Mr. Standish O’Grady, Enchanter.—The Selected Essays and Passages from Standish O’Grady is a priceless anthology of this neglected author. Very few people in England realise that Mr. Standish O’Grady is more than any other Irishman the rediscoverer of ancient and, in consequence, the creator of modern Ireland. His very first work on the Heroic Period of Irish history appeared in 1878; it was published at his own expense, and had a small and a slow sale; but to-day it is the inspiration of the Celtic revival. “Legends,” says Mr. O’Grady, “are the kind of history which a nation desires to possess.” For the same reason, legends are the kind of history which a nation tends to produce. I am not certain that it would not have been well to leave the legends of ancient Ireland in their dust and oblivion. They go back to remote periods in time, and seem, even then, to echo still earlier ages. It is possible, for instance, that Ireland was a nation over four thousand years ago. Some contend that a Buddhist civilisation preceded the Christian. Characteristically, it has been thought that Ireland supported Carthage against Rome. But what is the present value of these revivals of infantile memories? They cannot be realised to-day, and to dwell upon them is to run the risk of a psychic regression from waking to dreaming. “Enchantment,” Mr. O’Grady tells us, “is a fact in nature.” So potent a charm as himself has created may have been responsible—who dare say?—for the recall to present-day Irish consciousness of early historic experience that were best forgotten. Is it not a fact that the mood of Ireland to-day is between the legendary and the dreaming? Is not the “ideal” Irishman to-day Cuculain of Dundalk talking and acting in his sleep? It is a question for psycho-analysis.
Les Sentiments de Julien Benda.—I thought for some time of translating Les Sentiments de Critias, recently published in Paris by M. Julien Benda. The style is excellent, and M. Benda has the gifts of epigram and irony; but, upon second thoughts, the inappositeness of such a style to the situation in which we find ourselves forbade me. As M. Benda himself says, “there is no elegance about the war.” And success in writing about it elegantly must needs, therefore, be a literary failure. Critias’s “sentiments,” moreover, appear, when compared with the real sentiments evoked by the contemplation of the war, a little literary. He is like a sadder and a wiser Mr. Bernard Shaw flickering epigrammatically over the carnage. Impeccable as his opinions usually are, they are expressed too lightly to be impressive, and too carefully to be regarded as wholly natural. And that M. Benda can do no other is evident in his Open Letter to M. Romain Rolland, whom he considers a prig. If he had been capable of impassioned rhetoric it is in this address that he would have shown his skill, for the subject is to his liking, and the material for an indictment is ample. But the most striking sentence he achieves is that “We asked for judgment and you gave us a sermon.” It is pretty, but it is “art.”
Convalescence after Newspaper.—Matthew Arnold used to say that to get his feet wet spoiled his style for days. But there is a far worse enemy of style than natural damp; it is too much newspaper-reading. Too much newspaper not only spoils one’s style, it takes off the edge of one’s taste, so that I know not what grindstones are necessary to put it on again. Indulgent readers, I have been compelled for some weeks to read too much newspaper, with the consequence that at the end of my task I was not only certain that my little of style was gone, but I was indifferent in my taste. The explanation of the reductio ad absurdum to which an overdose of newspaper leads is to be found, I think, in the uniformity, mass and collectivity of newspaper literature. The writing that fills the Press is neither individual nor does it aim at individuality. If a citizen’s meeting, a jury, or the House of Commons were to perform the feat of making its voice heard, the style of their oracles would be perfect newspaper. But literature, I need not say, is not made after this fashion; nor is it inspired by such performances. Literature, like all art, is above everything, individual expression. Gardez-vous! I do not mean that literature is a personal expression of the personal opinion of the writer. On the contrary, it is the rôle of newspaper to give common expression to personal opinions, but it is the function of literature to give personal expression to common opinions. And since it is only personal expression that provokes and inspires personal expression, from newspapers one can derive no stimulus to literature, but only the opposite, a disrelish and a distaste.
How to recover one’s health after newspaper poisoning is a problem. To plunge back forthwith into books was for me an impossibility. It was necessary to begin again from the very beginning and gradually to accustom myself to the taste for literature again. Re-arranging my books, and throwing away the certainly-done with was, I found, as useful a preliminary tonic as any other I could devise. In particular there is a satisfaction in throwing out books which makes this medicine as pleasant as it is tonic. It visibly reduces the amount left to be read; there is then not so much on one’s plate that the appetite revolts at the prospect. And who can throw away a book without glancing into it to make sure that it will never again be wanted? Picking and tasting in this indeliberate way, the invalid appetite is half coaxed to sit up and take proper nourishment. This destruction and reconstruction I certainly found recovering, and I can, therefore, commend them to be included in the pharmacopæias.
