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THE CRITICAL GAME

BY
JOHN MACY

Author of "The Spirit of American Literature," etc.

BONI and LIVERIGHT
Publishers New York

Copyright, 1922, by
Boni and Liveright, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America.

To

ROGER IRVING LEE

CONTENTS

THE CRITICAL GAME

Criticism is one form of the game of writing. It differs from other forms only as whist differs from poker and as tennis differs from golf. The motives are the same, the exercise of the player's brain and muscles, and the entertainment of the spectators, from whom, if the player be successful, he derives profit, livelihood, applause, and fame. The function of criticism at the present time, and at all times, is the function of all literature, to be wise, witty, eloquent, instructive, humourous, original, graceful, beautiful, provocative, irritating, persuasive. That is, it must possess some of the many merits that can be found in any type of literature; it must in some way be good writing. There is no other sound principle to be discovered in the treatises on the art of criticism or in fine examples of the art. Whether Charles Lamb writes about Shakespeare or Christ's Hospital or ears is of relatively slight importance compared with the question whether in one essay or another Lamb is at one of his incomparable best moments of inspiration.

Remy de Gourmont says, apropos Brunetière's views of Renan:

Contre l'opinion commune, la critique est peut-être le plus subjectif de tous les genres littéraires; c'est une confession perpétuelle; en croyant analyser les œuvres d'autrui, c'est soi-même que l'on dévoile et que l'on expose au public … voulant expliquer et contredire Renan, M. Brunetière s'est une fois de plus confessé publiquement.

That is true, except that it may be doubted whether one type of literature is more subjective than another, since all types are subjective. Even a work that belongs, according to De Quincey's definition, to the literature of information as distinguished from the literature of power, even an article in an encyclopædia, an article, say, on Patagonia, has a man behind it; it cannot be quite objective and impersonal.

Criticism should not be set off too sharply from other forms of literary expression. It has no special rights, privileges, and authority; and at the same time it has no special disabilities that consign it to a secondary place in the divisions of literature. In any unit of art, a sonnet or an epic, a short story or a novel, a little review or a history of æsthetics, a man is trying to say something. And the value of what he says must, of course, depend partly on the essential interest of his subject; but it depends to a greater extent on the skill with which he puts words together, creates interest in himself. Arnold's essay on Keats is less Keats than Arnold. It could not have been if Keats had not existed. But the beauty of that sequence of words, that essay in criticism, is due to the genius of Arnold. Francis Thompson on Shelley adds no cubit to the stature of Shelley, but Thompson's interpretation is a marvellous piece of poetic prose which cannot be deducted without enormous loss from the works of Thompson, from English criticism. We read Pater on Coleridge, not for Coleridge but for Pater, and we read Coleridge for Coleridge, not for Shakespeare. Thackeray's lecture on Swift, which is full of animosity and miscomprehension, is a well-written revelation of Thackeray. Trollope's book on Thackeray, which is full of friendship and admiration, is an ill-written revelation of Trollope.

Some men of great ability, like Trollope, who have written good books themselves, lack the faculty, whatever it may be, of writing in an entertaining fashion about the books of other men. Swinburne is a striking example. His knowledge of literature was immense, and he had the enthusiasms and contempts that make the critical impulse; but except when the poet in him seized the pen and made a passage of lyrical prose, his excursions into criticism are bewildering and difficult to read. His sonnets on Dickens, Lamb, and the Elizabethans are worth more than all his prose. On the other hand, Lamb, who wrote like an angel about the Elizabethan dramatists, failed completely as a dramatist.

Every man who plays with literature at all must be ambitious to succeed in some form of art that may be called "creative," as distinct from critical—a distinction which, since Arnold taught us our lesson, we know does not exist. The reason for this ambition is plain enough. A novel or a play reaches a wider audience than a volume of essays, however admirable; it has a more obvious claim to originality, and it brings the author a greater degree of practical satisfaction. A few doubly or trebly gifted men, Dryden, Coleridge, Poe, Arnold, Pater, Henley, Stevenson, Henry James, could do first-rate work in more than one genre, including criticism. And a good case could be made out to prove that a man who knows how to handle words in many ways is on the whole the best qualified to comment on the art of handling words. However that may be, it is certain that in English literature a critic who is only a critic seldom wins a conspicuous position. Even Johnson was something more than a critic, and he was, with all due respect, somewhat less than a good one. And Hazlitt, who was a good one, wrote on many subjects besides books and art.

Because so many little people went into the business of reviewing and presumed to sit in judgment on their betters, criticism early got a bad name in English literature, and not all the dignified work of Arnold and others has yet succeeded in restoring the reputation of the word or the art. Criticism came to mean censure, a connotation which persists in current speech. The degeneration had already taken place in Dryden's time, and he protested that "they wholly mistake the nature of criticism who think that its business is principally to find fault." Authors of imaginative works became resentful and felt that the critic was an enemy, a nasty and incompetent enemy, as indeed he often was. An interesting compilation could be made—and probably Saintsbury or somebody else has done it—of the retorts and counter-attacks made by writers of other things than criticism against the whole critical crew. Here are a few examples:

Gentle Jane Austen in "Northanger Abbey" amusingly defends her heroine's habit of reading novels:

I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding … if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?… Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans.

That sounds as if Miss Austen's pride in her craft had been wounded. I know of no record that anybody ever spoke ill of her while she was living.

Scott, whose generous soul was hurt by the harsh squabbles of the Scottish reviewers, took a shot at the tribe in the letter which appears in the introductory note to "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" in the Cambridge edition:

As to the herd of critics, it is impossible for me to pay much attention to them for, as they do not understand what I call poetry, we talk in a foreign language to each other. Indeed, many of these gentlemen appear to me to be a sort of tinkers, who, unable to make pots and pans, set up for menders of them, and, God knows, often make two holes in patching one.

The idea that the critic is a secondary fellow who cannot make first-hand literature goes back to Dryden, the champion and exemplar of sound criticism, who wrote in "The Conquest of Granada":

They who write ill and they who ne'er durst write

Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

Landor repeats the idea in a "Conversation" between Southey and Porson, in which Porson says: "Those who have failed as writers turn reviewers."

Writers and other artists are usually sensitive and often vain. Some have taken critics too seriously, have given them too much importance while pretending to despise them, and have allowed themselves to be stung instead of brushing the flies off. Thanks to Shelley, the idea became current that the "viperous murderer," the critic, killed Keats. It was not so. Keats died of tuberculosis. Though he was, like all poets, delicately organized, he was an unusually sane and self-reliant man, quite sure of the value of his work. Moreover, in a day when rough criticism was the fashion, the critics were, though stupid, not especially rough on Keats. Shelley's "J'accuse" is flaming poetry, but—it is not good criticism. Byron had the right idea. With his superior wit and vigour he gave the reviewers ten blows for one and used his opponents as the occasion of a delightful exhibition of boxing. The reviewers were knocked out in the second round. "English Bards and Scottish Reviewers" is still in the ring, as I have pleasantly discovered by re-reading it.

The notion that the critic will, or can, do damage to the artist persisted long after Shelley and is perhaps still believed. In 1876, Sidney Lanier, a man of good sense and great bravery, whom the flies, or the "vipers," had but lightly nipped, wrote in a letter to his father:

What possible claim can contemporary criticism set up to respect—that criticism which crucified Jesus, stoned Stephen, hooted Paul for a madman, tried Luther for a criminal, tortured Galileo, bound Columbus in chains, drove Dante into a hell of exile, made Shakespeare write the sonnet, "When in disgrace of fortune and men's eyes," gave Milton £5 for "Paradise Lost," kept Samuel Johnson cooling his heels on Lord Chesterfield's doorstep, reviled Shelley as an unclean dog, killed Keats, cracked jokes on Gluck, Schubert, Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner, and committed so many other impious follies and stupidities?

Lanier's charges are not all quite true. He mixed up the sins of criticism with the sins of politics, economics, and other dreadful affairs. But his outburst is a good illustration of the quarrel between the "author" and the "critic." Especially when the author has for the moment lost his sense of humour.

The best treatment of the critic by the author, as also, perhaps, of the author by the critic, is humourous. In "One of Our Conquerors," Meredith lays out the art critics:

He had relied and reposed on the dicta of newspaper critics; who are sometimes unanimous, and are then taken for guides, and are fatal.

Washington Irving, in a delightful little paper called "Desultory Thoughts on Criticism," quietly places the reviewer in the low seat where he belongs. I shall not quote from the essay, but merely refer the reader to it and especially to the introductory quotation from Buckingham's "Rehearsal," in which the critic is set in a still lower seat.

Finally—for these quotations—Dr. Holmes, who lived all his life surrounded by praise and comfort, puts his finger gently on the parasitism of the critic. The passage is in "The Poet at the Breakfast Table":

Our epizoic literature is becoming so extensive that nobody is safe from its ad infinitum progeny. A man writes a book of criticisms. A Quarterly Review criticises the critic. A Monthly Magazine takes up the critic's critic. A Weekly Journal criticizes the critic of the critic's critic, and a daily paper favours us with some critical remarks on the performance of the writer in the Weekly, who has criticised the critical notice in the Monthly of the critical essay in the Quarterly on the critical work we started with. And thus we see that as each flea "has smaller fleas that on him prey," even the critic himself cannot escape the common lot of being bitten.

To what extent is the critic parasitic? To this extent: he is dealing with ideas already expressed, with cooked and predigested food. It is easier for any mind to think of something to say about an idea that has already gone through cerebral processes than it is to take the raw material of life and make something. You may sit on a bench in the park and watch the people and never, for the life of you, conceive a good story. Then O. Henry comes along and makes twenty stories. After he has done it, you can write something very brilliant about what O. Henry saw from the same bench that you sat on. And you can make neat remarks about the resemblances and differences between O. Henry, Boccaccio, and H. C. Bunner. That may be worth doing, if your remarks are really neat. For then you may be readable.

And that is the function of the critic, to be readable, to make literature of a sort. The critic is always playing his own game, selfish, egotistical, expressive of his own will, and no more disinterested than was Arnold himself when he took his pen in hand to slay a Philistine or to sign a contract with his manager for a lecture tour in America. In playing his own game the critic may help the game of another author by crying him up and advertising him. But a hundred critics, clamouring in the fatal unanimity at which Meredith pokes fun, cannot make the fortunes of a book or influence at the creative source the work of a man sufficiently strong and original to be worth reading. And the same hundred critics with lofty hatred of bad writing cannot prevent bad books from being written and read. George Eliot made it a rule not to read criticisms of her work because she found it necessary to be preserved "from that discouragement as an artist which ill-judged praise no less than ill-judged blame tends to produce in me." The implication that criticism, favorable or unfavorable, is ill-judged gives us an addition to our notes on what authors think of critics. I doubt whether, if that strong-minded woman had read everything that was written about her before and after her death, she would have altered a single sentence. Did Hardy stop writing novels because of the ignorant attacks on "Jude"? I would not accept without question Hardy's own word for it. I suspect that it was his own inward impulse, not determined by the opinions of the other people, that turned his energy to that stupendous epic, "The Dynasts."

To what extent can the critic play the game of the reader, be guide and teacher, maintain standards, elevate taste, make the best ideas prevail? Not to a very great extent. Criticism, good or bad, is read only by the sophisticated, by people whose tastes are formed and who can take care of themselves in matters literary and intellectual. Who that had not already looked into Shakespeare and Plato ever heard of Pater? The journals that print intelligent articles about literature and art have a small circulation; they are missionaries to the converted; their controversial discussions of general principles or of the merits of an individual are only family feuds. Critics play with each other in a professional game. The few amateurs who sit as spectators are a select minority who have seen the game before and who, though not in the professional class, are instructed, cultivated, have some knowledge of the plays. The critical game is enjoyed by those who are themselves critical and least in need of enlightenment.

Nevertheless, it is a great game—when it is played well.

The author of a book on golf illustrates it with the stances and swings of better players than himself; he makes an anthology. A collection of essays by various authors would illustrate the game better than the plays of a single critic, a much more competent critic than I. I do not pretend that the essays in this book are first-rate specimens of how the strokes should be made. But even a small fellow may flatter himself that he has an individual way of looking at things which may give unity of interest to a collection of papers. At any rate he has a right to exhibit his methods, and nobody is obliged to watch him or play with him.

Most of these papers have been published in reviews and magazines, The Freeman, The Dial, The New Republic, the Boston Herald, the Atlantic Monthly, the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, the New York Tribune.

The essay on Joseph Conrad appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1906. I am proud only of the date. Sixteen years ago Conrad was not universally recognized; some of his best work had not been done; and many finer essays than mine had not yet been written. If I was not the first American critic to pursue that mysterious mariner across enchanted seas, at least I can swear before the critical court of admiralty that the waters were not crowded with little craft like mine. It is a pleasure to read again a few letters which hail me for hailing Conrad and which make me believe that I did introduce the master to a few readers. If so, I have not lived in vain.

But my pride is somewhat reduced by the consideration that any reader intelligent enough to look at a literary essay in the Atlantic Monthly must sooner or later have discovered Conrad for himself without the assistance of a critic. However, I hug with amusement the memory of a Harvard professor who threw up his hands and said: "My God! I had no idea there was a man living who could write like that!" To the professorial mind in those days English literature stopped officially with the death of Browning or, at the latest, with the deaths of Stevenson and Pater. The essay itself is a little professorial, enfeebled by a sort of Boston-Harvard timidity, utterly failing to express the wild joy which I felt. The second paper on Conrad, written fifteen years later, is not so hesitant. It is interesting to look again at the bibliographical footnote to the first essay and see how Conrad's few books were scattered among the publishers. I could not find "An Outcast of the Islands" except in the Tauchnitz edition. Today his work is collected. There is a handsome subscription edition. And Mr. Doubleday tells me that a new book by Conrad has an assured immediate sale of twenty to thirty thousand. Perhaps, after all, we who cheered long ago when it was not the fashion to cheer have justified our miserable existence as critics.

The essay on Tolstoy was written in the two months immediately after his death. Mr. Ellery Sedgwick asked me to write it for the Atlantic Monthly and then rejected it. It was published in the New York Call. I bear no bitter grudge against Mr. Sedgwick for returning an article that he had ordered. But I am convinced, as I read the article over again, that he is an incompetent critic of criticism. Sometimes editors and publishers, whose business it is to provide the arena and assemble the spectators, play their part of the game stupidly. But on the whole I think they are more than generous to second-rate performers. If I owned a magazine I should be very grudging of the space I gave to literary chatter—except my own.

