observed nature either confirmation or disproof of their theories
to develop a technique the principal aim of which is coherence. So
admirable indeed has this technique become in its logic and complexity
that it has been adopted by many workers in other fields, on the whole
with disastrous results. In this book Professor Babbitt applies it to
literature, although he appears quite able to follow more empirical
methods. His reading has been extensive, and his judgments are precise.
Unfortunately he is not much interested in or amused by books save as
the symptoms of moral and metaphysical observations. He eats nothing
out of them. He only covers them with his cobwebs.
Like most metaphysicians, Professor Babbitt thinks in twos. The trick
is familiar. Define A. Call not-A B. One is very bad, one very good,
and the history of life, or of whatever else is under discussion, is
the history of their conflict. For this professor, A is an emotional
and naturalistic romanticism, and is very bad indeed. Rousseau is its
high prophet, the great war its issue, and "smart young radicals" its
dupes. We are invited back to ancient Greece, where A is absent, and
B, that is to say classicism, has neither artifice nor formality, back
to Socrates, back to Aristotle, back apparently to anyone who is a
philosopher and not a poet.
Now there is an essential fallacy in grouping writers like politicians,
in ringing a division bell for ever in their ears and furthermore doing
their voting for them. This talk of schools and of influences and of
disciples is extremely prevalent among the academic critics in America.
It may safely be said that they have illuminated nothing thereby.
Writers may use the language of their times and their friends, but
it is as a vestment and not as a foundation. Of course, the romantic
revolution, like the spluttering rebellions of our own day, may have
induced some subordinates to produce manifestos and call them works
of art. Some young men may be so excited by the eccentricity of their
form as to forget the necessity of any content. But such works do
not usually occupy the critic for long, and valuable appreciation of
literature will not be content with a quasi-botanical classification.
What are we to do, for example, with Charles Lamb? Is he a classicist
or a romanticist? Professor Babbitt has no qualms in affixing the
latter label. Lamb is as romantic as Wordsworth is, he says, but about
towns instead of about the country, and as a proof he refers the reader
to a letter in which Lamb, writing to Wordsworth, says: "In London
I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you
mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the
Strand ... the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee houses,
steams of soup from kitchens, the pantomimes," and so on. Little can
be gained for the appreciation of Elia or of the "Lake School" by
saying classic or romantic about this, and if this is indeed a child of
Rousseau, we may be certain that he would have dropped it with the rest
at the door of the foundling hospital.
Probably, however, the professor does not want to foster appreciation.
His incursion into literature is a border foray, and he is off at
once with his plunder to his ethical highlands. We remain to count
our losses. Milton, who "on the whole is highly serious," is not
much injured. But Keats is unwise. Browning is only half-educated.
Wordsworth, until he began the _Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, was betrayed
by his "penchant for paradox." Shelley was an emotional sophist, with
a nympholeptic imagination, who fell into sheer unreality. These
judgments contain truth, but a very little of truth. To write thus is
too plainly to adopt the methods of a political opponent. Professor
Babbitt warns us that if he had attempted rounded estimates these would
have been more favourable, but that as it is he is severe because he
is laying down principles, principles of discipline and authority as
against the unrestrained individualism of the modern.
One wonders, too, whether this massive series--the present volume is
the fourth--will contribute much more to ethics than to literature;
whether an intensive study of the West European literature of 1790 to
1850 will indeed, as Professor Babbitt may expect, dissuade readers
from surrendering to the emotions; whether the indecorum of Rousseau
does threaten civilisation with breakdown; and whether the imitation of
Sophocles and Dante would morally improve the character.
It is, in short, not very obvious why this book was written, nor
who will take pleasure in reading it, except for the enjoyment of a
first-class mind, even when it works in a vacuum.
SPRINGTIME AND OTHER ESSAYS. By Sir FRANCIS DARWIN. Murray. 7_s._ 6_d._
net.
This is an amiable book of gossipy essays, mostly in the key popular
at University Extension meetings. Some of them are reviews and rely
a little too much on extracts for any one familiar with the books
noticed to derive much excitement from them. The title-essay, however,
together with that on a _Procession of Flowers_, and the paper entitled
_Recollections_ are both worth attention. The essay on his boyhood and
youth shows that Sir Francis has an eye for character, and no little
gift for expressing himself neatly about his friends and acquaintances.
