6.
Envy As a Philosophy
But under this pretension to superiority, of course, there lies an uncomfortable realization of actual inferiority. The peasant hates; ergo, he envies—and "l’envie," as Heine said to Philarète Chasles, "est une infériorité qui s'avoue." The disdain that goes with genuine superiority is something quite different; there is no sign of it in him. He is so far from it, indeed, that he can imagine no higher delights than such as proceed from acts which, when performed by the hated city man, he denounces as crimes, and tries to put down by law. It is the cabaret that makes a Prohibitionist of him, not the drunkard in the gutter. Doomed himself to drink only crude and unpalatable stimulants, incompetently made and productive of depressing malaises, and forced to get them down in solitary swinishness behind the door, he naturally longs for the varieties that have a more delicate and romantic smack, and are ingested in gay society and to the music of harps and sackbuts. That longing is vain. There are no cabarets in the village, but only sordid speakeasies, selling raw spirits out of filthy jugs. Drinking cider in the barn is so lonely as to be a sort of onanism. Where is the music? Where are the whirling spangles, the brilliant lights? Where is the swooning, suffocating scent of lilies-of-the-valley, Jockey Club? Where, above all, are the lost and fascinating females, so thrillingly described by the visiting evangelist? The yokel peeks through a crack in the barn-door and glimpses his slatternly wife laboriously rounding up strayed pigs: to ask her in for a friendly bumper would be as appalling as asking in the cow. So he gets down his unappetizing dram, feels along his glabella for the beginning headache, and resumes his melancholy heaving of manure—a Prohibitionist by conscience, doubly-riveted and immovable.
In all his politics this envy is manifest. He hates the plutocrats of the cities, not only because they best him in the struggle for money, but also because they spend their gains in debaucheries that are beyond him. Such yellow-backs as “Night Life in Chicago” have done more, I believe, to propagate “idealism” in the corn-and-hog belt than all the eloquence of the Pfeffers and Bryans. The yokels, reading them in secret, leave them full of a passionate conviction that such Babylonish revels must be put down, if Christianity is to survive—that it is obviously against the will of God that a Chicago stockbroker should have five wives and fifty concubines, and an Iowa swineherd but one—and that one a strictly Christian woman, even at the purple moments when wits and principles tend naturally to scatter. In the cities, as everyone knows, women move toward antinomianism: it is a scandal throughout Christendom. Their souls, I daresay, are imperilled thereby, but certainly no one argues that it makes them less charming—least of all the husbandman behind his remote plough, tortured by ruby reflections of the carnalities at Atlantic City and Miami. On the land, however, that movement has but little genuine force, despite a general apeing of its externals. The female young may bob their hair, but they do not reject divine revelation. I am told by experts that it is still a sort of marvel, as it was in the youth of Abraham Lincoln, to find a farm-wife who has definitely renounced the theology of the local pastors. The fact has obvious moral—and, by an easy step, political—consequences. There are about six and a half million farmers in the United States. Keep in mind the fact that at least six millions of them are forced to live in unmitigated monogamy with wives whose dominant yearning is to save the heathen hordes in India from hell fire, and you will begin to get some grasp of the motives behind such statutes as the celebrated Mann Act. The sea-sick passenger on the ocean liner detests the “good sailor’ who stalks past him a hundred times a day, obscenely smoking large, greasy, gold-banded cigars. In precisely the same way democratic man hates the fellow who is having a better time of it in this world. Such, indeed, is the origin of democracy. And such is the origin of its twin, Puritanism.
