M. Anatole France, historian and adventurer, has given us many profitable
histories of saints and sinners, of Roman procurators and of officials of
the Third Republic, of _grandes dames_ and of dames not so very grand, of
ornate Latinists and of inarticulate street hawkers, of priests and
generals--in fact, the history of all humanity as it appears to his
penetrating eye, serving a mind marvellously incisive in its scepticism,
and a heart that, of all contemporary hearts gifted with a voice,
contains the greatest treasure of charitable irony. As to M. Anatole
France's adventures, these are well-known. They lie open to this
prodigal world in the four volumes of the _Vie Litteraire_, describing
the adventures of a choice soul amongst masterpieces. For such is the
romantic view M. Anatole France takes of the life of a literary critic.
History and adventure, then, seem to be the chosen fields for the
magnificent evolutions of M. Anatole France's prose; but no material
limits can stand in the way of a genius. The latest book from his
pen--which may be called golden, as the lips of an eloquent saint once
upon a time were acclaimed golden by the faithful--this latest book is,
up to a certain point, a book of travel.
I would not mislead a public whose confidence I court. The book is not a
record of globe-trotting. I regret it. It would have been a joy to
watch M. Anatole France pouring the clear elixir compounded of his
Pyrrhonic philosophy, his Benedictine erudition, his gentle wit and most
humane irony into such an unpromising and opaque vessel. He would have
attempted it in a spirit of benevolence towards his fellow men and of
compassion for that life of the earth which is but a vain and transitory
illusion. M. Anatole France is a great magician, yet there seem to be
tasks which he dare not face. For he is also a sage.
It is a book of ocean travel--not, however, as understood by Herr Ballin
of Hamburg, the Machiavel of the Atlantic. It is a book of exploration
and discovery--not, however, as conceived by an enterprising journal and
a shrewdly philanthropic king of the nineteenth century. It is nothing
so recent as that. It dates much further back; long, long before the
dark age when Krupp of Essen wrought at his steel plates and a German
Emperor condescendingly suggested the last improvements in ships' dining-
tables. The best idea of the inconceivable antiquity of that enterprise
I can give you is by stating the nature of the explorer's ship. It was a
trough of stone, a vessel of hollowed granite.
The explorer was St. Mael, a saint of Armorica. I had never heard of him
before, but I believe now in his arduous existence with a faith which is
a tribute to M. Anatole France's pious earnestness and delicate irony.
St. Mael existed. It is distinctly stated of him that his life was a
progress in virtue. Thus it seems that there may be saints that are not
progressively virtuous. St. Mael was not of that kind. He was
industrious. He evangelised the heathen. He erected two hundred and
eighteen chapels and seventy-four abbeys. Indefatigable navigator of the
faith, he drifted casually in the miraculous trough of stone from coast
to coast and from island to island along the northern seas. At the age
of eighty-four his high stature was bowed by his long labours, but his
sinewy arms preserved their vigour and his rude eloquence had lost
nothing of its force.
A nautical devil tempting him by the worldly suggestion of fitting out
his desultory, miraculous trough with mast, sail, and rudder for swifter
progression (the idea of haste has sprung from the pride of Satan), the
simple old saint lent his ear to the subtle arguments of the progressive
enemy of mankind.
The venerable St. Mael fell away from grace by not perceiving at once
that a gift of heaven cannot be improved by the contrivances of human
ingenuity. His punishment was adequate. A terrific tempest snatched the
rigged ship of stone in its whirlwinds, and, to be brief, the dazed St.
Mael was stranded violently on the Island of Penguins.
The saint wandered away from the shore. It was a flat, round island
whence rose in the centre a conical mountain capped with clouds. The
rain was falling incessantly--a gentle, soft rain which caused the simple
saint to exclaim in great delight: "This is the island of tears, the
island of contrition!"
Meantime the inhabitants had flocked in their tens of thousands to an
amphitheatre of rocks; they were penguins; but the holy man, rendered
deaf and purblind by his years, mistook excusably the multitude of silly,
erect, and self-important birds for a human crowd. At once he began to
preach to them the doctrine of salvation. Having finished his discourse
he lost no time in administering to his interesting congregation the
sacrament of baptism.
If you are at all a theologian you will see that it was no mean adventure
to happen to a well-meaning and zealous saint. Pray reflect on the
magnitude of the issues! It is easy to believe what M. Anatole France
says, that, when the baptism of the Penguins became known in Paradise, it
caused there neither joy nor sorrow, but a profound sensation.
M. Anatole France is no mean theologian himself. He reports with great
casuistical erudition the debates in the saintly council assembled in
Heaven for the consideration of an event so disturbing to the economy of
religious mysteries. Ultimately the baptised Penguins had to be turned
into human beings; and together with the privilege of sublime hopes these
innocent birds received the curse of original sin, with the labours, the
miseries, the passions, and the weaknesses attached to the fallen
condition of humanity.
At this point M. Anatole France is again an historian. From being the
Hakluyt of a saintly adventurer he turns (but more concisely) into the
Gibbon of Imperial Penguins. Tracing the development of their
civilisation, the absurdity of their desires, the pathos of their folly
and the ridiculous littleness of their quarrels, his golden pen lightens
by relevant but unpuritanical anecdotes the austerity of a work devoted
to a subject so grave as the Polity of Penguins. It is a very admirable
treatment, and I hasten to congratulate all men of receptive mind on the
feast of wisdom which is theirs for the mere plucking of a book from a
shelf.
TURGENEV {2}--1917
Dear Edward,
I am glad to hear that you are about to publish a study of Turgenev, that
fortunate artist who has found so much in life for us and no doubt for
himself, with the exception of bare justice. Perhaps that will come to
him, too, in time. Your study may help the consummation. For his luck
persists after his death. What greater luck an artist like Turgenev
could wish for than to find in the English-speaking world a translator
who has missed none of the most delicate, most simple beauties of his
work, and a critic who has known how to analyse and point out its high
qualities with perfect sympathy and insight.
After twenty odd years of friendship (and my first literary friendship
too) I may well permit myself to make that statement, while thinking of
your wonderful Prefaces as they appeared from time to time in the volumes
of Turgenev's complete edition, the last of which came into the light of
public indifference in the ninety-ninth year of the nineteenth century.
