Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—GEORGE SANTAYANA.

Man, biologically considered,... is the most formidable of all the beasts of prey, and indeed the only one that preys systematically on his own species.

—WILLIAM JAMES.

THE war of 1914 ended in an orgy of looting, as any rational being might have known it would, even if he had never heard of the secret treaties which predetermined this ending. It ended as all wars have ended and must end. Any pretence to the contrary is mere idleness. One can say for Brennus that he was no hypocrite, exuding repulsive slaver about “mandates,” “reparations,” and the like. He chucked his sword on the scales, saying Vae victis, and that was that. Of all the predatory crew assembled at Versailles, the only one for whom I had a grain of respect was old Clémenceau. He was a robber and a brigand, but he never pretended to be anything else, and he was a robber in the grand style. His attitude towards his associates pleased me. He regarded Lloyd George, Wilson, Orlando and their attendant small-fry from a lofty height of disdain, as one might imagine Jesse James or Dick Turpin regarding a gang of confidence men, area-sneaks, porch-climbers. He also took no pains to disguise his opinion of them, which delighted me. If you left your watch and pocket-book at home, you could do business with Clémenceau. He would not poison your rum-and-water or besmear your character, and all his cards were on the table. As highwaymen go, one has a good bit of respect for that sort.

In my view, the most significant and distressing result of the war was one which has gone virtually unnoticed; it completed the destruction of Europe begun by the war of 1870. Before that there had existed a very real European spirit, a community of understanding, a reciprocity in culture, which expressed itself in many common modes of thought and feeling, even of action. One gets probably the most complete understanding of it from the writings of the great Weltbürger Goethe. The persistent pernicious meddling of England in Continental affairs had done all it could to check the unifying influence of this spirit on European political organization, and Bismarck, as the architect of the imperial Germany, finished the job. It was after the events of 1870 that the Austrian Reichskanzler von Beust made his celebrated remark, “Europe no longer exists.” This was strictly true. The European spirit, which was the only Europe worth preserving, the only Europe that held any promise for the future, the only Europe that the student of civilised man cared two straws about,—this spirit was finally asphyxiated in smoke from the guns of von Steinmetz and Frederick-Charles.

Economism then had a clear field. The European spirit was everywhere promptly replaced by the spirit of an unintelligent, myopic, dogged, militant, political and economic nationalism, and the war of 1914 fixed this spirit upon Europe forever, as far as one can see. Wilson’s shallow stultiloquence about “self-determination” and “the rights of small nations” rationalised it everywhere to the complete satisfaction of the political mind, and gave it respectability as good sound separatist doctrine. Epstean’s law immediately and on all sides swept in an enormous herd of political adventurers, the innumerable Pilsudskis, Horthys, Kerenskys, Masaryks, Beneshes, big and little, and kept them working tooth and nail to provide pasturage for themselves in a mishmash of little twopenny succession-states. In each of these, strictly according to pattern, they made it their first business to surround themselves with a high-tariff wall and order up a first-class army.

It appeared to me, then, when the war was over, that Western society was an extremely sick patient on the world’s hands, and as happens in the case of certain diseases, its condition would have to get very much worse before it could get better. The palliatives and opiates of political empiricism ladled out like Mrs. Squeers’s brimstone and treacle every morning of the next two decades turned out to be sheer quackery. The effect of this dosage strengthened my conviction that death alone could rid the social body of the bacteria of economism and Statism. It was a fair presumption that as long as the planet can support a population it will have one of sorts, and that the population will organise itself into some form of society. No doubt, then, there would in time be cobbled up in Europe and America a social reconstruction in one shape or another. But before this could take place there must be a longer or shorter period of death-throes in the existing order, a period like the Dark Ages, when “the casual anonymous forces of dissolution will be supreme.” This was what had happened before, and with conditions being what they were, there seemed every reason to believe it was what would happen again.

