England might at any moment be involved in it. How would the people
take it? was the question of the hour. Sir Limpidus was of the
opinion that war just then would be a godsend. It would rouse the
ancient spirit of the people and dispel their madness. They would
once more rally to their natural leaders, who, for their part, would
throw off the mantle of frivolity. Even defeat as a united nation
would be better than ignoble peace with the anarchic mob supreme.
But Mr. Pickthall's final verdict on Sir Limpidus occurs earlier than
this, and is put into the statesman's own mouth or rather mind. Sir
Limpidus has delivered an address at his old school, and is told by
his disappointed son that "the fellows ... wanted you to talk about
yourself, the things you've done, in Parliament and foreign countries,
and all that."
"I've not done anything to make a speech about," said Sir Limpidus,
after a moment's hesitation.
His triumph as a statesman was not one of doing. It was the natural
consequence of being what he was. If it came to doing, he had fought
a duel in his youth, and in Albania had assisted to burn down a
village. Those incidents in his career were not fit subjects for a
speech to schoolboys; and besides them in the way of doing there was
nothing but pursuit of women and field sports. So it was with a smile
over the double meaning of the words that he repeated: "I've done
nothing to make a speech about."
The headmaster, following his distinguished guest, happened to
overhear this mild disclaimer, and he laughed aloud, calling his
colleagues round him to enjoy the classic joke.
These two extracts will serve better than any analysis to explain both
the direction and the method of Mr. Pickthall's satire. It has the
doubtful merit (in a satire) of being consistently moderate; and Sir
Limpidus, who is never quite a figure of truth, also misses ever being
quite a figure of fun. Social criticism on these lines may put forward
quite adequately the author's point of view; but unless it has some
imaginative vigour it cannot be said to justify the form in which it is
cast. Mr. Pickthall's book is a presentation, by means of characters
instead of by abstract arguments, of certain lines of thought regarding
politics, education, and other questions; and in so far it is an essay
in the same _genre_ as Miss Stern's novel. Where it differs is in the
fact that the lines of thought have remained to the author incomparably
more interesting than the means of their presentation. These figures
are painted in the flat: they have little imaginative life: and, as a
work of creative fiction, the book must be regarded as a failure.
With the remainder of the books on our list, we return to the older
tradition of the novel, the tradition which seeks to produce a work
of art, the lessons deducible from which (if any) are, roughly,
applicable to human nature in general. In this sort, Mrs. Virginia
Woolf has written a very extraordinary story. Katharine Hilbery,
after much hesitation, engages herself to William Rodney, a precise
Civil Servant, who writes plays in verse. He develops doubts of their
love simultaneously with hers, and is not sure whether he is not in
love with her cousin, Cassandra, as, after some curious experiments
in emotionalism, he discovers himself to be. He therefore disengages
himself from Katharine and engages himself to Cassandra. Meanwhile
Ralph Denham, a brilliant and more vital, if less polished, young man,
in love with Katharine, seeing her given to William, proposes to Mary
Datchet, who loves him but refuses him. When Katharine is free he
proposes to her and is accepted. This story Mrs. Woolf tells in nearly
five hundred-and-fifty pages of fairly close print.
The taste for her writing is decidedly an acquired one; and, as we have
proved by experiment, it is possible to read some two hundred pages
without acquiring it. But when a certain saturation point is reached,
a remarkable change takes place in the reader's sensibility; and
what before he thought amazingly tedious and thin-spun he then finds
delightful--delightful enough for it to be worth while turning back to
the beginning and reading again the two hundred pages which wearied
him at the first attempt. Mrs. Woolf has indeed proved a truth which
undoubtedly exists but which few writers are capable of establishing,
namely, that no character, properly ascertained and portrayed, can ever
be uninteresting. It is not by vivacity or humour that she maintains
the readableness of her innumerable scenes and conversations. Perhaps
the most vivacious passage in the book is the description of Cassandra,
as she appears in William's memory:
Cassandra Otway had a very fine taste in music, and he had charming
recollections of her in a light fantastic attitude, playing the flute
in the morning-room at Stogdon House. He recalled with pleasure the
amusing way in which her nose, long like all the Otway noses, seemed
to extend itself into the flute, as if she were some inimitably
graceful species of musical mole. The little picture suggested very
happily her melodious and whimsical temperament.
