Blue Voyage: A Novel (21 page)

“Yes, that’s true, that’s a nice illustration for it. Everybody does worship gold——”

“I made a mistake!”

“That wasn’t
fair
!”

“She
reneged
!”

“But what I say is, if they don’t want to travel the same road with me, let them go their own way.”

“That’s what I say to my son, who joined the Christian Scientists. He’s always after me——”

“
—Episcopalian,
they call it in America——”

“Well, that’s the reason, you see, why I didn’t want to
play
for anything.”

“
Anything,
that’ll keep you in touch with God, that’s the great thing. But they all want to go their own way, nowadays. You can’t prevent it—it’s no use is it? trying to prevent it. But so long as they keep in touch with God, that’s the great thing.”

“—Christ, I mean.”

“Well, I never played it much, I just started.”

“They don’t deny Him. But they say He’s not the Son of God.”

“
—beginning
——”

“They say that Christ was a good
man
. The only thing they deny is His
Kingship
. But what do we mean, I ask you, by Christ? Have you stopped to think about that? That’s a point of very great importance. Is there any reason why we should reserve the title of Christ only for the one individual that was known as Jesus? There have been many Christs since Jesus of Nazareth. There was Saint Francis. There were some of the Popes, too, good and holy men. There was Moody and Sankey. There was Spurgeon. In what way was Spurgeon not deserving of the name of Christ? He gave his life to God—look at all those wonderful words and thoughts of his. And these are only a few. There have been many Christs—some of them lowly people that were never heard of in history. How many have been put on the rack for their faith in God? No man can say. There have been many Christs; and there will be Christs again.”

“We couldn’t have made a whole lot, could we?”

“The ace of diamonds was all I had.”

“Nine of trumps——”

“You have to follow suit, you see.”

“What’ll you do?”

“One spade.”

“One spade.”

“Ha ha ha! You have to say something
different
from her! You don’t follow suit in the
bidding
!”

“Well, if you’ve got one spade you’d better hold on to it!”

“They’re playing euchre, is it?”

“Miss Kennedy? No. She wasn’t a bigot. She might see things in a different light from what you do. But that isn’t bigotry. Because you’re Church—and she’s Chapel—does that give
her
the right to call
you
a bigot? No. Miss Kennedy was a Unitarian, and a God-fearing woman. You might not agree with her, but that wouldn’t make her a bigot.”

“Well—I try to fathom all these things——”

“It’s the way they’ve been brought up, that’s it, isn’t it, Mrs. Covey? They reverence God in their own way. And it seems good to them, just like your way seems good to you. It’s all in the way you’ve been brought up when you’re a child.”

“Well—that’s true, of course—and my husband is right where he says we should all strive to be tolerant—but just the same there’s some things that’s hard to understand or be tolerant of. I’ve had a good deal of religious experience, for after being brought up as a Churchwoman, when I married I became a Wesleyan. And then, singing as I did—I used to sing a lot—I went about a good deal to different sects and societies, and saw a good many different points of view. But some of the Catholic ideas, now, I cannot think they are good. And this although my best friend, a woman I’ve known all my life, died a Catholic. To my idea, the way they use the crucifix is wrong, like a kind of idolatry. For them, their crucifix is just a kind of talisman, to protect you. Just a talisman. And then the way they worship the mother of Christ—that’s another thing that seems to me uncalled for. I used to ask Mrs. Jennings, ‘Why is it you worship the mother of Christ as if she was a god? She was only a mortal woman like you or me.’ And of course, that’s just why it appeals to them. They have her there to represent all the mothers … Lots of my friends have been Catholics.”