What puzzled me profoundly was this: The history of all human institutions affords a study which is really very simple, of the operation of three great natural laws in the realm of the spirit. Homo sapiens is so remarkably sapient about the incidence of natural law in the physical world, and so resourceful about adapting himself to it—why, then, is he so impenetrably stupid about recognising the incidence of natural law in the spiritual world, and about accommodating his plans and doings to its inflexible operation? When Homo sapiens discovered that electricity always follows the path of least resistance, it took him no time at all to perceive that the thing to do was to arrange a path for lightning to follow, and then stay out of that path. The habits of electricity are a recondite matter, but Homo sapiens was equal to discovering and dealing with them intelligently. Why is he apparently unequal to discovering and dealing intelligently with the natural laws which can bear so disastrously upon the social institutions which he attempts to form?

In response to an urgent social demand, a revolutionary régime was set up in France in 1789. At the outset it was backed and promoted by men of far-seeing intelligence, including a good part of the aristocracy. They charted the revolution’s course, and made a good job of it. Taine says truly that the French aristocrats were never so worthy of power as when they were on the point of losing it. The thing to be remarked is that the primary interest of these men and the primary intention of the revolution were social.

Then at the moment when the revolution became a going concern, Epstean’s law brought in a waiting troop of political adventurers whose interest was not social but institutional. Their views of the social demand which brought the revolutionary organisation into being were shaped by that interest. As Benjamin Franklin put it, they were of the sort whose sense of political duty is, first, to themselves; second, to their party; and third (if anything be left over) to society. Their aim was to make the revolution serve this institutional interest, and in virtue of their numbers and peculiar aptitudes they rather easily did so.

Then Gresham’s law struck in. As the numbers of this latter group increased, their interest became the prevailing interest, and their view the prevailing view. Social interest was rapidly driven out, and as almost always happens in the case of political revolutions, those who represented it were lucky if they escaped with their lives.

Then finally the law of diminishing returns took hold. As the institution grew in size and strength, as its confiscations of social power increased in frequency and magnitude, as its coercions upon society multiplied, the welfare of society (which the original intention of the revolution was to promote) became correspondingly depleted and attenuated.

These three laws dog the progress of every organisation of mankind’s effort. Organised charity, organised labour, organised politics, education, religion,—look where you will for proof of it, strike into their history at any point of time or place. In view of this, the question of collective behaviour which baffled me was the one which baffled Henry Adams. Why, if Homo sapiens be really sapient, does he not take these laws into account in designing his institutions? I suppose that in his search for an answer, Adams had encountered as much feeble talk about “poor fallible human nature” as I had, and been as impatient with it. He died puzzled, as I expected to do, and should have done if subsequently I had not been lucky enough to come upon Mr. Cram’s theory of man’s place in nature, which answered my question at once. There was a stroke of fate’s irony in this, for Mr. Cram was on friendly terms with Adams; it was he who got Adams’s consent to a commercial publication of Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres. Mr. Cram, however, did not broach his theory until a good many years after Adams’s death.

So as I surveyed the symptoms displayed by high-pressure nationalism in post-war Europe, my knowledge of these three laws gave me a clear idea of what to expect from it. The furore of jubilation over the spread of “democracy” did not impress me, for I knew as well as Chief Justice Jay that “every political theory which does not regard mankind as being what they are, will prove abortive.” The peoples had once more been persuaded, browbeaten, coerced or otherwise bedevilled into the old stock notion that adopting this-or-that political system would make nationalism permanently workable; whereas to make it workable under any system is ludicrously beyond their collective psychical capacities. I did not yet know why it was beyond their capacities; I was willing to believe that in course of progressive evolution it would not always be so. The present fact, however, was that by no conjuration could the thing be done.

II

During the decade following the war I lived in New York for four years, engaged in getting out a weekly publication modelled in format and general appearance after the style of the London Spectator. I had no illusions about the enterprise, for I knew it had no prospect of ever even beginning to pay for itself, and therefore it could not last long. Gresham’s law had already made hay of our periodical literature. My opinion on this point was not asked, and I did not proffer it; in fact, I believe this is the first time I have spoken of it. The venture did, however, present the chance of what I thought might be an interesting experiment, which turned out to be so, far beyond my expectations.

