Books and authors

by Robert Lynd

2. “MAX” IN DANGER

Mr. Beerbohm is in danger of being canonised. Critics may quarrel about him, but it is only because the wreaths get in the way of one another, and every critic thinks that his should be on top. They have even discovered that “Max” has a heart. “Max” may plead that it is only a little one, but that will not save him. Some other critic will discover that he has a message, and someone else will announce that he has a metaphysic. In order to avert this unseemly canonisation—or, at least, to keep it within the bounds of reason—one would like to adopt the ungracious part of advocatus diaboli and state the case against “Max” in the strongest possible terms. But, alas! one finds that there is nothing to say against him, except that he is not Shakespeare or Dr. Johnson.

One of the charms of Mr. Beerbohm is that he never pretends to be what he is not. He knows as well as anybody that he is not an oak of the forest, but a choice bloom grown from seed in a greenhouse, and even now lord of a pot rather than of a large garden. His art, at its best, is praise of art, not praise of life. Without the arts, the world would be meaningless to him. If he rewrote the plays of Shakespeare, he would make Hamlet a man who lacked the will to write the last chapter of a masterpiece, and Othello an author who murdered his wife because her books sold better than his, and King Lear a tedious old epic poet who perpetually recited his own verse till his daughters were able to endure it no longer and locked him out for the night. Cordelia, for her part, would be a sweet little creature, whose love for the old man was stronger than her literary sense, and who would slip out of a window and join him where he stamped up and down in the shrubbery, tripping over the bushes, cursing her more fastidious sisters, and booming out his bad verse to her and the rain. Mr. Beerbohm’s world is exclusively populated by authors, save for a few painters, sculptors, actors, musicians, and people who do not matter. One has to include the people who do not matter, because otherwise one’s generalisation would not be true.

Most people are agreed that Mr. Beerbohm’s recent work is his best. Consider his last three books, then, and how little of them could have come into existence, save in a world of authors. A Christmas Garland, his masterpiece, is a book of prose parodies on authors. Seven Men—yes, that, too, is his masterpiece—is a book in which every character that one remembers is an author or, at least, a liar. There were Enoch Soames with his poems, Ladbroke Brown with the BEAU-tiful play (as Swinburne would have said) on Savonarola, and the rival novelists of that adventurous week-end with the aristocracy. And in his last book, And Even Now, we find once more a variegated human comedy in which all the principal characters are authors and artists or their works, and other human beings are only allowed to walk on as supers. First of all we have “A Relic,” in which Mr. Beerbohm sees a pretty lady in a temper, and a short, fat man waddling after her, and determines to write a story about them. He does not write it, but he writes a story about the story he did not write. Then comes “How Shall I Word It?”—a joke about a “complete letter-writer” bought at a railway bookstall. This is followed by “Mobled King,” describing a statue to King Humbert, which, though erected, has never been unveiled because the priests and the fishermen object, and concluding with a wise suggestion that “there would be no disrespect, and there would be no violence, if the bad statues familiar to London were ceremoniously veiled, and their inscribed pedestals left just as they are.” Fourth comes “Kolniyatch”—a spoof account of the “very latest thing” in Continental authors. Few of us have read Kolniyatch in “the original Gibrisch,” but Mr. Beerbohm’s description of his work and personality makes it clear that he was an author compared with whom Dostoievsky and Strindberg were serene and saccharine:

Of the man himself—for on several occasions I had the privilege and the permit to visit him—I have the pleasantest, most sacred memories. His was a wonderfully vivid and intense personality. The head was beautiful, perfectly conic in form. The eyes were like two revolving lamps, set very close together. The smile was haunting. There was a touch of old-world courtesy in the repression of the evident impulse to spring at one’s throat.

After this comes “No. 2, The Pines”—yes, this is Mr. Beerbohm’s masterpiece, too. Everybody writes well about Swinburne, but Mr. Beerbohm writes better than anybody else—better, if possible, even than Mr. Lucas. What other writer could drive respect and mockery tandem with the same delicate skill? Mr. Beerbohm sees the famous Putney household not only with the comic sense, but through the eyes of a literary youth introduced for the first time into the presence of immortals. The Pines may be a Lewis-Carroll Wonderland, but it is still a wonderland, as he recalls that first meal at the end of the long table—“Watts-Dunton between us very low down over his plate, very cosy and hirsute, and rather like the Dormouse at that long tea-table which Alice found in Wonderland. I see myself sitting there wide-eyed, as Alice sat. And, had the Hare been a great poet, and the Hatter a great gentleman, and neither of them mad but each one only very odd and vivacious, I might see Swinburne as a glorified blend of those two.”

“A Letter that Was Not Written,” again, is a comedy of the arts, relating to the threatened destruction of the Adelphi. “Books within Books” is a charming speculation on books written by characters in fiction, not the least desirable of which, surely, was “Poments: Being Poems of the Mood and the Moment”—a work that made a character in a forgotten novel deservedly famous. The next essay, “The Golden Drugget,” may seem by its subject—the beam of light that falls from an open inn-door on a dark night—to be outside the literary-and-artistic formula, but is it not essentially an argument with artists that the old themes are best—that this “golden drugget” of light would somehow make a better picture than Smithkins’ Façade of the Waldorf Hotel by Night, in Peace Time? Similarly, “Hosts and Guests,” though it takes us perilously near the borderland of lay humanity, is essentially a literary causerie. Mr. Beerbohm may write on hosts and describe the pangs of an impoverished host in one of the “more distinguished restaurants” as he waits and wonders what the amount of the bill will be; but the principal hosts and hostesses of whom he writes are Jael and Circe and Macbeth and Old Wardle. “A Point to be Remembered by Very Eminent Men,” the essay that follows, contains advice to great authors as to how they should receive a worshipper who is to meet them for the first time. The author should not, Mr. Beerbohm thinks, be in the room to receive him, but should keep him waiting a little, though not so long as Leigh Hunt kept young Coventry Patmore, who had been kicking his heels for two hours when his host appeared “rubbing his hands and smiling ethereally, and saying, without a word of preface or notice of my having waited so long, ‘This is a beautiful world, Mr. Patmore!’”

There is no need to make the proof of the literary origins of “Max” more detailed. The world that he sees in the mirror of literature means more to Mr. Beerbohm than the world itself that is mirrored. The only human figure that attracts him greatly is the man who holds the mirror up. He does not look in his heart and write. He looks in the glass and writes. The parts of nature and art, as Landor gave them, will have to be reversed for Mr. Beerbohm’s epitaph. For him, indeed, nature seems hardly to exist. For him no birds sing, and he probably thinks that the scarlet pimpernel was invented by Baroness Orczy. His talent is urban and, in a good sense, prosaic. He has never ceased to be a dramatic critic, indeed, observing the men created by men (and the creators of those men) rather than the men created by God. He is a spectator, and a spectator inside four walls. He is, indeed, the last of the æsthetes. His æstheticism, however, is comic æstheticism. If he writes an unusual word, it is not to stir our imaginations with its beauty, but as a kind of dandyism, reminding us of the care with which he dresses his wit.

Within his own little world—so even the devil’s advocate would have to end by admitting—Mr. Beerbohm is a master. He has done a small thing perfectly, and one perfect quip will outlive ten bad epics. It is not to be wondered at that people already see the first hint of wings sprouting from his supremely well-tailored shoulders. He is, indeed, as immortal as anybody alive. He will flit through eternity, not as an archangel, perhaps, but as a mischievous cherub in a silk hat. He is cherub enough already always to be on the side of the angels. Those who declared that he had a heart were not mistaken. There is at least one note of tenderness in the peal of his mockery. There is a spirit of courtesy and considerateness in his writing, noticeable alike in “No. 2, The Pines,” and in the essay on servants. Thus, though he writes mainly on the arts and artists, he sees in them, not mere figures of ornament, but figures of life, and expresses through them clearly enough—I was going to say his attitude to life. He is no parasite at the table of the arts, indeed, but a guest with perfect manners, at once shy and brilliant, one who never echoes an opinion dully, but is always amusingly himself. That accounts for his charm. Perfect manners in literature are rare nowadays. Many authors are either pretending or condescending, either malicious or suspicious. “Max” has all the virtues of egotism without any of its vices.

II
MR. ARNOLD BENNETT CONFESSES

Mr. Bennett is at once a connoisseur and a card. He not only knows things but has an air of knowing things. He lets you know that he is “in the know.” He has a taking way of giving information as though it were inside information. He is the man of genius as tipster. In Things That Have Interested Me he gives us tips about painting, music, literature, acting, war, politics, manners and morals. He never hesitates: even when he is hinting about the future, he seems to do it with a nod that implies, “You may take my word for it.” There was never a less speculative author. Mr. Wells precipitates himself into eternity or the twenty-first century in search of things that really matter. Mr. Bennett is equally inquisitive, but he is inquisitive in a different way and almost entirely about his own time. Where Mr. Wells speculates, Mr. Bennett finds out, and, “when found, makes a note.” He gives one the impression of a man with a passion for buttonholing experts. He could interest himself for a time in any expert—an expert footballer or an expert Civil Servant or an expert violinist or an expert washerwoman. He likes to see the wheels of contemporary life—even the smallest wheel—at work, and to learn the secrets of the machine. His attitude to life is suggested by the fact that he has written a book called The Human Machine, and that it is inconceivable that he should write a book called The Human Soul. This is not to deny Mr. Bennett’s vivid imaginative interest in things. It is merely to point out that it is the interest not of a mystic but of a contemporary note-taker. That is the circle within which his genius works, and it is a genius without a rival of its kind in the literature of our time. He pursues his facts with something of the appetite of a Boswell, though more temperately. He has common sense where Boswell was a fool, however. Mr. Bennett, finding that even a glass of champagne and, perhaps, a spoonful of brandy taken regularly had the effect of clogging his “own particular machine,” decided to drink no alcohol at all. Boswell might have taken the same decision, but he could not have kept to it. Mr. Bennett, none the less, is as fantastic in his common sense as was Boswell in his folly. Each of them is a fantastic buttonholer. It is this element in him that raises Mr. Bennett so high above all the other more or less realistic writers of his time.

Things That Have Interested Me is a book of confessions that could have been written by no other living man. His style—perky, efficient, decisive—is the echo of a personality. What other critic of the arts would express his enthusiasm for great painting just like this?

It was fortunate for Turner that Girtin died early. He might have knocked spots off Turner. And, while I am about the matter, I may as well say that I doubt whether Turner was well advised in having his big oil-paintings hung alongside of Claude’s in the National Gallery. The ordeal was the least in the world too severe for them. Still, I would not deny that Turner was a very great person.

Such a paragraph, with its rapid series of terse judgments, is defiantly interesting. It is not only the “You may take it from me” attitude that fascinates us: it is the “me” from whom you may take it. It is an excited “me” as well as a cocksure “me.” Mr. Bennett is an enthusiast, as you may see when, writing of Brabazon, he affirms:

In my opinion his “Taj Mahal” is the finest water-colour sketch ever done. He probably did it in about a quarter of an hour.

Or, turning to literature, he will tell you:

Similarly will a bond be created if you ask a man where is the finest modern English prose and he replies: “In The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane.”

Mr. Bennett is always hunting the superlative. He wants the best of everything, and he won’t be happy till he tells you where you can get it. It is true that he says: “Let us all thank God that there is no ‘best short story.’” But that is only because there are several, and Mr. Bennett, one suspects, knows them all. “I am not sure,” he says on this point, “that any short stories in English can qualify for the championship.” Yet I fancy the editor of a collection of the world’s best short stories would have to consider a good deal of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Wells’s Country of the Blind, and Mr. Bennett’s own Matador of the Five Towns.

Mr. Bennett’s chase of the superlative is not confined to the arts. He demands superlative qualities even in barbers. He has submitted his head to barbers in many of the countries of Europe, and he gives the first prize to the Italians. “Italian barbers,” he declares, “are greater than French, both in quality and in numbers.” At the same time, taking barbers not in nations but as individuals, he tells us: “The finest artist I know or have known is nevertheless in Paris. His life has the austerity of a monk’s.” Judging them by nations, he gives Denmark a “highly commended”:

I like Denmark because there some of the barbers’ shops have a thin ascending jet of water whose summit just caresses the bent chin, which, after shaving, is thus laved without either the repugnant British sponge or the clumsy splashing practised in France and Italy.

He knows about it all: he knows; he knows. And, knowing so much, he is in all the better position to censure a certain British barber who parted his hair on the wrong side:

When he came back he parted my hair on the wrong side—sure sign of an inefficient barber. He had been barbering for probably twenty years and had not learnt that a barber ought to notice the disposition of a customer’s hair before touching it. He was incapable, but not a bad sort.

And Mr. Bennett, even though he is perilously near being a teetotaller, can discourse to you as learnedly on drinks as on ways of getting your hair cut. “Not many men,” he says, “can talk intelligently about drink, but far more can talk intelligently about drink than about food.” He himself is one of the number, as witness:

There was only one wine at that dinner, Bollinger, 1911, a wine that will soon be extinct. It was perfect, as perfect as the cigars.... We decided that no champagne could beat it, even if any could equal it, and I once again abandoned the belief, put into me by certain experts, that the finest 1911 champagnes were Krug and Duc de Montebello.

One of the especial charms of Mr. Bennett as a writer is that he talks about painters and barbers, about champagne and short stories, in exactly the same tone and with the same seriousness, and measures them, so far as one can see, by the same standard. Indeed, he discusses epic poetry in terms of food.

All great epics are full of meat and are juicy side-dishes, if only people will refrain from taking them as seriously as porridge. Paradise Lost is a whole picnic menu, and its fragments make first-rate light reading.

To write like this is to give effect of paradox, even when one is talking common sense. It is clear that Mr. Bennett does it deliberately. He does it as an efficient artist, not as a bungler. He fishes for our interest with a conscious gaucherie of phrase, as when he ends his reference to the novels of Henry James with the sentence: “They lack ecstasy, guts.”

