Journal, is the obverse of the same coin:
I am passing through the world swiftly and have only time to live my
own life. I am cut off by my own limitations and environment from
knowing much or understanding much. I know nothing of literature
and the drama; I have but little ear for music. I do not understand
art. All these things are closed to me. I am passing swiftly along
the course of my life with many others whom I shall never meet. How
many dear friends and kindred spirits remain undiscovered among that
number? There is no time for anything. Everything and everyone is
swept along in the hustling current. Oh! to sun ourselves awhile in
the water meadows before dropping over the falls! The real tragedies
in this world are not the things which happen to us, but the things
which don't happen.
There are critics who would trace the source of such outbursts as these
and of the joy in life that constantly appears in Keats to the effects
of bacterial disease. We cannot contradict the conclusion, which may
have a certain truth. We can only point out that the same cause does
not always produce the same effect, and we must therefore deduce a
particular genius in those in whom this spirit manifests itself.
Barbellion was, from one point of view, a case of pathology, but he
was not, any more than was Keats, nothing but that. He had a fine
temperament which he expressed very finely.
There is a temptation when one is considering the Journal, to which
Barbellion's work must eventually be reduced, to consider it as so
much raw material and to speculate how, if he had lived, he would
have used the many talents he displays in it. He began it as a record
of a naturalist's observations, and it developed only very gradually
into a self-portrait and a repository for all his reflections and
impressions. He was still, when his last illness overtook him, a
professional scientist, scribbling in his diary at night for a hobby.
But he was thinking of going over to literature; and one cannot help
asking whether, if he had done so, he would not have turned his genius
to some more formal and less miscellaneous method of expression. It is
easy to discern in him any number of capacities. He might have become
a critic--a statement which can be proved by a few examples taken at
random:
I thoroughly enjoy Hardy's poetry for its masterfulness, for his
sheer muscular compulsion over the words and sentences. In his
rough-hewn lines he yokes the recalcitrant words together and drives
them along mercilessly with something that looks like simple brute
strength.... All this pleases me the more for I know to my cost what
stubborn, sullen, hephæstian beasts words and clauses can sometimes
be. It is nice to see them punished. Hardy's poetry is Michael Angelo
rather than Greek, Browning not Tennyson.
It amuses me to discover the evident relish with which the author of
_The Daffodil Fields_ emphasises the blood and the flowers in the
attack on Achi Baba. It's all blood and beautiful flowers mixed up
together to Masefield's great excitement.... Still, to call Gallipoli
"bloody hell" is, after all, only a pedantically exact description.
You understand, tho', a very remarkable book--a work of genius.
... James Joyce's _Portrait of the Artist_--one of those books which
the mob will take fifty years to discover but once discovered will
again neglect.
He might have been a psychological or a satirical novelist, a
metaphysician, a casual essayist. He might have been a poet of nature.
His diaries are studded with the most exquisite descriptions of
landscapes and living things, which grow only more vivid and moving as
the end approaches and they become transcripts from memory instead of
recent impressions. The last long entry in the Journal is one of them,
and it is so good and so characteristic that it insists on being quoted:
Rupert Brooke said the brightest thing in the world was a leaf with
the sun shining on it. God pity his ignorance! The brightest thing
in the world is a Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun.
This is a bit of a secret, for no one knows about it save only the
naturalist. I had a new sponge the other day and it smelt of the sea
till I had soaked it. But what a vista that smell opened up!--rock
pools, gobies, Blennies, anemones (crassicon, dahlia--oh! I forget).
And at the end of my little excursion into memory I came upon the
morning when I put some sanded opaque bits of jelly, lying on the
rim of the sea, into a glass collecting jar and to my amazement and
delight they turned into Ctenophors--alive, swimming, and iridescent!
You must imagine a tiny soap bubble about the size of a filbert with
four series of plates or combs arranged regularly on the soap-bubble,
from its North or to its South Pole, and flashing spasmodically in
unison as they beat on the water.
