biography of the youth of William James and himself-telling how as
a child in the hotels and resorts of Europe he spent his time in
looking on at what was happening about him. He never got into the
game very far, because he preferred to think about it. That is
what Henry James did all his life long. He looked on, thought
about life with that wonderfully keen, and subtle, and humorous
mind of his, turned it into criticism; then fitted the results
with enough plot to make them move,--and there was a so-called
novel. Every one knows how in his last edition he rewrote some of
his early stories to make them more subtle. It would have been
amusing if he had seen fit to rewrite them altogether as critical
essays upon international life! I wonder how much they would have
suffered by the change.
This is why so many readers have been very proud of Henry James,
and yet unable to defend him successfully against critics who
pulled out handfuls of serpentine sentences from his latest novel,
asking, "Do you call this fiction?" It was not fiction, not
fiction at least as she used to be written; it was subtle,
graceful, cunning analysis of life. Fiction is synthesis--
building up, making a Becky Sharp, inventing a Meg Merrilies,
constructing a plot. Criticism is analysis--taking down, Henry
James was not so good at putting together as at taking to pieces.
He was able in one art, but in the other he was great.
The current tendency to make every new figure in world literature
conform to Greatness of a recognized variety or be dismissed, is
unfortunate and misleading. We are to be congratulated that the
greatness of Henry James was of a peculiar and irregular kind, a
keen, inventing greatness, American in this if in nothing else.
Unnumbered writers of the day, of whom Mr. Kipling is not the
least eminent, have profited by his influence, and learned from
him to give the final, subtle thought its final form. If that form
in his own case was tortuous, intricate, difficult, why so was the
thought. If it makes hard reading, his subject at least got hard
thinking. Before you condemn that curious style of his-so easy to
parody, so hard to imitate--ask whether such refinement of
thought as his could be much more simply expressed. Sometimes he
could have been simpler, undoubtedly; it was his fault that he did
not care to be; but that "plain American" would usually have
served his purpose, is certainly false.
Henry James must yield first honors as a novelist, it may be, to
others of his century if not of his generation. As a writer, above
all as a writer of fine, imaginative criticism of the intellect as
it moves through the complexities of modern civilization, he
yields to no one of our time. Whether he has earned his
distinction as an American writer I do not know, although I am
inclined to believe that he is more American than the critics
suspect; but as a master of English, and as a great figure in the
broad sweep of international English literature, his place is
secure.
Samuel Butler's "Erewhon" has passed safely into the earthly
paradise of the so-called classics. It has been recommended by
distinguished men of letters, reprinted and far more widely read
than on its first appearance; it has passed, by quotation and
reference, into contemporary literature, and been taught in
college classes. "Erewhon Revisited," written thirty years after
"Erewhon," is less well known.
Mr. Moreby Acklom (whose name, let me assure the suspicious
reader, is his own and not an Erewhonian inversion), in a most
informing preface to a new edition, makes two assertions which may
serve as my excuse for again endeavoring to explain the
fascination for our generation of the work of Samuel Butler.
College professors, he avers, have an antipathy for Samuel Butler;
the chief interest of Butler, he further states, was in theology.
Now I am a college professor without antipathy to Samuel Butler,
with, on the contrary, the warmest admiration for his sardonic
genius. And furthermore Butler's antipathy for college professors,
which is supposed to have drawn their fire in return, is based
upon a ruling passion far deeper than his accidental interest in
theology, a passion that gives the tone and also the key to the
best of his writings and which brought him into conflict with the
"vested interests" of his times. It is his passion for honest
thinking. If Butler's mark had been theology merely, his books
would have passed with the interest in his target. He would be as
difficult reading to-day as Swift in his "Tale of a Tub."