Mrs. Woolf is not a satirist, not even so much as was Jane Austen; and
she avoids humour for its own sake, not so much because she is not
capable of it as because that is not here her concern. The outstanding
quality of her book is its consistent wealth of minute and accurate
observation, both of behaviour and of states of mind, by means of which
the persons are at length fully revealed. Extracts from work of this
sort are unfortunately, as a rule, not very convincing: it is like a
liquid which has no colour when it is seen in a tea-spoon and a great
deal when it is seen in a bucket. But a specimen may be given. Here
Katharine and Rodney, sitting together in silence, are considering for
the first time the possibility of breaking their engagement:
She would have spoken, but could not bring herself to ask him for
signs of affection which she had no right to claim. The conviction
that he was thus strange to her filled her with despondency, and
illustrated quite beyond doubt the infinite loneliness of human
beings. She had never felt the truth of this so strongly before. She
looked away into the fire; it seemed to her that even physically they
were now scarcely within speaking distance, and spiritually there
was certainly no human being with whom she could claim comradeship;
no dream that satisfied her as she was used to be satisfied; nothing
remained in whose reality she could believe, save those abstract
ideas--figures, laws, stars, facts, which she could hardly hold to
for lack of knowledge and a kind of shame.
When Rodney owned to himself the folly of this prolonged silence and
the meanness of such devices, and looked up ready to seek some excuse
for a good laugh or opening for a confession, he was disconcerted by
what he saw. Katharine seemed equally oblivious of what was bad or
of what was good in him. Her expression suggested concentration upon
something entirely remote from her surroundings. The carelessness
of her attitude seemed to him rather masculine than feminine. His
impulse to break up the constraint was chilled, and once more the
exasperating sense of his own impotency returned to him. He could not
help contrasting Katharine with his vision of the engaging, whimsical
Cassandra; Katharine undemonstrative, inconsiderate, silent, and yet
so notable that he could never do without her good opinion.
She veered round upon him a moment later, as if, when her train of
thought was ended, she became aware of his presence.
This is woven of gossamer threads, and so indeed is the whole novel;
but these threads make together a consistent, flexible, and beautiful
fabric. There is one further observation that is perhaps worth making.
Writers who go so deeply into the minutenesses of psychology and
behaviour as Mrs. Woolf commonly tend to obscurity not only in their
material but also in their presentation of it. In the pages of this
book there is not one thought or one sentence that is not impeccably
lucid.
_The Power of a Lie_, by Mr. Jonas Bojer, a Norwegian author,
whose book, _The Great Hunger_, has already attracted attention,
is preceded by an introduction by Sir Hall Caine; and indeed the
farmers and peasants with which it deals do a little recall the
Manxmen of that writer's early work. But there the suitability of this
sponsorship ends; and we must enter a protest against the practice
of handicapping a book with a preface by a critic who is evidently
incapable of understanding it or of expressing himself intelligently
upon it. The story is sufficiently simple. Knut Norby, a wealthy,
simple, good-hearted, irascible old farmer, has allowed himself in a
weak moment to be cajoled into backing a bill for Wangen, who is an
unbalanced, incompetent, and rather unamiable person. Wangen fails;
and Norby is reduced to panic terror by the thought of what his wife
will say when she hears of his folly. He therefore puts off the moment
of confession by speaking so evasively as to give the impression that
he denies having signed the bond, and Fru Norby, indignant against the
man who has sought to defraud her husband, takes the matter into her
own hands and lays a charge of forgery against Wangen. The innocent
man, who is guilty enough in other particulars, having brought many
persons who trusted him to destitution, is elevated into a condition of
excessive self-righteousness by this unjust accusation. Norby struggles
for some time to put matters right, but his courage always fails him
at the point of confession; and gradually he comes to regard Wangen as
a wicked man and as the tool of unscrupulous persons. Wangen, always
weak and shifty, at length forges a letter to prove his case, which
he cannot do otherwise, as the only witness to the signature is dead.