With that year one may say, with some justice, that the age of Turgenev
had come to an end too; yet work so simple and human, so independent of
the transitory formulas and theories of art, belongs as you point out in
the Preface to _Smoke_ "to all time."
Turgenev's creative activity covers about thirty years. Since it came to
an end the social and political events in Russia have moved at an
accelerated pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral and
intellectual unrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole body of his
work with the unerring lucidity of a great national writer. The first
stirrings, the first gleams of the great forces can be seen almost in
every page of the novels, of the short stories and of _A Sportsman's
Sketches_--those marvellous landscapes peopled by unforgettable figures.
Those will never grow old. Fashions in monsters do change, but the truth
of humanity goes on for ever, unchangeable and inexhaustible in the
variety of its disclosures. Whether Turgenev's art, which has captured
it with such mastery and such gentleness, is for "all time" it is hard to
say. Since, as you say yourself, he brings all his problems and
characters to the test of love, we may hope that it will endure at least
till the infinite emotions of love are replaced by the exact simplicity
of perfected Eugenics. But even by then, I think, women would not have
changed much; and the women of Turgenev who understood them so tenderly,
so reverently and so passionately--they, at least, are certainly for all
time.
Women are, one may say, the foundation of his art. They are Russian of
course. Never was a writer so profoundly, so whole-souledly national.
But for non-Russian readers, Turgenev's Russia is but a canvas on which
the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in the
great light and the free air of the world. Had he invented them all and
also every stick and stone, brook and hill and field in which they move,
his personages would have been just as true and as poignant in their
perplexed lives. They are his own and also universal. Any one can
accept them with no more question than one accepts the Italians of
Shakespeare.
In the larger, non-Russian view, what should make Turgenev sympathetic
and welcome to the English-speaking world, is his essential humanity. All
his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors, are
human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking
themselves to pieces in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions.
They are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit
to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from
day to day the ever-receding future.
I began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a sense. But one ends by
having some doubts. To be so great without the slightest parade and so
fine without any tricks of "cleverness" must be fatal to any man's
influence with his contemporaries.
Frankly, I don't want to appear as qualified to judge of things Russian.
It wouldn't be true. I know nothing of them. But I am aware of a few
general truths, such as, for instance, that no man, whatever may be the
loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives and the peace of
his conscience--no man, I say, likes to be beaten with sticks during the
greater part of his existence. From what one knows of his history it
appears clearly that in Russia almost any stick was good enough to beat
Turgenev with in his latter years. When he died the characteristically
chicken-hearted Autocracy hastened to stuff his mortal envelope into the
tomb it refused to honour, while the sensitive Revolutionists went on for
a time flinging after his shade those jeers and curses from which that
impartial lover of _all_ his countrymen had suffered so much in his
lifetime. For he, too, was sensitive. Every page of his writing bears
its testimony to the fatal absence of callousness in the man.
And now he suffers a little from other things. In truth it is not the
convulsed terror-haunted Dostoievski but the serene Turgenev who is under
a curse. For only think! Every gift has been heaped on his cradle:
absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the
quickest responsiveness, penetrating insight and unfailing generosity of
judgment, an exquisite perception of the visible world and an unerring
instinct for the significant, for the essential in the life of men and
women, the clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest sympathy--and
all that in perfect measure. There's enough there to ruin the prospects
of any writer. For you know very well, my dear Edward, that if you had
Antinous himself in a booth of the world's fair, and killed yourself in
protesting that his soul was as perfect as his body, you wouldn't get one
per cent. of the crowd struggling next door for a sight of the Double-
headed Nightingale or of some weak-kneed giant grinning through a horse
collar.
J. C.
STEPHEN CRANE--A NOTE WITHOUT DATES--1919
My acquaintance with Stephen Crane was brought about by Mr. Pawling,
partner in the publishing firm of Mr. William Heinemann.
One day Mr. Pawling said to me: "Stephen Crane has arrived in England. I
asked him if there was anybody he wanted to meet and he mentioned two
names. One of them was yours." I had then just been reading, like the
rest of the world, Crane's _Red Badge of Courage_. The subject of that
story was war, from the point of view of an individual soldier's
emotions. That individual (he remains nameless throughout) was
interesting enough in himself, but on turning over the pages of that
little book which had for the moment secured such a noisy recognition I
had been even more interested in the personality of the writer. The
picture of a simple and untried youth becoming through the needs of his
country part of a great fighting machine was presented with an
earnestness of purpose, a sense of tragic issues, and an imaginative
force of expression which struck me as quite uncommon and altogether
worthy of admiration.
Apparently Stephen Crane had received a favourable impression from the
reading of the _Nigger of the Narcissus_, a book of mine which had also
been published lately. I was truly pleased to hear this.
On my next visit to town we met at a lunch. I saw a young man of medium
stature and slender build, with very steady, penetrating blue eyes, the
eyes of a being who not only sees visions but can brood over them to some
purpose.
He had indeed a wonderful power of vision, which he applied to the things
of this earth and of our mortal humanity with a penetrating force that
seemed to reach, within life's appearances and forms, the very spirit of
life's truth. His ignorance of the world at large--he had seen very
little of it--did not stand in the way of his imaginative grasp of facts,
events, and picturesque men.
His manner was very quiet, his personality at first sight interesting,
and he talked slowly with an intonation which on some people, mainly
Americans, had, I believe, a jarring effect. But not on me. Whatever he
said had a personal note, and he expressed himself with a graphic
simplicity which was extremely engaging. He knew little of literature,
either of his own country or of any other, but he was himself a wonderful
artist in words whenever he took a pen into his hand. Then his gift came
out--and it was seen then to be much more than mere felicity of language.
His impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the surface. In his
writing he was very sure of his effects. I don't think he was ever in
doubt about what he could do. Yet it often seemed to me that he was but
half aware of the exceptional quality of his achievement.
This achievement was curtailed by his early death. It was a great loss
to his friends, but perhaps not so much to literature. I think that he
had given his measure fully in the few books he had the time to write.
