READERS & WRITERS
Readers and Writers
(1917-1921)
By
R. H. C. (A. R. Orage)
[Illustration]
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1
_First published in 1922_
_All rights reserved_
Preface
Under the title of “Readers and Writers” and over the initials “R. H.
C.” I contributed to the _New Age_, during a period of seven or eight
years, a weekly literary causerie of which the present volume, covering
the years 1917-1921, is a partial reprint. My original design was to
treat literary events from week to week with the continuity, consistency
and policy ordinarily applied to comments on current political events;
that is to say, with equal seriousness and from a similarly more or less
fixed point of view as regards both means and end. This design involved
of necessity a freedom of expression rather out of fashion, though it was
the convention of the greatest period of English literature, namely, the
Eighteenth Century; and its pursuit in consequence brought the comments
into somewhat lively disrepute. That, however, proved not to be the
greatest difficulty. Indeed, within the last few years an almost general
demand for more serious, more outspoken and even more “savage” criticism
has been heard, and is perhaps on the way to being satisfied, though
literary susceptibilities are still far from being as well-mannered as
political susceptibilities. The greatest difficulty is encountered in the
fact that literary events, unlike political events, occur with little
apparent order, and are subject to no easily discoverable or demonstrable
direction. In a single week every literary form and tendency may find
itself illustrated, with the consequence that any attempt to set the
week’s doings in a relation of significant development is bound to fall
under the suspicion of impressionism or arbitrariness. I have no other
defence against these charges than Plato’s appeal to good judges, of whom
the best because the last is Time. Time will pronounce as only those
living critics can whose present judgments are an anticipation of Time’s.
Time will show what has been right and what wrong. Already, moreover, a
certain amount of winnowing and sifting has taken place. Some literary
values of this moment are not what they were yesterday or the day before.
A few are greater; many of them are less. My most confident prediction,
however, remains to be confirmed: it is that the perfect English style is
still to be written. That it may be in our own time is both the goal and
the guiding-star of all literary criticism that is not idle chatter.
A. R. ORAGE.
_The New Age_, 38 CURSITOR STREET, E.C. 4.
_December 1921._
Contents
PAGE
PREFACE 5
FONTENELLE 15
BIOGRAPHY 16
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PRESS 17
CRITICS BEWARE 20
HENRY JAMES 22
TURGENEV 27
PLOTINUS 29
THE NEW EUROPE 31
THE FASHION OF ANTI-PURITANISM 32
POPULAR PHILOSOPHY 34
WAS CARLYLE PRUSSIAN? 36
IS NIETZSCHE FOR GERMANY? 37
NIETZSCHE IN FRAGMENTS 38
THE END OF FICTION 41
THE CRITERIA OF CULTURE 42
THE FATE OF SCULPTURE 45
THE TOO CLEVER 46
HOMAGE TO PROPERTIUS 49
MR. POUND AND MR. WYNDHAM LEWIS IN PUBLIC 52
MR. EZRA POUND AS METRICIST 57
MR. EZRA POUND ON RELIGION 60
MR. POUND, CARICATURIST 62
THE ADMIRABLE VICTORIANS 63
FRENCH CLARTÉ 65
WHEN SHALL WE TRANSLATE? 66
NATURE IN MIND 68
MR. CLIVE BELL’S POT 70
THE CRITICISM OF POETS 73
“JOHN EGLINTON” 74
IRISH HUMOUR 75
THE LITERARY DRAMA OF IRELAND 76
MR. STANDISH O’GRADY 79
MR. STANDISH O’GRADY, ENCHANTER 80
LES SENTIMENTS DE JULIEN BENDA 81
CONVALESCENCE AFTER NEWSPAPER 82
NATURE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 88
S.S.S. 90
STERNE CRITICISM 92
STERNE ON LOVE IN FRANCE 94
ENGLISH STYLE 95
LITERARY CULS-DE-SAC 98
THE DECLINE OF FREE INTELLIGENCE 98
LITERARY COPYRIGHT IN AMERICA 103
RIGHT CRITICISM 109
MAN’S SURVIVAL OF BODILY DEATH 111
BEARDSLEY AND ARTHUR SYMONS 115
“Æ’S” “CANDLE OF VISION” 117
HOW TO READ 134
THE OLD COUNTRY 135
LOOKING FOR THE DAWN 136
FIELDING FOR AMERICA 139
POOR AUTHORS! 140
ON GUARD 143
THE COMING RENAISSANCE 145
LEONARDO DA VINCI AS PIONEER 147
“SHAKESPEARE” SIMPLIFIED 151
THE “LONDON MERCURY” AND ENGLISH 152
MR. G. K. CHESTERTON ON ROME AND GERMANY 155
THE ORIGINS OF MARX 161
MARX AS POLITICIAN 163
JOHN MITCHEL AS THE SAME 166
NORSE IN ENGLISH 167
THE COMEDY OF IT 168
THE EPIC SERBS 171
ERNEST DOWSON 173
A SENTIMENTAL EXCURSION 175
THE NEWEST TESTAMENT 178
NOTHING FOREIGN 182
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 184
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE MYSTERIES 185
GENTLY WITH PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 188
A CAMBRIDGE “COCOON” 190
AN OXFORD MISCELLANY 195
THE IMPOTENCE OF SATIRE 196
THE “DIAL” OF AMERICA 199
AMERICA REGRESSING 206
THE BEST IS YET TO BE 209
INDEX 215
Readers and Writers
FONTENELLE.—There is a reason that Fontenelle has never before been
translated into English. It is not that Mr. Ezra Pound, who has now
translated a dozen of Fontenelle’s dialogues, was the first to think of
it. Many readers of the original have tried their hand at the translation
only to discover that somehow or other Fontenelle would not “go” in
English as he goes in French. The reason is not very far to seek.
