The Vision of Wells
I should like to set “M. M.’s” mind at rest about H. G. Wells, but I can’t quite understand what her objection to him really is. She seems to be in what the charming little old Victorian lady would have called “a state of mind.” Something about Wells annoys her; she hasn’t thought it out clearly, but she raps Wells wherever she can get at him, as a sort of personal revenge for her discomfort.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the passage she quotes from the hero really represents Wells’s feeling about the relations between the sexes. He believes that “under existing conditions” there is always danger of love between men and women unless the man has one sole woman intimate, and lets “a superficial friendship toward all other women veil impassable abysses of separation.” “M. M.” wisely admits the truth of that—in fact, it’s the most obvious of truisms. Then the hero—or Wells—goes on to say that this, to him, is an intolerable state of affairs. For this “M. M.” calls him “wicked,” and “Mr. M. M.” accuses him of not being busy enough, and of not working for a living.
I wonder if “M. M.” stopped to think exactly why the hero considers this an intolerable state of affairs. The statement means nothing more than that the man would like to have intimate friendships with more than one woman. He doesn’t say he wants to love more than one woman. Well, it is easily conceivable that a man of active mind and companionability would like to have some degree of intimacy with various women. There doesn’t seem to be anything wicked about that, and it’s possible that he should feel so even if he was “working for a living.” If we confine ourselves to one intimacy, we’re likely to lose the full relish of it before many years. The thought of that is certainly intolerable. A man who is close to a good many people is usually better fitted to appreciate his best friend. A woman novelist who has a conspicuously successful marriage put it well the other day. “If you go into a room where there is a bunch of violets,” she said, “you are charmed by the odor. If you stay in the room all the time, you forget about the odor—or it bores you. But if you are continually going out and coming in again, it greets you every time, and you learn to appreciate its subtleties.” Perhaps “M. M.” thinks that reason is begging the question. Well, take the other side. Any human being who is expanding has an insatiable desire for new experience, new knowledge. That is the healthiest instinct in mankind. Such a person would naturally fret at the inability to be intimate with a new acquaintance who interests him. That feeling would not be wicked; it would be right, by any sane standard.
Forgive the blatant obviousness of all this. But I’m bent on carrying through the discussion to the end. Granted, then, that our hero’s feeling is not intrinsically wicked—what then? He faces a dilemma. Either he must run the risk of a new love affair, or—and this, I think, escaped “M. M.”—present conditions must be changed. If he has a new love affair, he is at the least violating the Victorian lady’s conventional morality, which says that every man must love not more than one woman as long as that woman lives. We come then to an extremely vital problem. On the one hand, is conventional morality desirable? On the other, can present conditions be so changed as to eliminate the danger? The solution of that problem is of great importance to anyone interested in human beings. If it can’t be solved, it means that the man or woman must quench a right and healthy instinct along whichever line he or she chooses. And that’s a bit of pessimism which a warm-hearted man like H. G. Wells doesn’t want to accept without further investigation. That’s the reason he wrote The Passionate Friends. He is engaged in the noble endeavor to do something at least toward freeing the great spirit of mankind from the network in which it is enmeshed. The history of that struggle is the history of human progress.
Perhaps it isn’t necessary further to defend Mr. Wells for the sort of novels he writes. But I’d like to offer an illustration of the difference between Wells and the old-fashioned novelist. The old writer started with the conviction that certain laws and fundamental conditions were forever fixed, and must limit the destinies of his characters. He then works out his little story according to rules, and gets his effect by arousing in us pity for the misfortunes, hatred for the sins, and joy for the virtuous triumphs of his people. The tendency of the whole was to show us once more what the eternal verities were—and the result was highly “moral.” Every character was an object lesson. Wells, on the other hand, is not a preacher, but a scientist. He starts with the conviction that, through lack of impartial investigation, we don’t really know what the eternal verities are, or what power can be derived from them. His attitude is as far from the old writers’ as is Mme. Curie’s from the alchemists’. He attempts to free his mind from every prejudice. Then he begins his experiment, puts his characters in their retort under “controlled conditions,” and watches what happens. What his characters do corresponds to fact as well as his trained mind can make it. The result may be negative or positive—but at least it is true, and, like all truth, it is really valuable.
“M. M.” prejudges the case when she talks about denial, and building up character, and loyalty, and unselfishness. These things may demand her conclusion, and again they may not. At best they are means to an end. She may be right. But Wells is going ahead to find out. He isn’t arguing for anything. We may be denying something we ought to have; we may be building the wrong kind of character; we may be loyal to a false principle; we may be unselfish with evil result. But if we cease to becloud the issue, and watch carefully the experiment of Mr. Wells and his followers, we shall know more about it than we do.
And, for a general toning of her mind, I should like to ask “M. M.” to read The Death of Eve, by William Vaughn Moody, to pay particular attention to the majestic song of Eve in the garden, and after she has felt the tremendous impulse of that line—
Whoso denyeth aught, let him depart from here
to turn back to her words about denial, and see whether she still thinks denial is always synonymous with strength.
George Soule.
Another View of “The Dark Flower”
It is with no desire to be carping that I offer this criticism of The Dark Flower, for I, too, am a devoted disciple who hangs on the master’s lips; but being a skeptical modern woman withal, I am not abject. Perhaps we should be satisfied with what Galsworthy has given us—this searching vision into the soul of a rarely sensitive man. The writing of it—what we term style—is beyond doubt Galsworthy’s most distinguished performance, far more poetical than any of his verse. Its material is invaluable for its sheer honesty as well as its sheer beauty. Its reality and intimacy are grippingly poignant. And yet how account for the pain of futility which sweeps over you as you close the book, drowning for the time the ecstasy of high joy in all its beauty? It is as if the heavy aroma of autumn’s decay had invaded a garden in early spring.
