The origin of Archbishop Thomson was obscure. His great-uncle “may
reasonably be supposed” to have been “an ornament to the middle
classes”. His aunt married a gentleman who was present at the murder of
Gustavus III. of Sweden; and his father met his death at the age of
eighty-seven by treading on a cat in the early hours of the morning. The
physical vigour which this anecdote implies was combined in the
Archbishop with powers of intellect which promised success in whatever
profession he adopted. At Oxford it seemed likely that he would devote
himself to philosophy or science. While reading for his degree he found
time to write the _Outlines of the Laws of Thought_, which “immediately
became a recognised text-book for Oxford classes”. But though poetry,
philosophy, medicine, and the law held out their temptations he put such
thoughts aside, or never entertained them, having made up his mind from
the first to dedicate himself to Divine service. The measure of his
success in the more exalted sphere is attested by the following facts:
Ordained deacon in 1842 at the age of twenty-three, he became Dean and
Bursar of Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1845; Provost in 1855, Bishop of
Gloucester and Bristol in 1861, and Archbishop of York in 1862. Thus at
the early age of forty-three he stood next in rank to the Archbishop of
Canterbury himself; and it was commonly though erroneously expected that
he would in the end attain to that dignity also.
It is a matter of temperament and belief whether you read this list with
respect or with boredom; whether you look upon an archbishop’s hat as a
crown or as an extinguisher. If, like the present reviewer, you are
ready to hold the simple faith that the outer order corresponds to the
inner—that a vicar is a good man, a canon a better man, and an
archbishop the best man of all—you will find the study of the
Archbishop’s life one of extreme fascination. He has turned aside from
poetry and philosophy and law, and specialised in virtue. He has
dedicated himself to the service of the Divine. His spiritual
proficiency has been such that he has developed from deacon to dean,
from dean to bishop, and from bishop to archbishop in the short space of
twenty years. As there are only two archbishops in the whole of England
the inference seems to be that he is the second best man in England; his
hat is the proof of it. Even in a material sense his hat was one of the
largest; it was larger than Mr. Gladstone’s; larger than Thackeray’s;
larger than Dickens’; it was in fact, so his hatter told him and we are
inclined to agree, an “eight full”. Yet he began much as other men
begin. He struck an undergraduate in a fit of temper and was rusticated;
he wrote a text-book of logic and rowed a very good oar. But after he
was ordained his diary shows that the specialising process had begun. He
thought a great deal about the state of his soul; about “the monstrous
tumour of Simony”; about Church reform; and about the meaning of
Christianity. “Self-renunciation,” he came to the conclusion, “is the
foundation of Christian Religion and Christian Morals. . . . The highest
wisdom is that which can enforce and cultivate this self-renunciation.
Hence (against Cousin) I hold that religion is higher far than
philosophy.” There is one mention of chemists and capillarity, but
science and philosophy were, even at this early stage, in danger of
being crowded out. Soon the diary takes a different tone. “He seems,”
says his biographer, “to have had no time for committing his thoughts to
paper”; he records his engagements only, and he dines out almost every
night. Sir Henry Taylor, whom he met at one of these parties, described
him as “simple, solid, good, capable, and pleasing”. Perhaps it was his
solidity combined with his “eminently scientific” turn of mind, his
blandness as well as his bulk, that impressed some of these great people
with the confidence that in him the Church had found a very necessary
champion. His “brawny logic” and massive frame seemed to fit him to
grapple with a task that taxed the strongest—how, that is, to reconcile
the scientific discoveries of the age with religion, and even prove them
“some of its strongest witnesses for the truth”. If any one could do
this Thomson could; his practical ability, unhampered by any mystical or
dreaming tendency, had already proved itself in the conduct of the
business affairs of his College. From Bishop he became almost instantly
Archbishop; and in becoming Archbishop he became Primate of England,
Governor of the Charterhouse and King’s College, London, patron of one
hundred and twenty livings, with the Archdeaconries of York, Cleveland,
