THE WOLF AT THE DOOR
ONE DAY I DINED WITH MAJOR PUTNAM’S SON, MR. G. P. PUTNAM AND HIS wife, the famous air-woman who lost her life flying the Pacific in 1937, and Mr and Mrs. Beebe and others. We dined in New York harbour on the Isle de France, which gave me a very interesting glimpse of the twentieth century, for the decoration of this great ship was entirely of that century. If you go to China you like to see it looking Chinese, and not imitating, say, England; for then you might just as well stay at home. In the same way I like to see a century looking like a century, and not ashamed of itself, aping some better century, or, to use its own language, some correcter period. The reason I hate “correct periods” is that the moment the blight of one of them comes down on an age, the essential thing about all design is gone. The essential thing about design is not whether Jacobean, Queen Anne or Georgian is the correcter period, but whether the design is alive or dead, whether the craftsman is trying to make something beautiful or something correct. There is a joy, or at least a contentment, in trying to do beautiful work, and this joy or contentment will shine back out of the work, to illuminate the spirits of others and become part of pleasant memories, perhaps to be carried far through space and time, by travellers remembering their homes, by old men remembering the haunts of their childhood, and it will be the intention of the worker to give this pleasure, and he will be glad to think he has done it. But the workers that they will get to make what they call genuine antiques will take no pleasure in it, and no pleasure will be put into the making of them; all this is dead work, following exact patterns; and the object of it is not to content but to trick; and the sham that they have put into work will be in it for ever. The whole of the reign of King Edward VII, and many years before it, and many years after, was the period of the genuine antique; I do not know what other name could possibly be given to its furniture. When writing to my wife I said of the Isle de France, “I never saw anything like it on land or sea. It was a triumph of pure 20th-century work: portholes by Lalique, fine modern furniture, the furniture of the renaissance that has by now definitely followed that 30 or 40 years of the genuine antique, most beautiful ironwork in such things as gates etc., vast red pillars, modern statues and pictures that were practically sane, and more than I can describe of what was as new to the eye as anything the furthest traveller could find in any land.”
I am not comparing Lalique with Chippendale or with Sheraton, but live work with dead, craftsmen with imitators. Some say “I greatly prefer the correct period. And you can’t tell the difference when it’s done by an expert.” But I know no voice shriller than the voice of a sham, and to me it cries aloud whenever I meet it. Chippendale would never have been heard of if the curse of the genuine antique had been known in his time, as our great craftsman Ernest Gimson has hardly been heard of. If one enquires further, as to why it was that people in England suddenly deserted the custom of their ancestors and no longer made honest furniture for themselves, I think the reason is that a period of bad taste entered English houses early in the reign of Queen Victoria, evoked by the ostentation of men for whom machinery had made too sudden wealth, and fostered by the bad example of the work of the machine itself. After a while people turned away from ugly designs to find something calmer and lovelier; but the craftsmen were now starving, or, worse still, working for the genuine-antique-mongers, so householders turned back to the men who were dead, when they needed new furniture; and soon the genuine-antique-mongers were doing as thriving a trade as the body-snatchers or resurrection men, of whom Dickens tells, though the resurrection men did at least supply medical students with genuine bodies. Under such conditions an honest craftsman like Ernest Gimson, unable to show a birth-certificate of the correct period, must have found it harder to get employment than any craftsman had ever found it before. But now a new spirit was showing, and designers were designing again. Only the other day a member of the staff of the B.B.C. said to me of the internal decoradon of Broadcasting House, “I am afraid it ‘dates’ rather.” And I realized there was truth in that, and the same might apply to the Isle de France. But that is exactly as it should be! The early 20th century had left its mark on the ages, as no period can do which merely apes another.
The designers of the upholstery of the Isle de France had not only felt, which is the most necessary thing for a designer to do, but had also thought. You might not suppose that it required much thought to shade an electric light, but it is astonishing how many people are unable to do it. The problem is to arrange three things in the following order; the eye, the shade, the globe. But look round you, my reader, if not too much dazzled by the glare, and see in how many houses the following is the order; the eye, the globe, the shade (except for the flies on the ceiling, for whom the arrangement is perfect). It is known that an electric light requires a shade, so a shade is always bought, but in about half the houses in England it is put on the wrong side of the globe, like a present that nobody wanted, put away in an attic. It is known that a bright light flashed in his face may dazzle a burglar; but they dazzle themselves. In the Isle de France there were gigantic vases, over 7 feet high, and hidden in these were the electric globes, which shone upwards, lighting the whole room. We, who are a seafaring people, make our ships more like ships: other countries make them more like floating houses. But I will not further digress by an investigation of these two methods.