A critical friend—we critics suffer from each other—admonishes me that in the foregoing remarks I have treated an important art in a flippant manner. Certainly I am not so foolish as to take my essays very seriously, and I believe that much modern criticism is too solemn, that if we fooled with literature in a lighter spirit we should enjoy it more and be happier.

Charles Lamb was not afraid to kick up his heels, and yet nobody will accuse him of being a trivial clown. Oscar Wilde was a man of wit, sometimes a buffoon, and he could puncture a stupid piece of work with ridicule. But the prevailing tone of his best essays is one of dignity and sobriety.

Good criticism is as important as anything that man can put on paper. Moreover, certain subjects must be treated by the critic with the utmost gravity. It would be owlishly humourless, uncritical, not to take Tolstoy seriously. Essays about the greater men of genius and the deeper problems of art must be substantial, solid, or they are inappropriate, out of key.

But it is possible to be sane and erudite without being leaden, to approach a noble subject earnestly without striking an attitude of priestly austerity. Some of our sincerest contemporaries, both the academic and the rebellious, seem to me to worry about literature, as if it were an invalid that needed nursing or a dead man about whom the last word must be said before next Thursday afternoon. They do not get enough fun out of it. They forget that Pater, who was not a mad wag and not a dilettante, could sometimes see the gaiety of things and was willing to be inconclusive.

Criticism is important. The best contemporaneous English criticism is not good enough. And even in France, where we have been taught to look for sound critics, Flaubert thought as late as 1869 that criticism was still in its infancy. He wrote to George Sand: "You speak of criticism in your last letter to me, telling me that it will soon disappear. I think, on the contrary, that it is, at most only dawning…. When will they (critics) be artists, only artists, but really artists? Where do you know a criticism? Who is there who is anxious about the work in itself, in an intense way?… The unconscious poetic expression? Where it comes from? its composition, its style? The point of view of the author? Never. That criticism would require great imagination and great sympathy." To which George Sand replied with good sense: "The artist is too much occupied with his own work to forget himself in estimating that of others."

Since then France has had a generation of critics, some of whom were artists. If Hennequin, who thought he was a scientific critic, was not an artist, if De Gourmont, who smiled wisely at the whole game, was not an artist, then the word means nothing. In England and America criticism has not made much progress since Pater died. I know that I am punctuating literature in the manner of the academic fogies. But one of the humours of this sport is that you sometimes do things which are fouls when your opponent is guilty of them.

I come back gladly to the analogy of the game. We have, I believe, made progress in one direction. In the direction of fair play. We cannot write like Hazlitt, but we will not hit below the belt as he did sometimes. We cannot write like Arnold, and his combination of literary charm and scholarship makes us feel desperately small, but in our descent from his altitude we have freed ourselves from his major vice, his dogmatic snobbery, his bigoted liberalism. The pulpit-pounder still thrives in religion and politics; in criticism he is becoming obsolete. I am sure, or at least hopeful, that this is true in America. I think I see a slight but appreciable improvement in candour, simplicity, generosity, geniality, and fairness in attack. On the whole we are a little more sportsmanlike than some of our elders. That is all that I claim for us. Our real consolation is that the ancient and honorable game is still young, still to be played.

DANTE IN ENGLISH

I am tempted to call the following remarks "Reading Dante for Fun." The most austere of poets should not be treated with levity. But, after all, poetry, even poetry of profound ethical and religious import, is to be enjoyed. And the simple point that I wish to make, as a mere reader with but a stumbling knowledge of Italian and almost no knowledge of the vast library of Dante scholarship, is that Dante is accessible in English. His book of magic is at least half open even to one who must forever remain partly blind and deaf to the beauty of the original. It is a great pleasure to read the convenient little volumes of the Temple Classics with the Italian text on the left-hand page and the English on the right, to read idly or study deeply, according to mood and temperament. At any rate, let us not be overcome by the solemnity of the occasion or discouraged by the difficulties, some of which the commentators have cleared away and some of which they have made more difficult.

Dr. Toynbee[ [1] finds that since 1802 the Commedia as a whole has been translated into English about once every four years. And he excludes from his record American translators and critics. Why did Dr. Toynbee or the British Academy make this commemorative volume so narrowly insular? English and American scholarship is one institution. And American Dantists have done good work. Though it is the fashion to scorn the Yankee bards and seers, Lowell's essay and the translations by Longfellow, Norton, and Parsons are important in the history of Dante in English, not British, literature. They had literary gifts, they knew Italian, and they were able to appreciate a universal mind. For all their provinciality their shades can afford to smile at their young countryman, Mr. Mencken, who writes: "If I have to go to hell for it, I must here set down my conviction that much of the 'Divine Comedy' is piffle." Well, he ought to go to hell—to Dante's hell, which is an entertaining and hospitable place. In the cold prose of Norton or John Carlyle, where the melody is necessarily lost, there may be some passages in which an alert modern reader cannot find great interest, but the number of lines of "piffle" is exactly none.

It is not to be expected that all men, even all literary men, will respond to Dante. Horace Walpole called him "extravagant, absurd, disgusting; in short, a Methodist parson in Bedlam." This is amusing, even refreshing, in view of the too pious devotion of some later Englishmen. But the eighteenth century was not the time for English appreciation of Dante, and Walpole, witty prosateur, was not the man to enjoy him. Dante was known, of course, to Chaucer and to the Elizabethans and Milton, and his influence on English poetry was perhaps even greater than Dr. Toynbee's record makes evident. But it is with the nineteenth century, which, bien entendu, was born intellectually a few years before its numerical date, that Dante becomes a power in English literature. He is, indeed, a part of the revival of English romanticism. The translations of Boyd and Cary appeared early in the century, and from then on Dante belonged to English literature, as well acclimated as any other foreign classic. The index of Dr. Toynbee's record contains the names of almost all the important English poets from Scott to Francis Thompson.

And it contains hundreds of other names, not perhaps of great importance in literature, but important in this respect, that they show the appeal of Dante to a great variety of minds, of minds not mediæval, not Catholic, not Italian. Nobody can dip into him, however superficially, without getting something. He has so much that everybody can be happy, from the Pope to the most pagan young poet. Though the true Dantist will insist that the greatest of poets must be understood, or accepted, entire, like his own God and his own universe, I propose that the anthological view of him is proper and delightful. If he is so rich and structurally perfect that no side of him can be neglected, then he is so rich and so strong that any side of him can be neglected. You can sit under a tree on the side of a mountain without comprehending the mountain, but deriving much happiness from the tree, the altitude, and the view.

The interpreters of Dante's stupendous unity are all true to Dante, in that they try to find some complete explanation of him and will tolerate no neglect of his least detail. Dante himself, for all his mystery and multiple meanings, is quite explicit about the indivisibility, the integrity, of his work. So that the episodic, incomplete view of him, which I recommend to other casual readers, is unphilosophic and amateurish. Let us concede that and at the same time let us reserve the right to be cheerfully weary of systems where the "benumbed conceiving soars." Ruskin speaks the indubitable truth: "The central man of all the world, as representing the imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at their highest, is Dante." But such a genius is too awful to contemplate, and it is more comfortable to keep this side idolatry.

Moreover, the interpreters, seeking to comprehend Dante's vast totality, do not discover complete unity among themselves. Mr. Walter Arensberg[ [2] thinks that he has unlocked the mystery, and I think that he has. But as I had a little to do with filing that key I will not say how well I think it turns in the wards of the lock; I will leave him to the mercies of other critics and merely note that six centuries after Dante's death we have a novel interpretation.

And then comes Professor Courtney Langdon[ [3] with another. One of his ideas seems to me just, though debatable—namely, that any modern man has the right to find anything in Dante that he can find, to derive the sort of joy and wisdom that suit him, the reader, whether or not Dante would recognize that reader's meaning. The poet exists for our benefit and, like the Bible, does not forbid but justifies the multitude of sects and individual expositors. That idea alone is worth Professor Langdon's labor, and it will be interesting to see how he develops it. Unfortunately, his translation is worse than useless. He simply has not the gift of English verse. His own verses, prefixed to the several canticles, are absurd doggerel; they remind one of Longfellow's lovely sonnets (the best poems he ever wrote) only by their position of naïve rivalry with the splendor that follows. And, what is more strange, Professor Langdon writes abominable prose, such assaults upon the ear as "verse's rhythm" and "Divine Comedy's last part." If the poet exists for us, in English or Italian, one of the things to learn from him is how to write.

The poet exists for us. That is an excellent idea. It is our privilege to take what we enjoy and reject what we do not like or understand. I cannot be interested in Dante's ethics, which interested him so profoundly and is the bone of his thought. His "stern indignant moral," as Carlyle called it, is for me no part of the beauty of the "mystic song." I cannot regard without suspicion, even in a New Englander, Norton's statement to Dr. Dinsmore that the quality of the Commedia, other than its beauty, which attracted him to Dante was "his powerful exposition of moral penalties and rewards." Other than its beauty? What does that mean? If the qualities of the Commedia can be separated (Dante happened to believe that they can not be), let us throw the ethics, the penalties, and rewards to the four winds. Let us keep as much as we can grasp of the beauty of the episodes, the images, the phrases, the structure, whatever gives delight.

The beauty of the fifth canto of Inferno does not depend on the ethical fact that the carnal sinners are punished, but on the poetic fact that their pathetic loves on earth are recalled and that their punishment is vividly, physically dramatized. The tragic pity and terror of it break through the baldest translation stripped of the enchantment of the original verse. Many English poets have been tempted to try to render that famous fifth canto. Mr. Arensberg has made the best version that I have seen. His version is in the terza rima, a difficult thing to manage in English, and he succeeds in making a good English poem, a shade finer than a mere tour de force. I doubt whether he or any other poet can so well translate the entire Commedia in the same form, though the attempt has been made. The terza rima has never been quite naturalized in our language. Even such a master as Shelley can not turn it perfectly. We imported the sonnet as easily as the apple and we made some French forms grow thriftily in our hardy garden. The terza rima remains artificial and foreign, peculiarly Italian and more peculiarly Dante; he made it his own and moved at ease in its exacting rigidities. He was in thought and form a diabolical magician.

In order to show the terza rima in English and to suggest (not to solve!) the problem of translation, let us look at three versions of the last ten lines of the fifth canto of Inferno, the story of Paolo and Francesca. Francesca is speaking and tells how she and her lover read the story of Lancelot and Guinevere—romance within romance! First, Norton's clear, deliberately uninspired prose:

"When we read of the longed-for smile being kissed by such a lover, this one, who never shall be divided from me, kissed my mouth all trembling. Gallehaut was the book, and he wrote it. That day we read no farther in it!"

While the one spirit said this, the other was so weeping that through pity I swooned as if I had been dying, and fell as a dead body falls.

Then Longfellow in traditional blank verse (and it is good verse; he knew his business):

"When as we read of the much longed-for smile

Being by such a noble lover kissed,

This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided,

Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating.

Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.

That day no farther did we read therein."

And all the while one spirit uttered this,

The other one did weep so that, for pity,

I swooned away as if I had been dying,

And fell, even as a dead body falls.

Finally, Arensberg in terza rima:

"When we had read how one so amorous

Had kissed the smile that he was longing for,

This one, who always must be by me thus,

Kissed me upon the mouth, trembling all o'er;

Galeot the book, and he 'twas written by!

Upon that day in it we read no more."

So sorely did the other spirit cry,

While the one spoke, that for the very dread

I swooned as if I were about to die,

And I fell down even as a man falls dead.

Those versions, I submit, are all good; and I risked the tedium of repeating the same idea of Dante in the English of three different translators. Because my simple point is that Dante in English is interesting—to anybody who cares for English literature.

[1] Britain's Tribute To Dante in Literature and Art. A Chronological Record of 540 Years. By Paget Toynbee. London: Published for the British Academy, 1921.

[2] The Crytography of Dante. By Walter Arensberg. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921.

[3] The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The Italian Text with a Translation in English Blank Verse and a Commentary. By Courtney Langdon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 3 vols.

DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Dante's De Monarchia is usually treated by the commentators as a mere footnote to the Commedia; and this subordination is justifiable because the poet in Dante overwhelms all other expressions of his genius and also because the Commedia contains much political philosophy, some of which De Monarchia elucidates. But De Monarchia, considered by itself, is a work of great importance. Even if by some unthinkable accident the Commedia had been lost and De Monarchia had survived, it would remain a significant treatise on the state and the papacy and would deserve to be regarded as we regard the political writings of philosophers from Plato to Hobbes. To be sure, the chief interest of the work for us lies in the fact that Dante wrote it, and it would lose some of its value if it were isolated from the rest of his thought; the amazing unity of his mind and the coherence of his purpose make a piecemeal view of any part of him essentially false. His vision of earth and heaven has a thousand aspects but no fragments. Even the unfinished works, Il Convivio and De Vulgari Eloquentia, are not fragments but are rather to be read as partial manifestations of a singular and consistent plan.

De Monarchia is a vision of earthly well-being. It is an argument, prosaic and heavy in the English translations and very difficult in the original, I should suppose, even to an excellent Latin scholar. But the argument embodies a dream of the greatest of dreamers. The first part sets forth the necessity of empire. Only under a single world-governing monarch are possible the solidarity of mankind and the fullest possible development of the human spirit. In unity man can find peace and justice. Man is made in the image of God, and God is one; wherefore man in imitation of God must make the secular world conform to the universe and set up a unique earthly dominion. In the nature of things empire is divinely ordained and this is further proved by the fact that Christ willed to be born under the Emperor Augustus.

The second part seeks to show that the Roman empire was appointed by God to rule the world. It was established by the aid of miracles, which confirm it as especially created by the will of God. Christ died under the empire; if the empire had not been the rightful temporal authority, Christ would have been punished by the agent of an unjust power, his suffering would have been unlawful and therefore the sin of Adam would not have been duly expiated. Rome was born to command, because it did, in point of fact, conquer the world, and also because the histories of its many heroes and patriots show that the Roman citizen loved right and justice.