and the East Riding in his gift, and the Canonries and Prebends in York
Minster. Bishopthorpe itself was an enormous palace; he was
immediately faced by the “knotty question” of whether to buy all the
furniture—“much of it only poor stuff”—or to furnish the house anew,
which would cost a fortune. Moreover there were seven cows in the park;
but these, perhaps, were counterbalanced by nine children in the
nursery. Then the Prince and Princess of Wales came to stay, and the
Archbishop took upon himself the task of furnishing the Princess’s
apartments. He went up to London and bought eight Moderator lamps, two
Spanish figures holding candles, and reminded himself of the necessity
of buying “soap for Princess”. But meanwhile far more serious matters
claimed every ounce of his strength. Already he had been exhorted to
“wield the sure lance of your brawny logic against the sophistries” of
the authors of _Essays and Reviews_, and had responded in a work called
_Aids to Faith_. Near at hand the town of Sheffield, with its large
population of imperfectly educated working men, was a breeding ground of
scepticism and discontent. The Archbishop made it his special charge. He
was fond of watching the rolling of armour plate, and constantly
addressed meetings of working men. “Now what are these Nihilisms, and
Socialisms, and Communisms, and Fenianisms, and Secret Societies—what
do they all mean?” he asked. “Selfishness,” he replied, and “assertion
of one class against the rest is at the bottom of them all.” There was a
law of nature, he said, by which wages went up and wages went down. “You
must accept the declivity as well as the ascent. . . . If we could only
get people to learn that, then things would go on a great deal better
and smoother.” And the working men of Sheffield responded by giving him
five hundred pieces of cutlery mounted in sterling silver. But
presumably there were a certain number of knives among the spoons and
the forks.
Bishop Colenso, however, was far more troublesome than the working men
of Sheffield; and the Ritualists vexed him so persistently that even his
vast strength felt the strain. The questions which were referred to him
for decision were peculiarly fitted to tease and annoy even a man of his
bulk and his blandness. Shall a drunkard found dead in a ditch, or a
burglar who has fallen through a skylight, be given the benefit of the
Burial Service? he was asked. The question of lighted candles was “most
difficult”; the wearing of coloured stoles and the administration of the
mixed chalice taxed him considerably; and finally there was the Rev.
John Purchas, who, dressed in cope, alb, biretta and stole “cross-wise”,
lit candles and extinguished them “for no special reason”; filled a
vessel with black powder and rubbed it into the foreheads of his
congregation; and hung over the Holy Table “a figure, image, or stuffed
skin of a dove, in a flying attitude”. The Archbishop’s temper, usually
so positive and imperturbable, was gravely ruffled. “Will there ever
come a time when it will be thought a crime to have striven to keep the
Church of England as representing the common sense of the Nation?” he
asked. “I suppose it may, but I shall not see it. I have gone through a
good deal, but I do not repent of having done my best.” If, for a
moment, the Archbishop himself could ask such a question, we must
confess to a state of complete bewilderment. What has become of our
superlatively good man? He is harassed and cumbered; spends his time
settling questions about stuffed pigeons and coloured petticoats; writes
over eighty letters before breakfast sometimes; scarcely has time to run
over to Paris and buy his daughter a bonnet; and in the end has to ask
himself whether one of these days his conduct will not be considered a
crime.
Was it a crime? And if so, was it his fault? Did he not start out in the
belief that Christianity had something to do with renunciation and was
not entirely a matter of common sense? If honours and obligations, pomps
and possessions, accumulated and encrusted him, how, being an
Archbishop, could he refuse to accept them? Princesses must have their
soap; palaces must have their furniture; children must have their cows.
And, pathetic though it seems, he never completely lost his interest in
science. He wore a pedometer; he was one of the first to use a camera;
he believed in the future of the typewriter; and in his last years he
tried to mend a broken clock. He was a delightful father too; he wrote
witty, terse, sensible letters; his good stories were much to the point;
and he died in harness. Certainly he was a very able man, but if we
insist upon goodness—is it easy, is it possible, for a good man to be
an Archbishop?
