could make good ait out of almost any- thing, whether good or bad from the standpoint of right reason. But under these circumstances there is, it follows, no objection to the source being a rational one: for reason never did any harm to art, even if it n< ver did it any gnfcd. And m other respects wo are all highly interested in the success of reason. ' * But if, politically and socially, men are today fated to a ‘subjective’ iole, and driven inside their private, mental eaves, how can art be anything but ‘subjective,’ too? Is externality of any sort pos- sible, for us* Are not v\e of necessity confined to a mental world of the subconscious, m which wo natur- ally sink back to a more primitive level; and hence our ‘ primitivism, ’ too? Our lives cannot be de- scribed in terms of action — externally that is — be- cause we never truly uct. We have no common world into which we project ourselves and recognize what we see there as symbols of our fullest powers. To those questions w r c now in due course would be led: but what here 1 have been trying to show is that lirst of all much more attention should be given to the intellectual principles that are behind the work ol art: that to sustain the pretensions of a considerable innovation a work must be surer than it usually is to-day of its formal parentage: that nothing that is unsatisfactory m the result should be passed over, but should be asked to account for itself in the abstract terms that are behind its phe- nomenal face. And I have suggested that many subjective fashions, not plastically or formally very satisfactory, would become completely discredited 108 INTRODUCTION TO PART II if it were clearly explained upon what flimsy theories they are in fact built : what bad philosophy, m short, has almost everywhere been lesponsible for the bad art. My main object in Pair face has been to place m the hands of the readers of imaginative literature, and also of that very eonsideiable literal ure directed to popularizing scientific and philosophic notions, in language as clear and direct as possible, a sort of key ; so that, with its aid, they ma\ be able to read any work of art ptcscnlcd to them, and, resisting the skilful blandishments of the lictiomst, reject this plausible ‘life’ that often is not life, and understand the ideologic or philosophical basis of these confus- ing entertainments, where so many false ideasehang* hands or change heads. As it is, the populanzer is generally approached with the eyes firmly shut and the mouth wide open. And the fiction in its \cr\ nature takes with it the authority of life — people live it, as it were, as they read: so it is able to pass off as Ira e almost anything. The often \ ery elabor- ate philosophy expressed in this sensational form very often not only misrepresents the empirical reality, but misstates the truth. I dignify this critical work with the title of .system* because as literature stands today, it m reality amounts to that. It is a system that will enable any fairly intelligent man, once he opens his mind to it, and seizes its mam principles, to read under an entirely new light almost everything that is w r ntten at the present time! Works of sociology, fiction, history, philosophy, claiming to be on the one hand conceived ‘objectively,’ according to the non-human 109 PALEFACE methods of ideal Science, will be found on close in- spection, 11 l most instances, to be All-too-Human, and to be serving ends anything but scientific; and, in another class, works of fiction claiming only to be ingenuous works of art , will be found to be saturated with political doctrine, or with attitudes of mind imposed upon the Many in I he first place not by pure pleasure experts, anxious only to ‘excite the palate of their clients, but by political experts, de- vising means of ruling people by working on their senses and emotions. In order of course to employ this system effec- tively the reader must acquaint himself with many things of a sort that do not come Ins way in the ordinary course of life, lie must accustom himself to regarding the means by which people arc ruled today as very much more shrewd and elaborate than is generally believed. He must entirely dis- eard all the notions of the essential brute stupidity of ‘powci’ that foimerly sometimes would have applied in Europe, but certainly docs not at present. If he finds it dillicult lo believe that he is ruled with such a ‘ruthless’ cleverness, let him study for a moment the highly ‘psychological’ methods by which the Soviet rules its subjects. The Soviet do their ruling m public, indeed: they explain and explain, as did the german theoreticians of war: there is no excuse, therefore, for any one to-day not to be au courant with the way that he is likely to be ruled. For lie can be sure that those open professors of intrigue and heid-hypnotism are not the only practitioners at work. Those who do not publish daily accounts of how they reach their ends are at 110 INTRODUCTION TO PART II least likely enough to be not less clever than those who do. In the following pages, then, it is my intention to squeeze out all the essential meaning that there is in the works I select, and to lea\e only the purely literary or artist a* shells. Thai the Public, at the present moment, should lurv e that essential matter isolated for it, seems to me of very great importance. Again, Mr. D. II, Lawrence, an english writer, supplies th£ most important e\idenee in the re\iew of the contemporary amcrican 1 consciousness/ But, first of all, many american and english books aie read almost equally on both sides of the Atlantic; Sinclair Lewis is as much at home* here m England as he is m America, and Mr. Law r rence is, I believe, more widely read in the United States than m Eng- land. Jlis name is invariably associated, in America, with that of Sherwood Anderson. In the 1025 Amencami of Mr. Mencken a seorntul Midtile West rcvicw r er refers to "Sherwood Lawrence/ as though that composite name covered one person. So my choice of Lawrence is explained. A further reason, liowe\cr, is that his Morning* in Mexico reveals the true aim of Sherwood Anderson and others of his school better rh-m they ha\c, to my knowledge, so far revealed themselves. This docs not mean that Mr. Lawrence is better qualilied to express what they all equally wibli to say. it happens, only, that he has provided, in Ins book, an ideal material for such an analysis as the present one. There is one more j/oint. No criticism of America as a whole is involved m my choosing, m this in- stance, amcrican writers. America appears to me 111 PALEFACE # much stronger ancl more admirable than those of her writers who are most prominent m criticizing her, and who for a longtime have been busy attempt- ing to convert the essential American to something that would be far less effective or desirable than what at present lie still is. Also these writers are committed to a policy of dm mg him into a position that would be a much less env iable one than that he occupies at present. This situation, with .the ‘Com- ing of Age of America,' is changing, but it is unlikely that menckemsm will be dropped, and if it is suc- ceeded by a mere jingoism, its effects will remain, not far beneath the surface. It is my sense of the immense importance of America to the Western World thal has impelled me to scrutinize the inmd of contemporary America, as displayed in some of her most influential writers. My admiration for that very forcible* publicist, Mr. Mencken, is not in contradiction with that. Mencken was absolutely necessary to destroy the sclf-com- placency that w'ell-being must bring. Also he has been of enormous use, no doubt, m cutting off the American from Ins self-indulgent, comfortable Past, which is no longer actual today. That Past had to be evacuated, the* anglo-saxon romanticism had to be knocked out of Americans, or out of the Eng- lish, by somebody. But it is no doubt true, as most of the writers of the* reaction sec today, that such a critic as Mencken, become an institution, should he dissuaded from philosophizing, as it were, his function. 112 Section I ROMANTICISM AND COMPLEXES § 1. The Paleface 7 arrives the Dubious Present of an ''Inferiority Complex' once proud, boastful* super-optimistic I American of the United States lias become M just a # White k man-m-the-slreef 5 with a pro- nounced ‘inferiority complex.’ (I speak of the edu- cated, or book-reading, American.) This lact, or something like it, is patent to anybody who has followed american thought of laic and had oppor- tunities of inciting a good many Americans. ‘Never glad confident morning again* — for the Ameiican of the United States. This, most Euro- peans would here exclaim, is a change for the better. — Wliat I propose to consider is the first cause or causes of this transformation : and if it is, in reality, a change for the better or not, as it affects America, and as it affects us, m Hie other parts of the anglo- saxon World. 1 will take the last point first. The toning-down of the American is coeval, I sup- pose, to give it a lairly exact convenient date, with the activities of Mr. Mencken. 1 do not of corn sc mean that this great transformation has been effected by the editor of the American Mercury . But the Americana of that writer is not calculated to inspire a very acuti sense of self-respect in the american bosom: and certainly attacks by Mr. Mencken upon the traditional american conceit must have been a powerful factor in bringing to the surface this h 113 PALEFACE gradual sensation of insecurity, the habit of self- criticism, the dissatisfaction, to which I am alluding. At the present moment this has grown, it would seem, into what is actually an ‘inferiority complex.’ Or that is how the situation presents itself to me. That the influence of Mr. Mencken, both in his own writings and through his disciple Mr. Sinclair Lewis, is of a popular, rather than an intellectual, order is true. But we are concerned he^e with the wider general discouragement and disiJhision of the large book-reading mass of a prosperous modern democracy : so that docs not affect our statement. § 2. White Hopes with a * Complex .’ There is among t lie younger writers a powerful movement to amerieanize. The tendency is to isolate America from Europe, and to produce an art that shall be starkly american , for the Americans. Tins, at the present time, finds expression in numer- ous attempts in the literary field, at all events, to depict essential phases of american life. The scene usually chosen is that part of the United States that is least affected by the more recent european im- migration, and t here fore most american, in the old sense Mencken, 1 should say, means very little to the 1 people engaged in these latter activities. As a publicist who ten, or five, years ago shook things up, and who at all times has used lus influence to get a good book read and so prepared the way for the present more intelligent standards, they would respect him. But as a political publicist lie would lit WHITE HOPES WITH A ‘COMPLEX’ not interest them. These are, as it were, the m- tellectualist Wljitc Hopes. But they are White Hopes who have passed through very dark barrages of disillusioned thought; and the character of all they do will bear traces, I think, of the rough hand- ling thc\ have rccAved. They are White Hopes with a complex ; or White Hopes composed of many com- plexes. A?s such the more far-sighted literary fans will, no doubt, think twice before putting their money on them. This is a general statement, with- out reference to any particular writers. But more than that, m its search for the savage and the primitive (resulting usually m rather arti- ficial romantic constructions) this movement has a philosophy which is scarcely that of the superb natural physical vigour (innocent of expedients to look strong, or to terrorize with exhibitions of vio- lence, innocent also of an intensive and romantically overheated stx-philosophy) of the early, purely curo- pean, American. It has all over it the stigmata of the neo-barbarism of the post-war gilded rabble, of cafe, studio and counting-house. And the neo- barbansm, so elaborate and sophisticated, is euro - peart — not anything that can be called ‘American,’ m origin. It is of the Bitzcs and Carltons, of the Cote d’Azur, of the luxurious vulgar philistine bohemian ism of the european cities. Greenwich Village today, without drink, is a dirty neglected and empty slum. It is to prosperous bohemian Europe you must look for the necessary mise cn scene of this philosojfliy. The pan-amencan movement, then, so excellent as a direction, so far, except in a few cases, does not 115 PALEFACE seem to have emancipated itself from the essential curopean post-war decay. However much it buries its head in the lawny sands, or super-rich and fat Zolaesque red loam, of Arizona, Indiana, or Ohio, its bottom (so to speak) — its tell-tale ecstatically wriggling back-side, remains m the Cafe du Dome, Montparnasse. And there is no true bridge between the primitive America it is sought to resuscitate and the Cafe du Dome. Glance into the Dome, any one who questions this, and who happens to be m Pans. You would think you were m a League of Nations beset by a Zionist delegation, in a movie studio, m Moscow, Broadway, or e\ en Zion itself , an ywhere but in the mythical watertight America of the present reaction, whatever that pm sang America may be worth as an idea, and it seems to me a good one. These suggestions I allow myself to make very much under correction, however: and that anyway is not the subject of mv essay, except indirectly. It had to be alluded to to obtain an accurate per- spective for the satire of Mencken — Lew is — Nathan. § 3 The opposite ' Supei tonlp Complex' thrust at the same Him upon the U mailing Black. Anything that affects the general mind, however, m the w T ay that the attacks of Mencken have, does also, without their knowing it, usually influence the intellectuals. Such a man as Shcrwnod Anderson, for instance (who, in Ins turn. w r as the originator of the Amcnca-purr school), has been very much in- fluenced by all those waves of opinion and sugges- tion militating against the American believing in 116 THE ‘SUPERIORITY COMPLEX * himself quite as firmly as formerly he did, and so against this dre^m of a watertight America. What I shall have subsequently to say with regard to the books of Sherwood Anderson will, I think, make this aspect of the matter very much clearer. Ambition of that sort should certainly be made oi sterner stuff than such^as Anderson is able to supply. It would not be an exaggeration, m consequence, to say tltfit Americana is making a present to the White American of a formidable and full-fledged ‘inferiority complex,* that is, in so far as lie is the w r idely-advcrtised, popular focus of all the dis- illusioned thought of the post-war Western mind in the United States. Parallel with this, many writers of anicncan nationality are busy providing the Negro, the Mexican Indian, the Asiatic Settler, and indeed any- body and evervbdv who is not a pur sang White, of the original american-curopean stock, with a ‘superi- ority complex.’ This in some eases is not an easy matter. The American Negro, for instance, is difficult to galvanize into pride of that sort, and is apt to remain obstinately ‘inferior.’ Similarly, the Kaffir requires a good deal ol hard pumping before he swells into an aggressive race-class warrior ready to scorn, bare his teeth and drive out, the White. But still the good work goes on. The almost de- mented energy and ingenuity on tin* part of the pumpers is one of the most curious features of these unique events. All this is of course the complement of the other little present — that of the ‘inferiority complex.’ A mechanical reversal is in progress, or promises (if that is how you look at it) to occur. 117 PALEFACE § 4. The Nature of Mr. Mencken's Responsibility. At this pom l I had better make clear what I sup- pose is Mr. Mencken’s position in this racial turning of the tables, and that of those associated with him in these revolutionary enterprises. Mr. Mencken, let us sav, beeame^more and more impressed with the futility of the machinery of Democracy, which lie was able to observe in full and indecent operation all round him, m the rich and exaggerated amencan scene. It showed itself capable of idiocies of un- equalled dimensions. The Poor White showed how unable he was to defend himself against his inter- fering rulers, of whatever shade of race or politics. The Rich White was not a specially high type of magnate, and lie manipulated his power with a sickly unction of cordiality and righteousness that gave the intelligent amencan patriot (such as Mr. Mencken) a violent nausea, and every sort of misgiving for the future of amencan life. This violent nausea trans- lated itself into violent acts of criticism and persi- flage. The more truly patriotic, the more disgusted he would be. I am not acquainted with Mr. Mencken; but that, as a description of what has brought about Ins famous critical attacks, would. I suppose, be gener- ally accepted bv educated Americans. In any ease he has convicted the American Democracy (mainly out of its own mouth, in his Americana , which arc extracts from newspapers, handbills, advertisements, etc.) of surprising stupidities. Generalizing from this body of evidence, ho concludes that such a form 118 MR. MENCKEN’S RESPONSIBILITY of Democracy as has developed n* America is funda- mentally bad and absurd. Passing on fibm the general statement to my private view of the matter, 1 do not see how any one surveying the evidence Mr. Mencken has collected could deny that a jadieal change of ->ome sort w r as to be dosired for this great key-nation of the modern world. By key -nation I mean tljat what the United States arc today, the other most ‘advanced’ coun- tries w r e know, from experience, will become to- morrow. Ivarl Marx, in his dav. told people to watch Industrial England, on the same principle. So what America rt ally is is of as great importance outside its frontiers as within them. But those changes should perhaps be quite different from what Mr. Mencken would bring about, if he were called in to do the changing, as well as t he smashing. Radical the changes no doubt should be. But there are so many radical things that are the opposite, even, of what is meant, currently, in America by ‘radical.’ Even the choice of this epithet for ntu direction only of change, or revolution, reveals, surelv, a very much narrowed view of life's possibilities. §5. What is Change' factors m the choice of form. Venice, in the midst of its lagoons, was a marine fortress and a trading centre. Man- hattan was a narrow rock, hence the skyscraper, it is said, the skyscraper, elsewhere m America, is often, we are told, a mere ornament, something a rising town must have before it can become a full- fledged ‘city.* The competitive skyscrapers in New r York have similarly been the supreme advertise- ment of Big Business: the rising big business, like the rising big town, had to have a skyscraper. The biggest business, it was assumed, would have the biggest skyscraper. The forms of cities do not grow' according to the requirements of the greatest happiness of the great- est number. They are usually the inventions of minorities. The lull of masonry that goes up behind the Battery at New r York is no doubt as much the panache of mercantile conceit as it is a geographic expedient, ft is one of l he avatars of the principle of beauty, as much as the Venetian palaces. And, m the distance, it is beautiful as well as impressive, though differently from Venice. It is the difference between the towered and terraced most recent battleship of the k Rodney ’ type and the ^ate-barge of the Doge. The upshot of these remarks is as follows (though I cannot go into it >*'ry carefully here) : First, the geographic conditions, and indeed generally the physical conditions, are not so important as is usu- 121 PALEFACE ally supposed in deciding the character of ‘Change’ or of ‘ Progress 9 in the outward form of cities. There is a kind of physical and climatic absolute, no doubt. But the reality is, very often not that absolute, but some sort of perversion. Hence it would he much more m your power than you are accustomed to think to change yourst If, just as it would be to change your environment. In any of a great variety of ways, provided vou had the imagination and the necessary power. ‘ Change 9 is much less than is generally be- lieved a single-gauge track. It is not a ^nglc-gauge track at all. It is a multitudinous field of tracks and lines, only one of which is used. That single line — the one that is used, the one that "happens 9 — we call ‘the new.’ As we proceed along it we call that ‘progress. 9 It is my argument that there is an absolute progress for any given community, but that they are seldom able to investigate it, and seldom attain it. But all philosophy of history today — and Spongier is a most perfect example of that — assumes an ab- solute arrest somewhere or other. There is, on any analogy, advance or ‘progress’ between the amoeba and Socrates. (The amoeba’s opinion of Socrates, I am assuming, wc should not regard as a contribu- tion to values: else the amoeba becomes merely another romantic outcast or superseded ‘race, ’about which we grow touchy and diffident.) But now there is nothing but a rising and falling of peoples and cultures, on a dead level as regards value. Change is always merely — change. It is quite evi- dent that if this had been the philosophy of the earliest men no arts, sciences, or anything but wild 122 WHAT IS 'CHANGE’ OR PROGRESS ? animal life would have resulted. Yet what people call ‘Progress* 1;oday is generally not an advance. Those are the two main facts in this connection: that is the centre of the confusion. Under these circumstances the men of imagination of this period of ‘change* and violent ‘progress* are under no obligation to keep their eyes fixed on the one track and direction that what is called ‘modern ’ and ‘progress* is taking. The fatalism of that fixed stare, of that ‘what is, is,’ is perhaps natural enough, but, in its turn, can only claim to be one attitude. And, as to ‘progress’ or ‘change,’ there are millions of extremely different forms available. You should, for that one out of the many, of your persona] choice (not yet existing, but quite available), wish: and you should steadily oppose what you do not wish. As for the many individuals of imagination and with certain powers, they have to learn once more to wish, or will, quite simply. That is the first step. This all Europeans have for fifty veais been taught not to do, until today to will is very difficult tor them: they have had such a thorough grounding in impotence. But certainly what no one m his senses would wish or will is the America of Mr. Mencken's Americana or the Europe of Herr Spong- ier. And it avouU also show very little imagination — less even than that displayed by those who shut their eyes and open their mouths and swallow* the hastily-manufactured 4 new * — to will yesterday back. For it is yesterday that conceived in the first place the America of Artoricana, and the Europe of spenglerism. Imagine such an artist as Leonardo da Vinci alive 128 PALEFACE at this time and suddenly given carte blanche (in some access of official enthusiasm} to change radi- cally London, New York, or Berlin into the most beautiful city he could imagine: or else suppose him entrusted with the creation of Canberra or a new Delhi. Ij you can imagine sucli an event as that, then you will immediately see the bleakness and un- reality of what is generally called ‘Progress,’ or the false revolutionary fatalism we describe as ‘Change.’ § G. From White Settler to Poor City-White . I will now return to the ‘inferiority complex’ of the White Man. That the seeds of that reversal of feeling do not date from the end of the War, but from long before it, is obvious. If w r e consider for a moment the circumstances in which the White Race has found itself for a long time now, and the temper of many of its literary spokesmen, poets and statesmen, we shall see that clearly. The colonization of the Ncw r World, Australia, and of large areas in Asia and Africa, by the Euro- pean, opened a new epoch of World-history, of a different character from any preceding it. It w r as the domestication, or imperialization, of the entire globe, with the White as overlord. For the most part the White peoples who o\erran the world, and, with the help of their rapidly de- veloping Science, enslaved the greater part of it, wiping out entire races and cultures, were possessed of a meagre cultural outfit, ‘And only a borrowed religion. It is a commonplace that Cortez and Pizarro were less ‘civilized/ on the whole, than the 124 FROM WHITE SETTLER TO POOR CITY-WHITE i Aztecs, Mayans or Incas they subdued. Tlie Anglo- Saxons, who were responsible for the major part of this curopean expansion and colonization (although not the first in the field) possessed less cultural equip- ment, and a more naive and crude variety of religion (their well-thumbe8 Genevan Bible m their breast- pocket), thqn the other White partners of this World- conquest. As far as, l he Anglo-Saxon is concerned, there was never any unnecessary diffidence or lack of self- persuasion about Ins conquest. Whether he wiped out the ‘Redskin ’ of America to make room for him- self, captured and enslaved the Negro and put him on his plantations, or subjugated the highly civilized Hindu, he can seldom liavc suffered from anything in the 1 shape of an 'inferiority complex.’ Quite the reverse, of course. He was quite sure that he was in eveiy way a better man than the people he over- ran. He was more ‘enilized,’ more ‘moral,’ he w r as a ‘gentleman,’ he was ‘White,’ lit was cleaner (that came next to his ‘godliness’), he was faultlessly brave: lie was, in short, of a different and better clay. Some of Jus enemies were brave, some ‘gentle- men * (like the Turk)- but none possessed all those qualities that were Ins. If to succeed is wliat you want, and not to fail, that is l he only spirit m wdiieli to effect a conquest. The great opportunities that offered themselves to the early colonist and trader reinforced this opinion. He was repaid for his colonizing enter- prise by the possession of land — even if his family at home had never possessed an acre — and, if not too stupid, could easily grow nch. The hard and 125 PALEFACE active life made a better man of him, too, than many of his stock that remained in tlieir country of origin. With his scientific weapons he was like a god amongst 1 he ‘ heathen 5 and the ‘ poor Indian ’ (who worshipped stones, ‘heard god in Hie wind,’ and was ‘untutored ’ in White science). So there were substantial grounds for a sensation of superiority. A century ago the White was in full possession of a ‘superiority complex,’ in consequence, and until the M r ar (when all the Whites, m one glorious aufo-da-fe , for four years did their best to kill and ruin each other) he retained it. From those early days of White conquest down to the days of the ‘ Poor White ’ (the subject of Sher- wood Anderson’s books), and to the present educated city- White, with Ins gradually crystallizing ‘inferior- ity complex’ — the subject ot this essay — is a road of disillusionment and decline, to some extent. White Civilization, especially in America, built it- self up with great rapidity into a towering baby- lonian monument to Science; but the old freedom and sense of pow cr shared b> e\ cry White Man in the early dins naturally was crushed, or over- powered, at least, by the great technical achieve- ments of the same instruments (hat had secured luni his new empire. So, if you compare that empire with the roman, for instance, it has been in Ins hands a remarkably short time. Today the average White Man experiences great difficulty m realizing how the engine has been turned against himself, and how his ‘conquest’ is already a thing 6f the past. This slowness to understand, this indolent, in- stinctive, self-protective living in the past , or else 126 FROM WHITE 'SETTLER TO POOR CITY-WHTTK just sheer ignorance of the World-situation today, accounts for many things: certainly it would ac- count for an attitude of astonishment or incredulity that such a plain statement as the present one must expect to encounter. For, m a sense, it is what we all know to be th? situation : and yet, when stated m so main words, and associated with a few of the things thal obviously must ensue from it, if may at first, to many readers, seem fantastic. Better than a great deal of argument — for the purpose of convincing people that I am not talking quite in the air — will be to quote, at adequate length, passages from a variety of sources which will, I think, plainly show the reality of this deep and powerful current of doubt and confusion that has overtaken the White Man. And I will begin with the most obvious, as far as America is concerned, namely, the destructive work of Mr. Mencken. § 7. 'Ameiicana 9 of Mcncfov, The Americana of Mr. Mencken are so well known that there would be no object m quoting them at any length. It must be admitted, in general criti- cism of these documc nts, that another sort of patriot than tin.-, earnest, clever, germanic editor could easily throw doubt on their value and significance. Perhaps the most useful w r ay of considering them w'ould be to approach them from the standpoint of this hypothetic patriot, of another persuasion. Their very qualities,' •even, will be best brought out by this method. I w r ill proceed to do this. But by adopting this procedure 1 wish to make it clear that 127 PALEFACE i I would not minimize the great debt of America to Mr. Mencken, or 1o Sinclair Lewis, for holding up their hostile mirrors. In the first place, then, it could be said that the Americana consist mostly of ridicule of religious emotionality. But all religion, looked at with the uninterested eye of the outsider, or from the exclu- sively secular or scientific standpoint, lends itself to ridicule. For instance, to the Anglo-Saxpn of two centuries ago, the religious ‘superstitions’ of every race whatoer, except the Anglo-Saxon', provided much amusement. A ‘heathen Chinee" at his de- votions, ‘Fuzzy-wuzzy ’ at his, the ‘Indian natrve/ or the Coolie, at his (cf. Mother India); the Jew muttering awaj m Ins dingy synagogue; even ‘the Dago’ at his, was a joke at which the Anglo-Saxon laughed heartily. And, of course. Ins laughter in- creased Ins self-esteem. From tins point of v lew , Mr. Mencken’s Americana is merely the Anglo-Saxon at his devotions being laughed at, m his turn. It is the turn of the Anglo- Saxon, inert I y. It is a mistake to regard the Ameri- cana as exclusively referring to the more savage states of America. The evangelism of Dakota is no funnier than the same sort of thing m Wales or Scotland. The London Salvationist, at the corner of any street, would provide Mr. Mencken w T ith per- fect A me? ieana jokes. Americana is an at tack upon the Anglo-Saxon Protestant at Ins devotions, more than anything else, as Mother India is an attack upon the religious habits of tile Indian. (But Mr. Mencken is a different sort of critic to Miss Mayo.) Therefore, all that comes under the head of ridi - 128 ‘AMERICANA’ OF MENCKEN « cule of religion could be matched anywhere m the world. Horatio Bottomley, in the days of Ins most flond publicity, was as grotesque as any ‘moron’ m a ‘backward’ southern State. Abandoning the beautiful forms and ancient etiquette of devoutness, the Protestant everywhere inevitably grew vulgar in the ’form t his worship took. This was mia\ oid- able. As time went on lie grew v?orse, more vulgar instead of Jgss. In America he has perhaps gone furthest, but not so very much ahead as all that. The richest, and so the most aggressive and cocksure Protestant will be the most ridiculous. And pos- sibly the spirit of american Advertisement, taking a hand in the Allciutah business, has made a slightly more fantastic-looking thing of it than can be found elsewhere. That i« the utmost that can be claimed for the criticism of Americano. That is .ill there is to that, and it is more than half of the matter of Mr. Mencken's book, and the richest and funniest portion. Here is an example from the Louisiana cuttings (p. 98, Americana, 1 925) of llow Christianity is being spread among the girl-students of Tulana Unncrsitv etc.’ : ‘ What per cent, of your students read the Bible daily ? Y ou ? IIow many minutes a day do you pray? Ever pray thirty minutes by watch? Honest! ‘In how many rooms on your campus is there a deck of spot cards ? A Bible ? ‘How about smoking, cursing, drinking? ‘What per cent, of your students go to Sunday- school? Preaching? Once a day? Twice? 129 i PALEFACE Prayer-meetings at a Church ? Contribute to the Church? Belong to the Church school? Study the Sunday-school lesson?’ That is a fair specimen of the more normal evi- dence provided by Mr. Mencken'. It is not particu- larly funny. It is depressing reading: but* surely it could be matched anywhere in the Christian world. The anxious, insistent, ‘humorous’ note has a uni- versally familiar ring. Really these collections called Americana throw a more interesting light upon the people who are amused and delighted (apparently) by them, than they do upon the people whom ostensibly they are supposed to hold up to ridicule. As you read them you are inclined rather to glance aside and survey your fellow-readers, and to wonder what variety of snobbery, or superiority complex, has brought to- gether this large ‘reading-public.’ The critic of t hese collections, again, would have occasion often to object that things quoted as solemn statements were evidently intended to be jokes. They are not usually very good jokes. They look, m facl , as though they had been specially con- cocted to catch Mencken's eye. Here is one from Massachusetts (p. 121): ‘Effects of Woman Suffrage as disclosed by the Lynn Telegram-News , a great intellectual and moral organ.’ [These are Mencken's heading^, describing the nature of the cutting.] ‘Many of the village belles ... of Danvers, . . . ISO ‘AMERICANA’ OF MENCKEN * have started wearing dog-collars. Dog-collars are not only being worn by schoolgirls, but are even worn by teachers The girls do not always buy their dog-collars. That fact was brought to light when many complaints were heard from dog owners to the effhet that dogs have mysteriously lost iheir^ieck pieces.’ This looks like a clumsy joke of the ‘sly’ order, written by some tired newspaper-man m the silly season. Here is a ‘dispatch ’ from Orono, Maine, appearing ‘in recent public prints’: ‘If Ilenry James, soeiety novelist and short story writer of the late Nineteenth Century, were to reappear today, one-fifth of the University of Maine freshmen class would expect him to be arrayed as a two-gun bandit, according to the results of a questionnaire made known to-dav. Martin Luther was the son of Moses; the author of Vanity Fair wa « William Shakespeare; Dis- raeli was a poet ; and Moses was a Roman ruler, according to some of the other answers submitted in reply to questions." Every civilized country lias and has always had its examination jokes — What the Eton boy answered when asked what he knew of the Orinoco or (began, as an instance of the sort of thing. (Oregon, or for that matter Orono, he would probably describe as a cheese, or a game of eafrds.) In all this type of story two reflections are apt to remain in the mind of the person to whom it is told : first, he feels that the 181 PALEFACE i story has probably been made up by somebody to make him laugh; which he doesn't mind if he has got his laugh satisfactorily. Or else, if the story is authentic, he usually has the impression that th( dunce who is its hero was not quite such a dunce as he looked ; and even may have been a much shrewder fellow than his examine! s. i The above cutting from ‘public prints’ in Maine is no exception to this rule. That flfoscs was a roman ruler was evidently the freshman’s idea of a joke. That Mart m Luther was t he son 6f this roman ruler was a subtle extension of the joke — both, to me, ha\c a theological and learned look. Or per- haps the freshman was a reader of Americana* and wished to make a parade of lus ignorance of the sacred text, seeing that so many ‘morons’ showed a lamentable familiarity with it. In any case, if the ‘freshman’ of Orono could be coimcted of a benighted ignorance, as a magnificent compensation tlu newspaper men of all the ‘public prints ’ of Orono shine brightly as a well-informed body of men, con- versant with the work of Henry James, thoroughly acquainted with the Scriptures, and with some know- ledge of the Reformation. So, as it is America m general we are having held up to us, not any par- ticular class, Orono, M,une, does not come nff so badly. Then a great number of the extracts have reference to the absurdity of Prohibition. Prohibition is, of course, a joke played upon the American People of a very perfect kind. That«such a joke could be played does not say much for their collective poli- tical sagacity, it could be argued. But can any 132 ‘AMERICANA’ OF MENCKEN European today assert that this is not a joke that may equally be ptoyed, successfully, upon his people at any moment now ? The War provides some Americana fun, us well. Hut the War is another joke, like Prohibition, that has been played on*all of us without exception. So, people who Ijve in glass houses , etc. I will go on, for a moment, with these possible criticisms of Mr. Mencken’s excellent satire: ‘Progress of Methodist Kvlfnr in the home of the Creoles, as reported by a press dispatch from New r Orleans.’ ‘The old Absinthe House, one of the landmarks m the old French quarter of New Orleans, where, according to repute, Jean Lafitte planned his pir- atical forays and boasted of what he and Napoleon Bonaparte would do to Messieurs les Anglais, was badly damaged last night. Prohibition agents did it all for one quarter of an ounce of absinthe, according to their oflicial report, tiled today. In the old courtyard, a door, priceless relic of the old hotel, was smashed. The book m which artists, statesmen, writers and lesser or greater notables had signed their autographs was east carelessly upon the wreckage-littered jfloor. Because a few drops of absinthe was found m the place, charges of possession and sale of intoxicants w r cre placed against the proprietor.’ This shows how the idiotic drink-w'ar resulting from the Volstead Aut leads to vandalism: ‘price- less relics’ and an old and historical building suffer. This is Rheims Cathedral, damaged by german shell- 138 PALEFACE * i fire, over again in a small way — that is the idea. Only here it is not the Germans* but their former enemies doing the same thing. And here we have to note another feature of the Americana : namely, that many of them are designed to turn the tables upon the * Allied’ war-propa- gandist. Mr. Mencken, being of german 'origin, naturally resented that propaganda, and, in the heat and folly of the moment, its frequent % unfairness. But such material for a turning-of-the-tables of this sort eould be found in any community. * It is merely the tale of general human stupidity. And, of course, the Germans did destroy an irreplaceable work of art, and would have destroyed others had they been able. — This undercurrent of nationalist passion in Mr. Mencken, it could be claimed, weakens his criticism. When he says that there have been rumours of the suppression of his paper, he refers to the american police as Polizei . lie refers to the ‘goose-stepping’ habits of the american masses. So he rubs it in. If lie had conveyed that Americans were mesmerized and drilled without this familiar war-time tag of Polizei , the effect would have been stronger. But Mr. Mencken is, I should say, a very honest man, and he lias strong feelings Kentucky should be a good state for Mr. Mencken. If you refer to Americana , 1025, you can fairly take that as an example. But it is surprising how little he gets out of it to his purpose. Of course, there is the usual extravagant Salvation Army language quoted. But that vernacular of provincial religion is rather engaging than otherwise, and an example 134 ‘AMERICANA’ OF MENCKEN of extreme high-spirits on the part of very simple folk indeed — whpse principal offence scetns to be that they do not want their kind to intermarry with Negroes, and that they believe m the liebrew saered books so deeply that they object to people teaching that men are descended from monkeys, instead of having been created along with monkeys and all other things, all m one simultaneous Fiat. (The ultra-sophisticated beliefs of Mr. D. II. Lawrence, which I shall be examining shortly, lie somewhere between tin* two — between Mencken and the Ken- tuckian 'moron’ — as Berman would call him, after Mencken.) The first of these two arch -offences I regard as a substantial virtue; the bitter contempt directed upon the second by many people I do not share: so all this part of Menckcmana I find dull or pointless. Here is the example from Ktni lieKy of high-spirits, combined with imperfect education: ‘Solomon, a Six-Cylinder Sport. Could you handle as many wives and concubines as this ‘'Old Bird”? Itcv. B. Cl. Hodge will preach on this subject Sunday night at Settle Memorial.’ The simple mind, m ruminating on the behaviour of one of the most ce lebrated personages m its Scrip- tures, is struck by the vigorous picture of thispretcr- naturally wise old Jew r presented to it. What more natural? The Ilev. B. CL Hodge announces that he will discourse on that theme to his rough high- spirited flock. Whi*t could be more appropriate? I can see nothing worth getting excited about there. And it is only very mildly funny. 135 PALEFACE On the next page, again (p. 90), the amusements of Dean Paul Anderson are pilloriejl. Those amuse- ments appear to be, as a matter of fact, neither more nor less intellectual than — Lady Dean Paul's, I was going to say, though I only know what hers are from reading I he accounts in the society-page of the London papers: 1 will say, instead, those of any t> pical member otthe intellectual cream of London Society. Mr. Mencken is, I daresay, a shade snob- bish about lus kentuckian ‘moron/ The ignorance of t hat moron is t he burden of his song. * But is that obvious butt as a fact so very much more ridiculous (though entirely innocent of cultural pretensions) than the masses at Saratoga Springs, the Lido, Deau- mIIc, and so on? The Society Columns, to which I alluded above, are certainly not particularly funny. Their smooth and nerveless adulation (except wliert* any real artist , or real person at all, comes to be men- tioned) makes dull reading. The imdde-class audi- ence of Mr. Mencken would not get much of a chuckle out of them ; blit they would be suitably impressed. Are ‘Society 5 morons, however, fundamentally less ridiculous, mean or irritating than diwout and clamorous rustics? I don’t believe that they are: they seem to me far more so, and terribly smug, into the bargain. Apart from my intention here to give a kind of typical adverse statement where these col- lections arc concerned, I am not an ideal Mencken reader at all, I confess, m spite of my admiration for their spirited compiler. Another Kentucky cutting is* about a Missionary Training School : ‘ . . . m future no student wear- ing bobbed hair will be admitted, 5 etc. But bobbed 136 ‘AMERICANA’ OF MENCKEN hair suits some women’s heads and not others. Therefore a tyrannical orthodoxy on one side results in as much injustice to Nature, and the skulls and hair provided by Nature, though no more, as that of ‘goose-stepping ’ fashion on the other. So this agam is a disappointing cutting. The moje I go into it, and proceed to give effect to my idea of finding an answer to "'Mencken, the more I find I should agree with the other sort of aincncan patriot rat hoi than with Mr. Mencken. But still there remains Mr. Mencken’s great service in stirring the pot round, and that with honesty, it seems, and not with malice. Also, in straining every nerve to find fault — if only in that — lie has done good. For he has demonstrated the limits of average imbecility, as well as its extent: lie has done the worst that can be done, and it actually is not so impressive as all that. He has even revealed many unsuspected virtues m the ‘moron of the Backward States.’ Other services rendered by his method I will refer to Jater m this essay. § 8. ‘ Complexes ’ as between Whites. As regards other Whites, many Whiles, at one tunc and another, have -.offered from an ‘inferiority com- plex,’ but never as regards people not Whites. The enghsh farm-labourer or mechanic, in the past, has suffered from an ‘inferiority complex’ where a Dun- dreary Swell was concerned: but Buddha would be for him a ‘nigger.’ {This was absurd. But it was the requisite for White world-success. Americans at the time of Edgar Allan Poe, or 187 4 PALEFACE those of the period of The Virginians, certainly ex- perienced no ‘inferiority complex’ where their euro- pean cousins were concerned. They were the cadets and equals of one great family. But since that time, for various reasons, the educated American lias felt ‘inferiority’; or, not to use the language of Freud, he has felt provincial, and been rather terrorised by the thought of the*' cultured’ backgrounds of polite european life. This had less to do with fhe culture question, I believe, than with the great sway, m the european nund, of the aristocratic idea. * As all the great european families, who have not been exter- minated by war or revolution, have intermarried with their bankers and brokers, the aristocratic idea has lost its sway entirely: and, that factor elimi- nated, the other, the cultural one, by itself, could scarcely offer much opposition. So the American today not only has no reason to be, but m fact is not at all, impressed with the European as such: although, if he had his choice, he might prefer to live m Europe rather than America. And here is a para- dox (the paradox involved in the subject-matter of this t ssay) : for in most eases he would rather, prob- ably (‘America ’-movements aside), live in Europe: he probably at no former time would have been so ready as today to say good-bye to America- and yet he has ceased to believe m Europe or m Euro- peans, or to have any illusions about them. There is no spreadeagleism at all discoverable to the Euro- pean descending on the eastern shore of the United States today, nor in amencan books does it play any part. ‘The American’ of the bntish news- papers is, indeed, a complete myth — an Uncle Sam 138 THE AMERICAN |BA BY cartoon of veryhong ago. Yet it is not the thought of Europe that instinctively humbles him. It is the thought of himself. In spite of all this, the new ‘inferiority complex’ of the American, which has nothing to do with Europe at all, i* partly composed of the material of europcgn criticism of America reaching him in- directly. And to that subject ? now will turn. § 9. The American Baby . It is a widely-held notion in Europe that the American is a kind of baby-man : that the American is not adult, that lie remains all Ins life a child. And that is of course one of the things that Mr. Mencken’s criticism suggests, Mr. Sherwood Anderson says, ‘Most amcrican men never pass the age of seven- teen " This would equally well describe most men everywhere: but when the typical educated Euro- pean thinks of the inhabitant of the United States he thinks of something childish, super-young, un- developed, excitable and helpless. He thinks of him (and of the American Woman equally) as a creature of ‘crazes’ and impulses, who when not ‘crazy about’ this is “crazy about’ that; a half- cooked, foolishly-eager, snob of every idea that can get itself advertised and descrif e itself as novel and ‘stimulating’ (the last invariably-used adjective suggesting some radical impotence in the public): but generally and to sum up all the rest, as sub- stantially prone tc# an ever-deepenmg juvenility, ever more of which mi rely receptive quality is willed for itself by this spoilt-child of fortune — for that is 139 PALEFACE precisely what it wishes to be, an irresponsible child, sheltered from the rough embarrassments, fatigues and battles of the surrounding universe. It would indeed not at all surprise this type of European if the entire American Nation, pressing on back into the rosy lands of self-deceiving childhood and breath- less illusion, vanished, one lin< day, into the womb out of which it eanfe. That this cannot, in reality, describe, the great mass of the population of America I need not say, nor is that my view, or that of the bet tei -informed European. Bui it is still a widely-held opinion. So, if european opinion ever reached and touched America, it would not lessen the ‘inferiority com- plex’ being manufactured for it on the home-soil. So to the older White countries America cannot look for help in the analysis of its ‘complex ’ For them America is a baby, the baby of Europe and — after a hundred and fifty years — a peculiarly infantile one, making on all-fours for the womb of its origin. § 10. Was Wait Whitman the Father of the American Baby? Although I know, as I have said, that the whole of America is not a gigantic baby, tied to the apron- strings of some ‘cosmic ' Mama, nevertheless it really does seem that the aniencan mind is today more in- fantile than it. was in the days of Edgar Allan Poe, for instance. The Virginians and New Englanders of that day it would have entered nobody s head to accuse, even, of this peculiar infantilism. The amencan mind was at that time, no doubt, much 14.0 THE FATHER OF THE AFRICAN BABY abused by the criemies or rivals of the master-state of the New World, but that state was governed and represented by adult Europeans at a few removes tempered in the sternest roman traditions of english enterprise. So it does seem that America, as it has grown older, has grown younger and younger, m the sense* that, there is a patch or streak in the mind of the amorican aggregate that give*, some colour to the more recent european myth of the American Baby. If we take this patch, or this tendency, and if we isolate it, find so form an entire Baby, and proceed to call that ‘America ’ (winch is what has happened, I believe, in the ease of the european belief I am here discussing), then who was responsible for that par- ticular eluld ? For, as it did not exist a century ago, it must have made its appearance in the interim. Walt Whi Linar was, 1 feel sure, the father of the American Baby, looked at m that light. Walt showed all those enthusiastic expansive habits that w’e associate with the Baby, lie rolled about naked in the Atlantic surf, uttering ‘ barbaric yawps,’ as he called them, m an ecstasy of primitive exhibitionism. He was prone to ‘ cosmic ’ raptures. A freudian analyst specializing in inversion or perversion would have said, observing his behaviour over a suitable period, that he was certainly the victim of a psy- chical ‘fixation,’ which incessantly referred him back to the periods of earliest childhood. He was a great big heavy old youngster, of a perfect freudian type, with the worst kind of ‘enthusiasm 5 in the grcck sense of that word.* He was also, it should be re- membered, the epic ancestor of the now’ celebrated american ‘fairy.’ 141 JPALEFACE Walt Whitman, as the father (if the American Baby, is a hint, only, to the americari 1 analyst of these questions, and I of course may be wrong in stressing that particular figure. But he does seem to fit so wonderfully the requirements of the case: so I at all events recommend him m tliatT capacity. § 11. The Healthy Attitude of the American to his ‘ Babylon When I visited New York I found the pictorial effects exceedingly curious and beautiful. This was not a view in any way shared by the more intelligent New Yorkers, I was glad and surprised to find. They, who lived m the place, and understood the motives of the builders and their masters, regarded it as so much vulgar and childish display. The ‘Down -town 5 towers and cathedrals produced noth- ing but a contemptuous and rather bitter mirth m them. For me it w as purely the satisfactions of the eye that made me like it. In every other w T ay I w r as m agreement with them. For towards everything, and all the people, that are behind the creation of these ‘swinging gardens of Bab} Ion,’ I feel about as they do. Strange as it was to find this disillusioned and hos- tile attitude on the part of the intelligent educated men, it was far stranger to find it as wtII amongst the workmen and average of t he community. Far from boasting of their eit v, they seemed to take very little interest m it, except occasionally to remark that they did not like New York, and that one of these days — I should see — it ‘would all blow up,’ 112 SHERWOOD ANDERSON since Nature dnl not approve of such structures as were to be found there, and Nature would have the last word ! These traces of Nature-worship arc reminiscent of Whitman, it is true. It was the Rood side of Whit- man — the very aflcicnt gospel that was the matrix of his* own* but which he was not able to incarnate, and only succeeded in making exaggerated and ridiculous. * § 12. Sherwood Anderson . I now come to the part of this brief preliminary essay where I propose to show, by means of citations from books, the reality of my argument. And Sher- wood Anderson comes first in order of importance as a witness, though actually the first writer I shall use is english, and not amcncan. It may be as well to point out at once that I am m no way attempting here any estimate of the value of the writings I use as evidence. I take the good and bad writer (as I sec it) mdiffcrentlv. Provided, for good or bad reasons, or for very mixed reasons, he exerts, or recently has exerted, influence, that is enough for my purpose. Of all the children of Walt Whitman, Sherwood Anderson is perhaps the most celebrated : and he has exercised a very great influence upon all the young school of american fiction, and indeed throughout the intelligent life of America. So the feelings and tendencies to which Ins work testifies are authentic evidence in such an examination as this. Now, although, as I have said, I am certainly offering no opinion upon the value as writers of the 143 PALEFACE people I have chosen to quote, there^are certain judg- ments or classifications that it is impossible not to make in taking up the evidence. It will be better, m a few words, to make clear at the start what these must be. § 13. The Essentia 1 Romanticism of the Return to the ‘ Savage 9 and the * Primitive If there is one tiling more than another that is quite certain about Sherwood Anderson? and what almost may be called his ‘ school, ’ it is that they are extreme romantics. At least one member of this ‘school,’ or person influenced by Anderson and writ- ing on somewhat the same lines (Hemingway), has turned upon his inspirer, and very ably caricatured him, choosing for his satire exactly this quality in Anderson — namely, his incurable romanticism. Hemingway himself appears to me much drier and less sentimental than Anderson, and so hn> action may bo the result of a genuine impatience with the absurdities of Dark Laughter . Hut how far this essential romanticism can be weeded out of the racincss-of-lhe-soil of american creative writing, I do not know: I am not familiar enough with all the circumstances to be able to offer an opinion about that. Bullfighters and Boxers occupy the centre of the stage in Hemingway’s books; if Action is your god, if you arc a romantic and regard strong roman- tic tendencies as a highly desirable thing m an artist, then you will be glad to meet these gladiators so constantly at the heart of the business; but if you are not so romantically inclined you will get tired 144 THE ‘SAVAGE’ AND THE ^PRIMITIVE’ of such a physical infatuation, and tlic insatiable taste for violence- -for sangre y arena, for blood and sand, blood and iron, and all the other accompani- ments of the profuse discharge of human blood. It is possible to feel that the blood-stream, perforations through which it pours out, things l hat make it beat and throb hytly, and so on, are not the onl> subjects of interest. • You may wen go further than that, and fc el that our literature today is becoming a sort of mortuary games; moft and more a roman brutality is invad- ing our books; so that the communistic fever into which everyone was plunged during the War, especi- ally those who took part m it —the gladiators w atehed by the politicians and financiers, for whom the War was a sort of immense Circus— is perpetuated in print. Tins fascist or murincttinn (futurist) appe- tite for Violence — and possibly m the case of Hem- ingway this particular romanticism has been en- couraged m him by that perfect 4 American liaby ’ of the Whitman tradition, Ezra Pound— is perhaps the most characteristic note of all to be found in these writers. Theirs are ‘American dreams — AngJo- saxon dreams,’ in the words of one of the principal dreamers. Torrents oj Spring (Ernest Hemingway) may be, however, a sign, on the part of the strongest and latest of this school, of a turning of the tide. For if you repudiate one romanticism you are apt to re- pudiate others and with luck the whole gaudy pack may come tumbling down. Corrected m some, especially those following Anderson who have benefited no doubt by contacts K 145 PALEFACE which have militated against too/fenaivc a romantic afflatus, with Sherwood Andersomthc pure romance of whitmanesque tradition remains. At a first reading he looks a little like a Strindberg softened in the prosperous optimistic air of America, and brought up in the shadow of Whitman. Two sisters of Strindberg lid \c written a biography of the great swl-dish writer ( Strindberg's Systrar Beratta, reviewed in the Observer , August 21st, 1927, from which T quote). His sisters, apparently, take Strindberg at lus own persistently storn.v, romantic valuation. ‘In his sistcis' opinion, he teas possessed by a dark demon ' How that description seems to fit what many romantic persons today would like* to be the figure under which the world should know them! We are in the presence of a school of ‘dark demons,’ m short, with Bernard Shaw behind them demoniacally grinning, but m a lighter and more mischievous mood; and behind him, all the mephis- tophelian ‘darkness’ of Nietzsche. Behind that comes the debonair ‘darkness* of Lord Byron. §14. Possessed In/ 'a Da) k Demon.' But we have in England a much more complete and much more up-to-date Anderson, who is very widely read in America : that is Mr. D. II. Lawrence. No one, I suppose, will be found to deny Mr. Law- rence the title of ‘romantic’; and I think it is quite evident that he is possessed by a very ‘dark demon’ indeed, that takes him to the darkest and most mysterious corners of the earth in search of other ‘demons' of sinulat complexion. He succeeds m 116 POSSESSED BY ‘A DAIvK DEMON’ rooting out quit 1 a fair number of devils still, and their ‘ mysterious,’ mechanical worshippers. Litera- ture is indebted to the activities of this ‘demon’ of his for many excellent pages; though it is certainly our business to show (on our way to the Melting-pot, in shoft all the wav to the final mix-up), we who are possessed by the White demon, the dam on of the White Man, the authentic one, l*moan, that that is as compelling as the ‘dark* for the purposes of art, without the perils for our race (in its inarch towards the Melt inkpot) of the ‘dark’ familiars. Hut that is not m any way what we are talking about here, for the same could be said of Anderson, who does not always writ*, badly, as of Lawrence. Mr. I). II. Lawrence’s book. Mornings in Mexico, had just appeared when I was in New York this summer (1!>27). ILs ‘dark demon’ may be ob- served m it working al high pressure on the material provided by Mexieo: and I am taking this hook, along with those of Anderson, to r« \cal what I am driving at in this review' of the contemporary mind. In general outline m\ argument will be this: — Against this Dark Demon I oppose everywhere (for the sake ot argument and ‘purely and simply to amuse myself*) a White Demon or daimon ; the spirit of the Wlme Race against the spirit of the Dark Race — the ‘mystical’ ‘dark’ race of the ro- mantic-Wliitc imagination (not against — naturally — any flesh and blood Black brother, or fellow-slave, of the moment). Against this over-excitable, over- susceptible romanticPWhitc, too, 1 bring the disci- pline of my criticism, and offer him as cold a bath as possible, where, for the period of immersion, at least, 147 PALEFACE lie can keep cool. With its White {Demon I believe the White Race ean be saved (instead of perishing oil its way to the Melting-pot), if this demon can only be properly utilized. He is a marvellous force, who has manifested himself on many occasions, and often given us evidence of his magical power. If we do not entirely throw him over, he can yet be our saviour: he was the ‘ daimon 5 of Socrates , this White Demon we have inherited: he has vivid and spectacular history that it would be unwise for his antagonists to allow themselves to forget. It may be that very rapidly many people of our race will slop kowtowing to the ‘Dark Demon,' and turn again to luin. And ultimately he may blanch or bleach the entire Melting-pot. But there 1 is no reason at all why we should not be on excellent if ‘distant 5 terms with the ‘Dark One,’ c\en as m Byron’s Vision of Judgment we lind that, when they met, ‘ His Darkness and his Brightness Exchanged a greeting of extreme politeness . 5 There is no reason why we should not be exceed- ingly polite to all that is ‘dark.’ From here onwards I am assembling as evidence of what I lia\c so far In en discussing in the abstract, quotations from those authors who have suggested themselves to me as expressing most clearly the ‘dark 5 point of view. So at this point I am ter- minating the first division of my survey. 148 S o o 1 1 o n T I TIIE ‘ INFERIORITY COMPLEX ’ OF THE ROMANTIC WHITE, AND STUDENT SUICIDES « § 1. Romance on iis Last (Physical) Legs. T HE*lfssion for ‘the primitive’ among the civilized, or (the same thing) the appetite for thy '‘dark’ and exotic among the Whites, made its first appearance m Europe, m its present form, m the earlier part of the last century, at the time of the Romantic Revival. So its romantic genealogy is not m question. Baudelaire in 1850 went about with a mulatto mistress, and wrote some of his most beaut iful poems to her crinkly head, her ‘tenebrous’ flanks, Iur ‘mysterious* eyes — full of night and ‘savage’ properties. Latir, the french boy-genius, Rimbaud, followed much the same lines, disappearing at the age of twenty as a trader into Africa. Still later, at the beginning of this century, Paul Gauguin kicked the dust of Europe off his shoes and departed to live with the Sout h Sea Island- ers, whither the romantic Scotsman, Robert Louis Stevenson, had preceded him. Going very much further back, the Templars succumbed to the mys- tical attractions of the lowest kind of orientalism, and exchanged the europeamzed Master of St. Peter for Baphomct: and at their trial it was alleged that the Grand Master qf 1 he order had passionately re- marked that ‘one hair of the head of a Saracen wus more valuable than the whole body of a Christian.’ 1 19 I PALEFACE Nietzsche writes, in his Joyful Wisdom, ‘The bar- barians have always loved the South ; and once they got there, never wanted to come baek into the North again,’ etc. This was partly wanderlust, no doubt, partly ap- preciation of a gentler climate and a nice blue sky. But the European, like every of her man, Jhas always had a fancy for the mysterious’ lands outside his own, inhabited bv marvellous and strange peoples. He has always ‘smelt strangeness,’ and mistaken that for love. History is quite choked 4 with that counterfeit. Today these mysteries have been exploded. The Age of Newton, as Mr. Bussell calls it, has destroyed what was imposing and native in the great eastern civilizations; and Bolshevism, with the full encour- agement and assistance of the West, is westernizing (and bolshevizing) the Eastern populat ions still more, as it ‘nationalizes’ them m the Western sense; our popular musical-eomedv actors and actresses spend week-ends m Ilawai or Samoa; there is no ‘Darkest Africa,’ or it is full of trippers shooting tame tigers; our Earth has narrowed and is everywhere 1 accessible and open to inspection What difficulties the author of Arabia Deserta encountered m lus attempt to make-believe to himself that he was in the heart of an inaccessible, fanatical, and perilous land — a sort of ‘Darkest Africa’-— any reader of Ins wonder- ful book w ill rt member. So the position of Romance is not what it was before the turbine engine, wireless, etc. It wnll still be ds old ‘romantic’ self forever (for the romantic cannot change its ‘dark’ cthiopian skin) but henceforth it will be a shabby and dmnn- 150 ROMANCE ON ITS LAST (PHYSICAL) LEGS ished one. Romance will never be the same Ro- mance again, at least for a long time. The more imaginative ‘romantics’ have taken to Time-travel instead, disquieted with the vulgarity of Space. Under these circumstances the romantic mind is not so easy to justify to-day as it was even at the time of Gajigum: infinitely less so than it was for Baudelaire. There is scarcely any excuse for being a romantic * for the White, he announces, ‘fatal’; ‘consciousness’ to us? As well ask, of course, why a man always wishes to proselytize about 153 PALEFACE his pet vice. The more unusual it is, the more he wishes every one to share it. But Mr. Lawrence’s explanation is that he has ‘a little ghost inside 5 him, which ‘sees both ways.’ And this arrangement he recommends to us. We should all get such little optical ghlbsts. I will quote the whole of this passage : # ‘The consciousness of one branch of humanity is the annihilation of the consciousness of another branch. That is, t he life of the Indian, his stream of conscious being, is just death t another and pleasanter aspect of his talent, or rather phase of his peculiar evolution. What has effected tins desirable change m Dr. Berman I do not know f . But much that lie says here appears quite sensible. The discouragement, confusion, and decay or col- lapse of communities (whether very laige or \cry small) is what we are considering. It is our belief that the White race, since the War (which m every sense was a mortal L4 ow t to it), is, now (despite the great advantages still remaining with it, and the reasons for self-esteem to be found in its great posi- 157 PALEFACE tion in the world, its supremacy up to the present), suffering from many of those symptoms of discour- agement, disbelief in itself and its destiny, and material collapse, that have often been noticed in other peoples. Whe n it is a small organism, a small people, it decays and disappears quickly. , With sueli a great and elaborately organized system as the White European ' World, these sig^s arc far more difficult to detect. And Dr. Berman’s chapter on ‘Suicide as a symptom,’ dealing with the recent epidemic of american student suicides, is what has made me go aside to examine this book before pro- ceeding with Mr. D. II. Lawrence. Dr. Berman gives an account of the phases of the* extreme mechanical doctrine of Behaviour (of which the principal exponent is Professor Watson), which lie calls a ‘religion.’ Bui he cites Bergson as the author of all that is anti-Behaviour, of all that is Gestalt , of all that is admirable, according to him, m the contemporary world. He attacks Science, under its extreme (and its most comic and ridiculous) form, Bcha\ lour. So he still stands not so far from where he formerly did. For the significant opposition in the contemporary \\orld is not between Bergson on the one side, and Behaviour on the other. They are much nearer together than they would each have us believe. For if Behaviour conics out of E\olution, does not also Creative Evolution and Bergson come out of E\olution? The* real opposition is very different from that. ‘Behaviourism or Waisominity ,’ says Dr. Ber- man, then, Svas begotten by Darwinism out of the modern scientific spirit. ... As a child of Darwm- 158 SUICIDE EPIDEMIC AMONG THE WHITES ism . . . America may be expected to disgrace itself about it as soon as its implications reach the demo- cratic mind. The uproar . . concerning the teach- ing of evolution . . . will turn out to be the foam of a passing ship as compared with the howls which will be emitted . / . when the full significance of the New r Faith, finally filters down to their le\cl ’ (that of the 1 backwaijfl and moronic’ mass of Americans). The sooner the ‘morons’ of America ‘disgrace themsehes’ with regard to ‘Behaviour,' the better, in my view of the matter. But I hope while these ‘morons/ as Dr. Berman calls them, are about it, that they will disgrace themselves about Creative Evolution and Be rgson as well, and any other sort of Evolution they can lay their moronesque hands on. But Berman has been reading : I feel quite certain that Berman must have been reading some 1 improv- ing book or other - 1 wonder which it was? For listen to him : ‘The Smart Set has become the Smart Crowd, indeed tin* Smart Mob . . . urbanites and sub- urbanites, wise because instructed by radio, tab- loid and press agent, pride themselves on being intellectually hard-boiled when thc\ are only somewhat parboiled. . . . Behold the spectacle then of our men and women of ideas accepting the charge of being clcvensts, careerists, tnvialists, as a compliment, but shrinking with the horror of that most horrible of all horrors — the horror of ridicule — from the stigma of being called senti- mentalists, emotionalists, feelmg-ists.’ Ah, so the ‘morons’ do not only consist of Mr. ISO PALEFACE Mencken’s favourite victims, the inhabitants of ‘the backward States of the Union ’ ! They arc also to be found among the ‘Smart Crowd/ these ‘morons’ : and now 4 our men and women of ideas ’ turn out to be 4 morons ’ ! That is a slight advance for Dr. Ber- man. I am sure Berman must haiv been reading some very enlightening book . But lie will lujvcr tell us which it was, so lot us be grateful tl^it something or other has happened to Dr. Berman that has made him slightly more sensible, and leave it at that. Well, the conditions described in thV above ex- tract are suitable to discouragement , and to a view of life that may at last persuade people that such an existence as that is so futile that it is hardly worth living: that is Dr. Berman’s argument. (And a very good one, too.) ‘Behaviourism then is sympathetic to the age,’ lie say s. ‘By extravagantly exalting movement, by placing’ what a man is doing ‘so implicitly m the foreground . . . * fl must interrupt Dr. Berman. If he is seriously going to switch over to this line he must immediately drop all that Bergson and Gestalt . For surely Berg- son, of all people, was the mercurial philosopher of incessant movement , of flux and luss. So he cannot abuse those who ‘exalt moi cment ’ in one pari of his book, and kowtow to Bergson in another — I will now continue the quotation.] ‘ by regarding seriously the half-truth that language is a scries of muscle twitchmgs, essen- tially in the same class as walking or running, and ICO SUICIDE EPIDEMIC AMONG THE WHITES by reducing the emotions to “nothing but” vis- ceral reactions. . . . Behaviorism appeals to the worshippers of noise in contemporary art and manners . . . the believers in direct action in politics hail its implications for them. In a time like burs when among proliferating cities, in any branch of human activity, niotiop and commotion arc infinitely ^preferred to contemplation and insight, the gospel of muscular (and glandular) conduct as>the conquering creed of the twentieth century may be expected to be hailed as the very indigenous credo of a democratic people. — The effects have been bad and will become worse.’ Where Berman got all this from I can’t guess; but it is quite sensible, or so it naturally seems to the author of the Art of Bring Hided and the Revolution- ary Simpleton . 4 The bchavionst, m fact, comes to us with a challenge to all our values, of good and evil, right and wrong. There is no aspect of human life he does not touch with liis ubiquitous concepts and attitudes. ... In the law and m education he is coming, with his defiant technique . . . his lan- guage (is) the accepted nomenclature of the experts and his theories the means by which the lives of children are being regulated and mutilated.’ You would think, of course, here that Berman was describing not Behaviourism, but Bolshevism, or at least Psychoanalysis. I do not believe that Behaviourism is the religious force that he pretends. It is just the extreme gospel of the Machine Age. l 161 PALEFACE Every little average ‘goose-stepping, superstitious, sentimental ’ unit of a present-day industrial mass- democracy is a behaviourist. He would be just as thorough a one without Professor Watson. Why Behaviourism is so intolerable intellectually is not because it leads , but because it follows thfc little average ‘goose-stepping, superstitious, .sentimental’ unit of the mass-democracy, and Aakes a mechani- cal imitation of this robot in the philosophic field. Dr. Berman, however, is determined to treat it as a religion. And at all events what he frays about the effects of it, and of similar doctrines, upon the more sensitive mind is no doubt correct: ‘Most to be dreaded of all the injuries that may be inflicted by Behaviorism upon the souls of sensitive personalities (the others do not matter) is the ellect upon their sense of freedom, their altitude of initiative, which means their feeling of being intensely and fully alive. The repetitive tom-tom of the Behaviorist drum is insistent that we are wholly and totally the victims of con- ditions beyond our control, from the moment of birlh to the moment of extinction. . . . Without regard to any central theme of individuality, move- ment begets movement, habit begets habit. . . . ‘Consider the value ol yourself, of your lite, of your strivings and efforts ... of the feeling of your unique self m the light of the conditioned reaction! . . . How invigorating to weakening morale . . . ! To sec himself as the product of muscle-twitchmgs and glai\d-oozings is the most degrading spectacle of himself ever presented to Man. . . . 162 SUICIDE EPIDEMIC AMONG THE WHITES ‘In the language of its protagonists: of all the inodes ever offered for the use of conscious behav- ior, Behaviorism has the least survival value. ‘ Information , ideas , theoiies about ourselves may , mts(U inevilabh^ kelp or hinder us to In e. The effect may be t(j exa'), intensify, inspire, transform con- sciousness ano' conduct. Or it aiay be to depress, infect, sicken, dishearten to the point of death.’ Dr. Berman decides that it is Behaviourism (now, he sajs, become a leligion) that has disheartened to the point oj death a variety of Americans, especially students, m the course of the v r car 1927. If the religion of Behaviourism grows it will no doubt (more than any Moloch, he assures us) claim more and more victims. In a chapter entitled fc Suicide as a Symptom * he details a long list of student-suicides: ‘Recently there occurred an outbreak of suicide among student youths. . . . Within a few months a number ot students had taken their lives, leav- ing behind them letters stating their sense of the futility of keeping alive. The record runs: On January 2nd a University of Illinois student killed himself, writing that he had experienced all that life contained ... the son of a specialist m mental disorders shot himself m his father’s home. lie found life “dark and worthless,” he wrote his father. On January 23rd a student m the Uni- versity of Wisconsin shot himself because he was bored with this earth and wished to see how things were over there,’ etc. 163 PALEFACE § 5. Races similarly ruined by the White Man. And so Dr. Berman goes through a monotonous list of amencan students who hang, shoot, poison, or gas themselves because life is dark and empty. ► He considers this a phenomenal of the. same sort as that noted by Dr. Hifers ^among the Melanesians : • | ‘ W. II. R. Rivers once studied the degenera- tion of the inhabitants of the Melanesian Islands after the advent of the White Man. ‘Particularly was he interested in the fact that m certain of the islands there was almost complete extinction of the native population, in spite of the presence ol plenty oj the materials of subsistence and the absence of epidemic ot unusual disease. ... he came to the conclusion that these peoples were dying out because they were losing their zest m life. And they were losing their zest in life because the coming and cunning of the White Man had under- mined their attitude to life so completely as to affect the very Will to Live.’ lie then proceeds : ‘It seems to me there is an analogy between the state of mind of these students and the native populations.’ In the Art of Being Ruled (Cliatto and Windus, 1926) I came to similar conclusions: and the quota- tion I have used at the beginning of this part, relating to the neighbours of the Chukchee, tells the same story, on the authority of a traveller who had lived with those tribes, as is told by Dr. Rivers of the 164 RACES RUINED BY THE WHITE MAN Melanesians. Remove from a ra-raing Yale student his ra-ra ! — and put nothing equally stimulating there in its place — remove all his illusions about him- self, as a huma* being (fortunate enough to belong to a particularlyfeute nation, fortunate enough to be of tliiNclass that yi # sent to Yale, fortunate enough to have large musei . a s and to be a star in the world of university sport', fortunate enough to have blond eurly hair and so to attract the attention of all beautiful girls met, or to be dark and sensitive-look- ing, and^so to receive much attention as a likely prey, etc. etc. etc.)— remove all these, or even an appreciable portion of them, and your student will lose his zest for life, just as the Melanesian or the neighbour of the Chukchee did when deprived of what were for him the equrvalent of those satis- factions. The White Man’s superior cunning is, however, hardly the word, in describing what he destroyed the Melanesian with. There was not nwugh ‘cun- ning’ m the White Man, unfortunately. The de- scendants of those Whites, students in amencan universities, because they are not sufficiently ‘ cunning? because they believe anything that is told them, because they are too ‘goose-stepping, superstitious, and sentimental’ (though not called ‘morons’ in- variably by Berman and others whenever men- tioned — but of course not, seeing that they are the principal clients of Berman and others, the cultured minority), because they have allowed themselves to remain romantic, show a tendency now to destroy themselves. Some nnnd more ‘cunning’ than the White has enveloped them and infected them with 165 PALEFACE a Consciousness 9 not their own. And if we look round for the possessor of this more Cunning 9 nund than the White mind, able to destroy it with its alien Consciousness 9 (as Mr. D. II. Law* once would call it), then we need not go to a hostilefracr, we can find it m the mind of Science, more Cpnmng 9 certainly than the vuy simple anglo-saxoi administrators, who robbed the j'oor Indian of his / zest for life,’ or ‘Will to Live.’ Rut if the word Cunning 9 is to be the key to this problem of the new ‘inferiority complex 9 of the White, then eeitamly Behawourism comes very far down the list, and must be disqualified at once. For it is very simple and not at all cunning. Professor Watson, as also Yerkes and most behaviourists and ‘testers,’ is a very simple, even stupid, man. Messrs. Freud and Jung — or shall we say Einstein? — have really had much more influence — and Psychoanalysis and Relatiwtv, m all their various popular mani- festations, are calculated to produce much more effect.than poor threadbare, mechanical, unglamour- ous, sexless. Behaviour . § G. Behaviow ist ‘ Summn Conversation . 9 That Behaviourism has its i ffi < L upon popular thought, or at least upon the ficlionist, vho is the middleman come} mg philosophic notions to the minds of people not accessible to ideas m anything but a sensuous and immediate form, of that there is of course plenty of evidence/ I will take a con- versation from Th( Apple of the Eye , by Glenway Wescott, a ‘first no\cl,’ dealing with life in the ICG BEHAVIOURIST ‘SUMMER CONVERSATION’ • Middle West. It is a conversation between a young man and a boy, the former instructing the latter as to the true character of life. For its possible real- ism, you have to allow for the very intense puritanic backgrounds provided for it by its ainenean setting. % fc Dan hngeijed beside him. . . wS “Tell me tyien,’ he asked, "‘don’t you believe in chastity?” "Mike’s eyes brightened at jfn opportunity to teach. “What a queer question ! It has beaut)'. Before I went to the university I thought it was the only beautiful thing. To li\ e m the spirit in- stead of tin flesh. The flesh nothing but candle- wax under the flame. Then you feel that you’re like Christ and all the saints. Puritanism appeals to the imagination, but it makes people sick.” " “Sick?” Dan echoed, confused. fc “You see, there isn't anything but flesh.” He spoke slowly, in broken phrases, pronouncing 1 he tv ords with obvious pleasure. “We are all flesh; when it \ weak, v r c ’re weak ; w hen n ’s sick, we ’re siek; when it’s dead, we’re dead. Now w r e’re civilized, we tiy to pretend that our bodies don’t matter. But our minds, our imaginations, are flesh too, and part of the w T hole. Puritanism is like cutting a muscle m your arm, and trying to move vour hand with its own muscles. . . " “ Your religion is wrong,” Mike went on. . . . “It cuts us m tw r o. It di\ ides the body from the spirit. The body is what we are and the spirit what w T e think. . . ‘ “And it is only pleasure, your kind of love?” Dan asked wistfully. 167 PALEFACE ‘ “Only? Only pleasure?” Mike shouted, and lus laughter turned quickly to an affectionate seriousness. “Listen, boy. It ’s built on despair. Once we thought life didn’t matter, wasn’t any- thing but a preparation for ete&nty: a vale of tears — with a sunny paradise, ufor y strange and full of songs, all ready for t he wiwtliy. Tha“t \s all over. We’ve found out we’re only«cells; they break up w’hefi we die. We’ve found out that we’re animals, just animals that remember more and worry more. So life is the only thing that does matter. A few years, thirty or forty or lifty years, hungry years; then we end up here, under the grass; and we’re going to have a good tune. . . .” ‘ “And what is a good time?” * “That . . .” Mike paused — “that is a ques- tion.” He spoke the words jubilantly. “Joy, delight, pleasure — there isn't any word.” Mike stretched himself dreamily. . . .“Fun, without anv end. A bunch of flowers, falling, falling, over the eyes, over the mouth, till you're all still and satisfied. . . .” ’ That is the central statement of the book (I am not considering it with reference to its merits as a book, but only as evidence for the infiltration ot philosophic ideas), and it is beha\ louristic more than anything else, I suppose. Tt is no doubt some such attitude as that, resulting from Behaviourism, of which Dr. Berman was thinking. But Behaviour- ism alone would not have produced even that, or anything like it. All the influences that, however 108 RACE OR IDEAS? paradoxically at first sight, fit into Behaviourism, must also be counted into the whole effect. And Bergson and Gestalt , and so Berman, is one of them. It will now bej possible, I think, for any reader to return to the ‘^ark 9 matter of Mornings in Mexico with a clear grc.sp not only of the manner m which I am approaching what Mr. Lawrence has to sav, but also with more chances of understanding some of the remoter, and indeed \ery extended and im- portant, implications of what he is saying. § 7. Race or Ideas? I will quote once more the passage of lus with which I began : ‘The Indian wav of consciousness is different from and fatal to our w ay of consciousness. Our w r a\ of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian. The two ways, the two streams are never to be united. . . . The consciousness of one branch of humanity is the annihilation of the consciousness of another branch. That is, the life of the Indian, his stream of conscious being, is just death to the White man.” — (Morn- ings m Mexico, p. 105.) Let iis place this side by side with the similar passage from Dr. Berman : ‘In the language of its protagonists: of all the modes e^er offered for the use of conscious behavior, Behaviorism has the least survival value. . . . Information, ideas, theories about ourselves may, must, inevitably help or hinder us 169 PALEFACE to live. The effect may be to exalt, intensify, inspire, transform consciousness and conduct. Or it may be to depress, infect, sicken, dishearten to the point of death.’ i f So the ‘stream of conscious be/nq,’ which is the Mexican Indian, ‘is just death to the White Man.’ That is Mr. Lawrence. For Dr. Berman ‘ideas and theoiies* are capable of aehie\mg the same result. They can ‘depress, infect, sicken, dishearten to the point of death.’ Is it necessary for this different ‘consciousness/ between wlueh and ours ‘there is no bridge, no canal of connection,’ this soul , to he incarnated m a Mexi- can Indian (or a Ilmdu, a Polynesian or a Bantu, to choose Mr. Lawrence’s other examples) ? Or can this be merely a disincarnatc idea? Is the scien- tific or mathematical man of genius as good for those destructive purposes as the Toltee or Hopi? Or must it he a ract ? The romantic side in Mi . Lawrence, las love of the sensationally concrete, would always dispose him to seek tins situation m the psychological clash of races, as others can only s* t it in classes. He sees it as a 7 ace situation and also quite conventionally, as a conventional and wholly melodramatic race situation. East is East, and West is West, and the unbridgeable something— the alien and unassimilable seed m the matrix of the Indian ‘conseiousiu ss.’ -will not accommodate itself to the White. It is a fight to the death. One or the other dies. My more abstract interests would naturally make me seek it rather in ideas than in laces. I admit, 170 • RACE OR IDEAS? however, that the culture of one race, acquiring a political mastery over another, and imposing its ideas upon it, Is able and very likely to destroy the soul and so lilt physical life of another race. There are too many events that testify to it m leeent his- tory for that not* to be beyond possibility of ques- tion. But an idea is quite as powerful. E\en a race, for that matter, can annihilate another race with a sAvarm of ideas, or mtelleetualized notions; ideas proper to itself but Avith properties of disin- tegration for another race; or with ideas not neces- sarily its own, but such as it could manipulate with- out injury to itself, and which are destructive to its adversary. W e ha\ T c examples of something of that kind. But the ideas themselves, swarming over from the fields of scientific research, arc just as potent. 4nd though thev do no harm to their trained manipulator, they ma\ be harmful enough to those Avhom they attack. Besides, tlure is no puAverful race with A\hom \\e arc m contact whose alien ‘ consciousness ’ could affect us m this waj, unless you count the half-asiatie masters of Russia, whose ideas, it is true, are pouring through our con- sciousness, and a modified and diluted form of Avhose gospel has established itself in our midst. If we war m touch with an alien ‘consciousness’ ( there would be no need even to b< physically at war with its possessors) m the avuv that the Melanesians Avere with the White, or the neighbours of the Chuk- chee avj tli the Russian, on terms difficult and dis- advantageous to ourselves, then avc should find that ‘consciousness,’ no doubt, mimical, confusing and dangerous to our vital impulses, as Mr. Lawrence 171 PALEFACE describes. And in the same way the Whites cer- tainly are finding the attack of alien rleas confusing and dangerous for their Will and In ’agination, just as much as though they were cleaijy, sharply and picturesquely incarnated m some alien people, with whom we came in daily contact, alid who had tested us politically. So the racial analogy .will serve. But you must fix* your eye on something less palp- able — on systems of ideas, and a restless mass of theories. Wc are almost reminded of the superstitions as- sociated with the tombs of the egyptian dead, and the belief in the unlucky nature of the enterprise of the excavator: the late Lord Carnarvon and Tutan- kamen, for instance. His death seemed to come very suddenly after disturbing Tutankamen. — The White Man has unearthed and brought to light an enorm- ous historical rubbish-heap: there is nothing he has not excavated and brought into his own ‘conscious- ness 5 for examination. Sonic of the distant charms and remote systems have released into his ‘stream of consciousness’ things that are not healthy for it, perhaps ? These general considerations (which presented themselves and demanded to be dealt with at the beginning of this section) disposed of, we can return to the Mexican Indians, Toltec and Hopi. The Toltec and Hopi, Mr. Lawrence believes, and with that I for one am prepared to agree, might be dangerous for the ‘consciousness’ of Mr. Lawrence if he did not possess that ‘little ghost’ looking both ways at once, on account of which he is immune. So they will do no harm to one of the most justly cele- 172 •RACE or ideas? bratcd of endish novelists, we can be reassured. And it is verjV unlikely that the ‘consciousness’ of the Toltec andjjHopi will ever cause any noticeable embarrassment at this time of day to anybody else. At least this would be so if it wnc not for Mr. Law- rence (the only Wfiite liable, even, to interference at the hands »f these faded daimons). Through Mr. Lawrence (who mtikes himself into a sort of Hopi or Toltec for the occasion), they may still add their quota of confusion to the civilized world. Jt’or Mr. Lawrence is repeatedly telling his White readers that they are poor specimens com- pared to his energetic and ‘mysterious’ Indians, and a certain proportion of his White readers are liable to believe this, and add this ‘theory,’ or 'informa- tion’ (whichever you care to call it) to the material of then rapidly developing ‘inferiority complex.’ (For wc are speaking, too, of a ‘consciousness,’ of which often enough, even, people are not conscious.) It is perhaps bv itself a tiny factor, bul it fits m with ‘The Revolt of Asia igainst White Civilization,’ or what not. So it is wortli while to examine it. If wc get to understand one or two things of this kind thoroughly, ue shall understand the lot. 173 PALEFACE f Section III f ‘ LOVE ? WHAT HO ! SPELLING STRANGENESS ’ *> § 1. ‘IVc Whiles, creatines oj apiiit .’ — P. H. Law- rence. * I WILL now turn to Mr. D. H. Lawrence’s ac- count of the Mexican Indian, and especially to his chapter ‘ Indians and Entertainment ‘It is almost impossible for the White people to appioach the Indian without either sentimentality or dislike.* [Mr. Lawrence proves himself in this respect a good, While Man , I think, m his book about the Indian. There is no sign of dislike, so he is the other sort of conventional White Man.] ‘The common healthy vulgar White usually feels a certain native dislike of these drumming aboriginals.’ Mr. Lawrence we can at once agree is not ‘a common healthy vulgar White*; he has nothing very ‘native* about him, cither white oi dark. ‘The highbrow invariably lapses into senti- mentalism hke the smell of bad eggs.’ Mr. Lawrence is a ‘highbrow,’ about that I think there cannot be two opinions. And a ‘sentimental- ism like the smell of bad eggs,’ I am sorry to have to say, rises from all the work of Mr. Lawrence. It 174 ‘WE WITTES, CREATURES OF SPIRIT’ is all slight! yl‘ high’ arid faisandc in a sentimental way. \ Anyhow, faJ from ‘disliking’ the ‘ drumming 1 of these ‘aboriginals,’ there is no question that he likes it \gcry much; and hca\ lly implied in all his d< scrip- lions is the notion that these drumming and other ‘native’ habits are far superior to ours; the dark ones to the white. If we followed Mr. Lawrence to the ultimate conclusion of Ins romantic teaching, we should allow our ‘consciousness’ to be over- powered by the alien ‘consciousness’ of the Indian. And we know what he thinks that would involve: for he has told us that ‘the Indian way of conscious- ness is different from and fatal to our way of con- sciousness.’ We w T ill now turn to his account of the specific way in which this ‘consciousness’ of the Mexican Indian differs from ours. The ‘commonest entertainment among the Ind- ians,’ we are told (that is I suppose among the ‘com- mon healthy vulgar' Indians, if Mr. Lawrence’s romantic soul could bring itself to admit that a Toltec or a Hopi could be ‘common’ or ‘vulgar’), ‘is singing round the drum, at evening.* There are fishermen in the Outer Hebrides, he says, who do something of this sort, ‘approaching the mdian way,’ but of course, being mere Whites, they do not reach or equal it. Still, the Outer Hebrideans do succeed m suggesting to Mr. Lawr- rence a realm inhabited by ‘beasts that . . . stare through . . . vivid mindless eyes.’ They do man- age to become mindless : though not so mindless as the Indian, therefore inferior. 175 PALEFACE ‘This is approaching the India m song. But even this is pictorial, conceptual far t eyond the Ind- ian point. The Hebridean sti ll sees himself human, and outside the great naturalistic influences. . . .’ The poor White Hebridean still, alas, remains human, he is not totally mindless, though more nearly so than ary other White Mr. Lawrence off- hand can bring to mind. The important thing to note in all these accounts is the insistence upon mindlessness as an essential quality of what is admirable. The Hebridean is not to be admired so much as the Mexican Indian be- cause he still deals m 4 conceptual,’ ‘ pictorial * things ; whereas the Mexican Indian is purely emotional — ‘musical,’ in a word, in the Spenglcr sense. (For the full analysis of this type of thinking I refer you to Time and Western Man, where there is a detailed account of spenglensm.) And the first impulse to the anti-coneeptualist, anti-intellectual, anti-pictor- lal point of view in philosophy, and thinking gener- ally, was given by Bergson: just as m Berman’s account of Behaviourism we saw linn attributing the genesis of Gestalt to Bergson. So at last we know just where we are, philosophically, with Mr. Lawrence. Mr. D. H. Lawrence is a distinguished artist — member of the great and flourishing society of ‘Emergent Evolution,’ ‘Creative Evolution,’ ‘Gestalt,’ ‘ World-as-History,’ etc. etc. § 2. Mr. Lawrence a Follower oj the Bergson-Spcngler School. I will go on quoting to show how completely Mr. Lawrence is beneath the spell of this evolutionist, 176 THE BtrttGSON-SPENGLER SCHOOL emotional, nol-human, ‘mindless’ philosophy: and how thorougmy he reads it into and applies it to the manifestations of the Indian ‘consciousness.’ ‘The Indian, singing, sings without words or vision.' I am italicizing the expressions that it is parti- cularly necessary to mark in wh^t I am quoting. How the attitude to ‘words,’ on the one hand, and to ‘vision’ and the things of \ision, ‘pictorial’ things, on the other, is puie Spongier! ‘Faice lifted and flightless', eyes half dosed and visionlcss, mouth open and speechless, the sounds arise m Ins chest, from the consciousness in the abdomen .’ A ‘consciousness in the abdomen’ or a visceral consciousness (which otherwise is ‘sightless,* ‘ vision- less,’ and k speechless “) is what we commonly should call unconsciousness . And indeed that is what — if we wrire to capitalize it under one v\ord — we should take as describing tlic kernel of this propagandist account. It is as a servant of the great philosophy of the Unconscious (which began as ‘Will’ with Schopenhauer, became k Tlie Philosophy of the Unconscious’ with Von Hartmann, launched all that ‘the Unconscious’ means m Psychoanalysis, and was ‘Intuition’ for Bergson, which is ‘Time’ for Spcngler, and ‘Space-Time’ for Professor Alex- ander) that Mr. Lawrence is writing. ‘ The consciousness in the abdomen ’ removes the vital centre into the viscera, and takes the privilege of leadership away from the hated ‘mind 1 or ‘in- tellect,’ established up above in the head. 177 M PALEFACE § 3 Spengler and the ‘Musical' Consciousness. The c sounds that arise . . . from the conscious- ness m the abdomen’ should be compared with the ‘sounds' 1 or ‘sound-symbols 1 transcending mere words of Spongier. When Speitgler is trying to give us an idea of what lie means by ‘Time/ for in- stance, lie writes'. 1 “Time” — that which wc actually feel at the sound of the word, which is clearer m music than in language . . . has this organic essence, which Space has not/ As I have pointed out elsewhere, Spongier’ s is in the same sense an ‘organic philosophy 1 as White- head’s. (The ‘philosophy of organic-mechanism’ is how Professor Whitehead describes his philo- sophy.) — These names and bare indications will sug- gest to you the theories that lie behind the romantic interpretations of Mr. Lawrence. I cannot here go into his philosophic derivations any more than to indicate very generally what they arc. — So, with him, we sec the impulses of the evolutionist, organic plnlosoplu reaching the glorification of the ‘con sciousncss in the abdomen 1 - -a sort of \isceral, ab- dominal, mind. involved with the gonadal affective apparatus, and establishing m these ‘centric parts' a new rc\olutionary capital, the n\al and enemy of the head, with its hated intellect , the aristocratic prerogative of the human being, that is such tin offence to communism. ‘Every higher languagc/says Spengler, ‘pos- sesses a number of words . . . about which there 178 the ‘ Musical ’ consciousness is a veil. No hypothesis, no science, can ever got into touch with that which we feel when w r e let ourselves sink into the meaning and sound of these words. They arc symbols, not notions. . . . The Dcstim -idea demands . . . depth , not intellect — (Decline of the West , p. 117 of english transla- tion.) In Spengler's language (winch, as you see, is ‘sound’ or ‘music,’ as he calls it, not anything so definite gs zvotd, s) ‘Time* is about the same thing as ‘ Destinv.’ To say that it was the same would be to suggest an exactitude which is foreign to Spengler. And upon the feminine nature of ‘Time’ or ‘Destiny* Spengler insists a great deal. ‘Endhv,s Becoming is comprehended m the idea of Motherhood . Woman as Mother is Time and is Destiny.’ A glorification of the Feminine principle, natur- ally, is also a great feature of the writing of Mr. D. H. Lawrence. The joining up of all these thread % is no doubt a tax upon the reader’s attention, and I wish it were not necessary so often to set out the evidence of what T am writing. But if I confined myself to assertion, or to a reference, merely, to where these parallels could be found, and omitted to give the text of some of the things at lea^t to w hich I refer, my argument would not be so substantially founded as it is, and above all, for piactical pur- poses, would want the convincing appeal domed from ‘chapter and verse.’ 179 PALEFACE § 4. Communism , Feminism , and the Unconscious jound in the Mexican Indian by Mr. Law- rence. One of the rhythmical patterns of ‘sound’ pro- duced by t lie Indian the latter describes as a ‘Lear hunt,’ Mr. Lawrence tells us. 'But,’ say\Mr. Lawrence, ‘the man coming home from the bear hunt is any man, all men, the bear is any bear, every bear, all bear. There is no individual , isolated expedience. It is the hunting . . . demon of manhood which has won against the . . . demon of all bears. The experience is generic, non-individual.’ So we reach Mr. Lawrence's communism, cast into the anthropologic moulds fiist prepared by Sir Henry Manic. For Mr. Lawrence is, m full hys- terical flow er, perhaps our most accomplished enghsh communist. lie is the natmal communist , as it w r ere, as distinguished from the indoctrinated, or tlico- ictic, one. (1) The Unconscious; (2) The Feminine; (3) The Communist : those are the mam principles of action of the mind of Mr. Lawrence, linked m a hot and piping trinity of rough-stuff primitivism, and freud- ian hot -sex-stuff. With Sons and Lovers, his fir book, he was at once hot-foot upon the fashionable trail of incest; the book is an eloquent wallowing mass of Mother-love and Sex-idolatry. His Women in Love is again the same thick, sentimental, luscious stew. The ‘Homo ’-motive, how could that be absent from such a compendium, as is the nature of Mr. Lawrence, of all that has long passed for ‘rcvolu- 180 COMMUNISM IN THE MEXICAN INDIAN tionarjV reposing mainly for its popular effective- ness upon the meaty, succulent levers of sex and supersex, to bait those politically-innoccnt, roman- tic, anglo-saxon simpletons dreaming their ‘anglo- 4 axon dreams,’ whether m America or the native country of Mr. LaVrenee ? The mot if of the * child- cult,’ which is usually found prominently m any ‘revolutionary’ mixture, is cchted, and indeed screamed, v ept and bellowed, throughout Sons and Lover*. At first sight, I ani afraid, many of the rappiachc - men Is that I make here may sound strained, since, I am sorry to sav, if things do not he obviously to- gether and publish their conjunction explicitly and prominently, it is not considered quite respectable to suggest that they have anv vital connection. The suggestion of anything ‘illicit’ shocks, even where ideas are concerned. That one idea should have a hidden liaison or be m communication with another idea, without e\er approaching it in public, or any one even mentioning them together — that is the sort of thing that is neve r admitted in polite society. So the majority of people are deeply unconscious of the affiliations of the various phenomena of our tune, which cm the surface look so very autonomous, and even hostile ; yet, existing under quite a different label, in a quite different region of time and space, they are often closely and organically related to one another. If you test this you will be surprised to find how many things do belong together, m fact, m our highly contentious and separatist time. Yet it is our business — especially, it appears, mine — to establish these essential liaisons, and to lay m PALEFACE bare the widely-flung system of cables connecting up this maze-like and destructive system in the midst of which we live — destructive, that is of course, to something essential that we should clutch and be careful not to lose, on our way to the Melting-pot What, you might say, for instance, has Mr. Law- rence’s remark about the ‘mindlessness 9 of the Mexi- can songs got t** do with communism ? Or, again, ‘mindlessness 9 or ‘communism 9 to do with ‘the Feminine Principle’ (as opposed to the Masculine)? I can show you at once wlml ‘mindlessness 9 has to do with ‘communism.’ I will quote the latest euro- pean advocate of Bolshevism, ltene Fulop-Miller, from his book The Mind and Face of Bolshevism . It should really be called The Face of Bolshevism* since we learn that ‘Mind 9 is of all things what Bol- shevism is concerned to deny and prohibit. He is relating how the ‘higher type of humanity 9 is to be produced, the super-humanity of which Bolshevism is the religion. ‘It is only by such external functions as the millions have m common, their uniform and simul- taneous movements, that the many can be united in a higher umt\ : marching, keeping m step, shouting “hurrah ” in unison, festal singing m chorus, united attacks on the enemy, these are the manifestations of life which are to give birth to the new and superior type of humanity. Eva y - thing that divides the many fiom each other , that fos- ters the illusion of the individual importance of man , especially the “ sovlf hinders this higher evolution and must consequently be destroyed . . . organiza- tion is to be substituted for the soul . . . the 182 COMMUNISM IN THE MEXICAN INDIAN vague mystery of the “soul,” with that evil handed down from an aecursed individualistic past. . . .’ Let us now continue with our quotations from Mr. Lawrence. 'There is no individual , isolated experience. . . . 