Readers and Writers (1917-1921)

by A. R. Orage

Mr. Clive Bell’s Pot.—Mr. Clive Bell cannot escape the charge of literary insolence by giving to his collection of essays the deprecatory name of Pot Boilers. That the articles he has reprinted were designed to boil Mr. Clive Bell’s pot, and did, in fact, keep it simmering, may be true enough; for the Athenæum, in which most of them appeared, was an eclectic journal with a surprising taste for the bad as well as for the good. Mr. Clive Bell’s modesty, however, is titular only, for not merely has he republished these ashes of his yesterday’s fire, but he imagines them to be still ablaze. “It charms me,” he says, “to notice as I read these essays, with what care and conscience they are done.... I seem consistently to have cared much for four things—Art, Truth, Liberty, and Peace.” These are things which a more modest man would have left his biographer and eulogist to say of him; and even then not even friendship would have made them true. To Art and Truth, there are, of course, a good many references in Mr. Clive Bell’s essays, but the mere mention of these names ought not to be regarded as an evidence of care for the things themselves. Cannot the names of Art and Truth be also taken in vain? In the two concluding essays of the book are to be found most clearly Mr. Clive Bell’s conception of Art. It is indistinguishable from what may be called the Bohemian conception. Art is not moral, art is not useful, art is not a relative fact; it is an absolute to which all these other things are relative. The artist, again, is not a “practical” person, and it is no use expecting of him an interest in the non-artistic affairs of the world. The war, for instance? It is only a means to art, and what should be said of artists who abandon the end to occupy themselves with the means?

But this Bohemian and superior attitude is consistent apparently with some very mundane bitterness. Mr. Clive Bell does not appreciate the war, which appears to have put him considerably out, in spite of his Kensington Olympianism. He is shocked at hearing that “this is no time for art.” But, on the other hand, he does not appear to be able to escape from the war. The penultimate essay is about Art and the War, and the first essay is a palinode for the state of affairs to which the war put an end. According to Mr. Clive Bell, the world before the war was in a most promising condition of renaissance—of æsthetic renaissance. “Our governing classes,” he says, “were drifting out of barbarism.... ‘Society’ was becoming open-minded, tired of being merely decent, and was beginning to prefer the ‘clever’ to the ‘good.’” But with the war all this was interrupted—probably never to be resumed; for what is the use of attempting to establish an æsthetic culture upon the state of poverty which will certainly ensue after the war? Poverty and art, he as nearly as possible says, are incompatible; it is only by means of wealth, wealth in superabundance, that art is possible. And since war is destructive of wealth, “war has ruined our little patch of civility” without bringing us anything in exchange for it. The Bohemian view of art is own brother to the Sardanapalian view of culture in general; it presupposes great wealth, while denying that art is a luxury. Art is not a luxury or an elegant amenity added to life, says Mr. Clive Bell. At the same time, it is only when Society is wealthy that art can flourish. The contradiction is obvious, and it pervades Mr. Clive Bell’s work. It is not worth dwelling on a moment.

The Criticism of Poets.—Professor Rudmose-Brown, the author of French Literary Studies, is under the fatal illusion that it is necessary (or, at any rate, proper), to write about poetry poetically; and his comments are too often in this style: “The illimitable night of his obscurity is strewn with innumerable stars.” But it is a style which is not only repellent in itself, but doubly repellent from its association with an exposition of poetry. Dr. Johnson has written about poetry in the proper style. He was respectful in the very distance his prose kept from poetic imagery. Cold and detached he may have seemed to be, but all good criticism, comment, and even appreciation labour of necessity under this charge. What would be said of a judge who demonstrated the emotions of the persons before him; or, equally, of a judge who did not feel them? To be a critic or judge of poetry, or of any art, requires, in the first instance, an intense sympathetic power; but, in the second instance, a powerful self-restraint in expression, manifested in poetical criticism, I should say, by a prose style free from the smallest suggestion of poetry.

“John Eglinton.”—Mr. “John Eglinton” has been called “the Irish Emerson”; but the description of the “Irish Thoreau” would fit him much better. He is transcendental, like Emerson, but after a different, and a less high-falutin’ manner—the manner of transcendental common sense. On the other hand, he shares with Thoreau the quality of passionate independence, and what may be called adventurous solitude. “John Eglinton” names his essays Anglo-Irish, and they answer even more accurately to the description than the compound implies; for they are essays upon the hyphen that joins them. Exactly as Thoreau was most completely at home in no other man’s land between the world and the wood, “John Eglinton” is at his easiest somewhere between England and Ireland. He is not Irish, nor is he English. He is not Anglo-Irish either; but, once more, the hyphen between them. It is this sense of difference from both elements that makes of “John Eglinton” at once so attractive, so significant, and so illuminating a writer and thinker. Being between two worlds, and with a foot in each, he understands each world in a double sense, from within and from without. To each in turn he can be both interpreter and critic; and in these delightful essays he is to be found alternately defending and attacking each of the national elements between which his perch is placed. “Candid friend” would, perhaps, be a fair description of his attitude towards both nations, if the phrase were not associated with the disagreeable. But since “John Eglinton” is anything but acid in his comments, and writes of both nations in a spirit of mingled admiration and judgment, I can think of nothing better at the moment than my image of the hyphen. He is alone between two worlds, friendly but critical equally of both.

