They don’t come very often, the books that speak so generously and beautifully to the inner certainties of the mind. And when they do, it is desirable not to do them dishonour by words too clumsy or sweeping.
But that Mr. Montague’s Disenchantment has come to us in just the way that it has is a curiously mixed satisfaction and disappointment to the present reviewer. Satisfaction, in that for the past several years I have been saying to every publisher who was going abroad: “Why the devil do you go only to London and nowhere else? Are you aware that there are very exciting centres of literary activity in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham—all sorts of places outside London. Some day” (I kept saying to publishers) “one of the great books will bob up a long way from London. You might remember, for instance, Stevenson and Barrie. Now when you are in England why don’t you go to call on Mr. Montague at the Manchester Guardian? He’d know what was going on. Very likely he could tell you of someone who was writing a fine book—someone London wouldn’t know about.”
I take no particular credit for saying this: it was obviousness itself to any one who had noticed Mr. Montague’s earlier books. But the publishers, with their stereotyped habit of calling on a few literary agents in London, and thinking they have then done their possible, paid no attention. One of the odd things about publishers is that they have so little adventurous spirit about spooring for the really fine stuff.
Well, the book, quietly written and published, turned out to be by Mr. Montague himself. Half a year went by, but we in America heard nothing about it. There are always wide and well-polished alleys for the transmission of information amusing or trivial. Comparatively unimportant news spins along the parquet floor, and a crash resounds like that of tenpins tumbling. But humanity, probably with a wise instinct, averts its ear from matters that require meditation. The American publishers, seriatim, had their look at the sheets of Disenchantment. All apparently agreed that it was magnificent, but with their cheery assumption of knowledge as to what we want to read opined that it was too British or too full of intricate allusion or too much about the war, of which we were asserted to be weary. Or that the British publisher was asking an unwarrantable price for it; that only a few readers here would appreciate it; that it would be impossible to come clear on the expense.
These are all sound, sagacious reasonings. The one thing our publisher friends did not realize was that it is by publishing, every now and then, a book of this sort that they save their souls. It is an honour to put such a book on one’s list, even if it should prove presently unprofitable.
Disenchantment is an enchanting book. It is an Anatomy of Melancholy in the exact sense. It is a spiritual history of the war: a penetrating, intellectual, richly allusive, wise, sober, and compassionate study of that slow process of disintegrating certainty that marked every mind capable of independent action. People who have never read it probably imagine that the Anatomy of Melancholy is a dismal and grievous work. It is, however, one of the most richly amusing of all books; and it is only fair to say (accepting the danger of being misconceived) that Mr. Montague’s delicious humour makes Disenchantment one of the most witty of contemporary writings. For war, after all, is a human institution and subject to the complexity of all planetary matters. It has, in Mr. Robert Nichols’s great phrase, its ardours and endurances; also its selfishnesses, stupidities, and laughters. It is not to be supposed that men who are pompous and silly and hilarious and craven in business, book reviewing, education and theology will be otherwise when they go to war.
So Mr. Montague, in anatomizing the melancholy that has fallen upon the world, employs, with perfect skill and perfect restraint, every shaft in the quiver of a literary artist. The old devil of herd-poison lingers among us yet: there will be some simple spirits who will think this book bitter, some who will think it blasphemous; some who will maintain that it plays into the hand of Apollyon (whose residence, they will probably insist, is somewhere along Unter den Linden). But there will also be some, and not few I think, who will see in this book the breadth and burning spirit of one who has long gone beyond the conception of war as a merely national matter; who looks upon it as a movement of tragedy among men where the innocent suffer no less outrage than the guilty. And yet even those who may find Mr. Montague’s disrobing of official frailty almost too disturbing will take pleasure in the beauty of his text. Let no one prate to you of the luxuriant splendour of some of our accredited stylists. The deity of prose moves in Mr. Montague’s pages. His savoury marrow of allusion—Shakespeare, for instance, has become part of his actual thinking tissue—will be undigested by some unpracticed readers. He will be, we might say, shrimp to the sundry; but no harm will ensue: the casual reader will merely pay Manchester compliment for what belongs first to Stratford. And Mr. Montague deserves all the compliment that is possible in an uncourtly world.
This book could only have been written by a man who has been through the scorching and weariness. Its simplicity, its calm, temperate understanding of human weakness, the optical vividness of its narrative passages, the generous sympathy that moulds even its ironies—these are the possession of experience. And it occurs to me to ponder the courage and fortitude of one who could sit down, in the sobriety of retrospect, to write a book recalling beauties and sufferings that most of us would have been glad to let slide into the discard of memory. There could have been only one motive, and only one sustaining power, potent enough to carry the hand through so bitter a task. A love of humanity and a generous hope of humanity’s increase of sanely innocent happiness could beget a book as noble as this; no other emotion could avail.
And still the troubled reviewer feels—this being three months after his reading of the book, and no mere snapped off opinion—that he has not done justice to the subject. For this book is not merely one of the noblest passages of political writing that he knows of, and not merely one of the most clearly and beautifully moving exhibitions of honest thinking. It is a book that is sanative and antitoxic for the present time. He is a shallow observer indeed who does not see, in the post-bellum world, muddy currents of cynicism and discontent; revulsive twitchings, literature no less jangled than politics. Mr. Montague does not disenchant us from any enchantments that were worth keeping. Except the politicians and the ultra-parsonical parsons, we had slipped their leash long ago. He offers a lucid enlarging mirror of truth and sense in which a thoughtful reader may see enlarged and brightly snuffed the small sooty flame of his own natural candle, as William Penn called the inward spirit. He magics us for the moment by his charm and the lovely humanity of his vision into thinking that we, too, can, if we will, be just, liberal, and humane.