Like most of the great satirists of the world, Butler's saeva
indignatio was aroused by the daily conflicts between reason and
stupidity, between candor and disingenuousness, with all their
mutations of hypocrisy, guile, deceit, and sham. In "Erewhon" it
was human unreason, as a clever youth sees it, that he was
attacking. We remember vividly the beautiful Erewhonians, who knew
disease to be sin, but believed vice to be only disease. We
remember the "straighteners" who gave moral medicine to the
ethically unwell, the musical banks, the hypothetical language,
the machines that threatened to master men, as in the war of 1914-
1918 and in the industrial system of to-day they have mastered men
and made them their slaves. There was a youthful vigor in
"Erewhon," a joyous negligence as to where the blow should fall, a
sense of not being responsible for the world the author flicked
with his lash, which saved the book from the condemnation that
would have been its fate had the Victorians taken it seriously. It
was an uneven book, beginning with vivid narrative in the best
tradition of Defoe, losing itself finally in difficult argument,
and cut short in mid-career.
"Erewhon Revisited" is much better constructed. The old craftsman
has profited by his years of labor in the British Museum. He has a
story to tell, and tells it, weighting it with satire judiciously,
as a fisherman weights his set line. If his tale becomes unreal it
is only when he knows the author is ready to hear the author in
person. If the Erewhon of his first visit does not fit his new
conception he ruthlessly changes it. One misses the satiric _tours de
force_ of the first "Erewhon." There is nothing so brilliant as the
chapters on disease and machines which for fifty years since life has
been illustrating. But "Erewhon Revisited" is a finished book; it has
artistic unity.
And why does Butler revisit Erewhon? Not because he was trained as
a priest and must have an excuse to rediscuss theology, although
the story of the book suggests this explanation. Higgs, the
mysterious stranger of "Erewhon," who escaped by a balloon, has
become a subject for myth. In Erewhon he is declared the child of
the sun. Miracles gather about the supreme miracle of his air-born
departure. His "Sayings," a mixture of Biblical quotation and
homely philosophy, strained through Erewhonian intellects, become
a new ethics and a new theology. His clothes are adopted for
national wear (although through uncertainty as to how to put them
on one part of the kingdom goes with buttons and pockets behind).
Sunchildism becomes the state religion. The musical banks, which
had been trading in stale idealism, take it over and get new life;
and the professors of Bridgeford, the intellectuals of the
kingdom, capitalize it, as we say to-day, and thus tighten their
grip on the public's mind and purse.
Butler's purpose is transparent. It is not, as Longmans, who
refused the work, believed, to attack Christianity. It is rather
to expose the ease with which a good man and his message (Higgs
brought with him to Erewhon evangelical Christianity) can become
miraculous, can become an instrument for politics and a cause of
sham. Indeed, Butler says in so many words to the Anglicans of his
day: "Hold fast to your Christianity, for false as it is it is better
than what its enemies would substitute; but go easy with
the miraculous, the mythical, the ritualistic. These 'tamper with
the one sure and everlasting word of God revealed to us by human
experience.'"
All this is permanent enough, but I cannot believe, as most
commentators do, that it is the heart of the book; or if it is the
heart of the book, it is not its fire. The satiric rage of Butler,
who in the person of Higgs returns to Erewhon to find himself
deified, does not fall upon the fanatic worshipers of the
sunchild, nor even upon the musical banks who have grown strong
through his cult. It kindles for the ridiculous Hanky and Panky,
professors respectively of worldly wisdom and worldly unwisdom at
Bridgeford, and hence, according to Mr. Acklom, the antipathy
toward Butler of all college professors.
But it is not because they are professors that Butler hates Hanky
and Panky; it is because they represent that guaranteed authority
which in every civilization can and does exploit the passions and
the weaknesses of human nature for its own material welfare.
Butler had been conducting a lifelong warfare against scholars who
defended the _status quo_ of the church and against scientists who
were consolidating a strategic (and remunerative) position for
themselves in the universities. He saw, or thought he saw, English
religion milked for the benefit of Oxford and Cambridge graduates
needful of "livings"; and Darwinism and the new sciences generally
being swept into the maw of the same professionally intellectual
class. A free lance himself, with a table in the British Museum, some
books and a deficit instead of an income from his intellectual labors,
he attacked the vested interests of his world.