But I think that this way of looking on Barbellion's work, excusable
as it might be, would nevertheless be mistaken. Every author writes
the book that it is given to him to write, and Barbellion's book was
the Journal. If, as seems very likely, he had developed altogether
into a writer, he might still not have abandoned this form which had
become by a gradual process peculiarly his own. Goethe said that all
his works were the fragments of a great confession, and this is true,
in a greater or lesser degree, of most authors. Barbellion would
have differed from the rest only in that his works would have been
ostensibly and formally, as well as actually, his confessions.
And this view is supported by the fact that up to the last he
was improving the flexible and accommodating method of literary
expression which his diary had become. The last eighteen months of
it seem to me to show an advance on the third part of the published
Journal almost as striking as the advance of that third part on
the first. The form fitted very closely to Barbellion's many-sided
and individual temperament; and, as time went on and he understood
better what he was doing, he made it fit more closely still. It was a
frame into which he could put with perfect ease all that his roving
perceptions picked up in life: an impression of a landscape or an
animal, a conversation overheard in the street, a suddenly flashing
truth about himself or some other person, a general reflection upon
humanity. As a journal-writer he is not, of course, alone; but, being a
strongly-marked personality, he is unique even among journal-writers.
His intense interest in his own consciousness does not, as it did with
Amiel, blind him to the actual outside world; he has more humour, more
gusto in concrete detail than Marie Bashkirtseff, a vein of sheer
poetry that we do not find in Pepys. This is not intended to rank him
above the writers with whom he loved to compare himself, but rather to
emphasise his individuality among them.
We find ourselves at last wondering not how he would have employed the
gifts he displays in the Journal, but to what pitch of excellence he
might have brought the Journal itself. The last entries are admirably
full of matter and admirably worded. The passage I have quoted on the
Ctenophors is of almost perfect lyrical beauty--not a random jotting,
but an impression seized and made permanent with all the proportion and
balance of a sonnet by Hérédia. Over against it there might be quoted
passages on the old village nurse who attended him for months, closely
and humorously observed and set down without the waste of a syllable.
Or there are pages of reflections like this:
_The Icons._
Every man has his own icon.
Secreted in the closet of each man's breast is an icon, the image of
himself, concealed from view with elaborate care, treated invariably
with great respect, by means of which the Ego, being self-conscious,
sees itself in relation to the rest of mankind, measures itself
therewith, and in accordance with which it acts and moves and
subsists. In the self-righteous man's bosom, it is a molten image of
a little potentate who can do no wrong. In the egotist's, an ideal
loved and worshipped by almost all men, addressed with solemnity
and reverence, and cast in an immutable brazen form. Only the
truth-seeker preserves his image in clay, covered in damp rags--a
working hypothesis.
A man towards his icon is like the tenderness and secretiveness of a
little bird towards its nest, which does not know you have discovered
its heart's treasure. For everyone knows the lineaments of your image
and talks about them to everyone else save you, and no one dare
refer to his own--it is bad form--so that in spite of the gossip and
criticism that swirls around each one's personality, a man remains
sound-tight and insulated.
The human comedy begins at the thought of the ludicrous unlikeness,
in many cases, of the treasured image to the real person--as much
verisimilitude about it as, say, about a bust by Gaudier-Brzeska.
Heavens! what a toy shop it will be at the Last Day! When all our
little effigies are taken from their cupboards, undraped, and ranged
along beside us, nude and shivering. In that Day how few will be able
to say that they ever cried
"God be merciful to me a sinner," or "a fool," or "a humbug."
The human tragedy begins as soon as one feels how often a man's life
is ruined by simple reason of this disparity between the image and
the real--the image (or the man's mistaken idea of himself)--like an
_ignis fatuus_ leading him through devious paths into the morass of
failure, or worse--of sheer, laughing-stock silliness. The moral is:
γνῶθι σεαυτόν {gnôthi seauton}
(My dear chap, quoting Greek at your time of life.)