Fontenelle wrote a French peculiarly French, a good but an untranslatable
French. He must, therefore, be left and read in the original if he is to
be appreciated at his intrinsic value. Mr. Pound has made a rash attempt
at the impossible in these dialogues, and he has achieved the unreadable
through no further fault of his own. The result was foregone. The
dialogues themselves in their English form are a little more dull than
are the _Conversations_ of Landor, which is to say that they are very
dull indeed. Nothing at the first glance could be more attractive than
dialogues between the great dead of the world. To every tyro the notion
comes inevitably sooner or later, as if it were the idea for which the
world were waiting. Nevertheless, on attempting it, the task is found to
be beyond most human powers. Nobody has yet written a masterpiece in it.
Fontenelle was not in any case the man to succeed in it from an English
point of view. We English take the great dead seriously. We expect them
to converse paradisaically in paradise, and to be as much above their own
living level as their living level was above that of ordinary men. Here,
however, is a pretty task for a writer of dead dialogues, for he has not
only to imitate the style, but to glorify both the matter and style of
the greatest men of past ages. No wonder that he fails; no wonder that in
the vast majority of cases he produces much the same impression of his
heroes as is produced of them at spiritualistic séances. The attempt,
however, will always continue to be made. It is a literary cactus-form
that blooms every fifty years or so. As I calculate its periodicity, some
one should shortly be producing a new series.
BIOGRAPHY.—Very few biographers have been anywhere near the level of
mind of their subjects, and fewer still have been able to describe even
what they have understood. The character of a great man is so complex
that a genius for grasping essentials must be assumed in his perfect
biographer: at the same time, it is so tedious in the analysis that the
narrative must be condensed to represent it. Between the subtlety to
be described, and the simplicity with which it must be described, the
character of a man is likely to fall in his portrait into the distortion
of over-elaboration or into the sketch. Though difficult, however, the
art has been frequently shown to be not impossible. We could not ask for
a better portrait of Johnson than Boswell’s. Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_
is as good as we desire it to be. Plato’s _Socrates_ is truer than life;
and there are others. On the whole, the modern gossiping method is not
likely to become popular in a cultured country.
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PRESS.—From his little brush with the
Press, Dr. Lyttelton has come off badly. It was not because his case
was bad, but because he had not the moral courage to stick to his
guns. His case was that Parliament had practically ceased to be the
leader of the nation, and that its place had been taken by the Press.
Unfortunately, however, the Press had come to depend for its living upon
sensationalism, with the consequence that its tendency was to prefer
fiction to fact. A perfectly good case, I say, who know more of Fleet
Street than Dr. Lyttelton will ever know. Every word of the indictment is
well within the truth. But when challenged by the Press to substantiate
his charges, Dr. Lyttelton, instead of inviting the world simply to
_look_ at the Press and to contrast its reports with facts, proceeded to
exculpate the editors and to put the whole blame on the public. It is
the public, he said, that is responsible, and there is no use in rating
the editors, who merely supplied what the public wanted. But so long as
public men adopt this cowardly attitude nothing can possibly be done,
for the “public,” like a corporation, has neither a body to be kicked
nor a soul to be damned. Relatively to the proprietors and editors of
the Press the public consists of irresponsible individuals, who merely
choose from among what is laid before them. They are mostly as innocent
as children who deal at a tuck-shop, and, perchance, buy sweets and cakes
that are bad for them as readily as things that are good for them. The
responsible parties are the proprietors and editors, and, above them, the
law. It is not an offence to buy articles at a shop that are illegally
displayed for sale. The public supposition is that if they are on sale
they can be bought. And, in fact, the Public Prosecutor, unlike Dr.
Lyttelton, does not proceed against the purchasers of illegal articles,
he proceeds against the vendors. In the case of our newspaper proprietors
and editors the conditions of shop-keeping are parallel; they expose
professed news and views for sale, with an implied guarantee that their
goods are both good and fit for human consumption. The public cannot be
expected to know which is which, or what is what, any more in the case of
news and views than in the case of tea and potatoes. Rather less indeed,
since the ill-effects of false news and unsound views are, as a rule, too
long delayed and too subtle to be attributed to their proper causes. But
the Press proprietors and editors know very well. They know whether the
news they expose is true, or the views they vend are sound. They know
also that in a large degree they are neither the one nor the other. Yet
they continue to sell them, and even to expect public honours for their
fraudulent dealings. The excuses made for them are such as could be made
for any other fraudulent industry; that it pays, that the public swallows
it, that honesty would not pay, that the public does not want truth
and sincerity, that the public must learn to discriminate for itself.