He exposed the dangers which wait upon all miraculous religions,
the shams which they give birth to. But not because he was
obsessed with theology. If he had lived in the nineteen hundreds
he would have studied, I think, sociology and economics instead of
theology and biology. He would have attacked, in England, the
House of Lords instead of Oxford, and had an eye for the
intellectuals who are beginning to sway the mighty power of the
labor unions. He would have been a Radical-Conservative and voted
against both the British Labor party and the Coalition. In America
he would have lashed the trusts, execrated the Anti-Saloon League,
admired and been exasperated by Mr. Wilson, hated the Republican
party, and probably have voted for it lest worse follow its
defeat. He would have been, in short, a liberal of a species very
much needed just now in America, a bad party man, destructive
rather than constructive, no leader, but a satirist when, God
knows, we need one for the clearing of our mental atmosphere.
And unless I am wrong throughout this brief analysis, Samuel
Butler, who mentally and spiritually is essentially our
contemporary, would not, if he were writing now, concern himself
with theology at all, but with the shams and unreasons which are
the vested tyrannies set over us to-day. Erewhon, when we last
hear of it, is about to become a modern colonial state. Its
concern is with an army and with economics. Chow-Bok, the savage,
now become a missionary bishop, is about to administer its
ecclesiastical system. Its spiritual problems no longer center
upon the validity of miraculous tradition and the logic of a
theological code. But the vested interests (represented by Pocus,
the son of Hanky) remain. These Butler would attack in the needed
fashion. These remain the enemy.
VII
CONCLUSION
DEFINING THE INDEFINABLE
I am well aware that literature or even such an inconsiderable
part of literature as this gay book on my desk or the poem on the
printed page, as a whole is indefinable. Every critic of
literature from Aristotle down has let some of it slip between his
fingers. If he describes the cunning form of a play or a story,
then the passion in it, or the mood behind it, eludes him. If he
defines the personality of the writer, the art which makes all the
difference between feeling and expression escapes definition. No
ten philosophers yet agree as to whether beauty is an absolute
quality, or simply an attribute of form, whether a poem is
beautiful because it suggests and approaches an archetype, or
whether it is beautiful because it perfectly expresses its
subject.
And yet when the ambition to explain and describe and define
everything is humbly set aside there remains a good honest job for
the maker of definitions, and it is a job that can be done. I may
not be able to tell what art is, but I can tell what it isn't. I
may fail to make a formula for literature, but I can try at least
to tell what Thomas Hardy has chiefly accomplished, define
Conrad's essential quality, point out the nature of romantic
naturalism, and distinguish between sentiment and sentimentality.
And if such things were ever worth doing they are worth doing now.
Only a prophet dares say that we are at the beginning of a great
creative period in the United States, but any open-eyed observer
can see that an era of American literary criticism is well under
way. The war, which confused and afterward dulled our thinking,
stirred innumerable critical impulses, which are coming to the
surface, some like bubbles and others like boils, but some as new
creations of the American intellect. The new generation has shown
itself acrimoniously critical. It slaps tradition and names its
novels and poetry as Adam named the animals in the garden, out of
its own imagination. The war shook it loose from convention, and
like a boy sent away to college, its first impulse is to disown
the Main Street that bore it. Youth of the 90's admired its elders
and imitated them unsuccessfully. Youth of the nineteen twenties
imitates France and Russia of the 70's, and contemporary England.
It may eventually do more than the 90's did with America; in the
meantime, while it flounders in the attempt to create, it is at
least highly critical. Furthermore, the social unrest, beginning
before the war and likely to outlast our time, has made us all
more critical of literature. Mark Twain's "Yankee in King Arthur's
Court" turned the milk of Tennyson's aristocratic "Idylls" sour.