The third part is an argument for the separation of church and state, which are independent authorities both deriving directly from God. Many false arguments for the temporal power of the church are refuted. Though the emperor, as a man, is the first son of the church and should obey it like other Christians, yet as emperor he owes allegiance only to God, whom he represents on earth in temporal matters as the pope represents God in spiritual matters. The very nature of the church, its essential spiritual function, forbids it the possession of temporal power.

Have we here, then, nothing but a defence of an empire that has been dust these many centuries, and stale scholastic arguments for the separation of church and state, a long settled question in theoretic politics and practically settled in most countries? There is much more than that in De Monarchia even for the most confident modern democrat, who may regard emperor and pope as twin tyrants and for whom the word "mediæval" has derogatory connotations. It is true that the empire under which Dante actually lived is dead as the empire of the Caesars and that the empire of Dante's dream was never realized in the workaday world. As a political pamphlet De Monarchia is obsolete without even the persistent contemporaneity of some eighteenth century tracts. In a sense Dante's treatise died at birth. Bryce, who gives an excellent summary of it in his "Holy Roman Empire," shows that this plea for empire, conceived by the supreme mind of the age, was the epitaph of the existing empire. It was, indeed, a swan-song, not of the author, who was still to take us to Paradise and put his dream in lovelier form, but of empire in the Catholic Christian sense of "holy." The empire that persisted after the thirteenth century grew further and further away not only from a poet's dream but from any practical possibility of united political authority. The solidarity of mankind was not to be achieved through Rome or Christ, and Dante was not, as he thought, announcing a new era, but summing up a passing era.

But the truth of a dream inheres in the dream itself and is measured only in a secondary way by the course of events. De Monarchia has for us at least the value of a pacifist tract, the noble core of which is not obscured by the strangeness of some of the reasoning or by the destruction of Dante's political milieu. Like some other pacifist documents it is the work of an aggressive militant mind. Dante had lived and suffered in a world continuously at war. The contesting powers, great and small, were so complicated that the historian has difficulty in keeping them clear. To the major quarrels between church and state and the strife of the city-republics with one or the other or both were added an internal warfare between economic classes and feuds between castes and families, all hopelessly intricate.

In this bloody confusion Dante had played the part not of closet philosopher au-dessus de la mêlée, but of soldier and civil official. And to the last he was temperamentally a fighter, though forced by circumstances to drop the sword for the pen. He was not in the eyes of his contemporaries what he has become for us, the supreme solitary genius exiled by an ungrateful city, but was simply one of a thousand members of a beaten party. He was not a pathetic, unappreciated poet but a pertinacious partisan who happened to be on the losing side. He knew war and misery and defeat. Yet his plea for peace is by no means that of a weary belligerent; it is that of a bellicose champion of certain principles. And so, though those principles do not appeal to us and though the expression of them is laborious, even turgid, De Monarchia is still hot with conviction.

The instrument of peace was the one form of government that Dante knew, the empire. Even if his genius had taken the form of vaticination (he was indeed, as it turned out, a poor prophet), he naturally could not in his time have made himself familiar with leagues of nations and Wellsian "world-states." He had to ride on a horse, not in a motor-car. And he rode, as a worldly rider, to a fall. The tragedy of the fall has in it a large element of dramatic irony because he was so splendidly sure of his ideas at exactly the moment when they were least secure.

Dante's conception of an ideal empire had nothing in common with what we now call imperialism, which is mere commercial conquest and can be led by Kaiser or democratic prime minister with equally disastrous results. Dante believed in an imperial headship for the good of all humanity. The ruler of the world was to be the servant of the world, not its master and exploiter; a supreme monarch was to be protected by his lonely authority from the temptations that beset a weak man clothed with limited and contentious authority; aloof from strife and cupidity, having all and so being beyond pride and ambition, he could be a disinterested and just administrator.

The aim of empire is universal peace—Dante begins his argument almost in the terms of Burke and with something like Burke's combination of generosity and elaborate futility—peace, "the best of those things that are ordained for our beatitude." For on peace depends the destiny of mankind to realize the full power of the human mind in thought and deed. Dante's world state is Utopia, compounded, as all Utopias must be, of wisdom and utter impossibilities, of sublime faith and facts half-understood. While he dreamed he did not believe himself a dreamer, any more than did Shelley. He believed intensely in the practical value of his vision, in its originality and its finality as a solution of the problems of the political world. He says that knowledge of monarchy has been shunned because it has no direct relation to profit, and that he will be the first to bring it from obscurity to light for the good of the world and for his own glory. The humble servant and the arrogant doctor at the bedside of the patient! It is one of the most consistent contradictions of proud souls. The reformer has found a new and sure cure and cries "Eureka!"

In spite of the practical failure of his dream, which in a sense defeats him, I do not believe that Dante's pell-mell acceptance of all stories about the greatness of Rome, with no apparent discrimination, is proof that he did not know what he was about. He was making a special plea and he pillaged history and legend to get material for the purposes of his argument. He is a dialectician animated, like all reformers, by unselfish motives, but willing to score a point if he can. We may be fairly sure that Dante was not a credulous person with a childish view of history, but a sophisticated controversialist handling his evidence for effect. Though he mingles fact and fiction and though his documentary resources were more limited than ours, yet he knew perfectly what he was trying to do, and modern attempts to gloss him in a patronizing and apologetic manner are generally mistaken.

There is a grim humour in the fate that overtakes the works of wise men. The treatise which Dante believed would bring peace to a vexed world became a matter of strife. Later Ghibellines used his argument, unfairly, of course, to support the supremacy of the empire over the church, and ecclesiastical authority retorted by condemning the book and even threatening the repose of Dante's bones. A somewhat similar quarrel arose over Hobbes's "Leviathan" three centuries later. Seeking to unite all men, the political philosopher is attacked from both sides, and if he lives he finds that he has poured oil not on troubled waters but on a fire.

Though De Monarchia is much more than a footnote to the Commedia and is worth study for its own sake, yet the unity which it seeks in the world is closely allied to the unity of Dante's celestial vision by which he tried to lead mankind to God. Mankind refused to be cured of its political pains by De Monarchia and even ignored it in spite of Dante's secure and growing fame (there was no English translation until the late nineteenth century). But mankind also never accepted and never will accept the supreme vision of the Commedia. It is a beautiful poem enjoyed by the literary, and even in Italy it is valued, quite properly, as a mere work of art. The world has never paid much attention to Dante's declared purpose to bring mankind through art to God. So that in one way of regarding him, which may perhaps be his way, he failed in the Commedia as he did in De Monarchia. The world of thinking and acting men, whose salvation Dante believed he could work by verse and prose, remains disunited and contentious, weaponed with such bitterness of heart and methods of destruction as the dreamer of Inferno never dreamed.

NIETZSCHE

It is more than thirty years since Nietzsche's work was finished and darkness fell upon that mighty intellect. In 1917, Mr. W. M. Salter, who certainly knows the bibliography of Nietzsche, wrote:

I can not make out that his influence is appreciable now—at least in English-speaking countries…. He has, indeed given a phrase and perhaps an idea or two to Mr. Bernard Shaw, a few scattering scholars have got track of him (I know of but two or three in America), the great newspaper and magazine-writing and reading world has picked up a few of his phrases, which it does not understand.

The preface of Frau Foerster-Nietzsche's edition of her brother's correspondence with Wagner is dated, Weimar, 1914, and the English translation was published in 1921. Dr. Oscar Levy's preface to his selection from the five volumes of Nietzsche's correspondence,[ [1] published in Germany between the years 1900-1909, is dated August, 1921.

So, although Nietzsche's works are now all, or nearly all, to be read in English, he is not quite an old story which every literate child should know. Professional students of philosophy seemed to have missed him or to have tardily recognized him, and the mere casual reader of philosophy may quietly dodge Mr. Mencken's bludgeon: "Only blockheads to-day know nothing of them [Nietzsche's ideas] and only fools are unshaken by them." That sort of aggressiveness on the part of a champion of Nietzsche will not help the master's ideas to prevail; though it may seem to be a disciple's repetition of Nietzsche's superb arrogance, it is really not true to his spirit. For Nietzsche attacked thoughts and thinkers, quarrelled with opponents who were somewhere near his size, ignored the opinions of the brainless multitude, and was content to wait for time and the slow-moving world to find him out.

Certainly he can not be jammed down our throat, and quite as certainly his stimulating and cathartic doses can not be snatched from our lips by moralistic prohibitionists. It is possible, of course, for a doctor to take advantage of one's innocence and ignorance and put one to sleep with drugs. That was my own experience. Dr. Paul Elmer More stole up on me in the dark with a soporific little book, the first I had ever read about Nietzsche. When I came to, the world was at war. A wild German philosopher, who had been quoted by a brutal German general named Bernhardi, was responsible for the violation of Belgian women. This was manifestly absurd, but there was no time to investigate and explain, even for one's private satisfaction, the causes of this ridiculous misunderstanding not only of an individual philosopher but of the relation of book-philosophy to appallingly unphilosophic crimes.

It is amazing to find that the absurdity persists, that it is necessary for Dr. Levy to try to prove in 1921 that Nietzsche did not incite the Germans to a war of conquest! Has not the hysteria sufficiently subsided for wise men to quit wasting their energies in a contest with spooks? It was part of Nietzsche's work to ridicule ghosts and blow away myths, and that he should have become a myth himself is an irony that he might have enjoyed. He gloried in being misunderstood. The true philosopher has always been in lonely opposition to the dominant ideals of his time. It is in a tone not of resentment or complaint but of haughty satisfaction that he writes to Georg Brandes, in the last year of his intellectual life:

Your opinion of present-day Germans is more favourable than mine … all profound events escape them. Take, for example, my "Beyond Good and Evil." What bewilderment it has caused them. I have not heard of a single intelligent utterance about it, much less of an intelligent sentiment. I believe that it has not dawned on the most well-intentioned of my readers that here is the outcome of a sane philosophic sensibility, and not a medley of a hundred outworn paradoxes and heterodoxes. Not a soul has ever experienced the same sort of thing that I have. I never meet anyone who has been through a thousandth part of the same passionate struggle.

Nietzsche's philosophic solitude accounts in part for the excellence of his letters. In his struggles with the world, and his wilful alienation from it, he clung passionately to the few who were allied to him by the ties of blood, friendship, or intellectual sympathy. The letters contain no philosophic ideas which he did not express again and again in his professional writings. They do contain something else, however, moods, emotions, pleasures and private difficulties, intimacies which are never quite apart from the incessant battle of thought yet belong to moments of comparative ease when the soldier is off duty. This philosopher, whose work is so intensely personal, who says that he wrote his books with his whole body and life, did not completely express himself in his books. He poured his soul into them and was honestly naked and unashamed. But for all his autobiographical candor, his work is not a promiscuous confession. He labored over his paragraphs like an artist, calculated their effect, and made them personal only in so far as suited his philosophic purpose. There remains a sensitive and reticent Nietzsche who revealed himself to his friends alone.

He was fortunate in his friends. When he writes in the preface of "Human, All-Too-Human," that he has evolved an as yet non-existent company of free spirits, because he needs them and because they are some compensation for lack of friends, he is posing in a philosophic attitude which is quite justified by his experience as a thinker and writer but which is not quite true to the private history of Friedrich Nietzsche. He never lacked friends, and his isolation was in great measure self-imposed. The most distinguished friend he lost was Wagner; the break came late in the older man's life, and it seems to have been the younger man who disrupted the friendship.

Even without Wagner, Nietzsche's correspondents are numerous and varied, as many and of as many kinds as a wise man needs, if he chooses to make the most of them. The lonely philosopher was not neglected as man and brother. He preferred to flock by himself. His ill health rather than the animosity of his countrymen drove him out of Germany; and he was happiest, as close as he ever came to happiness, when he concentrated his energy in his work. He makes a philosophic virtue of necessity, affects to despise what he can not have, laments his solitude and is proud of it. To his sister he writes:

You can not think how lonely and out of it I always feel when I am in the midst of all the kindly Tartufferie of those people whom you call 'good,' and how intensely I yearn at times for a man who is honest and who can talk even if he were a monster, but of course I should prefer discourse with demi-gods…. Oh, this infernal solitude!

A few months later, when this aged philosopher is forty, he writes to an old friend that all the people he loves belong to the past and regard him with merely merciful indulgence.

We see each other, we talk in order to avoid being silent—we still write each other in order to avoid being silent. Truth, however, glances from their eyes, and these tell me (I hear it well enough): 'Friend Nietzsche, you are now quite alone!'

That's what I have lived and fought for!

The last sentence may be taken in two ways. It may mean that Nietzsche strove for isolation, or it may be interpreted bitterly: "So that's what I get from my friends for all my labor and struggle!" Perhaps both meanings are there. The letter ends: "Ah, dear friend, what an absurdly silent life I lead! So much alone, so much alone! So 'childless'! Remain fond of me; I am truly fond of you." That sounds like a not too human cry of hunger for affection. The man who prefers demi-gods and is confident that he would be worthy of their companionship is not immune from the pangs of ordinary mortals.

Nietzsche had a self-critical knowledge of his own needs and nature, and, so far as circumstances permitted, he followed the course that pleased him. He sometimes groaned but he never whined. In a letter to his sister, who had evidently suggested the possibility of marriage, he says that he cheerfully accepts the disadvantages of independence. The list of requirements that he lays down are enough to make us congratulate the impossible she whom he wisely refrained from marrying. "I know the women folk of half Europe," he writes, "and wherever I have observed the influence of women on men, I have noticed a sort of gradual decline as the result." That is one of the philosopher's amusing errors. He did not know women folk at all; the most fatuous, almost the only fatuous, passages in his works and his letters are those about the ladies, and his letters to ladies are the declarations of a free spirit shying off from something "agreeable though perhaps a trifle dangerous."

Nietzsche is at his best, of course, when he writes to distinguished men, the few who recognized his genius and made him glow in his cold solitude. Nietzsche craved recognition; his contempt for fame was largely a contempt for sour grapes. Brandes and Strindberg put wreaths on his head, and he was proud of them. He writes to Strindberg:

I am the most powerful intellect of the age, condemned to fulfill a stupendous mission…. It is possible that I have explored more terrible and more questionable worlds of thought than anyone else, but simply because it is in my nature to love the silent backwater. I reckon cheerfulness among the proofs of my philosophy.