One of the most amusing passages in the book is that in which Mr. Bennett leaves us with a portrait of himself as artist in contrast to Henry James, the writer of “pot-boilers.” It hardly needs saying that in doing this Mr. Bennett is making no extravagant claims for himself, but is merely getting in a cunning retort to some of his “highbrow” critics. The comparison between his own case and that of James refers only to one point, and arises from the fact that James wrote plays with the sole object of making money. On this Mr. Bennett comments:

Somebody of realistic temperament ought to have advised James that to write plays with the sole object of making money is a hopeless enterprise. I tried it myself for several years, at the end of which I abandoned the stage for ever. I should not have returned to it, had not Lee Mathews of the Stage Society persuaded me to write a play in the same spirit as I was writing novels. It was entirely due to him that I wrote Cupid and Commonsense. Since then I have never written a play except for my own artistic satisfaction.

Nor, one feels, did he write even the casual jottings on life and the arts in Things that Have Interested Me for any other reason than that it pleased him to do it. The jottings vary in quality from ephemeral social and political comment to sharply-realised accounts of “things seen,” vivid notes of self-analysis, confessions of the tastes and experiences of an epicure of life with a strong preference for leaving the world better than he found it. Mr. Bennett gives us here a jigsaw portrait of himself. We can reconstruct it from the bits—a man shy and omniscient, simple and ostentatious, Beau Nash from the Five Towns.

III
MR. CONRAD AT HOME

Mr. Conrad is nothing of a peacock. You may stare at him as long as you like, but he will never respond with a sudden spread of gorgeous vanities. He is more like some bird that takes on the protective colouring of the earth and delights in avoiding rather than in attracting the prying eye. Flatter him as you will; call him a phœnix or a bird of paradise: he may be secretly pleased but he will only croak gruffly in reply, “To have the gift of words is no such great matter.” He does not know how to play up to our inquisitive admiration. We may think, as when we take up A Personal Record, that now at last we have caught him in a position in which he is bound to show us his fine feathers. But it is a vain hope. Glimpses we get—amazing glimpses—but never the near and detailed spectacle we desire. He protests that he is no cynic, but is he sure that he does not find a cynical amusement in tantalising our curiosity? Otherwise, would he have written in the preface to Notes on Life and Letters that “perhaps it will do something to help towards a better vision of the man, if it gives no more than a partial view of a piece of his back, a little dusty (after the process of tidying-up), a little bowed, and receding from the world not because of weariness or misanthropy, but for other reasons that cannot be helped”? It may be that Mr. Conrad can suggest more enticing mysteries by a portrait of a piece of an author’s back than other writers can by a full-length representation, showing the polish on the boots and the crease in the trousers. In art the half (or very much less) is greater than the whole. Still, Mr. Conrad’s principal object in showing us the back is that it may leave us unsatisfied and speculating. He does not intend to satisfy us. It is as though he had written on the title-page of his autobiography: “Thus far and no further.”

At the same time, if he tells little about himself, he does not escape giving himself away in his admiration for other men. He has an artistic faith that breaks into his sentences as soon as he begins to talk of Henry James or Maupassant or Turgenev. Not that he belongs to any school in literature: he hates all references to schools. He becomes sullenly hostile if anyone attempts to classify authors as romantics, realists, naturalists, etc. Every great author is for him a man, not a formula. He can hardly mention the word “formula” without disgust. “No secret of eternal life for our books,” he declares, “can be found among the formulas of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed combination of drugs.” Again, “the truth is, that more than one kind of intellectual cowardice hides behind the literary formulas.” And once more, in speaking of the good artist: “It is in the impartial practice of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art can be found, rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this or that particular method of technique or conception.” This may suggest to the pedantic that Mr. Conrad has no critical standards, and he certainly prefers to portray an author rather than to measure him with a tape as if for a suit of clothes. And he is right; for to portray an author truthfully is to measure him in a far profounder sense than can be done with a tape run round his waist, and down the side of his leg. Mr. Conrad’s quest is the soul of his author. If it be a noble soul, he has a welcome for it, as Plutarch had in his biographies. He may not agree with Maupassant’s deterministic view of life, but he salutes Maupassant in passing with the remark: “The worth of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.” His first demand of an author is truth—not absolute truth, but the truth that is in him. “At the heart of fiction,” he declares, “even the least worthy of the name, some sort of truth can be found—if only the truth of a childish theatrical ardour in the game of life, as in the novels of Dumas the father.”

Mr. Conrad, indeed, claims for fiction that it is nearer truth than history, agreeing more or less on this point with Aristotle and Schopenhauer:

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting—on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. An historian may be an artist, too, and a novelist is an historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

I confess I dislike this contention among the various literary forms—poetry, fiction, history, biography, drama and essay—as to which of them is nearest grace. It is not the form that seizes the truth, but the imagination of the artist working through the form. Imagination and the sense of life are as necessary to a good historian as to a good novelist. Artists need not quarrel for precedence for any particular art in a world in which all the great books that have so far been written could be packed into a little room. At the same time, it is well that a novelist should take his art as seriously as Aristotle took the art of poetry. It often requires an exaggeration to bring the truth into prominence. And, in any case, the exaggerations of the novelists in this respect have as a rule been modest compared to the exaggerations of the poets.

If Mr. Conrad is to be believed, however, the novelist is the rival, not only of the historian, but of the moralist. He warmly denies that he is a didactic writer, but at least he holds that in all great fiction a moral is implicit that he who runs may read:

That a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth engraved in the innermost recesses of the fair temple built for our edification by the masters of fiction. There is no other secret behind the curtain. All adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an act of renunciation.

One would have to think hard in order to fit Tristram Shandy and The Pickwick Papers into this—if the word is not forbidden—formula. Perhaps it is a formula more applicable to tragic than to comic writing. Mr. Conrad as critic often seems to be defining his own art rather than the art of fiction in general. He knows what he himself is aiming at in literature, and he looks for the same fine purpose in his fellow-writers. We feel this when he requires of the novelist “many acts of faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying hope.” This, he declares, “is the God-sent form of trust in the magic force and inspiration belonging to the life of this earth.” “To be hopeful in an artistic sense,” he adds, “it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of its being made so.” There surely speaks the author of Youth and Typhoon. And the image of the same author may be seen in the remark that “I would ask that in his dealings with mankind he”—the novelist—“should be capable of giving a tender recognition to their obscure virtues.” Mr. Conrad cannot escape from the shadow of his own genius. It falls on every page of his criticism as fatally as any formula, though more vividly. His protest against what has been called “stylism” is simply the protest of one who did not approach the art of literature through that door. He is praising not merely Maupassant but his ideal self when he tells us:

His proceeding was not to group expressive words, that mean nothing, around misty and mysterious shapes dear to muddled intellects and belonging neither to earth nor to heaven. His vision by a more scrupulous, prolonged and devoted attention to the aspects of the visible world, discovered at last the right words as if miraculously impressed for him upon the face of things and events.

That, no doubt, is how Mr. Conrad learned the art of writing, and we may read autobiography into his praise of Maupassant again when he says: “He stoops to no littleness in his art—least of all to the miserable vanity of a catchy phrase.” But his appreciation of Maupassant, though admirable in so far as it defines certain qualities in his own and Maupassant’s work, is worded in a manner that savours of intolerance of the work of many other good writers, from Shakespeare to Dickens and, if one may include a more Lilliputian artist, Stevenson. Thus he observes:

He will not be led into perdition by the seductions of sentiment, of eloquence, of humour, pathos; of all that splendid pageant of faults that pass between the writer and his probity on the blank sheet of paper, like the glittering cortège of deadly sins before the austere anchorite in the desert air of the Thebaïde.

Maupassant’s austerity may have been an excellent thing for Maupassant, but to write like this is surely to reduce austerity to the level of a formula. That “splendid pageant of faults” may well be the salvation of another writer. We may admit that they remain faults unless they fit in as organic parts of a writer’s work. But Maupassant was a smaller, not a greater, writer in so far as he was unable so to fit them in.

It would be going too far to suggest, however, that Mr. Conrad merely emphasises in other writers those qualities which he himself either possesses or desires to possess. Most good portraits are double portraits: they portray both the painter and the sitter. Mr. Conrad always does justice to his sitter, as when he writes: “Henry James is the historian of fine consciences,” or as when he says of Maupassant: “It cannot be denied that he thinks very little. In him extreme energy of perception achieves great results, as in men of action the energy of force and desire.” At the same time, we read Notes on Life and Letters for the light it throws, not on this or that author or the Polish question or the question of unsinkable ships, but on Mr. Conrad himself. The essay on Anatole France, for instance, interests us mainly because it reminds us that Mr. Conrad is as impatient of political panaceas as of literary formulas. Remembering that Anatole France is a Socialist, he observes characteristically: “He will disregard the stupidity of the dogma and the unlovely form of the ideal. His art will find its own beauty in the imaginative presentation of wrongs, of errors, and miseries that call aloud for redress.” He commands the artist to hope, but he clearly forbids anybody to hope too much. His “Note on the Polish Problem” shows that during the war the most he hoped for his country was an Anglo-French protectorate. Humanitarians horrify him with their dreams. He hates impossibilism as he hates the talk about unsinkable ships. But what he really hates most, both in politics and in ships, is the blind worship of machinery. He looks on Socialism, I fancy, as an attempt on the part of machine-worshippers to build an unsinkable State—a monstrous political Titanic, defiant of the facts of nature and fore-doomed to catastrophe. And how this old master of a sailing-ship hates the Titanic! He has little that is good to say, indeed, of any steam vessels, at least of cargo steam vessels—“a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull mechanical toilers, conceited and without grace.” Progress? He retorts: “The tinning of salmon was ‘progress.’” And yet, when he met the men of the merchant service during the war, he had to admit that “men don’t change.” That is a fact at once reassuring and depressing. It is reassuring to know that human beings, if they avoid the sin of idolaters, can make use of machines with reasonable safety. The machine, like the literary formula, is a convenience. Even the Socialist State would be only a convenience. It would in all probability be very little more alarming than a button-hook or a lead pencil.

IV
MR. WELLS AND THE WORLD

Mr. Wells is in love with the human race. It is one of the rarest of passions. It is a passion of which not even all imaginative men are capable. It was, perhaps, the grandest of Shelley’s grand passions, and it was the demon in William Morris’s breast. On the other hand, it played a small part if any, in the lives of Shakespeare and Dickens. Their kaleidoscopic sympathy with human beings was at the antipodes from Shelley’s angelic infatuation with the human race. The distinction has often been commented on. It is the difference between affection and prophecy. There is no reason, I suppose, why the two things should not be combined, and, indeed, there have been affectionate prophets both among the religious teachers and among men of letters. But, as a rule, one element flourishes at the expense of the other, and Charles Lamb would have been as incapable of even wishing to write the Outline of History as Mr. Wells would be of attempting to write the Essays of Elia.

Not that Mr. Wells gives us the impression that he loves men in general more than Charles Lamb did. It seems almost as if he loved the destiny of man more than he loves man himself. His hero is an anonymous two-legged creature who was born thousands of years ago and has been reincarnated innumerable times and who will go on being re-born until he has established the foundations of order amid the original slime of things. That is the character in history whom Mr. Wells most sincerely loves. He means more to him than Moses or any of Plutarch’s men. Plutarch’s men, indeed, are for the most part men who might have served man but preferred to take advantage of him. Compare Plutarch’s and Mr. Wells’s treatment of Cato the Elder and Julius Cæsar, and you will see the difference between sympathy with individual men and passion for the purpose of man. You will see the same difference if you compare the Bible we possess with the new Bible of which Mr. Wells draws up a syllabus in The Salvaging of Civilisation. The older book at the outset hardly pauses to deal with man as a generalisation, but launches almost at once into the story of one man called Adam and one woman called Eve. Mr. Wells, on the other hand, would begin the human part of his narrative with “the story of our race”:

How through hundreds of thousands of years it won power over nature, hunted and presently sowed and reaped. How it learnt the secrets of metals, mastered the riddle of the seasons, and took to the seas. That story of our common inheritance and of our slow upward struggle has to be taught throughout our entire community in the city slums and in the out-of-the-way farmsteads most of all. By teaching it, we restore again to our people the lost basis of a community, a common idea of their place in space and time.

Mr. Wells’s attitude to men, it is clear, is primarily that of a philosopher, while the attitude of the Bible is primarily that of a poet. It remains to be seen whether a philosopher’s Bible can move the common imagination as the older Bible has moved it. That it can move and excite it in some degree we know. We have only to read the glowing pages with which The Salvaging of Civilisation opens in order to realise this. Mr. Wells’s passion for the human group is infectious. He expresses it with the vehemence of a great preacher. He plays, like many great preachers, not on our sympathy so much as on our hopes and fears. His book is a book of salvation and damnation—of warnings to flee from the wrath to come, of prophecies of swords turned into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks. He loves his ideal group-man almost as Bunyan loved Christian. He offers him, it is true, at the end of his journey, not Paradise, but the World-State. He offers it to him, moreover, not as an individual but as a type. He bids men be ready to perish in order that man may arrive at the goal. His book is a call to personal sacrifice to the end, not of personal, but of general salvation. That, however, is an appeal that has again and again been proved effective in history. It is of the same kind as the appeal of patriotism in time of war. “Who dies if England lives?” sang Mr. Kipling. “Who dies if the World-State lives?” Mr. Wells retorts.

The question remains whether the ordinary man can ever be brought to think of the world as a thing worth living and dying for as he has often thought his country worth living and dying for. If the world were attacked by the inhabitants of another planet, world-patriotism would become a necessity of self-defence, and the peoples of the world would be presented with the alternatives of uniting or perishing. Mr. Wells believes, no doubt, that they are presented with these alternatives already. But can they be made to realise this by anything but an external enemy? It is external enemies that create and intensify patriotism. Can human beings as a whole organise themselves against war as the enemy with the same thoroughness with which Englishmen organised themselves against Germany as the enemy? Mr. Wells obviously believes that they can. But it is to the great religions, not to the great patriotisms, that he looks for examples of how this can be done. He recalls how the Christian religion spread in the first four centuries and how the Moslem religion spread in the seventh century, and he believes that these precedents “support a reasonable hope that such a change in the minds of men, whatever else it may be, is a practicable change.” His gospel of human brotherhood, indeed, is propounded as a larger Christianity rather than as a larger patriotism. He realises, however, the immensity of the difficulties in the way of the spread of this gospel. He sees that the majority of men are still indifferent to it. Unless they are in the vein for it, “it does not really interest them; rather it worries them.” That is why he believes so ardently in the need of a new Bible—a Bible of Civilisation—which will restore to modern men “a sense of personal significance, a sense of destiny, such as no one in politics or literature seems to possess to-day.” That is why he scorns such a compromise and concession to the frailty of human nature as a League of Nations and calls on men to turn their eyes from all such conveniences and makeshifts and to concentrate on the more arduous ideal of human unity. Of the League of Nations he writes:

The praise has a thin and legal and litigious flavour. What loyalty and what devotion can we expect this multiple association to command? It has no unity—no personality. It is like asking a man to love the average member of a woman’s club instead of loving his wife.