_The Patron and the Crocus_
Young men and women beginning to write are generally given the plausible
but utterly impracticable advice to write what they have to write as
shortly as possible, as clearly as possible, and without other thought
in their minds except to say exactly what is in them. Nobody ever adds
on these occasions the one thing needful: “And be sure you choose your
patron wisely”, though that is the gist of the whole matter. For a book
is always written for somebody to read, and, since the patron is not
merely the paymaster, but also in a very subtle and insidious way the
instigator and inspirer of what is written, it is of the utmost
importance that he should be a desirable man.
But who, then, is the desirable man—the patron who will cajole the best
out of the writer’s brain and bring to birth the most varied and
vigorous progeny of which he is capable? Different ages have answered
the question differently. The Elizabethans, to speak roughly,
chose the aristocracy to write for and the playhouse public. The
eighteenth-century patron was a combination of coffee-house wit and Grub
Street bookseller. In the nineteenth-century the great writers wrote for
the half-crown magazines and the leisured classes. And looking back and
applauding the splendid results of these different alliances, it all
seems enviably simple, and plain as a pikestaff compared with our own
predicament—for whom should we write? For the present supply of patrons
is of unexampled and bewildering variety. There is the daily Press, the
weekly Press, the monthly Press; the English public and the American
public; the best-seller public and the worst-seller public; the
high-brow public and the red-blood public; all now organised
self-conscious entities capable through their various mouthpieces of
making their needs known and their approval or displeasure felt. Thus
the writer who has been moved by the sight of the first crocus in
Kensington Gardens has, before he sets pen to paper, to choose from a
crowd of competitors the particular patron who suits him best. It is
futile to say, “Dismiss them all; think only of your crocus”, because
writing is a method of communication; and the crocus is an imperfect
crocus until it has been shared. The first man or the last may write for
himself alone, but he is an exception and an unenviable one at that, and
the gulls are welcome to his works if the gulls can read them.
Granted, then, that every writer has some public or other at the end of
his pen, the high-minded will say that it should be a submissive public,
accepting obediently whatever he likes to give it. Plausible as the
theory sounds, great risks are attached to it. For in that case the
writer remains conscious of his public, yet is superior to it—an
uncomfortable and unfortunate combination, as the works of Samuel
Butler, George Meredith, and Henry James may be taken to prove. Each
despised the public; each desired a public; each failed to attain a
public; and each wreaked his failure upon the public by a succession,
gradually increasing in intensity, of angularities, obscurities, and
affectations which no writer whose patron was his equal and friend would
have thought it necessary to inflict. Their crocuses in consequence are
tortured plants, beautiful and bright, but with something wry-necked
about them, malformed, shrivelled on the one side, overblown on the
other. A touch of the sun would have done them a world of good. Shall we
then rush to the opposite extreme and accept (if in fancy alone) the
flattering proposals which the editors of the _Times_ and the _Daily
News_ may be supposed to make us—“Twenty pounds down for your crocus in
precisely fifteen hundred words, which shall blossom upon every
breakfast table from John o’ Groats to the Land’s End before nine
o’clock to-morrow morning with the writer’s name attached”?
But will one crocus be enough, and must it not be a very brilliant
yellow to shine so far, to cost so much, and to have one’s name attached
to it? The Press is undoubtedly a great multiplier of crocuses. But if
we look at some of these plants, we shall find that they are only very
distantly related to the original little yellow or purple flower which
pokes up through the grass in Kensington Gardens about this time of
year. The newspaper crocus is amazing but still a very different plant.
It fills precisely the space allotted to it. It radiates a golden glow.
It is genial, affable, warm-hearted. It is beautifully finished, too,
for let nobody think that the art of “our dramatic critic” of the
_Times_ or of Mr. Lynd of the _Daily News_ is an easy one. It is no
despicable feat to start a million brains running at nine o’clock in the
morning, to give two million eyes something bright and brisk and amusing
to look at. But the night comes and these flowers fade. So little bits
of glass lose their lustre if you take them out of the sea; great prima
donnas howl like hyenas if you shut them up in telephone boxes; and the
most brilliant of articles when removed from its element is dust and
sand and the husks of straw. Journalism embalmed in a book is
unreadable.
