It appears, after all, that I was not so mad as I seemed. Perchance
newspaper, being only a feigned literature, induces only a feigned
madness. Be it as it may. I find that my current note-book, though
as handy and tempting to be destroyed as any other, was nevertheless
destroyed only after the cream of it had been whipped into the permanent
book which I have kept through many rages for a good many years. The
extracts are here before me as I write in convalescence. It is amusing to
me to observe, moreover, that their cream is not very rich. Much better
has gone into the bonfire. Why, then, did I save these and sacrifice
those? Look at a few of them. “Nobody’s anything always”—is there aught
irrecoverable in that to have compelled me to spare it? “Lots of window,
but no warehouse”—a remark, I fancy, intended to hit somebody or other
very hard indeed—but _does_ it? Is any of the present company fitted
with a cap? “The judgment of the world is good, but few can put it into
words.” That is a premonitory symptom, you will observe, of a remark made
a few lines above to the effect that literature is a personal expression
of a common opinion or judgment. I have plainly remembered it. _Apropos_
of the _New Age_, I must have told somebody, and stolen home to write it
down, that its career is that of a rocking-horse, all ups and downs but
never any getting forward. It is too true to be wholly amusing; let me
horse-laugh at it and pass it on. “A simple style is like sleep, it will
not come by effort.” Not altogether true, but true enough. The rest are
not much worse or better, and the puzzle is to explain why those should
be taken and these left.
Again _apropos_, may a physician who has healed himself offer this piece
of advice? Read your own note-books often. I have known some people who
have a library of note-books worth a dukedom, who never once looked into
them after having filled them. That is collecting mania pure and simple.
From another offensive angle what a confession of inferior taste is
made in preferring the note-books of others to one’s own. A little more
self-respect in this matter is clearly necessary if your conversation
is to be personal at all; for in all probability the references and
quotations you make _without_ the authority of your own collection are
hackneyed. They are the reach-me-downs of every encyclopædia. Is this the
reason that the vast majority of current quotations are as worn as they
are; that a constant reader, forewarned of the subject about to be dealt
with, is usually forearmed against the tags he will find employed in
it? In any case, the advice I have just given is the corrective of this
depressing phenomenon of modern writing. You have only to trade in your
own note-books to be, and to give the air of being, truly original.
Browsing is a rather more advanced regimen for convalescence than the
re-arrangement of books. The latter can be performed without the smallest
taste for reading. It is a matter of sizing them up, and any bookseller’s
apprentice can do it. But browsing means dipping into the contents here
and there; it is both a symptom of returning health and a means to it. In
the last few days I must have nibbled in a hundred different pastures,
chiefly, I think, in the pastures of books about books. De Quincey,
Matthew Arnold, Bagehot, Macaulay, Johnson, etc.—what meadows, what
lush grass, what feed! After all, one begins to say, literature cannot
be unsatisfying that fed such bulls and that so plumped their minds.
It cannot be only a variety of newspaper. Thus a new link with health
is established, and one becomes able to take one’s books again. Here I
should end, but that a last observation in the form of a question occurs
to me. Is not or can not a taste for literature be acquired by the same
means by which it can be re-acquired? Are not the child and the invalid
similar? In that case the foregoing directions may be not altogether
useless.
NATURE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE.—In observation of Nature English literature
excels all others. But that is by no means to say that every English
writer upon Nature is good. The astonishing thing is that contemporary
with such masters of both Nature-observation and literary expression
as—to name but two—Mr. W. H. Hudson and Mr. Warde Fowler (and half a
dozen others could be named in the same street) there should still be so
many writers insensible enough to perfection to write about Nature when
they have little to say and few gifts of expression. You would think that
having seen the sun they would not light a candle, or that if they did,
nobody would look at it. But the truth is that not only are many candles
lit, but they are all much admired—much more, indeed, than the suns
themselves. There may be a good reason for it, namely, that the reading
public is so much in love with Nature-writing that the best is not good
enough for us. Or, again, everybody living in the country and having a
pen at all, wishes to write his own Nature-observations as everybody
wishes to write his own love-lyrics, regardless of the fact that the best
love-lyrics have already been written. It may be so; but the admission
appears to me to be over-generous.
