The Enormously Civilized Minority

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Consideration of Mr. George Jean Nathan's Celebrated Distaste for Things Political

Politics: I have no interest in politics. I have too humorous a disesteem for the democratic form of goverment to be guilty of any such low concern....

THIS passage is taken from the testament of Mr. George Jean Nathan which he recently set down in the American Mercury for the guidance of his biographer. I should like to say a few words about it. For I take an interest in politics, not merely in the high politics of Downing Street and the Quai d'Orsay, but in the politics of Queens County and the price of sewer pipe, and so, while I shall never learn to live as beautifully as Mr. Nathan, I should like to reassure myself that I am not a complete barbarian.

I take courage from the fact that Mr. Nathan's opinion is at worst a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Were Mr. Nathan a mathematician, I should be overawed if he declared that in comparison with the austere elegance of mathematical thinking, politics was a sleazy affair. I should be impressed if he were a philosophical poet, or a Buddhist saint, or an Arctic explorer, or the mother of five slim and handsome boys, or a grower of American beauty roses, or a good and not too rapacious dentist. But Mr. Nathan is a theatrical critic. He is a man who devotes most of his life to considering the New York theatre, and that, it seems to me, removes him from the circle of those whose taste is too exquisite for ordinary mortal companionship. A man who can endure all that Broadway has to offer, who can make a life work talking about the Broadway theatre, is neither so humorous nor so delicately attuned, but that he could endure the grossness and the stupidity of politics under the democratic form of government. For after all popular government is not wholly contemptible if you compare it with popular entertainment.

I do not agree with Mr. Nathan's opinion that his humorous disesteem for politics is due to his superior taste. I think it is due to an inferior education, to a somewhat lazy incomprehension of what politics deal with, and to an imagination which is defective in dealing with realities that are complex, invisible and elusive. Attending a show is much easier than observing the political scene. The whole story is presented at once, and in less than three hours, whereas in politics the show goes on forever, and all that anyone can watch is an episode here and there. That, of course, makes it difficult to discern the plot and to realize the significance of any one episode in the whole story. In the theatre, moreover, the idea has become a story, whereas in politics it remains entangled in the rough confusion of reality. To the mass of men politics are therefore almost never interesting until they can be presented as theatre. For the ordinary human mind insists upon the dramatization of events. This is the only form which it finds easily interesting, and where, as in the theatre, there is not only dramatization but visualization, imagination is aroused with the least possible effort. So most people enjoy the theatre and are bored with politics, not because the theatre deals with more interesting characters and situations, but because it deals with them through a more perfect medium of popular expression.

THIS is the reason, I think, why in a smart and pleasure loving society like our own men will spend evening after evening working themselves up over the tin-pan emotions of the commercial theatre, solemnly discussing illconsidered problem plays and semi-articulate philosophies, while they remain almost entirely oblivious of those great movements of people and of ideas which shape their destiny. I submit that the present debate in England and in America over naval armaments has more intense significance and engages profounder human meanings than any play which Mr. Nathan has reviewed in his lifetime. Its effects will be felt longer. In a thousand subtle ways it will shape more human lives. There is more mystery and terror in it, more prophesy, more poignant tragic possibility. But by the sophisticated classes, of whom Mr. Nathan is such an entertaining spokesman, this high debate between the greatest empire and the most powerful republic in human history, is virtually ignored. It passes them by almost as completely as if they were under an anaesthetic. They live like peasants, cultivating their own little gardens, amusing themselves with legends, never comprehending, never sharing, the whole invisible unfolding of reality amidst which they exist.

It takes too much original mental effort to find out what lies beneath the trivial surface of political manoeuvre and political intrigue. In a play a creative mind has intervened between the audience and what William James used to call the blooming buzzing confusion of reality. In politics you have to take reality in the raw. You have perpetually to be on guard against false arrangements of reality, puncturing rhetoric, deflating legends, destroying ideologies, returning again and again to the raw material. In plays you have reality selected, ordered and explained for you, often by a superior mind. You have reality composed inside a frame with a definite beginning, middle and an end. You have the meaning brought into relief, extricated from its qualifications and its contradictions, and simplified to a conflict in which you can vicariously participate. All this is much easier and pleasanter and more satisfactory than reading the papers and the documents, listening to speeches and studying statistics. All the sweat it takes to reduce reality to order and significance has been done before Mr. Nathan enters the theatre. It has been done, I have no doubt, by men dealing with material as refractory as the material of politics, by men who, if they were as easily stopped by their capacity for humorous disesteem as Mr. Nathan confesses he is, would never write and produce a play. For the spectator and the reviewer the theatre is relatively effortless because the creative effort has been done in advance. But when Mr. Nathan picks up a newspaper, he is driven, if he is to make head or tail of it, to know much that is not apparent, to disentangle the sense from the nonsense, in short, to do his own creative sweating.

THERE is nothing morally reprehensible in being too busy or lazy to go to that much trouble about politics in a democracy. Mr. Nathan is free, white and twenty-one, and if he chooses to live in an ivory tower or at a Broadway hotel, as blandly unconcerned as my dog with the historical process of which he is a part, I salute him and pass on. But when he has the brass to make a virtue out of his unconsciousness, noting it down carefully as one more item in the already rather long list of his superiorities, I suggest to him that this is nothing but Philistinism masquerading as high disdain. The Philistine is a man who comforts himself with the notion that there can't be much in anything which he can't get much out of. He can't read poetry so he laughs at poets. He can't enjoy ideas so he snorts at highbrows. If he can't play golf he calls golf chasing a little white pill around a meadow. Whatever he can't do he does his best to show is not worth doing.

(Continued on page 120)

(Continued from page 39)

Now the art of governing happens to be one of the most difficult arts which men practice. It is more difficult, I think it is fair to say, than reviewing plays. It may even be more difficult than writing plays. At least there have been more masterpieces produced in the theatre than in the chancellories. The art of governing is often practiced by absurd amateurs. Like all the arts, especially the theatre, it attracts a host of second raters and fakers. I do not think Mr. Nathan could surprise me with any new stupidity in politics. But when I am told that this art is a low concern, I set down the man who tells me that as just a trifle dumb.

Dumb in spots. Mr. Nathan is far from being wholly dumb. To my taste he knows the theatre as well as anyone between Thirty-fourth and Fifty-ninth Streets. He knows the theatre better than I shall ever know politics. I sincerely admire him. I think that in addition to being a very shrewd critic he has created a character called George Jean Nathan which is as interesting as any I have seen for a long time on any stage. I think too that he is by way of being a connoisseur of human folly, not a connoisseur of the first order, for he lacks education and sympathy, but nevertheless a man of unusual taste. A sort of gourmet with dyspepsia. Not a man of the world, but at least a man of his own world. But when he talks about matters he doesn't understand he talks through his hat.