(I could see, watching them out of the corner of my eye, that Cynthia and the fair-haired girl were turning, hesitating, there at the top of the companionway, as if at a loss. Should they come down, approach me? Try in some way to catch my eye?… They wavered, Cynthia was biting her lip—they vacillated, waiting perhaps for some sign from me—and then, receiving none, departed slowly forward and did not return. I believe that Cynthia knew that I had seen her. Yes. She
knew;
knew from the stiff unseeing way in which I stood and stared, staring meaninglessly, with awkward profile, at the wholly uninteresting sea. Good God. My folly and weakness are abysmal. Why must I behave in this extraordinary fashion?
Ask dad, he knows
! Ask Clara, the Negro nurse! Ask Mr. Greenbaum, the Latin teacher, who watched me through the crack of the door to see if I was cribbing! Ask that slattern under the arc light, in November, 1909, who caroled at me “Does your mother know you’re out?” Ask the burly Italian in the Apennine train, who said, when I had dismally failed to shut that infernal broken window (and the smoke was pouring in) “
Poco bravo
!” Ask that detestable red-faced redheaded vulgar master (tuberculous, too) who superintended when I was given the water cure, aged seventeen! And the God-impersonating baseball coach who would never trust me with a chance on the first nine!… Ask them all. And ask my dipsomaniac great-grandfather, my charming imaginative fibbing mother, my sensual analytic father, and the delirious wallpaper pattern on my nursery wall.
Behavior is a function of environment
. Selah! I wash my hands of it. But I don’t want to behave like this? Or do I? Is it metaphysically—or physiologically—possible to will the good and achieve the evil? to desire, and not to accomplish? and thus to
become
something which one had not willed? Cynthia’s conception of Demarest is not Demarest’s conception——)

“Well!”

“Well!”

“Now I should like to ask you a whole lot of questions.”

“Ask, and it shall be given unto you.”

“May I inquire what it is you write?”

“Plays. Also an unfinished novel or two. And a few poems.”

“Have any of them been produced?”

“Published, but not produced. That’s the difficulty. Or rather——”

“I dare say you’re too highbrow. Is that it?”

“No. The trouble is deeper than that. In fact, so deep that it’s hard to analyze. I’ve often made the attempt, never with much satisfaction. Not that it matters very much. Ha ha! I always say that, at this point, and of course it’s precisely
that
that matters … the fact that I say, and
do
often believe, that it doesn’t matter, I mean.”

“Not enough faith in yourself, perhaps.”

“No, not exactly that—though that’s a part of it. It’s more general—a sneaking feeling that the whole thing is a snare and a delusion.”

“I don’t get you. You mean the world in general?”

“No—though I often suspect that too; but that’s not just what I mean. No, the sneaking feeling I refer to is a feeling that the arts—and perhaps especially the literary arts—are a childish preoccupation which belongs properly to the infancy of the race, and which, although the race as a whole has not outgrown, the civilized
individual
ought to outgrow.”

“Hm. I see. Or I
don’t
see!”

“No reasonable person any longer believes in magic—but many of the ideas and words and fetishes, which we inherit from the age of magic, still survive in debased forms: mascots, lucky pennies, charms, lucky numbers, fortunetelling, and so on. Well, when we begin as children to use language, we use it as a form of magic power to produce results. We learn to say ‘more’ because when pronounced it will actually
get
us more. And, we never wholly lose this early conviction (though it becomes overlaid and unconscious) that some sort of virtue or power resides in language. When we like a passage in a poem or tale we refer to it as ‘magical.’ We thus indicate unconsciously the primitive origin and nature of the arts. Art is merely the least primitive form of magic … But all this relates chiefly to the
linguistic
side of the literary art. There is also the other side, that part of it which it has in common with the other arts—the psychological content, the affective and emotional necessity out of which it springs. You know Freud’s theory that the ordinary dream is a disguised wish-fulfilment or nexus of them? Well, the work of art performs exactly the same function. Some of these esthetic critics say that
content,
so to speak, doesn’t matter at all; they talk of the ideal work of art as one in which everything has become form, and of the ideal critic as one in whom there is no confusion of the emotions aroused in himself (by the work of art) with the work of art itself. That error seems to me perfectly extraordinary! And yet it is a very common one. For of course this pure form, and pure contemplation, are both chimeras; there ain’t no sich animals. What is the pure form of a potato? The minute you leave out its potatoishness you leave out everything. Form is only an aspect of matter, and cannot be discussed apart from it. You can isolate the feelings and emotions which give rise to a play, but you cannot entirely isolate its form, for its form
responds
to these. Can you conceive of a play which would be entirely meaningless, one which was not only unintelligible, but which also aroused no feelings? Impossible. Language is reference. And its reference is dual: it refers to facts—as the word potato refers to a tuber—but also it refers to feelings; for every individual will have, as the result of his own particular experiences, his own particular
cluster of feelings
about the potato. Do I make myself clear?”

