BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
THE LETTERS OF CHARLES SORLEY. Cambridge University Press. 12s. 6d. net.
The value set on irony by the Greeks might well be studied by us moderns. A proper sense of irony teaches both humility and patience, and it will not lead to cynicism unless the basis of the soul be cynical. It teaches, above all, proportion, which is the lesson needed most, perhaps, by modern artists and sociologists, philanthropists and theologians, business men and politicians. These letters of Charles Sorley's, the letters of a young, eager, cultivated boy, are rendered ironical by circumstance. After the ordinary life of a public schoolboy at Marlborough he went, in 1914, before going to Oxford, for an educational holiday in Germany. He stayed in a German family, he was enthusiastic about German things and German people as compared with the English, and he reached England only just in time to escape being a prisoner of war in Germany. The letters are lively, intelligent rather than terse, good-humoured, shrewd and full of that enthusiasm which was Charles Sorley's great natural talent. It is not, however, the essays on Masefield and Housman which give the book its interest. It is the pages on his life in Germany and a few passages on life in the Army which make the volume one of the most remarkable records of the young England which bore the brunt of the war.
How delightful is this passage on the German supper—Sorley lodged in an academic household at Schwerin:
The people come at seven, and talk about the rise in the price of butter till 8. From 8 till 9.30 they eat and drink and talk about the niceness of the victuals, and ask the hostess their cost. From 9.30 to 10.30 they talk about the scarcity of eggs. From 10.30 to 11 they drink beer and cross-examine me about the Anglo-German crisis. From 11 till 12 they make personal remarks and play practical jokes on one another. From 12 to 12.30 they eat oranges and chocolate and declare they must be going now. From 12.30 to 1 they get heavy again and sigh over the increased cost of living in Schwerin. At 1 they begin to scatter. By 2 I am in bed.
That is not the only passage which takes the reader straight into the atmosphere of the Caravaners. There is this anecdote, too:
A friend of sorts of the Bilders died lately; and, when the Frau attempted to break the news to Karl at table, he immediately said, "Don't tell me anything sad while I'm eating."
Charles Sorley remarks on this that an exact parallel may be found in the Odyssey where the gentleman expostulates οὐ γαρ ἐγώ γε τερπομ' ὀδυρόμενος μεταδόρπιος {ou gar egô ge terpom' oduromenos metadorpios}—I hate being forced to grieve in the middle of supper.
The letters are full of casual literary criticism, and provide a curious contrast to the letters of Lionel Johnson recently published. Charles Sorley strikes one as having a far clearer idea of the position of literature in life than had Johnson, but he shows little sign of that fine critical intelligence which mark Johnson's best judgments. Sorley passes passionately from Masefield to Housman, from Housman to Hardy, from Hardy to Ibsen and Goethe. It seems odd that a boy of his temperament should think Faust greater than anything of Shakespeare's, and by implication greater than Peer Gynt; elsewhere he passes a really witty judgment on Goethe: "If Goethe really died saying 'More light,' it was very silly of him: what he wanted was more warmth."
His life in the Army was not long. After a hard training in England he left for France in May, 1915, and was killed by a sniper on October 13th. The books he had over there were Faust and Richard Jefferies. To some of us Jefferies is chiefly lovable and remarkable because of the men who have loved him; and that he could charm Sorley and bring to him, amid the disgust of the battlefield, something of the English countryside, gives him an additional claim on our gratitude:
I read Richard Jefferies to remind me of Liddington Castle and the light green and dark green of the Aldbourne Downs in summer.
The book is edited by Professor and Mrs. Sorley, and Mrs. Sorley contributes a brief biographical chapter. There are one or two references to living persons which would, perhaps, be better away, though we cannot imagine any person of humour objecting to the fun of this high-spirited, generous boy. Incidentally, in its picture of Marlborough and Sorley's literary activities, the letters provide a useful counterpoise to the rather reckless attacks made on the uncultured public schools of England.
ESSAYS ON ART. By A. Clutton-Brock. Methuen. 5s. net.
Shall we ever have a satisfactory æsthetic? Sometimes, in moments of hopefulness, one believes that there may be a few points of agreement in ethics, in politics, in metaphysics, even in economics: but to read a new book on æsthetic is to wonder again whether we shall ever get beyond the old tag, that it's a mere waste of time arguing about taste. Certainly Mr. Clutton-Brock's book, interesting, acute, and charmingly written as it is, does not show us how to reconcile, let us say, Tolstoy's What is Art? with Whistler's Ten o'Clock: or either with the great and unjustly-despised body of criticism to be found in Ruskin's works. His essays are provocative: at times he appears to clear up certain matters, and then the reader finds himself wondering.
