The Englishman's Boy Read Online Free Page B

answered the cry for bread
with
bread, filled America’s spiritual emptiness
with
a vision of itself. He was able to do this because he was a simple, self-educated man who had never forgotten his roots in backwoods Kentucky, a man with similarities to that other self-made genius, Abraham Lincoln. If it had been Griffith’s misfortune to go to college, some half-baked professor would have made him ashamed of who and what he was, filling his head with Henry James’s traitorous nonsense about the ineffable superiority of Europe. Instead, Griffith had sat at his father’s, the old Colonel’s, knee, absorbing his stories of the Civil War, retelling them in
The Birth of a Nation
with all the passion of someone who felt he had been present at the great battles, the touching surrender at Appomattox. This primitive, rugged self-confidence had produced an American
Iliad
, and the American people had responded to it the way the Greeks did to Homer, responding to the poetry of
conviction.
Chance tells me this with a conviction which seems at odds with the rumours of his life spent abroad, as if a Henry James character were launching an attack on James himself.
    He breaks off suddenly, as if embarrassed by his passion and enthusiasm, gives me a sly smile. “And then there is something else Mr. Griffith taught us by example. How to make a profit from fact. No motion picture since has approached the profitability of
The Birth of a Nation.
It was pure genius on his part to advertise his motion picture as fact. Americans are a practical people, they like facts. Facts are solid, they’re dependable. The average American feels foolishwhen he enjoys a made-up story, feels sheepish, childish, a mooner, a dreamer. But entertain him with facts and you give him permission to enjoy himself without guilt. He needn’t feel swindled, or hoodwinked, a hick sold a bill of goods by a carnival barker. He prefers to feel virtuous because he’s learned something useful,
informed
himself,
improved
himself.
    “You mark my words, Harry, there’ll come a day when the public won’t swallow any of our stories unless they believe them to be real. Everybody wants the real thing, or thinks they do. Truth is stranger than fiction, someone said. It may not be, but it’s more satisfying. Facts are the bread America wants to eat. The poetry of facts is the poetry of the American soul.
    “Of course,” he qualifies, “the facts in picture-making must be shaped by intuition.” He pauses dramatically. “I learned that at the feet of Bergson. I am a Bergsonian,” he declares, a little like Aimee Semple McPherson might declare she is a Christian.
    I haven’t the slightest clue what a Bergsonian is, but it sounds vaguely like Theosophy, or something worse. “A Bergsonian?” I say.
    “Before the war I attended his lectures at the Collège de France in Paris. A mesmerizing philosopher. His lectures were packed to the rafters – society ladies, students, writers, artists. Admission was by ticket only. I was one of those privileged to be admitted. Bergson taught that received ideas, habit, routine, turn a man into an automaton, a robot. What distinguishes a man from a robot is not intelligence – presumably a machine might some day be constructed that could outperform a man in the rational faculties – but intuition. The intellect, Bergson says, is designed to apprehend the external world but cannot plumb the inner world of things. It’s the wrong tool, Harry. Intuition has its roots in our deepest being, a being we are scarcely aware of, and because we are scarcely aware of it, it remains our truest, most uncorrupted self. My intuition, my will, is the clue to my hidden self. Through intuition it is possible for me to penetrate whatever shares my fluid and changeable nature – other human beings, all art … history. Analysis puts a man outside the thing he studies, while intuition puts him inside. Analysistherefore renders partial knowledge while