Here is an admirable vignette of Parslow, the butler:
He had what may be called a baronial nature: he idealised everything
about our modest household, and would draw a glass of beer for a
postman with the air of a seneschal bestowing a cup of malvoisie on
a troubadour. He would not, I think, have disgraced Charles Lamb's
friend Captain Burney, who welcomed his guests in the grand manner
to the simplest of feasts. It was good to see him on Christmas Day;
with how great an air would he enter the breakfast-room and address
us: "Ladies and gentlemen, I wish you a happy Christmas," etc. I am
afraid he got but a sheepish response from us.
It has something of the air of those charming pictures of Christmas
in the country which Randolph Caldecott used to contribute to the
_Graphic_ Special Numbers. Sir Francis's paper on _Names of Characters
in Fiction_ does not seem to us an adequate treatment of a really
fascinating subject. He just touches the fringe of it, but he appears
to us over-lenient to the bad old habit of naming characters after
their vices, virtues, or idiosyncrasies. That is tolerable in purely
allegorical work, such as Bunyan's, but becomes very tiresome in
Thackeray--whom Sir Francis rates far too highly--and frequently
absurd both in him and minor authors. Women novelists have here shown
more sense; you do not meet such terrible monstrosities as Mantrap,
Lollypop, Fitzoof, Portansherry, or Nockemorf in the novels of Jane
Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or Mrs. Gaskell. A character's name is not
perfect if one can imagine it different, and most of the "typical"
names are mere labels which have no real, organic connection with their
wearers, as have the names of Flaubert's characters, of Balzac's, or of
Henry James's.
DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS, SENSATION NOVELISTS: A STUDY IN THE
CONDITION AND THEORIES OF NOVEL WRITING IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND. By WALTER
C. PHILLIPS, Ph.D. New York: Columbia University Press. 8_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Phillips is rather a pathologist of fiction than a critic. His
thesis here, broadly speaking, is that Dickens, and after him Wilkie
Collins and Charles Reade, were drawn into melodramatic invention by
the demands of the public and the conditions of publication of their
day. His diagnosis is indisputable, though his premises are not. It
is not to be denied that Dickens wrote melodrama. He liked that kind
of thing, and so did his public. Where Mr. Phillips goes astray is in
assuming that Dickens was a tradesman who supplied a craving public.
The truth is otherwise. Dickens gained his public with the _Pickwick
Papers_, and after that could do what he pleased. It is quite another
thing to say that he was of like mind with his public, and took in
melodrama through the pores. It had been in the air for fifty years.
But Mr. Phillips sees little else in Dickens, and thereby does his
subject and himself injustice. For one false note which that great man
struck, the trained ear will detect two dozen true. If some of his
monsters--Quilp in particular--are pantomime monsters, and some of
his angels pantomime angels, others of them, monstrous or not, have
been added to the inhabitants of English-speaking lands, and still
walk in our midst. No writer has ever increased the population to the
same extent. Mrs. Gamp may be more than woman, or less; she may be
a living proverb. It does not matter, since she lives. Dickens, in
fact, was a genius. He did what he chose, or what he must, sometimes
superlatively well, sometimes incredibly ill. We bolt the bad for
the sake of the good. There is no concealment possible of the fact
that he had unfortunate and occasionally unwholesome tastes. The
worst of them was his pleasure in cruelty. Quilp and his wife, Jonas
Chuzzlewit and his, Creakle and his boys, Squeers and his: there is a
gloating over such relations which, to our mind, is the worst blot upon
Dickens's fame. But Mr. Phillips, absorbed in the commercial aspect
of literature, counting the words in the huge novels of that day,
calculating circulation, and examining into profits, has not had time
for such points. He had been better employed there than in amassing
statistics for "The Novelist as Wage-earner." Too much attention has
been paid already to the finance of the business. Money-getting did not
affect Dickens in the first flights of his genius, when his direction
for good and all was determined. It may have stimulated Wilkie Collins
and Charles Reade--a very different pair of men. Mr. Phillips is in
the right when he hits them off as "virtuosos." "Not even Stevenson,"
he shrewdly says, "was more exclusively and hopelessly a writer of
story-books" than Charles Reade.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
A GALLOPER AT YPRES. By Lieut.-Col. P. R. BUTLER, D.S.O. Unwin. 15_s._
net.