Let me not be misunderstood: the loss was great, but it was the loss of
the delight his art could give, not the loss of any further possible
revelation. As to himself, who can say how much he gained or lost by
quitting so early this world of the living, which he knew how to set
before us in the terms of his own artistic vision? Perhaps he did not
lose a great deal. The recognition he was accorded was rather languid
and given him grudgingly. The worthiest welcome he secured for his tales
in this country was from Mr. W. Henley in the _New Review_ and later,
towards the end of his life, from the late Mr. William Blackwood in his
magazine. For the rest I must say that during his sojourn in England he
had the misfortune to be, as the French say, _mal entoure_. He was beset
by people who understood not the quality of his genius and were
antagonistic to the deeper fineness of his nature. Some of them have
died since, but dead or alive they are not worth speaking about now. I
don't think he had any illusions about them himself: yet there was a
strain of good-nature and perhaps of weakness in his character which
prevented him from shaking himself free from their worthless and
patronising attentions, which in those days caused me much secret
irritation whenever I stayed with him in either of his English homes. My
wife and I like best to remember him riding to meet us at the gate of the
Park at Brede. Born master of his sincere impressions, he was also a
born horseman. He never appeared so happy or so much to advantage as on
the back of a horse. He had formed the project of teaching my eldest boy
to ride, and meantime, when the child was about two years old, presented
him with his first dog.
I saw Stephen Crane a few days after his arrival in London. I saw him
for the last time on his last day in England. It was in Dover, in a big
hotel, in a bedroom with a large window looking on to the sea. He had
been very ill and Mrs. Crane was taking him to some place in Germany, but
one glance at that wasted face was enough to tell me that it was the most
forlorn of all hopes. The last words he breathed out to me were: "I am
tired. Give my love to your wife and child." When I stopped at the door
for another look I saw that he had turned his head on the pillow and was
staring wistfully out of the window at the sails of a cutter yacht that
glided slowly across the frame, like a dim shadow against the grey sky.
Those who have read his little tale, "Horses," and the story, "The Open
Boat," in the volume of that name, know with what fine understanding he
loved horses and the sea. And his passage on this earth was like that of
a horseman riding swiftly in the dawn of a day fated to be short and
without sunshine.
TALES OF THE SEA--1898
It is by his irresistible power to reach the adventurous side in the
character, not only of his own, but of all nations, that Marryat is
largely human. He is the enslaver of youth, not by the literary
artifices of presentation, but by the natural glamour of his own
temperament. To his young heroes the beginning of life is a splendid and
warlike lark, ending at last in inheritance and marriage. His novels are
not the outcome of his art, but of his character, like the deeds that
make up his record of naval service. To the artist his work is
interesting as a completely successful expression of an unartistic
nature. It is absolutely amazing to us, as the disclosure of the spirit
animating the stirring time when the nineteenth century was young. There
is an air of fable about it. Its loss would be irreparable, like the
curtailment of national story or the loss of an historical document. It
is the beginning and the embodiment of an inspiring tradition.
To this writer of the sea the sea was not an element. It was a stage,
where was displayed an exhibition of valour, and of such achievement as
the world had never seen before. The greatness of that achievement
cannot be pronounced imaginary, since its reality has affected the
destinies of nations; nevertheless, in its grandeur it has all the
remoteness of an ideal. History preserves the skeleton of facts and,
here and there, a figure or a name; but it is in Marryat's novels that we
find the mass of the nameless, that we see them in the flesh, that we
obtain a glimpse of the everyday life and an insight into the spirit
animating the crowd of obscure men who knew how to build for their
country such a shining monument of memories.
Marryat is really a writer of the Service. What sets him apart is his
fidelity. His pen serves his country as well as did his professional
skill and his renowned courage. His figures move about between water and
sky, and the water and the sky are there only to frame the deeds of the
Service. His novels, like amphibious creatures, live on the sea and
frequent the shore, where they flounder deplorably. The loves and the
hates of his boys are as primitive as their virtues and their vices. His
women, from the beautiful Agnes to the witch-like mother of Lieutenant
Vanslyperken, are, with the exception of the sailors' wives, like the
shadows of what has never been. His Silvas, his Ribieras, his Shriftens,
his Delmars remind us of people we have heard of somewhere, many times,
without ever believing in their existence. His morality is honourable
and conventional. There is cruelty in his fun and he can invent puns in
the midst of carnage. His naiveties are perpetrated in a lurid light.
There is an endless variety of types, all surface, with hard edges, with
memorable eccentricities of outline, with a childish and heroic effect in
the drawing. They do not belong to life; they belong exclusively to the
Service. And yet they live; there is a truth in them, the truth of their
time; a headlong, reckless audacity, an intimacy with violence, an
unthinking fearlessness, and an exuberance of vitality which only years
of war and victories can give. His adventures are enthralling; the
rapidity of his action fascinates; his method is crude, his
sentimentality, obviously incidental, is often factitious. His greatness
is undeniable.
It is undeniable. To a multitude of readers the navy of to-day is
Marryat's navy still. He has created a priceless legend. If he be not
immortal, yet he will last long enough for the highest ambition, because
he has dealt manfully with an inspiring phase in the history of that
Service on which the life of his country depends. The tradition of the
great past he has fixed in his pages will be cherished for ever as the
guarantee of the future. He loved his country first, the Service next,
the sea perhaps not at all. But the sea loved him without reserve. It
gave him his professional distinction and his author's fame--a fame such
as not often falls to the lot of a true artist.
At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, another man wrote of
the sea with true artistic instinct. He is not invincibly young and
heroic; he is mature and human, though for him also the stress of
adventure and endeavour must end fatally in inheritance and marriage. For
James Fenimore Cooper nature was not the frame-work, it was an essential
part of existence. He could hear its voice, he could understand its
silence, and he could interpret both for us in his prose with all that
felicity and sureness of effect that belong to a poetical conception
alone. His fame, as wide but less brilliant than that of his
contemporary, rests mostly on a novel which is not of the sea. But he
loved the sea and looked at it with consummate understanding. In his sea
tales the sea inter-penetrates with life; it is in a subtle way a factor
in the problem of existence, and, for all its greatness, it is always in
touch with the men, who, bound on errands of war or gain, traverse its
immense solitudes. His descriptions have the magistral ampleness of a
gesture indicating the sweep of a vast horizon. They embrace the colours
of sunset, the peace of starlight, the aspects of calm and storm, the
great loneliness of the waters, the stillness of watchful coasts, and the
alert readiness which marks men who live face to face with the promise
and the menace of the sea.
