Part 10 (1/2)
The Mollycoddle engenders ideas, and the Red-blood exploits them. The Mollycoddle discovers, and the Red-blood invents. The whole structure of civilisation rests on foundations laid by Mollycoddles; but all the building is done by Red-bloods. The Red-blood despises the Mollycoddle; but, in the long run, he does what the Mollycoddle tells him. The Mollycoddle also despises the Red-blood, but he cannot do without him.
Each thinks he is master of the other, and, in a sense, each is right.
In his lifetime the Mollycoddle may be the slave of the Red-blood; but after his death, he is his master, though the Red-blood know it not.
Nations, like men, may be cla.s.sified roughly as Red-blood and Mollycoddle. To the latter cla.s.s belong clearly the ancient Greeks, the Italians, the French, and probably the Russians; to the former the Romans, the Germans, and the English. But the Red-blood nation _par excellence_ is the American; so that, in comparison with them, Europe as a whole might almost be called Mollycoddle. This characteristic of Americans is reflected in the predominant physical type,--the great jaw and chin, the huge teeth, and predatory mouth; in their speech, where beauty and distinction are sacrificed to force; in their need to live and feel and act in ma.s.ses. To be born a Mollycoddle in America is to be born to a hard fate. You must either emigrate or succ.u.mb. This, at least, hitherto has been the alternative practised. Whether a Mollycoddle will ever be produced strong enough to breathe the American atmosphere and live, is a crucial question for the future. It is the question whether America will ever be civilised. For civilisation, you will have perceived, depends on a just balance of Red-bloods and Mollycoddles. Without the Red-blood there would be no life at all, no stuff, so to speak, for the Mollycoddle to work upon; without the Mollycoddle, the stuff would remain shapeless and chaotic. The Red-blood is the matter, the Mollycoddle the form; the Red-blood the dough, the Mollycoddle the yeast. On these two poles turns the orb of human society. And if, at this point, you choose to say that poles are points and have no dimensions, that strictly neither the Mollycoddle nor the Red-blood exist, and that real men contain elements of both mixed in different proportions, I have no quarrel with you except such as one has with the man who states the obvious. I am satisfied to have distinguished the ideal extremes between which the Actual vibrates. The detailed application of the conception I must leave to more patient researchers.
One point more before I close. This Dichotomy, so far as I can see, applies only to man. Woman appears to be a kind of hybrid. Regarded as a creature of instinct, she resembles the Red-blood, and it is to him that she is first attracted. The hero of her youth is the athlete, the soldier, the successful man of business; and this predilection of hers accounts for much of human history, and in particular for the maintenance of the military spirit. On the other hand, as a creature capable of and craving sympathy, she has affinities with the Mollycoddle. This dual nature is the tragedy of her life. The Red-blood awakens her pa.s.sion, but cannot satisfy it. He wins her by his virility, but cannot retain her by his perception. Hence the fact, noted by a cynic, that it is the Mollycoddle who cuckolds the Red-blood. For the woman, married to the Red-blood, discovers too late that she is to him only a trophy, a scalp. He hangs her up in the hall, and goes about his business. Then comes the Mollycoddle, divining all, possessing and offering all. And if the Red-blood is an American, and the Mollycoddle an European, then the situation is tense indeed. For the American Red-blood despises woman in his heart as profoundly as he respects her in outer observance. He despises her because of the Mollycoddle he divines in her. Therefore he never understands her; and that is why European Mollycoddles carry off American women before the very eyes of the exasperated Red-blood. ”Am I not clean?” he cries. ”Am I not healthy? Am I not athletic and efficient?” He is, but it does not help him, except with young girls. He may win the body; but he cannot win the soul. Can it be true then that most women would like two husbands, one Red-blood, the other Mollycoddle, one to be the father of their children, the other to be the companion of their souls? Women alone can answer; and, for the first time in history, they are beginning to be articulate.