Another nourishing exercise when you are in this state is the overhauling of your accumulations of memoranda, cuttings and note-books. I have sat for hours during the last few days, like a beaver unbuilding its dam, turning out with a view to destroying their contents, drawer after drawer and shelf upon shelf. It is fatal to set about the operation with any tenderness. Your aim must be to destroy everything which does not command you to spare it. The tragic recklessness of the procedure is the virtue of the medicine. As a matter of fact there is little or nothing now left in my drawers for future use. Nearly all my paper-boats have been burned, including some three-decked galleons which were originally designed to bring me fame. No matter; the Rubicon is crossed, and to be on the other side of newspaper with no more than a thin portfolio of notes is to have escaped cheaply.
For the humour of it, however, I will record a careful exception. It appears, after all, that I was not so mad as I seemed. Perchance newspaper, being only a feigned literature, induces only a feigned madness. Be it as it may. I find that my current note-book, though as handy and tempting to be destroyed as any other, was nevertheless destroyed only after the cream of it had been whipped into the permanent book which I have kept through many rages for a good many years. The extracts are here before me as I write in convalescence. It is amusing to me to observe, moreover, that their cream is not very rich. Much better has gone into the bonfire. Why, then, did I save these and sacrifice those? Look at a few of them. “Nobody’s anything always”—is there aught irrecoverable in that to have compelled me to spare it? “Lots of window, but no warehouse”—a remark, I fancy, intended to hit somebody or other very hard indeed—but does it? Is any of the present company fitted with a cap? “The judgment of the world is good, but few can put it into words.” That is a premonitory symptom, you will observe, of a remark made a few lines above to the effect that literature is a personal expression of a common opinion or judgment. I have plainly remembered it. Apropos of the New Age, I must have told somebody, and stolen home to write it down, that its career is that of a rocking-horse, all ups and downs but never any getting forward. It is too true to be wholly amusing; let me horse-laugh at it and pass it on. “A simple style is like sleep, it will not come by effort.” Not altogether true, but true enough. The rest are not much worse or better, and the puzzle is to explain why those should be taken and these left.
Again apropos, may a physician who has healed himself offer this piece of advice? Read your own note-books often. I have known some people who have a library of note-books worth a dukedom, who never once looked into them after having filled them. That is collecting mania pure and simple. From another offensive angle what a confession of inferior taste is made in preferring the note-books of others to one’s own. A little more self-respect in this matter is clearly necessary if your conversation is to be personal at all; for in all probability the references and quotations you make without the authority of your own collection are hackneyed. They are the reach-me-downs of every encyclopædia. Is this the reason that the vast majority of current quotations are as worn as they are; that a constant reader, forewarned of the subject about to be dealt with, is usually forearmed against the tags he will find employed in it? In any case, the advice I have just given is the corrective of this depressing phenomenon of modern writing. You have only to trade in your own note-books to be, and to give the air of being, truly original.
Browsing is a rather more advanced regimen for convalescence than the re-arrangement of books. The latter can be performed without the smallest taste for reading. It is a matter of sizing them up, and any bookseller’s apprentice can do it. But browsing means dipping into the contents here and there; it is both a symptom of returning health and a means to it. In the last few days I must have nibbled in a hundred different pastures, chiefly, I think, in the pastures of books about books. De Quincey, Matthew Arnold, Bagehot, Macaulay, Johnson, etc.—what meadows, what lush grass, what feed! After all, one begins to say, literature cannot be unsatisfying that fed such bulls and that so plumped their minds. It cannot be only a variety of newspaper. Thus a new link with health is established, and one becomes able to take one’s books again. Here I should end, but that a last observation in the form of a question occurs to me. Is not or can not a taste for literature be acquired by the same means by which it can be re-acquired? Are not the child and the invalid similar? In that case the foregoing directions may be not altogether useless.
Nature in English Literature.—In observation of Nature English literature excels all others. But that is by no means to say that every English writer upon Nature is good. The astonishing thing is that contemporary with such masters of both Nature-observation and literary expression as—to name but two—Mr. W. H. Hudson and Mr. Warde Fowler (and half a dozen others could be named in the same street) there should still be so many writers insensible enough to perfection to write about Nature when they have little to say and few gifts of expression. You would think that having seen the sun they would not light a candle, or that if they did, nobody would look at it. But the truth is that not only are many candles lit, but they are all much admired—much more, indeed, than the suns themselves. There may be a good reason for it, namely, that the reading public is so much in love with Nature-writing that the best is not good enough for us. Or, again, everybody living in the country and having a pen at all, wishes to write his own Nature-observations as everybody wishes to write his own love-lyrics, regardless of the fact that the best love-lyrics have already been written. It may be so; but the admission appears to me to be over-generous.