On the Sense of Beauty Among Lodge Members

Is There, After All, Any More Reason to Trust in the Aesthetic Sincerity of One Group Than Another?

SIMEON STRUNSKY

WHEN we argue (said Jones) that there is no hope for a great Art in a nation addicted to joining Lodges and yearning for dear old Mammy down in Alabam', we perpetrate the serious injustice of ascribing to the American masses a sincerity which they do not possess.

It must be Jones's early newspaper training that impels him to begin his remarks with a "lead", of which the preceding paragraph is a very good example. As everybody knows, it is the reporter's ambition in writing a "lead", to pack his story so completely and tightly into the first paragraph, that all the public has to do is to read the rest of the column in order to find out what the first paragraph is about. Upon that model the present brief essay is shaped. If the reader will only be patient to the extent of approximately fifteen hundred words, the chances are that he will get the meaning of Jones's terse and time-saving introductory sentence.

I wondered where was the injustice in accusing somebody of being sincere.

Jones replied that if a man were on trial for murder, and if he showed that at the time of the murder he was fifty miles away engaged in cracking a safe, it would be manifestly unjust to maintain that the man was constitutionally incapable of committing burglary. This truth, of which he had had dim intimations from time to time, came upon Jones with full force one evening when he happened to drop in at a neighborhood vaudeville house. After the regular bill there was something in the nature of an amateur song contest. The assigned subject was Mammy. As each performer appeared on the stage, the words of his own original conception of Mammy were flashed upon the screen, and the audience was encouraged to yearn along with the author for Time to roll back and carry him to his Mother's knee once more.

The Ubiquitous Mammy

THE geographical location of Mammy (said Jones) varied that night. Now she was under the palmettos down in Alabam'. Now she was under the fig trees, or whatever was the correct foliage, down in Tennessee. Now she was on the front porch of the old homestead on the banks of the Housatonic. But the audience displayed no sectional discrimination. It was for Mammy north or south, right or wrong, white-haired or only with silver threads among the brown, with the familiar gold-rimmed spectacles or without.

Now, among those who were most ardent that evening to be taken back, anywhere from twenty-five to fifty years in time, and from three hundred miles to fifteen hundred miles in distance (said Jones), were two citizens immediately in front of him. They weighed, say, two hundred apiece. The backs of their heads rose straight upon a foundation of corrugated neck. Their faces, during two hours of miscellaneous vaudeville, had revealed a capacity for emotion that might be expressed as a decimal point followed by at least two zeros.

Jones listened to these two wooden images in front of him as they wailed aloud for their Mammy in terms of unmitigated slush, and it came to him with a sense of desolation how sore, indeed, were the prospects for Art in such a milieu. At that moment, said Jones, he felt that he could easily have contributed a chapter to the next forthcoming symposium on America on the Blink, But almost instantly came the illuminating, the ineffably comforting thought: How if they don't mean it?

"How, how, if they don't mean it?" I said.

"I thought I had made myself plain," said Jones. "Here is your sodden mass of American citizenry. They sing Mammy. They yearn aloud for the old home down by the Chattahoochee. They join lodges. They attend Rotary luncheons. Dreadful—if they meant it. But suppose they are no more sincere about it than you and I are sincere when we sit before the embers with dimmed candles and talk in low voices about beauty?"

"Beauty?" I said.

Jones showed some impatience. He said we should never get anywhere if he had to stop every minute and define for my benefit the most ordinary terms of contemporary speech. But sustained wrath is foreign to Jones's nature. Almost immediately he relented, and reminded me how here and there amidst the flat, dead mass of stupidity and taboo and Mammy a few of us were concentrating on beauty; concentrating on the soup on Father's vest, or Mother's goitre, or Sister's open goloshes in the February slop, or in any other way pursuing the fleeting vision of beauty. But, after all, Jones and I were in an infinitely small minority (he said). A synthesis of American civilization as a whole would undeniably be a picture of a Rotary convention saluting the flag in some lodge hall or other just across the way from Mammy's vineclad cottage down in Alabam'.

The Little Herd

"BUT suppose they don't mean it?" said Jones, repeating himself badly. "Suppose Alabam', like beauty, is just a cliche? Or should I say a manifestation of the herdinstinct?"

This time I was determined to show him that I was not so belated in vital matters as he had intimated.

"Oh no," I said, "you must say cliche. Herd instinct went out several months ago."

"It's a pity," said Jones. "Herd instinct suits my purpose so admirably. When a little nerd says beauty and doesn't mean it, and a big herd says Alabam' and doesn't mean it, the future of art is not differently affected."

I suggested that the factor of make-believe does enter into art.

"Very well," said Jones. "That suits me perfectly. If the enthusiasm of the vast majority of the American people for the old lodge swimming-hole down in Alabam' is mere pretence, why, you have there the make-believe on which to build your art. As a matter of fact, you have realized, of course, that people do not ordinarily join lodges because something unbeautiful in their nature impels them to dress up like Marshal Foch?"

I told him I had not realized that fact as definitely as he assumed.

"Men join the lodges," said Jones, "either for the sick and death benefits or, much more often, because it helps in their business. It isn't the pursuit of the ugly that makes the lodge member; it is the desire to tie up with the right people."

"Not always," I said. "I am sure that some people must be quite unselfish in joining."

"Have it your way," said Jones. "That suits me perfectly." And while I was thinking how hard it is to keep your temper with people whom it suits perfectly whatever you say, he continued.

The Eternal Quest

"WHEN a man joins a fraternal order," said Jones, "he is either sincere or he is not. If he is insincere, then he is obviously not blockading himself against the approaches of beauty. If he is sincerely fraternal, that's rather fine, isn't it? The only difference then would be that in Paducah a man is fraternal with his druggist, and with the grain and feed man across the street, while you and I are fraternal with Romain Roll and or Anatole France or Gandhi or someone else five to fifteen thousand miles away. But on the whole I give the American people the benefit of the doubt.

And he went on to say that among ten million people applauding Alabam' there were, proportionately, just as many people who didn't mean it, as among ten thousand people applauding Back to Methuselah. I suggested that beauty meant experience, search, life; whereas the Alabam' meant stagnation.

He replied that he wasn't at all sure. He said he recalled .an occasion, now nearly fifteen years ago, when a young woman asked him whether he didn't think that the young generation was splendidly grappling for a new spiritual anchorage. He recalled the event because, not only was the phrase a striking one, but the young woman was quite exceptionally attractive. Well, only the other day another young woman told him that a certain book was vitally relative to her balance. Here, indeed, was search and change. "But it is also true," he said, "that fifteen years ago, people in the vaudeville houses yearned for their old Kentucky home, and that now the site of the old homestead has shifted to Alabam'."

He thought that the rate of evolution during these fifteen years had been about the same among the followers of beauty and among the fraternal orders.