BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
AN INTERPRETATION OF KEATS'S "ENDYMION." By H. Clement Notcutt. Printed for the Author by the S.A. Printing Co., Capetown.
Mr. Notcutt, who is professor of English in the University of Stellenbosch, believes that Endymion enshrines an allegory, or at least that it contains, in a clear unbroken stream beneath the surface, a meaning that corresponds with the ideas that filled the poet's mind. The alternative can hardly be impugned; it is as true of Keats as of most poets, and in the interpretation of Professor Notcutt it appears to mean little more than that there is a general reflection of the ardour of the poet's mind and his desire of beauty and beauty's immortality. If it is a question of allegorising to a greater extent than that vague generality, then Keats is surely the last poet who can be taxed with it. Professor Notcutt recognises some of the objections and says that the reason why Keats did not explain his allegory was that he was dissatisfied with the poem and discouraged by its reception; but that does not explain why, in the intimacy of his letters (many of which allude to Endymion) he did not give a hint to anybody that there was an allegory to explain. The letters, indeed, with which Professor Notcutt shows an excellent familiarity, speak freely of imagination and invention, in reference to Endymion, but of recondite suggestions and esoteric gospelling there is nothing. Nor can we regret this. A heavenly meaning attached to the earthly story would not have made Endymion a better but a worse poem. It is one of the most beautiful, if one of the most faulty, poems in the language. It was Keats's privilege to see and create beauty and present it as a finer reality in the midst of the crude and half-unreal realities of common life. Had he lived he might have enlarged even this office in fulfilling it, but it is sufficient that Endymion shows that he could fulfil it.
CERVANTES. BY Rudolph Schevill. Murray. 7s. 6d. net.
TOLSTOY. By G. Rapall Noyes. Murray. 7s. 6d. net.
For most of us Cervantes is Don Quixote: even if we are familiar with The Exemplary Novels and the Journey to Parnassus, we do not get from them any idea of personality which infringes on the overwhelming effect produced by the Knight of La Mancha. Even Mr. Schevill, who is a Professor of Spanish Literature in the University of California, in his effort to give us an idea of Cervantes only succeeds in producing an idealised portrait of Don Quixote. How odd this is can be realised if we try to think of other imaginative authors in the terms of their characters. If we are tempted to think of Shakespeare as Hamlet, we immediately correct ourselves by recollections of Falstaff, of Prospero, of Coriolanus, or Juliet. No one, however much he may be persuaded that the Papers of the Club are the author's best book, begins to compare Dickens with Pickwick; nor, to take an author nearer Cervantes in time, has one any inclination to identify Rabelais with Pantagruel.
Two explanations of this odd fact about Cervantes are possible: one is that he had exhausted his capacity for creative, imaginative work in the writing of Don Quixote—but this view cannot be upheld by anyone who loves the Exemplary Novels. The other is the simple one that Cervantes was Don Quixote. It is a commonplace of psychology, especially of Catholic psychology, that men of fine temperament will always be severer on faults which are their own. Cervantes found in himself the exaggerated chivalry which he starts to mock, but still loves in Don Quixote. He had the Crusader's heart, but he lived in a time when—pace Mr. Chesterton—the Crusading spirit was dead, or knew the uglier ends. So in his immortal story Cervantes presents the last knight with tonic humour and loving laughter. Ultimately nothing can make anyone ridiculous but success and prosperity; and from these Cervantes preserves his hero. Mr. Schevill's book is not very lively reading. He gives us the facts of Cervantes' life, and his treatment of Cervantes' art in comparison with other Spanish popular works of the period has no like value for English readers. At one time Spanish literature was well known in England, but to-day we have no doubt that Mr. Schevill's detailed accounts of La Lazarillo and La Celestino are necessary.