A KUT PRISONER. By H. C. W. BISHOP. Lane. 6_s._ 6_d._ net.
THE ROMANCE OF THE BATTLE LINE IN FRANCE. By J. E. C. BODLEY.
Constable. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
Here are three new additions to the colossal pile of "war books"--two
of them the personal records of soldiers, the third a more pretentious
effort by a civilian. Colonel Butler went out in 1914 with the Seventh
Division to Belgium, was engaged in the first battle of Ypres, came
home wounded, returned to Flanders, went thence to the Somme (in
the days before the Somme became hell), and leaves us finally at
Marseilles on his way to "some other theatre of war." The book
contains nothing very remarkable, but it is agreeably written, and
should give pleasure to the author's friends and to others who care to
be reminded again of "Somewhere in France," where they have marched and
fought and billeted.
Mr. Bishop's is a modestly told and mildly exciting story of an escape
from the Turks. He was an Indian Army subaltern captured at Kut, and
interned at Kastamuni. Thence with two companions he got away to the
Black Sea coast, was recaptured and rescued again. The rescuers were a
handful of diverting brigands, with whose help Mr. Bishop eventually
crossed the Black Sea and made his way home _viâ_ Russia. There is no
attempt to generalise either about military matters or prison life. We
gather, however, that Mr. Bishop and his friends were not on the whole
badly treated by the Turks. And there was a time, in 1916, when they
lived well--eggs at halfpenny a piece, good white flour at sixpence a
pound, and fruit practically gratis! O blessed Kastamuni!
Mr. Bodley is more sophisticated. In the first half of his book he
takes us over the battlefields of France, and discourses of the
captains and the kings, the priests and politicians of past centuries
who fought and played and intrigued there, of the glories and beauties
of the old towns and villages of the Somme and the Marne, of Rheims
and Verdun and a hundred other places. But he completely changes the
angle of his attack in the second half of his volume, which he calls,
"An additional chapter on the results of the late war as affecting our
national life and imperial interests." His main theme appears to be
the necessity or desirability of continuing hostility to Germany. The
Germans, he thinks, are still a fundamentally evil race whose worst
faults we imitate and whose few virtues we eschew. These virtues are
their commercial enterprise, their zest for town-planning and housing,
and the comparatively small amount of money they waste in paying
lawyers. Lawyers, it appears, are Mr. Bodley's _bête noire_; he regards
them, and especially the political barristers and the overpaid judges
and law officers, as the curse of our unhappy country. But what chiefly
raises his ire are the abominations which we are said to have copied
from Prussia of bureaucracy and the system of "honours"--peerages,
baronetcies, knighthoods, Orders of Merit, Orders of the British
Empire, poured out in bucketfuls on a motley crowd of corrupt or
undistinguished individuals. This is, of course, an indictment which
any writer is entitled to make, though some may think that Mr. Bodley
occasionally lets himself be carried rather far by his indignation. But
the connection with the faults of Germany seems a little far-fetched.
There are times, too, in the course of his special pleading when he
verges on the ridiculous. Is it not absurd, for example, to say that
"the formidable machinery of state socialism" (meaning chiefly Old Age
Pensions and National Insurance) is "incompatible with representative
government"? And who wants a long argument to prove that Queen Victoria
was not responsible for the plague of Germanism which Mr. Bodley thinks
has infected English society? The whole of this "additional chapter"
is a melancholy illustration of the effect of the war in causing an
educated Englishman to lose his sense of proportion.
RECORDS. By Admiral of the Fleet LORD FISHER. Hodder & Stoughton. £1
1_s._ net.
The plain man who walks in the trim garden of literature must feel,
in coming upon Lord Fisher in print, as we imagine the shade of Bach
might feel confronted by a jazz band, or an elementary drawing mistress
before a canvas of Mr. Wyndham Lewis. Lord Fisher has for many months
been "the talk of the town"; the respectable reviewer feels that
only in the talk of the town can the appropriate comments be found.