Yes, there is something essentially futile about The Dark Flower. It lies so hidden in the warp and woof of the whole fabric that the casual reader passes it over unseen. I can best explain by referring to the novel itself. Each of the three episodes deals with Mark Lennan’s passion for a woman: in his youth for an older woman, in his maturity for a woman his own age, in his approaching autumn for a young girl. And in all three passion—the great primal force—is made an illicit emotion. In the first two episodes the women are married; in the last, Lennan is. It is scarcely by chance that Lennan’s loves were unlawful; on the contrary, a symbolic significance seems to be intended, that passion is natural, free, coming and going by tides unbound by man’s will or law. But if that was Galsworthy’s aim, he has run an unnecessary stretch beyond his goal. By his over-emphasis, passion becomes purposefully illicit, voluntarily seeking out the forbidden object and the secret passage. And instead of being the priceless inheritance from a free God, passion becomes an ailment laid upon us by some designing fate.
And now glance at the dénouement of each episode. In the first it is the woman who closes the little drama; Mark merely watches her go. In the second the woman’s husband kills her, and Mark is left dazed. In the last his wife steps in and turns the current of events. Always an extraneous force makes the decision for him. He is never permitted to grapple with the situation created. Galsworthy forever extricates him. Not once is his passion allowed to run its course. Each experience is abortive. If I had been Mark Lennan I should have been tempted to curse the meddling fate that insisted upon rescuing me just before I jumped.
No, a woman would not have had her perfect moment with Mark Lennan, but only the promise of it.
Mark is a futile person; his love life a procession of futile experiences. But in spite of its futility it is an exquisite record for which I whole-heartedly give thanks.
Marguerite Swawite.
Dr. Foster’s Articles on Nietzsche
M. H. P.’s remarks in “The Critics’ Critic” of the April number of The Little Review on Dr. George Burman Foster’s paper entitled “The Prophet of a New Culture” in the March issue induced me to give that notable article a third reading. M. H. P. says “... there’s ... too much enthusiasm to be borne out by what he actually says,” and then asks the author, “Won’t you forget a little of this sound and fury and tell us as simply as you can just what it is that you want us to do?” This obviously tired and disturbed “critic” continues: “... I have a feeling that pure enthusiasm, wasting itself in little geysers, is intrinsically ridiculous. Enthusiasm should grow trees and put magic in violets—and that can’t be done with undue quickness, or in any but the most simple way. Nobody cares about the sap except for what it does.”
This irrelevant criticism is an intellectually lazy protest of a sensuous, self-styled “healthy” person blundering through an interpretative analysis of hard, serious thought, expecting to find a program or a plan, cut and dried, ready for the seekers of a new culture. Dr. Foster properly avoided making any definite proposals based upon his study of Nietzsche. With a contagious enthusiasm he wrote his own response to Nietzsche’s attitude toward the universe. To condemn his animation is barbaric stupidity. He probably was not conscious when he wrote the paper that anybody wanted him to outline in desiccated phrases a scheme to crystallize the Nietzschean philosophy into personal or social action. He was fired by his subject, and his function—I do not say his purpose—was to spread the flame. The depths of feeling must be reached before action can be more than an abortion of the mind. Dr. Foster’s serious, almost sad, enthusiasm, makes the spirit of Nietzsche arouse feeling, and feeling underlies every organic social action. It is not what he “actually says” but what Nietzsche says to him that explains and justifies Dr. Foster’s enthusiasm.
An incoherent generalization like “pure enthusiasm wasting itself in little geysers is intrinsically ridiculous” is a part of the typical literary method of veneering ignorance or prejudices. For a critic who asks “what is it that you want us to do?” which is the desperate voice of an imitationist, and then talks glibly of “pure enthusiasm,” which is gaseous rhetoric, I have neither respect nor compassion. What is “pure enthusiasm”?
M. H. P.’s objection to “sound and fury,” which he associates with “political speeches” “for a major prophet,” clearly is attributable to a temperamental inability to understand Nietzsche or emotionally to respond to his dynamic appeal to intelligence. A “healthy” critic—was there ever one?—is a myth, or a morbidly self-conscious person whose striving after “healthy” attitudes is an infallible sign of disease at the top. Such a person is pathologically interesting, but in the realm of philosophical criticism he is incompetent. I should expect him to demand that “enthusiasm should grow trees and put magic in violets”—which is a ridiculous horticulture. To limit enthusiasm to so definite a purpose as this is to affect a poetic attitude whose labored simplicity has nothing in common with the magic of violets.
Your critic, who has a mania for “the most simple way,” is aware of his own amorphous complexity, and demands that thinkers and writers be specific, calm, easy, leisurely, “healthy,” and lucid, thereby economizing his unhealthy distress. For him, Nietzsche has no message, and upon him Dr. Foster’s enthusiasm is wasted. To him “sound and fury” exist where to Nietzsche’s “preordained readers” there is the new music of truth. It is that deep harmony which ran in legitimate fury through the remarkable article contributed by Dr. Foster. “Nietzsche was a Knight of the Future.” This sentence from the article bears interestingly upon M. H. P.’s allegation of “undue quickness” in what the author expects from the adoption of the Nietzschean view of life. As for nobody caring about the sap, I should say that if he have an enthusiasm for growing trees and putting magic in violets he will, perforce, have that care for the sap which conditions the strength of the tree and the magic of the violet. Nietzsche’s superman is not to be achieved in a society that cares nothing about the sap.
Whoever reads Nietzsche and Whitman “slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes,” will be better qualified than M. H. P. to serve as a critic of articles like Dr. Foster’s. Why not call it “the critics’ gossip”?
DeWitt C. Wing.