The patron we want, then, is one who will help us to preserve our
flowers from decay. But as his qualities change from age to age, and it
needs considerable integrity and conviction not to be dazzled by the
pretensions or bamboozled by the persuasions of the competing crowd,
this business of patron-finding is one of the tests and trials of
authorship. To know whom to write for is to know how to write. Some of
the modern patron’s qualities are, however, fairly plain. The writer
will require at this moment, it is obvious, a patron with the
book-reading habit rather than the play-going habit. Nowadays, too, he
must be instructed in the literature of other times and races. But there
are other qualities which our special weaknesses and tendencies demand
in him. There is the question of indecency, for instance, which plagues
us and puzzles us much more than it did the Elizabethans. The
twentieth-century patron must be immune from shock. He must distinguish
infallibly between the little clod of manure which sticks to the crocus
of necessity, and that which is plastered to it out of bravado. He must
be a judge, too, of those social influences which inevitably play so
large a part in modern literature, and able to say which matures and
fortifies, which inhibits and makes sterile. Further, there is emotion
for him to pronounce on, and in no department can he do more useful work
than in bracing a writer against sentimentality on the one hand and a
craven fear of expressing his feeling on the other. It is worse, he will
say, and perhaps more common, to be afraid of feeling than to feel too
much. He will add, perhaps, something about language, and point out how
many words Shakespeare used and how much grammar Shakespeare violated,
while we, though we keep our fingers so demurely to the black notes on
the piano, have not appreciably improved upon _Antony and Cleopatra_.
And if you can forget your sex altogether, he will say, so much the
better; a writer has none. But all this is by the way—elementary and
disputable. The patron’s prime quality is something different, only to
be expressed perhaps by the use of that convenient word which cloaks so
much—atmosphere. It is necessary that the patron should shed and
envelop the crocus in an atmosphere which makes it appear a plant of the
very highest importance, so that to misrepresent it is the one outrage
not to be forgiven this side of the grave. He must make us feel that a
single crocus, if it be a real crocus, is enough for him; that he does
not want to be lectured, elevated, instructed, or improved; that he is
sorry that he bullied Carlyle into vociferation, Tennyson into idyllics,
and Ruskin into insanity; that he is now ready to efface himself or
assert himself as his writers require; that he is bound to them by a
more than maternal tie; that they are twins indeed, one dying if the
other dies, one flourishing if the other flourishes; that the fate of
literature depends upon their happy alliance—all of which proves, as we
began by saying, that the choice of a patron is of the highest
importance. But how to choose rightly? How to write well? Those are the
questions.
_The Modern Essay_
As Mr. Rhys truly says, it is unnecessary to go profoundly into the
history and origin of the essay—whether it derives from Socrates or
Siranney the Persian—since, like all living things, its present is more
important than its past. Moreover, the family is widely spread; and
while some of its representatives have risen in the world and wear their
coronets with the best, others pick up a precarious living in the gutter
near Fleet Street. The form, too, admits variety. The essay can be short
or long, serious or trifling, about God and Spinoza, or about turtles
and Cheapside. But as we turn over the pages of these five little
volumes,[13] containing essays written between 1870 and 1920, certain
principles appear to control the chaos, and we detect in the short
period under review something like the progress of history.
Of all forms of literature, however, the essay is the one which least
calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is
simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we
take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an
essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with
its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In
the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of
amusement, surprise, interest, indignation; we may soar to the heights
of fantasy with Lamb or plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but
we must never be roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its
curtain across the world.
