Points of View (Sherman)/On Falling in Love
My quarrel with the Dreiser-Hecht school of monoptic novelists and with the Menckenian school of monoptic critics is not that they fail to see sharply but that they are stone blind of one eye, and that: they tend to transmit this monoptic peculiarity to all their literary posterity. I have professed my admiration for the intensity of their limited vision. They see very well the turmoil of instinctive and passional life which seethes beneath the surface of civilized and moralized life. Their disclosures of the subconventional welter have the value for us of all explorations of dark continents. I accept many: of their conclusions about the obscure territory which they have traversed. I think, for example, that they are probably right in representing the subconventional relationships of the mass of human beings as almost indescribably lustful and hateful.
It is only when they begin to reason about the value of the subconvenional life as compared with the civilized and moralized life that they appear to me to be afflicted with blindness. Having demonstrated, very ably demonstrated, that the subconventional life is lustful and hateful, they next proceed to argue that it alone is "real." If there is a logical connection, I miss it. The argument affects me as fantastic: it is as if an arctic explorer, having proved that the cold of the polar regions is almost incredibly painful, should procced to argue that Prince Patrick Island is the only fit place to live, and that London, Paris, and New York are phantasmagorial. My faith is weak: I have never been able to think of New York, or even of Chicago, as a dream-city.
Yet the moment the monoptic naturalists begin to discuss the moral world, they take just that line: they insist that the moral world is so unreal as to be virtually non-existent—at the same time howling at the thorns which it thrusts into them. The assumption of practically all the insurgents against custom, convention, and morality is that every man who takes a customary, conventional, or moral attitude is a hypocrite, and that every man who doesn't abandon such attitudes is a coward and essentially a moral phantom.
The now popular but profoundly erroneous notion underlying their mental processes is this: that no man can express himself hotly and sincerely through any form of action or through any form of words which has ever been employed before. It is an extension of the attack on the verbal cliché to the entire fabric of approved and applauded values which we call civilization. A Hebrew singer smites his harp and sings: "Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord." That is all right; probably he meant it. Some thousands of years later I write in my diary: "De profundis clamavi." That is a cliché. When I repeated that trite form, I meant nothing, I felt nothing. Jacob clove to Rachel. All right; probably he liked her. Jones cleaves to Mrs. Jones. All wrong; doubtless he hates her. Dumas created the three musketeers. All right; a bright idea. A Scotch writer describes the search for hidden treasure. All wrong; paste and scissors.
In some such fashion as this many a good man's reputation for being alive has been destroyed or seriously damaged. A very pretty case is that of R. L. Stevenson. I am one of the old fogies, past forty, who are not ashamed to acknowledge that they have preserved their "illusion" about Stevenson, in spite of everything that Henley and the surviving members of the Stevenson family and old Edinburgh gossips have done to smash his image. The illusion of my youth about Stevenson was this: that he was one of the most accomplished and versatile artists of the later nineteenth century—that he could play every instrument in the band, and most of them with a degree of skill beyond the reach of his detractors.
On Mr. Scribner's recent republication of his verse and his short stories in two comprehensive volumes, I tried him again where he is often said to be weakest, as a poet. I record here without shame that I can't get through the poems to-day without feeling once more some such emotional perturbation as caused me many years ago, after standing for a few minutes before Saint-Gaudens' memorial on the wall of St. Giles in Edinburgh, to walk abruptly aside from my companions into a duskier aisle of the church. The lilt of the voice, the essence and sting, the authentic bite of the personality are there. The fiddling, dancing, preaching, flute-playing, play-acting, ever-various Stevensonian personality, the Scotch Presbyterian in his French velveteen jacket is there; and he is the man that we loved.
Now the grand business of monoptic naturalistic criticism is to prove that there never was any such personality as convulses my diaphragm. The creature whose memory, mixed with the music of the organ in St. Giles, leads me weeping up the Samoan mountain to the rock-hewn tomb under the southern skies never existed. The "real Stevenson," I am assured, was a wretched, pallid, rakehelly, tuberculous fellow, so shambling, disreputable, ill-kempt, and dirty that one would be rather ashamed to be seen on the street with him. Naturalistic criticism establishes that such was the "real" man. Next, naturalistic criticism searches for this tuberculous weevil in the prose and poetry of "R. L. S."; is obliged to report that, except for a rare blood spot or so, he is not there; regretfully—O, so regretfully—announces that Stevenson the writer was a "sham," a "poser." This naturalistic attack had begun even before his death, and the family made merry over it in Vailima: "To carry a brave front though your heart quaked was a pose; to live up to your better nature was a pose; and Louis made us all laugh by saying earnestly, 'in short, everybody who tries to do right is a hypocrite'!"