The idea was, first, to see whether such a paper as we had in mind could be produced in this country. I did not believe it could be; I doubted that there was enough latent literary ability of that grade to supply us with contributors. I was soon proven wrong about that. Then, second, we proposed to see whether the quality and character of the paper could be successfully held up from issue to issue. Jumping three or four hurdles of the same height is perhaps no great feat, but jumping fifty-two at a stretch is another matter. Again I had sturdy doubts that this could be done, and again I was proven wrong. Finally, we thought that the paper’s distribution might give us some sort of rough measure of the general level at which the best culture of the country stood. I had my own ideas about this also, and for once I was approximately right. Any one who remembers the state of the public mind in the early ’nineteen-twenties does not need to be told that we launched our experiment under as unfavourable circumstances as could well be imagined; and this made such success as we had all the more satisfactory to me. In my eyes the marvel was, and will always be, that we had any success at all.

We produced what was quite generally acknowledged to be the best paper published in our language. I think it was that. Moreover, its character and quality were maintained at an exact level throughout the four years of its existence. Looking through a volume of any year, one will find each issue precisely as good as those preceding it and those following; precisely the same character of philosophical and literary integrity. No issue had any soft spots or padding, nor did it have any “features” or star contributors. The paper must have made some sort of mark, in a way, for I notice that after twenty years a thin tradition of it still survives. I still see it mentioned once in a while in some connexion, and always with respect, almost always with some little touch of affection.

I feel free to speak thus frankly of the paper’s quality because I had far less to do with forming or maintaining it than people think I had. My chief associate was (or I should say is, for he is still living) one of the ablest men I ever knew, far abler than I, and more experienced. He did not live in New York and had less frequent contact with the office, so on this account I gravitated into the status of a chargé d’affaires. With the business of the concern I punctiliously had nothing to do. I think an editor should follow the line of William Winter’s policy, who throughout his long career as a critic of the drama steadfastly refused to meet an actor or actress or (I believe, but am not quite sure) a stage-director or producer. Our business manager was an old friend and a sensitive gentleman who kept as decorously out of my cabbage-patch as I out of his. Our relations were affectionate and delightful, but we never talked business.

Once only he criticised my judgement. It was at the outset, when we were setting up the office and I had put out bait for a stenographer. After the usual run of unemployable applicants had subsided, Miss A was announced, and a drooping, drawling, slacktwisted creature produced herself and collapsed into a chair. We had a few words, and I told her to be on hand next day, and meanwhile to stop in at the manager’s office and tell him to put her on the payroll. The manager was disgusted. “You’re a fine one,” he said. “That wishy-washy wench you sent down this morning doesn’t know enough to come in when it rains. You’d let any pretty red-head with a drawl and a seventeenth-century face wander in here any time and pull your leg.” The young lady dawdled in next morning and went to work. A month later she graduated out of stenography, and at the end of four months she had mastered the routine of proofreading, indexing, making up dummies, seeing the paper through the press, and was running the office.

I mention this because it brings me around to my qualifications as an executive. I had only two. I am probably the poorest judge of character now living; none could be worse. A person might be a survivor of the saints or he might be the devil’s rag-baby, for all I should know. But I never yet made the mistake of a hair’s breadth on a person’s ability, one might almost say sight-unseen. If a captain of industry made me his personnel-manager he would find me worth a ducal salary. This gift is no credit to me, so I can speak of it without immodesty; I was born that way. I can smell out ability as quickly and unerringly as a high-bred pointer can smell out a partridge.