Reduced to a simple statement, all these mean, in effect, that the Press
is prepared to trade on the ignorance and folly of the public. So long
as editors and proprietors are allowed to sail off from responsibility
under the plea that they are only satisfying a public demand, so long
will it be possible for purveyors of other forms of indecent literature
and vendors of other articles of public ill-fare to complain that they
are unfairly treated. There is likely to be always a demand for fiction
against fact, the plausible lie against the honest truth, the doctored
news against the plain statement, and the pleasing superficial against
the strenuous profound. A change of taste in these respects could only
be brought about by a determined effort in education extending over a
generation and applied not only to schools, but to the Press, the pulpit,
and to book-publishing. But because the preference now exists, and is a
profitable taste to pander to, it is not right to acquit the Press that
thrives on it.
CRITICS BEWARE.—Mr. Crees, the author of a new study of George Meredith,
has first pointed out one of the dangers in writing about Meredith
and then fallen into it. Everybody knows what it is; it is writing in
epigram, or, as Mr. Crees calls it, “miscarrying with abortive epigram.”
That phrase alone should have warned Mr. Crees how near he was to
ignoring his own counsel; but apparently he saw only the idea and not
the fact, for a passage soon occurs in which he illustrates the danger
perfectly. He is writing of the difficulty encountered by a certain kind
of intellectual—Meredith, for example—in winning any public recognition;
and this is the way he miscarries on:
The idol of the future is the Aunt Sally of the present. The
pioneer of intellect ploughs a lonely furrow. He is assailed by
invective, beset by contumely, the butt of ridicule, the Saint
Sebastian of the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism.
He is depressed by disregard, chilled by the icy waters of
contempt, haunted by the dread of beggary, the recompense of
strictness of conviction.... And when detraction recites its
palinode, his sole compensation is to reply (from the Elysian
fields), “I told you so.”
There are many untruths contained in this passage, some flattering and
others not, to the “intellectual,” and they are properly expressed—if
untruths ever can be—in the style. The style is one in which the truth
cannot be told; and it perfectly illustrates the axiom that critical
writing cannot be too simple and unaffected. It is a common practice
for a critic to approximate his style to the style of his subject; for
example, to write about poetry poetically, about a “grand impassioned
writer” in a grand and impassioned manner. By so doing it is supposed
that a critic shows his sympathy and his understanding of his subject.
But the method is wrong. Criticism is not a fine art. The conversational
tone is its proper medium, and it should be an absolute rule never to
write in criticism what cannot be imagined as being easily said.
HENRY JAMES.—The “Henry James Number” of the _Little Review_ is devoted
to essays by various hands upon the works and characteristics of the late
novelist. The most interesting essay in the volume is one by Miss Ethel
Coburn Mayne reporting the first appearance and subsequent development
of Henry James as witnessed by the writers for the famous _Yellow Book_,
of whom Miss Mayne was not the least characteristic. What a comedy of
misunderstanding it all was, and how Henry James must have smiled about
it! At the outset the _Yellow Book_ writers had the distinct impression
that Henry James was one of themselves; and they looked forward to
exploiting the new worlds which he brought into their ken. But later on,
to their disappointment, he fell away, receded from their visibility,
and became, as Miss Mayne puts it, concerned less with the “world” than
with the “drawing-room.” The fault, however, was not with James, nor was
the change in him. The _Yellow Book_ too readily assumed that because
James wrote in it, he was willing to be identified with the tendency
of the school; and they thought him lacking in loyalty when afterwards
it appeared that he was powerfully hostile. But how could they have
deceived themselves into supposing that a progress towards the ghostly
could always keep step with a progress towards the fleshly? The two were
worlds apart, and if for a single moment they coincided in an issue or
two of the _Yellow Book_, their subsequent divergence was only made the
more obvious. I, even I, who was still young when the _Yellow Book_ began
to appear, could have told its editors that Henry James was not long
for their world. Between the method employed in, say, the _Death of the
Lion_ and the method of Henry Harland, Max Beerbohm, Miss Mayne herself,
and, subsequently, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, there was, and could be, only
an accidental and momentary sympathy. James was in love with the next
world, or the next state of consciousness; he was always exploring the
borderland between the conscious and the super-conscious. The _Yellow
Book_ writers were positively reactionary to him, for their borderland
was not between men and angels, but between men and beasts. James’s
“contemptuous” word for Mr. D. H. Lawrence—which Miss Mayne still groans
to think of—was the most natural and inevitable under the circumstances.
It might have been foreseen from the moment Henry James put his pen
into the _Yellow Book_. If there are any critics left who imagine that
the _Yellow Book_ was anything but a literary _cul de sac_, I commend to
them this present essay by Miss Mayne. Under the disguise of criticism of
Henry James, it is a confession.
* * * * *
Henry James’s _Middle Years_ is a fragment of the autobiography begun
some years before the author’s death. We are told that this fragment
was “dictated” by Henry James and that it was never revised by himself,
both of which facts explain a little of the peculiarity of his style.