For the idea of man, for human unity, for our common blood, for the one order of the world, I can imagine men living and dying, but not for a miscellaneous assembly that will not mix—even in its name. It has no central idea, no heart to it, this League of Nations formula.

Many people will agree with much of Mr. Wells’s scornful criticism of the League of Nations. He is obviously writing the plainest common sense when he declares that it has failed so far to solve the problem of modifying the traditional idea of sovereign independence and the problem of a super-national force that will be stronger than any national force. The average statesman is still an Imperialist at heart, even when he praises the League of Nations with his lips. He desires a world-order that will confirm the present order of rival Empires rather than a world-order that will supersede it. He desires to avert war, but only if he may preserve all the conditions that make war inevitable. Mr. Wells is impatient of all this as a treachery to the greatest ideal that has come into the world in our time. On the other hand, I think that the advocates of the League of Nations and not the advocates of the World State are going the right way to propagate the sense of world-unity that Mr. Wells desires. The League of Nations, whatever its shortcomings, does make human nature a partner in its ideal. It remembers the ordinary human being’s affection for his own country, and does not treat it as a mere prejudice in the path. It realises that the true victory of internationalism will be not as the destroyer of individualism but as its counterweight. It used to be thought that a man could not be loyal to both his church and his country unless the Church were a State Church. Some Socialists have believed that the family and the State were inevitable rivals. As a matter of fact, every man is in a state of balance among conflicting loyalties—loyalty to himself, to the family, to the school, to the Church, to the State, to the world. The religion of the brotherhood of man must bow to this fact, or it must fail. To ignore it is to be a doctrinaire—to fail, that is, to bring home one’s doctrine to men’s business and bosoms. It is to sit above the battle so far as the immediate issues with which mankind is faced are concerned. Mr. Wells has rendered an immense service to his time by compelling us to remember the common origin and the common interests of mankind. He has invented a wonderful telescope through which we can look back and see man struggling out of the mud and can look forward and see him climbing a dim and distant pinnacle. I am not sure, however, if he has pointed out the most desirable route to the pinnacle—whether he does not expect us to reach it as the crow flies instead of by winding roads and by bridges across the deep rivers and ravines. He may take the view that, as man has learned to fly mechanically, so he may learn to fly politically. One never knows. The glorious feature of his prophetic writing, meanwhile, is its driving-force. He is one of the few writers who have given momentum to the idea of the world as one place.

V
MR. CLUTTON-BROCK

Mr. Clutton-Brock is a critic with an unusual equality of interests. He seems to be the centre of an almost perfect circle, and literature, painting, religion, philosophy, ethics, and education are the all but equal radii that connect him with the circumference. Many writers have been as versatile, but few have been as symmetrical. He has all his gifts in due proportion. He is not more æsthetic than moral, or more moral than æsthetic. His idealism and his intellect balance each other exactly. His matter and his manner are twins. He produces on us the effect of a harmony, not of a nature in conflict with itself. Had he lived in the ancient world, he would probably have been a teacher of philosophy. He has gifts of temper as well as powers of exposition and understanding that make him a teacher even to-day, whether he will or not. He does not speak down to us from the chair, but he is at our elbows murmuring with exquisite restraint yet with an eagerness only half-hidden the “nothing too much” of the Greeks, the “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty” of Keats, the good news that the flesh and spirit are not enemies but friends, and that the Earth for the wise man is not at odds with Paradise.

Those who shrink from virtue as from a split infinitive sometimes speak in disparagement of Mr. Clutton-Brock’s gifts. He is the head of a table at which the virtues and the graces sit down side by side, and they are dressed so much alike that it is not always easy to tell which is which. He is always seeking, indeed, the point at which a virtue passes into a grace, and he knits his brows over those extreme differences that separate one from the other. The standard by which he measures things in literature and in life is an ideal world in which goodness and beauty answer one another in antiphonal music. His ideal man is the kalos k’ agathos of ancient Athens. He goes among authors in quest of this part-song in their work. He misses it in the later Tolstoy: he discovers it in Marvell and Vaughan. He is not to be put off, however, with a forced and unnatural antiphony. He is critical of the antiphony of body and soul that announces “All’s well!” in Whitman’s verse. He finds in Whitman not organic cheerfulness but functional cheerfulness—“willed cheerfulness,” he calls it. And he says of Whitman with penetrating wisdom: “He was a man not strong enough in art or in life to do without that willed cheerfulness; it is for him a defence like irony, though a newer, more democratic, more American defence.” He writes with equal wisdom when he says that Whitman “has got a great part of his popularity from those who were grateful to him for saying so firmly and so often what they wished to believe.” But might not this be said of all poets of hope? Might it not be said of Shelley and of Browning? I am not sure, indeed, that Mr. Clutton-Brock does not do serious injustice to Whitman in exaggerating the element of reaction in him against old fears as well as old forms. His discovery of the secret of what is false in Whitman has partly blinded him to the secret of what is true. Otherwise, how could he ask us whether there is anything in Leaves of Grass that moves us as we are moved by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Sleeper? Can he have forgotten Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, to name but one of Whitman’s profoundly moving poems? Mr. Clutton-Brock does, indeed, end his essay with fine if tempered praise of Whitman’s genius. But his essay as a whole is a question-mark, expressing a doubt of something false, something even “faked.”

His essay on Poe is more sympathetic. He finds in Poe, not a false harmony, but a real discord—a pitiable discord. “There was a fatal separation,” we are told, “between his intellect and his emotions, except in a very few of his poems, because he could not value life or human nature in comparison with the life and the nature of that other planet for which he was homesick. So he exercised his intellect on games, but with a thwarted passion which gives a surprising interest and beauty even to his detective stories.” This is well said, but, as we read the essay, we become aware of a curious ultra-fastidiousness in Mr. Clutton-Brock—a lack of vulgarity, in the best sense of the word. We see this in his attitude to Poe’s most popular work; he dismisses The Raven and The Bells as “fit to be recited at penny readings.” That certainly has been their fate, but it does not prevent them from being masterpieces in their kind—the jeux d’esprit of a planet-struck man. They are not, however, we may admit, the poems that reveal Poe as an inspired writer. It is a much more serious thing for Mr. Clutton-Brock to omit Annabel Lee from the list of the six poems or so, on which Poe’s reputation as a poet rests. Annabel Lee is a work of genius, if Poe ever wrote a work of genius. Helen, Thy Beauty is to Me—which has none of its faults—is the only one of his poems that challenges its supremacy, perhaps successfully. Mr. Clutton-Brock’s essay on the other hand, will be of service to the general reader if it gives him the feeling that Poe is to be approached, not as a hackneyed author, but as a writer of undiscovered genius. He does not exaggerate the beauty of The Sleeper, though he exaggerates its place in Poe’s work. The truth is, Poe is a neglected poet. The average reader regards him as too well known to be worth reading, and The Sleeper, The City in the Sea and Romance are ignored because The Bells has fallen into the hands of popular reciters.

Mr. Clutton-Brock has the happy gift of taking his readers into the presence of most of his authors in the spirit of discoverers. It is not that he aims at originality or paradox. He is always primarily in search of truth, even when he gets on a false scent. His essay on Meredith is a series of interesting guesses at truth, some of which are extremely suggestive, and some of which seem to me to miss the mark. The most suggestive is the remark that Love in the Valley is not only written on “a theme that inspired the music of the first folk-songs,” but that the verse itself has “for its underlying tune” a folk-measure—the old Saturnian measure of the Romans. Macaulay, it may be remembered, was startled to learn that his ballad of “brave Horatius” was written largely in the Saturnian metre, and still more startled when he was unable to find any perfect example of this metre in English verse, except:

The Queen was in her parlour, eating bread and honey.

It comes as something of a shock to be told that the lines—

Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping

Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star;

are musically akin to:

Lars Porsena of Clusium,

By the nine gods he swore.

And Mr. Clutton-Brock would be the last man to pretend that it is the same music we find in both. Meredith’s variations on the old tune are, he makes clear, as important a part of the music as is the old tune itself. “It is folk-song with the modern orchestra like the symphonies of Dvorák, and it combines a singing rhythm with sharpness and fullness of detail as they had never before been combined in romantic poetry.” Criticism like this is not merely a comment on technique; it is a guess of the spirit, emphasising the primitive and universal elements which make Love in the Valley probably the most enduring of Meredith’s works.

I do not think Mr. Clutton-Brock is so happy when he writes of Meredith as a novelist. He goes too far when he suggests that Meredith’s witty characters, or mouthpieces, are “always subsidiary and often unpleasant,” like the wise youth in Richard Feverel. Meredith, he declares, “does not think much of these witty characters that he cannot do without.” He “would never make a hero more witty than he could help, for he likes his heroes to be either men of action or delightful youths whom too much cleverness would spoil. He himself was not in love with cleverness, and never aimed at it.” This is only partly true. It is partly true in regard to Meredith’s men, and not true at all in regard to his women. Diana of the Crossways alone is enough to disprove it. Meredith’s heroes were conventions; his heroines were creations; and he liked his creations to be witty. He loved wit as his natural air. His Essay on Comedy is a witty dithyramb in praise of wit. Mr. Clutton-Brock seems to me to make another mistake in regard to Meredith when he says that “if he had had less genius, less power of speech, less understanding of men, he might have been an essayist.” As a matter of fact, Merdith was too proud to be an essayist. There are no proud essayists, though many vain ones. Mr. Belloc is the nearest thing to a proud essayist that one can think of, and his pride is really only a fascinating arrogance.

It will be seen that Mr. Clutton-Brock excites to controversy, as every good critic who attempts a new analysis of an author’s genius must do. Were there space, I should like to dispute many points in his essay, “The Defects of English Prose,” in which, incidentally, he accepts the current over-estimate of the prose—the excellent prose—of Mr. Hudson. The purpose of criticism, however, is to raise questions as much as to answer them, and this Mr. Clutton-Brock continually does in his thoughtful analysis of the success and failure of great writers. He is an expositor with high standards in life and literature, who worships beauty in the temple of reason. His essays, though slight in form, are rich in matter. They are fragments of a philosophy as well as comments on authors.

VI
HENLEY THE VAINGLORIOUS

Henley was a master of the vainglorious phrase. He was Pistol with a style. He wrote in order to be overheard. His words were sturdy vagabonds, bawling and swaggering. “Let us be drunk,” he cried in one of his rondeaux, and he made his words exultant as with wine.

He saw everywhere in Nature the images of the lewd population of midnight streets. For him even the moon over the sea was like some old hag out of a Villon ballade:

Flaunting, tawdry and grim,

From cloud to cloud along her beat,

Leering her battered and inveterate leer,

She signals where he prowls in the dark alone,

Her horrible old man,

Mumbling old oaths and warming

His villainous old bones with villainous talk.

Similarly, the cat breaking in upon the exquisite dawn that wakes the “little twitter-and-cheep” of the birds in a London Park becomes a picturesque and obscene figure:

Behold

A rakehell cat—how furtive and acold!

A spent witch homing from some infamous dance—

Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade

Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade!

Or, again, take the description of the East Wind in London Voluntaries:

Out of the poisonous East,

Over a continent of blight,

Like a maleficent influence released

From the most squalid cellarage of hell,

The Wind-fiend, the abominable—

The Hangman Wind that tortures temper and light—

Comes slouching, sullen and obscene,

Hard on the skirts of the embittered night;

And in a cloud unclean

Of excremental humours, roused to strife

By the operation of some ruinous change,

Wherever his evil mandate run and range,

Into a dire intensity of life,

A craftsman at his bench, he settles down

To the grim job of throttling London Town.

This is, of its kind, remarkable writing. It may not reflect a poetic view of life, but it reflects a romantic and humorous view. Henley’s humour is seldom good humour: it is, rather, a sort of boisterous invective. His phrases delight us like the oaths of some old sea-captain if we put ourselves in the mood of delight. And how extravagantly he flings them down, like a pocketful of money on the counter of a bar! He may only be a pauper, behaving like a rich man, but we, who are his guests for an hour, submit to the illusion and become happy echoes of his wild talk.

For he has the gift of language. It is not the loud-sounding sea but loud-sounding words that are his passion. Compared to Henley, even Tennyson was modest in his use of large Latin negatives. His eloquence is sonorous with the music of “immemorial,” “intolerable,” “immitigable,” “inexorable,” “unimaginable,” and the kindred train of words. He is equally in love with “wonderful,” “magnificent,” “miraculous,” “immortal,” and all the flock of adjectival enthusiasm.

Here in this radiant and immortal street,

he cries, as he stands on a spring day in Piccadilly. He did not use sounding adjectives without meaning, however. His adjectives express effectively that lust of life that distinguishes him from other writers. For it is lust of life, in contradistinction to love, that is the note of Henley’s work. He himself lets us into this secret in the poem that begins:

Love, which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb.

Again, when he writes of Piccadilly in spring, he cries:

Look how the liberal and transfiguring air

Washes this inn of memorable meetings,

This centre of ravishments and gracious greetings,

Till, through its jocund loveliness of length

A tidal-race of lust from shore to shore,

A brimming reach of beauty met with strength,

It shines and sounds like some miraculous dream,

Some vision multitudinous and agleam,

Of happiness as it shall be evermore!

The spectacle of life produced in Henley an almost exclusively physical excitement. He did not wish to see things transfigured by the light that never was on sea or land. He preferred the light on the wheels of a hansom cab or, at best, the light that falls on the Thames as it flows through London. His attitude to life, in other words, was sensual. He could escape out of circumstances into the sensual enchantments of the Arabian Nights, but there was no escape for him, as there is for the great poets, into the general universe of the imagination. This physical obsession may be put down in a measure to his long years of ill-health and struggle. But even a healthy and prosperous Henley, I fancy, would have been restless, dissatisfied, embittered. For him most seas were Dead Seas, and most shores were desolate. The sensualist’s “Dust and Ashes!” breaks in, not always mournfully, but at times angrily, upon the high noon of his raptures. He longs for death as few poets have longed:

Of art and drink I have had my fill,

he declares, and the conclusion of the whole matter is:

For the end I know is the best of all.