My second qualification was the belief that a good executive’s job is to do nothing, and that he can’t set about it too soon or stick at it too faithfully. In our early days, when some one asked me how something ought to be done, I would look at him in a vacant kind of way, and say I didn’t know—hadn’t thought about it—couldn’t just say, at the moment—how would you do it? So-and-so. Well, probably that’s all right—you might take it up with the other people and see if they have any ideas. In this way they soon stopped looking to me for directions. I never gave any directions or orders; sometimes a suggestion but only as the other staff-members made suggestions, provisionally, and under correction from any one who had anything better to offer. I did not assign subjects for editorial treatment. Each of us picked his own, and we all discussed them together, once a week. I did a good deal of writing for the paper at one time and another, but the managing editor treated my copy like any one else’s; it was in no way sacrosanct.

This plan of action was practicable because there were three superexcellent editorial minds on the staff, and all of them totally inexperienced. I knew what their abilities were as soon as I laid eyes on them, and I would not let any one who had had any experience come on the premises. Thus these persons had nothing to unlearn, they were not unconsciously bound by any editorial conventions, and when they met a difficulty they would deal with it by the untrammelled application of excellent ability and sound common sense.

My little ways as an executive, however, reacted on me by setting up my reputation in the office as a rather amiable imbecile, and I doubt I ever quite lived it down. It was well along in our second year, I remember, when I overheard one of the girls talking to some woman who had come in with something on her mind which apparently she was proposing to unload on me. “Oh, don’t talk to Mr. Nock,” the girl said. “He doesn’t know anything about that. Mr. Nock doesn’t know anything about anything. Go in and talk to Miss X.” I was so delighted by this that whenever I saw the girl afterwards I could hardly keep from thanking her for the compliment.

Miss X was my secretary for the whole of our four years, barring the first month. When I finally told the lackadaisical Miss A that she was getting too good for me and would have to move on, I commissioned her to scratch me up a substitute. In a day or two she brought in Miss X, smaller and younger than herself, and even prettier. Within a week I began to learn what petticoat government is, and I kept on learning that bitter lesson to the end. Miss X had Scots blood and an idea of domestic discipline which was truly Scottish. I never got up courage to ask her whether she had been reared in the Calvinist persuasion, but she might well have been. I sometimes suspected that her predecessor had put her up to taking me on as a sort of problem-child but whether so or not, that is what she did from the first day of her sojourn with us. I could do nothing of my own motion; my soul was not my own. She told me what I must do, always something I preferred to put off, and what visitors I must see, usually some one I preferred not to see; and she stood by with sweet, calm, quiet, gentle, cussed persistence to see that I did as I was told. The worst of it was that the wretched girl was always right, so what could one do?

I mention her because she was closest to me, and therefore her attitude towards me was probably the best index of the general estimate which the office put upon my intelligence. I had a pet name for her which I have forgotten, perhaps Lollipop—something of the kind. One day when an eminent and dignified professor and his wife were in my room, talking about an article which he was bringing out in our next issue, I stepped to the door (for I had no push-buttons on my desk, nor yet a telephone, Gott soll hüten) and called Lollipop to fetch me a proof. After my visitors had gone, I heard one of the girls say, “I think you ought to tell Mr. Nock to call you Helen when such distinguished people are around.” Miss X replied, “No, he couldn’t remember that name five minutes to save his life.”

In the true and proper sense of the word we were a radical publication, and gave ourselves out as such. That is to say, we struck straight through to the root of whatever subject we discussed. We had no ink to waste on superficialities. We were not taken in by buncombe or clap-trap, and while we were urbane about it, we managed to let our readers know our opinion of those who hawked these commodities. Thus, as Mr. Beard says of us in his history of the period, we scattered acid on many a sacred convention. Once in a while, not often,—we never overdid it,—in a good-natured way we especially enjoyed upsetting some extra-preposterous mare’s-nest which our Liberal friends were solemnly exploiting. In an incurably convention-ridden, truth-dreading, humbug-loving society, this could hardly be called giving the people what they wanted, and we took no umbrage when it was found unpalatable. There is some satisfaction in seeing now how very little the test of time has left us to regret or retract; and how much there is which we said was so, and which the people have belatedly found out is so.