Tolstoy himself might have been imagined by Cervantes. That is the thought that occurs in reading Mr. Noyes's book directly after Mr. Schevill's. Apart from that, no two great artists could be more dissimilar. Tolstoy is always uneasy. It is his uneasiness which caused his quarrel with Turgenev. It is his uneasiness which makes it impossible for him to remain steadfast to his own convictions. For years there was a false idea of Tolstoy, which is only gradually yielding to the facts. He was neither saint nor prophet; but an ordinary man with a capacity for self-analysis enormously magnified—so magnified that he seems a giant. It is this huge quality which makes so many critics, as Mr. Noyes, class him far beyond Turgenev and Dostoevsky, and put him in a position which he is willing to occupy in the future. Of direct personal criticism Mr. Noyes gives us little. He is overcome by the amount of his material, and is too fond of approaching his subject through the books of other critics. For instance, he quotes Mereshkovsky's comment on the end of War and Peace, as if it was a locus classicus on Natasha's psychology, instead of a piece of ill-natured criticism on a great artist by a showman. The end of War and Peace, which shows us Natasha absorbed in Cervantes' life, is the same criticism on wars, grandeurs, and world-spooks as is made by Hardy's poem on The Breaking of Nations; and neither has any cynicism in it. Mr. Noyes's picture of Tolstoy the man adds nothing to Aylmer Maude's exhaustive volumes; and he values too seriously and literally a great deal of Tolstoy's detailed religious writing. His book is, however, worth having, even if only for the superb lines written by Tolstoy to some abject person who objected to Resurrection as "smutty." We will not give his name, but he was, alas! English. Tolstoy, writing in English, defends himself and then says:
When I wrote the book I abhorred with all my heart the lust, and to express this abhorrence was one of the chief aims of the book. If I have failed in it I am very sorry, and I am pleading guilty if I was so inconsiderate in the scene of which you write that I could have produced such a bad impression on your mind. I think that we will be judged by our consciences and by God, not for the results of our ideas, which we cannot know, but for our intentions, and I hope my intentions were not bad.
Did ever great artist humble himself so generously? His attacker, with his unpleasant mind, will be numbered with the excellent Mr. Hyde, who inspired Stevenson to his defence of Damien.
BOOKS IN THE WAR. By Theodore Wesley Koch. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
VILLAGE LIBRARIES. By A. Sayle. Richards. 5s.
Mr. Koch's amply illustrated book is, in the main, a record of the achievements in the war of the American Library Association. As such it is exhaustive, if rather wanting in variety. The soldiers' demand for books, after all, and gratitude for their bestowal, were much the same in America as in France, in the trenches as in hospitals, so that by the time he has finished this book the reader is somewhat wearied by the repetition of feats of distribution, surveys of the vast literary field covered, instances of literary recalcitrance overcome by deft suggestion and so forth. Nevertheless, it is a book of considerable interest and will bear permanent witness to the fact that, in all future wars, libraries will have to be mobilised with the armies. Over and over again the fact, which we have all learned, is insisted on that food for the mind is one of the most important sustainers of moral. Not only is reading an anodyne, but it is a disinfectant and a prophylactic, as necessary in war as chloroform, lysol, and anti-typhoid vaccine. In all that vast organisation of intense welfare—work which, spasmodic and fragmentary in peace, was by a supreme irony perfected in war—the supplying of books to soldiers and sailors held a high place. Every taste had to be catered for, every degree of education given its appropriate food. To some the Army was an elementary school, to others it almost fulfilled the functions of a university, especially after the Armistice, when ambitious educational schemes were set on foot to calm idle and chafing warriors, and when our own War Office deluged France and Germany with piles of lofty literature, very little of which, we believe, was read.
The belligerent nations learned at last that it was just as worth while to tempt a soldier to read as to teach him to shoot. The question now remains what fruit this discovery is going to bear in peace, where the problem, apparently simpler, is really harder. Soldiers at war had not the opportunity of using their leisure as they wished; they were circumscribed in place and opportunity. The free citizen is less fettered, and, being more scattered, is less amenable to propaganda. Yet for citizens at peace, no less than for soldiers at war, propaganda, tactful and patient, is necessary if they are to be induced to apply the medicine of reading to their minds. From a quite different point of view this truth is made clear by Miss Sayle's little book, which is a development of an attractive article in the New Statesman describing the beginning and development of a library in a small Hampshire village. It is a book which all who have similar ambitions for their villages should read, for it will save them many natural and fatal errors, besides telling them all they need know about organisation, finance, book-buying and book-housing, in plain words with plenty of humour.
Miss Sayle very strongly insists on it that a village library must be simply and solely a circulating library, stocking the books which its members want to read and no others. More ambitious efforts may be made wherever the Public Libraries Act is applied, but a village library will almost always be supported by voluntary subscriptions, and can only afford books which pay their way. She shows how much propaganda is needed to start even such a library and to keep it going—a library from which practically every book that was not agreeable fiction had to be ruthlessly weeded. In twelve years the one visible sign of progress has been the tendency of Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick to replace Mrs. Henry Wood as the favourite. Yet she holds that it has been worth while, and we agree. A small agricultural community has been induced to own, manage, and take a pride in a library, and even the fact that "father went less often to the 'Anchor' as the result" is a solid testimony to its value. If life of villages in the future regains its old vigour without becoming entirely urban in character, enterprises of this kind will be a duty incumbent on their more enlightened members. And they will only be successful if Miss Sayle's maxims are followed. Her "dont's" are admirable, and the biggest one of all is "don't get slack." She might have added the lesson of Mr. Koch's book and of the whole war: "don't forget that any reading is better than a vacant mind."
