wretchedness and given to looking in the mirror of his own bodily
corruptions was often tempted, by "a sickly inclination," to commit
suicide, and that he even wrote, though he did not dare to publish, an
apology for suicide on religious grounds, his famous and little-read
_Biathanatos_. The family crest of the Donnes was a sheaf of snakes,
and these symbolise well enough the brood of temptations that twisted
about in this unfortunate Christian's bosom. Donne, in the days of his
salvation, abandoned the family crest for a new one--Christ crucified
on an anchor. But he might well have left the snakes writhing about
the anchor. He remained a tempted man to the end. One wishes that the
_Sermons_ threw more light on his later personal life than they do.
But perhaps that is too much to expect of sermons. There is no form
of literature less personal except a leading article. The preacher
usually regards himself as a mouthpiece rather than a man giving
expression to himself. In the circumstances what surprises us is that
the _Sermons_ reveal, not so little, but so much of Donne. Indeed,
they make us feel far more intimate with Donne than do his private
letters, many of which are little more than exercises in composition.
As a preacher, no less than as a poet, he is inflamed by the creative
heat. He shows the same vehemence of fancy in the presence of the
divine and infernal universe--a vehemence that prevents even his most
far-sought extravagances from disgusting us as do the lukewarm follies
of the Euphuists. Undoubtedly, the modern reader smiles when Donne,
explaining that man can be an enemy of God as the mouse can be an enemy
to the elephant, goes on to speak of "God who is not only a multiplied
elephant, millions of elephants multiplied into one, but a multiplied
world, a multiplied all, all that can be conceived by us, infinite
many times over; nay (if we may dare to say so) a multiplied God, a
God that hath the millions of the heathens' gods in himself alone."
But at the same time one finds oneself taking a serious pleasure in
the huge sorites of quips and fancies in which he loves to present
the divine argument. Nine out of ten readers of the _Sermons_, I
imagine, will be first attracted to them through love of the poems.
They need not be surprised if they do not immediately enjoy them. The
dust of the pulpit lies on them thickly enough. As one goes on reading
them, however, one becomes suddenly aware of their florid and exiled
beauty. One sees beyond their local theology to the passion of a great
suffering artist. Here are sentences that express the Paradise, the
Purgatory, and the Hell of John Donne's soul. A noble imagination is
at work--a grave-digging imagination, but also an imagination that is
at home among the stars. One can open Mr. Pearsall Smith's anthology
almost at random and be sure of lighting on a passage which gives us
a characteristic movement in the symphony of horror and hope that was
Donne's contribution to the art of prose.
Excerpts of great prose seldom give us that rounded and final beauty
that we expect in a work of art; and the reader of Donne's _Sermons_ in
their latest form will be wise if he comes to them expecting to find
beauty piecemeal and tarnished though in profusion. He will be wise,
too, not to expect too many passages of the same intimate kind as that
famous confession in regard to prayer which Mr. Pearsall Smith quotes,
and which no writer on Donne can afford not to quote:
I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God,
and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and
his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for
the whining of a door. I talk on, in the same posture of praying;
eyes lifted up; knees bowed down; as though I prayed to God; and,
if God, or his Angels should ask me, when I thought last of God in
that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I had forgot what I
was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of
yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw under
my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an anything, a
nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer.
If Donne had written much prose in this kind, his _Sermons_ would be
as famous as the writings of any of the saints since the days of the
Apostles.
Even as it is, there is no other Elizabethan man of letters whose
personality is an island with a crooked shore, inviting us into a
thousand bays and creeks and rivermouths, to the same degree as the
personality that expressed itself in the poems, sermons, and life of
John Donne. It is a mysterious and at times repellent island. It lies
only intermittently in the sun. A fog hangs around its coast, and
at the base of its most radiant mountain-tops there is, as a rule, a
miasma-infested swamp. There are jewels to be found scattered among
its rocks and over its surface, and by miners in the dark. It is
richer, indeed, in jewels and precious metals and curious ornaments
than in flowers. The shepherd on the hillside seldom tells his tale
uninterrupted. Strange rites in honour of ancient infernal deities
that delight in death are practised in hidden places, and the echo of
these reaches him on the sighs of the wind and makes him shudder even
as he looks at his beloved. It is an island with a cemetery smell. The
chief figure who haunts it is a living man in a winding-sheet. It is,
no doubt, Walton's story of the last days of Donne's life that makes
us, as we read even the sermons and the love-poems, so aware of this
ghostly apparition. Donne, it will be remembered, almost on the eve of
his death, dressed himself in a winding-sheet, "tied with knots at his
head and feet," and stood on a wooden urn with his eyes shut, and "with
so much of the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and
death-like face," while a painter made a sketch of him for his funeral
monument. He then had the picture placed at his bedside, to which he
summoned his friends and servants in order to bid them farewell. As he
lay awaiting death, he said characteristically, "I were miserable if
I might not die," and then repeatedly, in a faint voice, "Thy Kingdom
come, Thy will be done." At the very end he lost his speech, and "as
his soul ascended and his last breath departed from him he closed his
eyes, and then disposed his hands and body into such a posture as
required not the least alteration by those that came to shroud him."