The mellowness and sweetness of these lines are worth noting as
characteristic of a transformation which is obviously taking place
through all the last pages of the diary. This transformation adds
something in the nature of a rounding and a completion to the whole
work, which might otherwise have been merely an interrupted record. It
enlarges too our conception of the author's character and capacities
and fills in, most graciously, our picture of him.
Barbellion was accustomed to accuse himself of being an egotist; but,
on his own definition, he was a truth-seeker. His portrait of himself
was not immutable. It grew clearer as he understood himself better and
it changed as he changed. It was not complete when he died because his
own development was not complete. But he carried it as far as he could
and made of it a singular picture. His Journal is a book of an enduring
sort, not merely because it is an accurate and candid self-portrait,
but also because of the inherent attractions of its subject. Barbellion
was a poet, a humorist, an observer, a philosopher, as well as a
truthful, passionate, and extraordinarily courageous man. In drawing a
picture of the last he also made a picture of the world as it seemed
to the first four and thus captured in it poetry, humour, observation,
and philosophy. The subject is still too fresh, and, by the vividness
of its presentment, too painful, for any attempt at a final valuation
to be made. A few months ago Barbellion was still alive, suffering and
hoping; and, with the best will in the world, no critic can avoid being
influenced by this fact. But his book is a fair topic for prophecy;
and it is not very rash to predict that, as it loses the sharpness
and painfulness of a record of fact, so its qualities as a work of
literature will come more into prominence and we shall realise that
Barbellion was not only a genius untimely overwhelmed by an evil
fate, but a genius who, before he was overwhelmed, had opportunity
to do some at least of his appointed work. Then, whatever may be the
theoretical views we hold on the connection between disease and genius,
we shall be able to think less of Barbellion as a "case" and more of
him as a writer. We shall, perhaps, not think that we have a complete
portrait of him in his Journal any more than we have a complete
portrait of Keats in the Odes or even in the Letters. The greatest of
artists cannot entirely disclose himself in his work. Barbellion did so
no more than others. But he was an artist, and, between what he wrote
of himself and what was otherwise revealed, it is possible to form a
picture of an extraordinary personality.
A LITTLE CLASSIC OF THE FUTURE[27]
[27] _Bibliographical Note_: _Principal Works by Edith Œ.
Somerville and Martin Ross: An Irish Cousin_, 1889;
_Naboth's Vineyard_, 1891; _Through Connemara in a
Governess Cart_, 1893; _The Real Charlotte_, 1895;
_The Silver Fox_, 1897; _Some Experiences of an Irish
R.M._, 1899; _All on the Irish Shore_, 1903; _Some
Irish Yesterdays_, 1906; _Further Experiences of an
Irish R.M._, 1908; _Dan Russell the Fox_, 1911; _In
Mr. Knox's Country_, 1915; _Irish Memories_, 1917;
_Mount Music_, 1919. All published by Longmans.
By ORLO WILLIAMS
The evanescence of laughter is most pathetic. Its bubbles vanish from
the sparkling wine that held it so soon after it has been uncorked,
leaving a sadly flat beverage to the critical palates of future
generations. Wit, being a subtler and less easily disintegrated
essence, does not so quickly pass away, but the buoyant bubbles of
laughter, except in some rare vintages, survive but a moment the
uncorking of their bottle. We may smile at the things that aroused the
laughter of our ancestors, bringing our intellect and our imagination
to the tasting, but it is seldom that we experience spontaneously the
"sudden glory" of bursting sides when we read the words which aroused
it. It is almost painful to look through the files of _Punch_ of some
sixty years ago, for it arouses that agonised shame with which one
witnesses the failure of an inferior joke injudiciously introduced into
superior society. One blushes for its pitiful exposure. Nor is it any
consolation to reflect that the laughter of our own day will, for the
most part, seem like the cracking of most unsubstantial thorns under
ghostly pots to those who come after us. Very little of the literature
of the past which truly survives is really provocative of hilarity.