The deep drawn undercurrent of socialistic thinking urges us
toward a new consideration of all earlier writing, to see what may
be its social significance. The "churl," the "hind," the
"peasant," the "first servant" and "second countryman," who were
the mere transitions of earlier stories now are central in
literature. They come with a challenge, and when we read
Galsworthy, Wells, Sinclair, Dreiser, Hardy's "The Dynasts,"
Bennett--we are conscious of criticizing life as we read. The pale
cast of thought has sicklied modern pages. The more serious works
of art are also literary criticism. Again, there is the mingling
of the peoples, greatest of course in America. Our aliens used to
be subservient to the national tradition. They went about becoming
rich Americans and regarded the Anglo-American culture as a
natural phenomenon, like the climate, to which after a while they
would accustom themselves. Their children were born in it. But now
it is different. The Jews particularly, who keep an Oriental
insistence upon logic even longer than a racial appearance, have
passed the acquisitive stage and begin to throw off numerous
intellectuals, as much at home in English as their fellow
Americans, but critical of the American emotions, and the American
way of thinking, as only a brain formed by different traditions
can be. Soon the Mediterranean races domiciled here will pass into
literary expressiveness. It is as impossible that we should not
have criticism of the national tradition expressed in our
literature as that an international congress should agree upon
questions of ethics or religion.
And of course the new internationalism, which is far more vigorous
than appears on the surface, favors such criticism. The war
brought America and Europe two thousand miles closer, and the
habit of interest in what Europeans are thinking, once acquired,
is not likely to be lost. No American writer of promise can hope
now to escape comparison with the literatures of Western Europe,
and comparison means a new impulse to criticism.
Fundamental, creative criticism--like Sainte-Beuve's, Matthew
Arnold's, Walter Pater's, like Dryden's, Brunetiere's, De
Gourmont's, or Croce's--will presumably come. The conditions, both
of publication and of audience, are ripe for it now in the United
States. But there is a good deal of spade work in the study of
literature to be done first, and still more education of the
reading American mind. One reason why Lowell was not a great
critic was because his scholarship was defective, or, to put it
more fairly, because the scholarship of his contemporaries, with
whose knowledge he might have buttressed his own, was incomplete.
And if a twentieth century Sainte-Beuve should begin to write for
general American readers, it is doubtful whether they would accept
his premises. Says the intellectual, why _should_ he write for the
general public? I answer that if he writes for coteries only, if he is
disdainful of the intelligent multitude, he will never understand
_them,_ and so will not comprehend the national literature which it is
his function to stimulate, interpret, and guide.
The spade work of criticism is research, investigation into the
facts of literature and into its social background. The scholar is
sometimes, but not often, a critic. He finds out what happened,
and often why it happened. He analyzes, but he does not usually
make a synthesis. He writes history, but he cannot prophesy, and
criticism is prophecy implied or direct. Few outside the
universities realize the magnitude of American research into
literature, even into American literature, which has been
relatively neglected. A thousand spades have been at work for a
generation. We are getting the facts, or we are learning how to
get them.
But before we may expect great criticism we must educate our
public, and ourselves, in that clear vision of what is and what is
not, which from Aristotle down has been the preliminary to
criticism. A humble, but a useful, way to begin is by definition.
I use definition in no pedantic sense. I mean, in general, logical
definition where the class or _genus_ of the thing to be
described--whether best-selling novel or sentimental tendency--is
first made clear, and then its _differentia,_ its differences
from the type analyzed out and assorted. But this process in
literature cannot be as formal as logic. Good literature cannot be
bound by formulas. Yet when a poem charged with hot emotion, or a
story that strays into new margins of experience, is caught and
held until one can compare it with others, see the curve on which
it is moving, guess its origin and its aim, forever after it
becomes easier to understand, more capable of being thought about
and appreciated. And when the current of taste of some new
generation that overflows conventions and washes forward, or
backward, into regions long unlaved, is viewed as a current, its
direction plotted, its force estimated, its quality compared, why
that is definition, and some good will come of it.