It was a strange chance that preserved his spectral monument almost
uninjured when St. Paul's was burned down in the Great Fire, and no
other monument in the Cathedral escaped. Among all his fantasies none
remains in the imagination more despotically than this last fanciful
game of dying. Donne, however, remained in all respects a fantastic to
the last, as we may see in that hymn which he wrote eight days before
the end, tricked out with queer geography, and so anciently egoistic
amid its worship.
Donne was the poet-geographer of himself, his mistresses, and his God.
Other poets of his time dived deeper and soared to greater altitudes,
but none travelled so far, so curiously, and in such out-of-the-way
places, now hurrying like a nervous fugitive, and now in the exultation
of the first man in a new found land.
THE NOVELS OF MR. COMPTON MACKENZIE
By JOHN FREEMAN
Wise men have foretold the death of imaginative literature.
Spider-like, science will seize the body of this gilded fly, stab it
methodically into numbness, and then, feeding upon its vitals, will
exhaust and destroy the useless thing. With sedulous precision the
scientist will do what the artist, alas, has failed to do more than
vaguely and uncertainly: he will re-interpret life, he will rediscover
man's relation to a vaster Universe. Ignoring or spurning all attempts
at the æsthetic apprehension of the significance of life and time, he
will at length announce his own positive formula by which all phenomena
and all relations must be valued. It is the scientist who will feel
and communicate, with a dry ecstasy wholly his own, the isolation of
man amid the meanness or the majesty of the world. That language which
we yet speak, stiff with ancestral associations, will be discarded;
obscure symbols, their order intelligible perhaps to another scientist
but to no one else, will be used to express the secrets of life and
riddles of death Thebes never knew. The watcher of the skies will be no
Keats: back to his galley-pots will every Keats be driven. In the midst
of that web called science the spider will sit with vigilant eyes,
holding their cunning in momentary suspense, swelling with vaster and
vaster accumulations.
It is not poetry alone that is threatened: imaginative art is not
confined to poetry. The strange thing is that when Thomas Hardy has
carried an imaginative view of life to a finer expression than that of
any artist of his time, and shown how easily prose may wear the strict
shackles of scientific precision, that prose itself should find no
younger masters ready to use and develop it; as if Hardy's forsaking
of prose for verse were no simple forsaking, but rather a subtle
betrayal. Unique success is his in combining the imaginative with the
scientific, the emotional with the rational, in his novels; his younger
contemporaries seem to have failed equally in both directions.
It would be absurd to charge this dereliction to any single novelist
or group of novelists. Mr. Conrad, for instance, simply evades the
charge by being in his turn unique; Mr. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett
fail in varying degrees but in both directions, and of their fellows
it is hard to think of any who has not similarly failed. Where gifts
are eminent the failure is eminent: hence this preface to remarks
upon the novels of Mr. Compton Mackenzie. Diligent, observant,
experienced, inexhaustible, or at any rate unexhausted, he has made his
opportunities and gained a hearing; indeed, as he reminds us in the
second volume of _Sinister Street_, he has won the greater advantage
of a hearing refused, the libraries having so ineffably rejected the
first volume. Nevertheless, from him that hath not---- What is it, in
fact, that has deprived him of the truest fruit of the gifts which he
has? I make no attempt to disguise the fact that Mr. Mackenzie appears
to be a writer who is not an imaginative artist, yet who might have
been an imaginative artist; a novelist who has not concerned himself
with life at all save in its external and mechanic motions. He has not
confined himself to a single manner: his first book, _The Passionate
Elopement_, was an eighteenth-century story in a style familiarised by
less capable and less versatile practitioners. Little indeed was to be
expected from an author whose first book contained such writing as:
Presently he saw her join a blue mask and lose herself in the
flickering throng. Last time he had remarked particularly that her
_vis-à-vis_ wore brown and gold, yet the two figures were alike in
movement and gesture, and he could swear the hands were identical. It
was the same without a doubt. Charles bit his nails with vexation,
and fretted confoundedly.