If the style of the earlier books was mazy, the style of _Middle Years_
is mazier. If the earlier style consisted of impressions impassionately
conveyed, the present is more elusive still. Henry James was always
difficult to pin down; in _Middle Years_ his fluttering among words
never rests a sentence. Nobody, I am convinced, who is not either a
genuine devotee of Henry James or one of the paper-audience his friends
cultivated for him, will succeed in reading through this work. An
infinitely leisurely mind or an infinite interest in just Henry James’s
way of looking at things is necessary to the endurance of it. But given
one of these, and in particular the latter, and the reading of _Middle
Years_ becomes an exhilarating exercise in sensing ghosts.
Yes, that is the phrase to describe what Henry James was always after.
He was always after sensing ghosts. His habitat has been said to be the
inter-space between the real and the ideal; but it can be more accurately
defined as the inter-space between the dead and the living. You see his
vision—almost his clairvoyance—actively engaged in this recovery of his
experiences years before as a young man in London. See how he revelled
in them, rolling them off his tongue in long circling phrases. Is it not
obvious that he is most at home in recollection, in the world of memory,
in the inter-world, once more, of the dead and the living? Observe,
too, how only a little more exaggeratedly anfractuous and swirling
his style becomes—but not, in any real sense, different—under the
influence of memory, than when professing to be describing the present.
It is plain that memory differs for him from present vision only in
being a little more vivid, a little more real. In order to see a thing
clearly, he had, in fact, to make a memory of it, and the present tense
of memory is impression. What I am trying to say is that Henry James
mentalised phenomenon; hence that he saw most clearly in the world of
memory where this process had been performed for him by time; and that
he saw less clearly in our actual world because the phenomena herein
resisted immediate mentalisation. The difference for him was between
the pre-digested and the to-be-digested; the former being the persons
and events of memory, and the latter being the events and persons of his
current experience.
Henry James will find himself very much at home with the discarnate minds
who, it is presumed, are now his companions. Incarnation, embodiment, was
for him a screen to be looked through, got over somehow, divined into,
penetrated. He regarded it as a sort of magic curtain which concealed at
the same time that under careful observation it revealed by its shadows
and movements the mind behind it. And I fancy I see him sitting before
the actual sensible world of things and persons with infinite patience
watching for a significant gesture or a revealing shadow. And such
motions and shadows he recorded as impressions which became the stuff of
his analysis and synthesis of the souls that originated them. But if that
was his attitude towards the material world—and it is further proved by
his occasional excursions into the completely ghostly—may we not safely
conclude that in the world he now inhabits his sense of impressions is
more at home still. For there, as I take it, the curtain is drawn, and
minds and souls are by one degree the more exposed to direct vision. With
his marvellous insight into the actual, what would Henry James not make
of the mental and psychic when these are no longer concealed by the
material? On the whole, nobody is likely to be happier “dead” than Henry
James.
TURGENEV.—Both in Mr. Conrad’s Introduction and Mr. Edward Garnett’s
critical study of Turgenev I observe the attitude of defence. They are
defending rather than praising Turgenev. But Turgenev has been so long
the victim of polemics that it is about time some judge summed up the
contentions and delivered judgment. Neither Mr. Conrad nor Mr. Garnett,
however, is qualified for this task by either temper or the power of
judgment itself. Mr. Conrad is a great writer, but he is not a great
critic, and as for Mr. Garnett, he is not even a great writer; and the
temper of both is shown in their common tendency to abuse not only
the plaintiff’s attorney but the jury as well. But there is no use in
abusing the jury—in other words, the reading public of the world—even if
some gain may be got by polemics with this or that critic. I am content
to hear Mr. Maurice Baring and M. Haumont told that they are merely
echoes of Russian partisanship and incapable of feeling the fine shades
of “truth” in Turgenev; for both these writers are quite capable of
hitting back. But when Mr. Conrad satirically remarks that Turgenev had
qualities enough to ruin the prospects of any writer, and Mr. Garnett
echoes _him_ to the effect that Turgenev owes his “unpopularity” to “an
exquisite feeling for balance” which nowadays is “less and less prized
by modern opinion,” I feel that the defence of Turgenev is exceeding
the limits of discretion. For it is not by any means the case that the
“unpopularity” of Turgenev is confined to the mob that has no feeling for
balance or is jealous of his possession of too many qualities. Critics
as good as Mr. Garnett and with no Russian political prejudices against
Turgenev can come to the same conclusion as the innumerable anonymous
gentlemen of the jury, to wit, that Turgenev was a great artist on a
small scale whose faults were large. That is certainly my own case. While
I agree (or affirm, for I am quite willing to take the initiative), that
Turgenev’s art is more exquisite, more humane, more European than that
of any other Russian writer, I must also maintain that in timidity of
thought, in sentimentality, in occasional pettiness of mind, he is no
more of a great writer than, let us say, Mr. Hall Caine. To compare the
whole of him with the whole of Dostoievski is to realise in an instant
the difference between a writer great in parts and a writer great even
in his faults. Turgenev at his best is a European, I would rather say a
Parisianised Russian; but Dostoievski, while wholly Russian, belongs to
the world. An almost exact parallel is afforded by the case of Ibsen and
Björnson, about whose respective values Norway used to dispute as now
Mr. Garnett would have us dispute concerning the respective values of
Dostoievski and Turgenev. The world has settled the first in favour of
Ibsen—with Norway dissenting; the world will similarly settle the latter
in favour of Dostoievski, with Mr. Garnett dissenting.