To his mother, to his sister, to Stevenson he writes this recurrent message—the glad tidings of death to come. Man’s life is for him but a child’s wanderings among the shows of a fair:

Till at last,

Tired of experience he turns

To the friendly and comforting breast

Of the old nurse, Death.

And in most of his poems on this theme it seems to be the peace of the grave he desires, not an immortality of new experiences. There is one moving poem, however, dedicating the “windlestraws” of his verse to his wife in which a reference to their dead child suggests that he, too, may have felt the hunger for immortality:

Poor windlestraws

On the great, sullen, roaring pool of Time

And Chance and Change, I know!

But they are yours, as I am, till we attain

That end for which we make, we two that are one:

A little exquisite Ghost

Between us, smiling with the serenest eyes

Seen in this world, and calling, calling still

In that clear voice whose infinite subtleties

Of sweetness, thrilling back across the grave,

Break the poor heart to hear:

“Come, Dadsie, come?

Mama, how long—how long?”

Sufferer and sensualist, Henley found in the affections some relief from his savage unrest. It was affection that painted that masterly sonnet-portrait of Stevenson in Apparition, and there is affection, too, in that song in praise of England, Pro Rege Nostro, though much of his praise of England, like his praise of life, is but poetry of lust. Lust in action, unfortunately, has a way of being absurd, and Henley is often absurd in his lustful—by which one does not mean lascivious—poems. His Song of the Sword and his Song of Speed are both a little absurd in their sheer lustfulness. Here we have a mere extravagance of physical exultation, with a great deal of talk about “the Lord,” who is—to the ruin of the verse—a figure of rhetoric and phrase of excitement, and not at all the Holy Spirit of the religious.

Henley, indeed, was for the most part not a religious man but an egoist. He saw his own shadow everywhere on the universe, like the shadow of a crippled but undefeated lion. He saw himself sometimes with pity, oftener with pride. One day he found his image in an “old, black rotter of a boat” that lay stranded at Shoreham:

With a horrid list, a frightening lapse from the line,

That makes me think of legs and a broken spine.

But he preferred to think, as in the most famous of his poems, of his “unconquerable soul,” and to enjoy the raree-show of life heroically under the promise of death. To call this attitude vainglorious is not to belittle it. Henley was a master in his own school of literature, and his works live after him. His commixture of rude and civil phrase may be a dangerous model for other writers, but with what skill he achieves the right emphasis and witty magniloquence of effect! He did not guess (or guess at) the secrets of life, but he watched the pageant with a greedy eye, sketched one or two figures that amused or attracted him, and cheered till his pen ought to have been hoarse. He also cursed, and, part of the time, he played with rhymes, as if in an interchange of railleries. But, in all circumstances, he was a valiant figure—valiant not only in words but in the service of words. We need not count him among the sages, but literature has also room for the sightseers, and Henley will have a place among them for many years to come.

VII
LORD ROSEBERY

Lord Rosebery’s oratory is the port at a banquet. It is a little somnolent in its charm. Mr. Birrell has a better cellar of the livelier French wines. But the Rosebery port is a wine without which no memorial dinner can come to a perfect end. It is essentially the wine of memory. It is used to moisten monumental effigies as champagne is used to christen ships. As you read his two volumes of Miscellanies, you get the impression that, wherever there is an effigy to be unveiled, you will find Lord Rosebery present with his noble aspersion of words. I do not know whether Lord Rosebery himself chooses what effigies he will talk about or whether he has them chosen for him. It is difficult to imagine a statue on which he would not talk admirably. He is the greatest living showman of statues. Even when there is no statue to be unveiled, but only a centenary to be commemorated, he usually sees the great man in the posture of a statue—a little larger than life, and with the sins and scandals discreetly slurred over. Hence it would be in vain to look in his commemoration addresses for great character studies or critical interpretations of genius. They are compliments, not criticisms. They are spoken on behalf of all present. Lord Rosebery’s art is the art of the funeral speech blended with the art of the speech at a distribution of prizes. Of this difficult though minor art he is an accomplished practitioner.

Hence it would be ridiculous to judge his addresses on Burns by the same standards by which we judge the studies of Carlyle and Stevenson and Henley on the same subject. Lord Rosebery’s speeches belong to the literature of formalities, and it is their chief virtue that they express the common view with brightness of emphasis, humour of anecdote, and at times with a charming sentimental music of speech. They say what everyone present would regard as the right thing to say, and they say it very much better than anybody else on the platform could say it. He is a spokesman, not a discoverer. His freshness is that of a man who furnishes what is already known rather than of one who adds to the stock of knowledge. That he has also the gifts of the writer who can add to the stock of knowledge is shown by his humorous, fascinating and amiable portrait of Lord Randolph Churchill. Here he speaks for himself, not for the meeting. Lord Randolph is as real to him as a character in fiction, with his spell, his impudence and his disaster. As we read this story we feel that, if he cared, Lord Rosebery might write a book of reminiscences, telling with detached frankness the whole truth about himself and his great associates, which would have an immortal place in English biographical literature. For the present, however, we must be content that there should be someone who can speak the general mind on Burns and Burke, on Oliver Cromwell and Dr. Johnson, with a hint of majesty and a lulling charm.

Certainly, he reveals no secrets that are not open secrets about his heroes. He is continually asking “What is his secret?” and the answer is usually a little disappointing, a little exiguous in surprise, when it comes. Thus he tells us that the secret of Burns “lies in two words—inspiration and sympathy.” That is true, but it leaves Burns smooth as a statue. Burns appeals to us surely, not only through his inspiration and sympathy, but as the spirit of man fluttering rebelliously, songfully, satirically, against the bars of orthodoxy. Scotsmen revere him as the champion of human nature against the Levites. His errors, no doubt, were as gross as those of the Levites, but human nature turns affectionately to those who protest on its behalf against tyranny, and Burns with all his sins, was a liberator. When he comes to Burke, Lord Rosebery again asks, “What is his secret?” “The secret of Burke’s character,” he says, “is this, in my judgment—that he loved reform and hated revolution.” This, again, leaves Burke with the eyes of a statue. We shall understand the secret of Burke much better if we see him as a man who had far more passionate convictions about the duties than about the rights of human beings. He believed in good government and in good citizenship, but he was never even touched by the Utopian dream of the perfectibility of man. Lord Rosebery, indeed, brings the figures of the dead to life, not in his interpretation of their secrets, but usually in some anecdote that reminds us of their profound humanity.

His happiest speeches, as a result, are about great men whose private lives have already been laid bare to all the world. When he has to speak on Thackeray, whose life still remains half a secret, he devotes more space to literary criticism, and Thackeray remains for the most part an effigy hung with wreaths of compliments. It is the fashion nowadays to speak ill of Thackeray, and Lord Rosebery’s extravagances on the other side would tempt even a moderate man into disparagement. He refers to Thackeray as “the giant whom we discuss to-day.” There could not be a more inappropriate word for Thackeray than “giant.” One might almost as well call Jane Austen a “giantess.” Charlotte Brontë, as a young author coming under Thackeray’s spell, might legitimately feel that she was in the presence of a Titan. But a man may be a Titan to his contemporaries and yet be no Titan in the long line of great authors. Thackeray, I am convinced, is greatly underestimated to-day, but he will come back into his own only if we are prepared to welcome him on a level considerably below that of the Titans—below Dickens and Tolstoy, below even Sterne. Not that Lord Rosebery finds nothing to censure in Thackeray. Though he remarks that Vanity Fair “appears to many of us the most full and various novel in the English language,” he has no praise for “the limp Amelia and the shadowy Dobbin.” At the same time, he turns aside his censures with a compliment. “The blemishes of Vanity Fair exalt the book,” he declares; “for what must be the merits of a work which absolutely eclipse such defects?” It is one of the perils of oratory that it leads men to utter sentences of this kind. They mean little or nothing, but they have the ring of amiability. On the other hand, Lord Rosebery makes no concession to amiability in his criticism of Esmond. “The plot to me,” he says, “is simply repulsive. The transformation of Lady Castlewood from a mother to a wife is unnatural and distasteful to the highest degree. Thackeray himself declared that he could not help it. This, I think, only means that he saw no other than this desperate means of extricating the story. I cannot help it, too. One likes what one likes, and one dislikes what one dislikes.” An occasional reservation of this kind helps to give flavour to Lord Rosebery’s compliments. It gives them the air of being the utterances, not of a professional panegyrist, but of a detached and impartial mind. Thus he begins his eulogy of Dr. Johnson with a confession that Johnson’s own writings are dead for him apart from “two poems and some pleasing biographies.” “Speaking as an individual and illiterate Briton”—so he makes his confession. It is as though the tide withdrew in order to come in with all the more surprising volume.

One thing that must strike many readers with astonishment while reading these speeches and studies is that an orator so famous for his delicate wit should reveal so little delight in the wit of authors. His enthusiasm is largely moral enthusiasm. We think of Lord Rosebery as a dilettante, and yet the dilettanti of literature and public life make only a feeble appeal to him. He is interested in few but men of strong character and men of action. His heroes are such men as Cromwell and Mr. Gladstone. Is it that he is an ethical dilettante, or is it that he is seeking in these vehement natures a strength of which he feels the lack in himself? Certainly, as we read him, he casts the shadow of a man who has almost all the elements of greatness except this strength. He has been Prime Minister, he has won the Derby, he has achievements behind him sufficient (one would imagine) to fill three lives with success, and yet somehow we picture him as a brilliant failure as we picture the young man who had great possessions. These very Miscellanies bear the stamp of failure. They are the praises of famous men spoken from a balcony in the Castle of Indolence. They are graceful and delightful. But they are haunted by a curious pathos, for the eyes of the speaker gaze wistfully from where he stands towards the path that leads to the Hill Difficulty and the pilgrims who advance along it under heavy burdens to their perils and rewards.

VIII
MR. VACHEL LINDSAY

Mr. Lindsay objects to being called a “jazz poet”; and, if the name implied that he did nothing in verse but make a loud, facetious, and hysterical noise, his objection would be reasonable. It is possible to call him a “jazz poet,” however, for the purpose not of belittling him, but of defining one of his leading qualities. He is essentially the poet of a worked-up audience. He relies on the company for the success of his effects, like a Negro evangelist. The poet, as a rule, is a solitary in his inspiration. He is more likely to address a star than a crowded room. Mr. Lindsay is too sociable to write like that. He invites his readers to a party, and the world for him is a round game. To read “The Skylark” or the “Ode to a Nightingale” in the hunt-the-slipper mood in which one enjoys “The Daniel Jazz” would be disastrous. Shelley and Keats give us the ecstasy of a communion, not the excitement of a party. The noise of the world, the glare, and the jostling crowds fade as we read. The audience of Shelley or Keats is as still as the audience in a cathedral. Mr. Lindsay, on the other hand, calls for a chorus, like a singer at a smoking-concert. That is the spirit in which he has written his best work. He is part entertainer and part evangelist, but in either capacity he seems to demand not an appreciative hush, but an appreciative noise.

It is clear that he is unusually susceptible to crowd excitement. His two best poems, “Bryan, Bryan” and “The Congo,” are born of it. “Bryan, Bryan” is an amazing attempt to recapture and communicate a boy’s emotions as he mingled in the scrimmage of the Presidential election of 1896. Mr. Lindsay becomes all but inarticulate as he recalls the thrill and tumult of the marching West when Bryan called on it to advance against the Plutocrats. He seems to be shouting like a student when students hire a bus and go forth in masks and fancy dress to make a noise in the streets. Luckily, he makes an original noise. He knows that his excitement is more than he can express in intelligible speech, and so he wisely and humorously calls in the aid of nonsense, which he uses with such skill and vehemence that everybody is forced to turn round and stare at him:

Oh, the long-horns from Texas,

The jay hawks from Kansas,

The plop-eyed bungaroo and giant giassicus,

The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo,

The horned toad, prairie-dog, and ballyhoo,

From all the new-born states arow,

Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,

Bidding the eagles of the West fly on.

The fawn, prodactyl, and thing-a-ma-jig,

The rakeboor, the hellangone,

The whangdoodle, batfowl and pig,

The coyote, wild-cat, and grizzly in a glow,

In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast,

They leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West.

From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long—

Against the towns of Tubal Cain,

Ah—sharp was their song.

Against the ways of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young,

The long-horn calf, the buffalo, and wampus gave tongue.

In such a passage as this Mr. Lindsay pours decorative nonsense out of a horn of plenty. But his aim is not to talk nonsense: it is to use nonsense as the language of reality. As paragraph follows paragraph, we see with what sureness he is piling colour on colour and crash on crash in order that we may respond almost physically to the sensations of those magnificent and tumultuous days. He has discovered a new sort of rhetoric which enables him to hurry us through mood after mood of comic, pugnacious and sentimental excitement. Addressed to a religious meeting, rhetoric of this kind would be interrupted by cries of “Glory, Hallelujah!” and “Praise de Lord!” Unless you are rhetoric-proof, you cannot escape its spell. Isolated from its context, the passage I have quoted may be subjected to cold criticism. It is only when it keeps its place in the living body of the poem and becomes part of the general attack on our nerves that it is irresistibly effective.

In “The Congo,” it is the excitement of Negroes—in their dances and their religion—that Mr. Lindsay has set to words. As he watches their revels, the picture suggests a companion-picture of Negroes orgiastic in Africa, in the true Kingdom of Mumbo-Jumbo—a Negro’s fairy-tale of a magic land:

Just then from the doorway, as fat as shotes,

Came the cake-walk princes in their long red coats,

Canes with a brilliant lacquer shine,

And tall silk hats that were red as wine.

And they pranced with their butterfly partners there,

Coal-black maidens with pearls in their hair,

Knee-skirts trimmed with the jessamine sweet,

And bells on their ankles and little black feet.

But it is the grotesque comedy of the American Negro, not the fantasia on Africa, that makes “The Congo” so entertaining a poem. The description of the “fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room” has often been quoted. There is the same feeling of “racket” in the picture of a religious camp meeting:

A good old negro in the slums of the town

Preached at a sister for her velvet gown;

Howled at a brother for his low-down ways,

His prowling, guzzling, sneak-thief days;

Beat on the Bible till he wore it out

Starting the jubilee revival shout.