His forgery is detected, and he is sentenced to a year's hard labour.
Meanwhile Norby has argued himself out of the truth and back into
the condition of benevolent justice, which is his natural state. The
book ends with a banquet given to him by his neighbours to show their
sympathy with him in his trials.
On this very remarkable composition Sir Hall Caine has the following
observations to make:
This book says, if I do not misunderstand it, that the sense of
innocence in an innocent man may be corrupting and debasing; that
to prove himself guiltless a man may make himself guilty, and that
nearly every good and true impulse of the heart may be whittled away
by the suspicion and abuse of the world.
I confess, though I am here to introduce this book to English
readers, and do so with gladness and pride, that this is teaching of
which I utterly disapprove. It conflicts with all my experience of
life to think that a man may commit forgery, as Wangen does, to prove
himself innocent of forgery, and that a man may become unselfish, as
Norby becomes unselfish, by practising the most selfish duplicity.
If I had to believe this I should also have to believe that there
is no knowledge of right and wrong in the heart of man, no sense of
sin, that conscience is only a juggling fiend, and that the presiding
power in the world not only is not God, but is the devil.
This passage is worth quoting because it suggests what Mr. Bojer has
avoided. Sir Hall Caine demands, to all intents and purposes, a book
like one of his own, in which there are definite and distinguishable
categories of good men and bad men, in which virtue is ranged
uncompromisingly against vice. But Sir Hall Caine's books, as this
preface would suggest, even if we had never seen one of them, are,
since the very earliest of them, negligible both artistically and
morally. Mr. Bojer has attempted something different and has succeeded
in writing a most unusual and interesting novel. He makes the perennial
discovery that good and bad are mixed in all men and he adds the
discovery that the sufferings of bad men are not always the results of,
or proportionate to, their sins. He has done these things in a story
which astonishes the reader by its straightforwardness and simplicity.
The characters are presented by means of the barest lines; and no
incident or theme is elaborated beyond a few pages. Nevertheless the
central idea is adequately worked out, and the whole novel leaves a
distinct and vivid impression on the mind.
In Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer discriminating English readers found over a
year ago an American novelist whom, alone of his generation, they were
able to admire and to consider seriously. This may have been partly
because he has learnt something, but not so much as to seem ridiculous,
from English models, and because he writes with a restraint,
moderation, and detachment which are rare in his literary compatriots.
But there was certainly also a definite and individual virtue in him to
which critical opinion in this country responded. He had a lively and
exact visual gift and a power of rendering great passion without risk
of bombast; and these qualities were rightly held to redeem many faults
and weaknesses in _The Three Black Pennys_. In _Java Head_, published
in the middle of last year, the first of these qualities was still
perceptible, but, as regarded the second, Mr. Hergesheimer's avoidance
of rant appeared to have become a paralysing inhibition. We do not know
quite what to make of his third book, _Gold and Iron_. In the absence
of any information to the contrary it would be natural to suppose that
it is a later work than the other two; but this seems to us almost
impossible and, if indeed it be so, decidedly regrettable. It consists
of three _nouvelles_ or "long-short stories," of which the first, _Wild
Oranges_, describing the rescue of a girl from a household living in
isolation and terrorised by a homicidal man-servant, is, except for a
few passages of description, a negligible piece of the magazine order.
In the second and third we do discover traces of the Mr. Hergesheimer
whose talents excited us in 1918. One deals with the resuscitation,
by a cold, contained, and determined man, of a deserted blast-furnace
and his attempt to establish himself as a magnate. The other describes
the return of a gold-miner, rich but with hands reddened in one of
the incidents of Forty-Nine, from California to his prim and sleepy
native village on the coast of Massachusetts. In both of these Mr.
Hergesheimer's object is to discover to the reader the interior
passions of intense but reserved and hardly articulate personalities.