He knows the men and he knows the sea. His method may be often faulty,
but his art is genuine. The truth is within him. The road to legitimate
realism is through poetical feeling, and he possesses that--only it is
expressed in the leisurely manner of his time. He has the knowledge of
simple hearts. Long Tom Coffin is a monumental seaman with the
individuality of life and the significance of a type. It is hard to
believe that Manual and Borroughcliffe, Mr. Marble of Marble-Head,
Captain Tuck of the packet-ship _Montauk_, or Daggett, the tenacious
commander of the _Sea Lion_ of Martha's Vineyard, must pass away some day
and be utterly forgotten. His sympathy is large, and his humour is as
genuine--and as perfectly unaffected--as is his art. In certain passages
he reaches, very simply, the heights of inspired vision.
He wrote before the great American language was born, and he wrote as
well as any novelist of his time. If he pitches upon episodes redounding
to the glory of the young republic, surely England has glory enough to
forgive him, for the sake of his excellence, the patriotic bias at her
expense. The interest of his tales is convincing and unflagging; and
there runs through his work a steady vein of friendliness for the old
country which the succeeding generations of his compatriots have replaced
by a less definite sentiment.
Perhaps no two authors of fiction influenced so many lives and gave to so
many the initial impulse towards a glorious or a useful career. Through
the distances of space and time those two men of another race have shaped
also the life of the writer of this appreciation. Life is life, and art
is art--and truth is hard to find in either. Yet in testimony to the
achievement of both these authors it may be said that, in the case of the
writer at least, the youthful glamour, the headlong vitality of the one
and the profound sympathy, the artistic insight of the other--to which he
had surrendered--have withstood the brutal shock of facts and the wear of
laborious years. He has never regretted his surrender.
AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA {3}--1898
In his new volume, Mr. Hugh Clifford, at the beginning of the sketch
entitled "At the Heels of the White Man," expresses his anxiety as to the
state of England's account in the Day-Book of the Recording Angel "for
the good and the bad we have done--both with the most excellent
intentions." The intentions will, no doubt, count for something, though,
of course, every nation's conquests are paved with good intentions; or it
may be that the Recording Angel, looking compassionately at the strife of
hearts, may disdain to enter into the Eternal Book the facts of a
struggle which has the reward of its righteousness even on this earth--in
victory and lasting greatness, or in defeat and humiliation.
And, also, love will count for much. If the opinion of a looker-on from
afar is worth anything, Mr. Hugh Clifford's anxiety about his country's
record is needless. To the Malays whom he governs, instructs, and guides
he is the embodiment of the intentions, of the conscience and might of
his race. And of all the nations conquering distant territories in the
name of the most excellent intentions, England alone sends out men who,
with such a transparent sincerity of feeling, can speak, as Mr. Hugh
Clifford does, of the place of toil and exile as "the land which is very
dear to me, where the best years of my life have been spent"--and where
(I would stake my right hand on it) his name is pronounced with respect
and affection by those brown men about whom he writes.
All these studies are on a high level of interest, though not all on the
same level. The descriptive chapters, results of personal observation,
seem to me the most interesting. And, indeed, in a book of this kind it
is the author's personality which awakens the greatest interest; it
shapes itself before one in the ring of sentences, it is seen between the
lines--like the progress of a traveller in the jungle that may be traced
by the sound of the _parang_ chopping the swaying creepers, while the man
himself is glimpsed, now and then, indistinct and passing between the
trees. Thus in his very vagueness of appearance, the writer seen through
the leaves of his book becomes a fascinating companion in a land of
fascination.
It is when dealing with the aspects of nature that Mr. Hugh Clifford is
most convincing. He looks upon them lovingly, for the land is "very dear
to him," and he records his cherished impressions so that the forest, the
great flood, the jungle, the rapid river, and the menacing rock dwell in
the memory of the reader long after the book is closed. He does not say
anything, in so many words, of his affection for those who live amid the
scenes he describes so well, but his humanity is large enough to pardon
us if we suspect him of such a rare weakness. In his preface he
expresses the regret at not having the gifts (whatever they may be) of
the kailyard school, or--looking up to a very different plane--the genius
of Mr. Barrie. He has, however, gifts of his own, and his genius has
served his country and his fortunes in another direction. Yet it is when
attempting what he professes himself unable to do, in telling us the
simple story of Umat, the punkah-puller, with unaffected simplicity and
half-concealed tenderness, that he comes nearest to artistic achievement.
Each study in this volume presents some idea, illustrated by a fact told
without artifice, but with an elective sureness of knowledge. The story
of Tukang Burok's love, related in the old man's own words, conveys the
very breath of Malay thought and speech. In "His Little Bill," the
coolie, Lim Teng Wah, facing his debtor, stands very distinct before us,
an insignificant and tragic victim of fate with whom he had quarrelled to
the death over a matter of seven dollars and sixty-eight cents. The
story of "The Schooner with a Past" may be heard, from the Straits
eastward, with many variations. Out in the Pacific the schooner becomes
a cutter, and the pearl-divers are replaced by the Black-birds of the
Labour Trade. But Mr. Hugh Clifford's variation is very good. There is
a passage in it--a trifle--just the diver as seen coming up from the
depths, that in its dozen lines or so attains to distinct artistic value.
And, scattered through the book, there are many other passages of almost
equal descriptive excellence.
Nevertheless, to apply artistic standards to this book would be a
fundamental error in appreciation. Like faith, enthusiasm, or heroism,
art veils part of the truth of life to make the rest appear more
splendid, inspiring, or sinister. And this book is only truth,
interesting and futile, truth unadorned, simple and straightforward. The
Resident of Pahang has the devoted friendship of Umat, the punkah-puller,
he has an individual faculty of vision, a large sympathy, and the
scrupulous consciousness of the good and evil in his hands. He may as
well rest content with such gifts. One cannot expect to be, at the same
time, a ruler of men and an irreproachable player on the flute.
A HAPPY WANDERER--1910
Converts are interesting people. Most of us, if you will pardon me for
betraying the universal secret, have, at some time or other, discovered
in ourselves a readiness to stray far, ever so far, on the wrong road.
And what did we do in our pride and our cowardice? Casting fearful
glances and waiting for a dark moment, we buried our discovery
discreetly, and kept on in the old direction, on that old, beaten track
we have not had courage enough to leave, and which we perceive now more
clearly than before to be but the arid way of the grave.