IX
ADVERTIs.e.m.e.nT
The last two days and nights I spent in a railway train. We pa.s.sed through some beautiful country; that, I believe, is the fact; but my feeling is that I have emerged from a nightmare. In my mind is a jumbled vision of huge wooden cows cut out in profile and offering from dry udders a fibrous milk; of tins of biscuits portrayed with a ghastly realism of perspective, and mendaciously screaming that I needed them--U-need-a biscuit; of gigantic quakers, multiplied as in an interminable series of mirrors and offering me a myriad meals of indigestible oats; of huge painted bulls in a kind of discontinuous frieze bellowing to the heavens a challenge to produce a better tobacco than theirs; of the head of a gentleman, with pink cheeks and a black moustache, recurring, like a decimal, _ad infinitum_ on the top of a board, to inform me that his beauty is the product of his own toilet powder; of cod-fish without bones--”the kind you have always bought”; of bacon packed in gla.s.s jars; of whiz suspenders, sen-sen throat-ease, sure-fit hose, and the whole army of patent medicines. By river, wood, and meadow, hamlet or city, mountain or plain, hovers and flits this obscene host; never to be escaped from, never to be forgotten, fixing, with inexorable determination, a fancy that might be tempted to roam to that one fundamental fact of life, the operation of the bowels.
Nor, of course, are these incubi, these ghostly emanations of the One G.o.d Trade, confined to the American continent. They haunt with equal pertinacity the lovelier landscapes of England; they line the route to Venice; they squat on the Alps and float on the Rhine; they are beginning to occupy the very air, and with the advent of the air-s.h.i.+p, will obliterate the moon and the stars, and scatter over every lonely moor and solitary mountain peak memorials of the stomach, of the liver and the lungs. Never, in effect, says modern business to the soul of man, never and nowhere shall you forget that you are nothing but a body; that you require to eat, to salivate, to digest, to evacuate; that you are liable to arthritis, blood-poisoning, catarrh, colitis, calvity, constipation, consumption, diarrhoea, diabetes, dysmenorrhoea, epilepsy, eczema, fatty degeneration, gout, goitre, gastritis, headache, haemorrhage, hysteria, hypertrophy, idiocy, indigestion, jaundice, lockjaw, melancholia, neuralgia, ophthalmia, phthisis, quinsey, rheumatism, rickets, sciatica, syphilis, tonsilitis, tic doloureux, and so on to the end of the alphabet and back again to the beginning. Never and nowhere shall you forget that you are a trading animal, buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market. Never shall you forget that nothing matters--nothing in the whole universe--except the maintenance and extension of industry; that beauty, peace, harmony are not commercial values, and cannot be allowed for a moment to stand in the way of the advance of trade; that nothing, in short, matters except wealth, and that there is no wealth except money in the pocket.
This--did it ever occur to you--is the real public education every country is giving, on every h.o.a.rding and sky-sign, to its citizens of every age, at every moment of their lives. And that being so, is it not a little ironical that children should be taught for half an hour in school to read a poem of Wordsworth or a play of Shakespeare, when for the rest of the twenty-four hours there is being photographed on their minds the ubiquitous literature of Owbridge and of Carter?
But of course advertis.e.m.e.nt cannot be interfered with! It is the life-blood of the nation. All traders, all politicians, all journalists say so. They sometimes add that it is really, to an unprejudiced spirit, beautiful and elevating. Thus only this morning I came across an article in a leading New York newspaper, which remarks that: ”The individual advertis.e.m.e.nt is commonly in good taste, both in legend and in ill.u.s.tration. Many are positively beautiful; and, as a wit has truly said, the cereal advertis.e.m.e.nts in the magazines are far more interesting than the serial stories.” This latter statement I can easily believe; but when I read the former there flitted across my mind a picture of a lady lightly clad reclining asleep against an open window, a full moon rising in the distance over a lake, with the legend attached, ”Cascarella--it works while you sleep.”
