Even as it is, there is no other Elizabethan man of letters whose personality is an island with a crooked shore, inviting us into a thousand bays and creeks and rivermouths, to the same degree as the personality that expressed itself in the poems, sermons, and life of John Donne. It is a mysterious and at times repellent island. It lies only intermittently in the sun. A fog hangs around its coast, and at the base of its most radiant mountain-tops there is, as a rule, a miasma-infested swamp. There are jewels to be found scattered among its rocks and over its surface, and by miners in the dark. It is richer, indeed, in jewels and precious metals and curious ornaments than in flowers. The shepherd on the hillside seldom tells his tale uninterrupted. Strange rites in honour of ancient infernal deities that delight in death are practised in hidden places, and the echo of these reaches him on the sighs of the wind and makes him shudder even as he looks at his beloved. It is an island with a cemetery smell. The chief figure who haunts it is a living man in a winding-sheet. It is, no doubt, Walton's story of the last days of Donne's life that makes us, as we read even the sermons and the love-poems, so aware of this ghostly apparition. Donne, it will be remembered, almost on the eve of his death, dressed himself in a winding-sheet, "tied with knots at his head and feet," and stood on a wooden urn with his eyes shut, and "with so much of the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and death-like face," while a painter made a sketch of him for his funeral monument. He then had the picture placed at his bedside, to which he summoned his friends and servants in order to bid them farewell. As he lay awaiting death, he said characteristically, "I were miserable if I might not die," and then repeatedly, in a faint voice, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done." At the very end he lost his speech, and "as his soul ascended and his last breath departed from him he closed his eyes, and then disposed his hands and body into such a posture as required not the least alteration by those that came to shroud him." It was a strange chance that preserved his spectral monument almost uninjured when St. Paul's was burned down in the Great Fire, and no other monument in the Cathedral escaped. Among all his fantasies none remains in the imagination more despotically than this last fanciful game of dying. Donne, however, remained in all respects a fantastic to the last, as we may see in that hymn which he wrote eight days before the end, tricked out with queer geography, and so anciently egoistic amid its worship.
Donne was the poet-geographer of himself, his mistresses, and his God. Other poets of his time dived deeper and soared to greater altitudes, but none travelled so far, so curiously, and in such out-of-the-way places, now hurrying like a nervous fugitive, and now in the exultation of the first man in a new found land.
[THE NOVELS OF MR. COMPTON MACKENZIE]
By JOHN FREEMAN
WISE men have foretold the death of imaginative literature. Spider-like, science will seize the body of this gilded fly, stab it methodically into numbness, and then, feeding upon its vitals, will exhaust and destroy the useless thing. With sedulous precision the scientist will do what the artist, alas, has failed to do more than vaguely and uncertainly: he will re-interpret life, he will rediscover man's relation to a vaster Universe. Ignoring or spurning all attempts at the æsthetic apprehension of the significance of life and time, he will at length announce his own positive formula by which all phenomena and all relations must be valued. It is the scientist who will feel and communicate, with a dry ecstasy wholly his own, the isolation of man amid the meanness or the majesty of the world. That language which we yet speak, stiff with ancestral associations, will be discarded; obscure symbols, their order intelligible perhaps to another scientist but to no one else, will be used to express the secrets of life and riddles of death Thebes never knew. The watcher of the skies will be no Keats: back to his galley-pots will every Keats be driven. In the midst of that web called science the spider will sit with vigilant eyes, holding their cunning in momentary suspense, swelling with vaster and vaster accumulations.
It is not poetry alone that is threatened: imaginative art is not confined to poetry. The strange thing is that when Thomas Hardy has carried an imaginative view of life to a finer expression than that of any artist of his time, and shown how easily prose may wear the strict shackles of scientific precision, that prose itself should find no younger masters ready to use and develop it; as if Hardy's forsaking of prose for verse were no simple forsaking, but rather a subtle betrayal. Unique success is his in combining the imaginative with the scientific, the emotional with the rational, in his novels; his younger contemporaries seem to have failed equally in both directions.
It would be absurd to charge this dereliction to any single novelist or group of novelists. Mr. Conrad, for instance, simply evades the charge by being in his turn unique; Mr. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett fail in varying degrees but in both directions, and of their fellows it is hard to think of any who has not similarly failed. Where gifts are eminent the failure is eminent: hence this preface to remarks upon the novels of Mr. Compton Mackenzie. Diligent, observant, experienced, inexhaustible, or at any rate unexhausted, he has made his opportunities and gained a hearing; indeed, as he reminds us in the second volume of Sinister Street, he has won the greater advantage of a hearing refused, the libraries having so ineffably rejected the first volume. Nevertheless, from him that hath not—— What is it, in fact, that has deprived him of the truest fruit of the gifts which he has? I make no attempt to disguise the fact that Mr. Mackenzie appears to be a writer who is not an imaginative artist, yet who might have been an imaginative artist; a novelist who has not concerned himself with life at all save in its external and mechanic motions. He has not confined himself to a single manner: his first book, The Passionate Elopement, was an eighteenth-century story in a style familiarised by less capable and less versatile practitioners. Little indeed was to be expected from an author whose first book contained such writing as:
Presently he saw her join a blue mask and lose herself in the flickering throng. Last time he had remarked particularly that her vis-à-vis wore brown and gold, yet the two figures were alike in movement and gesture, and he could swear the hands were identical. It was the same without a doubt. Charles bit his nails with vexation, and fretted confoundedly.
"My dear boy, my dear Charles, pray do not gnaw your fingers. Narcissus admired himself, 'tis true, but without carrying his devotion to cannibality."
Charles turned to the well-known voice of Mr. Ripple.
"A thousand pardons, dear Beau, I was vexed by a trifle. The masquerade comports itself with tolerable success."