The convert, the man capable of grace (I am speaking here in a secular
sense), is not discreet. His pride is of another kind; he jumps gladly
off the track--the touch of grace is mostly sudden--and facing about in a
new direction may even attain the illusion of having turned his back on
Death itself.
Some converts have, indeed, earned immortality by their exquisite
indiscretion. The most illustrious example of a convert, that Flower of
chivalry, Don Quixote de la Mancha, remains for all the world the only
genuine immortal hidalgo. The delectable Knight of Spain became
converted, as you know, from the ways of a small country squire to an
imperative faith in a tender and sublime mission. Forthwith he was
beaten with sticks and in due course shut up in a wooden cage by the
Barber and the Priest, the fit ministers of a justly shocked social
order. I do not know if it has occurred to anybody yet to shut up Mr.
Luffmann in a wooden cage. {4} I do not raise the point because I wish
him any harm. Quite the contrary. I am a humane person. Let him take
it as the highest praise--but I must say that he richly deserves that
sort of attention.
On the other hand I would not have him unduly puffed up with the pride of
the exalted association. The grave wisdom, the admirable amenity, the
serene grace of the secular patron-saint of all mortals converted to
noble visions are not his. Mr. Luffmann has no mission. He is no Knight
sublimely Errant. But he is an excellent Vagabond. He is full of merit.
That peripatetic guide, philosopher and friend of all nations, Mr.
Roosevelt, would promptly excommunicate him with a big stick. The truth
is that the ex-autocrat of all the States does not like rebels against
the sullen order of our universe. Make the best of it or perish--he
cries. A sane lineal successor of the Barber and the Priest, and a
sagacious political heir of the incomparable Sancho Panza (another great
Governor), that distinguished litterateur has no mercy for dreamers. And
our author happens to be a man of (you may trace them in his books) some
rather fine reveries.
Every convert begins by being a rebel, and I do not see myself how any
mercy can possibly be extended to Mr. Luffmann. He is a convert from the
creed of strenuous life. For this renegade the body is of little
account; to him work appears criminal when it suppresses the demands of
the inner life; while he was young he did grind virtuously at the sacred
handle, and now, he says, he has fallen into disgrace with some people
because he believes no longer in toil without end. Certain respectable
folk hate him--so he says--because he dares to think that "poetry,
beauty, and the broad face of the world are the best things to be in love
with." He confesses to loving Spain on the ground that she is "the land
of to-morrow, and holds the gospel of never-mind." The universal
striving to push ahead he considers mere vulgar folly. Didn't I tell you
he was a fit subject for the cage?
It is a relief (we are all humane, are we not?) to discover that this
desperate character is not altogether an outcast. Little girls seem to
like him. One of them, after listening to some of his tales, remarked to
her mother, "Wouldn't it be lovely if what he says were true!" Here you
have Woman! The charming creatures will neither strain at a camel nor
swallow a gnat. Not publicly. These operations, without which the world
they have such a large share in could not go on for ten minutes, are left
to us--men. And then we are chided for being coarse. This is a refined
objection but does not seem fair. Another little girl--or perhaps the
same little girl--wrote to him in Cordova, "I hope Poste-Restante is a
nice place, and that you are very comfortable." Woman again! I have in
my time told some stories which are (I hate false modesty) both true and
lovely. Yet no little girl ever wrote to me in kindly terms. And why?
Simply because I am not enough of a Vagabond. The dear despots of the
fireside have a weakness for lawless characters. This is amiable, but
does not seem rational.
Being Quixotic, Mr. Luffmann is no Impressionist. He is far too earnest
in his heart, and not half sufficiently precise in his style to be that.
But he is an excellent narrator. More than any Vagabond I have ever met,
he knows what he is about. There is not one of his quiet days which is
dull. You will find in them a love-story not made up, the
_coup-de-foudre_, the lightning-stroke of Spanish love; and you will
marvel how a spell so sudden and vehement can be at the same time so
tragically delicate. You will find there landladies devoured with
jealousy, astute housekeepers, delightful boys, wise peasants, touchy
shopkeepers, all the _cosas de Espana_--and, in addition, the pale girl
Rosario. I recommend that pathetic and silent victim of fate to your
benevolent compassion. You will find in his pages the humours of
starving workers of the soil, the vision among the mountains of an
exulting mad spirit in a mighty body, and many other visions worthy of
attention. And they are exact visions, for this idealist is no
visionary. He is in sympathy with suffering mankind, and has a grasp on
real human affairs. I mean the great and pitiful affairs concerned with
bread, love, and the obscure, unexpressed needs which drive great crowds
to prayer in the holy places of the earth.
But I like his conception of what a "quiet" life is like! His quiet days
require no fewer than forty-two of the forty-nine provinces of Spain to
take their ease in. For his unquiet days, I presume, the seven--or is it
nine?--crystal spheres of Alexandrian cosmogony would afford, but a
wretchedly straitened space. A most unconventional thing is his notion
of quietness. One would take it as a joke; only that, perchance, to the
author of _Quiet Days in Spain_ all days may seem quiet, because, a
courageous convert, he is now at peace with himself.
How better can we take leave of this interesting Vagabond than with the
road salutation of passing wayfarers: "And on you be peace! . . . You
have chosen your ideal, and it is a good choice. There's nothing like
giving up one's life to an unselfish passion. Let the rich and the
powerful of this globe preach their sound gospel of palpable progress.
The part of the ideal you embrace is the better one, if only in its
illusions. No great passion can be barren. May a world of gracious and
poignant images attend the lofty solitude of your renunciation!"
THE LIFE BEYOND--1910
You have no doubt noticed that certain books produce a sort of physical
effect on one--mostly an audible effect. I am not alluding here to Blue
books or to books of statistics. The effect of these is simply
exasperating and no more. No! the books I have in mind are just the
common books of commerce you and I read when we have five minutes to
spare, the usual hired books published by ordinary publishers, printed by
ordinary printers, and censored (when they happen to be novels) by the
usual circulating libraries, the guardians of our firesides, whose names
are household words within the four seas.