"My dear boy, my dear Charles, pray do not gnaw your fingers.
Narcissus admired himself, 'tis true, but without carrying his
devotion to cannibality."
Charles turned to the well-known voice of Mr. Ripple.
"A thousand pardons, dear Beau, I was vexed by a trifle. The
masquerade comports itself with tolerable success."
--and the glitter and varnish of an upholstered narrative casually
spangled with Meredithean brightness. But Mr. Mackenzie's second novel,
_Carnival_, disappointed expectation by being readable. Like some of
its successors, it might be mistaken for realistic; while another, _Guy
and Pauline_, might be termed idyllic by those who love the phrase. He
moves and changes; he is a part of all that he has met; and you wonder
at length what _he_ is. For myself, I am reminded frequently of an
ingenious character seen in provincial music-halls, who to the eyes of
a happy audience swiftly and imperceptibly invests and divests himself
of many costumes of marvellous hue--one growing plain as another is
impetuously flung off, blue gloves giving place to pink, a crimson
shirt to an emerald, a shooting-jacket to a dinner-jacket--until I
laugh unrestrainably.
Mr. Mackenzie has not sought a fugitive and cloistered virtue; his
characters, as Johnson said of Gilbert Walmsley, mingle in the great
world without exemption from its follies and its vices. He loves their
activities; he sets them going and follows their whirring motion with
the ruthless gaiety of a child playing with toys, who stops them,
breaks them, and sometimes sets them going again. He understands
mechanics and they must move; and when they are run down in one book
he winds them up again for another. He hurries hither and thither,
clutching at the skirts of perpetual motion like that other pageant
master, time. His scene is the capitals of Europe or a railway train
between them. He shares with his characters, of whatever age, their
brilliant youth. He invents untiringly. He does not vex himself or
his readers with description, but if he pauses to paint he paints
with unmistakable bright colours. He writes clearly: there is seldom a
slovenly sentence, never a memorable one. He has a cruelly accurate ear
for slang, and presents vulgarity with fond verisimilitude. Femininity
haunts him; his flowers, even, remind him of frills. Something of
extreme youth clings to his books--its zestfulness, curiosity,
indiscriminateness, and its unregretful volatility. But when, you may
ask, remembering at once his gifts and his opportunities, his gifts and
the world amid which they are exercised, when will he grow up? When,
rather, will he grow down and strike first roots into the dark earth of
the mind? When, amid all his brisk preoccupations with men and women,
will he touch life?
Leaving generalisation, it is interesting to look at one of the
simplest of Mr. Mackenzie's novels, _Guy and Pauline_, published in
1915, and conspicuously dedicated to the Commander-in-Chief and the
General Staff of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. It is the
story of Guy Hazlewood (wound up again after _Sinister Street_) and a
rector's daughter. Guy, returned from Macedonian Relief Fund work, is
charmed by a watery Oxfordshire house called Plashers Mead, and settles
there to write poetry. The rectory family are his neighbours, and with
the rector's daughters, Margaret, Monica, and Pauline, he quickly
obtains a brotherly footing, and then becomes engaged to the youngest.
The rector is a shadowy gardener with a singular fondness for answering
every question, upon whatever subject and of whatever importance, by
a reference to a blossoming or decaying plant; an idiosyncrasy which
is supposed to endear him to his family. And it is an "endearing"
book. Everybody is unvaryingly sweet; the adjective is as common and
as adhesive as mud. The three girls form a group of the kind for which
the far more finely observant and delicate art of Miss Viola Meynell
(among living novelists) has already obtained and exhausted our
sympathy. Ungracious as the comparison must seem to both writers, it
is irresistible and fatal. Linked sweetness too long drawn out becomes
tiresome, and the indistinct softness of the style makes the book
something more than tiresome.
