War Talk and Other Talk

January 1918 Oliver Wakefield
War Talk and Other Talk
January 1918 Oliver Wakefield

War Talk and Other Talk

The Superfluous Conversation of Unnecessary Speakers

OLIVER WAKEFIELD

THERE ought to be some sort of quarantine for conversational invalids. I mean especially those middle-aged talkers who flood every one around them with depressing words as each new difficulty or disaster of the war presents itself. Probably everyone has a friend or two, who is described as "taking the war too hard." This usually means talking the war too hard and lowering the vitality of his neighbors. The blunders of the Allies are terrible, he says. Did not Lloyd George just now say so? The need of unity of action was obvious from the first and they have not got it even now. And the people of this country, why, there are millions who hardly know the war exists, and millions who would pull us out of it at any cost. Look at Gallipoli; look at Greece; look at Russia; look at Italy; look at the submarines; look at the French scandals; look at the Bolsheviki and the pacifists.

Asking you to look at long lists of unpleasant things is one of the symptoms—merely to look at them without a ghost of a suggestion as to what you ought to do—and another symptom is the repetition ever so many times of this unchanging phrase: "I don't see what is coming of it," and until you too say you do not see what is coming of it, the old harpy .will not go away. Having brought you to the admission that there is not a ray of hope discernible in any quarter of the sky, he will sometimes brighten up a bit.

Any talker who can communicate to a fellow-man nothing whatever but the major part of his personal depression ought to be segregated, cut down to one edition of one newspaper a day, and if possible taught to do his bit toward helping the war along by keeping silent. As he improves, let him be taught some manly substitute for his fatal flow of fruitless and debilitating speech. Let him be taught to knit. The energy that is now spent in rending one another's withered bosom, might then pass harmlessly, even usefully off into worsted stockings.

Book-fear

ONE would think that the most dogged of fireside defenders would be satisfied with the moral purport of Mr. Galsworthy's latest novel, "Beyond." Nearly all the characters in it who offend against the marriage bond—and there are quite a lot of them—come to a bad end. In fact, in the interest of literary variety it would seem that sudden death, delirium, blasted hopes, social perdition and the wages of sin in one form or another were distributed with an almost too perfect moral precision. From the birth of the first illegitimate infant in an early chapter down to the moment in the final pages when the last illicit lover has his skull crushed in, the mills of God are made to grind, in a manner that ought seriously to discourage the carnally minded. Yet to this moment there are stout British commentators denouncing the book as dissolute.

One of them says he is shocked by the "deliberate devotion of such a pen as Mr. Galsworthy's to the defiance of the social conventions and ideas of duty and morality." Another wants to know how "parents and guardians can prevent young people from reading such horrid low class tales." They are calling it "dangerous" and "depraved." They are saying Mr. Galsworthy has set out malevolently to "undermine all respect for marriage and parenthood." The fear seems to be spreading and before long no doubt there will be a considerable portion of the British public who will really feel toward poor Mr. Galsworthy as towards a moral submarine.

Why reviewers pick out certain books as dangerous is one of the mysteries of literary journalism. You can no more tell what will frighten reviewers than what a horse will shy at. A reviewer will pass the same familiar object twenty times and then of a sudden rear at the sight of it as in the presence of a monster never before beheld. If one could gather all the books and plays denounced as dangerous in the last twenty years, what a splendid object lesson,it would be in the inutility of moral apprehension. Even so sensitive a moral being as a New York City politician probably would not seek to suppress to-day another "Mrs. Warren's Profession."

Reviewers are of course aware of this when they stop to think of it. Any reviewer nowadays really knows that all the ideas, situations,, and emotions presented in Mr. Galsworthy's "Beyond" have been thumbed and dog-eared in nearly every circulating library for a generation. For as a matter of fact it is about the most conventional book that Mr. Galsworthy has ever written and it seems almost a compilation from the fiction of our time. The homes that it could undermine must all have been long since blasted.