A man who can write like that of himself is the happiest of mortals, for he knows that he belongs among the immortals.

[1] "Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche." Edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. Authorized Translation by Anthony M. Ludovico. New York: Doubleday Page & Co.

TOLSTOY

I.

Tolstoy closes the second part of "Sevastopol" with these words: "The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and ever will be beautiful, is Truth." That sentence was written when Tolstoy was twenty-seven. For fifty years, in novels, tales, essays, and exhortations, he celebrated his hero with unflagging devotion. The deeds and lineaments of the hero are not always as other men have seen them, but the identity, the character of the hero is never in doubt. The hero changes and utters conflicting wisdom, not because of the worshiper's inconstancy, but because Tolstoy develops, because he outgrows and disavows his previous selves and violates consistency between one book and another in his zeal to find consistency between his next book and Truth.

In ceaseless pursuit of Truth, Tolstoy is led through the most stirring intellectual and moral experiences which modern man has undergone. He is part of all that we have met; from the remotest of European countries, from a moment in the world's thought that is already well behind us, his messages have encircled the globe and modify the living ideas of today. He touched all departments of thought and left none as it had been.

He plunged into the nineteenth century warfare of religion and science, found that both parties were priest-ridden and arrogant, and wrested from both the right of the individual to a simple faith and to knowledge free from the cant of the laboratory. The increasing grumble of the contest between privilege and labor—the most portentous war the world has seen and not yet at its crisis—assaulted his ears; he hearkened while most other members of the narrow circle of culture were deaf or indifferent, and he took his stand on the side of the workers against his own rank and kin. He laid bare the motives of war, in which he had drawn a guilty sword, and became a militant champion of peace. The unholy alliance of culture, religion, and civil authority he strove to dissolve by broadsides against each member of the triune tyranny, and so he conceived a new theory of art, a new reading of the gospels, and an anarchism so individual that it excludes most other anarchists. Under the solemnity of marriage and the thin poetry of romance he discerned the cloven hoof of self-indulgence, and he shocked the world with a virile puritanism, so powerful in its terms, so subversive of our timid codes that bashful Morality shrank from her bravest defender.

All the main thoroughfares of nineteenth century thought crossed before the doorway of Tolstoy's house. He trafficked with all the passengers, but joined no special group. Even his own disciples he allowed to go their own way; he took no part in their organization and left them to make their own interpretation and their own application of his teachings. Loving all mankind, having sympathetic knowledge of all sorts and conditions of men, he was nevertheless strangely solitary. At the end of his life his devotion to his ideas alienated from his family this most tender, home-loving man.[ [1] The young idealists of the world left him behind, for they broke out new highways of thought which he could not travel; young Russia sees in him a splendid survival of an elder age of storm and struggle, calls him master but not leader.

He justified in his own life his theoretic individualism, because he was great and strong enough to stand alone. The spirit of irony can not but deal gently with the sincerest, bravest of men. Yet may she note under the gray garment of humility a mien incorrigibly aristocratic and domineering. The most powerful mind in the world proclaimed self-submersion as the perfect virtue, because it is the most difficult virtue for a daring and vigorous spirit to attain. The foe of privilege, preaching that all men are brothers in love and alike before the Lord as they should be before the law of man, enjoyed a unique privilege—he was almost the only man in Russia who could with impunity say what he thought. He won this right because he was an aristocrat with friends at court and because the Russian government dared not disregard the admiration of the world which had made Tolstoy an international hero. He warned the mighty to walk in the fear of God, but they walked in the fear of Leo Tolstoy.

To remind ourselves of the titles of some of his books and the order in which they appeared, we may divide his work into seven parts. The first part includes military tales and autobiographic sketches: "Sevastopol," "Two Hussars," "The Raid," "The Cossacks," "Childhood," "Boyhood," "Youth." The second part, beginning in 1861, embraces his experience as school teacher, his discourses on education, school books, and stories for children and peasants. The third part, from 1864 to 1878, comprises "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." The fourth part begins with his religious conversion in 1878, and is devoted to theological, ethical and sociological essays: "My Confession," "Union and Translation of the Four Gospels," "My Religion," "What, Then, Must We Do?" The subjects treated in these books he expounds over and over for the rest of his life. Because it is salient from his other work we may say that the "Kreutzer Sonata" (1889) constitutes a fifth part. "What is Art?" and "Resurrection" may be thought of as a sixth part. Then follows the concluding decade of warfare in pamphlets, essays, letters, upon civil and ecclesiastical authority and other powers of darkness.

Any such partition of Tolstoy's work is untrue to its organic continuity, its massive unity. His books are embedded in his life. Though each novel stands alone in self-sustaining integrity, intelligible to all the world, yet each gains in clearness and power for being understood in relation to the mind that produced it. This colossus of solitary protest, rising rough and volcanic above the flats of modern thought, is vaster when seen close to his intellectual base. Viewed from a distance some sides of him, some contours, are blurred and deceptive. No part of his work can be wholly apprehended unless all parts are brought into the range of vision.

On the day of his death he was the most famous man of letters in the world. From the first report of his final illness bulletins flew over the cables in hourly succession. Yet for several weeks after his death, repeated inquiry among the dealers in English and foreign books in Boston (reputed center of culture and high thinking) showed that there never had been much demand for Tolstoy's books, except his novels, and that the momentary rise of interest caused by his death had not disturbed the dust on such books as "What, Then, Must We Do?" and "My Confession."

This seems to indicate that not all the articles and sermons which followed the ultimate news from Russia were grounded upon first-hand knowledge of Tolstoy. The truth is that his opinions have trickled through to us Westerners in diluted streams. He is already a tradition, and it is the habit of tradition to weaken as it spreads, to lose the effect which a drinker at the sources feels in their concentration, in their full and proportioned measure of ingredients. Tolstoy is abroad in the world; he has permeated the thought of the best minds and tinged the currents of our present beliefs. But few Westerners know him in his overwhelming entirety. This man who laid open his whole mind and heart with prodigal frankness is borne westward on the winds of rumor as a mythical prodigy. The outlines of his thought are misty and wavering to many of those who call him great. He spared no pains to clarify his beliefs; he expounded the same principle many times with undiminished force and ever new transparency; he gave sweeping permission to the world to translate and print his books. Yet there is no complete authorized edition of his works in any language, even in Russian, thanks to the censors and his own indifference to practical concerns.[ [2]

Thus for the moment a partial chaos has descended upon the work of Tolstoy, a coherent luminous body of work, which left his hand as free from ambiguity as his extraordinary skill and industry could make it, but which has been scattered in transmission. It will take some years for his loyal followers in England and America to give us a complete and adequate translation; and in spite of Matthew Arnold's naive confidence in the French, the most patient collator will have difficulty in finding Tolstoy's work or recognizing even the titles, in the books which the Parisian publishers have sent forth under his name. One who has assembled such of his books as are procurable in French and English would say with all emphasis possible:

"Withhold judgment about any particular belief expressed or supposed to have been expressed by Tolstoy until you have read as many of his books as you can get—and do not fail to read them." He is the one noble speaker who has happened in our time, "who may be named and stand as the mark and acme" of modern literature.

A little knowledge of Tolstoy is more than proverbially dangerous. He laid his vigorous hand upon every problem that vexes and strengthens the soul. His utterance on each problem is intense and aggressive. He boldly pursues an idea whither it leads, or drives it with passionate conviction to a foreseen conclusion, and stays not for the beliefs of any majority or minority of men. His magnitude overflows the accepted area of such an adjective as intolerant. Yet approached for the first time by a reader accustomed to the persuasive amenities of other saints and sages, he seems to bristle with outrageous denial; some of his opinions, isolated from the rest, stand as repellant outposts, forbidding many minds which, entering from another side, would go straight to the heart of him. For example, our traditional reverence for Shakespeare is wounded by his downright statement that Shakespeare was not an artist; the offended judgment retorts that thereby Tolstoy proves that he is himself no artist, or that in crotchety old age he outgrew the poetry of his virile years. It must be understood that the essay on Shakespeare is in the nature of an appendix to his essay, "What Is Art?" That in turn is closely related to his ethical and social teachings. Those again are inseparably bound with his tales and novels. And his fiction, finally, is rooted in Russian life, not only because, as is obvious, it deals with Russian people, but because during Tolstoy's prime, there was, as we shall presently see, an attitude toward the novel and all literary art which was peculiar to intellectual Russians.

Happily for English readers the foundation for complete understanding of Tolstoy has been laid by Mr. Aylmer Maude in his "Life," the second volume of which appeared a few days before his master's death. Mr. Maude has entire knowledge of his subject and perfect sympathy; he is a sane and independent thinker, and his work is admirable for its balance, its candor, its sturdy devotion, which, however, admits no surrender of the biographer's private beliefs. To the reader who cares merely for an interesting story Tolstoy's career offers more than that of most men of letters. It is laid amid the plots and counterplots of bloody Russia, the most melodramatic background of modern history. The man is spectacular, compelling, in all violation of his own doctrines of self-abasement. The peasant's smock, which he wore as symbol of his unity with common man, served only to make him the more picturesque. This ascetic religious philosopher was a master of thrilling war stories. He knew equally well the heart of a lady in the high life of Moscow, and the soul of a peasant woman. He was of athletic stature, and his huge hand was sensitive to the finger tips; with it he gripped a scythe, played the piano, wrote a tirade against modern music, and indited an exposition of the gospel of love which estranged some of his best friends! It is no wonder that his fiction bears the seal of reality, that it has the abundance, the variety, the jostling contrasts of life itself.

II.

In Russia prose fiction has been for a century the vehicle of the soberest reflections upon contemporary problems. It was dangerous for a Russian radical to express his beliefs directly in essays and expositions; what he was not allowed to utter in editorial and parliamentary debate he set forth indirectly through the novel, which thus became a sort of realistic parable. Suppression increased his emotional intensity. Feeling himself a member of a down-trodden class, he became the champion of other down-trodden classes. When Tolstoy began to write, the novel was already a tempered weapon against abuse, the skilful handling of it was a tradition among the literati, and there were masters to coach and encourage the beginner. The Russian novel records the deepest motives of Russian history. Tourgenef voiced the philosophic resignation and scepticism of the educated Russian and the evils of serfdom. Tolstoy portrayed the vices of the educated Russian and the evils of wage-slavery which followed the emancipation of the serfs. Russian fiction is great, because it treats the gravest struggles of life and because its authors have trained themselves in the art of expounding ideas in the form of fiction without transgressing the laws of narrative; they have learned to be the mouthpiece of life and to let life preach the sermons. To Tolstoy and other Russians the greatest American book is "Uncle Tom's Cabin," because it is the chronicle of a bleeding issue; I have seen many references to that book by Russian writers but scarcely a mention of Hawthorne.

Mr. Maude quotes a letter to Tolstoy from Drouzhinin, critic, novelist, and translator of Shakespeare: "An Englishman or an American," he says, "may laugh at the fact that in Russia not merely men of thirty, but gray-haired owners of 2,000 serfs sweat over stories of a hundred pages, which appear in the magazines, are devoured by everybody, and arouse discussion in society for a whole day. However much artistic quality may have to do with this result, you cannot explain it merely by art. What in other lands is a matter of idle talk and careless dilettantism, with us is quite another affair. Among us things have taken such shape that a story—the most frivolous and insignificant form of literature—becomes one of two things: either it is rubbish, or else it is the voice of a leader sounding through the empire."

Tolstoy's realism is, then, the result both of his own temperamental passion for truth and of a theory of art which prevailed in his literary circle. There were, to be sure, silly novelists in Russia; there, as everywhere, only the best minds regarded fiction as a vital matter. But there were enough such serious minds to welcome Tolstoy and encourage him. Nekrasof, editor of The Contemporary, found in Tolstoy's first work, "the truth—the truth, of which, since Gogol's death, so little has remained in Russian literature." Tourgenef repeatedly called Tolstoy the greatest of Russians, and on his deathbed pencilled the pathetic letter in which he pleaded with Tolstoy to return to his art. "I am glad," he said, "to have been your contemporary." Had he lived sixteen years longer, "Resurrection" might have made him happy.

In Tolstoy's discourses on religion appear many times the words "sense of life"—religion is the sense of life, the principle upon which the details of the moral world are ordered and by which they are to be interpreted. In a slightly different meaning "the sense of life" expresses the total effect of Tolstoy's fiction. He wrote to a young disciple: "Do not bend to your purpose the events in the story, but follow them wherever they lead you…. Lack of symmetry and the apparent haphazardness of events is a chief sign of life."

In "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" there are many plots. The unity is that of the loose-jointed English novel rather than that of the French, which travels on a straight track. Tolstoy's stories move like a river with many tributaries; he explores now one, now another of the branch streams, but the course of the main current is continuous, and runs in one general direction, as if the slope of the country had been determined before the recorder came upon the scene to measure and report.

"War and Peace" is greater than a novel; it is an epic, it is nation-wide and long as the growth from childhood to maturity. We see from a peak of the face of eastern Europe and the swarming of peoples and armies. The sensation of vastness, of humanity surging and flowing in obedience to obscure collective interests is produced by only one other modern book that I know, Hardy's "The Dynasts." From the high pinnacles of omniscience the imagination descends by swift unperceived transitions to the intimacies of a house in Moscow—to the heart of the girl Natacha—to the mind of Pierre saturated with alcohol plotting to assassinate Napoleon. The adventures and purposes of the characters cross and conflict, interweave and unite, but each goes as it must and there is no confusion in the telling.

In "Anna Karenina," the story of Levin is but loosely related to the principal tragedy, and the story of Levin's brother is an excursion from the highway of Levin's career. One can see that after the book is done. During its course the reader has no sense that any part is not precisely placed. The illusion of inevitability is perfect. Levin's brother is related to him by natural ties in life; it is natural, then, that he should appear in Levin's story.

The illusion of inevitability springs from Tolstoy's all-encircling comprehension of events, from his justice to each character and from his extraordinary physical vividness. He writes with his five senses. A critic warned him early that he was in danger of making a man's thigh feel like going on a journey to India.