The Falstaffian passages of Shakespeare at once leap up as if to deny
this statement; but, in the first place, Shakespeare brewed one of
those rarer vintages whose beaded bubbles wink ever at the brim, and,
in the second place, dramatic literature can always be revived by
the fresh infusion of a living actor's personality. It is the purely
written word of humour which will not give that sudden jerk to our
emotions which it gave on its first outpouring. We say that we can
appreciate Rabelais and the comic tales of the _Canterbury Pilgrims_;
we profess to revel in _Tristram Shandy_, and to find the _Pickwick
Papers_ delicious, and we are not wrong; but it is a soberer enjoyment
than that which these works of art gave to their first audiences. We
pick them up, certainly, when we wish to be entertained, but seldom
when we wish to laugh. There was a tutor at Oxford--there may be one
still--who was invariably annoyed when any of his pupils attributed a
historical phenomenon to "the spirit of the age," averring that there
was no such thing. But surely he was wrong in coupling this convenient
spirit with the ghosts of Stephen Sly and old John Naps of Greece,
for the peculiar changes undergone by laughter are there to prove
its existence. Laughter is compounded of the spirit of the age: it is
excited by peculiar and irrecoverable felicities and conjunctions of
temperament and environment, all of which are ingredients in that very
real but intangible spirit. We can guess at this spirit, but we cannot
recapture it, any more than we can recapture the light effervescence of
its laughter.
Further, laughter is not a lofty emotion. The beasts, they say, have
it not, but those who are little better than beasts laugh heartily.
We ourselves are not so proud of our laughter that we wish it to echo
through the ages, as we would have our high thoughts ring and our
tears, perhaps, drip. The heady wine that moves it is often an unworthy
vintage, more like the champagne which Murger's Schaunard christened
_coco épileptique_ than the true Hippocrene. So it has been in the
past. The shelves of libraries are full of these flat draughts from
which all the liveliness that alone gave them savour has departed.
Yet in all ages there have been nobler bins of these light literary
wines which, for all that they no longer catch at the throat, have a
more lasting quality and never entirely lose their gratefulness to
the tongue of the taster. They may not have sparkled in their prime
more brightly than their now neglected contemporaries, but they live
for certain finer essences in their composition, wit, style, finish,
colour, bouquet, or something even subtler than these, that indefinable
taste which distinguishes all that has been grown on a rich literary
soil, warmed by the sun of beauty and matured by a vintner who has
carefully and lovingly learned his trade. Such, after exciting the
laughter of the present in their youth, may in their ripeness, and even
in their decline, earn the humour of posterity. They may possibly be
numbered among the classics, that is to say, among the productions of
any age which deserve to live as models for the future or as peculiarly
happy expressions of a bygone time. The test of a classic is what men
and women of any age will always call its modernity, which means that
it possesses some of those timeless qualities of greatness or artistic
excellence which permeate the spirit of any age. Skill in construction
and delineation, accuracy of vision, fine rhythm, perfect choice of
language, happy adaptation of form to matter, sense of beauty, all
these, like beauty itself, do not die. The work which holds them, even
though thinly commingled, will outlive the evaporation of its bubbles,
and may by their preservative effect become, if not a great, at least a
little classic.
