It will be remarked that experience which was once claimed by the, aged is now claimed exclusively by the young. There used to be a system of morals and metaphysics that was specially known as the Experience Philosophy, but those who advanced it were grim rationalists and utilitarians who were already old in years, or more commonly old before their time. We all know that experience now stands for the philosophy of those who claim to be young long after their time. But they preach something that may in a sense be called an Experience Philosophy, though some of the experiences seem to me the reverse of philosophical. So far as I can make it cut, it consists of two dogmas; first that there is no such thing as right or wrong; and secondly, that they themselves have a right to experience. Perhaps the philosophy was best summed up in a phrase I saw recently in a very interesting and important American magazine, quoted from one of the more wild and fanciful of the American critics. I have not the text before me, but the substance of the remark was this: The critic demanded indignantly to know how many ordinary American novelists had any experiences outside, those of earning their bread, pottering about in a farm or a farm house, helping to mind the baby, etc. The question struck me as striking at the very root of all the rot and corruption and imbecility of the times.
We might politely inquire exactly how much experience is needed to equip a novelist to write a novel. How many marks does he get for being intoxicated; and which are the particular discreditable acts by which he can get credits? How many liaisons give him this singular rank as a literary liaison officer, and how many double lives does it take to constitute life? Is it only after a fourth divorce that he may write his first novel? For my part, I do not see why the same principle should not be applied to all the Ten Commandments as well as to that particular Commandment. It should surely be obvious that if love affairs are necessary to the writing of this particular sort of love story then it follows that a life of crime is necessary to the writing of any kind of crime story. I have myself made arrangements (on paper) for no less than fifty-two murders in my time. They took the form of short stories, and I shall expose myself to the withering contempt of the young sages of experience when I confess that I am not really a murderer, and had never yet committed an actual murder. And what about all the other forms of criminal experience? Must a writer be a forger, and manufacture other men's names before he is allowed to make his own?
It would also be easy enough to attack the fallacy upon the facts. Everybody who has any real experience knows that good writing should not necessarily come from people with many experiences. Some of the art which is closest to life has been produced under marked limitations of living. Its prestige has generally lasted longer than the splash made by sensational social figures. Jane Austen had already survived Georges Sand, the French woman novelist. Even the most modern critic, if he is really a critic, will admit that Jane Austen is really realistic in a sense in which Georges Sand is only romantic.
But there is of course, a much deeper objection to the whole of this new sort of Experience Philosophy, which is quite sufficiently exposed in the very examples I quoted from the magazine: There are certainly all sorts of experiences, some great and some small. But the small ones are those which the critic imagines to be great; and the great ones are those that he contemptuously dismisses as small. There are no more universal affairs than those which he imagines to be little and local. There are no events more tremendous than those which he regards as trivial. There are no experiences more exciting than those which he duly imagines to be dull. To take his own example, a literary man who cannot see that a body is marvellous could not see that anything was marvellous. He has certainly no earthly logical reason for regarding a movie actress as marvellous. The movie star is only what happens to the baby when it goes wrong, but from a really imaginative and intellectual standpoint, there is nothing marvellous about either of them except what is already marvellous in the mere existence of the baby. But this sort of moralist or immoralist has a queer, half-baked prejudice; to the effect that there is no good in anything until it has gone bad.
Now, if there is one thing of which I have been certain since my boyhood, and grow more certain as advance in age, it is that nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze. All this talk of waiting for experience in order to write is simply a confession of incapacity to experience anything. It is a confession of never having felt the big facts in such experience as babyhood and the baby. A paralytic of this deaf and dumb description imagines he can be healed in strange waters or after strange wanderings, and announces himself ready to drink poisons that they may stimulate him like drugs. The whole theory rests on a ridiculous confusion, by which it is supposed that certain primary principles or relations will become interesting when they are damaged, but are bound to be depressing when they are intact.
None of those who are perpetually suggesting this view ever state it thus plainly; for they are incapable of making plain statements, just as they are incapable of feeling plain things. But the point they have to prove if they really want their Experience Philosophy accepted by those who do not care for catch words, is that the high perils, pleasures, and creative joys of life do not occur on the high road of life: but only in certain crooked and rambling by-paths made entirely by people who have lost their way. As yet they have not even begun to prove it; and in any case, and in every sense, it could be disproved by a baby.