This is an ambition worthy of a novelist of the first rank; and indeed,
both in setting himself such a task and in his methods of approaching
it, Mr. Hergesheimer reveals himself as a writer of more than common
powers. But it can hardly be said to be successfully accomplished
here. In glimpses both Alexander Hulings and Jason Burrage are grasped
and shown as living men. Hulings comes vigorously and convincingly to
life in his duel with Partridge Sinnox, the dangerous gentleman from
New Orleans; it is possible to see Burrage, smoking a cheroot, feet
up on the brass rail of the hearth, with the refined and yet original
Honora Canderay beside him, at his first visit to her. But between such
glimpses as these both figures disappear, as though in a moving mist,
behind Mr. Hergesheimer's attempt to describe them. He will describe
them only in the precise and rigid way which he has chosen, a way which
involves omissions, reticences, and silences, subtle appeals to the
reader's understanding; and, in these stories at least, he has by no
means mastered it. It was used with much more success in _The Three
Black Pennys_ and in _Java Head_, and is probably capable of much
further development. If we are right in our surmise that these stories
are early work, there is a possibility that Mr. Hergesheimer may yet
show himself to be a very remarkable novelist indeed.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
THE LETTERS OF CHARLES SORLEY. Cambridge University Press. 12_s._ 6_d._
net.
The value set on irony by the Greeks might well be studied by us
moderns. A proper sense of irony teaches both humility and patience,
and it will not lead to cynicism unless the basis of the soul be
cynical. It teaches, above all, proportion, which is the lesson needed
most, perhaps, by modern artists and sociologists, philanthropists and
theologians, business men and politicians. These letters of Charles
Sorley's, the letters of a young, eager, cultivated boy, are rendered
ironical by circumstance. After the ordinary life of a public schoolboy
at Marlborough he went, in 1914, before going to Oxford, for an
educational holiday in Germany. He stayed in a German family, he was
enthusiastic about German things and German people as compared with the
English, and he reached England only just in time to escape being a
prisoner of war in Germany. The letters are lively, intelligent rather
than terse, good-humoured, shrewd and full of that enthusiasm which was
Charles Sorley's great natural talent. It is not, however, the essays
on Masefield and Housman which give the book its interest. It is the
pages on his life in Germany and a few passages on life in the Army
which make the volume one of the most remarkable records of the young
England which bore the brunt of the war.
How delightful is this passage on the German supper--Sorley lodged in
an academic household at Schwerin:
The people come at seven, and talk about the rise in the price of
butter till 8. From 8 till 9.30 they eat and drink and talk about the
niceness of the victuals, and ask the hostess their cost. From 9.30
to 10.30 they talk about the scarcity of eggs. From 10.30 to 11 they
drink beer and cross-examine me about the Anglo-German crisis. From
11 till 12 they make personal remarks and play practical jokes on one
another. From 12 to 12.30 they eat oranges and chocolate and declare
they must be going now. From 12.30 to 1 they get heavy again and sigh
over the increased cost of living in Schwerin. At 1 they begin to
scatter. By 2 I am in bed.
That is not the only passage which takes the reader straight into the
atmosphere of the Caravaners. There is this anecdote, too:
A friend of sorts of the Bilders died lately; and, when the Frau
attempted to break the news to Karl at table, he immediately said,
"Don't tell me anything sad while I'm eating."
Charles Sorley remarks on this that an exact parallel may be found
in the Odyssey where the gentleman expostulates οὐ γαρ ἐγώ γε
τερπομ' ὀδυρόμενος μεταδόρπιος {ou gar egô ge terpom' oduromenos
metadorpios}--I hate being forced to grieve in the middle of supper.
The letters are full of casual literary criticism, and provide a
curious contrast to the letters of Lionel Johnson recently published.
Charles Sorley strikes one as having a far clearer idea of the position
of literature in life than had Johnson, but he shows little sign of
that fine critical intelligence which mark Johnson's best judgments.
Sorley passes passionately from Masefield to Housman, from Housman
to Hardy, from Hardy to Ibsen and Goethe. It seems odd that a boy
of his temperament should think _Faust_ greater than anything of
Shakespeare's, and by implication greater than _Peer Gynt_; elsewhere
he passes a really witty judgment on Goethe: "If Goethe really died
saying 'More light,' it was very silly of him: what _he_ wanted was
more warmth."