And some had visions as they stood on chairs,

And sang of Jacob, and the golden stairs.

And they all repented, a thousand strong,

From their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong,

And slammed on their hymn books till they shook the room

With “glory, glory, glory,”

And “Boom, boom, Boom.”

Whatever qualities Mr. Lindsay lacks, he has humour, colour and gusto. When he writes in the tradition of the serious poets, as in “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight” and “Epilogue,” he is negligible: he is only one of a thousand capable verse-writers. He is dependent on his own idiom to a greater extent even than was Robert Burns. Not that his work in rag-time English is comparable in other respects to Burns’s in Scots. Burns’s themes were, apart from his comic verse, the traditional themes of the poets—the aristocrats of the spirit. Mr. Lindsay is a humorist and sentimentalist who is essentially a democrat of the spirit—one of the crowd.

And, just as he is the humorist of the crowd, so is he the humorist of things immense and exaggerated. His imagination is the playground of whales and elephants and sea-serpents. He is happy amid the clangour and confusion of a railway-junction. He rejoices in the exuberant and titanic life of California, where:

Thunder-clouds of grapes grow on the mountains.

and he boasts that:

There are ten gold suns in California,

When all other lands have one,

For the Golden Gate must have due light

And persimmons be well done.

And the hot whales slosh and cool in the wash

And the fume of the hollow sea,

Rally and roam in the loblolly foam

And whoop that their souls are free.

Mr. Lindsay himself can whoop like a whale. He is a poet in search of superlatives beyond the superlatives. He cannot find them, but he at least articulates new sounds. As one reads him, one is reminded at times of a child in a railway-train singing and shouting against the noise of the engine and the wheels. The world affects Mr. Lindsay as the railway-train affects some children. He is intoxicated by the rhythm of the machinery. As a result, though he is often an ethical poet, he is seldom a spiritual poet. That helps to explain why his verse does not achieve any but a sentimental effect in his andante movements. As his voice falls, his inspiration falls. In “The Santa Fé Trail” he breaks in on the frenzy of a thousand motors with the still, small voice of the bird called the Rachel Jane. He undoubtedly moves us by the way in which he does this; but he moves us much as a sentimental singer at a ballad concert can do. It is not for passages of this kind that one reads him. His words at their best do not minister at the altar: they dance to the music of the syncopated orchestra. That is Mr. Lindsay’s peculiar gift. It would hardly be using too strong a word to say that it is his genius.

IX
MR. PUNCH TAKES THE WRONG TURNING

There are those who gibe at Punch. There are also those who gibe at those who gibe at Punch. The match is a fairly even one. Punch is undoubtedly not as good as it used to be, but it is not quite so certain that it is not as clever as it used to be. Very few people realise that Punch was once a good paper—that it was a good paper, I mean in the Charles-Kingsley sense of the adjective. It began in 1841, as Mr. C. L. Graves prettily says, by “being violently and vituperatively on the side of the angels.” If Punch had kept pace with the times it would, in these days, at the age of eighty, be suspected of Socialism. Its championship of the poor against those who prospered on the poverty of the poor was as vehement as a Labour speech at a street-corner. One of the features of the early Punch was a “Pauper’s Corner,” in which “the cry of the people found frequent and touching utterance.” It was in the Christmas number of Punch in 1843 that Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” was first published. Mark Lemon, the editor, insisted on publishing it, though all his colleagues were opposed to him on the point. In the following years we find the same indignant sense of realities expressing itself in Leech’s cartoon, “The Home of the Rick Burner,” which emphasised the fact that the cause of an outburst of incendiarism in Suffolk was the greed of the farmers who underpaid their labourers. Punch also took up the cause of the sweated labourers in verse:

I’ll sing you a fine old song, improved by a modern pate,

Of a fine Old English Gentleman, who owns a large estate,

But pays the labourers on it a very shabby rate.

Some seven shillings each a week for early work and late,

Gives this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.

Nor did Punch shrink from looking a good deal higher than the fine Old English Gentleman for his victims. He had a special, almost a Lloyd Georgian, taste for baiting dukes. He attacked the Duke of Norfolk with admirable irony for suggesting to the poor that they should eke out their miserable fare by using curry powder. He made butts in turn of the Duke of Marlborough, the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of Sutherland, the Duke of Richmond and the Duke of Atholl. He did not spare even the Duke of Wellington. “The old Duke,” he declared, “should no longer block up the great thoroughfare of civilisation—he should be quietly and respectfully eliminated.” It was in the same mood that the Marquis of Londonderry was denounced both as a tyrannical coal-owner and an enemy of the Queen’s English—“the most noble, but not the most grammatical Marquis.” Punch’s view of the House of Lords is expressed with considerable directness in his scheme for reforming the Chamber, which begins:

It is an indisputable truth that there can be no such thing as a born legislator. As unquestionable is the fact that there may be a born ass.

But your born ass may be born to your legislator’s office, and command a seat in the house of legislators by inheritance, as in not a few examples, wherein the coronet hides not the donkey’s ears.

This is not particularly brilliant. It is interesting not so much in itself as because it is the sort of thing with which Punch used regularly to regale its readers. Punch in those days was a paper with a purpose. Its humour, like Dickens’s was to a certain extent a missionary humour. Punch saw himself as the rescuer of the underdog, and, if he could not achieve his object comically, he was prepared to do it angrily. He did not hesitate to fling his cap and bells rudely in the face of royalty itself. He might be accused of vulgarity, but not of being, as he has since become, the more or less complacent advocate of Toby, the top-dog.

Mr. Graves seems to think that the change in the spirit of Punch is due to the mellowness that comes with increasing years. But the real reason, I fancy, is that, while Punch began under an editor whose sympathies were with the bottom-dog, the sympathies of later editors have been much more respectable. It is not that Punch has lost the fire of youth, but that it has lost the generosity of the Victorian man of letters. It was, it may be admitted, easier to be generous in those days. A Victorian could make himself the champion of the ill-used poor without any feeling that he was assisting in bringing about a new order in society. A middle-class Georgian who attaches himself to the same cause cannot do so without realising that it is not a question of patching an old suit of clothes, but of making a new and a better one. The Victorian committed himself to charity. The Georgian has to commit himself to the cold-blooded charity of equality. Punch, indeed, seems to have begun to take alarm as soon as the Chartist movement made it appear likely that the workers were going to demand, not sympathetic treatment, but something like self-determination. By 1873, according to Mr. Graves, “references to the champagne-habit among the miners abound.” In a cartoon, “From the Coal Districts,” we are shown a lady in a fruiterer’s saying, “I’m afraid I must give up the pineapple, Mr. Green! Eight shillings is really too much!” She is interrupted by a “successful collier” who bids the fruiterer, “Just put ’em up for me, then, Master. ’Ere’s ’arf a sovereign; and look ’ere—yer may keep the change if yer’ll only tell us ’ow to cook ’un.” Punch, as we know it to-day, had been born.

It is interesting to trace the change in the temper of Punch, not only in domestic, but in foreign, affairs. Punch appears to have given up his pacifism—or, as Mr. Graves calls it with reforming zeal, his “pacificism”—as a result of his generous sympathy with insurgent Italians and Hungarians. That was the thin end of the wedge. Having once drawn the sword, Punch found it even more enjoyable than drawing cartoons. He drew it fiercely against the Russians in the Crimean War. He drew it fiercely against the Indians in the Indian Mutiny. He drew it on behalf of General Eyre after the negro outbreak in Jamaica. He drew it against Lincoln in the American Civil War. Mr. Graves ought, for historical reasons, to have reprinted Punch’s parody on one of Lincoln’s speeches. He is content, however, to describe it as “a truly lamentable performance, in which the President claims dictatorial powers, calls for whipcord to whip the rebels, abuses the ‘rotten old world,’ talks with the utmost cynicism of the blacks, and in general behaves like a vulgar buffoon.” Mr. Graves, with an impartiality which cannot be too highly praised, reminds the Punch of those days that “the magnanimous Lincoln would never allow” the Southerners to be called rebels in his presence—a significant reminder when we recall how Mr. Lloyd George drew on the Lincoln parallel in defending his treatment of the Irish. But, for the ironist, the most amusing of all Punch’s blunders in regard to foreign policy is the welcome he offered to the birth of the German Navy in an article called “Bravo, Bismarck!” “Britannia through her Punch,” he wrote, “rejoices to weave among her naval azures a new shade—Prussian blue.” It is only fair to say that Punch was not consistent in his attitude to Germany. But he has shown a curious capacity for backing the wrong horse—the horse that seemed to “get away” at the start, but that was ultimately disqualified by the stern judge, history. He gave up championing lost causes and took to championing causes that would be lost a generation later.

In the result, Mr. Graves, though a wit of distinction, has produced in Mr. Punch’s History of Modern England a book that is pathetic rather than amusing. It is a cemetery of dead jokes—the offspring of a little gentleman with a long nose who was cross more often than he was funny. Punch, indeed, has been for the most part a grinner rather than a wit. It has had, and still has, brilliant writers on its staff. But its temper is not the temper of its most brilliant contributors. Its attitude is that of the prosperous clubman who dislikes the advance both of the new rich and of the old poor. It has undoubtedly made itself the most successful comic paper in the world, but one sometimes wonders whether it has done so as a result of allying itself with comedy or of allying itself with success. Yet the fact remains that other men have started rivals to Punch, and that they have not only been not so successful as Punch but not so comic. Punch always baits the hook of its odious politics with a reasonable amount of comedy about things in general, and in the comedy of things in general, even if we think it might be done still better, it has at least always been ahead of its rivals. There have been men who have dreamed of a Punch that would bring the spirit of comedy to bear on all sides impartially. There are others who have dreamed of bringing the spirit of comedy to bear on the right side. One would not, perhaps, mind what side Punch was on if only it were a little more generous—if only it purveyed the human comedy as a comedy, and not, as in the case of working men, Irishmen, and non-Allied foreigners, as a sinister crook melodrama.

X
MR. H. M. TOMLINSON

Mr. Tomlinson is a born traveller. There are two sorts of travellers—those who do what they are told and those who do what they please. Mr. Tomlinson has never moved about the world in obedience to a guide-book. He would find it almost as difficult to read a guide-book as to write one. He never echoes other men’s curiosity. He travels for the purpose neither of information nor conversation. He has no motive but whim. His imagination goes roaming; and, his imagination and his temper being such as they are, he is out on his travels even if he gets no farther than Limehouse or the Devonshire coast. He has, indeed, wandered a good deal farther than Limehouse and Devonshire, as readers of The Sea and the Jungle know. Even in his more English volumes of sketches, essays, confessions, short stories—how is one to describe them?—he takes us with him to the north coast of Africa, to New York, and to France in war time. But the English sketches—the description of the crowd at a pit-mouth after an explosion in a coal mine, the account of a derelict railway station and a grocer’s boy in spectacles—almost equally give us the feeling that we are reading the narrative of one who has seen nothing except with the fortunate eyes of a stranger. It is all a matter of eyes. To see is to discover, and all Mr. Tomlinson’s books are, in this sense, books of discoveries.

As a recorder of the things he has seen he has the three great gifts of imagery, style and humour. He sees the jelly-fish hanging in the transparent deeps “like sunken moons.” A boat sailing on a windy day goes skimming over the inflowing ridges of the waves “with exhilarating undulations, light as a sandpiper.” A queer Lascar on a creeping errand in an East-end street “looked as uncertain as a candle-flame in a draught.” How well again Mr. Tomlinson conveys to us in a sentence or two the vision of Northern Africa on a wet day:

As for Bougie, these African villages are built but for sunlight. They change to miserable and filthy ruins in the rain, their white walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud tracks between the styes. Their lissome and statuesque inhabitants become softened and bent, and pad dejectedly through the muck as though they were ashamed to live, but had to go on with it. The palms which look so well in sunny pictures are besoms up-ended in a drizzle.

Mr. Tomlinson has in that last sentence captured the ultimate secret of a wet day in an African village. Even those of us who have never seen Africa save on the map, know that often there is nothing more to be said. Mr. Tomlinson, however, is something of a specialist in bad weather, as, perhaps, any man who loves the sea as he does must be. The weather fills the world for the seaman with gods and demons. The weather is at once the day’s adventure and the day’s pageant. Mr. Conrad has written one of the greatest stories in the world simply about the weather and the soul of man. He may be said to be the first novelist writing in English to have kept his weather-eye open. Mr. Tomlinson shares Mr. Conrad’s sensitive care for these things. His description of a storm of rain bursting on the African hills makes you see the things as you read. In its setting, even an unadorned and simple sentence like——

As Yeo luffed, the squall fell on us bodily with a great weight of wind and white rain, pressing us into the sea,

compels our presence among blowing winds and dangerous waters.

But, weather-beaten as Mr. Tomlinson’s pages are, there is more in them than the weather. There is an essayish quality in his books, personal, confessional, go-as-you-please. The majority of essays have egotism without personality. Mr. Tomlinson’s sketches have personality without egotism. He is economical of discussion of his own tastes. When he does discuss them you know that here is no make-believe of confession. Take, for instance, the comment on place-names with which he prefaces his account of his disappointment with Tripoli:

You probably know there are place-names, which, when whispered privately, have the unreasonable power of translating the spirit east of the sun and west of the moon. They cannot be seen in print without a thrill. The names in the atlas which do that for me are a motley lot, and you, who see no magic in them, but have your own lunacy in another phase, would laugh at mine. Celebes, Acapulco, Para, Port Royal, Cartagena, the Marquesas, Panama, the Mackenzie River, Tripoli of Barbary—they are some of mine. Rome should be there, I know, and Athens, and Byzantium. But they are not, and that is all I can say about it.

That is the farthest Mr. Tomlinson ever gets on the way towards arrogance. He ignores Rome and Athens. They are not among the ports of call of his imagination. He prefers the world that sailors tell about to the world that scholars talk about. He will not write about—he will scarcely even interest himself in—any world but that which he has known in the intimacy of his imaginative or physical experience. Places that he has seen and thought of, ships, children, stars, books, animals, soldiers, workers—of all these things he will tell you with a tender realism, lucid and human because they are part of his life. But the tradition that is not his own he throws aside as a burden. He will carry no pack save of the things that have touched his heart and his imagination.

