The Word and the Fact
by ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
1
THE American people seem to be upon the point of accepting, without challenge and almost without debate, a proposition which may profoundly affect the future of the world they are to live in. It is a proposition more often implied than declared, but its essential elements are these: that Mr. Wilson started out to make a peace with his eye on a set of principles, expecting the facts to conform; that Mr. Wilson failed to make a peace; that we, therefore, should start out with our eyes on a set of facts, letting the principles do the conforming.
That the practical men of both parties approve the proposal is not astonishing. The practical men have never cared very much for a policy of principle. In Wilson’s time they attacked the expressions of principle as schoolteacher’s talk. In our time they attack them as “ideologies.” They prefer facts. The facts are amenable; the principles are not.
The practical men, however, do not comprise the entire population of the United States. There are men and women in this country who believe, and believe passionately, in a policy of principle. What is astonishing is the failure of these believers to challenge a trend which, whether declared or undeclared, they must have seen. Why have they not insisted that the approach of the Allied Nations to the peace should be an uncompromising approach, the first purpose of which is the establishment of the principles for which the war has been fought?
One explanation may be the difficulty which even the believers in principle now experience in putting the essential principles into words. The war and the uses of the war have affected the great words of the democratic tradition even in the mouths of those who need them most. The great abstractions of the democratic cause, the summarizing and identifying words which undertake to name, and so reduce to moral perception, the nation’s experience as a nation — the generalizations by which men raise their thoughts above themselves — have lost a part at least of their usefulness and currency.
A hundred and fifty years ago, in the war of the American Revolution, the word liberty was a natural word, a word which came easily and without self-conscious effort to men’s mouths. When noble lords questioned Governor Richard Penn of Pennsylvania in the House of Lords in November of 1775 as to the reasons why members of the American Congress levied and carried on the war, Governor Penn replied: “In defense of their liberties.” When General Washington had occasion in the fall of 1774 to take a friend to task for his contemptuous reference to the rebelliousness of the people of Massachusetts, the General wrote: “But this you may at the same time rely on, that none of them will ever submit to the loss of those valuable rights and privileges, which are essential to the happiness of every free state and without which life, liberty and property are rendered totally insecure.” When Mr. Jefferson was charged with the task of putting into words the reasons for the adoption of the Richard Henry Lee Resolution, he found it precise and accurate to speak of a God-given right of liberty. And when Patrick Henry spoke with a purpose to move as hardheaded and sophisticated a representative House as was ever seated on this continent, he did not hesitate to make liberty his cause.
In this war also, and of necessity, we have identified our cause with these abstractions. Rut no one who has gone beneath the official rhetoric to the general usage will believe that we have used them easily. On the contrary, we have escaped from them where we could, talking instead of the “American way of life,” which, if an abstraction, is at least an abstraction which can be identified by homely and recognizable things — by cars, food, forms of address, habits on porches, manners in meeting. Or, awkward even with the “American way of life,” we have taken refuge in “America the way it was before,” as the refrigerator manufacturers and the home furnishing industry and the producers of automobiles are talking of it now in the handsome advertisements which beseech us to leave America the way it was for the boys to come back to. America the way it was is not an abstraction at all. It can be seen in four-color reproductions of paintings of charming village streets. It can also be seen, if one wishes to see it, in the mile after mile of unpalatable and unreproved squalor which spreads from the Chicago airport, say, to the towers of Chicago’s Loop.
2
NO ONE in his senses would suggest that our generation seeks to escape from the great words into these paraphrases, these equivocations, because of any lack of belief in the things for which the great words stand. The refusal of the American people in 1940 and 1941 to follow the treacherous propaganda which urged them to trust their liberty and freedom and democracy to the width of the Atlantic Ocean is proof enough that the American people continue to value democracy and liberty and freedom. What many in our generation doubt is not the thing itself but precisely the words in which the thing is said — precisely the Word. As inheritances from our forefathers, carrying the emotions of an entire history, a great people, a noble past, we accept the words for liberty and freedom as we accept the battle flags in the armories. But as words for ourselves, words for our present, words for our own time, we find it difficult to use them. It is not because Wilson’s oracular declarations were untrue that we have neglected them so strangely in this war. History has proved them truer than even Wilson knew. It is because the phrase, “a world safe for democracy,” is, in its words, in its rhetoric, a phrase we cannot easily or naturally make our own. We believe in the intentions of the words, but the words themselves embarrass us, leaving us conscious of the silence into which they fall.
