OPINIONS

by CLAUDE WASHBURN NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY PUBLISHERS {iv} First published 1926 Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. Constable Ltd. at the University Press, Edinburgh {v} TO T. R. YBARRA

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Of the following essays, ‘Zenith’ and ‘Black-and-White’ originally appeared in The Freeman, ‘Sophistication’ and ‘The French’ in The Nineteenth Century and After. My thanks are due to the editors of both publications for permission to reprint those essays here.

C. C. W.

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PREFACE

Which should by all means be read, being quite as much an essay as any one of those that follow, and, if not the best, at any rate the shortest; so that it affords a swift and almost painless means of determining whether it is worth while to borrow the book.

Opinions are troublesome things, especially to a writer of novels. Members of the latter, not very lovable tribe frequently assert that the characters they create acquire a life of their own, take the bit in their teeth, and become altogether unmanageable. This is as it may be. Novelists are not among the most veracious of people, and are apt to state as true, if in a whimsical deprecatory manner, things about their work that they only wish were true. ‘How did I come to write Wayfarers? Really I can hardly say. Once begun, the book seemed to write itself.’

What is much more certain is that opinions have a life of their own. They form gradually in one’s mind and must be got rid of ever so often, {x}like clogging sediment in a water-pipe; they will be expressed. And the reason that they trouble especially the writer of novels is that he will again and again find himself putting them in the mouths of characters who would never have held them.

For it is a curious fact that a writer cannot rid himself of opinions (or of anything else) save by writing them down in a book. He may unload them repeatedly on conversation, he may shout them to the house-tops—all to no avail. But once he has embalmed them in print he is released from them, perhaps does not even believe in them any longer, and sets involuntarily about collecting other different opinions.

Why this should be so is a mystery. Unless the writer is even more than usually vain, or unless he is one of the very few whose books are in every home and whose opinions therefore presumably sway thousands (only I don’t believe they do), he must in his heart be aware that nothing he has written has had the slightest effect on any one, that nothing any one has written has had much effect, and that immortality is a myth. No, there he and I are wrong. There is one way to literary immortality, a small immortality but assured: to have a book printed in the Tauchnitz Edition. Miss Rhoda Broughton’s name may be to the world at large but a shadowy{xi} memory, Mrs. Mackarness’s a total blank, but for ever and ever, on rainy afternoons, in dingy German or Italian pensions, elderly English spinsters will, in default of anything else to do, read tattered Tauchnitz copies of Cometh Up as a Flower and A Peerless Wife. They will be bored—but they will read them.

At any rate, your writer of novels, if he is to go on writing novels that at all satisfy him for the moment (though why he should, God knows!), must occasionally get rid of his opinions by means of a volume of essays; which does him good and does no one else any harm.

And that is what I have set out to do here.

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ON LIVING ABROAD

This is not an essay in defence of living abroad nor yet a plea to others to choose such a life. Rather, it is in the nature of a dispassionate explanation intended respectfully for those who wonder why a good many Americans who are neither loafers nor sentimentalists endeavouring to escape backward into what they fancy to have been the Utopian life of the twelfth century (or was it the thirteenth?) do prefer living abroad to living at home.

The first and very natural objection of such readers would probably be: ‘You are cut off from the life to which you belong.’ But is this really true? It would be true of, say, an Italian coming to America. He is indeed cut off, and unless he has a very strong personality his character suffers for it. A certain looseness comes. But it is not equally true of an American who emigrates to Italy. The Italian has strong bonds, roots that go down and down and link him to an incalculable past. (Which is both valuable and harmful). The American lives like some drifting rootless water-plant. Family for him is something to get away from; at least it does not postulate the obligations it does abroad. And he has seldom ties of place. So few Ameri{2}cans live at maturity in the house or even in the town where they were born that those who do are made the subject of quaint, rather emasculated, dialect stories in our more expensive monthly magazines. There is an appearance of national life because so many thousands are doing the same thing at the same time—reading the same advertisements,

wearing the same kind of clothes, going to the same movies; but they are not consciously performing the same duties. In existence we are a gregarious nation, but existence is nothing; in real life we are intensely lonely, isolated individuals—as much so as if we lived in Europe. Perhaps this would be as it should be, a foundation for individual achievement, if we would recognize it and rejoice in it. But no nation in the world is so wistfully desirous of a unity that, despite appearances, it has not got. All sorts of judgments, mostly idiotic, have been passed on Americans by Europeans, but there is at least one which is profoundly true: that Americans want pathetically to be liked. This is at once a sign of weakness in us and a proof of frustration; it reveals the fact that we have not the unity we crave. We huddle together for comfort, but, because we are doing childish insignificant things, we get no closer for that. It is true that individuals can never get very close to one another. Still, two men even at opposite ends of the earth

may exchange a few lines of writing that can profoundly influence the {3}life of each. But two men side by side, brushing their teeth ...?