I wish all his sketches had been as long as “The African Coast.” It is so good that it makes one want to send him travelling from star to star of all those names that mean more to him than Byzantium. One desires even to keep him a prisoner for a longer period among the lights of New York. He should have written about the blazing city at length, as he has written about the ferries. His description of the lighted ferries and the woman passenger who had forgotten Jimmy’s boots, remains in the memory. Always in his sketches we find some such significant “thing seen.” On the voyage home from New York on a floating hotel it is the passing of a derelict sailing ship, “mastless and awash,” that suddenly recreates for him the reality of the ocean. After describing the assaults of the seas on the doomed hulk, he goes on:

There was something ironic in the indifference of her defenceless body to these unending attacks. It mocked this white and raging post-mortem brutality, and gave her a dignity that was cold and superior to all the eternal powers could now do. She pitched helplessly head first into a hollow, and a door flew open under the break of her poop; it surprised and shocked us, for the dead might have signed to us then. She went astern of us fast, and a great comber ran at her, as if it had just spied her, and thought she was escaping. There was a high white flash, and a concussion we heard. She had gone. But she appeared again far away, forlorn on a summit in desolation, black against the sunset. The stump of her bowsprit, the accusatory finger of the dead, pointed at the sky.

We find in “The Ruins” (which is a sketch of a town in France just evacuated by the Germans) an equally imaginative use made of a key incident. First, we have the description of the ruined town itself:

House-fronts had collapsed in rubble across the road. There is a smell of opened vaults. All the homes are blind. Their eyes have been put out. Many of the buildings are without roofs, and their walls have come down to raw serrations. Slates and tiles have avalanched into the street, or the roof itself is entire, but has dropped sideways over the ruin below as a drunken cap over the dissolute.

And so on till we come to the discovery of a corn-chandler’s ledger lying in the mud of the roadway. Only an artist could have made a tradesman’s ledger a symbol of hope and resurrection on a shattered planet as Mr. Tomlinson has done. He picks out from the disordered procession of things treasures that most of us would pass with hardly a glance. His clues to the meaning of the world are all of his own finding. It is this that gives his work the savour and freshness of literature.

As for clues to Mr. Tomlinson’s own mind and temper, do we not discover plenty of them in his confessions about books? He is a man who likes to read The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms in bed. Heine and Samuel Butler and Anatole France are among his favourite authors. There is nothing in his work to suggest that he has taken any of them for his models. But there is a vein of rebellious irony in his writing that enables one to realise why his imagination finds in Swift good company. He, too, has felt his heart lacerated, especially in these late days of the world’s corruption. His writing would be bitter, one feels, were it not for the strength of his affections. Humanity and irony contend in his work, and humanity is fortunately the winner. In the result, the world in his books is not permanently a mud-ball, but a star shining in space. Perhaps it is in gratitude for this that we find it possible at last even to forgive him his contemptuous references to Coleridge’s Table-talk—that cache of jewels buried in metaphysical cotton-wool.

XI
THE ALLEGED HOPELESSNESS OF TCHEHOV

A Russian critic has said that Tchehov had nothing to give his fellows but a philosophy of hopelessness. He committed the crime of destroying men’s faith in God, morals, progress, and art. This is an accusation that takes one’s breath away. If ever there was a writer who had a genius for consolation—a genius for stretching out a hand to his floundering fellow-mortals—it was Tchehov. He was as active in service as a professional philanthropist. His faith in the decency of men was as inextinguishable as his doubt. His tenderness was a passion. He was open-hearted to all comers. He never shut his door either on a poor man needing medicine, or on a young man needing praise. He was equally generous as author, doctor and reformer. He who has been represented as a disbeliever in anything was no disbeliever even in contemporary men of genius. His attitude to Tolstoy was not one of idolatry, but it came as near being idolatrous as is possible for a clever man. “I am afraid of Tolstoy’s death,” he wrote in 1900. “If he were to die there would be a big, empty place in my life.... I have never loved any man as much as him. I am not a believing man, but of beliefs I consider his the nearest and most akin to me.” In his gloomier moods he thought little enough of the work either of himself or his younger contemporaries. “We are stale,” he wrote; “we can only beget gutta-percha boys.” But this was because he was on his knees before everything that is greatest in literature. In a letter to his friend, Suvorin, editor of the Novoe Vremya, he wrote:

The writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic—they are going towards something and summoning you towards it, too, and you feel, not with your mind but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects—the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davgdov; others have remote objects—God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are idealists, and paint life as it is, but, through every life’s being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you.

If this is the confession of an unbeliever, a philosopher of hopelessness, we may reasonably ask for a new definition of belief.

Tchehov, indeed, was born with an impulse towards reverence and faith. Though he denied that he was either a Liberal or a Conservative, he excited himself about causes like a schoolboy revolutionary. He had a religious sense of justice. He was ardently on Zola’s side during the Dreyfus excitement. “Let Dreyfus be guilty,” he declared, “and Zola is still right, since it is the duty of writers not to accuse, not to persecute, but to champion even the guilty once they have been condemned and are enduring imprisonment.... There are plenty of accusers, persecutors, and gendarmes without them, and in any case the rôle of Paul suits them better than that of Saul.” He quarrelled with Suvorin for attacking Zola. “To abuse Zola when he is on his trial—that is unworthy of literature.”

We find the same ardent reforming spirit running through the whole of Tchehov’s life. At one time he is engrossed in a project for building in Moscow a “People’s Palace,” with a library, reading-rooms, a lecture-room, a museum, and a theatre. At another time, he is off to the island of Saghalin to study with his own eyes the horrors of the Siberian penal system. “My God,” he writes in the course of his investigations, “how rich Russia is in good people! If it were not for the cold which deprives Siberia of the summer, and if it were not for the officials who corrupt the peasants, Siberia would be the richest and happiest of lands.” In another letter he looks forward to building a school “in the village where I am a school-warden.” When a plague of cholera breaks out, we find Tchehov once more living for others with the same saintly unselfishness. At times, no doubt, he cursed the cholera and he cursed his patients like a human being; but his cries were the cries of an exhausted body; they were merely a proof of the zeal that had worn him out. There is an attractive portrait of Tchehov at this time in the biographical sketch that precedes the English translation of his letters:

He returned home shattered and exhausted, but always behaved as though he were doing something trivial; he cracked little jokes and made everyone laugh as before, and carried on conversations with his dachshund Quinine, about her supposed sufferings.

This may be consistent with the philosophy of despair. It is certainly very unlike the practice of despair. But that Tchehov’s creed was the opposite of a creed of despair may be seen in letter after letter. In one letter he writes:

I believe in individual people. I see salvation in individual personalities scattered here and there all over Russia—educated people or peasants—they have strength though they are few.

In another letter he says:

Modern culture is only the first beginning of work for a great future, work which will perhaps go on for tens of thousands of years, in order that man may, if only in the remote future, come to know the truth of the real God—that is not, I conjecture, by seeking in Dostoievsky, but by clear knowledge, as one knows twice two are four.

If one thing is obvious, it is that the writer of these sentences is an enthusiast. Take him, again, when he is protesting against “trade-marks and labels” for artists, and announcing his creed:

My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom—freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.

In regard to literature, he believed not in the disheartening sort of realism but in a temperate idealism, as we learn from an excellent parable:

Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham only noticed that his father was a drunkard, and completely lost sight of the fact that he was a genius, that he had built an ark and saved the world. Writers must not imitate Ham....

On the other hand, Tchehov was always alert to defend the practice of honest realism in literature. He refused to admit that it is the object of literature to “unearth the pearl from the refuse-heap”:

A writer is not a confectioner, not a provider of cosmetics, not an entertainer; he is a man bound, under contract, by his sense of duty and his conscience; having put his hand to the plough, he mustn’t turn back, and however distasteful, he must conquer his squeamishness and soil his imagination with the dirt of life. He is just like any ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper correspondent, out of a feeling of fastidiousness or from a wish to please his readers, would describe only honest mayors, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railway contractors?

In Tchehov’s view, it is the duty of the artist to tell the truth about his characters, not to draw morals from them. “The artist,” he declares, “must not be the judge of his characters and of their conversations, but merely an impartial witness.” The artist must, no doubt, strive after some such impartiality as this. But the great artist will never quite attain to it. Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tchehov himself, all lavished affection on some of their characters and withheld it from others.

On the other hand, the artist must be tolerant to a degree that frequently shocks the orthodox moralist. He approaches individual men, not as a censor, but as a recorder. Tchehov, writing to a friend from his country estate, relates, for instance: “The village priest often comes and pays me long visits; he is a very good fellow, a widower, and has some illegitimate children.” To the stern moralist, a priest who is a very good fellow with some illegitimate children is an unthinkable paradox. To the artist it is a paradox that exists in nature: he accepts it with a smile. It is not that Tchehov was indifferent to the vices of the flesh. We find him writing on one occasion to a great journalist: “Why do they write nothing about prostitution in your paper? It is the most fearful evil, you know. Our Sobelev street is a regular slave-market.”

Tchehov, indeed, like every great artist, was a man divided. He had the artist’s passion for describing his fellow-men: he had also the doctor’s passion for helping them. He was in a sense pulled in opposite directions by these rival passions. Luckily, the tug-of-war, instead of weakening, positively strengthened his genius. The great artist is a reformer transformed. Shakespeare is sometimes held to have lived aloof from the reformer’s temporary passions. But that repeated summons to reconciliation in his plays is the credo of a man who has plumbed the great secret of the liberalism of his time and, equally, of ours. Pity, tenderness, love, or whatever you choose to call it, is an essential ingredient of the greatest genius, whether in reform or in art. It is the absence of pity that is the final condemnation of most of the literature, painting, and sculpture of our time. When pity is exhausted, the best part of genius is exhausted, and there is little but cleverness left. In Tchehov, more than in almost any other author of recent years, truth and tenderness are united. He tells us the truth even when it is most cruel, but he himself is kind. He often writes like a doctor going his rounds in a sick world. But he cares for the sick world. That is why his stories delight us as the synthetic golden syrup of more optimistic authors never does.

XII
NIETZSCHE: A NOTE

“And thus I wander alone like a rhinoceros.” Nietzsche writes in one of his letters that he had discovered this “strong closing sentence” in an English translation of the sacred books of the Buddhists and had made it a “household word.” It is at once a grotesque and an apt image of his isolation in a world of men and women. His solitude made him perilous: it ultimately exalted his egoism into madness. There are few more amazing passages in the annals of literature than those containing the last letters between the mad Nietzsche and the mad Strindberg. Nietzsche, signing himself “Nietzsche Cæsar,” wrote on New Year’s Eve, 1888:

I have appointed a meeting day of monarchs in Europe. I shall order ... to be shot.

Au revoir! For we shall surely see each other again.

On one condition only. Let us divorce.

Strindberg, writing on the same date and signing himself “The best, the highest God,” began his letter to Nietzsche: “I will, I will be raving mad,” and concluded it:

Meanwhile, let us rejoice in our madness. Fare you well and be true to your

Strindberg
(The best, the highest God).

Nietzsche’s reply was:

Mr. Strindberg:

Alas! ... no more! Let us divorce!

“The Crucified.”

Dr. Oscar Levy, in his introduction to an English selection from Nietzsche’s letters, vigorously objects to the emphasis that has been laid by some critics on Nietzsche’s madness. It is a reasonable protest, if the accusation is put forward in order to damage Nietzsche’s fame as an artist among philosophers. Dr. Levy, however, goes so far on the other side that he almost leaves us with a picture of Nietzsche as a perfectly normal man with all the normal “slave virtues.” “A good friend, a devoted son, an affectionate brother, and a generous enemy”—“not the slightest trace of any lack of judgment”—“perfectly healthy and lucid”—such are the phrases in which the Nietzsche of these letters is portrayed. We are told that “even the curious last letter to Georg Brandes still gives a perfect sense.” Here is the letter:

To the Friend Georg.

Having been discovered by you no trick was necessary for the others to find me. The difficulty is now to get rid of me.

“The Crucified.”

It would, I agree, be ridiculous to dwell on the madness at the close of Nietzsche’s life, if such extravagant claims had not been made for him by his followers. But the madness of Nietzsche is relevant enough in a criticism of his philosophy, if we are asked to accept him as one of the inspired guides to life.

Nietzsche himself was at once terrified and intoxicated by his sense of his own abnormal difference from common men. He knew, in part of his nature, that this aloofness was an evil. He craved for sympathy so passionately at times that he cried to one of his friends: “The whole of my philosophy totters after one hour’s sympathetic intercourse even with total strangers!” About the same time—it was in 1880—he wrote:

One ceases from loving oneself properly when one ceases from exercising oneself in love towards others, wherefore the latter (the ceasing from exercising, etc.) ought to be strongly deprecated. (This is from my own experience.)

Even before that, however he had definitely decided on the egocentric life. Writing to a friend on the subject of marriage, he declared: “I shall certainly not marry; on the whole, I hate the limitations and obligations of the whole civilised order of things so very much that it would be difficult to find a woman free-spirited enough to follow my lead.” He was himself the measure by which he measured all the values of life. “I am not quite satisfied with Nature,” he had said in an early letter, “who ought to have given me a little more intellect as well as a warmer heart.” But this mood of modesty did not last. At that time, he saw in his egoism his greatest weakness. “One begins to feel constantly as if one were covered with a hundred scars and every movement were painful.” As his consciousness of his genius grew, every scar and every pain seemed to him to bear witness, not to his egoism, but to his greatness. He assures his sister in 1883 that he is grateful even for his physical suffering because through it “I was torn away from an estimate of my life-task which was not only false but a hundred times too low.” He declares that he naturally belonged to “the modest among men,” so that “some violent means were necessary in order to recall me to myself.” He was unquestionably heroic in the way in which he accepted all the miseries of his life as the natural lot of a saviour of mankind. He boasted of his isolation and his sufferings magnificently. No sooner, however, did the world begin to smile on him than he began to boast on a more normal plane of delighted vanity. His most attractive braggings were addressed to his mother. He wrote to her from Turin:

Oh, if you only knew on what terms the foremost personages of the world express their loyalty to me—the most charming women, a Madame la Princesse Tenichefl not by any means excepted. I have genuine geniuses among my admirers—to-day there is no name that is treated with as much distinction and respect as my own. You see that is the feat—sans name, sans rank, and sans riches, I am nevertheless treated like a little prince here, by everybody, even down to my fruit-stall woman, who is never satisfied till she has picked me out the sweetest bunch from among her grapes.