1 1 is an experience of the blood- stream, not of the mind or spirit. Hence the subtle incessant insist- ent rhythm of the drum, winches pulsated like a heart, and soulless and inescapable. Hence the strange blind unanimity of the . . . nun’s voices.’ As jvu see, it might equally be Mr. Fulop-Miller on the beauties of Bolshevism. The Mexican Ind- ian of Mr. Lawrence is the perfect Bolshevik. The ‘blind unanimity of the men's voices’ (the ‘keeping in step . . . festal singing in chorus’ of Fulop- Miller) assures ‘soullessness.’ The ‘soul . . . must be destroyed * says the apostle of Bolshevism. ‘ the Indian song is non-individual. . . . Strange cfappmg, crowing, gurgling sounds, m an unseizable subtle rhythm, the rhythm of the heart m her throes : . . . from an abdomen where the great blood- stream surges m the dark, and surges in its own generic experiences.’ To witness all this is, to Mr. Law r rence, heaven. ‘ perhaps it is the most stirring sight m the world m the dark, near the fire, with the drums going,’ etc. etc. ‘It is the dark blood falling back from the mind, from sight and speech and knowing, back to the great central source where is rest and unspeakable renewal.’ On the same principle as ‘Back to the Land,’ the 183 PALEFACE cry of Mr. Lawrence (good little Freudian that he has always been) is ‘Back to the Womb!’ For al- though a natural communist and born feminist, it required the directive brain of Freud and others to reveal lam to himself. ‘We Whites, creatures of spirit?! he cries. Ah, the ‘strange’ things we ‘nevci icalize’! (sueli as the ‘strange falling jb^ck of the blood . . . the down- ward rhythm, the rhythm of pure forgetting and pure renewal '). § 5. The Indian a c Dilhytambic Speetato As to the pantheism of Mr. Lawrence’s Mexican Indian, the following passages inform us about that: ‘There is strictly no god. The Indian does not consider himself as created, and therefore external to God, or the creature of God . . . Creation is a great flood, for ever flowing. . Everythin i* Flows!— -for the Indian, as for Bergson, Mr. Lawrence, etc. In art the Mexican Indian ap- proximates closely to the ideal of the contemporary bolshevik theatre (the principles of which 1 ha\e discussed in an essay. The Dithyrambic Speetato?). ‘There is no division between actor and audi- ence. It is all one.’ ‘There is no OnJooktr. There is no Mmd. There is nc> dominant idea. . . . The Indian is complete]) embedded m . . . Ins own drama. It is a drama that has no beginning and no end. ... It can’t be judged, because there is nothing outside it, to judge it.’ 184 THE INDIAN A 4 DITIIYR AMBIC SPECTATOR* It is evidently just like life . It is a form of natural- ism, the mystical form. And above all there is no bunk about mind. Mind is kept in its place, m the mdian idea of drama ! 'The mind is time merely as a servant. . . . The mind bows dowh before the creative mystery.’ As to the good and the bad, that rfgam consists in being possessed of a personal will or individuality (which is wicked), or not being possessed of anj indi- viduality (which is virtuous). ‘Wickedness lies in . . . seeking to prostitute the creative wonder to the individual mind and will. . . The magician, the Prospero, is the supremely wicked person in the Indian scheme of tilings, m the eyes of iliesc ‘soulless,’ ‘drumming,* visceraliv- chumed-up Calibans. Magic, ‘witchcraft,’ Mr. Lawrence tells us, is the archetype of all wickedness. What is virtue m woman? Mr. Lawrence be- comes very Western at once, under the shadow of a kind of sulfragist -chivalry, at the mere thought of ‘Woman.’ ‘In woman [virtue] is the putting forth of all her- self m a delicate, marvellous, sensitiveness, which draws forth the v onder to herself, etc.’ (To ‘draw the wonder to herself’ is to be a witch, surely? So virtue and wickedness would get a little mixed up.) What would the Indian think if he heard his squaw being written about m that strain? — ‘delicate, mar- vellous sensitiveness.’ He would probably say ‘Chuck it, Archie!* m Hopi. At least he would be 195 PALEFACE considerably surprised, and probably squint very hard, under his ‘dark’ brows, at Mr. Lawrence. § C. The Under-Pan of and the Over-Don. When we are busy contrasting the White ‘con- sciousness* with the Dark, we arc always compelled to remember tiftit then 1 are other ‘consciousnesses 9 as well, perhaps even more hostile. Mr. Lawrence’s lirst chapter, ‘Corasimn and the Parrots , 9 is devoted to extending the idea of race - 4 consciousness 9 (in the sense of different species of men) to the whofe animal world. In the patio of his house Mr. Lawrence sits on a sunny morning m Mexico : and he ‘makes an instant friend of the reader’ (the publisher assures you on the back of the dust-cover) by telling you that he is only ‘one little indi\ idual looking at a bit of sky and trees, then looking down at the page of an exercise book.’ {Exercise book! Quite like a little child.) lie is nothing if not democratic, Mr Lawrence: just a ‘little individual,’ like yourself, dear reader, but bringing you a sunlit Morning all the way from Mexico. In the patio is a dog, called Corasnnn. lie is an even s mallet individual than Mr. Lawrence. fc Cor- asmm is a little fat, curl} white dog. . . . His little white nose is sharp, and under Ins eyes are dark marks, as under the eyes of one who has known much trouble. All day he docs nothing but walk resignedly out of the sun, when the sun gets too hot, and out of the shade when the shade gets too cool.’ 186 1 THE UNDER-PARROT AND THE OVER-DOG Meantime the parrots m the trees look down into the court, and observe the dog with hatred. All day long they mock him and lus two-legged masters; for all the world as the negroes mock the Whites in Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter . — Chapter One of Mr Lawrenee’S book is an aeeounl of the ‘Dark Laughtei ’ of the parrots, in short. ‘ “ Perro ! Oh, Perr-rro ! Pei'f-rr-rro ! ! ” shriek the parrots, with that strange penetrating, ante- diluvian malevolence that seems to make even the trees # prick tlieir ears. It is a sound that pene- trates one straight at the diaphragm, belonging to the ages before brains were invented.’ There we are back at the dear old ‘mysterious’ abdomen, once more! The ‘dark laughter’ of the mocking parrots goes m at the stomach, straight to the a lseeral ‘consciousness,* disdaining the meie ear and brain. At this point we grow 7 very primitive indeed. We are in the antediluvian w 7 orId with these parrots, who continue to pour ‘vitriolic’ mockery over the piesent masters of this earth, namely men and dogs. §7. Evolution, d la Metrical ne: (genre cutaelysmique, d la Marc). Here is Mr. Lawrence’s picture of Evolution d la mericainc . ‘Myself, I don’t believe m evolution, like a long string hooked on to a First Cause. ... I prefer to believe in wdiat the Aztecs called Suns: that is. Worlds successively created and destroyed. The 187 PALEFACE sun itself convulses, and the worlds go out like so many candles. . . . Then subtly, mysteriously, the sun convulses again, and a new set of worlds begin to flicker alight. ‘I like to think of the world jjoing pop! When the lizards had grown too unwieldy, and it was time they were taken down a peg or two.’ ft You see it is evolution just the same, with giant lizards and so forth But a jealous god 'mysteri- ously’ takes things dow r n a peg or two periodically. It is cataclysmic evolution, a la Marx, rather than evolutionary evolution . ‘Then the little humming-birds beginning to spark m the darkness and a whole succession of birds shaking themselves clean of the dark matrix . . . parrots shrieking about at midday, almost able to talk, then peacocks unfolding at evening. . . . And apart from these little, pure birds, a lot of unwieldy skmny-neckcd monsters bigger than crocodiles, bargmg through the mosses; till it was time to put a stop to them Then some one mys- teriously touched the button, and the sun went bang, with smithereens of birds bursting m all directions. Only a few parrots’ eggs and pea- cocks’ eggs and eggs of flamingoes smuggling in some safe 1100k, 1 o hatch on the next Day, when the animals uro»e. ‘Up reared the elephant, and shook the mud ofl his back. The bird* watched him in sheer stupe- faction. “What? What m heaven’s name is this wingless, beakless old perambulator?” ‘No good, oh birds » Curly little white Coras- EVOLUTION A LA MEXICAINE nun ran yapping out of the undergrowth, the new undergrowth, till parrots, going white at the gills, flew off into the aneientest recesses. Then the terrific neighing of the wild horse w r as heard in the twilight for the first time, and the bellowing of lions through the night. ‘And the birds w r ere sad. “ What is this l ” they said. “A whole vast gamut of- # ncw \oices. A universe of new voices.” ‘Then the birds under the leaves hung their heads and were dumb. “No good our making a sound,” they said. “We are superseded ” ‘. . . Only the real litile feathery individuals hatched out again and remained. This was a con- solation. The lai ks and w arblers cheered up, and began to sav their little sa^ , out of the old “Sun,” to the new r sun. But the peacock, and the turkey, and the raven, and tlic parrot above all, they could not get over it. Because, in the old da\ s of the Sun of Birds, they had been the big guns. The parrot had been the old boss of the flock, lie was so clever. ‘Now he was, so to speak, up a tiee. Nor dare he come down, be cause of the toddling little curly w T hile Corasnun. and such -like, down below. He felt absolutely bitter. That wingless, beakless, fcatherless, curly, misshapen bird’s nest of a Cor- asmin had usurped the face* of the earth, w r add!mg about, w'liereas his Grace, the hea\v-noscd old Duke of a parrot, was forced to sit out of reacli up a tree, dispossessed. ‘So, like the riff-raff up in the gallery at the theatre, aloft m the Paradise of the vanished Sun, 189 PALEFACE he began to whistle and jeer. Yap-Yap ! said his new little lordship of a Oorasmin. “Ye Gods!” ened the parrot. “Hear him forsooth! Yap- Yap! he savs! Could anything be more imbe- cile? Yap-Yap ! Oh, Sun of the Birds, hark at that! Yap-Yap-Yap! Pcrro* Pcrro! Pcrr- rro! Oh, Pcrr-rr-rro! ” ‘ The third Sun burst in water. . . . Out of the floods rose our own Sun, and little naked man. “Hello!” saul the old elephant. “What’s that noise?” ’ ‘ ‘ Come on! Pen o' Pen o'” called the naked two-legged one. And Corasnnn, fascinated, said to •himself: “Can’t hold out against that name. Shall have to go!” so off he trotted, at the heels of the naked one. ‘And m the branches the parrot saul to himself: “ Hi llo! What 's this new sort of halj-bird ? Wlvp lie's got Corasmrn trotting at his heels! Must be a new sort of boss! Let’s listen to him, and see if I can't take him off ‘“Perr-rro! Perr-rr-rro-oo ! Oh, Pcrro!” ‘ The parrot had hit it. I need not point, out to the reader, probably, the virtues of t his passage as a tour dc force of literary art. If is reminiscent of the best manner of Anatolc France, only possessing greater freshness — and in- deed the whole book is one of the best of Mr. Law r - rcncc’s that I have read. Unfortunately I have had 190 EVOLUTION A LA MEXICAINE to compress this lengthy passage, for all we are con- cerned with here is the notions underneath it, and not the literary expression. What this very vivid mock-account of a series of cataclysms and aztee ‘Suns’ reveals is the same thread of feeling as*is to lie found everywhere else in the book, and in those other numerous books whose underlying ideas, or philosophy, I iftn scrutinizing here. On the earth beneath, strutting about, is the ridiculous little white dog; up m the trees is the dignified aristocratic parrot. But the parrot is forced to remain ‘up a tiee 5 because this ridiculous little dog is the overlord of the moment, or the ser- vant of 1 lie present overlord, Man. But the ‘little white naked man 5 is not much less ridiculous than the little yapping white ball of a dog. Compared with the beautiful or at least aristocratical birds they have supersedrd, tins pair rut a poor figuie. Biit they have the power: thev walk the earth. The ‘ consciousness 5 of the little white dog and the little white man has been too much for the ‘consciousness 5 of the bird-world. But the sympathy of the reader, in this play of fantasia, it is cleaily intended, should be found en- tirely on the side of I he birds. They arc the finer beasts. And w lien in later chapters w r e arrive at the Indians, and pluck out the ‘ dark 5 heart of then ant c- dilu vian mystery, again we have a defeated race, but a far finer and profoundcr one than that that has superseded it. Chaplc r One, with the evolutionary apologue, is a psychological introduction to a study of the Indian, especially as contrasted with the White mind. 191 PALEFACE § 8. Rare or Class Separation by means of ‘ Dimen- sion . * The situation m tins bnd-aud-man play is the same situation as the White and Negro situation, the Civilized man and the Savage situation, or the White Overlord and subject asiatn faces situation. The play is introdujcd, at the start of the book, to stress and illustrate the situation to be considered and de- picted later on, when the ‘ consciousness 5 of the Ind- ian is to be pitted against the ‘consciousness* of the White Man. The monkey at a certain point comes on the scene. He is a survival from another ‘dimension/ Mr. Lawrence having introduced the mcxican machinery of his ‘Suns/ thinks of the woid ‘Dimension’ as being especially vague and picturesque, so he uses that. ‘If you come to think of it/ he says, ‘when you look at the monkey you are looking straight into the other dimension . . . lie's in the same universe of Space and Time as jou are. But there’s another dimension/ This other dimension the thought or ‘conscious- ness’ ot the monkev, of course. ‘lie’s different. There’s no rope of (‘volution linking him to you. like a na\ el string ho! Be- tween you and him there's a cataclysm and another dimension. It \s no good. You can’t link linn up. Never will. It ’s the other dimen- sion. ‘He mocks at you and gibes at \ ou and imitates you. Sometimes he is even more like you than 10‘2 RACE OR CLASS SEPARATION you are yourself. He *s funny, and you laugh just a bit on the wrong side of your face. It's the other dimension.’ As between Dark and White, Indian and Euro- pean, so between Man and Monkev, there is this ab- solute gulf for Mr. Lawrence, like the cleavage be- tween mathematical dimensions. ‘The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our w T ay of consciousness. . . . There is no bridge, no canal of connection.’ For ‘Indian’ substitute ‘Parrots'* (why not with a capital P though — is that because \vc are on the ground and the ‘parrot* up aloft?) or Monkeys (why not a capital M, like Ind- ian ?) and you have the same situation. ‘The Simian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our wiv,' etc., or ‘The Parrot's way of consciousness,’ etc. That is the idea. — It is all ar- ranged to heighten, or deepen, the separation be- tween the Indian and the White — or the Bantu or Hindu or the American Negro and the White § 9. An Imitation to Suicide add) eased to flu Whitt Man . The emotion throughout the book from which I have quoted is the dogmatism of ‘revolution,' of political revolution, to be precise. In contrast to the White Overlord of this world in which we live, Mr. Lawrence shows us a more primitive type of ‘consciousness,’ which has been physically defeated by the White ‘consciousness,’ and assures us that that defeated ‘consciousness’ is the better of the two. But, since the ‘consciousness’ of the Indian N 193 PALEFACE is death to the ‘consciousness’ of the White, and eventually, if it prevailed, to the White, physically, as well, it is (however indirectly, and in the form of an entertainment, a book of ‘fiction’) an invitation to suicide addressed to the White Man. ‘Give up, lav down, your White ‘‘consciousness,” ’ it says. ‘Capitulate to the mystical communistic Pan of the Primitive Man! He Savage!’ Not only the opposition as between beasts and men, or Black and White, is stressed (with, always, the rebellious hypnotic accompaniment of the re- volutionary drum, the primitive tom-tom, and al- ways, that is the important thing, all the sympathy of the reader engaged on the side of the oppressed and superseded, the undei-dog — or, in the abo\c in- stance, of the under-parrot); also we arc taken into the dark-backward, to more exaggerated opposi- tions. Once we ha\e got to the earliest birds, and, most ancient of all the dispossessed, the serpent (whom Mr. Lawrence sees biting his tail with an im- memorial rage, and remarking, as lie glances malev- olently up at Man, ‘I aaiII bruise Ins heel!’), beyond this wo reach Hungs —beyond the eaihest amoeba. Mr. LawTenee does not lak< us as fai as that. But the philosophers who mainly influence him do. This will be without mi a mug peiliups foi &omc readers. Elsewhere I have shown how r ihal iiionI fundamental of all revolutionary impulses Avorks, too. Mr. Bertrand Russell, for instance, obedient to Ins liberalist traditions, Avlueli he imports into his physics, attempts to stir up the tables and chairs against us and lead them in revolt against the over- Aveemng overlord Man, avIio sits upon them and 194 AN INVITATION TO SUICIDE uses them to write books at, without even asking himself if they may not resent Ins behaviour, and have their private thoughts about him — as he flings himself down upon them, or rests his elbows upon them and scratches Ins head. The reason why I direct an adverse analysis against this type of ‘revolutionary 5 emotional i tv, is not, once more, because I believe that the White Man as he stands to-day is the last word m animal life, or m spiritual perfection, or that he is not often quite as ridiculous as Mr. Lawrence’s parrots would have him, and in any ease lie is engaged in the road to the Melting-pot. I w ill not hen* enumerate my reasons for hostility" where this re- volutionary picture is concerned: 1 will say, only, that most Aztecs are probably fairly bored with being Aztecs. th«n the av< rage* IIopi. like the aver- age eat, is rather negatively admirable and exceed- ingly mechanical. that admiration for savages and eats is really an expression ol the worst side of the Machine Age — that Machine-Age Man is effusive about them because Hie;/ me machines like lumself; and Mr. Lawrence, at least, makes no pretence ol admiring Ins savages because they ai< fice — they are no longer for the cor.tc mporary rev olutionary ’ doc- trinaire ‘the noble savage' in the rousseaiiesquc or Fenimorc Cooper sense, at least not for the best informed doctrinaire* and, lastly, w r hat sueli gospels as those of Mr. Lawrence or of Sherwood Anderson really amount to is an (.motional, and not quite dis- interested, exaltation (indirectly) of the average man 9 rhomme moyen sensuel — though m this ease the average IIopi . 195 PALEFACE I find the average White European (such as C'hekov depicted) often exceedingly ridiculous, no doubt, but much more interesting than the average Hopi, or the average Negro. I would rather have the least man that thinks, than the average man that squats and drums and drums, with ‘ sightless,’ ‘ soul- less’ eyes: I would rather have an ounce of human ‘ consciousness * than a universe full of ‘abdominal’ afflatus and hot. unconscious, ‘soulless,’ mystical throbbing. — These few remarks must suffice to in- dicate the orientation of my attitude in ibis part of the debate. I am now going over into the books of Sherwood Anderson : and I assure you that, if you have fol- lowed my analysis of the passages in Mornings in Mexico, you will be in a much better position to understand exactly what Mr. Anderson wants lo say to you, at the same tunc that he spins you an ex- cellent yarn. I will begin with Dark Laughter (it pairs very well with Mornings in Mexico , though, as a book, in every w r ay inferior, and not, even a ‘good yarn’); and I will take my leave of Mexico with a quotation de- scribing the parrots in the patio mocking Kosahno the Indian servant, with their ‘dark laughter.’ In this way the two types of ‘dark laughter’ w r ill be brought into the nearest possible contact, so that any reader will be able to sec how verv near thev arc together in spirit, as well. The two parrots ‘a quite commonplace pair of green birds’ sit or hang there, with their ‘flat dis- illusioned eyes,’ their ‘heavy overhanging noses.’ their ‘sad old long-jowled faces,’ and watch the 196 ‘SPRING WAS COMING ON FAST 5 ridiculous human beings underneath hour after hour, bursting into mockery when tired of watching and noting. ‘The parrots whistle cxacth like Rosahno, only a little more so . . . Rosahno, sweeping the patio with his twig Ibroom . . . covers himself more and more wit h the cloud of his own obscurity. . . . Up goes the wild, sliding Indian wdnstlc into the morning. . . § 10 ‘ Spring was cowing on fas/ in Southern Indi- ana. 9 Mr. Sherwood Anderson’s book. Dark Laughter , ends as follows: ‘Why couldn’t Fred laugh? He kept trying but failed. In the road before the house one of the negro women now laughed. There was a shuffling sound. Tin' older negro woman tried to quiet the jounger, blacker woman, but she kept laughing the high shrill laughter of the negress. “I knowed it, I knowed it, all the time I knowed it,” she cried, and the* high shrill laughter ran through the garden and into the room where Fred sat upright and rigid in bed. ‘The End.’ The negresscs m Dark Laughter (they are the black servants, and their mocking laughter usually rises from the seullerv or kitchen) perpetually release their ‘high shrill laughter of the negress,’ as they observe with astonishment and derision the feeble- ness and absurdity of their White Overlords up in the parlour and out on the lawn . ‘ Up goes the wild, 197 PALEFACE sliding Indian whistle in the morning’ from the parrots (mocking the human beings in the court be- neath, from which, owing to the ovcrlordship of the human species, they are excluded, and forced to pass their time hanging upon the trees) m Mr. Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico : and up goes the ‘high shrill laughter’ of the negroes in Mi. Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter. The mgr esses m Mr. Anderson’s book are in the role of the parrots in Mr. Lawrence’s book: and the White Overlords in Mr. Anderson’s book are in the role of Iloino Sapiens in Mj^Law- mice’s book. Hut m Mr. Lawrence’s book, as in Mr. Anderson’s, the White Overlord , rather than the more abstract and fundamental Human Being, is the true objective. And the Mexican Indian in Mornings in Mexico plays the part (if the Negro m Dark Laughter . I think this parallel can be missed by no one So there is a good deal of truth, it seems, in the ‘moron’ critic’s gibe, ‘Sherwood Lawrence,’ m Mr. Mencken's Americana . Dark Laughter is the story of a journalist who, having escaped from his wife in Chicago, gets em- ployment in a small town in the South. He finds his employer's wile (‘Fred’ «s the employer) attiac- tive. She returns his love. She advertises for a gardener. He take^ on 11 k* job After what seems a very long time to the negro woman watching from the kitchen and other menial vantage points, Fred's Avife and the hind man go up to the bedroom of the wife of Fred, the emplover, during Fred’s absence, and the ‘deed of darkness’ is at last consummated. ‘A high-pitched negro laugh rang through the house.’— End of Book Ten. 198 ‘SPRING WAS COMING ON FAST’ That is the story. It proceeds to the mocking accompaniment of the laughter of the negro servants who find their masters a great joke. Fred’s wife finds their laughter disquieting, but she dismisses it as follows • ‘Soon it would be evening, the negro women come home. . . . About the negro women it did not matter. They would think fts tin ir natures led them to think, feel as their natures led than to feel. Von can’t ever tell what a negro woman thinks or feels. They aie like children looking at you. . . . White eyes, white teeth in a blown face — laughter.’ But we, the readers of Dark Laughto , know what the negresscs think more or less, for we have the following enlightenment, winch resolves itself into a sort of ‘Attabox * chorus- -the manlv straightfor- ward advice of the divinely-inspired black child of nature: ‘(Jet down to it ! (Jet to business' Hurry up! Have lur quick! Don’t hang and moon about !’ ‘Negroes singmg. — ** And the Lord said . . II m i y, Hum ” ‘Negroes smgmg had sometimes a way of get- ting at the ultimate truth of things. Two negro womeu sang in the kitchen of the house. . . . The two negro women in the house sang, did their work, looked and listened.’ That is the situation. ‘ Spring w r as coming on fast in Southern Indiana.’ But the specimen of the White race depicted for us, called upon to be the 199 PALEFACE ‘man in the case 5 or third side to the triangle, and to accommodate Fred’s wife, is slow, slow — as slow, in fact, as the spring in southern Indiana is fast. And — ‘The two negro women m the house watched and waited. Often they looked at edfcli other and giggled. The air on the lull tej) was filled with laughter — dark laughter. ‘Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!’ more, be a man to some woman’s woman. That would be up to Bruce. ‘In war, when you are wounded, a strange feel- ing of relief. “That's done. Now get well.” ‘“She has gone to Chicago.” That Bruce! 204 THE MANNER OF MR. ANDERSON Shoes twenty to thirty dollars a pair. A work- man, a gardener. Ho, ho ! ” Or : ‘“Go softly. Don't hurry. What’s all the shooting about l A little more white, a little more white, graying white, muddy white, thick lips — staying sometimes. Over we go! ‘Something lost too. The dance of bodies, a slow dance. 4 ‘Sleep again, white man. No hurry. Then along e street for coffee and a roll of bread, five cents. Sailors off ships, bleary-e> ed. Old nigger women and white women going to market. They know each other, nigger women, white women. Go soft . Don’t hurry ! ’ It. is, m its least dextrous form, the chopped Mr. Jingle style empkned by the author of Ulysse*, to represent a person thinking: for instance (from Ulysses, p. 281): ‘Damn good gm that was. — Fine* dashing young nobleman. Good stock, of course. That ruffian, that sham squire, with his violet gloves, gave him away. Course they were on the wrong side. They rose in dark and evil days. Fine poem that is: Ingram. They were gentlemen. lien Dollard does smg that ballad touchingly. Masterly rendi- tion. “ At the siege of Ross did my father fall.” 4 A cavalcade in easy trot along Pembroke quay passed, outriders leaping, leaping in their, m their saddles. Frockcoats. Cream sunshades. 205 PALEFACE ‘Mr. Kernan hurried forward, blowing furi- ously. His Excellency ! Too bad! Just missed that by a hair. Damn it ! What a pity!’ Here is Anderson again : ‘Once he had read a book of Z*>la, La Tare* and later, but a shot l tune before he left Chicago, Tom Wills had sluVn him a new book bv the Irishman Joyce, Ulysses. There were certain pages. A man named Bloom standing on a beach near some women. A woman. Bloom's wife, m her bed- room at home. The t bought s of the woman — her right of animalism — all set down — minutely. Realism m writing lifted up sharp something burning and new like a raw sore. Others coming to look at the sores.’ In The Enemy (No. 1 ) I said all t hat it is necessary to say about this jerky sententious way of writing, in dealing with Wush & Co. ‘Ulysses. There were certain pages. A man named Bloom.' — ‘Others coming to look at the sores.’ Pick up any monthly magazine devoted tot he most popular sort of fiction, and you will read ‘He flung out bitterly, in short jagged sentences, as though it was painful for him to speak : ‘ No good. All 1 over belw ecu ih. Things might have been diflerent. It — Ah well, it’s too late. Good-bve.” * This is intended to represent a person labouring under an emotion too deep for words. In the above passage of Mr. Anderson’s the effect aimed at is a sort of bitter brevity — stuff flung out carelessly by a man who m the opinion both of the author and of himself is rather a line fellow. 206 THE MANNER OF MR. ANDERSON The other passage 1 have quoted, beginning: ‘Go softly. Don’t hurry!’ etc., represents a maddening trick of many not a cry good writers to-day, who arc too nervous and stupid to be simple, and who con- sider that they have m some way modernized what the> have to tell, flr that they have made its essential banality more difficult to detect, bv breaking it up into jerky statements, and stark Elliptical noisy clauses. Also it poeticizes it. It is a very similar sort of stupidity, or else deceit (according to who employs it), to a\ erage free \ erse. If they are really live vwres they say most of their sentences Ivvo or three times over, like Miss Stein, occasionally, to vary it a little, breaking off m the middle, or pun- ning and fumbling incessantly with sonic word. § It. ‘ Hi uia! Heal ism mm the Sophistication of Fiend . Non , abov e, in the third passage by Mr. Anderson that I have quoted, Zola is mentioned first, and Joyce afterwards. Zola, standing for ‘brutal real- ism,’ or for ‘animalism, like Joyce (in Mr. Ander- son’s eyes) must bav e been always at the back of Ins mind, I suspect. La Terre is surely a recognizable forebear of Doth Laughter. All that is suetij, and stupid — all the thick, fat dummheit — in this book, is the authentic /.olaesque romance — Nature, sensu- ality, hot lowering sulphurous Summers — -bursting, sappy Springs; cows mooing for bulls, bulls bellow- ing for cows, etc. etc. It all is there. But Freud has come in, too. So when the hero is thinking about las childhood, no one w r ill be surprised to lind 207 PALEFACE that he first of all describes himself as a small boy, sitting beside his mother on a river-steamer, and ‘sensing* that his mother was ‘lusting* for a young man who stood near them with a dark moustache; and that then he half withdraws the young man with the dark moustache, and half-exoilerates Ins mother from these fresh sensations, and takes the blame himself. It was he , the little boy, who in reality (the authors dutiful eye on Dr. Freud) was ‘lusting ’ for his mother. ‘That young man Bruce had once seen on an Ohio river- boat when he was a boy taking a trip up river, with Ins father and mother. ... It would be an odd turn of the nnnd if the young man had never existed — it a boy’s mind had invented linn. Suppose he had just in\ ented lnm later — as some- thing — to explain Ins mother to himself, as a means forgetting close to the Ionian, Ins mother.’ So much for the usual incest. Next I will take the mystical communism. (Not that Freud’s teach- ing is not an integral part of eommuinsm, too, for it is Hie psychology appropriate to a highly coni- mumzcd patriarchal society in which l he family and its close relationship is an intense obsession, and the obscene familiarities of a closeiy packed communal sex-hfe a family-joke, as it were. It is a psychology foreign to the average European and his individual- istic life. The mccst-thcme is inappropriate to the european communities, on whom no severe religious restrictions of race or of caste have been imposed.) So by ‘communism’ here I mean what currently we mean when we say communism. Mr. Anderson is 208 ‘BRUTAL REALISM* describing happenings on the Mississippi before the coming of industrialism, and especially he is glori- fying the negroes. 4 black mysticism — never expressed except m song or in the movements of bodies. The bodies of the black workers belonged to each other as the sky belonged to the river. ... * ‘Brown bodies trotting, black bodies trolling. The bodies oj all the men running up and down the landing-stage were one body . One could not be dis- tinguished from another They were lost in each othn-- Could the bodies oj people be so lost , m each other j etc. He apostrophizes american painters, and calls them ‘silly American painters!’ He says that silly painters ‘chase a Gauguin shadow to the South Seas.’ Why don’t they stay at home and paint the Ameri- can Negro? he asks. If they v ant to lind romance — mystical romance, or ‘black mysticism,’ here it is at their doors. ‘The skm colors brown, golden yellow, reddish brown, purple brown. Where the sw r eat runs down high brown backs the colors come out and dance before the eyes. . . . Flash that up, jou silly painters . . . song-tones in words, music m w r ords — m colors too.’ § 15. The Black Cormnhmsm of Anderson. I will now quote successively those passages in Bark Laughter that contain the gist of Anderson’s whitmanesque message of Black and White brother- 209 o PALEFACE hood, or rather of Black-worship, and religious sub- mission to the Black-idea, as being a more primitive one than the White. The hero is going down the Mississippi. The fol- lowing passages represent the cogitations of this figure (expressing, presumably, many of the ideas peculiar to Fr. Anderson), upon those amencan problems connected with race. 'People talked with a slow drawling speech, niggers were hoeing cotton, other niggers fished for catfish in the river. ‘The niggers were something for Bruce to look at, think about. So many black men slowly growing brown. Then would come the light brown, Ihe velvet browns, Caucasian features. The brown woman tending up to the job — getting the race lighter and light er. Soft southern nights, warm dusky nights. Shadows flitting ... in dusky roads . . . soft voices laughing, laughing. . . This quotation has its ironical significance: for it shows the ‘noble savage’ (as represented by the amencan Negro) trying to get a white skin as quickly as possible, at the same time as the White is begin- ning to hide his head m shame at the thought that his is not a black, yellow or brown one. ‘Was there such a thing as an American ? Per- haps Bruce was the thing himself. He was reck- less, afraid, bold, shy. . . . ‘Could you ever really know ... a nigger? ‘Consciousness of brown men, brown women, coming more and more into american life — by that token coming into him. too. 210 THE BLACK COMMUNISM OF ANDERSON ‘More willing to conic, more avid to come, than any Jew\ etc. . . . Standing laughing — coming by the back door — with shuffling feet, a laugh — a dance in the body. ‘Facts established would ha\e to bo recognized sometime. . . /• ‘Thinking of mggeis! What >orf of business is that ? IIow come v Northern /neir so often get Ugly when they think of niggers, or they get senti- mental. 1 Give pity where 1 none is needed. The men and women of the South understand better, maybe. ‘Oh, hell, don’t get fussy! Let things flow! Let us alone! We Ml float! 5 Brown blood flowing. White blood flow mg, deepmer flow ing. ‘A slow- da nee, music, ship’s cotton, corn, coffee 1 . Slow’ lazy laughter of niggers. Bruce jomcni- bercel a line he had once s ecu written by a negro. “Would white pent ewer know why my people walk so softly and laugh at sunrise?” 