I was asked to broadcast, which gave me an opportunity to renew my thanks for much hospitality that had been shown me, and I read a few of my poems. It is curious to think that one may go to a microphone one evening and have a greater audience than Keats or Shelley are likely to have dreamed of having ever. When I entered the broadcasting building I could feel all round me that increased intensity that you might find in a circus or amongst the homes of any of the arts; indeed this was somewhat like the world’s circus.
I was invited to what we should consider in England quite a large luncheon-party, a thousand people. One speaker, speculating about the distance at which he would be heard, made into the microphone a little dig at Canada, alluding to the “frozen wastes” over which his voice would travel; but the microphone was only an amplifier, not extending its usefulness beyond that room, so that the little dig had the somewhat sad air of a dog in a city trying to scratch up pavement.
I went with Mrs. Rockefeller to Mozart’s opera, and the next night she took me to Mrs. Harriman’s box to see Tristan, and so I met another very kind American hostess. Next day I started off to give four lectures in what I hoped was to be the neighbourhood of New York, but I learned from Mr. Pond that the neighbourhood stretched further than I had thought. I went first to Wells College at Aurora near Lake Kayuga, and afterwards to Cornell College at Ithaca. Part of the time I spoke, and for the rest of it I read from my plays and stories. But there is nothing that one can record about a lecture, for even a speech taken down verbatim is a different thing to read than to hear, and speaking and writing are different arts. It may be too that there is an essential difference between speaking to an audience that you can see, and addressing one through the ether, (unless one can sense the unseen audience in some unknown way), for an audience is to a speaker something like what the canvas is to the painter, or rather more than that, say rather what the violin is to the musician.
As for reading plays, it is only by reading his play aloud himself that an author can ever convey its exact meaning; so much depends on our tones when we speak, that print or typescript can scarcely convey what a character in a play is driving at; and an actor who has never seen the author may conceivably play quite a different character from the one the author saw, a plausible, even a reasonable character, but one that, pulling in a different direction from the one in which the author aimed the play, must sooner or later wreck it. The greater the skill of the actor, the bigger the smash must be, if he and the author are pulling in different directions. In prose the meaning should be clear enough without the author having to read it, but there is a thing in prose that might possibly be missed if not so read, and that is the rhythm. I have seen prose that had no rhythm, but rhythm to me is as important in prose as in verse, and though I have known at least one man who said that, if you had anything to say, it couldn’t possibly matter how you said it, yet by some law that is altogether beyond our argument and certainly beyond my understanding, no really great or noble thought is ever uttered without a certain rhythm in prose, or metre in verse, which are a part of the grand air that is natural to it and by which it may always be recognized. Metre and rhythm may be said to be the ships that carry thoughts to posterity, and without which very few drift so far.
At Cornell College I saw something that I had never seen before, numbers of worn-out motor-cars, lying where they had been thrown away. In our civilization the motor was almost new, but here was Time treating them like old boots or hats, things with whose wearing out we were already familiar. And there was a dog there that belonged to all of them, and obeyed none. I suppose he saw no reason to obey any undergraduate, feeling himself practically one of them. One of them, at one of those gatherings at which one sits and talks after a lecture, said to me, “What a good name Sime is for Sime.” I did not quite agree, and said that I thought I could think of a better. So they asked me what, and I suggested Rhibelungzanedroom or Rhibelungzaha, which they agreed would have been more appropriate for this great and mysterious artist.
I went on to Pittsburg, where I was kindly entertained by Miss Sutton, and welcomed at her door by an old negro whose amiability I remember yet. There I lectured at the Twentieth Century Club, or rather I read, at their request, the whole of my play, IF. Then I returned to New York, stopping the night in Harrisburg, where I remember noticing a very neat bullet-hole in the glass of a taxi just behind the driver’s head. Another lecture when I got to New York, and there I met among other friends an old friend, Alan Rogers, a nephew of Mr. McVeagh, of Fasnacloich, who had often stayed with us in Ireland and had become a great friend of my son, whose contemporary he was. He took me afterwards to his flat, with another man and two girls, for whom the show was extended a little and I read one of my short stories for them. Next day Alan Rogers sailed for Japan, where his uncle was ambassador, to begin his diplomatic career, and he later sent me from there a delightful print of a Japanese swordsman, whose sword and eye and every rippling muscle revealed the man’s heart’s desire, which was to mow men’s heads. And later he brought me from Siam two chess-knights exquisitely carved in ivory, which were given to him by a Siamese prince with whom he used to play chess.