Grateful though he was for the practical admiration of the fruit-stall woman, however he liked to pick and choose among his admirers. After he had received an enthusiastic greeting from a coterie of Viennese disciples, he wrote scornfully to his mother of “such adolescent advances.” “I do not,” he declared, “write for men who are fermenting and immature.” He sneered if he was praised; he was infuriated if he was ignored. At one moment he would sneer at the barbarous Germans who did not understand him. At another, he would show how deeply he felt this want of appreciation in his own country for his “unrelenting subterranean war against all that mankind has hitherto honoured and loved.” Shortly before he went mad, he wrote to a friend:

... Although I am in my forty-fifth year and have published about fifteen books (—among them that non plus ultra “Zarathustra”), no one in Germany has yet succeeded in producing even a moderately good review of a single one of my works. They are now getting out of the difficulty with such words as “eccentric,” “pathological,” “psychiatric.” There have been evil and slanderous hints enough about me, and in the papers both scholarly and unscholarly, the prevailing attitude is one of ungoverned animosity—but how is it that no one protests against this? How is it that no one feels insulted when I am abused? And all these years no comfort, no drop of human sympathy, not a breath of love.

He reproached even his sister for her want of understanding. “You do not seem to be even remotely conscious,” he told her, “of the fact that you are next of kin to the man and his destiny, in which the question of millenniums has been decided—speaking quite literally, I hold the Future of mankind in my hand.” It is because his correspondence is so full of passages in this and similar moods that we find in Nietzsche’s letters little of the intimacy that we expect in good letters. It is as though he were suffering from an obsession about his fame. Many of his letters are merely manifestoes about himself. He was not greatly interested in other people or in the little ordinary things that interest other people. His most enjoyable passages might be described as outbursts, and towards the end of his life he chose as his correspondents Strindberg and Brandes, who also had the genius of outburst but in a less superb degree. It was Brandes who wrote to him with regard to Dostoievsky:

He is a true and great poet, but a vile creature, absolutely Christian in his way of thinking and living, and at the same time quite sadique. His morals are wholly what you have christened “Slave Morality.”

“Just what I think,” replied Nietzsche.

Not that the letters are without an occasional touch of fun. There is a delightful early letter in which Nietzsche tells how, being invited to meet Wagner, he ordered a dress suit. It was brought round to the house just in time to allow him to dress. The old messenger, however, brought not only the parcel but the bill, and presented it to Nietzsche:

I took it politely, but he declared he must be paid on delivery. I was surprised, and explained that I had nothing to do with him as the servant of my tailor, but that my dealings were with his master to whom I had given the order. The man grew more pressing, as did also the time. I snatched at the things and began to put them on. He snatched them too and did all he could to prevent me from dressing. What with violence on my part and violence on his, there was soon a scene, and all the time I was fighting in my shirt, as I wished to get the new trousers.

At last, after a display of dignity, solemn threats, the utterance of curses on my tailor and his accomplice, and vows of vengeance, the little man vanished with my clothes.

There is another amusing letter to his sister, in which he tells her how, one Christmas Day at Nice, he drank too much:

Then your famous animal drank three quite large glasses of a sweet local wine, and was just the slightest bit top-heavy; at least, not long afterwards, when the breakers drew near to me, I said to them as one says to a bevy of farmyard fowls, “Shsh! Shsh! Shshh!”

This incident is comically symbolic of much of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

It is hardly necessary to go into Dr. Levy’s defence of Nietzsche against the charge that he was the “man who caused the war.” Dr. Levy points out quite justly that Nietzsche was as severe a critic of Prussians and Prussianism as any English leader-writer in war-time. This, however, does not meet the point of the anti-Nietzscheans. What they contend is that Prussianism is essentially the vulgar application of the principles that underlie the Nietzschean philosophy. It is obviously ridiculous to contend that Nietzsche caused the war. It is arguable, however, that he was the supreme poet of the supreme falsehood that is at the bottom of all unjust wars.

In any case, like Carlyle, he will probably survive as an artist rather than as a teacher. And even men who detest his gospel will delight in the lightning of his phrase as it shoots out of the thunder-clouds of his imagination.

XIII
MR. T. S. ELIOT AS CRITIC

Mr. Eliot, in his critical essays, is an undertaker rather than a critic. He comes to bury Hamlet not to praise him. He has an essay on “Hamlet and His Problems,” in which he assures us that, “so far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure.” Now, there are several things about Hamlet that call for explanation. But there is one thing that needs no explanation, and that is its “artistic failure.” One might as well set out to explain why the mid-Atlantic is shallow, why Mont Blanc is lower than Parliament Hill, why Cleopatra was unattractive, why roses have an offensive smell. It might be possible for a writer of paradoxes to amuse himself and us on any of these themes. But Mr. Eliot is no dealer in paradoxes. He is a serious censor of literature, who lives in the gloom of a basement, and cannot believe in the golden pomp of the sun outside. It might be unfair to say that what he is suffering from is literary atheism. He has undoubtedly gods of his own. But he worships them in the dark spirit of the sectarian, and his interest in them is theological rather than religious in kind. He is like the traditional Plymouth Brother whose belief in God is hardly so strong as his belief that there are “only a few of us”—perhaps “only one of us”—saved. We see the Plymouth-Brother mood in his reference to “the few people who talk intelligently about Stendhal and Flaubert and James.” This expresses an attitude which is intolerable in a critic of literature, and should be left to the précieuses ridicules.

Mr. Eliot, however, does not merely say that Hamlet is an artistic failure and leave it at that. He goes on to explain what he means. He believes that:

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the “intractable” material of the old play.

In so far as this is an attempt to explain the specifically new Shakespearian emphasis in Hamlet, in contrast to those elements which he borrowed from an earlier play, the first part of the assertion is worth considering. But, as regards the completed play that we possess, novelties, borrowings, and all, the entire sentence gives us merely a false simplification. Shakespeare’s finished Hamlet is a play dealing with many things besides the effect of a mother’s guilt on her son. It is a play dealing with the effect of a whole circle of ruinous events closing in on a man of princely nature, who was a foreigner amid the baseness that surrounded him. Shakespeare showed in Hamlet that it was possible, contrary to all the rules, to write a play which combined the largeness of a biography with essential dramatic unity. Mr. Eliot, however, clings to the idea that Shakespeare failed in Hamlet because he was divided in interest between the theme of the guilty mother and other intractable stuff “that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.” Now, every great work of art is like the visible part of an iceberg; it reveals less than it leaves hidden. The greatest poem in the world is no more than a page from that inspired volume that exists in the secret places of the poet’s soul. There is no need to explain the mysteries that crowd about us as we read Hamlet by a theory of Shakespeare’s failure. To summon these mysteries into the narrow compass of a play is the surest evidence of a poet’s triumph. Let us see, however, how Mr. Eliot, holding to his guilty-mother theme, attempts to explain the quality of Shakespeare’s failure. He writes:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet.

“Hamlet (the man),” he adds, “is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.” Mr. Eliot has a curious view of the things that justify violent emotion. I should have thought that the murder of a father by his usurping brother, the infidelity of a mother and a mistress, the use of former companions to spy on him, the failure of all that had once seemed honest and fair, plots to murder him, the suicide of his beloved, might have caused considerable perturbation even in the soul of a fish. If ever there was a play in which the emotion is not in excess of the facts as they appear, that play is Hamlet. The emotion is “in excess” only in the sense that it expresses for us not merely the personal emotion of one man, but the emotions of generation after generation of fine and sensitive spirits caught in the gross toils of disaster. Hamlet is a universal type as well as an individual. In this he resembles such a figure as Prometheus to a degree which cannot be claimed for Lear or Macbeth or Othello. That, perhaps, is the real mystery that has bewildered Mr. Eliot.

Mr. Eliot will have it, however, that Shakespeare, and not he himself, is to blame for his bewilderment. He concludes his essay:

We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii, “Apologie de Raimond Sebond.” We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.

Would it be possible to write a paragraph in which there was a greater air of intellectual pursuit and a tinier reality of intellectual achievement? It would not be easy to say more essentially irrelevant things on a great subject. Mr. Eliot is like a man dissecting—and dissecting with desperate earnestness—a corpse that isn’t there.

And his essays in praise have scarcely more of that vitality which is a prerequisite of good criticism than his essays in blame. He obviously admires Blake and Ben Jonson, but he leaves them as rigid and as cold as though he were measuring them for their coffins. The good critic communicates his delight in genius. His memorable sentences are the mirrors of memorable works of art. Like the poet, he is something of a philosopher, but his philosophy is for the most part implicit. He is a light-bringer by means of quotation and aphorism. He may destroy, but only in order to let in the light. His business among authors is as glorious as was the business of Plutarch among men of action. He may be primarily æsthetic, or primarily biographical, or primarily expository; but in no kind of criticism can he reach more than pedantry, unless he himself is a man of imagination, stirred by the spectacle of the strange and noble passions of the human soul. He knows that literature is not the game of a coterie, but is a fruit of the tree of life, hanging from the same boughs as the achievements of lovers and statesmen and heroes. There is so little truth in Mr. Eliot’s statement that “a literary critic should have no emotions except those immediately provoked by a work of art—and these ... are, when valid, perhaps not to be called emotional at all,” that one would be bound to tell ten times more truth merely by contradicting it. The ideal critic would always be able to disentangle relevant from irrelevant emotions as he studied a work of art; but in practice all critics, save a few makers of abstract laws, are human, and the rich personal experience of the critic enters into his work for good as well as evil.

Mr. Eliot fails as a critic because he brings us neither light nor delight. But this does not mean that he will always fail. He has some of the qualities that go to the making of a critic. He has learning, and he enjoys intellectual exercise. His essay on “Tradition and the Individual Talent” shows that he is capable of ideas, though he is not yet capable of expressing them clearly and interestingly. Besides this, as one reads him, one is conscious of the presence of a serious talent, as yet largely inarticulate, and wasting itself on the splitting of hairs and metaphysical word-spinning. His failure at present is partly a failure of generosity. If a critic is lacking in generous responsiveness it is in vain for him to write about the poets. The critic has duties as a destroyer, but chiefly in the same sense as a gold-washer. His aim is the discovery of gold. Mr. Eliot is less of a discoverer in this kind than any critic of distinction who is now writing. Otherwise he could hardly have written the sort of attack he writes on Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of Euripides, in which he overlooks the one supreme fact that calls for a critic’s explanation—the fact that Professor Murray alone among English translators has (whether imperfectly or not) brought Euripides to birth as an author for the modern world. Let Mr. Eliot for the next ten years take as his patron saint the woman in the New Testament who found the piece of silver, instead of Johannes Agricola in joyless meditation. He will find her not only better company, but a wiser counsellor. He may even find his sentences infected with her cheerful excitement, for want of which as yet they can break neither into a phrase nor into a smile.

XIV
MR. NORMAN DOUGLAS’S DISLIKES

Mr. Norman Douglas has, in Alone, written a book of hatred tempered with archæology and laughter. Luckily, there is very little archæology and enough laughter to make the hatred enjoyable without being infectious. It is not that Mr. Douglas does not like some of his fellow-creatures. He likes heretics and jolly beggars. He liked Ouida. But, if Mr. Douglas likes you, the danger is that he will throw you at somebody else’s head. That is what he does with Ouida, whom he glorifies as “the last, almost the last, of lady authors.” He throws her at the head of the age in general—at “our anæmic and wooly generation,” at “our actual womanscribes” with “their monkey-tricks and cleverness,” at “our vegetarian world-reformers who are as incapable of enthusiasm as they are of contempt, because their blood temperature is invariably two degrees below normal,” and finally at an American novelist described as “this feline and gelatinous New Englander.” That gives a fair enough impression of Mr. Douglas’s attitude to the human race as seen at close quarters.

He has in a measure justified his attitude by making an amusing book of it. Mr. Douglas has a well-stored and alert mind, full of by-ways, that makes for good conversation. As we read him we feel that we are listening to the racy monologues of a traveller with a special gift for pouring out the comedy of his discomforts in abusive form. He tells us how he landed—“with one jump—in Hell,” which is his name for Siena in winter. “I hate Viareggio at all seasons,” he tells us farther on, and he describes the inhabitants as “birds of prey: a shallow and rapacious brood.” At Pisa, when he arrives, “the Arno is the emblem of Despair ... like a torrent of liquid mud—irresolute whether to be earth or water.” He finds a good landlady at Corsanico, but he immediately remembers how he had “lived long at the mercy of London landladies and London charwomen—having suffered the torments of Hell, for more years than I care to remember, at the hands of those pickpockets and hags and harpies and drunken sluts” ... “those London sharks and furies.” At Rome the remembrance of a “sweet old lady friend” sets him thinking also of her husband, “a worm, a good man in the worst sense of the word,” “the prince of moralisers, the man who first taught me how contemptible the human race may become”—“what a face: gorgonising in its assumption of virtue”—“he ought to have throttled himself at his mother’s breast.” The absence of mosquitoes and the fewness of the flies at Rome reminds him again of his sufferings at the hands, so to speak, of flies in other places. “One of the most cherished projects of my life,” he declares, “is to assemble, in a kind of anthology, all the invectives that have been hurled since the beginning of literature against this loathly dirt-born insect, this living carrion, this blot on the Creator’s reputation—and thereto add a few of my own.” The noise of the Roman trams leads him, while lying in bed, to devote the morning hours to “the malediction of all modern progress, wherein I include, with firm impartiality, every single advancement in culture which happens to lie between my present state and that comfortable cavern in whose shelter I can see myself ensconced as of yore, peacefully sucking somebody’s marrow, while my women, round the corner, are collecting a handful of acorns for my dessert,” after which he goes on to denounce the telephone as “that diabolic invention” and the Press for “cretinising” the public mind. At Olevana, it is the nightingale that rouses him to imprecations:

One of them elects to warble in deplorably full-throated ease immediately below my bedroom window. When this particular fowl sets up its din at about 3.45 a.m. it is a veritable explosion: an ear-rending, nerve-shattering explosion of noise.... It is that blasted bird clearing its throat for a five-hours’ entertainment.... A brick. Methinks I begin to see daylight....