To see the fair and the brave of this free country surrendering
themselves with unbounded trust to the direction of the circulating
libraries is very touching. It is even, in a sense, a beautiful
spectacle, because, as you know, humility is a rare and fragrant virtue;
and what can be more humble than to surrender your morals and your
intellect to the judgment of one of your tradesmen? I suppose that there
are some very perfect people who allow the Army and Navy Stores to censor
their diet. So much merit, however, I imagine, is not frequently met
with here below. The flesh, alas! is weak, and--from a certain point of
view--so important!
A superficial person might be rendered miserable by the simple question:
What would become of us if the circulating libraries ceased to exist? It
is a horrid and almost indelicate supposition, but let us be brave and
face the truth. On this earth of ours nothing lasts. _Tout passe, tout
casse, tout lasse_. Imagine the utter wreck overtaking the morals of our
beautiful country-houses should the circulating libraries suddenly die!
But pray do not shudder. There is no occasion.
Their spirit shall survive. I declare this from inward conviction, and
also from scientific information received lately. For observe: the
circulating libraries are human institutions. I beg you to follow me
closely. They are human institutions, and being human, they are not
animal, and, therefore, they are spiritual. Thus, any man with enough
money to take a shop, stock his shelves, and pay for advertisements shall
be able to evoke the pure and censorious spectre of the circulating
libraries whenever his own commercial spirit moves him.
For, and this is the information alluded to above, Science, having in its
infinite wanderings run up against various wonders and mysteries, is
apparently willing now to allow a spiritual quality to man and, I
conclude, to all his works as well.
I do not know exactly what this "Science" may be; and I do not think that
anybody else knows; but that is the information stated shortly. It is
contained in a book reposing under my thoughtful eyes. {5} I know it is
not a censored book, because I can see for myself that it is not a novel.
The author, on his side, warns me that it is not philosophy, that it is
not metaphysics, that it is not natural science. After this
comprehensive warning, the definition of the book becomes, you will
admit, a pretty hard nut to crack.
But meantime let us return for a moment to my opening remark about the
physical effect of some common, hired books. A few of them (not
necessarily books of verse) are melodious; the music some others make for
you as you read has the disagreeable emphasis of a barrel-organ; the
tinkling-cymbals book (it was not written by a humorist) I only met once.
But there is infinite variety in the noises books do make. I have now on
my shelves a book apparently of the most valuable kind which, before I
have read half-a-dozen lines, begins to make a noise like a buzz-saw. I
am inconsolable; I shall never, I fear, discover what it is all about,
for the buzzing covers the words, and at every try I am absolutely forced
to give it up ere the end of the page is reached.
The book, however, which I have found so difficult to define, is by no
means noisy. As a mere piece of writing it may be described as being
breathless itself and taking the reader's breath away, not by the
magnitude of its message but by a sort of anxious volubility in the
delivery. The constantly elusive argument and the illustrative
quotations go on without a single reflective pause. For this reason
alone the reading of that work is a fatiguing process.
The author himself (I use his own words) "suspects" that what he has
written "may be theology after all." It may be. It is not my place
either to allay or to confirm the author's suspicion of his own work. But
I will state its main thesis: "That science regarded in the gross
dictates the spirituality of man and strongly implies a spiritual destiny
for individual human beings." This means: Existence after Death--that
is, Immortality.
To find out its value you must go to the book. But I will observe here
that an Immortality liable at any moment to betray itself fatuously by
the forcible incantations of Mr. Stead or Professor Crookes is scarcely
worth having. Can you imagine anything more squalid than an Immortality
at the beck and call of Eusapia Palladino? That woman lives on the top
floor of a Neapolitan house, and gets our poor, pitiful, august dead,
flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, spirit of our spirit, who have
loved, suffered and died, as we must love, suffer, and die--she gets them
to beat tambourines in a corner and protrude shadowy limbs through a
curtain. This is particularly horrible, because, if one had to put one's
faith in these things one could not even die safely from disgust, as one
would long to do.
And to believe that these manifestations, which the author evidently
takes for modern miracles, will stay our tottering faith; to believe that
the new psychology has, only the other day, discovered man to be a
"spiritual mystery," is really carrying humility towards that universal
provider, Science, too far.
* * * * *
We moderns have complicated our old perplexities to the point of
absurdity; our perplexities older than religion itself. It is not for
nothing that for so many centuries the priest, mounting the steps of the
altar, murmurs, "Why art thou sad, my soul, and why dost thou trouble
me?" Since the day of Creation two veiled figures, Doubt and Melancholy,
are pacing endlessly in the sunshine of the world. What humanity needs
is not the promise of scientific immortality, but compassionate pity in
this life and infinite mercy on the Day of Judgment.
And, for the rest, during this transient hour of our pilgrimage, we may
well be content to repeat the Invocation of Sar Peladan. Sar Peladan was
an occultist, a seer, a modern magician. He believed in astrology, in
the spirits of the air, in elves; he was marvellously and deliciously
absurd. Incidentally he wrote some incomprehensible poems and a few
pages of harmonious prose, for, you must know, "a magician is nothing
else but a great harmonist." Here are some eight lines of the
magnificent Invocation. Let me, however, warn you, strictly between
ourselves, that my translation is execrable. I am sorry to say I am no
magician.
"O Nature, indulgent Mother, forgive! Open your arms to the son,
prodigal and weary.
"I have attempted to tear asunder the veil you have hung to conceal from
us the pain of life, and I have been wounded by the mystery. . . .
OEdipus, half way to finding the word of the enigma, young Faust,
regretting already the simple life, the life of the heart, I come back to
you repentant, reconciled, O gentle deceiver!"
THE ASCENDING EFFORT--1910
Much good paper has been lamentably wasted to prove that science has
destroyed, that it is destroying, or, some day, may destroy poetry.
Meantime, unblushing, unseen, and often unheard, the guileless poets have
gone on singing in a sweet strain. How they dare do the impossible and
virtually forbidden thing is a cause for wonder but not for legislation.
Not yet. We are at present too busy reforming the silent burglar and
planning concerts to soothe the savage breast of the yelling hooligan. As
somebody--perhaps a publisher--said lately: "Poetry is of no account now-
a-days."