FROM FRIEND TO FRIEND. By Lady Ritchie. Murray. 6s. net.
Perhaps the most distinguishing of the pleasant Victorian characteristics was the combination of dignity with charm, and few of the artists of the period had that combination to a greater degree than Thackeray's daughter. This last volume of hers is entirely civilised and urbane in its appeal, and yet has, with its urbanity, a warmth of affection and a genuine love for and interest in others which are often lacking in the better, more highly-coloured works of contemporary art. It is a book of memories, and what Lady Ritchie remembers is not mere gossip, not what can be had by observation, but the deeper things of friendly intercourse, and the light thrown on character by circumstance and intimacy. The title-essay is mainly concerned with that remarkable woman, Julia Margaret Cameron, who was the friend of all the great men of her day, and the first woman to attempt artistic portraiture in photography. In telling of her Lady Ritchie cannot avoid a certain kindly humour; but the Victorians' laughter was not cruel, and though Mrs. Cameron must have been at times rather a burden, one can feel sure no one of her friends let her guess it. Certainly worse fates might overcome one than to be nursed by her. Mr. Cameron was ill and his wife gave him "home care and comforts." During the crisis he had "strong beef-tea thickened with arrowroot six times a day," and when he was convalescent,
The patient has poached eggs at night, gets up at eleven, has his dinner (gravy soup and curry) at one, mulligatawny soup and meat at five, a free allowance of port wine, averaging a bottle a day. Ten drops of Jereme's opiate every morning, a dose of creosote zinc and gum arabic before his meals, and a dose of quinine after each meal.
There are essays on Mrs. Sartoris and Mrs. Kemble, a brief note on a Roman Christmas, when she saw Lockhart driving with Frederic Leighton, a few slighter pieces, and then, last of all, a tale—Binnie—belonging to the Mrs. Williamson series. Not many people, one supposes, now read Old Kensington or "Miss Thackeray's" other novels, but there should be something of a demand for them by those who first meet her lucid, gentle narrative talent in the story of Binnie.
ONE HUNDRED PICTURES FROM EDEN PHILLPOTTS. Selected by L. H. Brewitt. Methuen. 6s. net.
The snare of descriptive writing in novels is as the snare of decorative passages in an imaginative painting; the descriptions may fail to combine, remain detached from the meaning and purpose of the novel, and finally the novelist may be tempted by his skill in such writing to indulge in it at the expense of his proper task. French novels, the worst of which have as a rule a composition too often absent from ours, rarely abound in purple passages—certainly with no French novelist of equal standing could an admirer do what Mr. Brewitt has done with Mr. Phillpotts. Here are a hundred of Mr. Phillpotts's best decorations, full of observation, sensitive at times to another beauty than the merely observed, but rarely fused by that imaginative ardour which makes some of Mr. Hardy's and Mr. Conrad's descriptive passages an essential part of the novel. Sometimes, especially in his description of violence, Mr. Phillpotts's meaning is obscure: for instance, in the account of the Flood from one book you have a simile which is of no assistance to the picture—"Yelling, like some incarnate and insane manifestation of the elements massed in one, the hurricane launched itself upon the valley." He is more successful as a rule when he catches nature in softer moods, quick with spring or flushed with summer: there is a genuine charm of fancy, if no imaginative depth, in this pastel of a sleeping forest:
The trees indeed sleep, but they also dream. In the heart of every leafless oak a dryad whispers that the days are fleeting; that the icy-footed winter hours are drawing into the snow-wreaths away in their chill processions; that the fountain of the sap will soon rise again to spring's unsealing; that swiftly will the bud-sheath swell and pale and shimmer silkily down, like a cast-off veil at the feet of the vernal beeches.
Mr. Phillpotts rarely drops into that snare of the writer of picturesque prose, the rhythm of blank verse; but his style is not always equal to the demands he makes upon it. It never has the sombre, heavy-hearted gravity of Hardy's, nor the gloomy colour and triumphant ecstasy of Ruskin's. This is indeed a photograph album rather than a book of pictures.