So, leaving all this, one is not really leaving a life-in-common. If I go to see a baseball game, what is it to me that ten thousand others are also there watching it? The real question is: of how much value to me and to each of the ten thousand is the baseball game? Also, leaving all this, one is thrown frankly upon himself. Living among people who speak a different language and have different customs, he can no longer be supported by that illusory sense of companionship. If he has any strength of character he presently finds this an immense relief and becomes aware that at home his time was recklessly wasted on a thousand things that meant nothing to him—that did not touch his mind or his heart. To take the most trivial example, the telephone system in Italy or France is so bad that there he will almost never use a telephone; which at once frees him from something very like tyranny.

This sense of freedom is not the least of the advantages of living abroad. In large part, no doubt, it comes from one’s not really belonging to the life about one, since however well one gets to know a foreign country it always remains foreign, and though one acquire fluency in the language it must always, unless learned in childhood, be spoken more consciously—and conscientiously—than one’s own. But this is not the whole story. One is, too, aware of a greater freedom surrounding him in European—at least in Latin European—countries than in his own America. There is stronger indi{4}vidualism, less herd spirit, greater divergence of opinion. Individuals appear less like one another, and eccentricities that would almost ostracize men from their disapproving fellows in America are in France and Italy accepted with a smile. The sensitive American, especially if he is one of the many who have suffered bitterly at school and college and dully afterward from the intolerable oppression of herd standards, breathes in this relative

freedom deeply with a sense of sudden release. It is true that after a while, if he is observant, he perceives that the liberty is not, as perhaps he first thought it, something deep affecting the fundamentals of life, but, rather, a freedom from unnecessary rules for existence. He may even come to explain it as the result of a number of very superficial things—the comparative absence of standardizing advertisements, for example, the lack of universally read magazines, the smaller size of newspapers, the greater localism of feeling—though whether such things are cause or result remains a question to him. At any rate, even when estimated at only its proper importance, the sense of freedom still remains as something gracious.

Curiously enough, as our expatriate learns to understand better this delightful surface freedom, he begins to discern beneath it, in things that have to do not with existence but with life, some very rigid laws—more rigid than any beneath the surface in his own country—recognized unshirked duties. The greatest of these is the{5} accepted burden of the family. In America children early shake themselves free from their parents. More often than not, a grown man’s life is completely cut off from that of his father and mother, especially after his marriage; he frequently lives in another city than that where they live; the whole adventure of bearing and rearing him becomes to them as well as to him almost as though it had not been; not uncommonly he evades the responsibility of giving them a home when they are in need of one in their old age. As for uncles, aunts, and cousins, the average American avoids them with distaste. In Italy and France you get the opposite extreme. Except in the detached, irresponsible and less

national aristocracy, family ties are tremendously strong. A family is always closely bound together, even in its obscure ramifications of cousinship. However much its individual members may dislike one another they accept unquestioningly the family duties. Grave financial sacrifices are assumed as a matter of course. In many years of living in Italy I have never yet had servants who did not send the greater part of their wages to their parents, or known a single individual of the bourgeoisie or the provincial aristocracy who would not as a matter of course give up something he really wanted to do with a friend for the sake of something he ought to do for a relation. As for the peasants, no matter how poor, they will support ailing brothers or cousins, and even the wives and children of these, in perpetuity; for among the peasants,{6} who are the most truly Italian of all Italians, the family is law—the only law.

This undoubtedly has its defects. The better an American comes to know Italy or France (where the influence of the family is almost equally strong) the more he feels the often disastrous tyranny of this universal obligation. Yet it is more admirable than harmful; for in a world only too full of greed and selfishness it supplies a bed-rock of self-sacrifice, an anchor in something solid and permanent for the individual, and it creates a strong national life, which we Americans, for all our standardization of existence, are without. You have, in short, in Italy and France, the exact opposite to life in America. In the latter country there is unanimity, all but identity, of behaviour in superficial things, with, beneath, no convictions, no obligations, a chaotic emptiness; in the former countries below a surface freedom approximating licence there is a life founded on stern unquestioned laws.

One of the dangers (and they are many) for Americans who live abroad is that, not sharing the real life of the country, they get all the surface freedom without any of the underlying obligations. Trivial as the American’s obligations at home were—obligations to speak, dress, and behave like his fellows—they at least bound him to something, even if it was a silly something; and it is safer to be bound by some duties, though they are only to do a ‘daily dozen’ or to support Americanization, than to{7} be bound by none at all. For those Americans who do not look beneath the surface, or, looking, do not care, or whose character is weakened rather than strengthened by sudden freedom, the Latin countries of Europe are a dangerous place of residence. I have seen many such. They become very petty, very selfish, and so lazy that they do not even take the trouble to learn decently the language of the country in which they live, but play, instead, with other expatriates like themselves. Since at home their standards were imposed from the

outside, instead of evolved from within, and are now at one stroke abolished, they grow limp and flaccid in character and pick up any tawdry vice that appeals to their standardless weakness. Frequently the men go in for homo-sexuality, since somehow this seems to harmonize with living futilely and prettily with nothing to do but to look after the rose gardens about their villas. They are quite mad—in a mild suave way. Their only care in life is that they are occasionally blackmailed. Also they are gently fuddled most of the time. But their rose gardens are very pretty.