In the very first essay Mr. Clutton-Brock discourses on nature and art. "There is one beauty of nature and another of art." "Nothing kills art so certainly as the effort to produce a beauty of the same kind as that which is perceived in nature. In the beauty of nature, as we perceive it, there is a perfection of workmanship which is perfection because there is no workmanship. Natural things are not made, but born; works of art are made. There is the essential difference between them and between their beauties." Now is there any truth in those statements? Take, for instance, the simplest kind of beauty, the beauty which appeals to touch: is there any essential difference between the sensations of beauty given by stroking a sable and stroking a piece of exquisite silk velvet? Again, is the beauty conveyed by the sight of Cader Idris really different in kind from the beauty conveyed by the sight of Amiens Cathedral? Is a singer's appeal fundamentally different from the appeal of the nightingale?
Mr. Clutton-Brock goes on to say that "all great works of art show an effort, a roughness, an inadequacy of craftsmanship which is the essence of their beauty, and distinguishes it from the beauty of nature." That sentence betrays what seems to us his saddest error. He is confusing, we think, art and craft. It simply is not true that a work of art must show "inadequacy of craftsmanship." What is essential is that the artist should not seem to be satisfied with his mere technical skill of craft. He should, somehow, convey to us that he knows there is a beauty which no craft can render perfectly. He must, in short, be humble. For lack of that humility Blake refused to call Rubens a great artist. Yet Rubens, superb craftsman as he was, was not the superior of Velasquez, who yet preserves in all his work that sense of something desired yet unachieved—unachieved not because Velasquez's craft was inadequate, but because his vision was interpretative rather than imitative. It is important that the distinction between craft and art should be recognised, otherwise Mr. Clutton-Brock's perfectly sound contention that the beauty of art "is produced by the effort to accomplish the impossible" will be made a mere excuse for slovenly workmanship. This sort of discussion, however, is unsuitable for a review; even where space is, for practical purposes, infinite (e.g. in a conversation), it seldom leads to agreement. We can only say (what everybody knows) that Mr. Clutton-Brock is the sanest of all professional art-critics and that to differ from him is to doubt one's own opinions.
UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS. By Lord Dunsany. Elkin Matthews. 5s. net.
Lord Dunsany's fancy can generally be trusted to discover many odd prettinesses for our pleasure, but as in old Battersea enamel the prettiness is liable to chip off and show the dull metal beneath; and in these twelve sketches there is little of fancy. They were written "to show," so the Preface tells us, "something of the extent of the wrongs that the people of France had suffered," and the cultivated lack of vigour in style does serve, somehow, to illustrate the desolation of towns laid waste, and—which more peculiarly touches Lord Dunsany's sympathy—gardens. The monotony of the scene is, too, well typified by the same quality in description. Frequently, as in The Real Thing, when he sets out to be fantastic he is merely trivial; and throughout he draws from a wealth of ingenious but ungainly metaphor. However, the author well understands that the utmost terror of desolation can be inspired by the sound (rather than the sight) of man-made things gone to rust. Out in the dead land, where villages are to be conjectured from scattered heaps of stones, he was much impressed—for he refers to it again and again—by the "mournful sound of iron flapping on broken things," and—"this was the sound that would haunt the waste for ever." On the other hand, in Bermondsey versus Wurtemburg, he observed that a German soldier had chalked up the name of his regiment on a wall—the 156th Wurtemburgers. Subsequently a British soldier had prefaced this with "Lost by," and added after "retaken by the Bermondsey Butterflies." This might have served to point the less serious moments of a special correspondent to one of the lighter newspapers, but it scarcely warrants preservation in an admirably printed book with a strong binding in excellent taste.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON. By Isabel Savory. T. Fisher Unwin. 25s. net.