To have done, then, with the bush which no good wine needs, I would
like to taste again, in the company of the reader, what, if I may
prophesy in hope rather than in certainty, may become in English
literature a little classic of the future. The bush would not have
been so thick had it not been, on the face of it, unusual so to
greet a work that has moved so many thousands of us to hearty and
inextinguishable laughter. I mean the work of Miss Edith Somerville
and her mourned-for second self in letters who wrote under the name of
Martin Ross. Few humorists who write merely to catch the passing fancy
of the day can have been more successful or more popular: in the merely
temporary quality of effervescence they can compete with any of their
contemporaries. The sportsman who hates art and loathes poetry has the
_Irish R.M._ and its fellows in well-thumbed copies on his bookshelves;
the man who only reads for laughter and never for improvement praises
these authors as highly as the most discriminating, and those who would
faint at the suspicion of becoming in any way involved in classic
literature will joyfully immerse themselves in "Somerville and Ross,"
like thirsty bibbers quaffing a curious vintage for its exhilaration
rather than its quality. Appreciation has poured in upon them from all
sides, from those who know and delight in the comic sides of Irish
life, when treated observantly and not fantastically, from those to
whom hunting and horseflesh are almost the be-all and end-all of
existence, from those who treat their brains to a good story as to a
stimulative drug, as well as from those who bring more discrimination
to their appraisement. The devotees will often claim that they alone
can scent the subtler flavour from these hilarious pages. The Irishman,
unless he be of the kind that despises all light-heartedness in writing
of his country, will assert that none but he can get the exquisite
appreciation of comparing the work of art with the reality which
inspired it: the hunting fraternity will find it hard to suppose that
one who knows not what it is to be
Oft listening how the hounds and horn
Clearly rouse the slumbering morn
From the side of some hoar hill,
Through the high wood echoing shrill,
can possibly enjoy the skill shown by these authors in describing
the joy of horses and the thrill of hunting. Nevertheless, the books
of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross are heartily enjoyed by a host
of readers who are neither Irish nor hunting people, for the simple
reason that they are prompted to an explosion of laughter whenever
they take up one of these stories. The bulk of these readers would
wish to go no further in their appreciation: they embrace the givers
of present laughter with so full a measure of enjoyment that it would
seem to them unnecessary to probe any further into the chemistry of
such excellence, nor perhaps would they deem it possible that any
higher praise than their freely-expressed enjoyment could be looked
for by any authors. Yet to my mind it is possible. While including in
one's general testimony all that can be said by the most extravagant
of these admirers, the taster who is considering the cellar of English
literature which is being laid down for posterity may discern qualities
not so apparent to the quaffer for immediate exhilaration. It is hard
to conceive it, but the bubbles may vanish: if they do, the question
is, what will be left? My point is that the work of Miss Somerville and
Martin Ross has the qualities of a wine that will keep.
It cannot be a great wine, for the vineyard is too restricted. The
high winds of emotion have not swept over its soil, nor has the soft
rain of tenderness moistened it. It will always be bright and rather
dry like Vouvray, gay but with a little bite in it: posterity may
even call it "curious." But they will recognise that it holds the
authentic flavours that distinguish infallibly the finer products
of English literary bins. The authors have chosen a small field, but
they direct on it an accuracy of vision which is remarkable, and,
seeing that they were two, a unity of vision which is a miracle. In
the expression of this vision they display an unfailing sureness of
touch and a precision which is perfect in its admirable economy. They
handle our language with a deftness and flexibility which is a rarity
in itself, and their style, though always original, is nourished by
a recollection of great models both in prose and poetry. Theirs is a
literary equipment of the first class, solidly framed, well clothed,
attractive in appearance, and ornamented with taste. They touch nothing
that they do not embellish: events by their unflagging narrative power,
which goes as unfalteringly as one of their choicest hunters, character
by their sympathetic insight, scenery by their love of natural beauty,
dialogue by their dramatic sense. It is not all Ireland that they draw,
let that be admitted; they prefer to laugh, letting others weep. Yet,
if the whole heart of Ireland does not beat within their pages, a part
of it is there, pulsing with true Irish blood and throbbing with truly
Irish emotions. Their aspect is no more that of Mr. James Joyce or Mr.
Synge or Mr. Yeats than it is that of Mr. George Moore or Mr. Devlin,
but, if they are justly praised for their merits, that praise cannot be
diminished because they looked on Ireland with laughing eyes through a
West Carberry window. Their books are literature no less certainly than
_Castle Rackrent_ is literature, and for very similar reasons.