But it is not totally neglected. Those persons with gold-rimmed
spectacles whose usual occupation is to spy upon the obvious have
remarked audibly (on several occasions) that poetry has so far not given
to science any acknowledgment worthy of its distinguished position in the
popular mind. Except that Tennyson looked down the throat of a foxglove,
that Erasmus Darwin wrote _The Loves of the Plants_ and a scoffer _The
Loves of the Triangles_, poets have been supposed to be indecorously
blind to the progress of science. What tribute, for instance, has poetry
paid to electricity? All I can remember on the spur of the moment is Mr.
Arthur Symons' line about arc lamps: "Hung with the globes of some
unnatural fruit."
Commerce and Manufacture praise on every hand in their not mute but
inarticulate way the glories of science. Poetry does not play its part.
Behold John Keats, skilful with the surgeon's knife; but when he writes
poetry his inspiration is not from the operating table. Here I am
reminded, though, of a modern instance to the contrary in prose. Mr. H.
G. Wells, who, as far as I know, has never written a line of verse, was
inspired a few years ago to write a short story, _Under the Knife_. Out
of a clock-dial, a brass rod, and a whiff of chloroform, he has conjured
for us a sensation of space and eternity, evoked the face of the
Unknowable, and an awesome, august voice, like the voice of the Judgment
Day; a great voice, perhaps the voice of science itself, uttering the
words: "There shall be no more pain!" I advise you to look up that
story, so human and so intimate, because Mr. Wells, the writer of prose
whose amazing inventiveness we all know, remains a poet even in his most
perverse moments of scorn for things as they are. His poetic imagination
is sometimes even greater than his inventiveness, I am not afraid to say.
But, indeed, imaginative faculty would make any man a poet--were he born
without tongue for speech and without hands to seize his fancy and fasten
her down to a wretched piece of paper.
* * * * *
The book {6} which in the course of the last few days I have opened and
shut several times is not imaginative. But, on the other hand, it is not
a dumb book, as some are. It has even a sort of sober and serious
eloquence, reminding us that not poetry alone is at fault in this matter.
Mr. Bourne begins his _Ascending Effort_ with a remark by Sir Francis
Galton upon Eugenics that "if the principles he was advocating were to
become effective they must be introduced into the national conscience,
like a new religion." "Introduced" suggests compulsory vaccination. Mr.
Bourne, who is not a theologian, wishes to league together not science
and religion, but science and the arts. "The intoxicating power of art,"
he thinks, is the very thing needed to give the desired effect to the
doctrines of science. In uninspired phrase he points to the arts playing
once upon a time a part in "popularising the Christian tenets." With
painstaking fervour as great as the fervour of prophets, but not so
persuasive, he foresees the arts some day popularising science. Until
that day dawns, science will continue to be lame and poetry blind. He
himself cannot smooth or even point out the way, though he thinks that "a
really prudent people would be greedy of beauty," and their public
authorities "as careful of the sense of comfort as of sanitation."
As the writer of those remarkable rustic note-books, _The Bettesworth
Book_ and _Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer_, the author has a claim upon our
attention. But his seriousness, his patience, his almost touching
sincerity, can only command the respect of his readers and nothing more.
He is obsessed by science, haunted and shadowed by it, until he has been
bewildered into awe. He knows, indeed, that art owes its triumphs and
its subtle influence to the fact that it issues straight from our organic
vitality, and is a movement of life-cells with their matchless
unintellectual knowledge. But the fact that poetry does not seem
obviously in love with science has never made him doubt whether it may
not be an argument against his haste to see the marriage ceremony
performed amid public rejoicings.
Many a man has heard or read and believes that the earth goes round the
sun; one small blob of mud among several others, spinning ridiculously
with a waggling motion like a top about to fall. This is the Copernican
system, and the man believes in the system without often knowing as much
about it as its name. But while watching a sunset he sheds his belief;
he sees the sun as a small and useful object, the servant of his needs
and the witness of his ascending effort, sinking slowly behind a range of
mountains, and then he holds the system of Ptolemy. He holds it without
knowing it. In the same way a poet hears, reads, and believes a thousand
undeniable truths which have not yet got into his blood, nor will do
after reading Mr. Bourne's book; he writes, therefore, as if neither
truths nor book existed. Life and the arts follow dark courses, and will
not turn aside to the brilliant arc-lights of science. Some day, without
a doubt,--and it may be a consolation to Mr. Bourne to know it--fully
informed critics will point out that Mr. Davies's poem on a dark woman
combing her hair must have been written after the invasion of
appendicitis, and that Mr. Yeats's "Had I the heaven's embroidered
cloths" came before radium was quite unnecessarily dragged out of its
respectable obscurity in pitchblende to upset the venerable (and
comparatively naive) chemistry of our young days.
There are times when the tyranny of science and the cant of science are
alarming, but there are other times when they are entertaining--and this
is one of them. "Many a man prides himself" says Mr. Bourne, "on his
piety or his views of art, whose whole range of ideas, could they be
investigated, would be found ordinary, if not base, because they have
been adopted in compliance with some external persuasion or to serve some
timid purpose instead of proceeding authoritatively from the living
selection of his hereditary taste." This extract is a fair sample of the
book's thought and of its style. But Mr. Bourne seems to forget that
"persuasion" is a vain thing. The appreciation of great art comes from
within.
It is but the merest justice to say that the transparent honesty of Mr.
Bourne's purpose is undeniable. But the whole book is simply an earnest
expression of a pious wish; and, like the generality of pious wishes,
this one seems of little dynamic value--besides being impracticable.
Yes, indeed. Art has served Religion; artists have found the most
exalted inspiration in Christianity; but the light of Transfiguration
which has illuminated the profoundest mysteries of our sinful souls is
not the light of the generating stations, which exposes the depths of our
infatuation where our mere cleverness is permitted for a while to grope
for the unessential among invincible shadows.
THE CENSOR OF PLAYS--AN APPRECIATION--1907
A couple of years ago I was moved to write a one-act play--and I lived
long enough to accomplish the task. We live and learn. When the play
was finished I was informed that it had to be licensed for performance.
Thus I learned of the existence of the Censor of Plays. I may say
without vanity that I am intelligent enough to have been astonished by
that piece of information: for facts must stand in some relation to time
and space, and I was aware of being in England--in the twentieth-century
England. The fact did not fit the date and the place. That was my first
thought. It was, in short, an improper fact. I beg you to believe that
I am writing in all seriousness and am weighing my words scrupulously.