"The thought of 'the picturesque' repels me," writes Miss Savory in extenuation of her offence in the kind of sightseeing which less sophisticated tourists, for whom she accuses Nature of "touting," joyfully regard as inevitable. But though from time to time she is careful lest the reader should associate her with the organisations of Cook and Lunn, this superiority to the obvious is not always implicit. Whether the ideal book of travels should satisfy us by our own firesides or should merely stimulate us to go and see things for ourselves is a question that Miss Savory has not helped to decide. Her vision is uneven, but on the whole she provokes and does not satisfy curiosity. The book is a record of an exhaustive (and one would say exhausting) exploration of the Eastern Pyrenees, with Perpignan, Ille-sur-Tet, Estagel, and other places as centres for radiating expeditions, and "we did many wanders at Salses," she says. She climbed high mountains, and admired the views; she visited forgotten villages, and raked up their history; she lingered—none too long—under groined roofs and in panelled salles. But in her frank delight in good wine and food there is real vitality and emphatic, if unconscious, art. "We picked bunch after bunch (of grapes) hot in the sun, buried our faces in the warmness of them ... bit not one but mouthfuls, sweet and juicy...." And then she goes on to tell us that at the same moment there would be a "little sad, sour, tight bunch not a quarter grown" on a house in Gower Street, and that nobody was ever quite so dead as Queen Anne.
However, Miss Savory need not fear lest we should fail to recognise her appreciation of the beautiful things she saw, more especially as many of them—carvings, chateaux, plaster-work—are admirably reproduced as illustrations in collotype from the drawings of Miss M. L. MacKenzie: but our recognition would have been quicker if she had been at less pains to impress us with her originality.
JACOPONE DA TODI. By Evelyn Underhill. Dent. 16s. net.
In the preface to her life and letters of this remarkable man, Miss Underhill says: "Three types of mind should find pleasure in Jacopone's work and personality. First, those interested in Christian mysticism.... Next, lovers of poetry.... Last, those who care for the Italy of St. Francis and his descendants." The last two aspects of an arresting personality will doubtless make the wider appeal, admirably as his biographer has traced and explained the spiritual development of the man she calls the first great Italian religious poet.
So sympathetically has Miss Underhill treated the religious experiences of Jacopone that in the light of her exposition, extravagance, futility, seeming madness even, seem to take their rightful place in the spiritual history of a man who expresses that history in strangely beautiful poems. Born probably about 1230, soon after the death of St. Francis, Jacopone da Todi followed very closely in the steps of his more famous master. Like St. Francis, he belonged to a noble Umbrian family; like St. Francis, he turned from a gay worldly existence to the worship of Lady Poverty. His conversion, however, compared with that of the founder of the Franciscan rule, was a late one. St. Francis was only twenty-four, Jacopone was nearly forty when he left the world and its ways to begin the quest for perfection.
A legend (not perhaps entirely legendary, since it is in some respects supported by the self-revelations of his laude) grew up about his name, and was embodied, years later, in the so-called Vita, a manuscript of the fifteenth century.
Here it is related that Ser Jacomo—to give him his worldly title—was passionately devoted to his young wife, who was ascetic at heart, yet to please her husband wore the rich clothes he gave her, and took part in all the gaieties of the town. A tragic ending to Ser Jacomo's happiness was brought about when, on the occasion of a marriage festival, his beautiful Vanna was killed by the fall of a balcony.
"And when" (says the Vita) "they took off those garments of vanity which she had upon her in order to make her ready for the grave they found at last, next to her bare flesh, a harsh shirt of hair."
The legend goes on to relate that the shock of his wife's death, together with the discovery of her pious fraud, led first to madness and then to the conversion of Jacopone. Nowhere in his subsequent poems is there to be found a reference to his marriage. But this in itself is no proof of the falsity of the story, for, as with most mediæval penitents, the casting off of his old life meant to him the abjuration of earthly ties and memories. Jacopone the saint remains nevertheless Ser Jacomo the passionate lover. No songs in praise of an adored wife or mistress could be more fervid, more palpitating with emotion than those addressed to his Saviour.
It is by means of these religious poems—laude, as they were called—that the successive stages in the progress of the mystic may be traced. But leaving the mystic aside, we may feel grateful to Miss Underhill for having placed the poet before us. Many of his laude, in the English translation of Mrs. Theodore Beck, are given at length in this book, and very beautiful they are. To forget their theme and to consider only their form and imagery is to be reminded of secular Italy of the thirteenth century—its troubadours, its Court poets, its Courts of Love. For nearly forty years after all Jacopone had lived in the world, enjoying its laughter, its gaiety, its sunshine, and the poems of the saint, indicate that he had not forgotten all he learnt as a sinner—that is as an ordinary man of the class to which he originally belonged. "O Queen of all Courtesy," he begins in an address to the Blessed Virgin—and we are immediately transported in thought to a fair garden and a lover with his lute.