Public Opinion | Page 5

means successfully established
symbol of Allied Unity disappeared, how it was followed almost
immediately by the breakdown of each nation's symbolic picture of the
other: Britain the Defender of Public Law, France watching at the
Frontier of Freedom, America the Crusader. And think then of how
within each nation the symbolic picture of itself frayed out, as party

and class conflict and personal ambition began to stir postponed issues.
And then of how the symbolic pictures of the leaders gave way, as one
by one, Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, ceased to be the
incarnation of human hope, and became merely the negotiators and
administrators for a disillusioned world.
Whether we regret this as one of the soft evils of peace or applaud it as
a return to sanity is obviously no matter here. Our first concern with
fictions and symbols is to forget their value to the existing social order,
and to think of them simply as an important part of the machinery of
human communication. Now in any society that is not completely
self-contained in its interests and so small that everyone can know all
about everything that happens, ideas deal with events that are out of
sight and hard to grasp. Miss Sherwin of Gopher Prairie, [Footnote: See
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.] is aware that a war is raging in France and
tries to conceive it. She has never been to France, and certainly she has
never been along what is now the battlefront.
Pictures of French and German soldiers she has seen, but it is
impossible for her to imagine three million men. No one, in fact, can
imagine them, and the professionals do not try. They think of them as,
say, two hundred divisions. But Miss Sherwin has no access to the
order of battle maps, and so if she is to think about the war, she fastens
upon Joffre and the Kaiser as if they were engaged in a personal duel.
Perhaps if you could see what she sees with her mind's eye, the image
in its composition might be not unlike an Eighteenth Century engraving
of a great soldier. He stands there boldly unruffled and more than life
size, with a shadowy army of tiny little figures winding off into the
landscape behind. Nor it seems are great men oblivious to these
expectations. M. de Pierrefeu tells of a photographer's visit to Joffre.
The General was in his "middle class office, before the worktable
without papers, where he sat down to write his signature. Suddenly it
was noticed that there were no maps on the walls. But since according
to popular ideas it is not possible to think of a general without maps, a
few were placed in position for the picture, and removed soon
afterwards." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 99.]
The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not
experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event.
That is why until we know what others think they know, we cannot

truly understand their acts. I have seen a young girl, brought up in a
Pennsylvania mining town, plunged suddenly from entire cheerfulness
into a paroxysm of grief when a gust of wind cracked the kitchen
window-pane. For hours she was inconsolable, and to me
incomprehensible. But when she was able to talk, it transpired that if a
window-pane broke it meant that a close relative had died. She was,
therefore, mourning for her father, who had frightened her into running
away from home. The father was, of course, quite thoroughly alive as a
telegraphic inquiry soon proved. But until the telegram came, the
cracked glass was an authentic message to that girl. Why it was
authentic only a prolonged investigation by a skilled psychiatrist could
show. But even the most casual observer could see that the girl,
enormously upset by her family troubles, had hallucinated a complete
fiction out of one external fact, a remembered superstition, and a
turmoil of remorse, and fear and love for her father.
Abnormality in these instances is only a matter of degree. When an
Attorney-General, who has been frightened by a bomb exploded on his
doorstep, convinces himself by the reading of revolutionary literature
that a revolution is to happen on the first of May 1920, we recognize
that much the same mechanism is at work. The war, of course,
furnished many examples of this pattern: the casual fact, the creative
imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a
counterfeit of reality to which there was a violent instinctive response.
For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as
powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases
they help to create the very fictions to which they respond. Let