For the most part our embarrassment is felt rather than reasoned. The revolt against the Word — and “revolt” is too explicit and dramatic and precise a term — is a revolt not so much of the head as of the heart. There were a few attacks, during the generation of the literary belittlement, on the abstract words of the democratic tradition, and at least one professor of psychology has been able to attribute the perpetuation of modern warfare to the prevalence of such “fictional” and “ unreal” “catchwords” as freedom, liberty, equality, humanity, and tolerance — a proposition which would have interested Thomas Jefferson. But the uneasiness of the people themselves in the presence of these particular abstractions is not based upon any such intellectualism. It is not indeed based at all. It exists. And it exists for reasons which are not too difficult to state.
Any word becomes unwieldly and overconscious of itself when its meaning in action is inferior to its meaning in emotion — when its spread of emotional sail overbalances the lead and oak that ought to carry cargo. And any word which is used repeatedly to evoke emotion without the evocation of an action to which emotion can attach loses the balance upon which its seaworthiness depends. Even the great abstractions which attempt to translate experience into idea cannot altogether break their continuing derivation from experience without reducing their ideas to tags and slogans.
Freedom from the present interference of an arrogant, ill-advised, and ill-bred British king, named George the Third, is a good word, hard as an axehead, and as useful. Liberty to live as General Washington and Mr. Jefferson meant to live, in spite of Lord North and the Tory gang, is a word to put in a speech in a Chamber of Burgesses, or on the parchment of a Declaration, or in the words of a song, or on the walls of a tavern — as good and as natural and as precise in one place as another. But freedom and liberty as abstractions with no present application in this time are banners without staffs to fly from.
I do not suggest that the whole reason for our present uneasiness in the use of words we desperately need is our failure to state in positive and revolutionary language the purpose of this war. The revolt against the Word, and particularly against the abstract terms that bear the burden of an impotent emotion, had grown of itself in this country, and long before the war, under the pounding of a press and radio which, year after year, used greater and greater quantities of less and less precise and relevant words to persuade the American people to buy, or to eat, or to vote, or to wear, or to love a book, or to live in a suburb, or to hate a particular public official, or to accept a special theory of economics, or to purchase a lot in one cemetery rather than another. But though the communications industry must carry its heavy share of responsibility for the degeneration of the Word, the immediate responsibility for the loss of meaning of the words we now need most lies elsewhere.
The immediate responsibility rests with the governments which have declared or not declared the democratic purpose in this war.
3
TO USE freedom as the definition of the cause opposed to fascism, but to be unwilling to define the terrible and immediate danger fascism presents in every country — to be unwilling even to use the word for fascism over months of time — is to make drafts upon the credit of historical emotion which the word freedom had gathered from the lives of earlier men, without giving it a present point and meaning which can make its passion ours. To talk of liberty without declaring, with the precise and revolutionary ardor of those to whom the talk of liberty comes naturally, what liberty we mean to have, and for what purpose, is to trade upon the nobility of men long dead, and, worse, to spill and waste the virtue of the word they left us. Freedom, liberty, democracy, equality, are revolutionary words. They are revolutionary words always, and whenever used. They cannot be employed to arouse men’s minds to fight defensive wars for the protection of the status quo or the preservation of a society “the way it was” without destroying their vitality and meaning.
Words are not lists in books. They are shapes in men’s minds, sounds on their lips, parts of their lives. Men will reject, and should reject, the words that do not relate to the things they do, the words they cannot truthfully use of themselves, of their own actions. But the danger is that when the vitality and meaning of the words of principle are destroyed, the way will be opened to those who wish, as they put it, to “go behind the words to the facts.” The danger is that men will say, as the hardheaded men are saying of peace in this country today and in England and elsewhere: “This time we will get down to facts. This time we will make a peace on the facts, not on the rhetoric. This time we will deal with the factual situations, not with the moral precepts or the high purposes — a world safe for democracy, and all that. We will deal with the actual facts, not with the words — and the facts will speak for themselves.”
