Mr. Eliot will have it, however, that Shakespeare, and not he himself, is to blame for his bewilderment. He concludes his essay:
We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii, “Apologie de Raimond Sebond.” We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.
Would it be possible to write a paragraph in which there was a greater air of intellectual pursuit and a tinier reality of intellectual achievement? It would not be easy to say more essentially irrelevant things on a great subject. Mr. Eliot is like a man dissecting—and dissecting with desperate earnestness—a corpse that isn’t there.
And his essays in praise have scarcely more of that vitality which is a prerequisite of good criticism than his essays in blame. He obviously admires Blake and Ben Jonson, but he leaves them as rigid and as cold as though he were measuring them for their coffins. The good critic communicates his delight in genius. His memorable sentences are the mirrors of memorable works of art. Like the poet, he is something of a philosopher, but his philosophy is for the most part implicit. He is a light-bringer by means of quotation and aphorism. He may destroy, but only in order to let in the light. His business among authors is as glorious as was the business of Plutarch among men of action. He may be primarily æsthetic, or primarily biographical, or primarily expository; but in no kind of criticism can he reach more than pedantry, unless he himself is a man of imagination, stirred by the spectacle of the strange and noble passions of the human soul. He knows that literature is not the game of a coterie, but is a fruit of the tree of life, hanging from the same boughs as the achievements of lovers and statesmen and heroes. There is so little truth in Mr. Eliot’s statement that “a literary critic should have no emotions except those immediately provoked by a work of art—and these ... are, when valid, perhaps not to be called emotional at all,” that one would be bound to tell ten times more truth merely by contradicting it. The ideal critic would always be able to disentangle relevant from irrelevant emotions as he studied a work of art; but in practice all critics, save a few makers of abstract laws, are human, and the rich personal experience of the critic enters into his work for good as well as evil.
Mr. Eliot fails as a critic because he brings us neither light nor delight. But this does not mean that he will always fail. He has some of the qualities that go to the making of a critic. He has learning, and he enjoys intellectual exercise. His essay on “Tradition and the Individual Talent” shows that he is capable of ideas, though he is not yet capable of expressing them clearly and interestingly. Besides this, as one reads him, one is conscious of the presence of a serious talent, as yet largely inarticulate, and wasting itself on the splitting of hairs and metaphysical word-spinning. His failure at present is partly a failure of generosity. If a critic is lacking in generous responsiveness it is in vain for him to write about the poets. The critic has duties as a destroyer, but chiefly in the same sense as a gold-washer. His aim is the discovery of gold. Mr. Eliot is less of a discoverer in this kind than any critic of distinction who is now writing. Otherwise he could hardly have written the sort of attack he writes on Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of Euripides, in which he overlooks the one supreme fact that calls for a critic’s explanation—the fact that Professor Murray alone among English translators has (whether imperfectly or not) brought Euripides to birth as an author for the modern world. Let Mr. Eliot for the next ten years take as his patron saint the woman in the New Testament who found the piece of silver, instead of Johannes Agricola in joyless meditation. He will find her not only better company, but a wiser counsellor. He may even find his sentences infected with her cheerful excitement, for want of which as yet they can break neither into a phrase nor into a smile.
XIV
MR. NORMAN DOUGLAS’S DISLIKES
Mr. Norman Douglas has, in Alone, written a book of hatred tempered with archæology and laughter. Luckily, there is very little archæology and enough laughter to make the hatred enjoyable without being infectious. It is not that Mr. Douglas does not like some of his fellow-creatures. He likes heretics and jolly beggars. He liked Ouida. But, if Mr. Douglas likes you, the danger is that he will throw you at somebody else’s head. That is what he does with Ouida, whom he glorifies as “the last, almost the last, of lady authors.” He throws her at the head of the age in general—at “our anæmic and wooly generation,” at “our actual womanscribes” with “their monkey-tricks and cleverness,” at “our vegetarian world-reformers who are as incapable of enthusiasm as they are of contempt, because their blood temperature is invariably two degrees below normal,” and finally at an American novelist described as “this feline and gelatinous New Englander.” That gives a fair enough impression of Mr. Douglas’s attitude to the human race as seen at close quarters.
He has in a measure justified his attitude by making an amusing book of it. Mr. Douglas has a well-stored and alert mind, full of by-ways, that makes for good conversation. As we read him we feel that we are listening to the racy monologues of a traveller with a special gift for pouring out the comedy of his discomforts in abusive form. He tells us how he landed—“with one jump—in Hell,” which is his name for Siena in winter. “I hate Viareggio at all seasons,” he tells us farther on, and he describes the inhabitants as “birds of prey: a shallow and rapacious brood.” At Pisa, when he arrives, “the Arno is the emblem of Despair ... like a torrent of liquid mud—irresolute whether to be earth or water.” He finds a good landlady at Corsanico, but he immediately remembers how he had “lived long at the mercy of London landladies and London charwomen—having suffered the torments of Hell, for more years than I care to remember, at the hands of those pickpockets and hags and harpies and drunken sluts” ... “those London sharks and furies.” At Rome the remembrance of a “sweet old lady friend” sets him thinking also of her husband, “a worm, a good man in the worst sense of the word,” “the prince of moralisers, the man who first taught me how contemptible the human race may become”—“what a face: gorgonising in its assumption of virtue”—“he ought to have throttled himself at his mother’s breast.” The absence of mosquitoes and the fewness of the flies at Rome reminds him again of his sufferings at the hands, so to speak, of flies in other places. “One of the most cherished projects of my life,” he declares, “is to assemble, in a kind of anthology, all the invectives that have been hurled since the beginning of literature against this loathly dirt-born insect, this living carrion, this blot on the Creator’s reputation—and thereto add a few of my own.” The noise of the Roman trams leads him, while lying in bed, to devote the morning hours to “the malediction of all modern progress, wherein I include, with firm impartiality, every single advancement in culture which happens to lie between my present state and that comfortable cavern in whose shelter I can see myself ensconced as of yore, peacefully sucking somebody’s marrow, while my women, round the corner, are collecting a handful of acorns for my dessert,” after which he goes on to denounce the telephone as “that diabolic invention” and the Press for “cretinising” the public mind. At Olevana, it is the nightingale that rouses him to imprecations:
One of them elects to warble in deplorably full-throated ease immediately below my bedroom window. When this particular fowl sets up its din at about 3.45 a.m. it is a veritable explosion: an ear-rending, nerve-shattering explosion of noise.... It is that blasted bird clearing its throat for a five-hours’ entertainment.... A brick. Methinks I begin to see daylight....
Mr. Douglas, it is only fair to say, explains that Italian nightingales do not sing like English nightingales. But I fancy that Mr. Douglas sat down, when he began these sketches, in the mood for writing comic scarifications, and neither bird nor man, city nor river, was safe from his harsh laughter. He hurls a pen where King Saul in similar mood hurled a spear, and we must concede that he hurls it with force.