Therefore I don't say inappropriate. I say improper--that is: something
to be ashamed of. And at first this impression was confirmed by the
obscurity in which the figure embodying this after all considerable fact
had its being. The Censor of Plays! His name was not in the mouths of
all men. Far from it. He seemed stealthy and remote. There was about
that figure the scent of the far East, like the peculiar atmosphere of a
Mandarin's back yard, and the mustiness of the Middle Ages, that epoch
when mankind tried to stand still in a monstrous illusion of final
certitude attained in morals, intellect and conscience.
It was a disagreeable impression. But I reflected that probably the
censorship of plays was an inactive monstrosity; not exactly a survival,
since it seemed obviously at variance with the genius of the people, but
an heirloom of past ages, a bizarre and imported curiosity preserved
because of that weakness one has for one's old possessions apart from any
intrinsic value; one more object of exotic _virtu_, an Oriental
_potiche_, a _magot chinois_ conceived by a childish and extravagant
imagination, but allowed to stand in stolid impotence in the twilight of
the upper shelf.
Thus I quieted my uneasy mind. Its uneasiness had nothing to do with the
fate of my one-act play. The play was duly produced, and an
exceptionally intelligent audience stared it coldly off the boards. It
ceased to exist. It was a fair and open execution. But having survived
the freezing atmosphere of that auditorium I continued to exist,
labouring under no sense of wrong. I was not pleased, but I was content.
I was content to accept the verdict of a free and independent public,
judging after its conscience the work of its free, independent and
conscientious servant--the artist.
Only thus can the dignity of artistic servitude be preserved--not to
speak of the bare existence of the artist and the self-respect of the
man. I shall say nothing of the self-respect of the public. To the self-
respect of the public the present appeal against the censorship is being
made and I join in it with all my heart.
For I have lived long enough to learn that the monstrous and outlandish
figure, the _magot chinois_ whom I believed to be but a memorial of our
forefathers' mental aberration, that grotesque _potiche_, works! The
absurd and hollow creature of clay seems to be alive with a sort of
(surely) unconscious life worthy of its traditions. It heaves its
stomach, it rolls its eyes, it brandishes a monstrous arm: and with the
censorship, like a Bravo of old Venice with a more carnal weapon, stabs
its victim from behind in the twilight of its upper shelf. Less
picturesque than the Venetian in cloak and mask, less estimable, too, in
this, that the assassin plied his moral trade at his own risk deriving no
countenance from the powers of the Republic, it stands more malevolent,
inasmuch that the Bravo striking in the dusk killed but the body, whereas
the grotesque thing nodding its mandarin head may in its absurd
unconsciousness strike down at any time the spirit of an honest, of an
artistic, perhaps of a sublime creation.
This Chinese monstrosity, disguised in the trousers of the Western
Barbarian and provided by the State with the immortal Mr. Stiggins's plug
hat and umbrella, is with us. It is an office. An office of trust. And
from time to time there is found an official to fill it. He is a public
man. The least prominent of public men, the most unobtrusive, the most
obscure if not the most modest.
But however obscure, a public man may be told the truth if only once in
his life. His office flourishes in the shade; not in the rustic shade
beloved of the violet but in the muddled twilight of mind, where tyranny
of every sort flourishes. Its holder need not have either brain or
heart, no sight, no taste, no imagination, not even bowels of compassion.
He needs not these things. He has power. He can kill thought, and
incidentally truth, and incidentally beauty, providing they seek to live
in a dramatic form. He can do it, without seeing, without understanding,
without feeling anything; out of mere stupid suspicion, as an
irresponsible Roman Caesar could kill a senator. He can do that and
there is no one to say him nay. He may call his cook (Moliere used to do
that) from below and give her five acts to judge every morning as a
matter of constant practice and still remain the unquestioned destroyer
of men's honest work. He may have a glass too much. This accident has
happened to persons of unimpeachable morality--to gentlemen. He may
suffer from spells of imbecility like Clodius. He may . . . what might
he not do! I tell you he is the Caesar of the dramatic world. There has
been since the Roman Principate nothing in the way of irresponsible power
to compare with the office of the Censor of Plays.
Looked at in this way it has some grandeur, something colossal in the
odious and the absurd. This figure in whose power it is to suppress an
intellectual conception--to kill thought (a dream for a mad brain, my
masters!)--seems designed in a spirit of bitter comedy to bring out the
greatness of a Philistine's conceit and his moral cowardice.
But this is England in the twentieth century, and one wonders that there
can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post. It is a matter
for meditation. Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion
in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must
be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being.
He must be unconscious. It is one of the qualifications for his
magistracy. Other qualifications are equally easy. He must have done
nothing, expressed nothing, imagined nothing. He must be obscure,
insignificant and mediocre--in thought, act, speech and sympathy. He
must know nothing of art, of life--and of himself. For if he did he
would not dare to be what he is. Like that much questioned and
mysterious bird, the phoenix, he sits amongst the cold ashes of his
predecessor upon the altar of morality, alone of his kind in the sight of
wondering generations.
And I will end with a quotation reproducing not perhaps the exact words
but the true spirit of a lofty conscience.
"Often when sitting down to write the notice of a play, especially when I
felt it antagonistic to my canons of art, to my tastes or my convictions,
I hesitated in the fear lest my conscientious blame might check the
development of a great talent, my sincere judgment condemn a worthy mind.
With the pen poised in my hand I hesitated, whispering to myself 'What if
I were perchance doing my part in killing a masterpiece.'"
Such were the lofty scruples of M. Jules Lemaitre--dramatist and dramatic
critic, a great citizen and a high magistrate in the Republic of Letters;
a Censor of Plays exercising his august office openly in the light of
day, with the authority of a European reputation. But then M. Jules
Lemaitre is a man possessed of wisdom, of great fame, of a fine
conscience--not an obscure hollow Chinese monstrosity ornamented with Mr.
Stiggins's plug hat and cotton umbrella by its anxious grandmother--the
State.
Frankly, is it not time to knock the improper object off its shelf? It
has stood too long there. Hatched in Pekin (I should say) by some Board
of Respectable Rites, the little caravan monster has come to us by way of
Moscow--I suppose. It is outlandish. It is not venerable. It does not
belong here. Is it not time to knock it off its dark shelf with some
implement appropriate to its worth and status? With an old broom handle
for instance.