The facts will speak for themselves. And what they will speak will be facts. The facts about civil aviation will speak in terms of civil aviation. The facts about oil and gold and shipping and markets will speak in terms of oil and gold and shipping and markets. They are already speaking, indeed, in just those terms. And the peace we shall make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping — a peace, in brief, of factual situations, a peace without moral purpose or human intent, a peace of dicker and trade about the facts of commerce, the facts of banking, the facts of transportation, which will lead us where the treaties made by dicker and by trade have always led.
Those realists who believe that facts will produce of themselves their human significance, those who believe that if you take care of the facts the principles will take care of themselves, are realists of a poor reality. A human society abandoned to the logic of facts is a human society which only an old-style Marxist philosopher could contemplate with satisfaction. The whole history of civilization is the history of the effort, successful sometimes, sometimes unsuccessful, to compel the so-called logic of fact to conform to a human — which is to say, a moral — purpose; to compel the consuming logic of fire to conform to the purpose of light; to compel the murderous logic of force to conform to the purpose of order. To renounce the expression of purpose, to renounce the abstractions of speech in which the history of moral purpose is summed up, and to trust instead to the “facts” to secrete a purpose of their own, is to be guilty of something worse than folly. It is to be guilty of the crime against humanity, the crime our generation knows so well, the crime of abdication of moral and intellectual responsibility. The sickness of our day is the sickness of increasing intellectual chaos — the sickness of disordered and multifarious phenomena, undisciplined, unorganized, and uncomposed. Our need, our desperate and terrible need, is to impose upon the world of chaotic phenomena an order of understanding, a moral order, a humane and human conception. Our need, that is to say, is to extend, and not to narrow, the hold of word on fact — to extend over the chaos of inarticulate experience the order and the government of the Word.
It is not, surely, an impossible labor. It is not impossible — it cannot be impossible — to hold against the encroaching ocean of disorders the great democratic conceptions which our fathers brought to words. Words, however those who write of words may treat them, are not objects of fashion. They are living things, real things. They go in and out of meaning, not of taste. They alter as men alter, and for similar reasons. Treated with honesty and courage, they will live forever. Deprived of meaning, they will starve and die. Freedom waved as a banner in a war which does not breathe of freedom droops because its meaning has been taken from it. Democracy used as a distinction without a meaning has no meaning left. But democracy and freedom, in the mouths of those who dare to speak them and to mean the things they speak, are living words again: new, clean, fresh in the sun, natural and simple.
4
THIS year is the year of an anniversary of the Word which has been strangely overlooked. It was three centuries ago this year that John Milton addressed to the Parliament of England a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, which he called his Areopagitica. That famous book has been cited many times — and by some who had no right to call John Milton to their witness — as authority for the negative and narrow proposition that a publisher may publish what he pleases. Those who have read the book as it deserves know very well that Milton had no such narrow purpose.
It was not the right of the publisher to publish for his pleasure or his profit that Milton had in mind, but the right of the nation to read. And the right of the nation to read was important, not for amusement or news, but for the truth. And the truth was in books because they were living things. “Who kills a man,”wrote Milton, “kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. . . . ‘Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.” “For books,” he said, “are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
What is true of a good book is true of a good word. For what are the good words, the great abstractions of a nation’s speech, but the nation’s inward understanding of the thing it needs to be — the coinage into purpose of the lives that made it? And how, if the meaning of these words is taken from them by the meaningless condition of their later use — how shall the nation know what it can be?
Praise alone cannot protect the power of the Word or, lost, restore it. Only the people can give life to language; and only they when language draws its life from theirs. If the great words of the American purpose are to recover the vitality and power they once had, they must take their part in this war and in the peace that follows — their actual part, not their formal part. The war must be a war truly and visibly for the freedom of mankind, and the peace must be a peace for liberty in fact, not liberty in speeches. It is possible perhaps to compromise with men. It is never possible to compromise the meaning of the words, for the words become their meanings.
If this war for freedom, this war against fascism, ends without the destruction of fascism, the triumph of freedom, more will have been lost than victory in a war. If the peace that ends this war of freedom against fascism is a peace of arrangements, a peace of adjustments, a peace of facts, of trades, of balances, more will be gone than the chance to make a peace. If even now, even at this late last moment, the great abstractions of democracy can take their honest meanings and have their truthful way, more than a war will have been fought and won.