So great a feat is seldom accomplished, though the fault may well be as
much on the reader’s side as on the writer’s. Habit and lethargy have
dulled his palate. A novel has a story, a poem rhyme; but what art can
the essayist use in these short lengths of prose to sting us wide awake
and fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification
of life—a basking, with every faculty alert, in the sun of pleasure? He
must know—that is the first essential—how to write. His learning may
be as profound as Mark Pattison’s, but in an essay it must be so fused
by the magic of writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the
surface of the texture. Macaulay in one way, Froude in another, did this
superbly over and over again. They have blown more knowledge into us in
the course of one essay than the innumerable chapters of a hundred
text-books. But when Mark Pattison has to tell us, in the space of
thirty-five little pages, about Montaigne, we feel that he had not
previously assimilated M. Grün. M. Grün was a gentleman who once wrote
a bad book. M. Grün and his book should have been embalmed for our
perpetual delight in amber. But the process is fatiguing; it requires
more time and perhaps more temper than Pattison had at his command. He
served M. Grün up raw, and he remains a crude berry among the cook
meats, upon which our teeth must grate for ever. Something of the sort
applies to Matthew Arnold and a certain translator of Spinoza. Literal
truth-telling and finding fault with a culprit for his good are out of
place in an essay, where everything should be for our good and rather
for eternity than for the March number of the _Fortnightly Review_. But
if the voice of the scold should never be heard in this narrow plot,
there is another voice which is as a plague of locusts—the voice of a
man stumbling drowsily among loose words, clutching aimlessly at vague
ideas, the voice, for example, of Mr. Hutton in the following passage:
Add to this that his married life was very brief, only seven years and a
half, being unexpectedly cut short, and that his passionate reverence
for his wife’s memory and genius—in his own words, “a religion”—was
one which, as he must have been perfectly sensible, he could not make to
appear otherwise than extravagant, not to say an hallucination, in the
eyes of the rest of mankind, and yet that he was possessed by an
irresistible yearning to attempt to embody it in all the tender and
enthusiastic hyperbole of which it is so pathetic to find a man who
gained his fame by his “dry-light” a master, and it is impossible not to
feel that the human incidents in Mr. Mill’s career are very sad.
A book could take that blow, but it sinks an essay. A biography in two
volumes is indeed the proper depositary; for there, where the licence is
so much wider, and hints and glimpses of outside things make part of the
feast (we refer to the old type of Victorian volume), these yawns and
stretches hardly matter, and have indeed some positive value of their
own. But that value, which is contributed by the reader, perhaps
illicitly, in his desire to get as much into the book from all possible
sources as he can, must be ruled out here.
There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow
or other, by dint of labour or bounty of nature, or both combined, the
essay must be pure—pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from
dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter. Of all writers in
the first volume, Walter Pater best achieves this arduous task, because
before setting out to write his essay (“Notes on Leonardo da Vinci”) he
has somehow contrived to get his material fused. He is a learned man,
but it is not knowledge of Leonardo that remains with us, but a vision,
such as we get in a good novel where everything contributes to bring the
writer’s conception as a whole before us. Only here, in the essay, where
the bounds are so strict and facts have to be used in their nakedness,
the true writer like Walter Pater makes these limitations yield their
own quality. Truth will give it authority; from its narrow limits he
will get shape and intensity; and then there is no more fitting place
for some of those ornaments which the old writers loved and we, by
calling them ornaments, presumably despise. Nowadays nobody would have
the courage to embark on the once famous description of Leonardo’s lady
who has
learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas and
keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with
Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and,
as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary . . .
The passage is too thumb-marked to slip naturally into the context. But
when we come unexpectedly upon “the smiling of women and the motion of
great waters”, or upon “full of the refinement of the dead, in sad,
earth-coloured raiment, set with pale stones”, we suddenly remember that
we have ears and we have eyes, and that the English language fills a
long array of stout volumes with innumerable words, many of which are of
more than one syllable. The only living Englishman who ever looks into
these volumes is, of course, a gentleman of Polish extraction. But
doubtless our abstention saves us much gush, much rhetoric, much
high-stepping and cloud-prancing, and for the sake of the prevailing
sobriety and hard-headedness we should be willing to barter the
splendour of Sir Thomas Browne and the vigour of Swift.
Yet, if the essay admits more properly than biography or fiction of
sudden boldness and metaphor, and can be polished till every atom of its
surface shines, there are dangers in that too. We are soon in sight of
ornament. Soon the current, which is the life-blood of literature, runs
slow; and instead of sparkling and flashing or moving with a quieter
impulse which has a deeper excitement, words coagulate together in
frozen sprays which, like the grapes on a Christmas-tree, glitter for a
single night, but are dusty and garish the day after. The temptation to
decorate is great where the theme may be of the slightest. What is there
to interest another in the fact that one has enjoyed a walking tour, or
has amused oneself by rambling down Cheapside and looking at the turtles
in Mr. Sweeting’s shop window? Stevenson and Samuel Butler chose very
different methods of exciting our interest in these domestic themes.