Perhaps it is due to temporary loss of memory, whereby one modern novel suddenly looms up to the reviewer's mind, alone and terrible, devoid of relation to any other modern novel in the world. Perhaps if you had forgotten completely what a modern novelist was like, the sight of one would be shocking. Even Mr. Galsworthy might seem peculiar if encountered by a mind entirely blank. Or it may be that certain reviewers are constrained at intervals to utter moral noises without regard to the occasion, just as a watch-dog will sometimes bark at a wheelbarrow, not because there is danger in the wheel-barrow, but because there is bark in the dog. Perhaps the reviewers above quoted could not have held in at that moment no matter what novelist had passed by and it happened to be Mr. Galsworthy. Neither he nor they are really to blame for it. They fidgetted merely because they felt fidgetty and long months will no doubt follow in which, say, with Arnold Bennett up to something passionate, Mr. Wells at his wickedest, Bernard Shaw in eruption, new bad words coming out in each instalment of the Oxford Dictionary, and the air thick with volumes of the most terribly lucid sexual explanations, they will face equally grave moral perils with entire composure. Then just as you are dozing over some quite ordinary bedside compound of matrimonial miscalculations and rebellious hearts, they will ring out the wild alarm again—seized by the same old unaccountable spasm over the duality of the two sexes, and the usualness of the usual novel, and the contemporaneousness of their contemporaries.

Continued on page 92

Continued from page 30

Old-Fashioned Rhetoric ,

MR. CHESTERTON deplores the passing , away of the good old-fashioned rhetoric of public speakers. If he had lived in this country he would probably feel less regret. We have been as a nation far too indulgent towards spellbinders and the occasional heckling they now receive is a healthy sign. Take the party oratory of not so very long ago, oratory not designed to win adherents but merely to cheer up those already won. Recall if you can those old bell-wethers of the political conventions. What message had they for the unconvinced? That was the time when oratory was sheltered in the home circle. It was the art of chiming in, and the momentary enthusiasm which followed was the result of the brass band and the flag-wavings and the roarings and pounding of one's neighbors and not of anything that the speaker said.

Reading the speeches in the newspapers afterwards was like visiting the wings of theatres in the daytime. This is true of course to some extent of all oratory, but it is a question of degree. The better sort does not flatten out quite so lamentably even in cold print. In the old days we spoilt orators by our benignity and they presumed on our conviviality. The genial mood which accorded during many years that priceless privilege of vacuity seems to be wearing away. Fossils from what may be called the bryanitic stratum of that geologic epoch would now be regarded even by a purely average intellect with something approaching ennui.

"Behold a republic resting securely upon the foundation stones quarried from the mountain of eternal truth. Behold a republic in which civil and religious liberty stimulate all to earnest endeavor. . . . Behold a republic standing erect. Behold a republic increasing in population. Behold a republic, etc., etc!" This authentic insult to the human mind occurred within the memory of men now living, and so far as can be gathered from the report on that occasion not a blow was struck in return. To be sure it was painful a little while ago to read the speeches in the campaign for New York's mayoralty, and it is still more painful to look back upon them now. The kindness of audiences is still excessive and it is sad to think how many of our public speakers still get away unstoned. But there are signs of an ascending standard of criticism and a descending limit to the public patience, and the time may come, perhaps is even now approaching, when we shall stone them.

A Radical's Elation

M. DUGUIT, according to Professor Beard, has "given a mortal blow to the grand old doctrine" of indivisible sovereignty; somebody else has sent "orthodox Marxism tottering to its fall"; a group of English writers have hurled the "Blackstone-Austinian theory reeling against the ropes"; Mr. Walter Lippman has "shot more than one barbed shaft through the academic hide"; Mr. H. J. Ford has "jettisoned a huge cargo of American delusion"; several strong men are .giving "good old representative government" rather "a sorry time of it"; Mr. Veblen is applying "his scalpel to the cuticle of our national vanity" ; Mr. Bantley has "already tolled his bell in his trenchant 'Process.of Government'"; and Mr. George W. Perkins is "reading a funeral oration over good old individualism". Pluralism, he concludes, is here to stay, and pluralism has its heel on the neck of every sorthodoxy.

Now I have no desire to take off the edge of any man's pleasure in this animated scerie, and least of all Professor Beard's, whose articles I always read with profit Nor do I wish to prop up any of these good, old, grand, old, tottering things. I merely raise the question whetheh the layman, whom on this occasion Professor Beard is addressing, is not entitled to a word of explanation as to what some of these violences were about and why he ought to be happy in them. This sketchy way of putting the matter is not only tantalizing but it probably gives the wrong impression of the professor's point of view. It seems to imply a pleasure not in the fact that the good old things are being replaced by new and better ones but that the good old things are being banged about. It is unfortunate that progressive people should so often confine themselves to congratulating one another on the rapidity with which they move along. In their own interest they should try and hasten us outsiders. There is a good deal of radical writing that seems to consist in the rather barren assertions that the future is now upon us and that it has come to stay.