Irish Humour.—Mr. Stephen Gwynn’s Irish Books and Irish People contains an essay on “Irish Humour.” Mr. Gwynn is severe but just. He refers to the “damning effects” of the “easy fluency of wit” and the “careless spontaneity of laughter” which characterise Irish humour. It would be terrible, however, to have to admit that these divine qualities are “defects” in the accepted sense of qualities manqués; and the “defect” arises, I think, not from the presence of these qualities in the Irish genius, but from the absence of the counterbalancing qualities of weight, high seriousness, and good judgment. It would almost seem that the “elder gods” departed from Ireland centuries ago, leaving in sole possession the “younger gods” of irresponsible and incontinent laughter. As Mr. Gwynn says, “Irish humour makes you laugh”; it always takes one by surprise. But the laughter has no echoes in the deeper levels of consciousness; it rings true but shallow. Dogmatism on racial psychology is dangerous, and I have no wish to exacerbate feelings already too sore; but, as a literary critic, I venture my judgment that the Irish genius, as manifested in literature during the last century, is wanting in the solidity that comes only from hard work. Every Irishman, speaking roughly, is a born genius; but few Irishmen complete their birth by “making” themselves. Wit comes to them too easily to be anything but a tempting line of least resistance.

The Literary Drama of Ireland.—While exceedingly painstaking, thorough, and well-documented, Mr. Boyd’s essay on The Contemporary Drama of Ireland cannot be said to add much value to the value of a record. Unlike his recent volume of Appreciations and Depreciations, his present work carefully, and I should almost say, timidly, avoids coming to any large and personal conclusions, save in the case, perhaps, of the plays of Mr. St. John Ervine. The reason for this diffidence I take to be rather an apprehension of what he might discover were his real conclusions than any inability to arrive at them; for I cannot think that upon any other ground so usually decisive a mind would have been content to leave his readers in the dark. But what then is it that Mr. Boyd may conceivably have feared to discover? It is obvious enough, I think, to an outsider—to one, I mean, who does not belong to the coterie that calls itself the Irish literary movement; it is that the contemporary drama of Ireland is the history of a rapid decline.

Mr. Boyd is, of course, honest with his facts, and the material is thus before us for a judgment. He does not conceal from us, for instance, the illuminating circumstances that the Irish dramatic movement actually began under the impulse of the Continental movement, and that its earliest authors were desirous, not so much of creating an Irish drama, as of creating a drama for Ireland. Mr. Edward Martyn, who was undoubtedly the chief pioneer, was himself a follower of Ibsen and aimed at writing and producing what may be called Ibsen plays. But this praiseworthy attempt to reintroduce the world into Ireland was defeated by the apparently incorrigible tendency of the native Irish mind to reduce the world to the size of Dublin. In rather less than two years, during which time some six or seven plays were produced, the Irish Literary Theatre, founded by Martyn and Yeats, came to an end, to have its place taken almost immediately by the Irish National Theatre, which was formed about the group of Irish players calling themselves the Irish National Drama Society. But what has been the consequence of this contraction of aim and of interest? That plays of some value as folk-drama have resulted from it nobody would deny; but equally nobody would maintain that the world has been enriched by it in its dramatic literature. Ireland, in other words, has accepted a gift from the world without returning it; her literary coterie has taken the inspiration of the Continent and converted it to a purely nationalist use.

Even against this there would be nothing to be said if it succeeded; but fortunately for the world-principle it can be shown that such a procedure ends in sterility. As the reader turns over the pages of Mr. Boyd’s faithful record of the course of the drama in Ireland, he cannot but be aware of a gradual obscuration. One by one the lamps lit by Martyn, Moore, and others, which illuminate the earlier pages, go out, leaving the reader in the later pages groping his way through petty controversies acid with personality, and through an interminable undergrowth of sickly and stunted productions about which even Mr. Boyd grows impatient. The vision splendid with which the record begins dies down to a twilight, to a darkness, and finally to black night. The world has once more been shut out.

Mr. Standish O’Grady.—Mr. Standish O’Grady’s The Flight of the Eagle is not a romance in the ordinary sense; it is not an invented story, but an actual historical episode treated romantically. The period is Elizabethan, and the story turns mainly on the careers of Sir William Parrett, an English “Lord-Lieutenant” of Ireland, who appears to have suffered the usual fate of a popular English Governor, and Red Hugh O’Donnell or Hue Roe of Tir-Connall, which is now Donegal. If acquaintance with Irish history is ever to be made by English readers, the means must be romances of this kind. History proper is, as a rule, carefully ignored by the average reader, who must therefore have facts, if he is ever to have them, presented in the form of a story. It is only by this means, and thanks to Scott in the first instance, that the history of Scotland has penetrated in any degree beyond the border. Only by this means, again, have various countries and nations been brought home to the intellectually idle English reader by writers like Kipling. Both as a story-writer and as the first and greatest of the Irish historians of Ireland, Mr. Standish O’Grady is qualified to do for Ireland what Scott after his own fashion has done for Scotland, namely, bring his country into the historic consciousness of the world.