Mr. Percy W. D. Izzard has published in book form his “Year of Country
Days” under the general title of _Homeland_. The series has appeared
in the _Daily Mail_, where it appears to have given pleasure to a
considerable number of readers. I do not doubt the fact. Even the
least suggestion of Nature would be a relief in the stuffy and bawling
atmosphere of the _Daily Mail_. But in the form of a book, in which three
hundred and sixty-five of them appear, they are almost intolerable. Their
value lay in their contrast to the surrounding columns of the journal in
which they were published. Take away that background and let them stand
by themselves, and they are seen to be what they are—pale, anæmic, and
not very knowledgeable commonplace observations. Nothing really exciting
appears to have happened in the country under Mr. Izzard’s observation.
When reading Jefferies or Hudson or Ward Fowler or Selous, you are made
to feel, in a simple walk along a hedgerow, that something dramatic is
afoot. Discovery is in the air. But Mr. Izzard is never fortunate, and
all he has to record are the commonplaces of the country-side, which I
could as easily reconstruct from a calendar as gather from his text. “The
silver clouds are heaped together in billowy masses that sail with deeps
of Italian blue between.” How pretty! But the delight is wanting.
S.S.S.—The Simplified Spelling Society has broken loose from obscurity
again in the issue of a new pamphlet, called _Breaking the Spell; an
Appeal to Common Sense_. A preface contributed by Dr. Macan rehearses all
the old “reasons” for simplifying our spelling with as little attention
as ever to the real reasons against it. “Spelling,” we are told, “should
be the simplest of all arts.” It is so in Spanish, in Italian, in Welsh,
and in Dutch, and it was so in Greek and Latin. Why not, therefore, in
English? The reasoning, however, is ridiculous, for it assumes that it
was by some deliberate and self-conscious design that these languages
came to be spelled phonetically, and hence that we have only to follow
them faithfully (and the advice of the S.S.S.) in order to place our
language in a similar state. Language, however, is not a product
of logic and science, but of art and taste. It is determined not by
reason alone, but by the totality of our judgment, in which many other
factors than reason are included. To ask us to “reform” our spelling in
order to make it “reasonable” is to ask us to forgo the satisfaction
of every intellectual taste save that of logic; a procedure that would
not only “reform” our spelling, but all literature into the bargain. It
is pretended that the adoption of simplified spelling would have, at
worst, only a passing effect upon the well-being of literature. If, for
example, all the English classics were re-spelled in conformity with
phonetic rules, and their use made general, very soon, we are told, we
should forget their original idiosyncrasies, and love them in their new
spelling as much as ever. But people who argue in this way must have been
blinded in their taste in their pursuit of rationalistic uniformity.
Literature employs words not for their rational meaning alone, not even
for their sound alone, but for their combined qualities of meaning,
sound, _sight_, association, history, and a score of other attributes. By
reducing words to a rational rule of phonetic spelling, more than half
of these qualities would be entirely, or almost entirely, eliminated. A
re-spelled Shakespeare, for instance, if it should ever take the place of
the present edition, would be a new Shakespeare—a Shakespeare translated
from the coloured language in which he thought and wrote into a language
of logical symbols. An exact analogy—as far as any analogy can be
exact—for the proposal of the S.S.S. would be to propose to abolish the
use of colour in pictorial art, and to produce everything in black and
white. The colour-blind would, no doubt, be satisfied in the one case,
and, in the other, the word-blind would be equally pleased. Fortunately,
both proposals have the same chance of success.