The city proletarian, of course, is a cut above the hind, if only because his natural envy of his betters is mitigated and mellowed by panem et circenses. His life may be swinish, but it is seldom dull. In good times there is actual money in his hand, and immense and complicated organizations offer him gaudy entertainment in return for it. In bad times his basic wants are met out of the community funds, and he is even kept in certain luxuries, necessary to his contentment. The immense development of public charity in the cities of the United States has yet to find adequate analysis and record. Nothing quite like it was ever known in past ages, nor is it paralleled in any other country to-day. What lies under it, I daresay, is simply the fact that the plutocracy of the Republic, having had more experience with democracy than the plutocracy anywhere else, has attained to a higher skill in dealing with the proletarian. He is never dangerous so long as his belly is filled and his eyes kept a-pop; and in this great land, by Divine Providence, there is always enough surplus wealth, even in the worst times, to finance that filling and popping. The plethora of means has bred a large class of experts, professionally devoted to the business. They swarm in all the American cities, and when genuine wants fail them they invent artificial wants. This enterprise in the third theological virtue has gone to great lengths. The proletarian, in his office as father, is now reduced by it to the simple biological function of a boar in a barn-yard. From the moment the fertilized ovum attaches itself to the decidua serotina he is free to give himself whole-heartedly to politics, drink and the radio. There is elaborate machinery for instructing the partner of his ecstasies in the whole art and mystery of maternity, and all the accompanying expenses are provided for. Obstetricians of the highest eminence stand ready to examine her and counsel her; gynecologists are at hand to perform any necessary operations; trained nurses call at her home, supply and prepare her diet, warn her against a too animated social life, hand her instructive literature, and entertain her with anecdotes suitable to her condition. If she is too clumsy or too lazy to fashion a layette, or can't afford the materials, it is provided free of charge. And when she comes to term at last she is taken into a steam-heated hospital, boarded without cost, and delivered in a brilliant, aseptic, and, in so far as money can make it so, painless manner.
Nor is this all. Once she has become a mother her benefits only increase. If she wants to get rid of her child it is taken off her hands, and eager propagandists instruct her in the science of avoiding another. If she chooses to keep it there is elaborate machinery for reducing the care and cost of it to nothing. Visiting nurses of a dozen different varieties stand ready to assume the burdens of washing it, dosing it with purges, and measuring out its victuals. Milk is supplied free—and not simply common cow's milk, but cow's milk modified according to the subtlest formulæ of eminent pediatricians. Ice is thrown in as a matter of course. Medicines are free at the neighbourhood dispensary. If the mother, recovering her figure, wishes to go shopping, she may park her baby at a crèche, and, on the plea that she is employed as a charwoman, leave it there all day. Once it can toddle the kindergarten yawns for it, and in holiday time the public playground, each officered by learned experts. The public school follows, and with it a host of new benefits. Dentists are in attendance to plug and pull the youngster's teeth at the public charge. Oculists fit it with horn-rimmed spectacles. It is deloused. Free lunches sustain it. Its books cost nothing. It is taught not only the three R's, but also raffia-work, bookkeeping, basketball, salesmanship, the new dances, and parliamentary law. It learns the causes of the late war and the fallacies of Socialism.
The rest you know as well as I do. The proletarian is so artfully relieved of the elemental gnawings which constantly terrorize the peasant and so steadily distracted from all sober thinking that his natural envy of his betters is sublimated into a sort of boozy contentment, like that of a hog in a comfortable sty. He escapes boredom, and with it, brooding. The political imbecilities which pile up in great waves from the prairies break upon the hard rock of his urban cynicism like rollers upon the strand. His pastors have but a slight hold upon him, and so cannot stir him up to the frantic hatreds which move the yokel. Even his wife emancipates herself from the ancient demonology of the race: his typical complaint against her is not that she 1s made anaphrodisiacal by Christian endeavour but that she is too worldly and extravagant, and spreads her charms too boldly. The rustic, alone upon his dung-hill, has time to nurse his grievances; the city moron is diverted from them by the shows that surround him. There was a time when yellow journalism promised to prod him to dudgeon, and even to send him yelling to the barricades. But the plutocracy has deftly drawn its fangs, and in its place are the harmless tabloids. They ease his envy by giving him a vicarious share in the debaucheries of his economic superiors. He is himself, of course, unable to roar about the country in a high-powered car, accompanied by a beautiful coloured girl of large gifts for the art of love, but when he reads of the scions of old Knickerbocker families doing it he somehow gets a touch of the thrill. It flatters him to think that he lives in a community in which such levantine joys are rife. Thus his envy is obscured by civic pride, by connoisseurship, and by a simple animal delight in good shows. By the time the tale reaches the yokel it is reduced to its immoral elements, and so makes him smell brimstone. But the city proletarian hears the frou-frou of perfumed skirts.