9 So : “ silly ainenean painters’ chasing ‘a Gauguin shadow to the South Seas*’ No! ‘Across the street . . . a nigger woman ol Iwent j arises at live and stretches her arms. . . Nigger girl with slendei, flexible body.’ — Thai's the stufl! Why go to the South Seas v ‘Fheh that up, \ou silly painters. . . . Song-tones . . . m colours/ ‘Hot days. Sw r eet Mama! 5 § 16. ‘ JVhaf ho! Smelling Strangeness' Or let 9 s return to ‘that Gauguin ’ — he is, after all, the goods — though he chd go to the South Seas, 1 Cf quotation fiom T) II. Law rent e, p 174 211 PALEFACE whereas for half the money he could have stopped right here in New Orleans, and ‘flashed up 5 just as good a brand of Darkic (if that was all he wanted). — ‘Do you remember the night when that Gauguin came home to his little hut and there, m the bed, was the slender brown girl waitirig for him ? Better read that book. “Noa-Noa,” they call it. Brown mysticism in* the walls of a room , in the hair — of a Frenchman, m the (yes of a brown girl. Noa-Noa. Do you remember the sense of strangeness? French painter kneeling on the floor m the darkness, smell- ing the strangeness. The brown girl smelling the strangeness. Love? What lio* Smelling strange- ness.’ Love, What ho ! it is indeed : for it smells strange - ness, which is the essence of romantic love, as of ('very other form of romance. We here get the full flavour of the clumsy and rather drab exoticism of Mr. Anderson. The ‘brown mysticism’ of Gau- guin’s dusky mistresses lie wishes to transport into the Mississippi, and create a Noa-Noa upon its flood. And Niggerland shall henceforth be their Paeitic, for those inland populations that have never seen the sea, and each manbea Gauguin in lus own backyard. § 17. The 4 Poetic 9 Indian Them: is an important feature of the teaching of Mr. Sherwood Anderson with which lam much in sympathy. This he inherits too from Walt Whit- man. But it is flatly contradicted by the commun- ism of the rest of his work. 1 refer to Ins eloquent opposition to the influences of industrial life — to the killing ot life and natural beauty that that entails. 212 THE ‘POETIC’ INDIAN Part of Dark Laughter is devoted to a eulogy of life on the great river, Mississippi, and generally of the lands through which it flows. ‘A warm rich land of growth — trees growing rank — weeds and corn growing rank. The whole Middle American Empire — swept by frequent and delicious rains, great iorests, prairies on which early spring flowers grow' like a carpet — land of many risers running dosvn to the brown slow strong mother of ris'ers, land to live in, make love m, danee m. Once the Indians danced there, made feasts there. Tlie\ r threw poems about like seeds on a wand. Names of ris’ers, names of tow'ns. Ohio! Illinois! Keokuk! Chicago! Illinois ! Michigan ! ’ 'New York’ and ‘Boston,’ it is Irue. might appear intensely romantic to a Blaekfoot or a Mohican: and they may have remarked to each other, among their wigwams, sharpening their tomahawks, ‘These Whites throw poems about like seeds m the wind! Boston! Brotf'im'illr 1 llow beautiful!’ Still ! suppose there is sonic abstract superiority in the mdian names set beside the anglo-suxon ones. I am reminded of Matthew Arnold’s contrasting of the place-names for which the ‘creeping Saxon ’ was responsible, and those names originating with the Celts. ‘As the saxon names of places, with the pleas- ant, wholesome smack of the soil in them — Weatherfield, Thaxted, Shalford — are to the Celtic names of places, with their penetrating lofty beauty — Velmdra, Tyntagel, Carnarvon — so is 213 PALEFACE the homely realism of german and norse nature to the fairy-like loveliness of eeltie nature.’ So, if Mr. Anderson happens to be of ‘celtic 5 origin, he can match Carnarvon with Keokuk, Tyn- tagel with Chicago, and Vclindra Villi Michigan, and hold his head up once more! §18. The Mississippi and ihc Manufacturers. Bruce, the hero of Doth Laughter , having torn lumself free from domestic life in Chicago, ‘spent nearly two months ... in getting down river to New Orleans. . . . Nearly every man who lived long in the Mississippi Valley had that notion tucked way in linn somewhere. The great riser, lonely and empty now, was, in some queer way, like a lost river. It had come to represent t he lost youth of Middle America perhaps. Song, laughter, profanity, the smell of goods, dancing mggers — life everywhere! Great gaudy boats on a ri\er, lumber rafts floating down, voices across the silent nights, song, an empire unloading its wealth on the face of the waters of a river! . . . In its youth the Middle West had breathed with the breathing of a river. ‘The iactory men were pretty smart, weren't lhey v First thing they did when they got the chance was to choke off the river, take the rom- ance on I of commerce. They may not have in- tended anything of the sort, romance and com- merce were just natural enemies. They made the river as dead as a door-nail with their railroads and it has been that w r ay ever since. 214 THE MISSISSIPPI AND THE MANUFACTURERS ‘Rig river, silent now. Creeping slowly down past mud banks, miserable little towns, the river as powerful as ever, strange as ever, but silent now, forgotten, neglected. A few tugs with strings of barges. No more gaudy boats, pro- fanity, song, gamblers, excitement, life. ‘When he was working his way down river, Bruec Dudley had thought that* Mark Twain, when he went back to visit the river after the rail- roads had choked to death the river life, that Mark might have wntt en an epic then. He might have written of song killed, of laughter killed, of men herded into a new age of speed, of factories, of swift, fast-running trains.’ When wc in Europe* discuss America, w r e picture it only as this ‘soulless’ (to use Lawrence’s w r ord in another connection) desolation of the Machine Age. It typifies to the European the Robot, Machine-life, m excelsis. We forget, or we have no means of knowing, that the more intelligent American sees this, ‘sees through it/ as well as we do; and happen** to hate it with far moie intensity, sometimes, than is found with us. Earlier m this essay I have remarked that I w r as agreeably surprised to find those people I talked to m New York about t hat v cry remarkable city (which I was seeing for th* first time) expressed nothing but a veiled or open dislike for its famous colossal- ness. They looked pained or bored if I drew their attention to a particularly beautiful skyscraper. It was like talking to a farmer about the beauty of the scenery. And m american books you meet every- 215 PALEFACE where the same impatience and contempt for all this commercial display of power, scale and speed. No- where in the Old World have I ever met such a thorough aversion for all the things that we regard as typically ameriean, and which the American of the popular imagination is always supposed to be boasting about. §19. Passages from ‘Poor While.' That Mr. Anderson realizes that in this attitude towards the staggering material achievements of his country, he, and the many Americans of his way of thinking, are rebels against an entire scheme of things — the whole of our ‘ainericanized’ civilization, in fact — is clear from what happens in his book. Poor White. That is the story of a child of Poor Whites on the Mississippi, who discovers a genius for engineering. His inventions are highly profit- able to himself and those with whom he is associ- ated, and the town where he is settled rapidly turns from a village into a big factory town. We have a picture of the struggle between the old order and the new — between the craftsman and handiworkcr, and the new industrialism. But eventually Hugh the inventor begins turning against his own mechanical-toys, and even loses his power of inventing these. But by this reaction, Mr. Anderson says, he is still in advance of his fellows. He has become conscious ; before he bad been un- conscious (that is certainly a step in advance : but does it tally with Mr. Anderson’s teaching else- where?). 210 PASSAGES FROM POOR WHITE ‘He had been an unconscious worker , a doer, and was now becoming something else. The time of the comparatively simple st niggle with definite things, with iron and steel, had passed. He fought ... to understand himself, to relate him- self with the lift about him. The poor white, son of the defeated dreamer of the river, who had forced himself m advanec of Ins ftnow’s along the road of meehameal development, was still m ad- vanee of his fellows of the growing Ohio towns. ‘ The struggle he was making was Ihe shuggle his fellows of another generation would erne and all have lo make. . . . ‘There w r as unconscious defiance of a whole civilization m Hugh’s attitude. . . .’ The heroine ol the story, Clara, hates her hus- band’s and father's machinery even more than Hugh (as far as we are allowed to follow r him) comes to do. There is a sensational scene m which a harness-maker has cut a man’s throat for importing mac h i n e-made harness into the town, and forcing linn to sell it. ‘In her mind’ (in Clara's) ‘the harness-maker had come to stand for all the men and women in the world who were m secret revolt against the absorp- tion of the age m machines and the products of machines. He had stood as a protesting figure against wdiat her father had become.’ A little earlier Clara's father, Tom, has turned up, m a state of great excitement, w r ith the first motor car to be seen in that part of the country. He takes his daughter and son-in-law for a drive, Clara sitting behind, and 217 PALEFACE Hugh beside Tom . Here arc* two passages, recount- ing this event. ‘As the daughter sat in the motor listening to the shrill voice of the father, who now talked only of the making of machines and money, that other man talking softly m the moonlight as the horse jogged slowly along the dark road seemed very far away. *A11 such men seemed \ery far away. ‘‘Everything worth while is very far away,” she thought bitterly. “The machines men are so in- tent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.” ‘The motor flew along the roads and Tom thought of his old longing to own and drive* fast racing horses. “I used to be* half crazy to own fast horses,” he shouted to Ins son-in-law. “I didn’t do it, because owning fast horses meant a waste of money, but it was m my nnnd all the time. 1 wanted to go fast : faster than any one else.” In a kind of ecstasy he gave the motor more gas and shot the speed up to fifty miles an hour. The hot, summer air, fanned into a violent wind, whistled past his head. “Where would the damned race horses be now,” he called, “where would your Maud S. or your J.l.C. be. trying to catch up with me m tin.-* car? ” ‘Yellow wheat fields and fields of young corn, tall now and in the light breeze that was blowing whispering in the moonlight, flashed past. . . .’ ‘“You don’t know anything about it, and I don’t want you should talk, but there are new things coming to Bidwell,” he added. “When I 218 PASSAGES FROM POOR WHITE was in Chicago last month I met a man who has been making rubber buggy and bicycle tires. I ’m going m with him and we ’re going to start a plant lor making automobile-tires right in Bidwell. The tire business is bound to be one of the greatest on earth and*thcy ain’t no reason why Bidwell shouldn’t be the biggest tire center^ or known in the world.” Although the ear now ran quietly, Tom’s \oice again Ik came shrill. “There’ll be hundreds of thousands of ears like this tearing over '‘very road in America,” he declared. “ Yes, sir, they will; and if I calculate 1 lght Bidwell ’ll be the great tire town of the world.” ’ § ‘JO. The Contradiction between the Communist Emo- tionality of Mr Anderson and his impulses to counter the Machine Age. It is plain from the quotations I have given that Mr. Anderson is (whatever the origin of those im- pulses may Ik* wilh him) insurgent or reactionary where the greal mailed list of Big Business is con- cerned- -rebellious to all that giant orthodoxy of mercantile collectivism which is pulverizing th< life of the contemporary world, in herding people m enormous mechanized masses. Any independent intelligence*, standing aside from the two great hos- tile sects of Capitalism and Communism, must de- plore in the* latter, side by side with its doctrine of deliverance, the fact that its Promised Land looks too, in the distance, so like the film Metropolis . Mr. Anderson no doubt would be incapable of seizing the fundamental liaison of many of his 219 rALEFACE favourite ideas with the materialist aspect of the communist doctrine Where he bestows upon Clara, m Poor While , a lesbian chum, and makes her re spond to her life experience a la garQOvne; or, again, where he advertises in Dark Laughter a passion, as a child of six, for his mother (so conforming to the incest motif of Freud j, he is far from realizing, I should say, where these ideologic boriowmgs would lead him, had he the curiosity to track them back to their true sources. All this is hidden from Mr. Anderson : but that is not for a moment to say that, had lie the energy or intelligence to track the prin- cipal and most picturesque notions by which he has been influenced back where they most truly belong, he would not be even better pleased with himself than now he is. Nor do I saj r that, swiftly navigat- ing the broad stream of influences (to which he, m common with everybody else to-dav, has been sub- jected) up to its fountain head, and finding himself at last m the company of early Generals of the Society of Jesus, or Grand Inquisitors, closeted w T ith the chiefs of the Templars or passing into the shadow 7 of the Star Chamber, or findmg himself at length face to face with the learned priestly rulers of East- ern theocracies, such for instance as the priests of Sais. who told Solon that tin Greeks were only ignorant children, hi would not Ik* m better intel- lectual company than ever lie has been m the Middle West. What of course I really mean is that he, him- self, w T ould certainly be worse off with those master minds. But lus interests are ours, up to a point, and it is perhaps as well not to allow' Palefaces like Mr. Anderson to make too many mistakes and to 220 MR. ANDERSON AND THE MACHINE AGE arrive at the Melting-pot practically Black. Muddle and blindness is bad, encountered in the spokesmen of our race: for if such men as Shaw, Russell, Law- rence and so on, here m England and Anderson amongst the best-known dozen m America are not our spiritual spokesmen, ihen who are? Not Sen- ator Borali or Mr. Churchill, 1 suppose: nor Dean Inge nor Rabin Wise. Once the deep cloud of lgnor- auce and misunderstanding were dispelled, it would be found that many people w T itli even more enthu- siasm would stick to their present beliefs. Others, how’ever, would abandon them. We should all know' where wc w r ere, then, the issues would be stark and plain, and the argument would move more rapidly to its conclusion — smoothly, more satisfac- torily. to the best of all possible Melting-pots. So I think that the emotional insurgcnce of Mi . Anderson against the conditions of Big Business is flatly contradicted by his communism. I w r ill repeat the quotation where he is exclaiming about the peculiar solidarity of the negro workers. ‘The bodies of all the men running up and down the landing-stage were one body. One could not be distinguished from another. They w r erc lost in each other. Could the bodies of people be so lost in each other? 5 The answer of course to that last question (the exclamations of Mr. Anderson have usually the form of questions) is ‘ Yes, they can. It is quite easy for White Men, as w ell as Negroes, to become Mass men , “not to be distinguished from one another. 55 In- tensive Industrialism is able to achieve that for y r ou 221 PALEFACE whoever the bosses.’ But Intensive Industrialism is what Mr. Anderson never ceases to fulminate against. And his reasons for hating it .appear to be precisely that it does merge people m the way that he exultantly describes the Negro workers as being merged, m one featureless anonymous black organ- ism, like a gigantic centipidc. So in the same breath he is gioomv and joyful over the same phe- nomenon! The black skin appears to have the power of disguising the reality from him. A sub- sidiary confusion is caused, in this instance, by the fact that the mechanical Negroes are given as a characteristic feature of the free natural life of the Mississippi before the arrival of Industrialism, which put an end to the mechanical trotting Negroes — “running up and down the landing-stage . . . lost in each other.’ § 21. While ' SenlinienUilih / ' At the beginning of Section I1T, J have quoted Mr. 1). If. Lawrence, where hi' says, ‘It is almost impossible for the white people to approach the Indian without either sentimentality or dislike.’ And I remarked that Mr. Lawrence showed him- self to be a flood Whih M«n m that respect: for there is a great deal of ‘ sentimentality ’ about the Hopi in the books of Mr. Lawrence. Where the amencan Negro is concerned it is the same thing with Mr. Sherwood Anderson, although it is a different sort of 'sentimentality.' In any book of Jus you pick up you will find, wherever Negroes occur, that they are used to score off the WHITE ‘SENTIMENTALITY’ White; or arc compaied, with considerable ’senti- ment,’ very favourably with the White ‘Over- lord.’ This invariable attitude on the part of Mr. Ander- son is partly the effect of fashionable primitivist doctrine: and it partly the revolutionary, ‘radical,* impulse at work. The Negro is ‘kept m his place,' is ‘looked down on,’ is used as a hireling, and laughed at, by the arrogant Lord of Creation, the White Man. Mr. Anderson has learnt his little ‘radical’ lesson. So, wherever the Negro occurs, and he occurs fairly often in lus books, he is made to take the White down a peg or two. What blissful ignorance of really dark realities is displayed by these old-fashioned habits — old-fasluoned because they came into existence amongst and were proper to conditions that ha\e passed! There arc many duskier things than the big black honest open face of the poor Negro. § 22. ‘/ wish I ti as a Niggci.' T will give a few lurt her illustrations of roman- cing about Negroes. Take, lor example, the first storv, ‘I Want to Know \Vh> in The Triumph of the Egg. It is a story of the passion for horse -racing — it is, as it happens, a very, very emotional, even, in- deed, a blubbering story. It is, in fine, the triumph of the Egg — in the overtaxed soul of Mr. Anderson. Negroes are ‘flashed up' here and there. ‘Often when I think about it ... I wish 1 was a nigger. It *s a foolish thing to say . . . I can’t help it.’ 223 PALEFACE Three other boys and himself run away from home and go to the races. ‘Wc got into Saratoga as l said at night and went to the track. Bildad (a Negro) fed us up. He showed us a place to sleep in liay over a shed and promised to keep still. Niggers are all right about things like that. They won’t squeal on you. Offen a white man you might meet, when you had run away from home like that, might, appear to be all right and give you a quarter or half dollar or something, and then go right and give you away. White men will do that, but not a nigger. You can trust them. They are square with kids. I don’t know why.’ I have said in my introduction that I am propos- ing to you an entirely new system of feeling and thought, a new way of looking at the world in which, since the War, we have been called upon to live. ‘ I Want to Know' Why’ is a good thing to exercise jour teeth on if you arc giving this system a trial. But let us put under the microscope the two passages 311st quoted, to start with: afterwards the rest of the story can he associated with our results, derived from the scrutiny of that particular portion. Mr. Anderson of course is writing to start with in the breathless, unpunctuated jargon of childhood: for he is a little simple child once more, running away from home. (Often in The Triumph of the Egg he take s many lea \ cs out of the book of ‘ Trudy ' Stein, it is worth noting, for it is, as I have said, the Triumph of the Egg right enough.) So when he says ‘I wish I was a nigger,’ we should not be justi- 224 4 THE IvID s ficd in paying much attention to that, if it wcfc not that elsewhere, when no longer the irresponsible truant child, he displays just the same proclivities where Negroes are concerned. lie is always, in one form or another, ‘ w i slung he w as a nigger.’ So it is ‘a loolisli tlnng fro saj.’ It is a foolish thing, all right, and Mr. Anderson, in one way or another, is always saying it. § 23. 'The Kid: In the second passage 1 have quoted, Bildad, the kind dusky Uncle Tom, with the Dickens tear in the corner of Ins pathetic rolling benevolent black eye, gives the little runaways lots to eat; and then lie bustles off and finds the dear little chaps (m the tiue Dickens manner) a eosv little hiding place. k Ali, the good kind Nigger! Would that those hard unsympathetic White Men were as good to 4 kids” as that! (live me a Nigger e\er\ time — it you ’re a little mnoec nt kid (as I am for the moment, in misty-eyed memory) (making Ihr hard, cruel, White law% which foibids you to run aw r ay from home, and which imposes its disgusting White disci- pluie upon you. Ah, if the White Momnier and Pop only could understand ! As t he Nigger understands ! The Child is a thing that requires understanding! He is a w T ild, rousscauesque thing, a fragment of wild Nature. He hates discipline ! He w r ants to run wild! The Nigger is nearer to Nature: he under- stands the Child. Up, the Nigger! Down, the White Mamma! And especially, Down the White Papa ! * That is the andersoman idea. The Nigger and the OO'? *IM J p PALEFACE Children are kindred souls — both are giggling, emo- tional — laughing and crying — Children of Nature. ‘ you know how a nigger can giggle and laugh and say things that make you laugh. A white man can’t do it. . . .’ ( Triumph of the Egg, p. 10). Only the adult White is no sport,* is against Nature l Tt is he that has invented discipline ! It is the White that spoils % e verytlung ! So, down with discipline 1 Down with the White! Let Children and Niggers, moist -eyed and hand in hand, run wild and free! That is the andersonian message: and when we have wiped our eyes and put our handkerchiefs away (still sniffling a little, and still red around the eyes) — if we ever do that at all, of course! — let us open our little peepers and see what has been happening to us all. We ’ve been ha\ ing such a hell of a good time, such a lovely luscious cry, and so much luxuri- ous sob-stuff has been our bath for so long (not only as readers of Anderson, but as readers of so many books), that to be a little inflexible, and on the cold side, will be a change, at least. Suppose we begin to do what — in such a radiant, free and highly emo- tional world — wc should never never do at all : I mean, tall into that beastly condition, so abliorzent to all emancipated, i'recdom-lovmg Children of Nature, to all Behavioun-t'., to all Beigsomans, Ges- talt ites and Emergent Evolutionists — that condi- tion we call (as it were m mockery of our ‘reflexes’) ‘reflection.’ How would that new state of muid affect our view of the above passages in ‘ I Want to Know Why,’ indeed of the whole of that piece? First, we should undoubtedly say to ourselves that it was a little late in the da}’ to indulge in Uncle 226 ‘THE KID * Toma Cabin emotions. Things have changed too much throughout the world for the ‘ conquering* White Man to allow himself, without appearing ridiculous, those sentimental superiorities. It is even an offence to our Black brothers. On the other hand, the White t)verlord (not being an ‘overlord’ at all of course) can no longer strictly speaking afford the luxury of remaining a ‘kid.’ That is no good: the World is no longer his nursery, or happy hunting ground, so Ins days of charming Childhood, it should be recognized by him, a^e at an end. There arc many people, of course, who arc only too anxious to encourage him to remain a child. On all sides he is encouraged to remain very, very ‘young’ and harm- lessly ‘boyish,’ not to trouble his little head with thinking, not to allow any anxiety to come into his eternally young and divinely irresponsible life. ‘Ju&t have a good time: just be a “kid” — we’ll do the rest, we’ll look after the world!* his mentors practically say to him. 4 You are so young: much too young to do anything but enjoy yourself — at our expense! Don’t stmt j ourself! The mortgage will never have to be paid!’ Soothed and flattered, Little Master Paleface simpers and archly contorts himself, and turns to the toys provided for him — more insidious, < ertainly, than bread and circuses — by Ins indulgent guides, philosophers and friends. Some of his toys are getting very noisy and danger- ous. ‘Why not have another little War with the next nursery?’ Ins mentor suggests. ‘Just one!* Little Master Paleface frowns, pouts, and blows out his chest. If we were acquainted with these backgrounds — 227 PALEFACE and I am imagining us m order to represent us as reflecting, possessed of such knowledge — the senti- mental blandishments of Mr. Anderson, and his Unelc Tom up-to-date, would enable us verv quickly to dispose of all traces of our emotion. We should not develop a great power of sympathy for the glee- ful alliance ol ‘the Kid' with ‘the Nigger.’ The age-war, or more properly the war between the master and pupil, or between father and son, so ably fomented m Paleface society as a part of the revolu- tionary programme, would not tin ill us so very much. We should know, for instance, that if the Nigger helped the insurrectionary ‘Kid’ against Ins family, it might conceivably be because the Nigger, although not a bad sort, perhaps, might all the same be rather glad to cause a little anxiety and discom- fort to the adult White, who lorded it over lnm rather brutally. All Bildads, bearing m mind what the circumstances are, must be potential insurgents, and must have some sympathy with revolt m any form. We should know' (if w e w ere acquainted with the backgrounds specified above) that the order of the White World was far from perfect, but that it was nevertheless a form of order that should not utterly be allow r ed to decay before w t c reached the Melting-pot; that discipline is the enemy of the ‘good tune/ certainly, whether it is discipline m a fannl\, army, school, or state: but that no good time, even, ever was secured for very long by a studied neglect of disgusting disciplines. All these elementary, universal, homely truths, from w r hich there is no escape for successful life, and which arc the first conditions of organization or ‘mind/ as op- 228 ‘THE KID * posed to chaos or ‘sensation,’ we are supposing that we possess as a matter of course. Then, cerlnmh , after a good diekensian cry o\ er the kind loyal Black Man, shielding and caring for the runaway ‘kid/ Mr. Anderson’s eloquent appeals to our hearts and senses would begin to gure place to something disagieeable and mathematical, almost like the meter of a taxi. There is, of course, some exaggeration in this analysis: but it is only by ovir-stressing the signi- ficance of such material that the true meaning of all such wilting can be laid ban tor the inattentive reader. The reader must lie induced somehow to contract the habit of muling between the lines. That is really the wav to lead such stulf, ll you must read it (and masses of people do), the way I have just bc< n reading it for \ ou. K\ t n if sometimes vou are mistaken m \oui enthusiastic detective aetmty, that is better than alwa\s accepting blindly, as pur- poseless ‘cnt< itamim nt,’ what so often is saturated with some political philosophy or other — even un known to its author and evtn (d a good philosophy) interpreted, it may be, upside down. What Mi. Anderson ivauls to kn ore why about is, however, not anything to do with White and Black questions, nor is it part of the ‘Fathers-and-sons,’ the Kid m.sMA Uud, i evolutionary situation. It i-> the ‘sex-war,’ that other fundaiiKiital sub - 1 war/ that provides the material for the mam theme of the story. And the homo-sexual seiisibildy is, I think, brought in to reinforce tins part of the business. When the runaway ‘kid’ gets home, ‘Mother jawed and cried, but Pop didn’t say much.’ Pop was perhaps a rather cowed type of Poor White, or 229 PALEFACE perhaps he had no desire to add the burdens of the Kid — Pop war to those of the sex-war of Man — Wife. 4 1 told everything we done except one thing. I did and saw that alone. That what I 5 m writing about.’ — It is about that he ‘wants to know why.’ What happened apparently *hat ‘the Kid’ (who was sixteen) fell iu love with a trainer called Jerry Tilford. But prior to lus infatuation for Mr. Tilford, lie evidently fell head over ears in love with the horse trained by Tilford — ‘Sunstreak.’ ‘There' isn’t anything as sweet as that horse. ... I was standing looking at that horse and aching. In some way, I can’t tell how, I knew just how Sunstreak felt inside . . . he w r as just a raging torrent inside. ... I could just in a w r ay see right inside him. He was going to do some awful running and I knew it ... I knew it and Jerry Tilford his trainer knew.’ So we arrive at his yearning emotions as regards the trainer. Anything that interests him ‘the Kid’ seems to translate immediately into the hot, ‘ach- ing ’ terms of sexual love He has a permanent lump m Ins throat, 'the Kid.’ ‘If my throat hurts and it’s hard for me to swallow,’ he tells us, why then the horse he has these sensation^ about i< a good horse. It is the same more or less about trainers. A good tiainer, or I suppose a kind Nigger, affects him in the same' way. It w'ould require the tearful art of a Charlie C haplin to give us a proper version of this ‘Kid’; only Charlie w r ould have to throw in a ‘Nancy 5 touch to get the emotional im- pact required. 230 ‘THE KID’ ‘I knew it and Jerry Tilford, liis trainer, knew. I looked up and then that man and I looked into each other’s eyes. Something happened to me. I guess I loved the man as much as I did the horse because he knew that T knew. ... I cried and Jerry Tilford had a shine in his eyes.’ The orgasm continues: but the point of ‘the Kid's’ story lies in the fact that the orgasm js trans- ferred from the horse to the trainer. * I watched the race calm. . . You expect the crisis of the orgasm to occur, of course, when Sunstrcak passes the win- ning post. But nothing of the sort happens. All is suddenly ‘calm.’ That is the authors little sur- prise. ‘A funny thing hud happened to nie. I was thinking about Jerry Tilford, the trainer ... all through the mcc I liked him that afternoon e\cn more than I ever liked my own father. I almost foigot the horses thinking that way about him. ... It was the first lime 1 ever felt for a man like that.’ So Jern Tilford is his first love. — The race-meet - mg ends. — But ‘the Kid s’ passion for Jerry Tilford does not die down. ‘After the race that night I cut out from Tom and Hanley and Henry. I wanted to be by my- self and I wanted to be near Jerry Tilford if I could work it. ... I wanted to be as near Jerry as I could. I felt close to him. ... I was just lone- some to see Jerry, like wanting to see vour ow T n father at night when you are a young kid.’ 231 PALEFACE ‘The Kid * wanders about, tracks Jerry to a farm- house. He drives up with some other men. The Kid w'atches him enter, ‘aching,’ of course. But then come the ‘fantods.’ § 24. The Fantods . ‘I crept up along a fence and looked through a window and saw. It’s what gives me the fan- tods. I can’t make it out.’ This is where the great Why ? comes in. For the farmhouse was a brothel, it seems. And Jerry, his idol, proceeds to defile himself with women, who arouse m ‘the Kid’ the ml eases t and most correct aversion. ‘The women in the house were all ugly, mean- looking women, not nice to look at or be near. . . . 1 saw everything plain. . . . The women had on loose dresses and sat around m chairs. The men came in and sat on the w omen’s laps.’ And then, of course, Jerry belm\es m a way that makes ‘the Kid’ bate him. ‘His eyes began to shine,’ and ‘then he went and kissed that woman and I crept away .’ While watching all this through the window his emotions are of a Negro demonstrativeness. ‘I began to hate that man. I wanted to scream and rush 111 the room and kill him. I never had such a feeling before*. I was so mad clean through that I cried.’ Everything ends in tears, sooner or later. Every- 232 THE FANTODS thing ‘ends m a whimper.’ He creeps away and he is so upset that ho never goes to a racecourse again. The paroxysms of the over-feminine ‘Kid 5 do, no doubt, represent an important element in the White American nature: the sort of thing that has made it easy to fling it?mto jazz, that caused the gigantic farce of the lying m state of Valentino, and the rest of the things that give the European his idea of the american hysteria. If there were nothing but that, the noble Red Man, with his legendary calm aloof- ness, his faultless self-discipline and self-reliance, so that a solitary Brave was as much to be feared as a troop, would indeed be as superior to the White as he is to the Jigging, laughing and crying, yapping and baaing, average Negro. § 25. 4 Uncas 5 and the Noble Rtd&hin . I will conclude this scrutiny of the material in which the political message of Mr. Sherwood Ander- son is imbedded w ith some quotations from A Ntojy- Tellers Story . ‘Uncas — t4 Le Ccif Agile” . . . has an idea. Drawing a line m the snow, Ik* stands some fifty feet from the largest of the trees m the grow and hurls the hatchet through the air. What a deter- mined fellow ! I am of the paleface race mysdf and shall always depend for my execution upon la longue carabine , but Uncas is of another breed.’ These passages are from the account of the child- hood of the Story-teller, and this first chapter of his autobiography is full of the dramatization of the 233 PALEFACE early pioneering life that lay just behind his brothers and himself. This sensitive incubation period is full of Indian-worship, and a long preoccupation with the 1 primitive ideal. ‘Uncas 5 is Ins brother. ‘There is something direct, brutal and fine in the nature of Uncas. It is not quite an accident that m our games he is always the Indian while I am the despised White, the Paleface. It is per- mitted me to heal my misfortune a little by being not a storekeeper or a fur-trader, but that man nearest the Indian's nature of all the Palefaces who ever lived on our continent, “La Longue Carabine”; but I cannot be an Indian and least of all an Indian of the tribe of the Delawares. I am noL persistent, patient and determined enough. As for Uncas, one may coax and wheedle him along any road, and I am always clinging to that slight sense of leadership that my additional fif- teen months of living gives me, bv coaxing and wheedling, but one may not drive Uncas. To at- tempt driving linn is but to arouse a stubbornness and obstinacy that is limitless. Having told a lie to mother or father, he will stick to the he to the death, while I — well, perhaps there is m me something of the dog-like, the squaw-man, the Paleface. . . / (d Slut y-ltlh)'* Story , p. 10). Here you get the contrast that is much older and more fundamental than the Negro question — for the American has always had more contempt than anything else for the ‘Nigger’ — or than the sort of problems raised by Mr. D. H. Lawrence in his Morn- ings in Mexico . It is the memory of the values that 234 ‘UNCAS* AND THE NOBLE REDSKIN were suddenly confronted when the first White Christian colonists found themselves face to face with the pagan Redskin . The White defeated the Redskin, and even rapidly exterminated linn. But it was with a bad conscience. He knew that lie had been able to do it only beeausc*he possessed his ‘longue carabine.’ The noble vigour, unbreakable resolution, high code of honour, of these physically splendid races, picked off, thinned out and finally destroyed by his silly little pop-gun, and m the last stages by his lire-water, left an ineffaceable impression upon the mind of the White settler, which can he best defined, perhaps, as a sense of having stolen a march upon Nature, or having sinned against Nature, as the puritan con- science would probablj tlnnk of it. § 26. Machines versus Men . These red ‘savages,’ the Whites always have felt, w T ere noble 1 sa\ ages 5 (and so they have always cele- brated them), and not an ignoble, slothful, shamb- ling, jazzing, laughing-nnd-crymg, sort of big black baby, w r »th silly, rolling eyes, and big characterless lips, as the average ‘Nigger 5 is apt too much to be. To mention the ‘Nigger’ in the same breath as the Redskin would be absurd. They were of different clay. And the proud and splendid races possessing these difficultly -acquired qualities, who inhabited the northern aniencan continent w T licn they armed, and w T ho contemptuously called them ‘ Palefaces,’ ‘squaw-men,’ and so forth — these races had been wiped out not by them, but by civilization— by euro- pean science and its deadly weapons. These 235 PALEFACE machines had killed those men. Was it right that these machines should kill those people — and such splendid people, too ? This was the first lesson of the White m the great issue that later on was to occupv such a central posi- tion m his life — namely, of Man vfi'sus the Machine. The Redskin provided the first illustration. In that first picture the Win te was on the side of the Machine. With his machinery he drove back and then de- stroyed the Redskin. Later, all human enemies apparently disposed of, the struggle began between the all-conquering Machine and himself It looked as though Ins fate might be the same as that of the Redskin. To-day that is the problem more than ever. But it is never stated very clearly, because all the organization of publicity is m the hands of the owners of the Machines. Here and there such writers as Anderson however gi\e expression to it. § 27 . Hen/y Fold and the ‘ Poor White ' I have given above a fair account, I belie\ e, of what must be at the bottom of the anglo-saxon mind of America, though of course that would not at all apply to the mind of a recent german 01 rus- sian immigrant. It is strange that llenry Ford, who is, I daresay, the greatest Ining Amirjcan, should stand for all that is most mechanical in the world and at the same lime should ha\e almost identically the point of view of Mr. Sherwood Ander- son as regards the modern city-life of the Machine Age, and attempt to revive, side by side with, and away from, his \ast commercial plants, the atmos- phere of the early colonist days m America. 230 HENRY FORD AND THE 4 POOR WHITE ’ Where Ford is discussing, in one of his pronounce- ments, the criticisms brought against him for ‘me- chanizing human beings’ m his factories, he says, with admirable candour, that lie himself could not lead the life of one of Ins herd of workmen. Bill he points out that t?ie humanitarian is wasting his sym- pathy who wrings his hands over the condition of these men; for that — Ford says — is the sort ot lile that brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number. Most men wish to be machines. They want to feed and sleep — and mechanical work is a sort of sleep — and be told what to do, nothing more. Food, just enough exercise for health, rest and sleep, a constant supply of new toys, and, above all, no responsibility — that is the idea. But Ford is trul\ humane and public -spirited, in the traditional ouropcan sense, and if others would agree to follow suil , Ik would cmpt\ his factories to- morrow, I expect, break up his plant, and return to the ‘simple life’ with groat satisfaction. That is whcie he differs from most of In'- follow -magnates, lie is a superman of the Machine Age, but he is still, paradoxically, a ‘creature of spirit.’ He is not him- self a machine. 237 PALEFACE CONCLUSION § 1. The While Machine and Us Complexes. I T was originally my intent ion, *as an excursus to this preliminary essay, to pro\ide a carefully sifted list of the great group of 'complexes* carried about by the average White Man to-daj r . (I use the word 4 complexes ’ as that will eonvey to the general reader w r hat is meant, and it also particu- larly recommends itself, since it is precisely Freud and his assistants, w r ho, along with the idiotic word, ha\e supplied the idiotic thing — have helped in short to build up the full Idiot, as lie is emerging today.) It would be necessary, of course, to overhaul this list e\ery six months, as new material arrives by every post. But the mam lines could now be defi- nitely established. I should lia\c grouped these complexes under their specific* headings. There would be, for in- stance, the ‘husband’ complex (virility-motif); age complex (A. young, B. old, variety); sex complex (shamamstic vanety, sentimental frothing capitula- tion, etc. — the basi-ard-american negntic hysteria of k I Want to Know Why ’) ; infantilism (the desire to remain in sheltered tutelage, refusal of responsi- bility), and so on. With each I should have pro- vided a complete definition, and a set of concrete illustrations, of the fool-proof sort. But as this would have great lv extended t he length of my essay, it w r as necessary t o abandon that part of the evidence. 238 THE WHITE MACHINE AND ITS COMPLEXES As the White spirit shrinks, oppressed under its burden of war, business insecurity, blood-tax, do- mestic interference, domestic disunion, constant threat of revolutionary cataclysm, anti-cataclysm, and so forth, its very position of world-mastery, racial advantage and prestige, is inclined to become a mockery and burden to it. Everywhere to-day the White European (both as a European and also among the great White colonics and nations) is pro- foundly uneasy, and looks apprehensively behind him at all moments, conscious of a watchful presence at his back, or somewhere concealed in his neigh- bourhood, which he does not understand. Dark Laughter of Ihc hidden watching negro servants is a typical concrete expression of this uneasiness: evi- denth , when mastcis become obsessed w ith their ser- vants, they are then only masters m name. But this lliieatcmng something to wdiosc presence I refer is, of course, m a different category of terror and menace from the fairly harmless concrete Negro. Mcamvlnle inside himself (then* he never looks, though it is, of course, there that he should direct the most objective glance that lie can muster), the ferment of the intellect ualist disease goes on, and ‘complex’ after ‘complex’ is introduced, attacks some mortal centre of life and vitality, and a further portion of the White civilized soul is dismtegiated: a further stagger, hop or shamble is given to the White machine. § 2. ‘ Inferiority ,’ and t withdrawal ‘ Back to Nature .’ So, in the books that we have been considering, where the White Man is confronted by the Black, 239 PALEFACE the Red or the Brown, he now feels inside himself a novel sensation of inferiority. He has, in short, an ‘inferiority complex’ where ever}’ non- White, or simply alien personality or consciousness, is con- cerned. Especially is it in Ins capacity of civilized (as opposed to pi imitivc , ‘savage,* ‘animal’) that he has been taught to feel mjeuor. The trick of this inferiority could all be laid bare by any inquiring person who took the trouble to ex- amine, not the purely curative doctrine of Dr. Freud, but his philosophical, literary, sociological teaching, and its psychological ramifications throughout our society. There are many factors beside Freud: but Psychoanalysis is m itself quite adequate. The trick of the inferiority complex that we have been approaching, via creative fiction, is to be sought m a certain belief that has been imposed gradually upon the White Consciousness, during forty or fifty ycais, namely, a belief (it reduces itself to that) that man cannot ‘progress’ beyond the savage or the animal: that when lie tues to (as the White European has done, as the Hellene did), he becomes m the mass ineffective and ridiculous: therefore, that the sooner lie turns about, and re- traces his steps until he is once more like the Huns of Attila, or any community whose mam business in life is to ‘snnte hip and thigh ’ sonic other rival com- munity — or like the plain unvarnished man-eating tiger, or the wild boar, the better. Tins direction of thought, and With the greatest definition this purpose is visible, has moulded all those schools of fiction, or fancy, specimens of which (from the pages of Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Anderson) 210 4 INFERIORITY ’ AND ‘BACK TO NATURE 4 I have given m evidence. The particular human- ism of Pound is cut from the same stuff (cf. The Goodly Fere of Pound, with the sentimental-militant interpretation of Christ). All through the range of his complexes the con- temporary White Man can be observed at the same occupation, consisting everywhere m a reversal and a return. For instance, as an adult lie looks back at the child , and he is taught to say m his heart that the child is a ‘better man/ so to speak, than he is. Therefore he seeks to become as infantile as possible, and to approximate, as far as may be, to the infan- tile condition. By the Bergson school of thought he has been taught to regard intuition (the ‘intuition of the Woman,’ for example, contrasted with ‘the mere logic of the Man ’) as superior to Intellect. So he looks back towards that feminine chaos, from which the masculine principles have differentia led themselves, as more perfect. As the Child is more perfect than, and the conditions of its life more desirable than those of the Man, so the mind of the Woman is more perfect than, and the lot of the Woman — m league with or immersed in Nature — more to be desired than the lot of Hie Man. So the contemporary man has grown to desire to be a woman, and has taken obvious steps to effect this transformation (cf. pages on shamnnistic cult, Art oj Being Ruled). Then Power or Wealth has been re- presented as not only evil m itself, but not at all to be desired (ef. the ‘higher type’ of collective man of communism, according to Rene Fulop-Miller). And so on through all the series of backward- cults, from primitivism or naturalism, to fairyhood. 2tl Q rALEFACE §3. The Revolutionary Rock-cbill and the Laws of Time. As people stand and watch the rock-drill at work in the street, so they watch the engine of political destruction ai work, asking themselves stupidly what it is all about. Why is all this going forward in our midst m this very strange and open manner? There is something here I don't understand ! It is as though the authorities had sent the ‘revolution- ary’ drill, under an armed escort, to break up the public thoroughfare. It ’s very odd ! — I suppose my brain is not able to grasp these new ideas ! whispers poor fuddled Mr. Everyman to himself, apprehen- sively. He perhaps looks round guiltily, to see if lus astonishment has been observed. If one of these puzzled, staring members of the great Public consulted Spongier, that celebrated philosopher would reply, ‘Well, accoidmg to the time-table of the best chronological philosophy (a time-table as absolute as that of solar eclipses — I have reduced it all to a very orderly and predictable scheme indeed), according to that lime-table White Civilization is now virtually at an end. The various White Governments, leahzmg this, have directed various groups of “social workers" (as juumc) to come and break up the White World with that up- to-date psychological equipment you perceive them handling with so much adroitness. Why they use that rather violent and noisv “cataclysmic” rock- drill is because, if they didn’t do that, it w r ould take a very long tune to break up the tirmly cemented White World (lots of money and energy was spent 242 THE REVOLUTIONARY ROCK-DRILL on cementing it, you see, and in making if solid and resistent), and then we should all be behind the Time-table! The various governments, as it is, are exceedingly concerned at the length of time it takes to break up any specilic bit of civilization. They had not icalizcd how tough their cmliza- tion was.’ ‘Hut why do the Western governments want to smash up their own property, papa?’ \ou can hear the puzzled Flam Man (making his little eyes and mouth three round O’s) liiquiie of the poitontous Profcssoi . ‘Because, niv little man,’ Ilcrr Spenglcr would reply severely, ‘because they know they’ie behind- hand. They would nevei do anything that might result in mv Time-table bung contradicted or dis- proved. They w ill not risk — ne\ er fear! — offending Timtl Not Tnne\ You understand v When you little Flam Men say ‘ Time is money,’ that is saeulege. Even/thing — not only money — is Time.’ The Man in the Street would be no wiser than he was before, but lie would be considerably impiessed and frightened. A \asl shadow’ across the sk\, labelled Zeitgeist* would dimlv emerge for him, the god of the rock-dnil, a sort oJ scientific god. When next he saw the engines of upheaval and chaos at work, he would take good care to ask no questions! He would hurry on. t lying to look as much as pos- sible like Brer Rabbit; or else like a little innocent Child, ‘mindless’ and irresponsible, slightly moron- esque — as small and a hundred times as harmless as a fly. ‘213 PALEFACE § 1. The ' Jump' from Noa-Noa 1o Class-War. Wiiat has ‘primitivism * in art (taking Gauguin as a model of primilivist thought) got to do with the orthodox revolutionary doctrine of the Mass man, you may ask. That “jump’ is ivat a very long or difficult one, but it may be that some readers are not sufficientlv trained, or have not sufficient political experience, to make it. So I will state very briefly how these things arc connected. All war is compelled to be anti-progressist m the first place; it has to deny not only the notion of ‘progress,’ but also of humanity itself, as a privileged classification or principle of action. Every Western government has now accepted all that the new con- ditions of gas and aerial warfare entail. No future belligerent will be able to make use of a propaganda campaign about ‘atrocities,’ as was the ease in the last war: in advance every form of ‘atrocity’ is taken for granted. That is an entirely new situa- tion in the civilized european world. It imposes a formidable change of attitude upon any civilized government taking up arms today. The first thing on the declaration of var that all the air-squadrons of those governments engaged would have to do would be to go and bomb and muidcr the sleeping citizens of the nation on whom w r ar had been de- clared. The method of murder and poison, only upon a vast scale, which formerly w r as recognized as the peculiar province of Renaissance Italy and actu- ally the monopoly of the Borgias. is imposed upon us by the development of our machinery of destruction. But the marxian doctrine of ‘ class-war ’ is after all 214 THE ‘JUMP’ FROM NOA-NOA TO CLASS-WAR war : and it is impossible for revolutionary method not to keep pace with its militarist opponent. So you get most communists committed to the same anti-liumane tram of thought as the militarist. And further it is essential lor people engaged in preparing for such events to instil into the Public a philosophy which must be ‘ruthless,’ materialist and mechani- cal. And so a philosophy must ensue that is a contradiction of eommonsense, and it will be quite unlike anv other popular philosophy that has ever existed. For here with our rapidIy-e\oIvmg ma- chines of destruction at our sides we are m a differ- ent position to any former men. The philosophy required will run generally as follows* The tiger is ‘ruthless’; the Borneo head- hunter used to hunt a man’s head as we go out with a butterfly net. those are the true models for you, Mr. Citizen! To the ‘Tiger burning bright* the political propagandist point s enthusiastically : about that apocalyptic beast there is no nonsense, he is ‘frankly an animal,’ without any sentimental squeamishness, he frankly enjoys the salts lie finds in the human blood he taps; as he leaps upon Ins human prey, and squashes the entrails out of it, he ‘thinks’ of nothing, he is a machine that acts . That is what poor little Mr. Citizen must do when the time comes. And the time is not far off, he is warned: and so with the class-war and the little communist . No room at all is left for either (1) the chivalry of earlier nationalist w ar, nor for (2) the sort of humani- tarian socialism of Fourier or Samt-Simon, or for that matter for the fabianism in which the very 215 PALEFACE genial and benevolent Mr. George Bernard Shaw was nourished. But people do not believe in the alleged motives for wars any more today, and they are uncertain as to the benefits of revolutions. Henceforth then all o those forms of organized violence must be gone into to some extent against human reason; they are henceforth motiveless, and hence mad. That is why the fever and delirium is essential, in those masses who are to participate in them. Organized mechanized violence must be made to assume the inscrutable face of a 'necessity — a necessity of Nature , not of man — man, indeed, must be carefully kept out of the picture. But these same machines, which impose this type of war upon us, and hence also t he philosophy that is required by it, in order to make it possible, also take us farther and farther aw r ay, in our everyday life, from ‘savagery,’ or primitive conditions. The petrol engine and rapidly evolving transport facili- ties of all sorts, along with wireless and the eniema, make nationalism more unreal and implausible every day. This is another desperate feature of the matter (from the point of view of the promoter of violence) that requires a desperate (philosophic) remedy. The ordered systematic, sensible atmo- sphere of our everyday life again renders men recal- citrant to programmes of primitive Molence. That is why a lolence today lias to introduce itself a la Borgia . A propagandist religion of violence and ‘action,’ that everywhere takes the form of a return to Nature cult, m one form or another, is born of these necessities. 246 BACKWARD STEPS AS FORWARD STEPS § 5. How all Backward Steps hax e to be represented as Forward Steps . All tins involves a backward step, then. From any standpoint at all that you enre to adopt, except that of a invstieal surrender of life altogether, such violence as is now involved m war must appear to the eye of reason as retrograde. And here is the kc\ to the form of a great deal of eontemporarv work m every field of activity. The backward step has to be represented as a forward step . ‘Progress/ it is true as a notion, must be violently attacked and discredited: but at the same time it would be impossible to persuade people to do any- thing without some sort of idea of ‘progress’ or betterment. So, with an ill grace, ‘progressist’ imagery and inducements have got to be used. As a sister paradox to this, an extreme primitivism has to be preached, vet all I he reality of what is truly primitive , chronologically, has to be removed from the pictures employed as baits and advertisements. There is a very hastv sketch of political primitiv- ism , as it could be called. It is not difficult to see how beautifully it agrees with the artistic primitiv- ism of Mr. D. H Lawrence — with aztee blood-sacri- lices, mystical and savage abandonments of the self, abstract sex-rage, etc , or Mr. Site rwood Anderson’s more muddleel and less up-to-date pnimtivist bag of tricks. And, in a general way, how useful art is, m a philosophy that must . as its lirst condition, be motiveless . As to the reason for my interest in these tolstoyan problems of War and Peace, it is not, of course, ‘247 PALEFACE humanitarian. You need go no further than the very practical and unsentimental fact, or facts, of the most vital interests of an artist being ruined by orgies of violence and ‘action,’ to understand my attitude, if you look for personal motive m it. It takes a long time without interruption to do any- thing worth doing in an art or science, and that (apart from the fact that it is a philosophy for brutes and the most complete ‘morons/ as they are called, only) the accursed philosophy we are discussing denies us You could not describe such opinions as ‘selfish,’ seeing that the interests represented are identical with everybody clse’s m this respect, except those of such as make money or acquire power by means of wars of all sorts. § 6. A Walking Definition of the ‘ Sentimental In my analysis of the primitivism of Messrs. Law- rence and Anderson, especially with regard to their attitude 1 to the Negro or Indian. I point out how in both cases they were careful to accuse all other people who had ever approached Blacks or Indians of being ‘sentimental towards,’ or else full of hatred for those coloured aliens . It seems plain to me that this was a step, merely, to protect themselves against an accusation that they realize they have deserved. It will be useful, however, to get some meaning into the tag ‘sentimental’ before we leave it. Any idea should be regarded as ' sentimental 9 that is not taken to its ultimate conclusion . I propose that as a working definition of ‘sentimentality.’ 218 DEFINITION OF THE 4 SENTIMENTAL ’ What is the ‘ultimate conclusion * of anything? you could object. But that evocation of the distant metaphysical limit has nothing to do with a working definition: we wish for a definition that will take us, not out of sight, but to the limits of our horizon only. • Why I regard the spirit of the works of Mr. Ander- son and of Mr. Lawrence as sentimental, is because it indulges m «i series of emotions that, if persevered in by the Public they are intended to influence, would cancel themselves. I regard Mr. Anderson as more sentimental than Mr. Lawrence, because I do not think he suspects what the real issues are at all; whereas I daresay Mr. Lawrence know r s to some extent, though just as he was m the first instance a little vague as to w here the ideas lie used came from, he piobably is not over clear as to whither they are bound, or w hat their atlihations are. All ernati\ ely, if both Mr. Anderson and Mr. Lawrence sec these conclusions with extreme clearness, then they are deliberately employing, at least, the machinery of sentimentality. But 1 think they both use it too naturally for it not to be native to them. § 7. Eveiy Age has been ‘ a Machine Age' The further investigation of those questions that have specifically to do with the machine, w T ith an adumbration of what our attitude should be w r ith regard to the machine, must be left to a later stage of this essay. In order to give some completeness to this first pul dished part 1 will, however, make a few r remarks before having the subject. 249 PALEFACE The hideous condition of our world is often attri- buted t o ‘ dark ’ agencies, willing its overthrow. But there have always been such devils incarnate — it goes without saying that there are such e\il agencies — ‘dark’ influences of every sort are certain at all moments to be at work. That alone would not ac- count for tin' unique' position of universal danger and disorganization in which we find ourselves all round the globe. It is obviously to its mechanical instrument, not to the human will itself, that we must look. Without Wluti Science and the terrible power of its engines, such evil people as always abound would be relatively harmless. How we might dispense with the Machine, or, rather, use it differently, can perhaps be suggested by a brief consideration of the mechanical, or geo- metric, as it appears m art. Many attempts lane beui made to associate art with the triumph of the Machine Age. The ques- tion, ‘A*e machines beautiful m themselves?’ has been asked for many years now. What people usu- ally neglect to notice is that all the most splendid plastic and pictorial art is in a \ery strict sense geo- metric. El cry age has been a Machine Ag(. At least you can say that as far as art is concerned, and as far as the machine is the application of geometric punciples. An alaskan totem-pole, a Solomon Island canoe, a Siamese or nulian temple, is a machine . inasmuch as it is m its concatenated parts, composed of very mechanically definite units, and is built up according t o a rigid geometric plan. The hunch of cylinders of a petrol engine has very much the same structural 250 EVERY AGE HAS BEEN A ‘MACHINE AGE’ appeal as a totem-pole or the column of a mayan divinity. Engravings of such machinery have something even of the aesthetic appeal of theJaitcr. So, m the field of art, there is nothing novel in machinery. All jmnntix e people have proved them- selves a sort of aesthetic engineers. So, m a sense, a great suspension bridge, or a modern factory build- ing — or a turbine engine — is only reintroducing into our life an element which the most ancient art supremely’ possessed, but which has been absent in european art, and which existed nowhere in curo- pcan life to any great extent, until the industrial age. Life itself, in all its foims, lias always possessed this, how r ever. The insect and plant worlds, much more than the animal world, ha\e always earned their structure outside, as it were, and thrust it upon the eye. The insect world could be truly said to be a Machine World, much more than our age, ih yet, is a Machine Age. The idea that plastic and graphic art is a soft, in- definite, fluffy or vague sort of thing, is more than a Victorian prejudice. It is almost a european pre- judice. Plastic or graphic ait is, in fact, nothing of the sort: it is essentially a geometric thing, a Hung of structure. But with european art the structure , the geometric ba^is of beauty, has always tended to be covered up, hidden away (and so lost very often), more than is the case wnth the great aesthetic sys- tems of the East. The hellenie naturalism, the result of the greek scientific bias, has, as I see it, resulted in Europe m an art which, except m the case of a few individuals of very great genius, has been so inferior to the art of China, for instance, that 251 PALEFACE it could almost be said that the European had never understood the secrets of the pure eye at all. It is for that reason that I have said elsewhere that I consider this centur\ has to its credit more art of the best kind than all the other centuries of euro- pean art put together, except the a’ge of the Renais- sance. This is, no doubt, partly due to the Jewish influence, partly to the fact that specimens of the art of the East and of the antiquity of the* so-called Ancient East, have become available to the Euro- pean. (The gothic naturalism, m its severer mo- ments, produced a very great art: but the general effect of the gothic buildings, according to the standard I am advancing, is one of a cloudy, not truly plastic, naturalism, that makes it not a thing of the eye, but of the 1 musical’ soul — m Spengler’s sense.) § 8. What is 'the West ’ 9 Tiikkk is a belief, or prejudice, that you cannot be a good plastic artist and at the same time ‘a good European.’ It would be an important step in the reform and rejuvenation of our beliefs if we could overcome such prejudices. The appreciation of the formal beauties of mexican pottery, for instance, does not in any way involve enthusiasm for mexican gods, though I daresay the Aztecs themselves would scarcely recognize Mr. Lawrence’s account of their beliefs. You could ‘flash up’ for Mr Sherwood Anderson the perspiring black back of a Negro with- out wishing necessarily to share Bildad’s lodging, marry Ins sister or daughter, or embrace his beliefs S52 THE INTELLECT 6 SOLIDIFIES ' or habits. You could use the colours and forms of a half-dozen magnificent beetles without becoming an insect ; you could use the shape of a grasshopper in an arabesque without taking to hopping, just as you could admire the shawl of a IIopi without wish- ing to be a IIopi,* } ou could make use of the white expanse of an icepack for vour picture without yearning to live the life of an Esquimau. These few r illustrations will, I hope, be of assistance m bringing out this part of mv argument, which is a matter of some importance for what we have been mainly dis- cussing. § 0. The Intellect * Solidifies * (The Jt^nnenh ad- vanced here in their relation to the Thonmt Position ) TiiKRh is a sinnlai confusion to the above which, since it has a good deal of bearing on what I every- where have to saw I will attempt to dispel m passing, as well as using it to confirm the present phase of m v argument Extreme concreteness and extreme definition is for me a neccssitv. Hence I find mvself naturally aligned today, to some extent, with the philosophers of the catholic revival. Against the mvsticism of the mathematician I find myself with Bishop Berke- ley (though, of course he is claimed by the enemies of the concrete, strangely enough) : I am on the side of commonscnse, as against abstraction, as w r as Berkeley, and as are today the thomist thinkers (though the militant neo-thomist would repudiate any association of their doctrine w r ith that of the 253 PALEFACE great Irish idealist): and my position, inasmuch as it causes me to oppose on all issues ‘the romantic/ comes under the heading ‘classical/ To show you how this must come about I will quote a passage from a book which I have just obtained, L'lntellectualismc dc Stunt Thomas , by Pere Pierre Itousselot, S.J. lie is enumerating the charges usually brought against the thonust ‘mtcl- lectualism/ ‘On reproche a Tint died ualisnic scolastiquc d’extenuerei d’abstiaire; on lui reproche aussi dc “sohdificr/ 1 Ce nouveau grief, qui pourrait sem- bler, au premier abord, s’accordcr mal avec le premier, n’en cst, au contraire, qu’unc expression plus adequate. Abstrairc , e’est mepriser le fluent et postuler la permanence; e’est done cnstalliser ce qui so repand, concent ror le diffus, glaccr ce qui coule; e’est solid) fier / Neglecting here the particular signihcance given to the tcim ‘abstraction ’ by Father Itousselot, it will be evident that what is laid to the charge of scholasticism, m this account, could also be levelled at what I si\ or rather I, precisely, would claim the possession of all these characteristics that aie here catalogued as crimes. To solid) Uj* to make con - cute , to give definition to — that is my profession: to ‘despise the fluid’ (mtpriser lc fluent) and ‘to pos- tulate permanence’ (postuler la permanence); to crystallize that which (otherwise) flows aw*a>, to concentrate the diffuse, to turn to ice that which is liquid and mercurial — that certainly describes my occupation, and the tendency of all that I think. 251 ‘THE WEST * AND ‘THE CLASSICAL' That is why I range myself, in some sense, with the modern scholastic teachers. This does not, however, at all mean that I share their historical prejudices, any more than it means that I share their dogmas. I do neither, in fact. ‘Classical’ is for me anything which is nobly delincd and exact, as opposed to that which is fluid — of the Elux — without outline, romantically ‘daik,’ vague', ‘mystenous,’ stormy, uncertain. The hcllenic age has no monopoly of those qualities geneialh cata- logued as ‘classical’; so, according to me, the term ‘classical’ is used in much too restricted, historical, a sense; m a word, too historically. § 10. The Xeccssity lot a AVzc Conception of ‘the West/ and of the Classical/ The opposition, as jl understood here, is not between the Roman Cult and Aristotle on the one hand, and the ‘modernist’ disorder of Nineteenth Century ‘ romant if,* 4 ve\ oiutionary,’ europcan thought, on the other. Rather it is a unnersal op position; mid the seed'* of the naturalist mistakes are ccihunlv to be iound precisely m Giecee: and I believe we should use the Classical Orient (using tins distinction in the sense ot Guenon) to rescue us at length from that far-reaching tradition. These are statements of principle only, and I am not able here to make them more than that. Rare as they are for the present, 1 hope they will have served to foreshadow' the conclusions to which the whole foregoing analyses of my essay have been in- tended to lead. ‘European’ does not mean for me 255 PALEFACE a fixed historical thing, for it is so little that, in any ease. If you tried to make of gache chivalry and italian science, german music and norsc practical enterprise, one thing, that would be a strange monster. Which is demonstrated by Mr. Massis m his Defense de l Occident, where li*s ‘West 5 is con- fined to the latin soil. This is an evasion only of the problem. It is just against that separatism as be- tween the different segments of the West that we have most to contend. We should have — should we not? — our local Melting-pot. It is a new West , as it were, that we have to en- visage: one that, vc may hope, has learnt some- thing from its recent gigantic reverses. For it is only bv a fresh effort that the Western World can save itself: it can only become ‘the West’ at all, in fact, m that wav, bv an act of further creation. There arc a great many common traditions and memories and a considerable consanguinity: that is the ‘material,’ at least, for one 4 West.’ As it is, not only such people as Spcnglcr, but also (but \uth better motives, and perhaps inevitably) the catholic thinkers and the best of the ‘patriots,’ insist on re- garding the problem historically, m terms of a rigid arrest. ‘The West “ is for almost all of ihose a fin- ished thing, either over whoj-c decay th'*v gloat, or whose corpse they trantically ‘defend.