I was soon off again, going to Boston to stay the night with my friend Mr. Ellery Sedgwick, and on next day to Brunswick to give a lecture at Bawdoin College. Wooden houses began to appear beside the train, nod scrubby woods, which showed, if the cold did not do it, that we were now some way North. It was the country from which Major Rogers drove the Indians in the middle of the 18th century. I read of him in a thrilling book that was given to me some years later by Mr. Evans, the senior partner of Heinemann’s, who published it. It was called the North West Passage, which was what Major Rogers used to dream about, but he led a very active life besides dreaming. This great leader of men had one extraordinary deficiency, if the author of the book is to be relied on, a deficiency which makes the story of his military life as odd as would be the reminiscences of a one-armed boxer: he appeared to have little idea of a commissariat, and would march from the sack of a well-provisioned town and presently starve, and he would travel starving by rivers without any thought of fish-hooks. Nevertheless it was probably due to him that some of these wooden houses were built and safely inhabited. I had been interviewed at every town I had visited, even in Harrisburg where I had only stayed a night to break the journey, but even when the train by which I now travelled stopped at a station a lady got in for this curious sport, while a photographer on the platform set up his camera. I did not grudge any ideas I might have to anyone that might want to hear of them; but, as I had a cold and it was freezing hard, I explained that they could all get on very well without seeing my photograph. I had an uncle who used to take a strange pleasure in interviews; and, happening to arrive in America at this time and not finding anybody to interview him, he resorted to an odd expedient to secure a few press-cuttings, or clippings as they are called in the States.
I lectured and read at Bowdoin College, and then came the usual talk afterwards in another room to a smaller audience. I think I talked then about an ideal which I have long held, which is that everyone should choose a calling from which others will benefit, in fact that he should work for and not against mankind. Making a box of matches, even a walking-stick, or digging in a garden, are examples of the first kind; working the three-card-trick at race-meetings is an example of the second, though I don’t think I gave them any examples; nor are they necessary, for a man always knows which of the two kinds of work he is doing. It is a difficult topic on which to speak; for many among one’s audience may have made their choice already, and if one or two of them should have chanced to have made the wrong choice they will resent advice that has come too late, whatever they might have done had it come betimes. And yet it is a topic of some interest to the world; for, if a philosophy can be given in a sentence, mine is that the wolf is always at the door. By this I mean that one should live as the woodman lives at the edge of the forest, keeping his door locked and its timbers sound, and knowing that when the door decays or is carelessly left ajar the wolf will force its way in. If anything at all is wrong with our people; if they cheat each other, poison each other, live too luxuriously... but need I go on? We have all seen what happens. Only do not blame the wolf; do not merely abuse Hitler. Do I like Hitler? No. I dislike even his moustache. But abuse is waste of time. Let us stick to our own job, making all about us sound, and be sure that the wolf will always stick to his, which is to sit in the cold and wait till we forget him or till our door rots, and then to follow the nature of the beast and to do such things as many wall always assure us nobody would dream of doing nowadays. Those nowadays! How different we thought them from the days of Attila! We all know better now. Yet in a few years Hitler and Attila will be forgotten, and a few people will be holding commerce to be more important than the thing to be bought, or the man who buys, and a few others will be making other mistakes, and one day the few will have become a sufficient proportion of a nation for Nature herself to notice them, and the wolf will rush in. I don’t think an instance is needed; one need not say which door, and it may be a window. But when any door is unlatched or rotten the wolf will come, and there will always be one waiting. Can a little cheating, a little silly luxury, in a country bring an enemy from the ends of the earth? Is there any possible connection between these things? Some may ask that, so I had better give an instance. I have read that when the French Prince Imperial, in an ambush in Zululand tried to vault on to his horse, a piece of his horse’s accoutrement that he gripped gave way, because it was made of sham leather. Surely a shop-keeper in England putting in a little dishonest work on that saddlery would have heartily derided anyone who suggested that any serious harm could come of it. And yet who knows what that young man might have become? His father had seized the throne of France before him, and so had his great uncle. And he would have had some military reputation to support him. Supposing he had had power in France 40 years later. That would have been in 1919. And he might possibly have lived to take a very different line some years after that, when Hitler entered the Rhineland. I don’t even know that the story of the sham leather is true. But does the gap between a bit of dishonest work and a world deluged in blood seem now quite so wide as it did?