In one way, our editorial policy was extremely easy-going, and in another way it was unbending as a ramrod. I can explain this best by an anecdote. One day Miss X steered in a charming young man who wanted to write for us. I took a liking to him at once, and kept him chatting for quite a while. When we came down to business, he diffidently asked what our policy was, and did we have any untouchable sacred cows. I said we certainly had, we had three of them, as untouchable and sacred as the Ark of the Covenant. He looked a bit flustered and asked what they were.

“The first one,” I said, “is that you must have a point. Second, you must make it out. The third one is that you must make it out in eighteen-carat, impeccable, idiomatic English.”

“But is that all?”

“Isn’t it enough for you?”

“Why, yes, I suppose so, but I mean, is that all the editorial policy you have?”

“As far as I know, it is,” I said, rising. “Now you run along home and write us a nice piece on the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin, and if you can put it over those three jumps, you will see it in print. Or if you would rather do something on a national policy of strangling all the girl-babies at birth, you might do that—glad to have it.”

The young man grinned and shook hands warmly. We got splendid work out of him. As a matter of fact, at one time or another we printed quite a bit of stuff that none of us believed in, but it all conformed to our three conditions, it was respectable and worth consideration. Ours was old-school editing, no doubt, but in my poor judgement it made a far better paper than more stringent methods have produced in my time.

As soon as I saw that the success of our experiment was certain and, if I may say so, that it would be rather distinguished, my interest began to dribble away. For some time I knew I had worked myself out of a job, as I had all along meant to do, and when we stopped publication I felt no regret, but only, like Spencer at the end of the Synthetic Philosophy, a sense of “emancipation from a long task.” The clear proof that I had become a superfluous man in our enterprise came towards the end of our third year. I abruptly dropped everything and went to Germany, leaving instructions that the paper should not be sent me, and that no one should write me any letters under any circumstances. I was away about three months. When I returned I called for all the issues that had come out in my absence, and went over them line by line. Nowhere could I find a jot of evidence, not even a suggestion, that I had been off duty for as much as a day.

This was precisely as it should be. I once heard a story of Thoreau which by internal evidence should certainly be authentic, though I do not know that it is. When he took up his father’s trade of pencil-making he worked at it diligently until he had made the definitive pencil, the pencil which in every respect was beyond his power of improvement. Then he shut up shop and made no more pencils. He was a superfluous man in the pencil-making business. He had shown that the thing could be done, shown how it could be done, he had hung up his achievement in plain sight of any one who wished to look at it, and that was that. One pencil was enough to prove his point, so why make any more?

A month ago I was dining with one of the country’s great industrialists when something that was said led up to this story of Thoreau, and I told it. The industrialist promptly said he thought Thoreau was a fool. There I had before me the product of two mutually exclusive philosophies. Economism would insist that having made the perfect pencil, Thoreau should make more pencils and sell them for money with which to buy more material to make still more pencils to sell for money to buy still more material, and so on, because the making and selling of pencils is the whole content of life. Thoreau did not believe it is the whole content of life. It was clear that economisim’s philosophy was the only one which my companion was capable of accepting. Detach him from his particular specialised practice of it, and existence would have no further meaning for him; and in this he was representative of the great bulk of society in this present age.

I find that I have gossiped at great length about my editorial adventure, perhaps too discursively. Nevertheless, with the aid of a little imagination the reader may easily see that the experience was invaluable in consolidating my views of life and in certifying that my demands on life were rational and sound. The best way to make sure of how much one actually knows of a thing, and especially to find out how much one does not know, is to write about it. When one writes from the standpoint of a certain philosophy week by week one is continually thrown back upon one’s fundamental principles and positions to reëxamine them and satisfy oneself that the logic of one’s conclusions from them is water-tight. My experience was diversified and searching, and like virtually all of the weightier experiences which luck has brought my way, it came at precisely the right time for doing me the most good.

Four years to a day, or rather to a week, from the date of the paper’s first issue, our enterprise closed down. It was on a Friday evening that we of the staff bade one another farewell; and at eleven o’clock next morning, when the Dutch liner Volendam moved out of her slip, I was aboard her on my way to Brussels.