PLOTINUS.—Plotinus, of whom Coleridge said that “no writer more wants,
better deserves, or is less likely to obtain a new and more correct
translation,” has lately been translated into excellent English by Mr.
Stephen Mackenna (_not_ the author of _Sonia_, by the way). For all
Coleridge’s demand and Mr. Mackenna’s supply, however, Plotinus is not
likely to be read as much as he deserves. Abstract thought, or thinking
in ideas without images, is a painful pleasure, comparable to exercises
designed and actually effective to physical health. There is no doubt
whatever that mental power is increased by abstract thought. Abstract
thinking is almost a recipe for the development of talent. But it is
so distasteful to mental inertia and habit that even people who have
experienced its immense profit are disinclined to persist in it. It was
by reason of his persistence in an exercise peculiarly irksome to the
Western mind that Plotinus approached the East more nearly in subtlety
and purity of thought than all but a few Western thinkers before or after
him. In reading him it is hard to say that one is not reading a clarified
Shankara or a Vyasa of the Bhishma treatises of the _Mahabharata_. East
and West met in his mind.
Plotinus’s aim, like that of all thinkers in the degree of their
conception, is, in Coleridge’s words, “the perfect spiritualisation of
all the laws of Nature into laws of intuition and intellect.” It is the
subsumption of phenomena in terms of personality, the reduction of Nature
to the mind of man. Conversely it will be seen that the process may be
said to personalise Nature; in other words, to assume the presence in
natural phenomena of a kind of personal intelligence. If this be animism,
I decline to be shocked by it on that account; for in that event the
highest philosophy and one of the lowest forms of religion coincide,
and there is no more to be said of it. The danger of this reasoning
from mind to Nature and from Nature to mind is anthropomorphism. We
tend to make Nature in our own image, or, conversely, _à la_ Nietzsche,
to make ourselves after the image of Nature. But the greater the truth
the greater is the peril of it; and thinkers must be on their guard to
avoid the dangers, while nevertheless continuing the method. Plotinus
certainly succeeded in avoiding the anthropomorphic no less than the
crudely animistic dangers of his methods; but at the cost of remaining
unintelligible to the majority of readers.
THE NEW EUROPE.—It should be possible before long to begin to discern
some of the outlines of the new continent that will arise from the flood
of the present war. That it will be a new continent is certain, and that
it will contain as essential features some of the aspects of the Slav
soul is probable. For what has been spiritually most apparent during the
war has been the struggle of the Slav soul to find expression in the
Western medium. Russia, we may say, has sought to Europeanise herself;
or, rather, Russia has sought to impress upon Europe Russian ideas;
with this further resemblance in her fate to the fate of the pioneers
of every great new spiritual impulse, that she has been crucified in
her mission. The crucifixion of Slavdom, however, is the sign in which
Russian ideals—or, let us say Slav ideals—will in the end conquer. They
will not submerge our Western ideas; the new continent will be the
old continent over again; but they will profoundly modify our former
configurations, and compel us to draw our cultural maps afresh. In what
respect, it may be asked, will our conceptions be radically changed? The
reply is to be found confusedly in the events of the Russian Revolution;
in the substitution of the pan-human for the national ideal, and in the
attempt, this time to be made with all the strength at the disposal of
intelligence, to create a single world-culture—a universal Church of men
of good-sense and good-will. This appears to me to be the distinguishing
feature of the new continent about to be formed; and we shall owe it to
the Slavs.
THE FASHION OF ANTI-PURITANISM.—The anti-Puritanism of the professed
anti-Puritans is very little, if any, better than the Puritanism they
oppose. The two parties divide the honours of our dislike fairly evenly
between them. Puritanism is a fanatical devotion to a single aspect of
virtue—namely, to morality. It assumes that Life is moral and nothing
else; that Power, Wisdom, Truth, Beauty, and Love are all of no account
in comparison with Goodness; and doing so it offends our judgment of the
nature of Virtue, which is that Virtue is wholeness or a balance of all
the aspects of God. Anti-Puritanism, on the other hand, denies all the
affirmations of Puritanism, but without affirming anything on its own
account. It denies that Life is exclusively moral, but it does not affirm
that Life is anything else; it destroys the false absolute of Puritanism,
but it is silent to the extent of tacitly denying that there is any
absolute whatsoever. This being the case, our choice between Puritanism
and anti-Puritanism is between a false absolute and no absolute, between
a one-sided truth and no truth at all. We are bound to be half-hearted
upon either side, since the thing itself is only half a thing.
I am not likely to revise my opinions about virtue from the school of
Marx and his disciple Kautsky. Marx was another flamen, a priest, that is
to say, of one aspect only of reality—in this case the economic. That the
moral cant of a particular age tends to represent the economic interest
of the dominant class, is, of course, a truism; but there is a world of
difference between moral cant and morality—and the latter is as uniform
throughout all history as the former is variable. Moreover, it is not by
any means always the case that the interests of the dominant class of
capitalism are identical with Puritanism. The interests of capitalism
to-day are decidedly with anti-Puritanism, in so far as the effects of
anti-Puritanism are to break up family life, to restrict births and to
cultivate eugenics. What could suit capitalism better than to atomise
the last surviving natural grouping of individuals and to breed for the
servile State? The anti-Puritan propagandas of Malthusianism and eugenics
are not carried on, either, by Marxians, but by the wealthy classes.