Some general definition of that intellectual emotion which we call
good reading is especially needed in America. Most of us, if we
are native born, have been educated by a set of literary
conventions arranged in convenient categories. That is more or
less true of all literary education, but it is particularly true
in the United States, where the formal teaching of English
literature _per se_ began, where, as nowhere else in the
world, there was a great and growing population eager to become
literate and with no literary traditions behind it. The student
from a bookless home learned to think of his literature as
primarily something to be studied; the teacher who had to teach
thousands like him was forced to reduce living literature to dead
categories in order that a little of it at least should be taught.
Thousands of Americans, therefore, of our generation emerged from
their training with a set of literary definitions which they
assumed to be true and supposed to be culture. Only true
definitions of what literature really is can break up such
fossilized defining.
On the other hand, that large proportion of our best reading
population which is not native in its traditions offers a
different but equally important problem. How can the son of a
Russian Jew, whose father lived in a Russian town, who himself has
been brought up in clamorous New York, understand Thoreau, let us
say, or John Muir, or Burroughs, or Willa Cather, without some
defining of the nature of the American environment and the
relation between thought and the soil? How is an intelligent
German-American, whose cultural tradition has been thoroughly
Teutonic, to make himself at home in a literature whose general
character, like its language, is English, without some defining of
the Anglo-American tradition? Lincoln must be defined for him;
Milton must be defined for him; most of all perhaps Franklin must
be defined for him. I have chosen elementary examples, but my
meaning should be sufficiently clear.
And the American critic--by which I mean you, O discriminating
reader, as well as the professional who puts pen to paper--is
equally in need of the art of definition. The books we read and
write are on different planes of absolute excellence or
unworthiness. There is--to take the novel--the story well
calculated to pass a pleasant hour but able to pass nothing else;
there is the story with a good idea in it and worth reading for
the idea only; there is the story worthless as art but usefully
catching some current phase of experience; and there is the fine
novel which will stand any test for insight, skill, and truth. Now
it is folly to apply a single standard to all these types of
story. It can be done, naturally, but it accomplishes nothing
except to eliminate all but the shining best. That is a task for
history. In the year in which we live--and it is sometimes
necessary to remind the austerer critic that we always live in the
present--there are a hundred books, of poetry, of essays, of
biography, of fiction, which are by no means of the first rank and
yet are highly important, if only as news of what the world, in
our present, is thinking and feeling. They cannot be judged, all
of them, on the top plane of perfect excellence; and if we judge
them all on any other plane, good, better, best get inextricably
mixed.
For example, consider once more a novel which at the moment of
this writing is a best-seller, and which with reference to its
popularity I have discussed in an earlier essay. I mean Mr.
Hutchinson's "If Winter Comes." This book is essentially the
tragedy of a good and honest soul thrown by harsh circumstance
into an environment which is bound to crush him. He has the wrong
wife, he has the wrong business associates, the girl he loves
is separated from him by moral barriers. If he breaks through these
he injures irreparably his own sense of what is due to his God and
his fellow man. His instincts of charity, humor, and love rebound
upon him. He is too Christian for England, and too guileless for
life. This is a worthy theme, and yet if we judge this novel on
the highest plane it fails miserably. For Mr. Hutchinson stacks
the cards. He gives his hero his way and his salvation, after much
suffering, by a series of lucky accidents. He destroys the problem
he creates, by forging an answer.
But this novel should not be finally judged on the highest plane.
It is not a tragedy, it is a romance. It belongs on the plane
below, the plane of stories told to meet the secret desires of
humanity, which have little to do with reality, and are quite
oblivious to fact. On this plane "If Winter Comes" ranks highly,
for it is poignantly told, there is life in its characters, and
truth in the best of its scenes. Definition saves us from calling
a good novel great; it spares us the unnecessary error of calling
a good and readable story bad because it is not a triumph of
consistent art.