Stevenson, of course, trimmed and polished and set out his matter in the
traditional eighteenth-century form. It is admirably done, but we cannot
help feeling anxious, as the essay proceeds, lest the material may give
out under the craftsman’s fingers. The ingot is so small, the
manipulation so incessant. And perhaps that is why the peroration—
To sit still and contemplate—to remember the faces of women without
desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be
everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where
and what you are—
has the sort of insubstantiality which suggests that by the time he got
to the end he had left himself nothing solid to work with. Butler
adopted the very opposite method. Think your own thoughts, he seems to
say, and speak them as plainly as you can. These turtles in the shop
window which appear to leak out of their shells through heads and feet
suggest a fatal faithfulness to a fixed idea. And so, striding
unconcernedly from one idea to the next, we traverse a large stretch of
ground; observe that a wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing;
that Mary Queen of Scots wears surgical boots and is subject to fits
near the Horse Shoe in Tottenham Court Road; take it for granted that no
one really cares about Æschylus; and so, with many amusing anecdotes
and some profound reflections, reach the peroration, which is that, as
he had been told not to see more in Cheapside than he could get into
twelve pages of the _Universal Review_, he had better stop. And yet
obviously Butler is at least as careful of our pleasure as Stevenson;
and to write like oneself and call it not writing is a much harder
exercise in style than to write like Addison and call it writing well.
But, however much they differ individually, the Victorian essayists yet
had something in common. They wrote at greater length than is now usual,
and they wrote for a public which had not only time to sit down to its
magazine seriously, but a high, if peculiarly Victorian, standard of
culture by which to judge it. It was worth while to speak out upon
serious matters in an essay; and there was nothing absurd in writing as
well as one possibly could when, in a month or two, the same public
which had welcomed the essay in a magazine would carefully read it once
more in a book. But a change came from a small audience of cultivated
people to a larger audience of people who were not quite so cultivated.
The change was not altogether for the worse. In volume III. we find Mr.
Birrell and Mr. Beerbohm. It might even be said that there was a
reversion to the classic type, and that the essay by losing its size and
something of its sonority was approaching more nearly the essay of
Addison and Lamb. At any rate, there is a great gulf between Mr. Birrell
on Carlyle and the essay which one may suppose that Carlyle would have
written upon Mr. Birrell. There is little similarity between _A Cloud of
Pinafores_, by Max Beerbohm, and _A Cynic’s Apology_, by Leslie Stephen.
But the essay is alive; there is no reason to despair. As the conditions
change so the essayist, most sensitive of all plants to public opinion,
adapts himself, and if he is good makes the best of the change, and if
he is bad the worst. Mr. Birrell is certainly good; and so we find that,
though he has dropped a considerable amount of weight, his attack is
much more direct and his movement more supple. But what did Mr. Beerbohm
give to the essay and what did he take from it? That is a much more
complicated question, for here we have an essayist who has concentrated
on the work and is without doubt the prince of his profession.
What Mr. Beerbohm gave was, of course, himself. This presence, which has
haunted the essay fitfully from the time of Montaigne, had been in exile
since the death of Charles Lamb. Matthew Arnold was never to his readers
Matt, nor Walter Pater affectionately abbreviated in a thousand homes to
Wat. They gave us much, but that they did not give. Thus, some time in
the nineties, it must have surprised readers accustomed to exhortation,
information, and denunciation to find themselves familiarly addressed by
a voice which seemed to belong to a man no larger than themselves. He
was affected by private joys and sorrows, and had no gospel to preach
and no learning to impart. He was himself, simply and directly, and
himself he has remained. Once again we have an essayist capable of using
the essayist’s most proper but most dangerous and delicate tool. He has
brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but
so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any
relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know
that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes. The
triumph is the triumph of style. For it is only by knowing how to write
that you can make use in literature of your self; that self which, while
it is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous antagonist.