Because he is a shopkeeper, the Anglo-Saxon is to-day an anti-Puritan in
these matters.
POPULAR PHILOSOPHY.—The difficulty of popular philosophical discussion
is not insuperable. It is all a matter of style. Mr. Bertrand Russell,
for example, manages by means of an excellent style to make philosophy
as easy to understand and as entrancing to follow as certain writers
have made the equally difficult subject of economics. It is, in fact,
the business of professional thinkers to popularise their subject and to
procure for their Muse as many devotees as possible. In the case of Mr.
Bertrand Russell, his admirable style has been put into the service of
the most abominable philosophy ever formulated. He is an accidentalist
of the most thorough-going kind who denies that life has any meaning or
purpose. Life appeared, he says, by chance, and will disappear, probably
for good, with the cooling of the sun; and he sings like a doomed
cricket on a dissolving iceberg. But it is all the more strange in my
judgment that a man who thinks thus can write as Mr. Russell writes.
There is a contradiction somewhere between the simple richness of his
style and the Spartan poverty of his ideas. He thinks glacially, but his
style is warm. I suspect that if he were psycho-analysed Mr. Bertrand
Russell would turn out to be a walking contradiction. In a word, I don’t
believe he believes a word he says! That tone, that style, them there
gestures—they betray the stage-player of the spirit.
A philosophy written in a popular style is not, of course, the same thing
as a popular philosophy. “From a popular philosophy and a philosophical
populace, good sense deliver us,” said Coleridge, meaning to say that
a philosophy whose substance and not whose expression only has been
adapted to the populace is in all probability false and is certainly
superficial. For in his _Lay Sermons_, published a hundred years ago,
Coleridge supplemented the foregoing remark by deploring the “long and
ominous eclipse of philosophy, the usurpation of that venerable name
by physical and psychological empiricism, and the non-existence of a
learned and philosophical _public_.” Between a philosophic public and
a philosophic populace there is the same distinction as between the
“public” that reads, let us say, Sedlák, and the “populace” that reads,
let us say, Mr. H. G. Wells. Mr. Wells is a popular philosopher; but
that is manifestly not the same thing as a writer who is trying to make
philosophy popular.
WAS CARLYLE PRUSSIAN?—In the _International Journal of Ethics_, Mr.
Herbert Stewart makes a chivalrous attempt to deliver Carlyle from
the charge recently brought home to him of having been a Prussian.
Militarist Prussianism, he says, rests upon a postulate which would have
filled Carlyle with horror, the postulate, namely, that an autocracy
must be organised for war. I am not satisfied, however, that Carlyle
would have been filled with anything but admiration. It is true that he
did not adopt the Prussian error of identifying Might with Right. “Is
Arithmetic,” he asked, “a thing more fixed by the Eternal than the laws
of justice are?” Could Justice or Right, therefore, be allowed to vary
with the amount of Might at its disposal—a deduction inevitable from
the Prussian hypothesis? On the other hand, Carlyle cannot be said to
have been equally free from the more subtle error of Prussianism, the
assumption that Might can be accumulated only by Right means. Might, he
said in effect, being an attribute of God, can be obtained by man only as
a result of some virtue. Hence its possession presumes the possession
of a proportionate virtue, and a man of Might is to that extent a man
of Right also. This subtlety led Carlyle into some strange company for
the moral fanatic he was. It led him to glorify Frederick the Great and
to condone Frederick’s crime against Silesia. It led him to despise
France and to defend West Indian slavery. Mr. Stewart must make his
choice between Carlyle as a confused ethical philosopher and Carlyle as a
Prussian. If he was not the latter, he was the former.
IS NIETZSCHE FOR GERMANY?—Nietzsche, we are told, is being read as never
before in Germany. It is certain that Nietzsche was taken, if taken
at all, in the wrong sense in Germany before the war. The Germans did
with him precisely what the mob everywhere does with the satirist; they
swallowed his praise and ignored his warnings. He is still, however, more
of a danger than a saviour to post-war Germany, if only for the reason
that his vocabulary is for the most part militarist. Culture is usually
presented by Nietzsche in the terms of combat, and the still small voice
of perfection is only heard in the silences of his martial sentences. Now
that Germany has begun to re-read Nietzsche, will it read him any more
intelligently than before? Is not a critique of Nietzsche a necessary
condition of safely reading him—in Germany? There are, undoubtedly,
authors who are most dangerous to the nation in which they appear.