To continue for a moment with our example: I do not contend that the picture of a pallid, rakehelly, tuberculous, shambling, disreputable Stevenson is false, so far as it goes. There is quite a bit of evidence and an abundance of gossip to the effect that there was such a Stevenson. What we old fogies contend is merely that this Stevenson was collected by a man with one eye. We contend also that there is nothing in the collection that seems more real or more valuable than what we discovered with an eye on the other side of our heads. The best-equipped heads have two eyes; but if some curious religious impulse urges the critic to pluck out one eye, we old fogies think it betrays a perverted judgment always to pluck out the right eye.
When only the left eye is preserved, criticism functions with the monotonous inevitability of predestination in some such fashion as this.
Hamlet exclaims in one place that man is a remarkable piece of work: "how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! . . . in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a God." But on another occasion Hamlet says: "I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things it were better my mother had not borne me. . . . What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven, we are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. "The first speech is windy rhodomontade; in the second, we see the "real" Hamlet.
Tennyson wrote Idylls of the King, but in his off hours he smoked infinite tobacco and relieved his mind by relating Rabelaisian anecdote. The author of Idylls of the King was a Victorian hypocrite. The "real" Tennyson was a Rabelaisian.
Dr. Kennicott in Main Street says, "A fellow ought to go to church—keeps him in touch with the higher things!" but Dr. Kennicott slips down the street and spends the evening with Maud Dyer. The speaker was a hypocritical Puritan. The "real" man went down the street to Maud Dyer.
One of our sweethearts of the stage sings her love lyrics, touching every section of the audience with the caress of her eyes, and in a flight of wafted kisses vanishes behind the scenes, where she explodes in shrewish curses at the man who has dropped the curtain a quarter of a second too soon. On the stage, the actress: off the stage, the "real" woman.
Two young fellows entertain a starchy and correct elderly man before their fire. After some hours of serious talk, the elderly man withdraws. As the door closes behind him, one of the young chaps eases himself in the chair, stretches out his legs, yawns, and says: "Now, let's talk smut." The first part of the evening was passed in an uncomfortable illusion; the second part, amid the "realities of life."
The old-fashioned poets inspect their dreams and paint a woman as the object of every man's desire. But the naturalistic novelists see her and paint her as she "really" is. They see her losing her temper, see her dowdy and with a smirched face, see her sick at the stomach, see her mean and cattish and sulky. A husband with a restless wife should say to her lover: "Here, take her and keep her for two years, and you will be as little enchanted with her as I am." The poets are professional liars. The novelists at last are giving us the "truth" about the great romantic humbug.
Such is the procedure of monoptic naturalistic criticism.
Now let us re-examine our last case—with two eyes, if we possess them. What is the real truth about falling in love? Is that object which commands the adoration of a young man's heart a mere brain-begotten fantasy of his own? By no means. What one falls in love with is, in most cases, "real" enough, what there is of it. But what one falls in love with is only a careful selection from the miscellaneous qualities possessed by the beloved person. The romantic passion of youth is monoptic. It is bred of occasional meetings, of prearranged contacts, of intercourse in agreeable settings, under favorable lights, with the two actors bringing to each other the best of their gayety, the choicest extracts of their talk, the distilled cup of their emotions, the flower of their personalities, all heightened a bit in value by the intoxication of young kisses and embraces, yet it is all substantial; that with which we fall in love is real enough.
Yet in so far as these romantic youths are love worthy persons, they are artists scrupulously employing their available means to produce a preconceived effect, namely, to appear lovable. They are acting a part—one of the several parts which they act; and perhaps they are doing it very well indeed. Perhaps they are throwing themselves so earnestly into their part that they conceive themselves to be essentially and mainly lovers, when, as a matter of fact, they are essentially and mainly a real estate agent and a cook, an egotistical novelist and a pianist, a financier and a female athlete, or a professor and a semi-professional bridge player. Presently they neglect their make-up and forget their cues. They stop acting. They slip back into their main business. They lapse to the level of their natural instincts and emotions. And the moment they begin to be entirely natural, they begin to bore each other; they begin to fall in hate. They look at each other with monoptic naturalistic gaze; and they fall in hate with a careful selection of the hateful qualities possessed by—by all men and women.