_Records_ begins thus: "Of all the curious fables I've ever come
across, I quite think the idea that my mother was a Cingalese Princess
of exalted rank is the oddest! One can't see the foundation of it!"
And it ends with a letter from a fellow-Admiral suggesting that Lord
Fisher, like Jesus Christ, is an Enigma. Between those two passages
there is a roaring torrent of anecdote, of quotations and exclamation
marks and capital letters, of criticism (often highly "indiscreet"), of
apologia, of confident prediction, of everything that is diverting and
irritating and arresting and astoundingly human--a torrent that sweeps
the reader off his feet and leaves him gasping and incredulous. The
book is a monument of magnificent egoism. One can only use its author's
own word of a sermon by Dean Inge and say it is "splendiferous." We
are told, in parenthesis, that he got into the Navy by writing out
the Lord's Prayer, doing a Rule of Three sum, and drinking a glass of
sherry. We are told that he looks like a Christmas-tree when he wears
his decorations. We have stories of how, in his shirt-sleeves and with
a boot in each hand, he entertained King Edward VII. in his bedroom,
and of a comic postcard sent to him by Queen Alexandra. There is one
chapter devoted to his views on the Bible, and another containing
a reprint of four speeches which he made: one at the Royal Academy
Banquet, a second at the Mansion House, the other two (and these would
both go on a postcard) in the House of Lords. There are numerous
photographs of him standing on his quarter-deck with Kings and Tsars,
and gentlemen grotesquely clad in top hats and frock coats; there is a
long appendix containing a list of Lord Fisher's "Great Naval Reforms."
His style beggars description. He throws epithets such as "lovely"
about like a high-spirited schoolgirl. He tells us, with the candour of
a schoolboy, that Sir William Harcourt was "a genial ruffian" and Sir
Michael Hicks-Beach "a perfect beast." The whole book is ablaze with
these bright flowers. And let us not be misunderstood: we say nothing
in disparagement of them. Would that more biographies were written so!
But Lord Fisher, we suspect, has suffered, and will suffer, from
the defects--or should one say the excess?--of his qualities. It
is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for
an Englishman--and above all an official Englishman--to take a man
seriously who writes and talks and thinks like this. _Hinc illæ
lacrimæ!_ as our author might say (for he loves his tags). And yet
there is serious stuff in this book--discussions of the conduct of the
war, of naval tactics and education, of submarines and oil-engines
and guns, and "Admiralty limpets." He has quarrelled on all these
matters--and on a thousand more, no doubt--with many of his colleagues.
It is not for us to take sides in such Homeric contests. Even now he
is trailing his coat again before the respectable public with a hectic
chapter entitled "Democracy." "Democracy," he says, "means 'equal
opportunity for all.'" A real Democracy in England would not have
permitted secret treaties nor flouted the Russian Revolution, nor "kept
true Labour leaders waiting on the doormat." "Hereditary titles," he
cries, "are ludicrously out of date ... and the sooner we sweep away
all the gimcracks and gewgaws of snobbery the better." And, in short,
this old warrior of seventy-nine, a Peer of the Realm, dressed like a
Christmas-tree in his decorations, the intimate of Kings and Emperors,
declares himself a Republican, and wants to "sack the lot"! Words fail
us; we can only lay the book down and pant for the next!
HENRY FOX, FIRST LORD HOLLAND, HIS FAMILY AND RELATIONS. By the EARL OF
ILCHESTER. In two volumes. Murray. 32_s._ net.
The deeplier we study eighteenth-century political history the more
satisfied we become that there were but two figures in it with the
gleam of statesmanship upon them, and but one with the light of genius.