His life in the Army was not long. After a hard training in England he
left for France in May, 1915, and was killed by a sniper on October
13th. The books he had over there were _Faust_ and Richard Jefferies.
To some of us Jefferies is chiefly lovable and remarkable because of
the men who have loved him; and that he could charm Sorley and bring
to him, amid the disgust of the battlefield, something of the English
countryside, gives him an additional claim on our gratitude:
I read Richard Jefferies to remind me of Liddington Castle and the
light green and dark green of the Aldbourne Downs in summer.
The book is edited by Professor and Mrs. Sorley, and Mrs. Sorley
contributes a brief biographical chapter. There are one or two
references to living persons which would, perhaps, be better away,
though we cannot imagine any person of humour objecting to the fun
of this high-spirited, generous boy. Incidentally, in its picture of
Marlborough and Sorley's literary activities, the letters provide
a useful counterpoise to the rather reckless attacks made on the
uncultured public schools of England.
ESSAYS ON ART. By A. CLUTTON-BROCK. Methuen. 5_s._ net.
Shall we ever have a satisfactory æsthetic? Sometimes, in moments of
hopefulness, one believes that there may be a few points of agreement
in ethics, in politics, in metaphysics, even in economics: but to
read a new book on æsthetic is to wonder again whether we shall ever
get beyond the old tag, that it's a mere waste of time arguing about
taste. Certainly Mr. Clutton-Brock's book, interesting, acute, and
charmingly written as it is, does not show us how to reconcile, let us
say, Tolstoy's _What is Art?_ with Whistler's _Ten o'Clock_: or either
with the great and unjustly-despised body of criticism to be found in
Ruskin's works. His essays are provocative: at times he appears to
clear up certain matters, and then the reader finds himself wondering.
In the very first essay Mr. Clutton-Brock discourses on nature and art.
"There is one beauty of nature and another of art." "Nothing kills
art so certainly as the effort to produce a beauty of the same kind
as that which is perceived in nature. In the beauty of nature, as we
perceive it, there is a perfection of workmanship which is perfection
because there is no workmanship. Natural things are not made, but
born; works of art are made. There is the essential difference between
them and between their beauties." Now is there any truth in those
statements? Take, for instance, the simplest kind of beauty, the beauty
which appeals to touch: is there any essential difference between the
sensations of beauty given by stroking a sable and stroking a piece of
exquisite silk velvet? Again, is the beauty conveyed by the sight of
Cader Idris really different in kind from the beauty conveyed by the
sight of Amiens Cathedral? Is a singer's appeal fundamentally different
from the appeal of the nightingale?
Mr. Clutton-Brock goes on to say that "all great works of art show
an effort, a roughness, an inadequacy of craftsmanship which is the
essence of their beauty, and distinguishes it from the beauty of
nature." That sentence betrays what seems to us his saddest error. He
is confusing, we think, art and craft. It simply is not true that a
work of art must show "inadequacy of craftsmanship." What is essential
is that the artist should not seem to be satisfied with his mere
technical skill of craft. He should, somehow, convey to us that he
knows there is a beauty which no craft can render perfectly. He must,
in short, be humble. For lack of that humility Blake refused to call
Rubens a great artist. Yet Rubens, superb craftsman as he was, was not
the superior of Velasquez, who yet preserves in all his work that sense
of something desired yet unachieved--unachieved not because Velasquez's
craft was inadequate, but because his vision was interpretative rather
than imitative. It is important that the distinction between craft
and art should be recognised, otherwise Mr. Clutton-Brock's perfectly
sound contention that the beauty of art "is produced by the effort to
accomplish the impossible" will be made a mere excuse for slovenly
workmanship. This sort of discussion, however, is unsuitable for a
review; even where space is, for practical purposes, infinite (_e.g._
in a conversation), it seldom leads to agreement. We can only say
(what everybody knows) that Mr. Clutton-Brock is the sanest of all
professional art-critics and that to differ from him is to doubt one's
own opinions.
UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS. By LORD DUNSANY. Elkin Matthews. 5_s._ net.