* It never seems to occur to them that the exceedingly novel conditions of life today demand an entirely new conception : in that respect they arc firmly on the side of those people who would thrust us back into the medieval chaos and barbarity; at whose hyp- notic ‘historical’ suggestion we would fight all the ‘256 LIVE AND LET LIVE old european wars over again, like a gigantic east of Movie supers, and so till the pockets of these political impresarios, § 11. IIoiv the Black and the White might live and let live . Since I have been discouraging, to the best ol* my ability, those tendencies (found on all hands) of White capitulation and sclf-entieism, in the pre- sence of the ‘rising tide of Colour/ and especially tendenc.es to invite the White Man to learn and to adopt the primitive communism (ri al or imaginary), nihilistic mysticism, and so on, of the primitive Ind- ian or the Black, it is necessary to return to what I have said m the ' Moral Situation,' and to insist once more upon the fact that it is not the Melting-pot i object to, but the depreciation and damage done to one of the ingredients. I should not welcome a race-war, or a holy wai, cither of an leelesia millions or any other type, as a sub^duti loi all the other obviously less real or fundamental class- w f ars that have been arranged foi us. That is not my idea. Nothing will certainly e\ er com mcc me that a White Man is not more deeply separated from a Negro (race-separation) than a Poor White is separated from a Rich White, or a White Fish-porter from a White Miner (cJass-scparatioii). But I have used a quotation from the Vision of Judgment , by r Lord Byron, earlier m t his essay to illustrate my attitude: ‘ His Darkness and his Brightness Exchanged a greeting of extreme politeness.’ I believe that we cannot, in fact, be polite enough to r 257 PALEFACE all those other kinds of men with whom we are called upon to pass our time upon the face of this globe. We should grow more and more polite : but, if pos- sible, see less and less of such other kinds of men between whom and ourselves there is no practical reason for physical merging, nor for spiritual merg- ing, or even very many reasons against both — for there are such people, too. But why war? If the White World had kept more Lo itself and interfered less with other people, it would have remained politi- cally intact, and no one would have molested it : the Negro would still be squatting outside a mud-hut on the banks of the Niger : the Delaware would still be chasing the buffalo. We could have been another China. Such aloofness today, as things have turned out, is an ideal merely, though to me it is not an ideal. I merely put the matter m that light because for the average unenlightened Paleface that would seem much better — he would like to be a powerful boss rather than a cosmopolitan wage-slave in the Meltmg-pot, .and his ideas do not soar above some regional dream. It is always from an exaggeration, however, on one side or tin other, that the actual comes into existence. Everything real that has ever happened has come out of a dream, or a Utopia. We are the Utopia oi the amoeba. Many of our lives would seem heaven to the apes. Are the assumptions at the basis of this discussion as conducted by me entirely false or merely alarm- ist? Very many other people, better qualified, m important ways, than I am, to judge, share my views. Let me quote one or two. •J58 LIVE AND LET LIVE 'Several years ago I wrote an essay on ‘‘The White Man and his Rivals/’ in which I pointed out the menace to the domination of the European, races from the awakening ambitions of Asia. Till about the beginning of the present century it was taken for granted by almost everybody that the permanent sujnemaej of the Whites was assured. . . . We had forgotten . . . how entnely that prepondei anee has hem due to superiority m weapons and industrial inventions . . . how for- midable the Brow'll and Yellow iaces arc by their intelligence, their \ast numbers, and their untir- ing industry. ‘Much has happened since then to confirm my forecast, and now we have an important and very disquieting book by Mr. Upton Close, an Ameri- can (The Revolt of Asia). . . . * Hi has fm mi d the eon viclion that the suicidal war of 191 4-1 91 8 ushered in “the end of the White Man’s world.” . . . Russia as an asiatie nation entirely alters the balance of power between the two continents. . . . Russia has not ceased to be “imperialist” and aggressive under Communism/ This is from an article* by Dean Inge (Evening Standard , May 11th, 1927). In the Criterion (Au- gust, 1927) Mr. T. S. Eliot, referring approvingly to a ‘meditation on the decay of European civilization by Paul Valery/ writes: ‘the Russian Revolution has made men conscious ol the position of Western Europe as (in Valery’s words) a small and isolated cape on the western side of the Asiatic Continent/ While I wa<* w ritmg the rough draft of this essay on 259 PALEFACE the Atlantic the following news item appeared in the Daily Mail, Atlantic Edition, August 15th, 1927 : — ‘SERIOUS BOLIVIAN REVOLT ‘Thousands oi Rebels Amok 4 La Pa4, Bolivia, Sunday . ‘Five thousand Indians, under Communist in- fluence, have destroyed the railway at Potosi and Sucre, and invaded the surrounding districts. They are murdering any who offer resistance. ‘The Bolivian Federal Army are fighting the savages, and heavy casualties are reported on both sides. ‘The revolt has assumed serious proportions and l he Federal Army cavalry captured several chiefs and executed them, together with 100 of their followers. — Central News' i ‘VVHITKS 11EINU Klljl/KD '(From Out Own Cot respondent) * Buenos Aires, Sunday ' Reports from La Paz, the Bolivian capital, de- clare that the Indian rising, under native and foreign Communist leaders, is most serious. Two hundred thousand well -aimed insurgents are now holding the railway line. ‘Whites arc being killed and house-, burned. They appeal to the Government, which admits the situation is grave.’ The sequel to tins was reported (September 8th) in the Veto York Herald. 260 LIVE AND LET LIVE ‘ BOLIVIAN CHARGES ‘Red Intervention 4 ( Special to the “ IloahV ') • ‘ La Paz, Bomyi Wednesday. 4 An alleged proof of Communistic actmtics m South America, directed and iinanccd by t lie Third International of Moscow, was presented in Parlia- ment today by the Bolivian Foreign Minister, who read letters signed by Bukharin and Zulkmd, prominent Russian leaders of international Com- munism. The exposure was followed by a vote of confidence m the Government. ‘The documents included instructions to “Com- rade Martinez, member of the Lat in-American section of the Communist International, '* to pro- ceed to Pans to obtain funds. After this he was to return to Bolivia, open a business house to con- ceal re\ olutionai \ work, and foment Communist revolt among the workers. ‘One letter was addressed to “Comrade Bas- tion, Pans.” It introduced Martinez and in- structed Dastion to give 1,000,000 francs to the Bolivian agitator out of the propaganda fund.’ I have quoted this to show how the regrettable imperialist and also humanitarian zeal of the Soviet probably is responsible for trouble, often, where Whites and the Coloured peoples are found together, as in South America or South Africa. The ‘open conspiracy,’ as Mr. II. G. Wells de- scribes it m Clissold, rumbles and drags itself for- 261 PALEFACE ward, spitting fire and brimstone, only very imper- fectly subterranean : it is a pity that we should have to admit that the Communist is responsible for the*e Coloured aggressions, and that it should after all be a Paleface (a russian agitator) who requires our White attention. In any ease we know that the Indian, like the Negio, politically apathetic and would do little himself. But no tears are necessary to deal with l Ins: only a strong movement of in- structed opinion The Indian, like the Chinese, is friendly and pacific. Even Ins black laughter is im- ported. The White teaches him that too. Really our White moral zeal is regrettable! for its immedi- ate result can only be, when exercised so clumsily, to provide our bosses with labour cheaper than ours, rather like Hie feminist revolution. It seems to be playing into the White bosses’ hands. § 12. The pat l Race has always played in Class . 1 I will quote here, without further comment, a passage from l he Ait of Being Ruled. It will, 1 think, be of assistance where those questions of race that we ha\ e been discussing are concerned. Especi- ally it will throw into relief the great pari that ract must play m class. fc Il may be well to go for n moment into flit* relation between class and race m the formation of the former. The classes that have been parasitic on other classes have always m the past been uiees. The class-privilege lias been a raee-privi- lege. Every white man has until recently been in full possession of a race-privilege where other races* of other colours were concerned, which con- 262 THE PART RACE HAS PLAYED IN CLASS stituted the white man as a class. The privilege was never developed to the extent that the ach- aian race-privilege of the atheman citizen, for example, was. But in a general wav it formed part of the consciousness ol the white man. Cleanliness wjis next to godliness, and whiteness was the indispensable condition of cleanliness. So to be a chosen people was to be a white people. ‘This class element in race expressed itself in the application of the term “lady,” for instance, to the most modest citizens of the anglo-saxon race. The lady m char-lady is a rice court esv- t itle. It is a class-title that it was possible for hei to exact on the score of race. This rudiment arv fact \ cry few poor whites lia\ e understood. They have been inclined to take these small but pre- cious advantages for granted, as indicative of a 7 cal superiority, not one resulting, as in fact it did, *from the sum ss ol the organized society to which they belonged. They have confused class with race — somewhat to their undoing as far as the immediate present is concerned. ‘Today race* and colour are as distinctive feat- ures as ever and it is unlikely in the future that race will cease 10 play its part in the formation of class/ Since writing this I have visited America and have somewhat modified my views in const quencc. § 13 . Black Laughter in Russia. Ik these last tw o sub-scctions of my Conclusion I will return to the subject that occupied fcuch a con- 203 PALEFACE siderable space in my criticism of Anderson and Lawrence. The clumsy adulteries of the dull Whites haunted by the black laughter of their Negro servants was the contribution of Anderson. Much more thorough and fundamental, Mr. D. H. Lawrence showed us all creatures whatever, a position of servitude or defeat, ‘taking it out’ of their oppres- sors, successors, or masters, by malevolent laughter and mockery of some sort. Thus the parrots ‘take it out of’ the little dog, Corasmm, or out of his masters (Rosahno or Mr. Lawrence), with their per- petual mutations. The ‘high-pitched negro laugh- ter,’ and the shrill voices of the parrots, come out of the same situation. All these are examples of revenge, in the form of mirth, directed against creatures who are evidently ‘bourgeois’ and recognized as Top-dogs. But Mr. Fulop-Miller has his story of Black Laughter of another sort. The Black Laugher no sooner has overthrown the overlord or master and stepped into his shoes, than up goes the Black Laughter against him. He is now the ‘ boss.’ That is, at all events, the story. Here it is. ‘For the new ruler of Russia, the Mass man. who came to bring freedom to the earth, id a very short time learned how to use the resources and tncks of tyranny bitter than the cruellest tsars. . . . No one ventured on any protest, any resist- ance, however slight : there was not a single open word of censure. . . . ‘But all at once it became evident that the subtly constricted apparatus of “mechanized obedience ” w’as not entirely reliable. . . . Some- 264 BLACK LAUGHTER IN RUSSIA thing disconcerting happened, due to natural forces without any intervention on the part of the subjects: that unplea sail! thing the '‘soul” which in spite of all mechanization had never been com- pletely eradicated, and was sleeping a sleep that looked like deaih,suddenl\ woke up in a smile that lurked on the lips of someone somewhere With this first smile at the failure of the loudly trump- eted experiments of Bolshevism began the real, the dangerous, counter-resolution, for it worked m secret and gradually attained a sinister penver. At firsi one person smiled, then others m increas- ing numbers. Soon the snulcrs united in a mys- tical organization and then mirth at last expanded into uncontrollable elemental laughter. Tins first revolt against Bolshevik oppression was the re- bellion of’ the despairing ; evermore frequently the hidden wrath became irony, ever louder swelled a to uncanny mirth, which threatened to shake the very foundations of the whole structure of Stale authority . . . .m the provinces, among the peasants, laughter went m a triumphal march through the village streets, captured the market-places, and began topress steadily forward towards the official headquarters. . . . ‘. . the dreaded masters of the Red Kremlin themselves trembled at this rising of laughers and jokers. In order to prevent an elemental out- burst of all-dissolving universal mirth and to de- prive this grave danger of all significance, the au- thorities hit on the clever idea of having recourse to an old institution, which has always been m- 265 PALEFACE separably bound up with despotism, the office of the court fool. By this means the powers effect- ively took the initiative m this mockery of un- popular institutions and guided it into the right path. . . . *. . . the old court fool was transformed into a circus clown and from the ring amused the people with his malicious jokes. "... “Bim” and “Bom” were the names of the two “merry councillors” of the new tsar, the Mass man; they alone among the hundred mil- lions of Russians were granted the right to express their opinions freely; they might mock, criticize, and deride the rulers at a time when the most rigorous persecution and terrorism prevailed throughout the whole country. Bun and Bom had received a special permit from the Soviets to express openly everything which was current among the people m a secret and threatening A\*ay, and thus to provide an outlet for latent rancour. Every evening, the thousand-headed Mass man, fawned upon by the whole eourt, sat m the circus and listened eagerly to the slanderous speeches of the two clowns Bim and Bom. In the midst of grotesque aerobatics and buffooneries, amid jokes and play, these two were allowed to utter bitter truths to which otherwise the ear of the ruler was angrily shut. ‘The circus in which Bim and Bom performed was crowded night after night to the farthest limits: people came from far and wide to hear Bim and Bom, who soon became star clowns. Them jokes were the daily talk of Moscow. One 266 BLACK LAUGHTER IN RUSSIA person told them to another, until finally l he whole town knew the latest insults winch these two fools had permitted themselves to make. ‘In the dark penod of militant communism, people were particularly under the sp< 11 of 1 he two clowns; at that lime, the loose jokes to which Bun and Bom Heated them with untiring energy were* the one respite from the continuous pressure oi force and tyranny, the only possibility of hearing open criticism and tnoekeiv of the ruler, the Mass man. People abandoned I hemseh es \ olupt u- ously to these precious moments of mlelli dual freedom. ( In spite of then impudent criticisms. Bun and Bom won tu vert heless one ot the duel supports of the Bolshevik regime: the universal discontent would have burst all bounds if it had not been dissolved in harmless mirth bv tin two clowns. But, however biting might be the satire of Bim and Bom, the Government could rely on their nevci overstepping the limits of the permissible*, for Bun and Bom were completely trustworthy members of the Communist Parly, and at the bottom of their hearts loyal servants of their masters. They understood how to draw tin* fangs of the seemingly most malicious jest before they let it loose in tin* ring Their attacks were never directed against the whole, bni only against details, are! thus they contrived to divert atten- tion from essentials. Besides, every one of their jokes contained a hidden warning to the laughter lovers: “Take care. Look out, we know you ! We are aw r are* of what > ou are thinking ancWechng * ” ’ 267 PALEFACE I do not suggest that there is any resemblance between the Black Laughter of Mr. Anderson’s negro servants and the official laughter of the Soviet clowns. The poor little provincial Whites of the american story have not the pow r er of life and death over their negro servants. They do not go down into the kitchen beforehand and arrange what the Black clown shall laugh at and what lie shall spare. The poor little White is at the mercy of lus dark ‘inferior,’ his traditional sense of ‘superiority’ dwindling every da\ . but of course, since he is not in reality superior, he should not have a Black ser- vant, then he wouldn't be laughed at. The Soviet clowns were apparently rather like members of Mr. Henry Ford’s propaganda depart- ment, which is supposed to have invented all the terms, such as ‘Tin Lizzy/ Flying Bedstead/ and so on, that are thrown at the Ford ear. Such an official, carefully regulated safety-valve is the great- est advertisement for the thing ‘attacked.’ It is like the jokes about the Scotchman’s meanness, which (I am glad to say) endear the Scot to all Britons. The kind of black la ugh In 1 have been considering all along is of quite a different character from that. It, too, of course, describes itself as mnucuuiis. The White is flatteringly assured that he is such a very secure Big While Chief that he can afford to become the laughing-stock of the rest of the world. But in practice that flattering picture is proved to be un- true. The account of the Black Laughter m Russia contains some apt instruction for us, if w r e can bring ourselves to be attentive to it. 268 WHITE LAUGHTER § 14. White Laughter . There is nothing today lor us to laugh about, it is true. Bernard Shaw and Company laughed all the tune. A merry twinkle was ne\er out of their eye. llappy sunny White children of long ago! But their laughter was the opposite of what ours should be. They laughed ever m) genially over things that, unfortunately, we can no longu ajjord to laugh at: today w ( are all, actually or potentially. Poor Whites. The prosperity even of America is a very precarious tiling as most Ameiicans today realize. Few people, as yet, even, understand that we can no longer alford to laugh in that sense. Nine people out ol ten live in the past: they are aware that ‘things have changed,’ but they do not realize very clearly in what speeilic way . They are ereat arcs of habit : they go on laughing as formeily, at the same things, as though the same things were there, and as though tin* Euiopean were in the same place. This really tragic sloth, and unwillingness to admit any- thing unpleasant, of the Many, is our main difficulty m proposing a change of orientation for our satire, or indeed m proposing a realistic eliort of any sort* The Present can only be icvcaled to people when U has become Yesterday . Another way of putting this is that people are historically -minded, and this, again and again, must be stressed. It is by taking ad- vantage of this human peculiarity that the politician invariably operates, and brings otf his most tragic coups. The bovarysme of man is as nothing com- pared to this trait (unless you take it aif a depart- 269 PALEFACE mcnf of bovarysmc) — namely, that Man is an animal that believes he is living m a different time to what m fact he is. So it is that a firm and concrete, totally unromantic, realization of the mam features of the Present, gives the man possessing it enormous advantages over others. It is, as it were, the hypo- thetic ground of the lever of Archimedes, when he said of his le\er, ‘Give me somewhere to rest it, and I will move the world.’ Bernard Shaw and Ins light-hearted fahian ehums laughed at their own kind. In those remote days their kind was all-powerful. That kind is vs. The White is still, in appearance, where he was: but he is not powerful: he has no triumphant world, all of his own kind, behind him. We have all, less than a decade ago, issued from a uar with each other — in which we all lost. We are surrounded by prophets announcing our doom. Our commerce, naturally, has languished and shrunk. It is a very different scene, m short, from that of merry, play-boy social- ism, mischievously disporting itself m the midst of that power and plenty of the Victorian Age. But even that laughter, in its time, was foolish and ill-advised, as, earlier in the Nineteenth Century, were the romantic re\olutionary tirades of Shelley and Byron. The Emuuiit Victorian*, and their in- stitutions, could not, m their day, afford to be laughed at as they permit ted everybody to do. The proof of the w eakness of t he racial policy of the White Overlord (simply taking him as an overlord and as- suming that it was his policy to remain that m some form or other, his lutheran conscience permitting) is to be react in the light of his present position. 270 WHITE LAUGHTER Today wo should not give up our laughter : for the White Man knows how to laugh, and the Anglo- Saxon has a kind of genius for it. But we should develop another form of laughter. We should make a more practieal use of I his great force, and not treat it as an lriesporisiblc, mischievous luxurv. Other peoples, their habits, their faces, their institutions, are just as ridiculous as ours. It is a little over- Christian to he this perpetual, ‘dignified ’ butt ! But it is no use at all for our laughter to he of that easy, ‘kindlj * schoolboy variety, that merely endears the people laughed at to the lookers-on. WV are not laughed at in that manner. There is nothing of the advertisement-value of that kind of laughter m the Black Laughter or Red Laughter directed at us. So let ns get a point into our new laughter, if we are going to have it at all. Do not let us fear to hurt people’s feelings by our laughter, since v f c may depend on it they will not spare ours. Nothing can help us so much as to develop tlm type of laughtei. Let the usual Black Laughter, or Red Laughter , directed at us, go on : but let it become a thing of the past for us to remain as its annahle, accommodating, and self-abasing butts. We can even dispense with the musical arpeggios of laughter itself: let us rather meet with the slight- est smile all those things that so far we have received with delirious rapture — first, at all events, until we are sure of them. All this frantically advertised welter of ideas that pour over us from all sides, from nowhere, let us above all, at last meet that as it should be met. Do not let us spring up and pro- strate ourselves every half-minute, as tlie latest 271 PALEFACE ambassador arrives with News from Nowhere, with an auctioneer’s clatter. Let us remain seated, the feminine privilege : let us smile sceptically, also the feminine privilege : let us insist upon every feminine privilege : let us be faultlessly polite, or rather over- polite, crudely polite : let us show tln^ political tout, dressed up as a wise man from the East, that we have expected him, that we should only have been surprised if he had not turned up : that we hope lie soon will go. That is the only way to treat the Thousand and One Magi and Chaldeans who suc- cessively rattle our knocker. 272 A FINAL PROPOSAL A MODEL ‘ MELTING-POT ’ T HERE are, m the specifically moral nature of the situation in which we find ourselves, fac- tors that I do not propose, to investigate. There is the contradictory spectacle, which we can all observe, of our institutions, as they dehumanize themselves, clothing themselves more and more, and with a hideous pomposity, with the stuff of morals — that stuff of which the pagan world was healthily ignorant, in ils physical expansiveness and instinct for a concrete truth, and which, for the greatest peoples of the East, has never existed except as a purely political systematization of something irre- trievably inferior, a sentimental annexe of a meta- physical truth. It is natural that ‘the Congo’ should ‘flood the Acropolis’ (though I am not sure that I did not misunderstand the Princess) when we see the attitudes of Renaissance culture, as illus- trated by the great french stylists, being subtly combined with the militant emotional gloom of the Salvation Army : v\ lien t he Sa 1 vation Army marches weeping, in jazz-step, into the study of Montesquieu, then the crocodiles are on their way to Ilellas. What I shall especially neglect is to analyse the artificial character of this puritanic gloom, settling m a dense political f moke-screen about us, gushed from both official and unofficial reservoirs. I shall confine myself to remarking that the person who meets all these sham glooms with an anguished De 273 s PALEFACE Proiundis 9 instead of a laugh (however unpleasant), is scarcely wise, though he may be good. To see a vineyard in the sun surrounded by armed federal officers of the law. who prevent anybody from taking the grapes and making them into wmc, is absurd, more than anything else. Foodstuffs rotting upon the quays while people arc 1 starving, is a fact that should be met, if at all, not by stylistic theologic melancholy, that seems obvious. Or again, the abstruse principles of the manufacture of paper- money, like the arbitrary non-manufacture of a healthy and pleasant wmc, and all that results from one as from the other — of gloom and a sense of the difficulty of everything — this is not the material for profound heart-searching groans, although that is the correct unofficial response, it is true. But a reader of this book will be left with those sums or equations on lus hands, to work out or not, as he may feed inclined. I have made it clear, T think, how the ethical , introduced into the physical pro- blem of the Melting-pot, produces a gloomy and passionate infusion : that is all I set out to do. With a definite proposal, one that has been made often before by many people, 1 will bring this essay to a dose. In America the expression Mdtmg-pot has been coined to describe the assimilation of european nationalities in the United States, and now of the negro population, ten million strong, which has begun m earnest. In Europe we have no such ex- pression, for the excellent reason that there is no assimilation in progress. If the United States pos- sessed fixed areas m which Danes, Spaniards, Ger- 274 A MODEL ‘MELTING-POT’ mans, Negroes, Irish and so forth were segregated, as we are, each settled m certain slates, with fortified frontiers, taught only their mother-tongue and un- able to converse with tin inhabitants of the next state, then there would lie no Melting-pot there either. America without its Melting-pot would simply be another Europe, plus a Black Belt and a few Chinatowns. There is a radical contradiction between the curo- pean and ameriean way of regarding this problem. Perhaps because it is so much taken lor granted, 1 his difference passes for the most part unnoticed by us. Whereas the rulers of America are committed to fusion (liowt ver dissimilar the racial stocks) m one form or another, in Europe the question does not even arise. Since the French live upon one side of the Rhine and Lhe Germans upon the other, or the English and the French upon opposite sides of the English Channel, there is no ‘problem’ as to their mixing: indeed the great majority of Germans or Frenchmen or Englishmen never set a member of the neighbour-nation except during such times as their respective governments decide appropriate for a mass-mei ting, as it were, and they are despatched to kill one another with bomb and bayonet. Even then it is only the infantry w'lio see members of the ‘enemy’ nation at all distinctly: and it is possible for an infantryman to pass many months in the Line without catching sight of more than a few of his european neighbours, and these mostly dead speci- mens, or even nothing more than their facetious skeletons. Of these two attitudes — the melting andAhc non- 275 PALEFACE melting — the American appears to me by far the better : I am heart and soul upon the side of the Melt- ing-pot, not upon that of the Barbed Wire. That is why 1 have called this book ‘The Ethics of the Melt- ing-pot,’ and not ‘The Ethics of the Barbed Wire.’ But what a terribly sad thing it us to reflect that literally millions of Basques, Finns, Scotsmen, Danes, Normans, Prussians, Swiss, should be kept rigidly apart while in Europe, bv the intensive per- petuation of purely historical frontiers (which the Versailles Treaty has made even more numerous and complicated than before), whereas if they emigrate to America they are liable suddenly to be hectored for an opposite reason — namely because they show some slight compunction in coupling with a jet- black Kaffir. Personally I consider that they are quite wrong in looking down upon the transplanted Kaffir: but it is far more stupid of them (if, say, a Swede) to look dow n upon a lovely Basque, or (if a Bavarian) to look down upon an industrious Gascon- esse. Yet have they not always been taught to do that, at least since the rise of the national idea m Europe or since the time of the great religious schisms? My own view is that the Melting-pot should be set up in Europe, upon tin spot. Instead of posters on our walls which say ‘ Join the Royal Air Force and See the World,’ there should be posters (and offices in every district to deal with applicants) saying, ‘ Marry a Swiss and See the World,’ or, more jocularly, ‘Get spliced to a Finn, and Get About.’ What can there be against it, except that it would be impossible to have wars any more in Europe ? If 276 A MODEL 4 MELTING-POT 1 it is objected that there is no unifying principle in Europe to compare with americanization , it is neces- sary to recall that only five centuries ago the whole of Europe possessed one soul m a more fundamental way than America can he said to at this moment, and the actual appearance of its towns must lia\e been at least as uniform as today (and that is very uniform), though m a more agreeable fashion. As to the individuals of the various races, there is no obstacle there. In the valleys of the Pyrenees, for instance, you meet with a great many people physic- ally as like as two eggs to the inhabitant of Devon- shire, Derby, Limerick, or Caithness : a swiss peasant woman is »n character and physical appearance often so identical with a Swedish, cnglish, german, or fiench girl, that they might be twin sisters. Tins everyone must have remarked who has ever travelled to those countries. It has always been fratricidal that these people should be taught to disembowel, blind and poison each other on the score of their quite imaginary "deferences* of blood or mind, but t oday there is less exeusi for it than ever before . So why not a Melti ng-pot '* — instead of more and more intensive discouragement of such a fusion. Europe is not so very large: why should it not have one speech like China and acquire one government ? But feeling about Europe in that manner, and all too familiar with that situation, the spectacle of the rather feverish opposite to that attitude, wherever these same Europeans leave their countries and live in the proximity of people so different from themselves as the Negroes or the Chinese, cannot* but occur to one as a very sudden and from some points*of view 277 PALEFACE unsatisfactory reversal. On the one hand you have too absolute a segregation, on the other too absolute a freedom to mix. America is the child of Europe entirely, except for the Negroes and m Mexico and south of Panama the Indians, and the two problems should not be dissociated. What happens to Europe is of great importance to America, and vice versa — what happens to America, that othcr-Europe, must be of great moment to us. This essay is much more to propose that we set up a Melting-pot in Europe — which would be as it were a Model Melting-pot, not at the boiling-pomt but cooking at a steady rati* day in day out — than to venture any criticism of the principle underlying the amcncan or afnean Melting-pot or, alternatively. Colour Line. Indeed a quite irrational attitude is often adopted by the American to miscegenation. Another factor of ‘inferiority’ feeling has its roots m a profound misunderstanding of the true sifua- tion. The American is apt to accept the false euro- pean attitude towards ‘race,’ as it is called. It is a common experience m talking to Americans to hear some magnificent human specimen (who is obviously the issue of say a lhst-ciass Swede and a magni- ficent Swissess, with a little Irish and a touch of Basque) refer tu himself a ‘m^ngicl.’ It is in- conceivable, yet indeed that is how such a ‘mixed’ product is apt to look upon this superb marriage of Scandinavian, Goth and Celt — all stocks as closely related in blood — if it is ‘ blood Jiat is the trouble — as the brahmanic caste of India. Merely physically this epithet is given the he : for all you have to do is to look at this sterling type of ‘ mixed ’ American to 278 A MODEL ‘ MELTING-POT ’ admire the purity Qf line and fine adjustment achieved by the conjunction of these sister stocks. Far from being a ‘mongrel/ of course, he is a sort of super- Europcan: the best of several closely allied stock* have met m him, in exactly the same way as was constantly happening in the noble curopean families — where the issue of a marriage between nobles, whether from England and Italy or Spain and Russia, did not constitute a ‘half-breed/ but rather a more exalted feudal product, so subtly ‘mixed/ Some racial mixtures are not so fortunate as others, however, it is necessary to allow: the Indian and spamsh mixtures, in say Peru or Mexico, have not proved really very good. The Barber of Seville that peeps through the Inca removes him from Mozart, and yet does not make a good Indian of him, though there arc exceptions. But practically all europcan intermarriage presents no problem at all, and is indeed politically much to be desired, as certain to abolish the fiction of our frontiers and the fiction of the ‘necessity* of war. The asiatic ele- ments in Southern Spain, Italy and Russia aside, the European is as much of one blood as are the in- habitants of the British Isles, and in many instances more so — for instance the Bavarian and the lowland Scotch are man for man as nearly one race (to look at them, as well as m their character) as you could find anywhere at all. If they spoke a common Ido the Austrian with his Spiclhahnfeder and Eichcnlaub stuck m his Steierhnt would melt into the Crofter without noticing he had left his native village. But (until they reach America, and all have to speak english, or, in Latin -America, spamsh) the 279 PALEFACE great difficulty is language. In discussing such a question as this we always get back to the problem of Babel. It is m the* interest of the Melting-pot that every European should wish to learn Volapuc as I do, or to ha\e some language picked for him that it shall be agreed all shall speak and that he can easily learn and speak— woo his possibly distant bride m, and talk over all those subjects of common interest with lus brother at the other extremity of Europe, which since the decay of latin as a universal tongue no one has been able to do. I cannot ima- gine any person in Europe who, when the matter was presented to him in that light, would not plump for some Volapuc: but if there is anvwliere a person who would not, lunv slender Ins reasons must be compared to those a Dutchman say in Africa could allege for refusing to mate his daughter with a Cape- Black or a settler from the Dekkan ! And yet even the Dutchman would not be right, would he? — how' much more wrong then would not the man m Europe be who stood out, for in fifty per cent, of the cases he would be vetoing a closer match than could be made even in the honic-\ llluge at any given time — for I would guarantee to match a young man in a Devon village better m the Canton of Berne than would be possible probably, at any given moment, m lus own cnglish district . On the other hand if the Dutchman in Africa had ten daughters and seized the other end of the stick (after a reading of Plomer) so fanatically as to pester them all to choose upou the spot a Black bridegroom, that would be a sentimental extreme that it would be perhaps allowable to deplore: if he should em- 280 A TVIODEL ‘MELTING-POT’ hellish his persuasiveness with highly-coloured abuse of all owners of a pale skin, then he would definitely become irritating and perhaps even absurd, and if his ten girls took him and flogged him no one could find it m his heart to bliimc them, though if called to a Grand Jury it would be necessary to send the whole of the ten girls to jail of course, for they should not, strictly speaking, flog their father, either, how- ever misguided, as potentially Ins whiteness would be the symbol of their consanguinity and the ulti- mate reason for their objecting to the break-up of their pigment. Tins last illustration touches upon a complexity which (m rare instances, so far) quali- fies the absolute simplicity of tins question — the problem of the gaga Paleface Papa who reads Plomer or Du Bois. But — as I have prophesied —he w r ill bo dealt with by Ins children or grandchildren, when he disinherits them and lea\es all Ins money to the fctaiale Kaffir cook. What m these concluding page'* it has been mv intention to stress is that the (icry ethics of the Melt- ing-pot are eonjunctly european and protestant m origin more than anything else (though the gallic in- vention of the ‘great nation’ plays its part as well). The fanatical ill-temper and the black intolerance that accompany the discussion and propaganda for ‘race-fusion’ can be traced to those* sources, when they cannot be directly traced to the equally intem- perate ethical zeal of the ‘radicahst’ righteousness. At this time the Anglo-Saxon is no longer para- mount in North America: but his language is still the general speech, and american civilization is m its main principles anglo-saxon. The alternation of 281 PALEFACE emotional indulgence in liberalist programmes (and anglo-saxon ‘radicalism 9 is newer and more heated liberalism, merely) and unintelligent race-prejudice, with which distressing see-saw we are so familiar, is anglo-saxon, is it not ? Neither the Spanish, Portu- guese nor French as colonists have handled their respective Melting-pot m that manner. The latin tradition, more tolerant, catholic and mature, has not sentimentalized about the deeply-pigmented skin, nor fixed upon it, on the other hand, a stigma. You would not be so likely to get adepts of jazz in a Black Belt m a latin land, nor the fer- ocity of lynching neighboured by anti- White tracts, written by Whites, nor a universal thunder of psalms from Black and White throats mixed, and evangelist extremes of intolerance and hysterical expansion — it would be more likely you would find a firmer attitude, more satisfactory to both sides, far less superstitious, m the Latin. Yet, although it is necessary to fix, for any such survey, the anglo-saxon responsibilities, they are not all anglo-saxon, and the nationalism of Europe as a whole is to blame, I think, both for the excesses of the ‘Nordic Blondes 9 or what Mencken calls tht ‘Ofays,’ where they occur, and for the excesses of their satirists and del rat tors. Must wc not agree that it is the artificial principle of europcan separa- tism (of all the Irelands, Ulsters, Catalomas, Pol- ands, Czecho-Slovakias and the rest) transplanted to America or Africa, that, there, is apt to issue in a quite new form m a hotbed of separatist, or of fusion- ist, passion — which in the near future may wreck those societies as it is wrecking ours? 282 A’ MODEL ‘ MELTING-POT ! If (to show my enthusiasm for fusion) I may allow myself a strikingly mixed metaphor, u is at the fountain-head that we should establish our Melting- pot — an example to all other Melting-pots. And it is here in Europe that we should start a movement at once for the miscegenation of Europeans — with each oiheu that is- -Asia and Africa could be con- sidered later, no doubt, for incorporation in our Model Melting-pot. I have dealt with this subject before, but in another connection, in The Lion and the Fox : I would refer the reader to pages 205-320 of that essay. There the problem of the Melting-pot as it applies — or rather as it docs not appty — to England, was discusst d at length, particularly as if concerns the ‘Saxon’ and the ‘Celt/ The ‘Celt,’ I there demonstrated, was a complete myth: and I showed how, with a great deal of wit, Matthew Arnold, who was probably aware of the shadowy nature of his ‘Celt/ staged an ironical drama for the John Bulls and Fenian Paddies of his time. I w ill quote a few lines from Chapter VI., Part IX., in which 1 lay bare the full w'orkmg of Arnold's ironical vision. I say— ‘From the treacherous polished surface of Arnold’s prose (its body clouded for its reception) I w T ill now expiscate that laughing idea which we have been preparing to examine. It is the idea of two island neighbours and strongly hallucinated brethren, the Irishman and the Englishman, the Celt and the Teuton (both m the baleful ‘grip’ of ‘celtisni/ which stands between them and success m science, or any exact, unemotional study), in- volved in a curious fratricidal strife a«d tangle of 283 PALEFACE romantic misunderstandings. . . . Arnold is not himself’ (I add) ‘at all the dupe of the “celtic” notion: his whole essay is written to expose it. Yet he accepts the conventional nomenclature of ‘Celt’ for all that type of expression and senti- ment that had been popularized under that name.’ And I then quote him, where he says, apropos of this famous ‘Celtisni’: ‘Nay, perhaps, if we are doomed to perish (Heaven avert the omen!) we shall perish by our Celtism, by our self-will and want of patience with ideas, our inability to see the way the world is going; and yet those very Celts, by our affinity with whom we are perishing, will be hating and upbraiding us all the time.’ It is generally forgotten that Ireland was colon- ized, especially in the east, by the Norsemen, nor- wegian being spoken m Dublin, as it was in Bristol, until the fourteenth century. That famous ‘celtic’ literary buccaneer, Mr. Bernard Shaw r , is no doubt a typical Norseman, as to stock at least. And m the essay from winch 1 have just quoted I illustrate d (page 322) the upshot of all this m the following fashion, Irom an average experience of inv own, which I am sure many people could match Here is what I wrote : — ‘During the martyrdom of the Mayor of Cork I had several opportunities of seeing consider- able numbers of Irish people demonstrating among the London crowds. I was never able to dis- cover which were Irish and which were English, 284 A MODEL 4 MELTING-POT * however. They looked to mo exactly the same. With the best will in the world to discriminate the orderly groups of demonstrators from the orderly groups of spectators, and to satisfy the romantic proprieties on such an occasion, my eyes icfused to effect the necessary separation, that the prin- ciple of “celtism’ demanded, into chalk and cheese. I should have supposed that they w r cre a lot of romantic english-people pretending to be lrish-people, and demonstrating w r ith the assist- ance of a few priests and pipers, if it had not been that they all looked extremely depressed, and english-people when they are giving romance the rein are ahvaj s very elated * It is singular I hat from the time of Arnold's Celtic Literatuie to that of The Lion and the Fas there should have been nobody in England to deled this colossal anomaly — there where there lane been so many people to foment, or (upon the other side) to take quite seriously, th* Irish Separatist passion. The fact is that it has always paid the Irish indi- vidually too well, to allow them to laugh at it (though now it is all over they are beginning to do so, witness Mr. Hernard Shaw m his article in Time and Tide , Dec. 1928): and the english politician in every case found Ireland such an uncomfortable problem that he w r as in no mood to relish the farce that might lie hidden under these disturbances. That will terminate for the present what I have to say upon this difficult subject. A Volapuc for Europe and an internationally organized Melting- pot/ a general international exchange s>f workers 285 PALEFACE and of women or men, an official Marriage Bureau, with photographs and pedigrees and all those certi- ficates that arc 4 indispensable in such a case — ar- rangements with the republics of America to adopt our particular Volapuc — that is the idea, in its brutal outline. I will not work it out further until I hear what response* the public makes to my sug- gestions, not only because that would be otiose, seeing the passionate atmosphere of jingo ideology that prevails at the moment, but because I am not so well qualified as many other people to draw up a practical scheme. Hut I shall be extremely happy to get in touch with any experts who arc so quali- fied, and to offer them what merely theoretic assist- ance lies m my power. 286 APPENDIX Note. — This review of Miss Mayo’s Mother India appeared in Enemy No. 2 m Tt is reprinted here without alteration, as an indirect contribution to the discussions conducted in Paleface APPENDIX MOTHER INDIA T HIS very much discussed book breaks a depth - record , as it were : it unerringly sinks to a level of vulgar untruth that should make it a para- gon of its kind. Miss Mayo is, therefore, to be con- gratulated: she has achieved what I feel she has in- tended; she has left an appreciably greater mess behind her in the world, oi that part where she operates, than was there already, and has sent up an appreciable distance the international tension and fever. She has had the satisfaction of insulting three hundred million people : and should it be that three hundied million of her ancestors sustained in- sults. or one of her most prominent ancestors three hundred million insults, this should do something towards wiping that out. (Such fantastic assump- tions come to your mind : for what can make a person want to write such a book?) There have already been mass meetings of protest in India. Her little book is assured of its place in the pantheon of Ilate. Its main argument leads the reader at once, with a firm matter-of-fact step, into the region of sex: and with a hand accustomed to the licences of the hospital, a few intimate physiological particulars are brusquely laid bare, just to put the reader m a good humour. The argument is this : owing, says Miss Mayo, to then premature sex-life, all the inhabitants^ India T 289 PALEFACE are ‘degenerate’ — quite the opposite of us. ‘At about eight years old the Indian male child is apt to be hired out to prostitution,’ she says. ‘The little boy ... is likely, if physically attractive, to be drafted for the satisfaction of grown men, or to be regularly attached to a temple, in the capacity of a prostitute. Neither parent, as a rule, sees any harm in this.’ Indeed the Indian mother, according to this lady, is addicted to practices all her own. ‘So far are they from seeing good or evil, as we see good and evil, that the mother, high caste or low caste, will practise upon her children — the girl “to make her sleep well,” the boy “to make him manly,” an abuse which the boy, at least, is apt to continue daily for the rest of his life.’ (The ‘at least’ is a curious clause.) Marriages between the immature is another feature of the picture. If, at eight years old, the boy is not ‘attractive’ presumably, his parents look round for a wife of his own age. So in that case between eight and fourteen he marries: but fourteen is late. Once married, being, of course, of an unbelievably degenerate stock, or else syphil- itic, he is found to be barren. No one is surprised. Usually the child-wife, in that case, is sent to a neighbouring temple for the night, where a priest can be relied on not to dismiss her without a fair prospect of a child, if he know's his business and likes the look of the girl. For there are a few, a very few, undegenerate Indians, they become priests. So it is with no surprise that you learn — or ‘after the rough outline just given, small surprise will meet the statement that from one end of the land to the other the average male Hindu of thirty years . . . 290 MOTHER INDIA is an old man : and that from seven to eight out of every ten such males between the ages of twenty- five and thirty are impotent.’ That is the sad tale of ‘ sex * that this writer, whose indignation and the form it has taken have sold a great many copies of her book, has to tell. That leprous thing — India — that provoked her to put all this down, she tells us, is such a gigantic menace to the United States that it would ‘seem to deprive one of the right to indulge a personal reluctance to incur consequences.’ So, deprived of all rights, with the air of a Christian martyr, Miss Mayo goes manfully on, and throws Ganges mud at the great Indian people, ridicules tlieir religion (what is hers?), and quotes to support her statements the Abbd Dubois. The Abba’s book, as indicated by her in a footnote, is Hindu, Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Claren- don Press, 1921. ‘Of all the readers of Mother India how many arc likely to know anything about the Abbe Dubois? One m a hundred may, but that is not probable. Yet it is, of course, a very well known and exceed- ingly interesting book, and most students of anthro- pology are familiar with it . Should Miss Mayo not point out, when she first quotes him in her account of her mdian trip last year, that he died in 1848 — in- stead of leaving it ‘Clarendon Press, 1924,’ and re- ferring later on, in passing, to the fact that the evid- ence of the Abbe Dubois dates from ‘the Nineteenth Century’? He is actually her main source of in- formation : he is quoted on pages 31, 37, 73, 75, 119, 143, 165 and 204. No other authority is drawn upon to this extent. Some of the most ‘ sqpsational ’ 291 PALEFACE matter of her book comes out of this text-book of the anthropology of British India. That, for ex- ample, is the case with the story about the Indian child- wives who go to the temples, if barren, and who are accommodated bv the priests. The ac- count given by the Abbe Dubois m Hindu Manners and Customs is as follows : Miss Mayo does not quote it, it is her custom to paraphrase, so as to make it seem more actual, probably, and more like her own; but, whatever the reason, it is a habit that breeds confusion, unfortunate m the circumstances. ‘Expert at reaping protit from the virtues as well as the vices of their countrymen, the Brah- mins sec m these touching impulses of nature merely a means of gaming w caltli, and also at the same time an opportunity of satisfying their carnal lusts with impunity. There are few temples where the presiding deity docs not claim the power of curing barrenness in women. ... On their arrival, the women hasten to disclose the object of their pilgrimage to the Bralmnns, the managers of the temple. The latter advise them to pass the night m the temple, where, they say, the great Venkateswara, touched by their devotion, will perhaps visit them in the spirit and accomplish that which until then has been denied to them through human power. I must draw a curtain over the sequel of this deceitful suggestion. The reader already guesses at it. The following morn- ing these detestable hypocrites, pictendmg com- plete ignorance of what has passed, make due enquiries into all details; and after having con- gratulated the women upon the reception they 292 MOTHER INDIA mot with from the god, receive the gifts with which they have provided themselves, and take leave of them. . . .’ (Hindu Manners, etc., p. 59 i.) It should be said that the well-known book of the Abbe Dubois is written m a very different tone as touching the Indian people from that of Miss Mayo. But then, as Dr. Max Muller writes, the views of the Abbe Dubois were those of ‘a scholar wutli sufficient knowledge, if not of Sanscrit, yet of Tamil, . . . to be able to enter into the view’s of the natives, to under- stand their manners and customs, and to make allowance for many of their superstitious opinions and practices, as mere corruptions of an originally far more rational and intelligent form of religion and philosophy.’ It is a quarrel between priests m the ease of the Abb6 Dubois. For was not this catholic priest m the Dekknn in order to get converts to Christianity? Naturally as a catholic priest he would not give a very glowing account of the Brahmin, his profes- sional rival. Nor would it be at all likely that his account of the Indian cults would be exactly propa- ganda for them, nor that he w r ould compare them favourably with Ins own ‘shop.’ But m his treat- ment of the Indian people there is no trace of the Mayo attitude In a prefatory note to Hindu Manners and Cus- toms^ Dr. Max Muller writes as follows: — ‘ It is difficult to believe that the Abb6 Dubois, the author of Moeurs, Institutions et CMmonies des peuples de TInde , died in only 1848. By his position as a scholar and as a student of Indian 298 PALEFACE subjects, he really belongs to a period previous to the revival of Sanscrit studies in India. ... I had no idea, when in 1840 I was attending in Paris the lectures of Eugene Burnouf at the College dr France, that the old Abbe was still living and in full activity as Direct etir des Missions Etr anger es, and I doubt whether even Burnouf himself was aware of his existence m Paris. The Abb£ be- longs really to the eighteenth century, but as there is much to be learnt even from such as Roberto de’ Nobili, who went to India in 160C ... so again the eighteenth century was by no means devoid of eminent students of Sanscrit, of Indian religion, and Indian subjects in general. It is true that in our days their observations and re- searches possess chiefly a historical interest. . . .’ This note of Dr. Max Muller’s was not written yesterday; but for him, even, the Hindu Manner S, Customs and Ceremonies ‘possess chiefly a historical interest.’ Under these circumstances, and since no one could pretend that Mother India was intended for any- thing but a large popular Public very unlikely evui to have heard of the Abb<5 Dubois, or at all likely to refer to his w’ork, would it not have been more honest, m quoting the Abbd* Dubois, to explain all this to the reader, instead of merely giving the refer- ence, with the name of the Clarendon Press, and the date 192 /f. ? But apart from that, was it honest at all to mingle the ‘eighteenth century’ information of this authority with gossip of today, and a few facts hastily gathered in a short tour? 294 • MOTHER INDIA Again there is the fact that the information taken from the eighteenth century account of the Abb£ Dubois is not necessarily quoted m his words. It is (pp. 36-37, Mother India) mixed up with material from Young India , Sept. ?, 1UVG, and that of other unspecified sources, and so recounted by the author as though all part of one story, in the result making the eighteenth century generalizations of the Abb6 Dubois appear something that had happened yester- day. There is no indication at all that its writer is any- thing but a \er> clever, able and practised person; she knows quite well that what she gives is not evidence : that it is presented in such a wav as to be violently offensn e on every ground to the Hindu (she favours strangely the Mohammadan): she cannot fail to see that in an insidious manner it puts the British Government of India m the position of a machia- vellian power, leaving the unfortunate Indian alone m lus apparently unexampled depravity and squalor (all the men sexually impotent and broken at twenty-live \ears old — the average age of demise 23, etc. etc.), whereas she, no doubt, has more than enough political intelligence to be aware that should the English lea\ e India tomorrow the Soviet would quietly walk m, if they are not practically there already; and a little compassion for the Indian (which she does not possess — nothing but the affect- ation of the fury of a kind of mad sanitary inspector) would save her from contemplating that particular change of masters for even such reptiles, ‘slaves/ perverted heathens, morons and masturbators, as she complacently describes: she knows that her 295 PALEFACE inflammatory gibes about ‘slave psychology’ ad- dressed to the indian people is the material of ‘radical’ oratory or of nationalist spread-eagleism such as no european public would swallow today, since they have found out that they are not, them- selves, so peculiarly ‘free,’ and that as to ‘slave- psychology’ people who Vve in glass-houses, and so on : and, finally, when she claims that the music of the spinning wheel of Gandhi has been a mam in- spiration to her m writing her book, she pollutes one of the only saintly figures m the world; and it is to be hoped that he will use all the lustrational re- sources of his easte-traming to cleanse himself of any traces left by the passage of Miss Mayo : also m con- nection with Gandhi, she is not so naive as not to know that her super-amencan gospel of dogmatic modernist reform (or is it amencan, or rather should Americans in general be held responsible for their Mayos? I believe not) can scarcely be said to have anything to do with what Gandhi teaches. What particular demon actuates Miss Mayo? I may go into that when I conic to use her book, along with many others, as evidence m later parts of my Paleface . But, now, I think, m mutation of the Abb6 Dubois, I will at this point ‘draw a curtain ’over Miss Mayo — not over her ‘daring’ or ‘outspoken’ bits about sex, heaven preserve us (Abb6 Dubois is much more amusing, if that is what you want, and there’s much more of it ), but — just over Miss Mayo. But there is another thing that Mis< Mayo knows — not quite to draw to the curtain. Miss Mayo knows that if an indian lady journalist, for instance, hurried to America on such a mission as Miss Mayo’s, 296 MOTHER INDIA she could very easily draw an equally untruthful picture. She knows this as well as I know similarly that a visit to England or Germany could be made into a Mother England or Mother Germany . Indet'd no day passes but we are able in Europe to observe this in practice: I refer to the accounts the Euro- pean is fed with about Mother America , accounts that arc intended to mak*' his llesh creep or his blood boil. No picture done m that wav (an be true, of course: and I am certainly the last person to lend any credence to the stories of the Mother America type. Miss Mayo, I am very sure, has nothing to do with anything that wc should legitimately call ‘America.’ The Indian lady \isitor to the United States, let us suppose, has arrived. She ‘ court - eoush ’ requests to be ‘shown over,’ and m her book she can say how very ‘courteous,’ at least (that looks well, it shows how fair and unbiassed you arc), e\ try- body was (how very stupidly courteous to such a person she may privatelj reflect): and she could (very easily) hav*‘ a remarkably ‘highly-placed diplomatist’ or ‘a great inventor’ perhaps (that would look well) always at her elbow, just as Miss Mayo alw r ays has a particular ly ‘ high-caste Brahmin ’ at her elbow, to inform against other high -caste Brahmins* the Indian lady visitor or inquisitor, the ‘restless analyst 5 from the East, could quote exten- sively from some amenean equivalent of the Loom oj Youth , and tell the horrified Indian Public how r in all the schools and universities of the United States homosexuality w r as rampant : then she could tell the usual stories of pregnant high-school girls — reveal whole classes carried away in one brake to theLying- 297 PALEFACE in Hospital: she could state as a fact that all ameri- can men were sexually impotent at thirty (hence the Broadway girl-shows), and that self-abuse was in- tense and universal throughout the 48 States of the Union : she could describe the death-rate per day m an amcncan city by violent crime, quote Mencken for bits about the monstrosities of Prohibition : and she could wind up by saying that America is ‘a physical menace’ (of. p. 23, Mother India) to the Hindu. ‘ Under present conditions of human activity, whereby, whether we will or no, the roads that join us to every part of the world continually shorten and multiply, it would appear that some know- ledge of mam facts concerning so big and to-day so near a neighbour should be a part of our intelli- gence and self-protection.’ ( Mother India, p. 20.) The above italics are mine. Or the Indian lady investigator might takeanother line. ‘The average male Hmdu of thirty years . . . is an old man,’ says Miss Mayo. But the Indian visitor to the United States might describe herself as astounded to find that at thirty years old the White Man seemed no older than ‘our Indians’ at eight, and. indeed, that that was the case at almost anv age: she could remark thereupon that she doubted, so childish were they (almost as though on purpose, she might suggest), whether these ‘boy- men’ had ever exercised their sexual nature at all, or ever, properly speaking, reached puberty; and, indeed, it was her belief that they never did, that was what she thought about it, and that she sus- 298 MOTHER INDIA pected them of pretending to be pederasts, very often, only 1o rover this sexual apathy, and so as to retain a sort of false, prolonged, childish immaturity, and in order also to evade (much stiffening and ruf- fling of Madras-suffragist indignation, here!) — crimi- nally to evade their sexual duties; that as to the amencan mothers, far fiom sitting by their daugh- ters’ bedsides, and ‘helping them to get to sleep’ in the mdian fashion, instead, these mothers put on flesh-coloured tights and went and danced all night, while their husbands stole out, gun m hand, and went lynching Negroes in the next block. All this the mdian ladv journalist could write to her terrified, indignant, delighted countrymen and country women. She could point out that now at any moment Mr. Levine might be expected to ‘hop’ over to Mother India — or Miss Mayo, again, by way of the air, for that matter -and heaven knows what germs he (or she) would not bring from such a country as the United States! She might suggest that Gandhi be sent to see what could be done to instil a certain sense of womanhood into these lo«d: populations. Perhaps President Coolidge could be persuaded to spin for a few hours every dav. But at least Gandhi— -or perhaps the League of Nations? — might dissuade the United States males from abusing themselves, every day, at least. And then, of course, she could quote Prescott’s Conquest oj Mexico to give an idea of the soil of blood-sacrifices currently perpetrated by the Ameri- cans. This she could easily mix up with the Ku Klux Klan, and say that they disembowelled fifty Negroes a day in any fair-sized american city. 299 PALEFACE This book she would call (in Tamil) Rail Columbia , Happy Land. This is a sort of book, at all events, that you can’t have enough of, both ways, and all ways. It pro- motes that excellent feeling of brotherly love be- tween nations and races that is so very useful and comfortable for all of us. 300 INDEX Alexander (Professor), 177 All God's Chilton* 58 Americana , 111, 113, 118, 11*3, 127-37, 188 American Mercury , 28, 113. American Keqro (The), 28 Anderson (Dean Paul), 136 Andewon (Sherwood), 95, 97, 116-17, 126, 139, 144-7, 151, 153, 187, 195-236, 240, 247- 249, 252, 264, 268. Antigone , 8 Apple of the Eye (The), 166 Arabia Deserta, 150 Archimedes, 270 Aristotle, 10, 255 Arnold (Matthew), 15, 16, 56, 213, 283-5 Arthur Press, 67. Art of Being Ruled (The), 77, . 155-6, 161, 161, 241, 262-3. Atlantis , 47-52 Attila, 240 Autobiography of an ex-colour cd Man (The), 28 Baudelaire, 52, 149, 151. Beecher Stowe (Mis ), 41 Behaviourism, 157-66. 176, 226. Bell (Clive), 100 Bergson, 158-60, 169, 176-7, 184, 226, 241. Berkeley (Bishop), 253. Berman (Louis), 135, 157-64, 168-70, 176. Bim and Bom, 266-68. Bonaparte (Napoleon), 133. Borah (Senatoi), 221. Boigia, 244, 246 Bosanquet, 7. Bottomley (Horatio), 129 Bouddha riran/, 52. Bradley, 7 Burnouf (Kugtaie), 294 Bui ton, 55 Butler (Samuel), 16 Butt (Clara), 106. Byron (Loid), 146, 152, 257, 270 Caird, 101 Carnarvon (Lord), 172 Celtic Literature , 285 Chaplin (Charlie), 230. Cliekov, 196 Churchill (Winston), 221. Clarendon Press, 291, 294. Clark (Sir William), 24. 67 mold, 261. Hose (Upton), 58, 62, 259 Cloyne (Bishop of), 105 < 'onquest of Mexico, 299 4 Corasmm and the Parrots 186-90, 261 Cortez, 124. Costello (Dolores), 26. Creatine Evolution, 158-9, 176, 226 Criterion , 259 Daily Mail , 260. Daily Telegraph, 24 Dark Laughter, 144, 187, 196- 215, 220, 239, 264 Dark Princess , 29-43, 46-7, 51, 85, 273 Darwinism, 158. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 85 Decline of the West , 179. 301 PALEFACE Defense de V Occident , 256. Dickens, 205, 225, 229 IHthy rambic Spectator (The), 184 Dominik (Hans), 47, 52, 58. Doughty, 55, 150 Dubois (Abb4), 291 -6. Du Bois (W. E B ), 23, 27, 29, 41, 50, 281. Emstein, 106 Eliot (T S ), 259 Emperor Jones, 64 Enemy (The), 200 Evening Standard, 250 Evolution of Theology, 101 Family II ei aid, 44 Fcnunore Coopei, 195 Fine Clothes for the Jew, 28 Fire m the Flint (The), 28 Flight, 28 Fo'melsaday , 28 Ford (Henry), 236-7, 268 Forum , 63. Fourier. 245 France (Anatole), 190. Freud, 138, 184, 203, 207-8, 220, 238, 240 Fry (Roger), 100. Ffalop-Miller (Rene), 182-3, 241, 264-8. Gandhi, 296, 299. Gauguin, 52, 149, 151, 209, 21 1 212, 244 Gobineau, 53, 55. Goethe, 67, 77. Goodly Fere (The), 241 Green (T. 11.), 7-16, 21-2, 79, 76, 88-92. Gulnon, 255. Hamlet , 58. Hartmann (Von), 177* Hardy, 151. Hayes (Roland), 65. Hearn (Lafcadio), 151 Hegel, 7 Hemingway (Ernest), 144, 200- 202 Hindu Manners , Customs and Ceremonies, 291-4 Hodge (Rev B. G ), 135. Huxley (Aldous), 52, 59, 63 Ido, 279 ‘ Indians and Enteitamment,* 174 Inge (Dean), 221, 259. Institutes, 13, 70 Intellectual isme de Saint - Thomas (//), 254. 4 I Want to Know Why,* 223- 233, 238 James (Henry), 131-2. Jesting Pilate, 59-62. Johnson (Doctor), 105 Joyce (James), 204-7- loyful Wisdom, 150. Jung, 166 Kandinsky, 33 Knopf, 2, 28, 29, 43. Ku Klux Klan, 37, 299. Lady Luch, 28. Lai son (Nella), 43-6, 56. Lawrence (D. H.), 31, 95, 97, 111, 120, 135, 146-7, 153-4, 157-8, 166, 169-98, 200, 203- 204, 211, 215, 221-2, 234, 240, 247-9, 252, 264 Levine (Mr ), 299 Lily, 28. Lion and the Fox (The), 283-5. 302 INDEX Livingstone, 65, 151. Locke (Alain), 63-6. Loin des Blonde a, 52-5 Loom of Youth (The), 297 Luther (Mai tin), 131-2 Jjynn Telegram N cws, 130 Mademoiselle Juhe, 152. Magie Noire , 52. Maine (Sir llemy). 87, 180 Marx (Kail), 119, 187-8, 244 Mas&is, 256 Matisse, 33-4. Mannas, 91. Mayo (Miss), 128, 289-300 Mayoi of Cork, 284 Mencken, 2, 111-12, 113-19, 123, 127-37, 139, 160, 198, 282, 298 Metropolis , 219. Mind and Face of Bolshevism, 182. Mceurs , Institutions et Cere- monies des peoples de VJnde , . 29? Moh^re, 58 Montesquieu, 273 Morand (Paul), 52. Mornings m Mexico , 95, 111, 147, 153-4, 157, 169, 174-96, 198, 200, 204, 234. Moses, 131-2. Mother India , 27, 128, 289-300 Mozart, 279 Muller (Dr. Max), 293-4. Mussolini, 106. Nathan, 116. Negro Drawings , 28. Newton, 74, 102-3, 106, 150. New York Herald , 260-1. Nietzsche, 53, 67, 146, 150. digger Heaven , 30, 153. Noa-Noa, 212, 244. Nobili (Roberto de*), 294. Novarro (Ramon), 26. Obsenrr, 146. Paul, 27, 86. Paul (Lady Dean), 136 Petty fer, 28 Philosophy of the Unconscious, 177 Picasso, 33-4. Pitt, 74 Pizarro, 124. Plato, 13, 90 Plomei, 2, 23, 28, 280-1. Poe (Edgai Allan), 137, 140 Poor White, 216-22. Porgir, 61 Pound (Ezra), 145, 241. Praxiteles, 35. Prescott, 299. Prolegomena to Ethics, 7, 92. Psychoanalysis, 161, 166, 177, 240 Quid sand, 28, 43-6. Radio Times, 103. Raucat (Thomas), 52-5 Relativity, 166 Religion of Behaviow ism (The), 157 Revolt of Asia (The), 58, 85, 259. Revolutionary Simpleton (The), 161 Rimbaud, 55, 149. Rivers (Dr. W. H. R.), 164. Robeson (Paul), 65. Rousseau, 195, 225. Rousselot (P4re Pierre), S.J., 254. Russell (Bertrand!, 100, 102-3, 106, 150, 194, 221. 308 PALEFACE Sage, 27. Safar’t Return (The), 28 Saint-Simon, 245. Salvation Army, 134, 273 Schopenhauer, 67, 177 Shakespeare, 58, 74, 131 Shaw (G. B ), 82, 146, 221, 246, 269-70, 284-5. Shelley, 152, 270 'Sherwood Lawrence,’ 111, 198. Sinclair Lewis 111, 114, 116, 128 Society of Jesus, 220 Socrates, 122, 148. Solomon, ‘ mx - cylinder sport,’ 135. Solon, 220. Hons and Lovers, 180-1. Spongier, 122-3, 176-9, 242-3, 252, 256. Star Chamber, 220 Stem (Gertrude), 207, 224. Stevenson (R. L ), 149-51. Stoddard (Lothrop), 64. Story-Teller’ e Story, 95, 203, 233-4. Strindberg, 146, 152. Strindberg's Systrar Bcratta, 146. ’ Suicide as a Symptom,’ 163. Templars, 149, 220. ' Terre (La), 206-7. Time and Tide, 285. Time and Western Man, 157, 176 . Tolstoi, 151. Torrmts of Spring, 145, 200-2. Triumph of the Egg (The), 223- 233. Tutankamen, 172. Twain (Mark), 215. Ulysses, 205-6 Uwle Tom's Cabin, 40-1, 227 Valentino, 233 Valdry (Paul), 259. Vanity Fair, 131. Vecbten (van), 29, 30, 153. Versailles Treaty, 276 Vinci (Leonardo da), 123. Virginians (The), 138. Vision of Judgment, 148, 257. Volapuc, 67-8, 280, 285-6. Volstead Act, 133 Watson (Professor), 158, 162, 166. IKean, Blues (The), 28. Wells, 261. Wescott (Glenway), 166. Whitehead, 178. White Man and his Rivals (The), 259. Whitman (Walt), 140-3, 145-6, 209, 212. Wildrcat (The), 28. Wise (Rabbi), 221. Women tn Love, 180. Wooing s of Jezebel, 28. ‘ Wush & Co.,’ 206. Yerkes, 166. Young India, 295. Zola (Emile), 151, 202, 206-7.