But his recognition of physical sensations and his power to convey them (they traverse bodily the stylistic obstacles of translation) take the story off the flat page and give it three dimensional reality. The acrid smell of an old man's breath, the coldness of a man's hand when he is in mental distress, the cracking of Karenin's knuckles when he clasps his hands in moral satisfaction or the anguish of wounded pride—such details cling to the mind, and the memory of them recalls the whole story.

Tolstoy's conception of human character is at once relentlessly analytic and profoundly pitiful and kind. The whole content of his thought from its bold surface to its deepest depth is instinct with compassion. Once when he was walking with Tourgenef they came to an old broken-down horse in a pasture. Tolstoy went up to it, stroked it, and uttered its thoughts and sufferings with such moving tenderness that Tourgenef cried: "You must once have been a horse yourself."

In "Master and Man," a beautiful story of two men lost in a snowstorm, the horse is a third character—an animal character, be it understood, for Tolstoy is antipodal to nature-faking. He has confidence that nature and man will tell their own story and disclose their inherent lessons. Dogmatic and uncompromising in his private ethical beliefs, he never sacrifices humanity even upon the altars where he tried to immolate himself. Valid morality springs spontaneously from his narrative, and is thereby a hundredfold more impressive than teachings forced from artificially moulded events. Even in his rewriting of traditional myths and parables he restores inorganic sermons to life, creates a living thing in which the ethical intention is assimilated and vitalized. He told these stories to the peasants, listened with delight to their retelling of them, and incorporated their racial turns of phrase. To an old peasant woman with a native gift for narrative, he said: "You are a real master, Anisya; thank you for teaching me to speak Russian and to think Russian."

He learned from life and he trusted life to teach the reader. Anna Karenina commits suicide, not because she is a naughty woman whom the novelist as guardian of morals must punish for the satisfaction of a virtuous world, but because the society that surrounds her, the everyday life of visiting and tea-drinking, inexorably forbids her to be happy. Tolstoy is a champion of the poor, and he began his career at a time when, as Mr. Cahan tells us, "the idealization of the peasant" was one of the staple phrases in essays and editorials. But in Tolstoy's stories there is no false sublimation of the peasant. He does not cry, like Dickens, or the professional charity-monger: "Pity these poor starved brothers." He simply recites their lives. Sometimes he chronicles the most terrible things in a grim restrained matter-of-fact tone, more moving than any passionate appeal to the reader's sympathy. He is, of course, a master of argument and exhortation, but all that is found in his other books, not in his fiction.

A critic, whose democracy is too narrowly partisan, complains that in "War and Peace" all the important characters are aristocrats, and that the story fails to reveal the motives of the people, of those inarticulate millions who Tolstoy himself says are the real makers of history. But this apparent fault is an instance of Tolstoy's integrity. When he wrote "War and Peace" he knew only aristocrats, or was chiefly interested in them. He had already begun to discern the relations between the multitude and the leaders whom history signalizes; but he had not lived close to peasants and workmen; he had approached them as lord and master, not yet as brother and interpreter. Moreover, if there be a moral hero in "War and Peace" whom the author seems to favor, it is Karataief, the illiterate soldier, whose simple faith dawns as a regenerative light upon Pierre, a rich man of the world who has met all philosophies and found them heartless.

Tolstoy could not write what he did not know or did not feel. His stories, though not autobiographic in the usual sense of the world, are the quintessence of his adventures and experiences, accurately recalled and profoundly meditated. When the manuscript of the "Kreutzer Sonata" was read in his house to a company of friends, Tolstoy said in answer to some objections:

"In a work of art it is indispensable that the artist should have something new, of his own. It is not how it is written that really matters. People will read the 'Kreutzer Sonata' and say, 'Ah, that is the way to write!' The indispensable thing is to go beyond what others have done, to pick off even a very small fresh bit. But it won't do to be like my friend Fet, who at sixteen wrote, 'The spring bubbles, the moon shines, and she loves me,' and who went on writing and writing, and at sixty wrote: 'She loves me, and the spring bubbles, and the moon shines.'"

It was impossible for Tolstoy, the novelist, to write of people whom he did not know, merely because he happened to have sympathy with some of their ideals and habits. It was impossible for him to violate human nature when he portrayed characters that he did know. Hating professional psychology and all other sciences and quasi-sciences, he is the greatest of so-called psychological novelists; his psychology was made before text-books, and it used to be called "truth to human nature." You cannot suggest, as you read a novel by Tolstoy, anything a character ought have done which was not done, any emotion he should have felt which Tolstoy has not suggested at exactly the right moment. He penetrates the characters of living men and the characters of history and romance. The pseudo-psychology of the critics of "Hamlet," does not deceive him. Napoleon, mythical monster and genius unapproachable, fails to over-awe him; Tolstoy draws him, man size, amid events that dwarf heroes.

In "Resurrection," Nekhludof is represented as holding social theories which in point of fact Tolstoy held. Nekhludof reads Henry George and tries to give his land to the peasants as communal property. Tolstoy, the social reformer, would admit no obstacle to the justice and the practicability of the plan; a lesser artist would have yielded to the reformer, the plan would have worked and the story would have proved the theory. But Tolstoy, the novelist, confronts Nekhludof with the suspicion, the ignorant shrewdness of the peasants; the plan encounters all the difficulties, legal and psychological, which life would offer.

"Resurrection" is the crowning proof of Tolstoy's artistic power. For twenty years he had developed theories about every problem of life; he held his opinions tenaciously; hugging them in resolute defiance he strode roughshod through the domains of church, state and family. His convictions were strong enough to silence him as an artist, and for years he obeyed the mandate of conscience that forbade him to write novels at all. But when, to raise money for the Doukhobors, he consented to write "Resurrection," his artistic sense was stronger than the rest of him (if, indeed, there was any antagonism between the two sides of his nature), and theories powerful enough to disrupt the universe were kept in bounds by his sense of proportion, his sense of life.

The feeling that Tolstoy, the artist, and Tolstoy, the reformer, are in any true sense engaged in struggle is largely due to the false dialectic of traditional criticism, which he by precept and practice has confuted. His great moral principles are the sure foundation of his greatness in art. For us Westerners modern realism—Hardy and Zola come first to mind—is associated with a godless though very humane scepticism. Religious sentiment has been left in the weak hands of romance, and the longer it has been left there the more false it has become. From the beginning, even before his religious conversion, Tolstoy had a sound ethical outlook. At the age of forty he wrote of Tourgenef's "Smoke": "The strength of poetry lies in love, and the direction of that strength depends on character. Without strength of love there is no poetry. In 'Smoke' there is hardly any love of anything and very little poetry. There is only love of a light and playful adultery, and therefore the poetry of that novel is repulsive." The spirit in that criticism is the guiding spirit in "Anna Karenina," and it is the same spirit which dictated this passage in the magnificent sermon on the Russian-Japanese war: "The great struggle of our time … is not the struggle in which men engage with mines, bombs and bullets; it is the spiritual struggle which goes on incessantly, which is going on now, between the enlightened conscience of humanity, about to be made manifest, and the shadows and oppression which surround it and crush it."

III.

To western liberals Tolstoy's assaults on church and state seem too vehement, partly because the tyranny he attacked is more obviously brutal than that from which we suffer, partly because we are complacently blind to facts which he revealed, facts which are present at our doors. Our mild meliorations delude us. We wave an idle hand and say: "Ah, yes, Russia is a savage country, but we are not like that."[ [3] And all the while the coldest labor statistics, if we dared to open them, show that in the exploitation of workmen, women and children, ours is as barbarous a country as any in the world. Our horrors and injustices are smoothed over by a disingenuous press, which is owned or indirectly controlled by the powers that be. American philanthropy steals with one hand and builds universities with the other. We have no kings and no dukes, but America is the sport of capital; it lies abjectly prostrate before a power-drunk bourgeoisie. We celebrate Tolstoy in harmless little magazine articles and wear shirts woven by children. We think we need no school like the one Tolstoy conducted for poor, backward Russian peasants, because we have our public schools and compulsory education laws—in some states. Hundreds of our children are at work; they have succeeded, thanks to the glorious free competition of business, in taking their fathers' places at the machines. The children that are in school wave the flag and read about George Washington.

Tolstoy's teachings can not at present shake the somnolent conscience of America. He believed in his innocence that our industrial masters have reached the outrageous limits of exploitation, and that America must be the first country to rise and throw off its parasites. But that is a foreigner's opinion and not to be taken seriously in the land of the free and the home of the National Civic Federation. His indictment of our civilization is only nine-tenths true, and we shall take advantage of the one-tenth that is overstatement to throw his indictment out of court. He sees that every government is a commercial agency by means of which a privileged minority conducts its business at the expense of the majority. We are ashamed to believe that that can be true of our Congress and our irreproachable Supreme Court. It is easier to dismiss Tolstoy, because he is "eccentric" and "goes too far." Did he not sweepingly assert that there is no such thing as a virtuous statesman? That absurdity permits us to ignore the book in which it appears.

Besides, it is more "optimistic" to read articles about the "history of achievement in the United States," to take democratic short cuts to superficial knowledge, than to read disconcerting books. Our healthy-minded confidence in American morals bids us be content with a little gossip about Carlyle and his wife, and not trouble ourselves with such a difficult book as "Past and Present." In like fashion we shall understand Tolstoy's ideals without reading "What, Then, Must We Do?" or "The Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You." Sufficient for us a few newspaper discussions about "Why Tolstoy Left the Countess and the Relations Between Family Life and Anarchism." For Tolstoy was an anarchist, and that disposes of him! We know all about anarchists; they live in Paterson, N.J., and in the imaginations of journalists, home secretaries, and framers of immigration laws.

Yet despite our republican wisdom, we cannot quite understand Tolstoy until we know the true meanings of such words as labor, capital, exploitation, rent, property, interest, and proletariat. In Russia these words are understood by many people, also in Germany. But we Americans, though highly cultivated, are not well informed about contemporary facts and current philosophies. We have still to be taught that the Russian revolution is our revolution, that it is part of a mighty economic change which is in process all over the world. A study of Tolstoy and his critics will help to instruct us—some day—about these momentous relations.

The present status of the revolution is more confused in Russia than in any other country.[ [4] The repressive measures of the government forced a temporary alliance between all types of revolutionaries. It was this alliance which isolated Tolstoy from other reformers and made him a retarding force, almost a reactionary, against the progress of the Social Democracy, that party of orderly Marxians under German tutelage which was the hope of young Russia. The Czar's government, which was no respecter of principles, grouped him with all the malcontents and libertarians. And he returned the compliment. Because he despised all economics, he could not join a "scientific" party. Failing to distinguish between the peaceful and the militant revolutionists, he charged them all with murder and grouped them with the government. And thus he stood alone, distrustful of peaceful anarchists because they were not religious, and distrustful of most religions because they were organized on a property basis. He stood alone. Yet all liberal men, antithetical to each other as are the socialists and the anarchists, united in loving him as they united in hatred of the government. They applauded his terrific indictment of the society under which we live, though they disagreed from various points of view with his solution. It was said of him on his eightieth birthday that whatever conflict there might be between his beliefs and those of other reformers, the foes of liberty were his foes and the friends of liberty were his friends.

Tolstoy's solution for our ills is Christian anarchy, a voluntary communism allied with the teachings of Jesus, or with Tolstoy's interpretation of them. He taught that all violence is wrong, all government is robbery, and that the only possible moral order is founded on love of man and renunciation of legal rights. That he should have been a champion of Henry Georgeism, a plan that depends on organized government, is one of his many inconsistencies; what drew him to the single-tax theory was probably not so much the economic principles as George's arraignment of landlordism.

It is Tolstoy's own arraignment of our so-called civilization rather than his proposed remedies which will quicken the conscience of the world.[ [5] His individualism, his doctrine of private goodness, looks backward and not forward. He is, like Carlyle, the voice of a bygone time.

He had lived through the failures of many political revolutions, and he abhorred anything that pretended to be scientific. He turned his eyes from the science of men to their souls. In his magnificent self he justified his individualism, but were we a billion Tolstoys, saintly and self-disciplined, we must work in organization, or we cannot work effectively. The world is religious, but religion is a matter of opinion. The world is also economic, and economics is not a matter of opinion, but of unavoidable facts over which the individual has little control.[ [6] Like Ruskin, Tolstoy rejected economics because most professorial economists do not tell the truth. He blamed the dismal science for the dismal facts and for the inadequacies of its classic expounders. Had he understood the economic structure of society (which nobody does understand), he would have seen the futility of trying to abandon his estates. His singular abnegation could not put an end to the evils of landlordism, even to the extent of his own plot of ground. He could not make the burden of landless people one ounce lighter by dismounting in his own person from their backs. Nothing can be done until an effective majority of men agree to abolish private ownership of land and establish communal ownership.

Tolstoy preached with splendid fervor the power of the individual soul. But his practice is proof of our impotent severalty. It was disorganization that caused the famine which he labored to relieve, and it was his efficient organization that kept the hungry from starving. That our greatest man of letters should sweat behind a prehistoric plow is good for his soul and for ours; but, even if we should all grow perfect in spirit and eager for our share of manual labor, we should still feed ourselves better by communal use of steam plows. Tolstoy's belated Proudhonism is not the solution for the evils of property. It is his negative teaching that has positive value. He is an abolitionist, not a constructive philosopher. But to say that is not to answer him, not to deny him. He remains unanswered as long as the labor of this world is done at the behest of the few and for their profit. His work is not done, his books cannot be outgrown, until every man of us looks at the facts honestly and cries with him: "It is impossible to live so! It is impossible to live so!"

[1] As this book goes to press, Madam Tolstoy's "Autobiography" is being published in The Freeman. Her views of the great man should be illuminating, especially if she does not try to minimize his defects.

[2] This is no longer true in the troubled year of grace, 1922. Every scrap of Tolstoy is published in Russia. And probably before long there will be complete translations in many modern languages.

[3] And we are still saying it, 1922!

[4] This refers, of course, to the revolution before the Great War. I wonder now, 1922, just what Lenin, Trotsky, Chicherin, et. al., think of Tolstoy, and what he would have thought of them!

[5] Will it? I am not so confident as I was once.

[6] That sounds like good sense. Some of Tolstoy's countrymen at Genoa seem to have proved it.

