Frenzied Fiction/This Strenuous Age
XII—This Strenuous Age
Something is happening, I regret to find, to the world in which we used to live. The poor old thing is being “speeded up.” There is “efficiency” in the air. Offices open at eight o’clock. Millionaires lunch on a baked apple. Bankers eat practically nothing. A college president has declared that there are more foot pounds of energy in a glass of peptonized milk than in—something else, I forget what. All this is very fine. Yet somehow I feel out of it.
My friends are failing me. They won’t sit up after midnight. They have taken to sleeping out of doors, on porches and pergolas. Some, I understand, merely roost on plain wooden bars. They rise early. They take deep breathing. They bathe in ice water. They are no good.
This change, I am sure, is excellent. It is, I am certain, just as it ought to be. I am merely saying, quietly and humbly, that I am not in it. I am being left behind. Take, for example, the case of alcohol. That, at least, is what it is called now. There were days when we called it Bourbon whisky and Tom Gin, and when the very name of it breathed romance. That time is past.
The poor stuff is now called alcohol, and none so low that he has a good word for it. Quite right, I am certain. I don’t defend it. Alcohol, they are saying to-day, if taken in sufficient quantities, tears all the outer coating off the diaphragm. It leaves the epigastric tissue, so I am informed, a useless wreck.
This I don’t deny. It gets, they tell me, into the brain. I don’t dispute it. It turns the prosencephalon into mere punk. I know it. I’ve felt it doing it. They tell me—and I believe it—that after even one glass of alcohol, or shall we say Scotch whisky and soda, a man’s working power is lowered by twenty per cent. This is a dreadful thing. After three glasses, so it is held, his capacity for sustained rigid thought is cut in two. And after about six glasses the man’s working power is reduced by at least a hundred per cent. He merely sits there—in his arm-chair, at his club let us say—with all power, even all desire to work gone out of him, not thinking rigidly, not sustaining his thought, a mere shapeless chunk of geniality, half hidden in the blue smoke of his cigar.
Very dreadful, not a doubt. Alcohol is doomed; it is going; it is gone. Yet when I think of a hot Scotch on a winter evening, or a Tom Collins on a summer morning, or a gin Rickey beside a tennis-court, or a stein of beer on a bench beside a bowling-green—I wish somehow that we could prohibit the use of alcohol and merely drink beer and whisky and gin as we used to. But these things, it appears, interfere with work. They have got to go.
But turn to the broader and simpler question of WORK itself. In my time one hated it. It was viewed as the natural enemy of man. Now the world has fallen in love with it. My friends, I find, take their deep breathing and their porch sleeping because it makes them work better. They go for a week’s vacation in Virginia not for its own sake, but because they say they can work better when they get back. I know a man who wears very loose boots because he can work better in them: and another who wears only soft shirts because he can work better in a soft shirt. There are plenty of men now who would wear dog-harness if they thought they could work more in it. I know another man who walks away out into the country every Sunday: not that he likes the country—he wouldn’t recognize a bumble bee if he saw it—but he claims that if he walks on Sunday his head is as clear as a bell for work on Monday.
Against work itself, I say nothing. But I sometimes wonder if I stand alone in this thing. Am I the only person left who hates it?
Nor is work all. Take food. I admit, here and now, that the lunch I like best—I mean for an ordinary plain lunch, not a party—is a beef steak about one foot square and two inches thick. Can I work on it? No, I can’t, but I can work in spite of it. That is as much as one used to ask, twenty-five years ago.
Yet now I find that all my friends boast ostentatiously about the meagre lunch they eat. One tells me that he finds a glass of milk and a prune is quite as much as he cares to take. Another says that a dry biscuit and a glass of water is all that his brain will stand. One lunches on the white of an egg. Another eats merely the yolk. I have only two friends left who can eat a whole egg at a time.
I understand that the fear of these men is that if they eat more than an egg or a biscuit they will feel heavy after lunch. Why they object to feeling heavy, I do not know. Personally, I enjoy it. I like nothing better than to sit round after a heavy lunch with half a dozen heavy friends, smoking heavy cigars. I am well aware that that is wicked. I merely confess the fact. I do not palliate it.
Nor is food all, nor drink, nor work, nor open air. There has spread abroad along with the so-called physical efficiency a perfect passion for information. Somehow if a man’s stomach is empty and his head clear as a bell, and if he won’t drink and won’t smoke, he reaches out for information. He wants facts. He reads the newspapers all through, instead of only reading the headings. He clamours for articles filled with statistics about illiteracy and alien immigration and the number of battleships in the Japanese navy.
I know quite a lot of men who have actually bought the new Encyclopædia Britannica. What is more, they read the thing. They sit in their apartments at night with a glass of water at their elbow reading the encyclopædia. They say that it is literally filled with facts. Other men spend their time reading the Statistical Abstract of the United States (they say the figures in it are great) and the Acts of Congress, and the list of Presidents since Washington (or was it Washington?).
Spending their evenings thus, and topping it off with a cold baked apple, and sleeping out in the snow, they go to work in the morning, so they tell me, with a positive sense of exhilaration. I have no doubt that they do. But, for me, I confess that once and for all I am out of it. I am left behind.
Add to it all such rising dangers as total prohibition, and the female franchise, the daylight saving, and eugenic marriage, together with proportional representation, the initiative and the referendum, and the duty of the citizen to take an intelligent interest in politics—and I admit that I shall not be sorry to go away from here.
But before I do go, I have one hope. I understand that down in Hayti things are very different. Bull fights, cock fights, dog fights, are openly permitted. Business never begins till eleven in the morning. Everybody sleeps after lunch, and the bars remain open all night. Marriage is but a casual relation. In fact, the general condition of morality, so they tell me, is lower in Hayti than it has been anywhere since the time of Nero. Me for Hayti.