Pauline hurried through a shower to church on Easter morning, and
shook mingled tears and raindrops from herself when she saw that Guy
was come to Communion. So then that angel had travelled from her
bedside last night to hover over Guy and bid him wake early next
morning, because it was Easter Day. With never so holy a calm had
she knelt in the jewelled shadows of that chancel or returned from
the altar to find her pew imparadised. When the people came out of
church the sun was shining, and on the trees and on the tombstones a
multitude of birds were singing. Never had Pauline felt the spirit of
Eastertide uplift her with such a joy, joy for her lover beside her,
joy for summer close at hand, joy for all the joy that Easter could
bring to the soul.
Elsewhere:
The apple trees were already frilled with a foam of blossom; and on
quivering boughs linnets with breasts rose-burnt by the winds of
March throbbed out their carol. Chaffinches with flashing prelude
of silver wings flourished a burst of song that broke as with too
intolerable a triumph: then sought another tree and poured forth
the triumphant song again. Thrushes, blackbirds and warblers quired
deep-throated melodies against the multitudinous trebles of those
undistinguished myriads that with choric pæan saluted May; and on
sudden diminuendoes could be heard the rustling canzonets of the
goldfinches, rising and falling with reedy cadences.
The story is clogged by Guy's meditations upon "poetical ambition"--he
is in the early twenties--and yet, with all these grievous handicaps,
it survives with sufficient force to express the poignancy with
which an incomplete passion may sink to oblivion. In Pauline Mr.
Mackenzie has succeeded in showing with simplicity and truth the quick
development of a child to a passionate, then a despairing, and at last
a forsaken woman; and in Guy the æsthetic frog swollen to a fraction
larger than his nature and then relapsing into insignificance. I am
not sure that the best of this novelist's achievement is not seen in
the isolation of these characters, the sufficiency of quiet incident,
and the sense--faintly yet perceptibly communicated--that the tragedy
of separation is implicit in the persons of his story. The atmosphere
may seem close, the setting fanciful, scenes, characters, and action
diminished and slightly prettified; yet there is genuine movement, rise
and decline. The occasion of Guy's last parting from Pauline is worth
noting, if only because Guy happens to be but the present name of Mr.
Mackenzie's invariable young man from Oxford; let it be remembered,
however, that Guy reappears years after in _Sylvia and Michael_ as a
larger shadow and dies with the Serbians before Nish.
"Even if temporarily I were interested in another girl, you may be
quite sure that she would always be second to you."
"But you might be interested?" Pauline asked breathlessly.
"I must be free if I'm going to be an artist."
"Free?" she echoed slowly.
There remains a negative merit. If the artist, as a hundred critics
have asserted and a thousand authors forgotten, is proved by what he
omits, it must be counted to Mr. Mackenzie for a virtue that this book
of four hundred pages does not contain a single seduction, and that,
despite the obvious piquancy of a contrast between Plashers Mead and a
London night-club, he has so easily and so blessedly avoided it.
The point is the more proper for remembrance inasmuch as such
forbearance is the last straining of the quality of mercy in this
author. Mr. Mackenzie commonly prefers cities to country scenes,
although a country scene in his earliest novel yielded him his first
opportunity of teasing innocent readers with an unsavoury interior.
Since he is a cultured writer you might imagine that Hogarth had
tutored him; but Hogarth is immensely masculine, and the origin of
our novelist's inspiration need be sought no farther back than the
'nineties. Nothing is more surprising, at any rate to men approaching
middle-age, than the fitful incandescence of that spark with which the
'nineties were tinily illuminated. The inferior intelligence and the
yet more inferior imagination which impelled certain artists--pleased
with the phrase decadent--to magnify the ferment of youthful senses,
may now seem even more trivial in their fruition than an Olympian
judgment would allow. But it is hard to be impartial when a purely
remote contemplation is forbidden by the flashing reflections from
living writers who are only in a narrow sense contemporary writers.