Rousseau was particularly dangerous to France. Whitman is inimical to
American culture. Dr. Johnson has been a blight upon English thought. And
Nietzsche, it may well be, is only a blessing outside of Germany. Art and
thought, it is commonly said, are beyond nationality and beyond race; and
from this it follows that it is only a happy accident when a great writer
or thinker is peculiarly suited to the nation in which he happens to be
born. He is addressed to the world—why should his message be specially
adapted to the language and people of his parentage? A nation runs risks
in accenting as its own the doctrines of the great men who chance to
appear among it. Equally, a nation runs the risk of missing its real
chosen unless it examines all the great men of the world. Chauvinism,
either by choice or by exclusion, is always dangerous. We must take the
good where we find it.
NIETZSCHE IN FRAGMENTS.—The English mind is easily “put off” a subject,
and particularly easily off a subject as uncongenial as Nietzsche; and
it has been known to remain in this state for a century or more. Several
of our own greatest thinkers and writers have had to wait a long period
for their readers, and by the time that the English mind has recovered
itself, they are often quite dead. It is likely to be the same with
Nietzsche. Having the plausible excuse for being “off” Nietzsche which
the war provided, the English intellectual classes—note that I do not
say the intellectual English classes, for there are none—will continue
to neglect Nietzsche until he has been superseded, as I believe he will
be before very long. Psycho-analysis has taken a good deal of Nietzsche
in its stride, and it is quite possible that the re-reading of Indian
philosophy in the light of psycho-analysis will gather most of the
remainder.
Nevertheless, the remaining fragments will be worth preserving, since
indubitably they will be the fragments of a giant of thought. As
Heraclitus is represented by a small collection of aphorisms, each so
concentrated that one would serve for an ordinary man’s equipment for
intellectual life, the Nietzsche of the future may be contained in a
very small volume, chiefly of aphorisms. He aimed, he said, at saying in
a sentence what other writers say in a book, and he characteristically
added that he aimed at saying in a sentence what other writers did _not_
say in a book. And he very often succeeded. These successes are his real
contribution to his own immortality, and they will, I think, ensure it. I
should advise Dr. Oscar Levy to prepare such a volume without delay. It
may be the case that Nietzsche will be read in his entirety again, though
I doubt it; but, in any event, such a volume as I have in mind would
serve either to reintroduce him or handsomely to bury the mortal part of
him.
I cannot, however, really believe that Nietzsche is about to be read,
as never before, in Germany. Dr. Levy has assured us, on the report of
a Berlin bookseller, that this was indicated in the sales of Nietzsche
in Germany; but the wish was father to the deduction from the very
small fact. Nietzsche was, before anything else, a great culture-hero;
as a critic of art he has been surpassed by no man. But is there any
appeal in culture to a Germany situated as Germany is to-day? I am here
only a literary _causeur_. With the dinosaurs and other monsters of
international politics I cannot be supposed to be on familiar terms. My
opinion, nevertheless, based upon my own material, is that Germany is
most unlikely to resume the pursuit of culture where she interrupted it
after 1870, or, indeed, to pursue culture at all. And the reason for
my opinion is that Russia is too close at hand, too accessible, and,
above all, too tempting to German cupidity. Think what the proximity to
Germany—to a Germany headed off from the Western world—of a commercially
succulent country like Russia really means. Germans are human, even if
they are not sub-human, and the temptation of an El Dorado at their doors
will prove to be more seductive than the cry from the muezzin to come
to culture, come to culture. Nietzsche on the one side calling them to
spiritual conquests will be met by the big bagmen calling them, on the
other side, to commercial conquests. Who can doubt which appeal will be
the stronger? Germany refused to attend to Nietzsche after 1870, when he
spoke to them as one alive; they are less likely to listen to a voice
from the dead after 1918. On second thoughts, I should advise Dr. Oscar
Levy to publish his volume in Germany first. For there he would show by
one satiric touch that no country needed it so much.
THE END OF FICTION.—Fiction nowadays, we are told, is not what it used
to be. We are told that it is the modern university. It is certainly a
very obliging medium. But on this very account it is as delusive as it is
obliging. It receives impressions easily, readily adapts itself to every
kind of material, and assumes at the word of command any and every mood.
But precisely because it does these things, the effects it produces are
transient. Lightly come, lightly go; and if, as has been said, fiction
is the modern reader’s university, it is a school in which he learns
everything and forgets everything. Modern as I am, and hopeful as I am
of modernity, I cannot think that the predominance of fiction, even of
such fiction as is written to-day, is a good sign; and when we see that
it leads nowhere, that the people who read much of it never read anything
else, and that it is an intellectual _cul-de-sac_, our alarm at the
phenomenon is the greater. What kind of minds do we expect to develop on
a diet of forty parts fiction to two of all other forms of literature?
Assuming the free libraries to be the continuation schools of the public,
what is their value if the only lessons taken in them are the lessons of
fiction? I will not dwell on the obvious discouragement the figures are
to every serious _writer_, for the effect on the readers must be worse.