Never to be yourself and yet always—that is the problem. Some of the
essayists in Mr. Rhys’ collection, to be frank, have not altogether
succeeded in solving it. We are nauseated by the sight of trivial
personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. As talk, no doubt,
it was charming, and certainly the writer is a good fellow to meet over
a bottle of beer. But literature is stern; it is no use being charming,
virtuous, or even learned and brilliant into the bargain, unless, she
seems to reiterate, you fulfil her first condition—to know how to
write.
This art is possessed to perfection by Mr. Beerbohm. But he has not
searched the dictionary for polysyllables. He has not moulded firm
periods or seduced our ears with intricate cadences and strange
melodies. Some of his companions—Henley and Stevenson, for example—are
momentarily more impressive. But _A Cloud of Pinafores_ had in it that
indescribable inequality, stir, and final expressiveness which belong to
life and to life alone. You have not finished with it because you have
read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part.
Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if
they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find
them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm,
knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and
talk. Yet it is true that the essayist is the most sensitive of all
writers to public opinion. The drawing-room is the place where a great
deal of reading is done nowadays, and the essays of Mr. Beerbohm lie,
with an exquisite appreciation of all that the position exacts, upon the
drawing-room table. There is no gin about; no strong tobacco; no puns,
drunkenness, or insanity. Ladies and gentlemen talk together, and some
things, of course, are not said.
But if it would be foolish to attempt to confine Mr. Beerbohm to one
room, it would be still more foolish, unhappily, to make him, the
artist, the man who gives us only his best, the representative of our
age. There are no essays by Mr. Beerbohm in the fourth or fifth volumes
of the present collection. His age seems already a little distant, and
the drawing-room table, as it recedes, begins to look rather like an
altar where, once upon a time, people deposited offerings—fruit from
their own orchards, gifts carved with their own hands. Now once more the
conditions have changed. The public needs essays as much as ever, and
perhaps even more. The demand for the light middle not exceeding fifteen
hundred words, or in special cases seventeen hundred and fifty, much
exceeds the supply. Where Lamb wrote one essay and Max perhaps writes
two, Mr. Belloc at a rough computation produces three hundred and
sixty-five. They are very short, it is true. Yet with what dexterity the
practised essayist will utilise his space—beginning as close to the top
of the sheet as possible, judging precisely how far to go, when to turn,
and how, without sacrificing a hair’s-breadth of paper, to wheel about
and alight accurately upon the last word his editor allows! As a feat of
skill it is well worth watching. But the personality upon which Mr.
Belloc, like Mr. Beerbohm, depends suffers in the process. It comes to
us not with the natural richness of the speaking voice, but strained and
thin and full of mannerisms and affectations, like the voice of a man
shouting through a megaphone to a crowd on a windy day. “Little friends,
my readers,” he says in the essay called “An Unknown Country”, and he
goes on to tell us how—
There was a shepherd the other day at Findon Fair who had come from the
east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of
horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different
from the eyes of other men. . . . I went with him to hear what he had to
say, for shepherds talk quite differently from other men.
Happily this shepherd had little to say, even under the stimulus of the
inevitable mug of beer, about the Unknown Country, for the only remark
that he did make proves him either a minor poet, unfit for the care of
sheep, or Mr. Belloc himself masquerading with a fountain pen. That is
the penalty which the habitual essayist must now be prepared to face. He
must masquerade. He cannot afford the time either to be himself or to be
other people. He must skim the surface of thought and dilute the
strength of personality. He must give us a worn weekly halfpenny instead
of a solid sovereign once a year.
But it is not Mr. Belloc only who has suffered from the prevailing
conditions. The essays which bring the collection to the year 1920 may
not be the best of their authors’ work, but, if we except writers like
Mr. Conrad and Mr. Hudson, who have strayed into essay writing
accidentally, and concentrate upon those who write essays habitually, we
shall find them a good deal affected by the change in their
circumstances. To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to
write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people
coming home in the evening, is a heart-breaking task for men who know
good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm’s
way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public,
or anything sharp that might irritate its skin. And so, if one reads Mr.