Mr. Douglas, it is only fair to say, explains that Italian nightingales do not sing like English nightingales. But I fancy that Mr. Douglas sat down, when he began these sketches, in the mood for writing comic scarifications, and neither bird nor man, city nor river, was safe from his harsh laughter. He hurls a pen where King Saul in similar mood hurled a spear, and we must concede that he hurls it with force.

Even nightingales, however, do not infuriate him as Victorians and Puritans do. When he writes angrily about nightingales you feel that he is only being amusing. When he writes about Victorians, you realise that he is positively white with anger. “It was not Nero ...” he cries, “but our complacent British reptiles, who filled the prisons with the wailing of young children, and hanged a boy of thirteen for stealing a spoon.” And again: “What a self-sufficient and inhuman brood were the Victorians of that type, hag-ridden by their nightmare of duty; a brood that has never been called by its proper name.” Mr. Douglas, at any rate, has done his best. He even gives us “a nation of canting shop-keepers,” but becomes more original with “hermaphrodite middle-classes.” But his real objection is neither to Victorianism nor to Puritanism; it is to Christianity, as we see when he writes of self-indulgence:

Self-indulgence, I thought. Heavily fraught is that word; weighted with meaning. The history of two thousand years of spiritual dyspepsia lies embedded in its four syllables. Self-indulgence—it is what the ancients blithely called “indulging one’s genius.” Self-indulgence! How debased an expression nowadays. What a text for a sermon on the mishaps of good words and good things. How all the glad warmth and innocence have faded out of the phrase. What a change has crept over us.

Mr. Douglas is frankly on the side of the pagans—not the real pagans who were rather like ordinary Christians, but the modern pagans who detest Christianity. This paganism is merely egoism in its latest form. It is anti-human, as when Mr. Douglas exclaims:

Consider well your neighbour, what an imbecile he is.... The sage will go his way, prepared to find himself growing ever more out of sympathy with vulgar trends of opinion, for such is the inevitable development of thoughtful and self-respecting minds.

Such is his creed, and in the result his laughter, though often amusing, is never happy. There is the laughter of sympathy, which is Shakespeare’s, and there is the laughter of antipathy, which is Mr. Douglas’s. That is, perhaps, why his publishers say that his is “a book for the fastidious in particular.” You could not say of Shakespeare that he is “for the fastidious in particular.”

We must grant an author his point of view, however, and the fact remains that, however we may differ from Mr. Douglas’s preaching, we go on reading him with pleasure, protest and curiosity. He puts his life into his sentences, and so he stamps with experience even such a piece of topographical information as:

From here, if you are in the mood, you may descend eastward over the Italian frontier, crossing the stream which is spanned lower down by the bridge of St. Louis, and find yourself at Mortola Superiore (try the wine) and then at Mortola proper (try the wine).

He is nearly always amusing about wine, whether it is good or bad. But that is only one of his moods. He also talks to you as a naturalist, as an archæologist, as a biologist, or will begin to make some odd book that you are never likely to read live for you; he has discovered an author called Ramage who is perhaps the most real and comical person of whom he writes. There is a vein of cruelty or of selfishness in some of the others who follow one another through his pages. The worst of them is the “phenomenally brutal” sportsman who, along with Mr. Douglas, gave a dead rat to a sow to eat:

She engulfed the corpse methodically, beginning at the end, working her way through breast and entrails while her chops dripped with gore, and ending with the tail, which gave some little trouble to masticate, on account, of its length and tenuity. Altogether decidedly good sport....

That is disgusting, but it is interesting. We may say the same of the sardonic account of the way in which lizards are played with in Italy:

It is not very amusing to be either a snake or a lizard in Italy. Lizards are caught in nooses and then tied by one leg and made to run on the remaining three; or secured by a cord round the neck and swung about in the air—mighty good sport, this; or deprived of their tails and given to the baby or cat to play with; or dragged along at the end of a string, like a reluctant pig that is led to market. There are quite a number of ways of making a lizard feel at home.

On the whole, one prefers to read Mr. Douglas on the subject of wine, or on the rarity of the use of red things (wine excepted) in Italy, or on the little flames that are supposed to be seen at night over the graves in cemeteries. Mr. Douglas may be gross at times, but he is never a bore. He gives us a meal of many courses, and allows none of the courses to last too long. But it would be a more enjoyable meal if we did not hear in the crabbed laughter of our host the undertones of despair—the despair that comes of “considering your neighbour, what an imbecile he is,” and failing to realise that in order to enjoy his imbecility to the full you must first see him a little lower than the angels. Cervantes did this. Dickens did it. Mr. Chesterton does it. That is why they are not “for the fastidious in particular.”

XV
M. ANDRÉ GIDE MAKES A JOKE

Lady Rothermere does not measure her praise of M. Gide, whose Prometheus Illbound she has translated into English. His is “a mind,” she declares, “which must be ranked among the greatest of the world’s literature.” “Must” is a challenging word. Of how many contemporary writers dare we use it in this sense? Dare we use it of Anatole France, or Bergson, or Hardy, or Shaw, or d’Annunzio, or Croce? We should be foolhardy, indeed, much as we rightly admire these authors, to put any of them just yet into the pantheon that contains the images of Plato and Shakespeare and Voltaire. Call no man happy till he is dead, says an old proverb. It would be still wiser to call no man one of the world’s greatest writers till he has been dead a hundred years. One cannot, if one is a quite human being, judge one’s contemporaries with the same impartial scrutiny with which one judges the mighty dead. The great man gives to his own age much to which posterity is indifferent, and gives to posterity much to which his own age may even be hostile. Tennyson served his age as a giant, and he was accepted as a giant by most of the fine critics of his age, from Edgar Allan Poe downwards. If an occasional critic such as Edward FitzGerald came to have doubts about Tennyson, it was because he himself stood monastically aloof from the age. It is one of the functions of criticism, no doubt, to separate the temporary from the immortal elements in the work of contemporary writers. But this is one of the counsels of perfection in criticism. The thing has never been infallibly done. Sainte-Beuve was as ridiculous in writing about Balzac as Lamb was about Shelley. Not that even posterity is capable of pronouncing what we call final judgments. We have a way of turning to posterity in despair for a true verdict on authors. Alas! posterity, though it has not the same reasons for erroneous judgments, is (like ourselves) of a variable and uncertain mind. Posterity has made strange blunders about Euripides, about Ronsard, about Donne, about Pope. Good authors constantly have to be rescued from the neglect of posterity. All we can be sure of is that an author who appeals to a succession of generations has given us something of the true gold of literature. Even if each new generation to some extent re-estimates the world’s classics, it usually leaves them secure in the position of classics. Or almost secure, for who knows whether the world will not one day cease to read Lucian or Virgil, or The Pilgrim’s Progress?

As for contemporary literature, how much of it is there that we dare confidently add to the ranks even of the minor classics? One is sure of a certain number of lyrics, notably those of Mr. Yeats. But in prose one has to be more cautious. Prose, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch lamented the other day, has fallen upon styleless days, and without style it is difficult to live for ever. Plutarch has survived with a minimum of it, and so has Marcus Aurelius, and so has Balzac. But on the whole, it must be admitted that most of the great writers, whether in prose or poetry, wrote well. M. Gide, it must be admitted, writes admirably, though not wonderfully. Lady Rothermere does not communicate the delicacies of his style in Prometheus Illbound, but one could not read even this translation without feeling that the author is a man of skill and wit in words. I doubt, however, whether there is enough style in it to give it a place on a shelf with the world’s important books. Lady Rothermere does not assert, indeed, that Prometheus Illbound is itself a masterpiece. She claims for it only that it is “the expression of the humorous side” of one of the world’s greatest minds. The humour, it seems to me, is too elusive to proceed from a great mind. Great minds, if they are humorous at all, are humorous in such a way that the ordinary man can see at least a part of the joke. M. Gide makes jokes for the favoured few. Many a man who is amused by the jokes of Plato and of Gibbon will be merely bewildered by the jokes of M. Gide. He enjoys the swift change of episode as Sterne does, but, whereas Sterne always saves the situation by giving us comic human beings passing across his haphazard stage, M. Gide does not create human beings at all. Lady Rothermere admits that “his world is a world of abstract ideas, under the action of which most of his characters move as marionettes.” She quotes: “Time and space are the boards which, with the help of our minds, have been set up by the innumerable truths of the universe as a stage for their own performances. And there we play our parts like determined, convinced, devoted, and voluptuous marionettes.” This dilettante and purely intellectual attitude to life is, I believe, impossible to a great mind. It is very tedious to hear sentimental people repeating the platitude that “great thoughts come from the heart”; but the platitude happens to be true. Shakespeare, it may be replied, in some of his moods saw the world as a stage and an “insubstantial pageant.” On the other hand, he never saw men and women as marionettes. He was always interested in character, and M. Gide is not. M. Gide is interested in problems. He is interested in ideas. He is not interested in men and women. He is a philosopher at play. Even when he introduces a tragic element into his work, as in Le Roi Candaule, we feel that the whole thing is a game, an experiment. A great deal of modern French literature makes one think of clever men amusing themselves in a laboratory. The French are Epicureans of ideas. They test creeds and philosophies and scepticisms with an exquisite freshness of curiosity. They seek after truth itself as an amusement. In no other nation can men talk so admirably of the universe while smoking cigarettes. In England, if a man talks of God, he either lights a pipe or stops smoking.

In Prometheus Illbound M. Gide has lit a cigarette, a rather fragrant cigarette, at the sun. There is perhaps something a little disproportionate in the action, something, too, a little audacious; but he does it, if the phrase is not too stale, with a fine gesture, and as he puffs at it, the glow of his cigarette seems to throw a tiny light on the immense problems of human existence. He is cosmic in his interests, if Parisian in his manners. He has Zeus and Prometheus and the eagle among his chief characters. Zeus, like M. Gide himself, is an experimentalist. He evidently rules the universe for the sensations with which it provides him. At least, when we find him walking along the most famous of the Parisian boulevards, he has just made up his mind to perform a perfectly gratuitous act—an act which not only will bring no return but will have no motive. In this mood, he drops a handkerchief in the street, and, when a thin gentleman named Cocles gives it back to him, he invites him to write the address of anyone he pleases on an envelope so that he may send a £20 note to him. The thin gentleman writes the name of Damocles which he has seen by accident, and Zeus strikes him on the face and disappears. He sends Damocles the £20 note, however. Damocles becomes worried as to where the anonymous note has come from and why. His good fortune, instead of satisfying him, only raises problems in his mind. He does not know to whom he owes it or what to do with it. The last we see of him, he is babbling incoherent questions about it on his death-bed.

Some time before this, however, Prometheus has arrived, and dined with Cocles and Damocles in a Paris restaurant. He finds Cocles discoursing in perplexity on the meaningless blow he had received from the unknown stranger, and he himself unwittingly becomes the cause of a second and still more distressing accident to Cocles. The conversation having turned on his eagle, Cocles and Damocles express their desire to see it, and Prometheus calls it from afar, whereupon “bursting through the window, it put out Cocles’ eye with one stroke with its wing, and then, chirruping as it did so, tenderly indeed but imperiously, fell with a swoop upon Prometheus’ right side. And Prometheus forthwith undid his waistcoat and offered his liver to the bird.” For the moment, however, we may leave Prometheus. The important event just now is the damage to Cocles’ eye. Neither the undeserved blow nor the accident to his eye ultimately causes misery as the undeserved £20 causes Damocles misery. When he sees Damocles’ misery on his death-bed, Cocles comments: “There you see the fate of a man who has grown rich by another’s suffering.” “But is it true that you suffer?” Prometheus asks him. “From my eye occasionally,” said Cocles, “but from the blow no more; I prefer to have received it. It does not burn any more; it has revealed to me my goodness. I am flattered by it; I am pleased about it. I never cease to think that my pain was useful to my neighbour and that it brought him £20.” “But the neighbour is dying of it,” said Prometheus.... It is clear that M. Gide has not taken it as his province to justify the ways of God to man. I fancy he suspects Zeus of having acted without a motive on many previous occasions before the strange adventure of the boulevard. He is also clearly amused by the workings of the human conscience. If Damocles had not had a conscience, he would not have died.

Cocles and Damocles, however, are only minor characters in this thin fantastic story. Prometheus is the real hero, though the accidents do not happen to him. He has only his eagle and his habit of lecturing about it. But it is his lectures about his eagle that give the book its meaning. His eagle is really a figure in an allegory—an allegory on a new plan. In the old-fashioned allegory one was more conscious of what the allegorical figures meant, than of the figures themselves. It was as if the author had tied labels round their necks. M. Gide realizes that we have got beyond such ancient simplicities. He consequently gives his figures no labels, but bids us “Guess!” and we go on guessing till the end of the story. He has constructed a puzzle, and, though we do not know whether it is worth solving or not, he contrives to make us immensely curious about it and immensely determined to solve it. Most people, when they have read his story, will ask, “What does he mean? What is this eagle of Prometheus?” Why does he first say that everyone has an eagle and that one must nourish one’s eagle? And why does he in the end kill his eagle and make a meal of it? And does M. Gide approve of the last proceeding? I see that the majority of critics identify the eagle with the human conscience. I think it is more than that. It is everything that prevents man from resting satisfied with a pagan philosophy of acceptance before the world’s beauty. It is that fury in the human breast that makes men desire progress. It is the moral consciousness of the race that leads men into profound self-denials and profounder questionings. When Prometheus kills and eats his eagle, he grows fat and cheerful. Does M. Gide then look back regretfully on the moral history of mankind? On the contrary. The eagle was found to be delicious, and at dessert they all drank his health. “‘Has he, then, been useless?’ asked one. ‘Do not say that, Cocles!—his flesh has nourished us. When I questioned him he answered nothing; but I eat him without bearing him a grudge: if he had made me suffer less, he would have been less fat; less fat he would have been less delectable.’ ‘Of his past beauty, what is there left?’ ‘I have kept all his feathers.’” “It is with one of them,” adds M. Gide, “that I write this little book.” Yes, M. Gide is a moralist, though a gay one, and Prometheus Illbound is a tract. He, too, desires progress—even if it be progress somewhere beyond and away from progress. His book is an amusing, though not a very amusing, parable. It will appeal to those who prefer subtle little thoughts to vehement great ones.