However, this is by the way. What denationalized Americans of this sort do is of no conceivable importance to any one, and the fact that they might have failed to do it had they remained at home is of little greater moment. They drift above life like soap-bubbles on a gentle breeze, and when they burst no one even cares. The real question is: what can be done{8} by an American of a little more character with the freedom that such as these misuse?

A great deal, I think. For a writer or a painter it is invaluable. It gives him a blessed feeling of space around himself that becomes more precious to him than all the soft comforts of America, that becomes indeed the one superlative comfort. At last he has elbow-room—and peace to think down to the bottom of his thoughts. Let him but guard his gift of freedom jealously and he can have evening after evening of solitude. In America he must have fought rudely to obtain even half-hours of solitude, since nobody could understand that he wanted it. He builds up about him now a peace that is not empty but the richest of all mediums. Any flight, any surrender, any subterfuge, was justifiable to obtain it—provided he does something with it; and if he does not, the punishment will be swift and he alone the sufferer, for the full sense of space will become an aching emptiness and his precious leisure a burden.

A lesser but quite genuine advantage in living abroad is the wider variety of one’s surroundings. I have lived in half a dozen different cities or villages, besides those in which I have merely sojourned for a short time, and each place had its own special flavour. To respond to the stern austere beauty of the Syracusan plain and then to the blurred softness of Taormina, to the dainty toy-like perfection of Lake Orta and then to the breathless magnificence of Garda, is to draw from every side of one’s nature.{9} But there is also a wider human variety. One can know more kinds of people here (I am writing now of Italy, where I have lived longest) than at home. For example, in America I and all my friends are barred from even superficial acquaintance with men who work with their hands. This, no doubt, is chiefly because America has become an industrial country, and it seems especially hard for members of other classes to know industrial labourers anywhere. But in Italy, except in a few large cities such as Milan and Turin, industrial workers do not form

a separate homogeneous class. There is this young man, who is the son of your or some one else’s gardener, or that, who is cousin to the peasant family at the foot of your hill. Besides which, Italy is largely an agricultural country. The peasants are in some ways odd inscrutable people, yet one does, with reservations, get to know those who live near-by—as well, perhaps, as in America one gets to know one’s neighbours, the insurance man, and the banker. (As far as that goes, a peasant’s mind does not seem to me any more inscrutable than a banker’s). But there is still another difference. In America manual labourers are mostly of foreign birth, so that it is doubly hard to get to know them. How can I get in touch with a Finn? His language, his antecedents, his manner of thought, all are strange to me. In the small and delightful town of southern Minnesota where my father lived as a young man, there appears to have been at that time a very agreeable community life.{10} The farmers in the country round about were of one

blood with the town-dwellers—chiefly of New England origin, Anglo-Saxons all, save for a slight mixture of Germans; and the professions in the town were recruited from among the sons of farmers. I don’t know whether the townspeople had a feeling of social superiority to the farmers; probably they had. But there was no gulf between them; they were of the same race and understood one another. To-day the townspeople remain principally Anglo-Saxon, but the country round about is farmed by Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns. The townspeople do not understand them nor they the townspeople. And you get the condition that Mr. Sinclair Lewis depicted, if rather too gloomily, in Main Street. In his unconvincing portrayals of a Scandinavian servant and a Scandinavian labour agitator one felt him straining, unavailingly, for a comprehension which he lacked the knowledge to attain.

In Italy peasants are of one race with the doctors, lawyers, land-owners, and provincial aristocracy (as distinguished from that of the great historic families in, for instance, Rome, which are cosmopolitan in their way of living, and so mixed in blood through intermarriage with foreigners that they are by now almost as American, English, French, or Austrian as Italian). It is perhaps impossible to know the peasants intimately, but it is not difficult to know them fairly well; and such knowledge adds greatly to one’s experience. I think there are times when all of us feel{11} impatient at knowing none but those who work with their brains and only think about or traffic in the things that other men have grown or built with their hands. This is a feeling easily capable of exaggeration. Carried too far it leads to the foolish belief, not uncommon to-day, that only those who work with their hands and create the physical wealth of the world are of value in it—which, of course, would reduce all life to mere existence. But

perpetual contact with the earth does make for sanity and for something not far removed from wisdom. I esteem the Italian peasants, especially those of Tuscany, as highly as any class of men with which I am acquainted. They are calm but alert; they are, I believe, in the main, kindly; they are tenaciously attached to the land; they work indefatigably; they have an infinitely deeper and truer culture than, for example, the supposedly higher class of shopkeepers, and, especially, a serenity approaching fatalism, that leads them to regard all governments with indifference and consider wars in much the same way as they consider earthquake or drought. There is a splendid permanence about them. Acquaintance with them is the best antidote I have found to that desperate apprehension of universal meaningless chaos that every man must so often feel to-day—to what Mr. Bernard Shaw so well expressed when he said it sometimes seemed to him that this world must be a place used by the other planets as an insane asylum.

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