I have known in the entire course of my life perhaps half a dozen men and women who were invariably charming, the very sight of whom rejoiced and refreshed any company in which they appeared. They have a natural genius for being charming, no doubt; but they have something more than that. They have a delight in practising the fine art of charm; they understand the technique of charm; they have drilled themselves in the expression of charm, till they are accomplished artists, as in capable of a false note in personal relations as Paderewski is incapable of striking the wrong note at the piano. Do they never feel headache, melancholy, exasperation, fatigue, wrath? They are human: I am sure they do. But they are finished and highly conscientious performers in the art of life; and one never catches them out. Their "pose" seems effortless now. It seems to spring from a vital principle of their being. Whatever they do, whatever they say, gives delight, because the welter of their subconventional instincts and emotions finds no outlet except through beautiful forms.
When I think of these charming persons, I wish to write an essay in defense of "posing." It is very clear, in the light furnished by the psychoanalysts and the naturalistic novelists—it is very clear that whenever we have been decently agreeable to one another for an hour at a time we have been posing—we have been acting a part, and we are a little fatigued when it is over. There is work in it. There is real work done when a lady accepts with effusive joy an invitation to a dinner, which she tells her husband five minutes later that she would "rather die than attend."
Nature does so little for us. Nature does not even teach us how to walk or to speak or to eat in a fashion which is not repulsive to civilized society. Military training and the dancing master and the singing teacher and the mater familias have to stand over us with a stick for the first eighteen years of our lives to take the natural curvature out of our spines, the shamble from our gaits, the squeak and snuffle from our voices, the cormorant from our table manners, before we are even physically fit subjects for any but the most indulgent scrutiny. No one who has ever been a parent but remembers how he longed for the time when his child would begin to "pose" as one who liked to have his face clean and his hair brushed. Eventually, one feels fairly sure that the child will like the part, and will keep his face clean and his hair brushed for the rest of his life, and will even add to these acquired graces daily manicure and shaving; but no analyst of human nature pretends that a well-groomed man is a sincere expression of the sub-conventional welter of instincts and emotions. He is the laborious triumph of art over nature.
All the world that is capable of ministering delight to any discriminating sense is a stage; and all the men and women, from pope to peasant, who do anything distinguished on this stage are merely actors. Why insult the bad actors by calling them hypocrites? A hypocrite is a man who has been cast for a part to which he is unsuited, and who consequently fails to identify himself with it. The sincere and successful actor is the one wise enough and fortunate enough to choose out of all the rôles open to him that which he likes the best, or those which he likes the best; and who then devotes himself with ardor to the perfection of his reles. All that he possesses of virtue and power and passion and personality—practically all of it, if he is a great actor—he finds means and occasions for using and expressing through his art. What remains—the dross and débris of his days—he destroys, if he can, as valueless; or if he is negligent about his rubbish, he leaves it as a rich legacy to some monoptic naturalistic biographer to be dished up after his death as the "real" man.
As I draw towards the conclusion of this meditation, my mind reverts to its starting point; and I ask myself quite simply the question: "Why do lovers fall out of love?" And now the reason has become as clear as daylight: They fall out of love because they grow too lazy to act their part. Pleased with my progress in discovery, I proceed to another question. I ask myself quite simply why the Dreiser-. Hecht school of naturalistic or monoptic fiction and 'the Menckenian school of naturalistic or monoptic; criticism are at the present time enjoying such wide, popularity among our young people. And once more the reason is as clear as daylight: The monoptic or naturalistic vision and criticism of life are enjoying wide popularity because they are tremendously flattering to the performance of bad actors; they are tremendously flattering to the lazy men and women who are out of their part; they confer a sense of superiority upon that indolent and inferior portion of mankind which slips and slumps from the great stage which tests a man's art back into the subconventional, formless, unchanneled turmoil of instinct and passion.