Coventry Patmore, chief poet and almost chief artist in that church
of which we hear so much in Mr. Mackenzie's novels, asserted with
more force than originality that what is morally bad is necessarily
bad art; and he proceeded to say, less tritely, that the delicate
indecency of so much modern art was partly due to deficient virility
which, in proportion to its strength, is naturally modest. Pleading
for plain-speaking, he maintained that indecency (which only a fool
could identify with plain-speaking) is an endeavour to irritate
sensations and appetites in the absence of natural passion; that
which passes with so many for power and ardour being really, in his
certain and indignant eyes, impotence and coldness. The distinction
between plain-speaking and delicate indecency is to be remembered
when Mr. Mackenzie's most ambitious attempts at the English novel,
_Sinister Street_ and _Sylvia Scarlett_, are considered. There may
be coarseness of expression, a fondness for trivial bluntness of
phrase; but it would be stupid to see in that more than coarseness or
bluntness. The theme of _Sinister Street_, says the author, is the
youth of a man who will presumably be a priest; a theme developed in
nearly four hundred thousand words by something like the process of
"annual elongation" which Johnson observed in a Hebridean road. The
book moves upon familiar biographical lines--the lonely children,
the local school and lesser public school, Oxford, and the betrayed
passion for a prostitute. It is an enormous and minute chronicle--of
what? Of the externals of a boy's life, of the customs of school,
flirtation with vulgar girls, evasions of school tasks, the ways of a
decrepit group surviving from the 'nineties, Catholic ritual, and a
little introspection here and there; and then, in the second volume,
of the same externals of Oxford life drawn to the same scale. Such a
scheme must needs attract the tens who have been to public school and
University, and delight the tens of thousands who haven't. Is it taking
a mean advantage of time's passage to compare _Sinister Street_ with
Serge Aksakoff's _Years of Childhood_ and its successors? Aksakoff
treats childhood with a simplicity, a quiet intentness, by the side
of which Mr. Mackenzie's enormous reconstruction seems loose and
artificial. _Sinister Street_ is vast in size and meagre in content. It
is packed with superfluities. Three-fourths of it is inessential to the
author's declared intention; it is no more than a guide-book cleverly
designed (_e.g._, the first week at Oxford) to evoke an illusion of
Oxford in Pimlico and Shepherd's Bush; and concentrating upon the
remaining fourth, you feel that your author has been aware of little
more than the physiology of adolescence and the usual facile religious
reactions. Boys from seventeen to twenty-three, girls from sixteen to
any age, may find in Henry Meats _alias_ Brother Aloysius, in Arthur
Wilmot the last of the Decadents, in the Lilys and the Daisys of the
streets, in the whole rank multitude of Mr. Mackenzie's "underworld,"
the irritation of sensation which adolescents naturally seek. Here may
curiosity be half-satisfied, half-stimulated. A Guide to Prostitution
could add little to the informations of _Sinister Street_: the dress,
the habitation, even the finances of those who have "gone gay," are
meticulously recorded. Passed, I am afraid, are the Orient promenade
and the underground gilded sty, but their glory is not departed, it
is merely transferred, and _Sinister Street_ remains sufficiently
lively and up to date to provoke the youngest and make the oldest feel
young again. Do you ask why God gives brains for such a use? I cannot
even guess. Mr. Mackenzie astonishingly blazons his book with Keats's
famous analysis: "The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature
imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between,
in which the soul is in a ferment, etc."--an astonishing phrase for
index to this book; whether used in simplicity or in subtle defiance,
this also I cannot guess. Clear enough is it that what passes for
imagination is no other than the froth of yesty waves of youth.... It
is a book written, if offence may be disavowed and avoided, by a boy
for boys. Mr. Mackenzie himself, in his introductory letter, refers to
his study of Russian writers (this in explanation of the length of his
novels), and in his epilogical letter he apparently regards the book
as a work of art. An author's opinion of his own intention is to be
respected, for who shall challenge it? It does but afford an additional
ground for judgment and surprise.
To consider _Sinister Street_ a mere aberration is an extravagant
possibility, but possibility itself is left panting behind _Sylvia
Scarlett_. Here, again, the author is generous of space, and here he
has not been content to write a guide-book. He has chosen a woman
for his central figure, and she, unlike the male protagonists of
the other books, is no coloured cloudy reflection of a reflection.
She is no minikin Michael or Guy or Maurice, but a semblable moving
figure. Sinister Street is her place of origin, Vanity Fair her scene
of action--a world of music-halls where farce passes for fantasy and
women's dress for an exciting theme. Farce? Sylvia is not only farcical
in herself, but is, like Falstaff, creative--the cause of farce in
others; and though Book One opens so admirably with a paragraph showing
how well the author can follow a good model, farce ensues and recurs
and makes her chronicle an amusing thing.