“Not at all. But go on, brother. I may catch up with you at the finish.”

“I’m determined to make you suffer … Let’s assume that I like a certain poem. Why do I like it? The esthetic critic would say that I like it because it’s beautiful, because, in other words, it’s a ‘perfect expression of something’; the
something
you see, doesn’t matter very much, so long as it has been ‘esthetically’ experienced! But this is based on the assumption that all ‘somethings,’ or experiences, are of like value. We know this isn’t true. It would be impossible to make an Iliad out of the buttering of a potato, or a Hamlet out of the paring of one’s nails. These experiences are universal—and could involve no confusion of reference; but they are not of very great interest, or significance, or desirability,
emotionally
. We are all, in a sense, frustrated—we are all of us, each in his particular way, starved for love, or praise, or power, and our entire characters are molded by these thwarted longings. I won’t go into the details of that mechanism, for I don’t know too much about it, probably no more than you do; the point I’m making for is this, that art’s prime function is the gratification of these longings. We can see this, if we like, as a kind of cowardice. We don’t like to grow up; we don’t like to face the bare or ugly facts of life, its privations, its miseries, its failures, its uncertainty, its brevity; we don’t like to see ourselves as mere automata, whose behavior is ‘merely a function of environment’; we don’t like to admit our ignorance as to our origin and destiny, or our impotence in the face of the laws that control us; and so we seek refuge and consolation in that form of daydream which we call art. Reading a novel, we become the hero, and assume his importance as the
center of the action
—if he succeeds, then we too succeed; if he fails, then we can be sure it is against overwhelming odds, against the backdrop of the colossal and unpitying infinite, so that in failure he seems to us a figure of grandeur; and we can see ourselves thus with a profound narcissistic compassion, ourselves godlike in stature and power, going down to a defeat which lends us an added glory … Art is therefore functionally exaggerative. When we find our response to things becoming jaded, when the bare bones of reality begin to show, then we clutch at the cobweb of the fairy tale. Think only of the world of love which literature opens to us! Solomon in all his glory of a thousand wives cannot rival us. We can range from Helen of Troy, or Lesbia, to Imogen with the cinque-spotted mole on her breast; from Isolde to tuberculous Milly Theale; from Cleopatra to Emma Bovary or Raskolnikov’s Sonia; or even to the bawdy ballad of sister Mary, who was bilious!”

“Ah—
there
I begin to follow you!”

“Of course!… Well now, we jump from that to
another
psychological aspect of this process of wish-fulfillment. And that is this. A work of art is good if it is successful: that is, if it succeeds in giving the auditor or reader an
illusion,
however momentary; if it convinces him, and, in convincing him, adds something to his experience both in range and coherence, both in command of feeling and command of expression. And here we come to the idea which is terribly disquieting to the purely
esthetic
critic, who likes to believe that there are absolute standards of excellence in art. For if we take a functional view of art, as we must, then everything becomes relative; and the shilling shocker or smutty story, which captivates Bill the sailor, is giving him exactly the escape and aggrandizement, and therefore
beauty,
that Hamlet gives to you or me. The equation is the same. What right have you got, then, to assume that
Hamlet
is ‘better’ than
Deadeye Dick
? On absolute grounds, none whatever. They are intended for different audiences, and each succeeds. Of course, Hamlet is infinitely more complex than the other. And we can and should record that fact and study it carefully, seeing in art, as we see in our so-called civilization, an apparent evolution from simple to complex. Well, all this being true, why be an artist? Or for which audience?… That’s the horrible problem.”

“I can see you’re in a bad fix. But if you feel that way about it, why
not
give it up? And do something really useless like me—selling chewing-gum or lace petticoats to people who don’t want them? Why not?”