Sir Robert Walpole deserves his son's boast: He did "maintain this
country in the enjoyment of the twenty happiest years that England
ever enjoyed." Writing when he did, and so far as it goes, that is
true. If his methods draw us to a cynical conclusion, the material to
his hand--a German King, a discredited opposition, and a horde of
rapacious place-hunters to keep fed--must be remembered and allowed
for. Pitt was a much more scrupulous man, and a much more gifted man,
but he was less successful for those very reasons. He had the honest
man's scorn of iniquity, and he had less hold of himself. Sir Robert
could keep his temper; Pitt never could. He knew the Duke of Newcastle
to be a liar and an old fool, and as good as told him so. "Fewer words,
if you please, my lord, for your words have long lost all weight with
me." There is not much accommodation about that. Sir Robert suffered
fools gladly: he could work with them better. Pitt was fastidious, and
would not soil his fingers with the only things they wanted of him. As
for all the rest they were a venal crew, timid as rats and greedy as
dogs. A month or two ago there came under review in these pages the
life of one of them, George Bubb Dodington--remarkable only because, a
thorough-paced rogue, he turned himself inside out for the admiration
of posterity. Here, at much greater length, done with conspicuous
judgment and ability, is the life, in two volumes, of another, Henry
Fox, the founder of Holland House and its line of peers.
If a word were needed to explain the rise of the brothers Stephen
and Henry Fox, the sons of a creature (whom Horace Walpole called
"a footman") of Charles II.'s, it would be the word which explains
the whole of eighteenth-century statecraft, the word Patronage. From
the King, fountain of honours, this sacred river ran to the Peers,
disposers of places, and from them broadened out into a pool where swam
the borough-mongers and jobbers, owners of the House of Commons. As for
the electorate, wherever there was one, "the business of the people
is to choose Us," said young Charles Fox, while he was yet under the
influence of his father; and although the capital letter is ours, and
not upon record, we may be sure that it was not wanting in delivery. It
is indeed but an echo of Henry Fox himself.
Our elections, thank God! do not depend upon the giddy mob. They
are generally governed by men of fortune and understanding, and of
such our ministers, for this twenty years past, have been so happy
as to have a majority in their favour. Therefore, when we talk of
people with regard to elections, we ought to think only of those of
the better sort, without comprehending the mob or mere dregs of the
people.
Such was the nursery-ground of the hero of Lord Ilchester's volumes,
from which that hero's son was able to lift himself.
By sitting still and stolidly manipulating his boroughs Stephen Fox
served himself better than his more able brother. He did not become
so rich, though he never lacked. He had money, he married money, and
became an earl. He suffered none of the mortifications and humiliations
of the active politician, who made himself the most unpopular man in
England, and, after serving his King at the expense of his country,
was thrown out and thrown over. To be sure he was Paymaster for eight
years, during which time a sum of £46,000,000 passed through his hands
to his immeasurable profit; but to do justice to Fox, his riches
weighed as nothing beside his sense of the ingratitude of the Rigbys
and others of the sort whom he had loved and tried to serve. Though he
did not begin so well off as his elder brother, he cannot be said to
have been badly off. At twenty-one he dropped into a sinecure office
of £450 a year and a capital sum which brought his whole income to
something like £900. His first political acquaintance of note was Lord
Hervey, and his next, from whom, to his credit, he never swerved, was
Sir Robert Walpole. "Fox really loved that man," was said of him, and
truly said; and when Sir Robert fell and he was handed over to Henry
Pelham he was found faithful again. In all this he differed widely
from Bubb Dodington, having a heart as well as a stomach, and if not
principles, at least passions. Dodington was merely a merchant of
himself, but Fox suffered his feelings to act and react, often to
his temporal detriment. As Lord Ilchester shows, he was not wise in
his attachments, nor always temperate in his actions. He alienated
Scottish sympathies by his vehemence after the Porteous riot; he
made an enemy of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke by his opposition to the
Clandestine Marriages Act--an opposition which may have been grounded
upon the fact that his own marriage had been of that order; he became
the friend and ally of the Duke of Cumberland, and obnoxious on that
account to Leicester House and the heir-apparent. When George III.
succeeded, and Lord Bute became the all-powerful minister, he attached
himself there, just in time to lose the friendship of the Duke and to
share in the hatred and distrust which the whole nation turned upon
the administration. In these mischances his heart rather than his head
played him false. Yet, for all his pains, neither of his masters liked
him. George II. owned that Fox had never told him a lie, and added that
he was the only man who had not. But he never trusted him in spite of
that. George III., having after much hesitation given him a barony,
steadily refused to advance him higher, though no man had worked harder
in his service or, it must be added, more discreditably. It was Henry
Fox who set to work, by methods which can only be called flagrant, to
form a party in Parliament to be known as "the King's friends." That he
did not succeed was not his fault.