STERNE CRITICISM.—Everybody knows that Sterne’s _Sentimental Journey_
broke off suddenly in the second book at the crisis of a Shandian
incident. What everybody does not know—I confess I only learnt it myself
a few days ago—is that Sterne’s Editor “Eugenius” not only concluded
the incident, but carried on the journey to the extent of another two
books. He did this, he informs us, from notes and materials left or
communicated to him by Sterne himself, and he is so frank as to say
that he has striven to complete the work in the style and manner of his
late friend. Having a particular admiration for the style of Sterne,
which, to my mind, is the easiest ever achieved in English, I have now
a double resentment against the presumptuous Eugenius. In the first
place, I question the man’s veracity almost as much as the veracity of
Sterne himself is to be questioned in the matter of Sterne’s intention
of completing his journey. The _Journey_ was a _tour de force_; it was
the result, as it were, of a challenge. Sterne had made a bet that he
would maintain the reader’s interest in a series of the most trivial
incidents by his mere manner of writing about them. That he had any
other intention than that of showing his power I do not for a moment
believe; least of all the suggestion that he had a plan of writing
in his mind which required the book to be finished in four sections,
four and just four. Eugenius’s excuses that he had often discussed the
completion of the _Journey_ with Sterne, and had heard from him the
“facts, events, and observations,” intended to be introduced into the
unwritten book, are thus a mere literary device for getting his own work
tied to Sterne’s kite. Even if Sterne gave him authority for it, I should
refuse to believe it, since Sterne may easily have been badgered into
consenting; and, in any case, is not necessarily to be believed upon a
matter of fact. One’s resentment is embittered by the manner in which
Eugenius makes the continuation. It is notorious that Sterne never made
a statement that could definitely incriminate himself. It was his whole
art to leave everything to his readers’ imagination, and to put upon
them the odium of the obvious interpretation. An admission on his part
would have been fatal not only to himself, but to the style and intention
of his work, which may be described as skating upon thin ice. Eugenius,
however, in spite of all the intimacy which he says subsisted between
himself and Mr. Sterne, was so far from having appreciated the elementary
quality of the _Journey_ that in completing the very incident on which
Book Two breaks off, he falls into the blunder of committing Sterne to a
“criminal” confession. I need not say what the confession is; it is the
obvious deduction to be drawn from the description provided by Sterne
himself. And it is precisely on this account that I am certain Sterne
would never have made it.
STERNE ON LOVE IN FRANCE.—One of my correspondents must have been reading
Sterne at the same time that I was being annoyed by Eugenius, for he has
written to remind me of Sterne’s opinion of Love as it is understood in
France. “The French,” wrote Sterne, “have certainly got the credit of
understanding more of Love, and making it better than any other nation
upon earth; but for my own part I think them arrant bunglers, and in
truth, the worst set of marksmen that ever tried Cupid’s patience.”
My correspondent recalls the fact from the dark backward and abysm of
time that, in a discussion of Stendhal, I expressed the same opinion;
and he has, no doubt, supplied the parallel in order to gratify me.
Gratifying it is, in one sense, to find oneself confirmed in a somewhat
novel opinion—which, moreover, was thought to be original as well—by an
observer of the penetration of Sterne. But it is less gratifying when one
reflects that Sterne was the last person in the world to have the right
to talk about Love at all. What should a genuine as well as a professed
sentimentalist have to say of Love more than that in its practice the
French were not sentimental enough for him? But it is not the defect of
sentimentality that stamps Love as understood in France with the mark of
inferiority, but the presence of too much egoism—a fault Sterne would
never have observed.
ENGLISH STYLE.—The same correspondent copies out for me Quincey’s “fine
analysis of Swift’s style,” as follows:—
The main qualification for such a style was plain good sense,
natural feeling, unpretendingness, some little scholarly
practice in the putting together of sentences so as to avoid
mechanical awkwardness of construction, but above all, the
advantage of a _subject_ such in its nature as instinctively
to reject ornament lest it should draw attention from itself.
Such subjects are common; but grand impassioned subjects
insist upon a different treatment; and there it is that the
true difficulties of style commence, and there it is that your
worshipful Master Jonathan would have broken down irrecoverably.