MAETERLINCK'S ESSAYS

If we had to lose one part or the other of Maeterlinck's work, I think we should less reluctantly surrender the plays than the essays. The essays are richer in substance than the dramas and they are as truly poetic. The sunny garden, where the poet lives with his bees and flowers, is a more splendid domain than moonlit pseudo-mediæval empires, peopled with the wraiths of women. And the little bull-pup of the essay is a truer dog than the one in "The Blue Bird."

Some years ago, when the essay on the dog was first published in English, I read it aloud to a woman who owned a Boston terrier, and I gave it to a professional breeder of dogs. Both liked it. It is an essay that any one can understand; it illuminates a ground where all kinds of people meet. Even Bill Sikes would have liked it. Maeterlinck says what almost everybody thinks, and says it as it has not been said before, not in "Rab and His Friends." The simple eloquence, the sincerity, the affectionate humor are the positive virtues of the essay; and its negative virtue is freedom from a kind of rhetorical artificiality in which Maeterlinck indulges when he gets away from the solid realities of life.

Maeterlinck is an amateur botanist and bee-keeper and a professional poet. He knows, or seems to know, the facts, and he sees them with an imaginative vision, wondering at them like a child, in the very act of giving quite lucid "scientific" explanations. He hovers often on the enchanted borderland between knowledge and fancy, and plays to and fro between regions which, though adjacent parts of the same universe, have different habits of thought. I am acquainted with an American poet and philosopher who does not know the common kinds of dogs such as any boy of ten knows. I also knew and argued with an eminent biologist who objected to Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," on the ground that the poetic phrasing falsified the facts. True, he conceded, the queen-bee does fly and the strongest male overtakes and fertilizes her. But for Maeterlinck to poetize the fact as a "nuptial flight" seemed to the man of science not only untruth to nature, but a blasphemy against the sacred love of man and woman.

My friend, the biologist, and my acquaintance, the American poet and philosopher, both seem to be unfortunately incomplete human beings. The poet and philosopher does not know what any duffer knows, what anybody who cares not only for animals but for ordinary folks that own dogs cannot refrain from knowing. He is a man of cosmopolitan experience and has surely been in the Bois more than once. In the Garden of Acclimatation is a wonderful kennel; there are at least fifteen kinds of dogs, each with his specific or sub-specific name hung on his cage. If you had never seen a dog you could not walk about that kennel five minutes without learning the names of a half-dozen varieties (and without discovering in yourself a highly moral desire to steal one or two of those beautifully kept beasts). Some ignorance is unpardonable, and some philosophy and some poetry would be more vital for a little plain back-yard knowledge. On the other hand, what a pity it is that any man's sense of fact should be so strait as to forbid entrance to his soul of a honey bee which Maeterlinck sends forth equipped with these gorgeous unentomological wings of words: "The yellow fairies of the honey." It's as bad as a democrat who should object to the phrase "queen-bee."

Maeterlinck has knowledge of nature, not only such knowledge as Wordsworth had, but a fair acquaintance with contemporaneous science. He has learned lessons from Fabre, whom he admires. He has studied his own garden in the light of what botanists have told him and in the other light, which is not hostile to botany, but is different, the light of poetry. He loves to speculate about unsettled questions. And his speculations have a very great intellectual merit. He is, on the whole, content to be uncertain about uncertain things and to express his inclinations toward one or another conclusion in a persuasive, wistful manner. Like many other poets, he leans toward the belief that nature, which includes us, knows more than we do, and that to ascribe intelligence, in a restricting way, to man alone is probably to leave out a good deal of the magic of growing things, and to omit some potential explanations of their mystery, their mystery in the poet's sense and in the stern truth seeker's sense. The essay on "The Intelligence of Flowers" revivifies the old moot question about what knowledge is, what instinct is. It's a very fine question, and it becomes hottest when the men of imagination and the men of science (happily they are not mutually exclusive) argue about whether a dog knows that he loves you. A British poet began a verse to a dog:

The curate says you have no soul—.

I know that he has none.

That is good; but it is spiteful. Let us admit the curate. For the dog would. A dog does not care a wag of his tail whether a man is curate or editor of a newspaper. Therein the dog is our superior.

Maeterlinck, though overtaken by the wan doubt of our times, is a true believer in other kinds of intelligence than ours. He holds that "nature, when she wishes to be beautiful, to please, to delight and to prove herself happy, does almost what we should do had we her treasures at our disposal." There, you see, he begs the whole question and ascribes to "nature" wishes, desires, intentions. He does the trick that poets always do; he answers the question that he asks and that he pretends to be discussing. "All that we observe within ourselves," he says, "is rightly open to suspicion; we are at once litigant and judge, and we have too great an interest in peopling our world with magnificent illusions and hopes. But let the least external indication be dear and precious to us."

In this the poet says all, while, on another page, the man of science, with firm integrity, minimizes evidence and refuses to be convinced. There is a region where the poet knows almost everything worth knowing. There is a region where the man of science knows, not everything worth knowing, but all that is known. There is a misty mid-region where a full-minded, large-hearted man can live happily. He gets the message going and coming. He receives what the poet has to say and what the man of fact has to say and he constructs his world from the fragmentary contributions of both regions. Maeterlinck himself in "Our Eternity," dwells on this central ground. Shakespeare and Isaiah are on his right hand. On his left hand are William James and other psychological students of the evidence of spooks.

Poets are enamored of death. Nine-tenths of all the imaginative literature of the world is concerned with love and death, the begetter and the extinguisher. The sweetest lines in Shakespeare deal with love; the stateliest lines, Hamlet's and Macbeth's, are upon death. The chief interest of life is in dying. We get our highest emotions from some other person's death, and we adapt our entire course, from the cradle to the grave, with a view to the fact that we are going to quit in some year determined by fate or God or other power not quite understood, a year carefully figured out by the actuaries of the life insurance companies.

Man is a perfect coward in the face of death, his own or that of somebody he loves. The believer and the unbeliever alike bewail the great adventure. The tears shed by the believer in immortality and by the disbeliever are the same hot, saline, human drops. Everybody wants an answer, and only the adherents of certain sects receive an answer that satisfies them. Those answers do not satisfy me or you, not because there is anything wrong in the answers, but because the people that hold the answers behave as all the rest of us do in the presence of death. Maeterlinck, on the basis of modern evidence, argues for two-hundred and fifty-eight pages that we do not know what happens when we die. "In any case, I would not wish my worst enemy, were his understanding a thousand-fold loftier and a thousand-fold mightier than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which he had surprised an essential secret and of which, as a man, he had begun to grasp an atom."

Amen! That leaves us where we started. But the fact, the cold, interesting, magnificent fact, is that we are alive, and some of us are working and some are playing. Maeterlinck is a great child playing with flowers and with words. He is also a competent workman, and he is assisted by another skilful craftsman to whom English readers owe much, Mr. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, who translates Maeterlinck into English. He is a fine artist. Following faithfully the run of our English idiom, he succeeds in keeping for our Anglo-Saxon eyes and ears the color, tone, or whatever it is, of Maeterlinck's beautiful style.

JOSEPH CONRAD

To the newest generation of adult readers the dawn of a literary light is a rare experience. It is as if the courses of our literature were Arctic in their slowness, as if the day came at long intervals, and then without warmth or brilliance. Our fathers knew the joy of welcoming the latest novel of Dickens or a new volume of essays by Carlyle. The only[ [1] great day whose beginning young men have witnessed is the day of Kipling; his light mounted rapidly to a high noon, and if the afternoon shadows have begun to deepen prematurely, that sun is still beautiful and strong. Other lights have kindled in the last fifteen years, and have gone out before they had fairly dislodged the darkness, or have continued to burn dimly.

Eyes accustomed only to darkness and uncertain lights are in condition to be deluded by the phantoms of false dawn; it is therefore unwise to greet with too much enthusiasm the arrival of Mr. Joseph Conrad. Even if the dawn is real, it is certainly overcast with heavy clouds, and it has not proved bright enough to startle the world. Nevertheless, his light is of unique beauty in contemporary literature, and the story of its kindling makes interesting biography.

Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski was born fifty years ago in Poland. His father, a critic and poet, and his mother, who was exiled to Siberia, were engaged in revolutionary journalism. At nineteen Conrad left home, to escape an unsettled life, and also, it is fair to assume, to satisfy his love of adventure. He found work on English vessels, and this fact gave to contemporary English letters a man who might otherwise have written in French. To-day he appears in hand-books of biography as Master in the British Merchant Service, and Author. At nineteen he had not mastered English; at thirty-eight he had published no book. Since then he has published about a volume a year. In preparation for his books he sailed as able seaman, mate, and master, for twenty years, on steam and sailing craft, and meanwhile he was reading deep in French and English literature,—all, we are told, with no intent to become a writer. Indeed it was a period of ill health resulting in an enforced idleness from the familiar sea that gave him opportunity to put some of his adventures into words. Perhaps he is a lesser illustration of a theory of Thoreau's that a word well said "must have taken the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, so that the truest writer will be some captive knight, after all." However that may be, the intellectual and physical adventures of Conrad's life were abundant, and they reappear, discernible though transfigured, in the substance and the qualities of his work.

His ten books are for the most part concerned with the waters of the earth, and the men that sail on the face of the waters, and with lands, far from English readers, to be reached only by long journeying in ships.[ [2] His first book, "Almayer's Folly," tells the story of a disappointed Dutch trader in Borneo, whose half-caste daughter runs away with a Malay chief. His second book, "An Outcast of the Islands," deals further with the career of Almayer and with that of another exiled Dutchman. "Nostromo," has for its scene an imaginary South American state, and its heroes are an Englishman and an Italian. "The Nigger of the Narcissus" (published in America as "The Children of the Sea") and "Typhoon" are each the chronicle of a voyage. "Lord Jim" is the story of a young mate who disgraces himself by one unseamanlike act, and becomes a wanderer in the eastern islands, and finally a kind of king in a village of savages. "Tales of Unrest" contains five stories, two of which are about Malays, and another about white traders in an African station. The hero of "Falk"—the title story of a volume of three pieces—is a Scandinavian sailor who has been a cannibal, and who wins the daughter of a German ship captain in an Eastern port. "Youth," the first story in a volume of three, is the memory of a young mate's voyage in an unseaworthy ship, which burns and leaves the crew to seek an Eastern seaport in the boats. The second story, "The Heart of Darkness," is an account of a journey into the Belgian Congo State and a curious study of the effect of solitude and the jungle and savagery on a white trader. The third piece in the volume is the story of a ship-captain who steers his ship with the help of a Malay servant and lets no one guess until the end that he is blind. Of two books written in collaboration with Mr. Ford M. Hueffer, the only one worth considering, "Romance," comes the nearest to being the kind of fiction that the advertisements announce as "full of heart interest, love, and the glamor of a charming hero and heroine." It begins with a smuggler's escapade in England, and ends in an elopement in the West Indies; the best parts, probably Mr. Conrad's share in the work, are those about the sea and all that on it is, fogs, ships, and bearded pirates. In these books are men and women of all civilized nations, the acquaintance of a globe-trotter, and there are, besides, enough Malays, Chinamen, and Negroes to make the choruses of several comic operas. But in Conrad they are serious people, every Malay with a soul and a tragedy; even the Nigger of the Narcissus is equipped with psychological machinery.

Conrad's subject-matter, the secretion of experience, is rich enough and of sufficiently strange and romantic quality to endow a writer of popular fiction; and his style,—that is, the use of words for their melody, power, and charm,—is fit for a king of literature. Stevenson, who found so little sheer good writing among his contemporaries, would have welcomed Conrad and have lamented that he could not or would not tell his stories in more brief, steady, and continuous fashion.

For there is the rub. Conrad is not instinctively a story-teller. Many a writer of less genius surpasses him in method. He has no gift of what Lamb calls a bare narrative.

There are writers with magnificent power of language who do not attain that combination of literary and human qualities which is readableness, and there are others who interest many people in many generations, and yet do not write well. To most readers Dickens is as delightful when he writes slovenly sentences as when he writes at his best. Scott, the demigod, pours out his great romances in an inexpressive fluid. On the other hand, Walter Pater writes infallibly well. These illustrations are intended to suggest a difference which is a fact in literature, and are not to be carried to any conclusive comparison. The difference exists and it is not a strange fact. It is strange, however, that Conrad, who spins yarns about the sea, master of a kind of subject-matter that would make his books as popular as "Robinson Crusoe" and "Treasure Island," should be one of those who can write but cannot make an inevitably attractive and winning book for the multitude.

Either he knows his fault and can not help it, or he wills it and does not consider it a fault. There is evidence on this question. Several of his stories are put in the mouth of Marlow, an eloquent, reflective, world-worn man. In one place Conrad says, "We knew that we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive experiences." The story Marlow tells is no more inconclusive and rambling than most of the other stories, so that one is forced to conclude that Marlow's character as narrator is Conrad's concession to his own self-observed habit of mind. In another place Conrad says: "The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine." Evidently Conrad prefers or pretends to prefer the haze to the kernel.

In an essay on Henry James he openly scorns the methods usual to fiction of "solution by rewards and punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or sudden death," and says: "Why the reading public, which as a body has never laid upon the story-teller the command to be an artist, should demand from him this sham of divine omnipotence is utterly incomprehensible." Thus Mr. Conrad flings down the gauntlet to those demands of readers which greater men than he and Mr. James have been happy to satisfy without sacrifice of wisdom and reality.

A further announcement of his literary creed he made in a kind of artistic confession published a few years ago. "His (the prose writer's) answer to those who in the fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused, who demand to be promptly improved or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus: 'My task which I am trying to achieve is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is before all to make you see…. If I succeed, you shall find there, according to your deserts, encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand; perhaps also that glimpse of truth[ [3] for which you have forgotten to ask."