The article from which I have quoted is interesting not only as ill.u.s.trating the diversity of taste, but as indicating the high degree of development which has now been attained by what is at once the art and the science of advertis.e.m.e.nt. ”The study of advertis.e.m.e.nt,” it begins, ”seems to have a perennial charm for the American public. Hardly a month pa.s.ses but some magazine finds a new and inviting phase of this modern art to lay before its readers. The solid literature of advertis.e.m.e.nt is also growing rapidly.... The technique of the subject is almost as extensive as that of scientific agriculture. Whole volumes have been compiled on the art of writing advertis.e.m.e.nts. Commercial schools and colleges devote courses of study to the subject. Indeed the corner-stone of the curriculum of a well-known business college is an elective upon 'Window-dressing.'” That you may be under no misapprehension, I must add that this article appears in what is admittedly the most serious and respectable of the New York newspapers; and that it is not conceived in the spirit of irony or hyperbole. To the American, advertis.e.m.e.nt is a serious, important, and elevating department of business, and those who make it their speciality endeavour to base their operations on a profound study of human nature. One of these gentlemen has expounded, in a book which has a wide circulation, the whole philosophy of his liberal profession. He calls the book ”Imagination in Business”;[4] and I remark incidentally that the use of the word ”imagination,” like that of ”art,” in this connection, shows where the inquirer ought to look for the manifestation, on this continent, of the aesthetic spirit. ”The imaginative man,” says the writer, ”sends his thought through all the instincts, pa.s.sions, and prejudices of men, he knows their desires and their regrets, he knows every human weakness and its sure decoy.” It is this latter clause that is relevant to his theme. Poets in earlier ages wrote epics and dramas, they celebrated the strength and n.o.bility of men; but the poet of the modern world ”cleverly builds on the frailties of mankind.” Of these the chief is ”the inability to throw away an element of value, even though it cannot be utilised.” On this great principle is constructed the whole art and science of advertis.e.m.e.nt. And my author proceeds to give a series of ill.u.s.trations, ”each of which is an actual fact, either in my experience, or of which I have been cognisant.” s.p.a.ce and copyright forbid me to quote. I must refer the reader to the original source.
Nowhere else will be found so lucid an expression of the whole theory and practice of modern trade. That theory and practice is being taught in schools of commerce throughout the Union; and there are many, I suppose, who would like to see it taught in English universities. But, really, does anyone--does any man of business--think it a better education than Greek?
Footnotes:
[Footnote 4: _Imagination in Business_ (Harper & Brothers).]
X
CULTURE
Scene, a club in a Canadian city; persons, a professor, a doctor, a business man, and a traveller (myself). Wine, cigars, anecdotes; and suddenly, popping up, like a Jack-in-the-box absurdly crowned with ivy, the intolerable subject of education. I do not remember how it began; but I know there came a point at which, before I knew where I was, I found myself being a.s.sailed on the subject of Oxford and Cambridge. Not, however, in the way you may antic.i.p.ate. Those ancient seats of learning were not denounced as fossilised, effete, and corrupt. On the contrary, I was pressed, urged, implored almost with tears in the eye--to reform them? No! to let them alone!
”For heaven's sake, keep them as they are! You don't know what you've got, and what you might lose! We know! We've had to do without it! And we know that without it everything else is of no avail. We bl.u.s.ter and brag about education on this side of the Atlantic. But in our heart of hearts we know that we have missed the one thing needful, and that you, over in England, have got it.”
”And that one thing?”
”Is Culture! Yes, in spite of Matthew Arnold, Culture, and Culture, and always Culture!”
”Meaning by Culture?”
”Meaning Aristotle instead of Agriculture, Homer instead of Hygiene, Shakespeare instead of the Stock Exchange, Bacon instead of Banking, Plato instead of Paedagogics! Meaning intellect before intelligence, thought before dexterity, discovery before invention! Meaning the only thing that is really practical, ideas; and the only thing that is really human, the Humanities!”
Rather apologetically, I began to explain. At Oxford, I said, no doubt the Humanities still hold the first place. But at Cambridge they have long been relegated to the second or the third. There we have schools of Natural Science, of Economics, of Engineering, of Agriculture. We have even a Training College in Paedagogics. Their faces fell, and they renewed their pa.s.sionate appeal.
”Stop it,” they cried. ”For heaven's sake, stop it! In all those things we've got you skinned alive over here! If you want Agriculture go to Wisconsin! If you want Medicine, go to the Rockefeller Inst.i.tute! If you want Engineering, go to Pittsburg! But preserve still for the English-speaking world what you alone can give! Preserve liberal culture! Preserve the Cla.s.sics! Preserve Mathematics! Preserve the seed-ground of all practical inventions and appliances! Preserve the integrity of the human mind!”