This “fine analysis” of Swift’s style does not appear to me to be
anything more than a powerful attack delivered by an apostle of the
opposing school. Swift and de Quincey are obviously poles apart in the
direction of their style, and I have no doubt that I could find in Swift
as severe an analysis of de Quincey as my correspondent has found in
de Quincey of Swift. At bottom the controversy carries us back to the
very foundations of European culture. On the whole, Swift followed the
Greek tradition—exemplified by Demosthenes—while de Quincey followed the
Latin—exemplified by Cicero. There can be no doubt of the school to which
Swift belonged; his _Drapier’s Letters_, for instance, were confessedly
modelled on Demosthenes. Likewise there can be no doubt of the school
which de Quincey attended; he learned his style of Cicero. The question,
however, is one of taste, by no means a matter of _non est disputandum_.
Which of the two schools of style is capable of the highest absolute
development; and, above all, which is the most suited to the English
language? My mind is fully made up; I am for the Greek and Demosthenes
against the Latin and Cicero. I am for Swift against de Quincey; for the
simple against the ornate.
De Quincey appears to me to fall into an almost vulgar error in
assuming that the style of plain good sense cultivated by Swift is fit
only for commonplace subjects, and that “grand impassioned subjects”
demand an ornate style. The style of Demosthenes was obviously quite as
well fitted to the high subjects of his Discourse on the Crown as to
the details for the fitting out of an expedition against Philip. The
_Apology_ of Plato is in much the same style, and not even de Quincey
would say that the subject was not anything but commonplace. With the
majority of English critics, I have a horror of fine writing, and
especially about fine things. The proper rule is, in fact, the very
reverse of that laid down by de Quincey; it is on no account to write
upon “grand impassioned subjects” in a grand impassioned style. After
all, as the Greeks understood, there are an infinite number of degrees
of simplicity, ranging from the simple colloquial to the simple grand.
The ornate Latin style, with its degrees of ornateness, is, on the other
hand, a bastard style. The conclusion seems to be this: that the simple
style is capable of anything, even of dealing with “grand impassioned
subjects”; whereas the ornate style is only barely tolerable in the most
exceptional circumstances. I would sooner trust Swift than de Quincey not
to embarrass a reader on a difficult occasion, as, for the same reason, I
prefer Shakespeare the Greek to Ben Jonson the Latinist.
LITERARY CULS-DE-SAC.—A cul-de-sac occurs in literary history when a
direction is taken away from the main highway of the national language
and literature; when the stream it represents is not part of the main
stream of the traditional language, but a backwater or a side stream.
There have been dozens of such private streams in the course of our
literary history, and I am not denying for an instant that their final
contribution to the main stream has been considerable.
THE DECLINE OF FREE INTELLIGENCE.—Pure intelligence I should define as
displaying itself in disinterested interest in things; in things, that
is to say, of no _personal_ advantage, but only of general, public, or
universal importance. Interest (to turn the cat in the pan) is the
growing end of the mind, and its direction and strength are marked by
a motiveless curiosity to know; it reveals itself, while it is still
active, as a love of knowledge for its own sake. Later on it often
appears that this motiveless love had a motive; in other words, the
knowledge acquired under its impulse is discovered in the end to “come
in handy,” and to have been of use. But the process of acquiring this
knowledge is for the most part, indeliberate, unaware of any other aim
than that of the satisfaction of curiosity; utility is remote from its
mind. This is what I have called disinterested interest, and it is this
free intelligence of which it appears to me that there is a diminishing
amount in our day. Were it not the case, the fortunes of the really
free Press would be much brighter than they are. An organ of free
opinion would not need to discover a utilitarian attraction for its free
opinions, but would be able to command a sale on its own merits. Such,
indeed, is the case in several European countries, notably in France,
Italy, and Germany. I am told that it is the case also in Bohemia (in
which country there is not only no illiterate, but no un-read adult) and
in the provinces of Yugo Slavia. In these countries a journal of opinions
can live without providing its readers with any commercial or specialist
bribe in the way of exclusive utilitarian information; it can live, that
is to say, by the sale of its free intelligence. Happy countries—in one
sense of the word; happy if also tragical; for their existence is not
always, at any rate, a paradise for the rich, a hell for the poor, and a
purgatory for the able!