A writer with ideals so high and strongly felt commits himself for trial by exacting standards. It is necessary to remind Mr. Conrad that if a reader is to feel, he must first understand; if he is to hear, he must hear distinctly; and if he is to see, his eye must be drawn by interest in the object, and it can look only in one direction at once. "Nostromo" is told forward and backward in the first half of the book, and the preliminary history of the silver mine is out of all proportion to the story of Nostromo, the alleged hero of the book. "Lord Jim" is confused.[ [4] The first few chapters are narrated in the third person by the author. Then for three hundred pages Marlow, a more or less intimate spectator of Jim's career, tells the story as an after-dinner yarn. It would have taken three evenings for Marlow to get through the talk, and that talk in print involves quotation within quotation beyond the legitimate uses of punctuation marks. In other stories the point of view fails. In "The Nigger of the Narcissus" are conferences between two people in private which no third person could overhear, yet the narrative seems to be told in the first person by one of the crew. In "Typhoon," where a steamer with deck almost vertical is plunging through a storm, we are on the bridge beside the simple dogged captain while he shouts orders down to the engine-room through the tube. Without warning we are down in the engine-room, hearing the captain's voice from above, and as suddenly we are back on the bridge again. A man crawls across the deck in a tempest so black that he cannot see whose legs he is groping at. We are immediately informed that he is a man of fifty, with coarse hair, of immense strength, with great lumpy hands, a hoarse voice, easy-going and good-natured,—as if the man were visible at all, except as a blot in the darkness!

Conrad has a mania for description. When anything is mentioned in the course of narrative, though it be a thousand miles from the present scene, it must be described. Each description creates a new scene, and when descriptions of different and separated places appear on the same page, the illusion of events happening before the eye is destroyed. If a writer is to transport us instantaneously from one quarter of the globe to another he should at least apprise us that we are on the magic rug, and even then the space-o'erleaping imagination resents being bundled off on hurried and inconsequential journeys. Often when Conrad's descriptions are logically in course, they are too long; the current of narrative vanishes under a mountain (a mountain of gold, perhaps, but difficult to the feet of him who would follow the stream); and when the subterranean river emerges again, it is frequently obstructed by inopportune, though subtle, exposition.

Conrad's propensity for exposition is allied, no doubt, with his admiration for Mr. Henry James, of whom he has written an extremely "literary" appreciation. Too much interest in masters like Flaubert and Mr. James is not gentlemanly in a sailor, and it cannot help a sailor turned writer, who pilots a ship through a magnificent struggle with a typhoon, leads us into the bewitching terror of the African jungle, and guides us to Malay lands where the days are full of savage love, intrigue, suicide, murder, piracy, and all forms of picturesque and terrific death. Mr. Conrad finds that there are "adventures in which only choice souls are involved, and Mr. James records them with a fearless and insistent fidelity to the péripéties of the contest and the feelings of the combatants." That is true and fine, no doubt, but the price which Mr. Conrad pays for his ability to discover it is the fact that hundreds of thousands of readers of good masculine romance are not reading "Lord Jim," or finding new "Youth" in a young mate's wondrous vision of the East, or welcoming a new hero in Captain Whalley. A man who can conceive the mournful tale of Karain and the fight between the half crazy white men at an African trading post has a kind of adventure better, as adventure, than the experiences of Mr. James's choice souls. Stevenson knew all about Mr. James and his "péripéties," but he could stow that knowledge on one side of his head, and from the other side spin "Treasure Island" and "The Wrecker". "The Sacred Fount" never could have befuddled the chronicle of the amiable John Silver, but in Mr. Conrad's "An Outcast of the Islands," where it seems to be a question which white man will kill the other, after a dramatic meet-in the presence of a Malay heroine, each man stands still before our eyes and radiates states of mind.

The lover who finds fault with his sweetheart because he is so proud of her is perfectly human and also perfectly logical. So my reason for dwelling on Mr. Conrad's shortcomings is because his books are thoroughly worth consideration. His advent is really important. More than any other new writer he is master of the ancient eloquence of English style; no one since Stevenson has surpassed in fiction the cadence and distinction of his prose. Never has an English sailor written so beautifully, never has artist had such full and authoritative knowledge of the sea, not even Pierre Loti. Stevenson and Kipling are but observant landsmen after all. Marryat and Clark Russell never write well, though they tell absorbing tales. There was promise in Jack London, but he was not a seaman at heart. Herman Melville's eccentric genius, greater than any of these, never led him to construct a work of art, for all his amazing power of thought and language. Conrad stands alone with his two gifts of sea experience and cultivation of style. He has lived on the sea, loved it, fought it, believed in it, been baffled by it, body and mind. To know its ways, to be master of the science of its winds and waves and the ships that brave it, to have seen men and events and the lands and waters of the earth with the eye of a sailor, the heart of a poet, the mind of a psychologist—artist and ship-captain in one—here is a combination through which Fate has conspired to produce a new writer about the most wonderful of all things, the sea and the mysterious lands beyond it.

If we grant that he is not master of the larger units of style, that is, of construction, we can assert that in the lesser units, sentence for sentence, he is a master of the English tongue. There is a story that he learned English first from the Bible, and his vigorous primal usages of words, his racial idioms and ancient rich metaphors warrant the idea that he came to us along the old highway of English speech and thought, the King James version. His sentences, however, are not biblical as Stevenson's and Kipling's often are, but show a modern sophistication and intellectual deliberateness. He frequently reminds us that he is a Slav who learned French along with his native tongue, that he has read Flaubert and Maupassant and Henry James. Approaching our language as an adult foreigner, he goes deep to the derivative meanings of words, their powerful first intentions, which familiarity has disguised from most of us native-born to English. He has achieved that ring and fluency which he has declared should be the artist's aim. Conrad's prose lifts to passages of great poetic beauty, in which the color of the sea, its emotional aspects, its desolation and its blitheness, are mingled with its meaning for the men who sail it, its "austere servitude," its friendliness and its treachery.

"The ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet. Round her the abysses of sky and sea met in an unattainable frontier. A great circular solitude moved with her, ever changing and ever the same, always monotonous and always imposing. Now and then another wandering white speck, burdened with life, appeared far off,—disappeared, intent on its own destiny…. The august loneliness of her path lent dignity to the sordid inspiration of her pilgrimage. She drove foaming to the southward, as if guided by the courage of a high endeavor. The smiling greatness of the sea dwarfed the extent of time."

No fairer temptation can be offered to a reader who does not know Conrad than to quote a passage from the end of "Youth," and no more honest praise can be offered to Conrad than to say that it is a selected, but by no means unique, specimen of his genius.

A crew that have left a burning ship in boats find an Eastern port at night. The weary men tie to the jetty and go to sleep. This is the young mate's narrative years after, the narrative of the reflective and eloquent Marlow: "I was lying in a flood of light, and the sky had never looked so far, so high, before. I opened my eyes and lay without moving. And then I saw the men of the East—they were looking at me. The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the color of an Eastern crowd. And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sigh, without a movement. They stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at night had come to them from the sea. Nothing moved. The fronds of palms stood still against the sky. Not a branch stirred along the shore, and the brown roofs of hidden houses peeped through the green foliage, through the big leaves that hung shining and still like leaves forged of heavy metal. This was the East of the navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise…. I have known its fascinations since: I have seen the mysterious shores, the still water, the lands of brown nations, where a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait, pursues, overtakes so many of the conquering race, who are proud of their wisdom, of their knowledge, of their strength. But for me all the East is contained in that vision of my youth. It is all in that moment when I opened my young eyes on it. I came upon it from a tussle with the sea—and I was young—and I saw it looking at me. And this is all that it left of it! Only a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour, of youth!"

[1] I ask the reader to remember that this was written in 1906.

[2]

• Almayer's Folly. The Macmillan Co. 1895.
• An Outcast of the Islands. Tauchnitz. 1896.
• The Nigger of the Narcissus (Children of the Sea). Dodd, Mead & Co. 1897.
• Tales of Unrest. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1898.
• Lord Jim. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1899.
• The Inheritors (with F. M. Hueffer). McClure, Phillips & Co. 1901.
• Typhoon. G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1902.
• Falk. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1903.
• Youth. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1903.
• Romance (with F. M. Hueffer). McClure, Phillips & Co. 1904.
• Nostromo. Harper & Brothers. 1904.

[3] These Slavs (see above on Tolstoy) are all for Truth, but they are not Chadbandians. They are artists. And so was the Anglo-Saxon who made Chadband.

[4] No, it is not. It is clear as daylight.

A CONRAD MISCELLANY

Nothing that Joseph Conrad writes is negligible; he is one of few living writers whom we must have complete to the last, or the latest, published word. Readers who care only for the yarn-spinner will not find much in his volume of essays, "Notes on Life and Letters," but even they will find something. And for those to whom Conrad is more than a story teller, an incomparable magician, these small bits from his laboratory will have much of the charm of the larger pieces, if only the reminiscent charm that brings any book of his, the least read or read longest ago, swiftly to the surface of memory. If a mere landlubber may hazard the similitude, the captain will always show his qualities whether he is on the bridge of a liner or in a rowboat.

The essays on books are unpretentious notes—eight pages on Henry James, seven on Maupassant, twelve on Anatole France, short excursions in criticism made between the longer voyages to the islands of the blessed. Like most criticism written by men of genius, these papers are interesting for what they say about another man of genius and also for what they say about the critic. One of the most satisfactory essays in what it reveals of Conrad is least satisfactory as objective criticism—the one about Marryat and Cooper, in which there is a declaration of descent in terms of surrender. To be sure, since the elder men are seamen and writers of the sea, Conrad's delight in them is understandable and not to be denied. But there are some things that must be denied even by a critic who gets seasick a mile off shore. One is Conrad's reiterated judgment that the greatness of Marryat "is undeniable." If Marryat is great, then so is Oliver Optic. And when Conrad speaks of the "sureness and felicity of effect" of the prose of Cooper—Cooper, whose style grates on the ear and who drags us by the sheer power of his story through his verbal infelicities—then I jump overboard and leave these literary sailors to fight it out.

When we get back on land to another of Conrad's masters, Guy de Maupassant, I feel less shaky. In "Tales of Unrest" are two stories, "The Return" and "The Idiots," in which I long ago thought I discovered the right kind of influence from the French master—what Conrad praises as Maupassant's austere fidelity to fact. Yet one is puzzled by the implied praise in the very dubious statement that "this creative artist [Maupassant] has the true imagination; he never condescends to invent anything." Just what does that mean? If "A Piece of String" and "The Necklace" are not diabolically ingenious inventions, then the word invention means nothing as applied to fiction. In point of invention how far apart are the story of the girls in "La Maison Tellier" and the story of the girl in the pathetic troupe in "Victory"? Both stories are equally invented, equally true to nature, equally free from "the miserable vanity of a catching phrase." But what is a catching phrase? I suppose that a Frenchman gets somewhat the same shiver of delight from fine rhythms in Maupassant's prose that we get from fine rhythms in Conrad. Both men—I could quote many examples—strike out amazing metaphors, the poetry of prose, which are not decorations hung on the outside but are the unremovable intestines of their story. Such metaphors in rhythm are surely "catching phrases," but they are not miserable vanities. I wonder if Conrad has a moment now and then when he distrusts his own eloquence—an eloquence which has brought against him from more than one critic the charge of being a phrase maker.

Conrad's prose is not so hard and compact as Maupassant's, and except the two short stories I have mentioned I recall nothing in Conrad which in manner or substance obviously illustrates his own statement that he has been "inspired by a long and intimate acquaintance with the work" of Maupassant. His greatest short stories, "Youth" and "The Heart of Darkness," seem worlds away from the French master. But inspiration, the influence of one artist on another, does not mean imitation in method or any visible resemblance in effect. It may mean a fundamental similarity in artistic attitude. The elements of similarity between the French writer and the British are the plain virtues, honesty and courage, which Conrad rightly ascribes to Maupassant; for these are the central virtues in the creed which Conrad announced many years ago and to which he has loyally adhered in the remotest strange seas of romance.

Another of Conrad's masters, acknowledged in the phrase "twenty years of attentive acquaintance" (and the phrase was written in 1905) is Henry James. This seems a curious discipleship if we consider only the material: James static, land-bound, class-bound; Conrad adventurous, errant, familiar with all breeds and degrees of men. But much the same thing happens to both kinds of material. For in the first place the material is not essentially different; it is the history of a two-legged animal staggering on land or aboard ship. And in the second place what happens is simply (though it is not so simple) that an artist tries to put this animal steady on its feet and make it give a reasonable account of itself—through himself. It gets transmitted through an intelligence, a personality, a style, into something more interesting than the actual poor creature who wabbles along the street or on the deck of a steamer. The courageous interpreters make their fellow men stand up, and the real hero of a romance is the romancer.

This is one of the paradoxes of fiction which the mere reader of fiction and of criticism written by masters of fiction can enjoy, that the modern self-conscious story tellers, forever proclaiming their devotion to an objective reality, to the naked fact, and even, like Conrad, pretending scorn of the phrase, are wilful persons who distort life into a new reality. There is something almost naïve in the honest belief of Tolstoy, James, Conrad, that nature, human nature, is something outside the artist, lying over there, and that the artist standing over here observes it, renders it, "mirrors" it. James himself, a most sophisticated realist, was not always so insistent as Conrad seems to think on the function of the novelist as historian; some years later than Conrad's essay, James found fault with the younger novelists because their work was too undigested, because it was not sufficiently remade, transformed by an individual interpreter—that is, though he did not say it so harshly, the younger men were not interesting individuals, not men of first-rate imagination.

But we must not get too far away from Conrad and his particular relation to James. He has a generously envious admiration for James's inconclusiveness, for the novel that stops but does not end because life does not end; it seems to be, like his admiration for Maupassant's accuracy and directness, a declaration of something that he has striven for and not always accomplished. Conrad winds his own stories up pretty sharply, wipes out his people with annihilation more desolating than the conventional piling of corpses at the end of "Romeo and Juliet" or "Hamlet." Recall the obliterating finality of "Lord Jim," of "Victory," which ends with the blank word "nothing." Or, where death does not conclude it all but the character lives on, remember the abrupt inevitable termination of "The Rescue": "Steer north!" Another relation which I have suggested and which Conrad as critic does not hint is this: Conrad's material, though superficially it is made up of adventure, wreck, blood, piracy, mystery, and Stevensonian yo-heave-ho, is, as he treats it, often as static as anything in James; it is stationary, concerned with the moods of men, analytic, psychological (that tiresome word has to do for it), even while the storm rages; and this is one of the reasons why readers with a taste for ripping yarns have not welcomed him with the unanimous popularity which they accorded to Stevenson and Kipling, to name fine artists and not, of course, to mention cheap favorites. If we really understood Conrad's fiction we have no difficulty in understanding his filial relation to Henry James. Begin with the paragraph on page 13 of "Notes on Life and Letters:" "Action in its essence, the creative art of the writer of fiction," etc., and see if the rest that follows is not, with a change or two, as good an account of Joseph Conrad as of Henry James—better, indeed, since one master of fiction writing of another speaks with two voices or with a voice proceeding from a two-fold authority and wisdom.