THE CRITERIA OF CULTURE.—The suppression of the display of feeling, or,
better, the control of the display of feeling, is the first condition
of thought, and only those who have aimed at writing with studied
simplicity, studied lucidity, and studied detachment realise the amount
of feeling that has to be trained to run quietly in harness. The modern
failure (as compared with the success of the Greeks) to recognise
feeling as an essential element of lucidity and the rest of the virtues
of literary form is due to an excess of fiction. Just because fiction
expresses everything it really impresses nothing. Its feeling evaporates
as fast as it exudes. The sensation, nevertheless, is pleasant, for the
reader appears to be witnessing genuine feeling genuinely expressing
itself; and he fails to remember that what is true of a person is likely
to be true of a book, that the more apparent, obvious, and demonstrated
the feelings, the more superficial, unreal, and transient they probably
are. As a matter of cold-blooded fact, it has been clearly shown during
the course of the war that precisely our most “passionate” novelists have
been our least patriotic citizens. I name no names, since they are known
to everybody.
Culture I define as being, amongst other things, a capacity for subtle
discrimination of words and ideas. Epictetus made the discrimination of
words the foundation of moral training, and it is true enough that every
stage of moral progress is indicated by the degree of our perception
of the meaning of words. Tell me what words have a particular interest
for you, and I will tell you what class of the world-school you are in.
Tell me what certain words mean for you and I will tell you what you
mean for the world of thought. One of the most subtle words, and one of
the key-words of culture, is simplicity. Can you discriminate between
natural simplicity and studied simplicity, between Nature and Art? In
appearance they are indistinguishable, but in reality, they are æons
apart; and whoever has learned to distinguish between them is entitled to
regard himself as on the way to culture. Originality is another key-word,
and its subtlety may be suggested by a paradox which was a commonplace
among the Greeks; namely, that the most original minds strive to conceal
their originality, and that the master-minds succeed. Contrast this
counsel of perfect originality with the counsels given in our own day,
in which the aim of originality is directed to appearing original—you
will be brought, thereby, face to face with still another key-idea of
Culture, the relation of Appearance to Reality. All these exercises in
culture are elementary, however, in comparison with the master-problem of
“disinterestedness.” No word in the English language is more difficult to
define or better worth attempting to define. Somewhere or other in its
capacious folds it contains all the ideas of ethics, and even, I should
say, of religion. The _Bhagavad Gita_ (to name only one classic) can be
summed up in the word. Duty is only a pale equivalent of it. I venture
to say that whoever has understood the meaning of “disinterestedness” is
not far off understanding the goal of human culture.
THE FATE OF SCULPTURE.—The art-critic of _The Times_ having remarked that
“the public hardly looks at the sculpture in the Academy, or outside it,”
Mr. John Tweed, an eminent sculptor himself, has now uttered a public
lamentation in agreement with him. Sculpture to-day, he says, is an art
without an audience; and he quotes a Belgian artist who told him what
heroes our contemporary sculptors in this country must be to continue
their work in the face of a unanimous neglect. It is not certain,
however, that the sculptors of to-day do not thoroughly well deserve the
fate to which they now find themselves condemned. In the economy of the
arts, or, if this phrase be preferred, in the strategy of æsthetics,
nothing is more necessary from time to time in each of the arts than an
iconoclast—by which I indicate not a destroyer simply, but a creator of
new forms. Such a pioneer is of necessity a little rude to his immediate
predecessors and to such of his contemporaries as are sheep. But in
the end, nevertheless, if they will only accept and recognise him, he
will revive their art for them. But in the case of sculpture the two
such iconoclasts as have recently appeared—Mr. Epstein and the late
Gaudier-Brzeska—were instantly set upon, not by the public, but by their
contemporaries, and walled within a neglect far more complete than the
neglect sculpture in general has received. Just when it appeared that
they might be about to reawaken public interest in carven forms, the rest
of the sculptors hurried to silence them, with the consequence that at
this moment there is literally nobody engaged in sculpture in whom the
intelligent public takes the smallest interest. As sculptors have treated
sculpture, so the public now treats sculptors. It is a pretty piece of
karma.
THE TOO CLEVER.—Neglect means nothing very much; success is a matter
of time for everything that is really classic. On the other hand,
deliberately to incur neglect by writing for the few involves the further
risk of more and more deserving it. Whoever makes a boast of writing
for a coterie sooner or later finds himself writing for a coterie of a
coterie, and at last for himself alone. It cannot be otherwise. As the
progress of the classic is from the one to the many, the progress of
the romantic is from the many to the one; and the more sincerely the
latter is a romantic, the sooner he arrives at his journey’s end. The
involution of aim thus brought about is obvious already in the succession
of works of the chief writers of the _Little Review_. They grow cleverer
and cleverer, and, at the same time, more and more unintelligible. I am
staggered by the cleverness of such a writer as Mr. Wyndham Lewis, and a
little more so at the cleverness of Mr. James Joyce. But in the case of
both of them I find myself growing more and more mystified, bewildered,
and repelled. Is it, I ask, that they do not write for readers like me?
Then their circle must be contracting, for I am one of many who used to
read them with pleasure. And who are they gaining while losing us? Are
their new readers more intensive if fewer, and better worth while for
their quality than we were for our numbers? But I decline to allow the
favourable answers. The fact is that the writers of the _Little Review_
are getting too clever even for coterie, and will soon be read only by
each other, or themselves.
A characteristic example is to be found in the opening chapter of Mr.
James Joyce’s new novel, _Ulysses_. This is how it begins:—
Stately, plump Buck Milligan came from the stairway, bearing
a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently
behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and
intoned....