To what is due this decline amongst us of free intelligence? There
are several explanations possible, though none is wholly satisfying.
It can be attributed to the industrialisation of our own country,
a metamorphosis of occupation which has been longer in being in
England than anywhere else. The economic balance between primary and
secondary production has been for a longer period lost in this country
than elsewhere, with the consequence that we have been the first to
exhibit the effects of over-industrialisation in the loss of the free
intelligence associated with primary production. The other nations may
be expected to follow suit as the same metamorphosis overtakes them.
Another explanation is the reaction against the intellectualism of the
nineteenth century. It is a familiar topic, but it is obvious that if
faith in the ultimate _use_ of intelligence is lost, men become cynical
in regard to the passion itself. Let us suppose that every love affair
always and invariably ended in disappointment or disaster. Let us suppose
that it became the accepted belief that such would always be the case.
Would it not soon become fashionable to nip the first stirrings of love
in the bud, and to salt its path whenever its shoots began to appear?
The nineteenth century reached its climax in a vast disappointment with
science, with the intellect, with intellectualism. The fifth act of
the thrilling drama inaugurated after the French Revolution closed in
utter weariness and ennui. It was no wonder that the twentieth century
opened in a return to impulse and in a corresponding reaction from
intellectuality. That the reaction has gone too far is the very disease
we are now trying to diagnose; for only an excessive reaction towards
impulse and away from thought can account for the poverty of free
intelligence. Sooner or later, the pendulum must be set free again, if
not in this country, then in America, or in some of the countries whose
rebirth we are now witnessing. It cannot be the will of God that free
intelligence should be extinguished from the planet; the world, somehow
or other, must be made safe for intelligence as well as for democracy.
My last guess at the origin of the phenomenon is the decline of the
religious spirit. Religion, I conceive, is the study and practice of
perfection, and it is summed up in the text: “Be ye perfect, even as your
Father in Heaven is perfect.” This impossible and infinite aim includes,
as a matter of course, the employment and development of intelligence as
one of the most powerful aids to perfection. Fools, the Indian Scriptures
inform us, can enter heaven, but only wise men know how to stay there.
And if the perfection we seek is to be lasting and incorruptible, it is
certain that an infinite amount of intelligence will be necessary to its
accomplishment. The loss of the belief in the perfectibility of the human
spirit, in the religious duty of perfection, might easily account for the
diminution of our regard for one of the chief instruments of perfection,
namely, intelligence. Why should we strive to set the crooked straight,
since it is not only impossible, but is no duty of ours? And why labour
with the instrumental means when the end is of no value? None of these
explanations, however, really satisfies me.
The free Press is more severely criticised by its readers than the “kept”
Press by its clientèle. The reason is, no doubt, that in comparison
with the “kept” Press it protests its freedom and sets itself up on a
pedestal. Every “excuse” is consequently denied to it, and the smallest
complaint is enlarged to a grievance. The “kept” Press may be caught
in flagrant self-contradiction, in lies, in chicanery of all kinds, in
every form of intellectual and other dishonesty—it continues to be read
and “followed” as if the oracle were infallible. No newspaper in this
country has ever died of exposure; many live by being found out. The free
Press, on the other hand, has often for its readers not only the most
exigent of critics, but the most contradictory. They are not only hard to
please (which is a merit), but their reasons for being pleased, or the
reverse, are bewilderingly various. And, moreover, when they are pleased
they are usually silent, and when they are displeased they cease to buy
the journal.
LITERARY COPYRIGHT IN AMERICA.—Horace Walpole used to say that the
Americans were the only people by whom he would wish to be admired. Let
me put the compliment a little differently and say that the Americans
are the people among all others whom we would most wish to admire most.
Having done so much to command our admiration already, we are not only
willing, we are desirous and anxious, that they should leave no amendable
fault unamended in themselves. Our command to them is that they should
become perfect.