Joseph Conrad, novelist, child of English and Continental literature, is not more unaccountable than any other literary genius. But how to explain, or even remember at all, that the head of living English men of letters, next to Hardy, is a Pole named Korzeniowski? It is fair to remember that and be inquisitive about it because in "Notes on Life and Letters" he pretends to write autobiography, and reminds us of his origin in a paper called "Poland Revisited." It is a baffling narrative, even more baffling than the vague book which he chose to call "A Personal Record." Conrad in quest of his youth never gets back to Poland at all except as a British tourist. The paper consists of thirty-two pages. Mr. Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski reaches Cracow on the twenty-fourth page. There are two or three pages of reminiscence, chiefly about his father's death. Then war is declared (this is in 1914), and the British subject, with the assistance of the American Ambassador, escapes from Poland and amid the booming of distant guns in Flanders sails safely back through the Downs "thick with the memories of my sea-life."

Mr. Conrad is the least patriotic of Poles and the most patriotic of Englishmen. His political opinions, which he was evidently invited to express by some English editor who remembered the fading fact of Korzeniowski and appreciated the luminous fact of Joseph Conrad, the writer, are no better and no worse than any competent journalist might have delivered. His hatred of Russia, expressed long before his adopted country became the ally of the Czar, may have its origin in some boyhood bitterness. But it is an Englishman who speaks, not a Pole. His prophecy of the downfall of Russian autocracy and of the menace of Prussianism shoots into the future with as true an aim as any man could have had in 1905, and a prophet is to be excused for having said at that time that there was in Russia "no ground ready for a revolution." "Conrad political" is less interesting than "Conrad controversial," since his controversial utterances were provoked by the sinking of the Titanic, the question of the safety of ships, and the stupidity of marine officials on land, subjects which he can discuss with the cool knowledge of the expert and the vehemence of an offended master of ships and words.

But the true men of the four into which in his preface he divides himself are "Conrad literary" and "Conrad reminiscent." The reminiscence is not of a dimly, even indifferently, remembered Poland, but of England and the sea. On the twenty-four-page journey to the five-page sojourn in Cracow what happens? London, flashed on you in a few sentences with an original vividness as if Englishmen had never described it before, realized in brief transit, an immense solid thing, compared to which Cracow is an insubstantial dream. He cannot recapture his boyhood, but he gives you instantly the London of to-day and the London of his youth when the British-Polish apprentice was looking for a berth. And then the voyage across the North Sea. Here we are at home. "The same old thing," he says. "A grey-green expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white foam-ridges, and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently made of wet blotting paper."

"The same old thing!" The sea is the same old thing, water deep and shoal, storm and calm, fog and clear weather, light and darkness, starshine and sunshine. It is understandable that from time to time a new poet should be born, Byron, Tennyson, Swinburne, Whitman, Conrad, Masefield, who, being a different man from all the rest, should phrase some mood of the sea in words that no other poet in centuries had used. But Conrad has written fifteen volumes mostly about the sea, many pages necessarily about some aspect which he has treated more than once. His treatment is so unmistakably his own that you could recognize any passage as his if you saw it on a piece of torn paper blown from nowhere. Yet it is truer of him than of Shakespeare that he never repeats, has no clichés, no pet phrases, but in each book finds astonishing new images, as if he himself had not written before. How does he do it?

STRINDBERG

Some men of genius at forty or fifty arrive at a view of life, an attitude toward the human comedy, as inclusive and definite as it is possible for them to conceive. Hardy at seventy is quite recognizable the man that he was at forty. The Meredith of 1860 is the Meredith of 1890. They grow, they improve or change their artistic methods. But their natures do not undergo violent revolutions. Other men, Tolstoy for example, experience a catastrophic annihilation of some part of themselves and emerge from the confusion, remade, fired with new beliefs. Tolstoy had one great battle with himself which divided his life into two main periods, and after the struggle his philosophy, whatever its worth, was fairly settled, and he knew how to express it clearly over and over again.

Strindberg seems to have been continuously at war with Strindberg; and the peace that he found was but the death-bed repentance of a man whose forces were spent. He went through many phases. "The Growth of a Soul", which is autobiographical, might better be called "The Conflicts of a Soul". It seethes with ideas, ends in a half-formed philosophy, and is only a section of Strindberg's intellectual adventures. He was ten men at ten different times, and he was ten men all the time. He expressed every aspect of himself. His manifold genius was master of all forms of literature. As Emerson said of Swedenborg, in whom Strindberg found all the light that his dark soul ever knew, he lies abroad on his times, leviathan-like. Undoubtedly to know him, one must know him entire, and I do not pretend to complete knowledge of his life and works.

Some fragments of his total artistic expression are not intelligible when they are read apart from his other books. "The Inferno" is a confused and murky nightmare which takes on form and purpose only when the light of biography is turned on it. Other works of Strindberg, read by themselves, are clear and shapely.

"By the Open Sea" is an intensely powerful study of an overcultivated man and a primitively passionate woman. It is, moreover, the work of a poet who loves the sea. The passage in which the ichthyologist observes through his telescope the wonder-world beneath the surface of the water is rich with the essential poetry of natural fact. The translator, Ellie Schleussner, would probably say, as Strindberg's admirers all say, that his resonant poetic prose cannot be rendered in another language. Yet the things that he sees in nature and his interpretations of them are in their naked substance the imaginative stuff which is poetry. This Titan was not content to be poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, philosopher. He was also a man of science, no mean rival, they say, of the professional student of biology and chemistry. The eye that looks through Borg's telescope has been trained in a laboratory and can also roll with a fine frenzy:

"The blenny, which has developed a pair of oars in front, but is too heavy in the stern and reminds one of first attempts at boat building, raised its architectural stone head, adorned with the moustachios of a Croat, above the heraldic foliage among which it had lain, and lifted itself for a short moment out of the mud only to sink back into it the next instant.

"The lump-fish with its seven backs stuck up its keel; the whole fish was nothing but an enormous nose, scenting out food and females; it illuminated for a second the bluish-green water with its rosy belly, surrounding itself with a faint aureole in the deep darkness; but before long its sucker again held safely to a stone, there to wait the lapse of the million years which shall bring delivery to the laggards on the endless road of evolution."

Strindberg has been called both misogamist and misogynist. Yet it is not possible to collect and compress within the bounds of such definite words a man whose ideas on any one subject fly far apart as the poles. If he sometimes, often, expresses virulent detestation of women and all their ways, he is not more tender toward men. He is not a caresser of life. He hangs the whole human race. But he analyzes; tries it before the twelve-minded jury in himself before he pronounces sentence. Point by point, detail for detail, he is just in perception of character and motive. His final view is simply not final, but contradictory as life itself. He thinks that woman is a snare to the feet of a man who would walk upright and accomplish something in the world. Yet he believes in the freedom of woman, would give her the vote, and emancipate her from economic bondage to the man. He even champions the liberty of the child, condemns "the family as a social institution which does not permit the child to become an individual at the proper time," and draws both parents as victims of "the same unfortunate conditions which are honored by the sacred name of law."

"Marriage" contains twenty short stories of married life, so many variations of Strindberg's thesis against the institution. So regarded, the book leaves one rather sore than enlightened. But these stories are stories, not tracts. Strindberg is a great, if rough and savage, artist. His opinions, whatever they are, do not devitalize his fiction. His short narratives are as skilful as Maupassant's in at least one respect, compression, sinewy economy. He can put in ten pages the domestic tragedy of a lifetime. He is a fine or, rather, a firm craftsman, and though the man rages, the artist has the artist's restraint and every other literary virtue short of ultimate beauty. He sets down terrible things with a cool succinctness. One story ends thus: "The children had become burdens and the once beloved wife a secret enemy despised and despising him. And the cause of all this unhappiness? The want of bread! And yet the large storehouses of the new world were breaking down under the weight of an over-abundant supply of wheat. What a world of contradictions! The manner in which bread was distributed must be at fault. Science, which has replaced religion, has no answer to give; it merely states facts and allows the children to die of hunger and the parents of thirst."

"The Red Room" is a satire on life in Stockholm, on life everywhere. The pathetic struggle of the artistic and literary career, its follies and pretenses, the fatuity of politics, the dishonesty of journalism, the disillusion that awaits the aspiring actor, all these things run riot through the lively pages. Strindberg's satire is severe, it is sometimes hard, but it is not mean. He has a large if rather distant sympathy for the poor fellows whose aspirations, failures, dissipations, and friendships he portrays. Of two young critics he says: "And they wrote of human merit and human unworthiness and broke hearts as if they were breaking egg-shells." He writes of their unconscious inhumanity and blindness in a way that reveals his own clearness of vision and fundamental humanity. The laughter of a somber humorist has in it a tenderness unknown to merry natures.

The dramatic and literary critic may profitably read the chapter called "Checkmate," in which the young journalist is made to say: "The public does not want to have an opinion, it wants to satisfy its passions. If I praise your enemy you writhe like a worm and tell me that I have no judgment; if I praise your friend, you tell me that I have. Take that last piece of the Dramatic Theatre, Fatty, which has just been published in book form…. It's quite safe to say that there isn't enough action in it: that's a phrase the public knows well; laugh a little at the 'beautiful language'; that's good, old disparaging praise; then attack the management for having accepted such a play and point out that the moral teaching is doubtful—a very safe thing to say about most things."

Strindberg's imagination visualized and dramatized everything. He made plays of an astonishing variety of ideas ranging from wild poetic fantasy to grim realism—a range as great as Ibsen's and greater than Hauptmann's.

Glance at those in the third volume of Mr. Björkman's translations, not to analyze them but merely to note their diversity. "Swanwhite" is a fairy fantasy of love, confessedly inspired by Maeterlinck, yet in no sense an imitation of him. "Advent" is a Christmas miracle play, which embodies a gentle sermon on the forgiveness of sins—a strange sermon from the man who wrote the last chapter of "By the Open Sea!" "Debit and Credit" is a realistic sketch portraying the man who succeeds at the expense of other people. "The Thunderstorm" plays upon an old theme, one that Strindberg knew by experience, the failure of marriage between an elderly man and a young woman. It ends rather serenely for Strindberg, whose last years were not peaceful: "It's getting dark, but then comes reason to light us with its bull's-eyes, so that we don't go astray…. Close the windows and pull down the shades so that all memories can lie down and sleep in peace of old age."

In "After the Fire" the vanity and dishonesty of petty people are ruthlessly exposed. The Stranger who finds all reputations to have been based on sham and all pride founded on wind, is said to be Strindberg himself. "Vanity, vanity…. You tiny earth; you, the densest and heaviest of all planets—that's what makes everything on you so heavy—so heavy to breathe, so heavy to carry. The cross is your symbol, but it might just as well have been a fool's cap or a strait-jacket—you world of delusions and deluded!"

TAGORE

Sometimes the world, or a section of it, goes wildly cheering after a prophet; and a stranger, watching the multitude, wonders wherein lies the greatness of the great man. The sceptic may be too ignorant to understand or he may be too clear-sighted to be deceived. Not many years ago the tom-tom of the Nobel Prize beat before the tent of the modest and inoffensive Hindoo poet, Rabindranath Tagore. English critics and poets of first-rate authority have called him wonderful. For all I know he may be wonderful, for I have not read all his work in English and I am not well acquainted with Bengali. But I submit that in "The Crescent Moon" and "The Gardener," there is not one great line, not one poem that is arresting, compelling, memorable. Moreover, there is much that is false and weak.

O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute!

O Farthest End, O the keen call of thy flute!

Now that may do in India, but in our part of the world it is feeble orchestration. The poets of the Bible and English poets since the days of the Elizabethan translation have equipped the celestial choirs with more sounding instruments. One cannot without a smile consider the far end of the cosmos playing a flute or a piccolo. Harken to how a supreme poet makes music worthy of the wide spaces:

But thou dost set in statelier pageantry,

Lauded with tumults of the firmament;

Thy visible music-blasts make deaf the sky,

Thy cymbals clang to fire the Occident,

Thou dost thy dying so triumphally;

I see the crimson blaring of thy shawms.

This is from Francis Thompson's "Ode to the Setting Sun." You see the difference. Thompson's lines are poetry. Tagore's simply are not.

Miss May Sinclair, herself a distinguished artist, says that Mr. Tagore's translation of his Bengali poetry into English "preserves, not only all that is essential and eternal in his poetry, but much of the strange music." That may be so, but how does Miss Sinclair know that? Does she understand Bengali? Does she read it and speak it well enough to be sure that Mr. Tagore has translated himself adequately? Is not she affording an instance of criticism that in an excess of enthusiasm runs beyond its own knowledge? Some of Tagore's lines are mildly sweet, and there are some pretty fancies in the Child-Poems. The poem in "The Gardener," which begins:

Why do you whisper so faintly in my ears, O Death, my Death?

would be faintly impressive if Walt Whitman had never lived.

Not only are Tagore's lines not great but some of his lines are foolish:

Under the banyan tree you were milking the cow with your hands, tender and fresh as butter.

Perhaps Mr. Tagore did not know that in English "butter fingers" greasily signifies manual ineptitude. I can not take that line seriously, nor understand how Tagore has become one of England's acknowledged poets. He distorts nature with pathetic fallacies which have not verbal splendor to carry them, as the verbal splendor of Shakespeare, Shelley, and Thompson often carries a metaphor that, so to speak, will not hold water.

I paced alone on the road across the field while the sunset was hiding its last gold like a miser.

The sunset is not in the least like a miser; and a true lover and observer of nature would not allow himself such a niggardly fallacious image. Are not our friends, the poets and critics, victims of the spell which odd things out of the East put on our occidental minds, the spell that makes some people run after queer preachers and philosophers who talk religion through their turbans?

One is reminded that Mr., or Sir Owen Seaman has in his delicious book of parodies, "The Battle of the Bays", an Edwin-Arnoldy thing that runs like this:

The bulbul hummeth like a book

Upon the pooh-pooh tree,