Lucas, Mr. Lynd, or Mr. Squire in the bulk, one feels that a common
greyness silvers everything. They are as far removed from the
extravagant beauty of Walter Pater as they are from the intemperate
candour of Leslie Stephen. Beauty and courage are dangerous spirits to
battle in a column and a half; and thought, like a brown paper parcel in
a waistcoat pocket, has a way of spoiling the symmetry of an article. It
is a kind, tired, apathetic world for which they write, and the marvel
is that they never cease to attempt, at least, to write well.
But there is no need to pity Mr. Clutton Brock for this change in the
essayist’s conditions. He has clearly made the best of his circumstances
and not the worst. One hesitates even to say that he has had to make any
conscious effort in the matter, so naturally has he effected the
transition from the private essayist to the public, from the
drawing-room to the Albert Hall. Paradoxically enough, the shrinkage in
size has brought about a corresponding expansion of individuality. We
have no longer the “I” of Max and of Lamb, but the “we” of public bodies
and other sublime personages. It is “we” who go to hear the _Magic
Flute_; “we” who ought to profit by it; “we”, in some mysterious way,
who, in our corporate capacity, once upon a time actually wrote it. For
music and literature and art must submit to the same generalisation or
they will not carry to the farthest recesses of the Albert Hall. That
the voice of Mr. Clutton Brock, so sincere and so disinterested, carries
such a distance and reaches so many without pandering to the weakness of
the mass or its passions must be a matter of legitimate satisfaction to
us all. But while “we” are gratified, “I”, that unruly partner in the
human fellowship, is reduced to despair. “I” must always think things
for himself, and feel things for himself. To share them in a diluted
form with the majority of well-educated and well-intentioned men and
women is for him sheer agony; and while the rest of us listen intently
and profit profoundly, “I” slips off to the woods and the fields and
rejoices in a single blade of grass or a solitary potato.
In the fifth volume of modern essays, it seems, we have got some way
from pleasure and the art of writing. But in justice to the essayists of
1920 we must be sure that we are not praising the famous because they
have been praised already and the dead because we shall never meet them
wearing spats in Piccadilly. We must know what we mean when we say that
they can write and give us pleasure. We must compare them; we must bring
out the quality. We must point to this and say it is good because it is
exact, truthful, and imaginative:
Nay, retire men cannot when they would; neither will they, when it were
Reason; but are impatient of Privateness, even in age and sickness,
which require the shadow: like old Townsmen: that will still be sitting
at their street door, though thereby they offer Age to Scorn . . .
and to this, and say it is bad because it is loose, plausible, and
commonplace:
With courteous and precise cynicism on his lips, he thought of quiet
virginal chambers, of waters singing under the moon, of terraces where
taintless music sobbed into the open night, of pure maternal mistresses
with protecting arms and vigilant eyes, of fields slumbering in the
sunlight, of leagues of ocean heaving under warm tremulous heavens, of
hot ports, gorgeous and perfumed. . . .
It goes on, but already we are bemused with sound and neither feel nor
hear. The comparison makes us suspect that the art of writing has for
backbone some fierce attachment to an idea. It is on the back of an
idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and
thus compelling words to its shape, that the diverse company which
included Lamb and Bacon, and Mr. Beerbohm and Hudson, and Vernon Lee and
Mr. Conrad, and Leslie Stephen and Butler and Walter Pater reaches the
farther shore. Very various talents have helped or hindered the passage
of the idea into words. Some scrape through painfully; others fly with
every wind favouring. But Mr. Belloc and Mr. Lucas and Mr. Lynd and Mr.
Squire are not fiercely attached to anything in itself. They share the
contemporary dilemma—that lack of an obstinate conviction which lifts
ephemeral sounds through the misty sphere of anybody’s language to the
land where there is a perpetual marriage, a perpetual union. Vague as
all definitions are, a good essay must have this permanent quality about
it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that
shuts us in, not out.
[Footnote 13: _Modern English Essays_, edited by Ernest Rhys,
5 vols. (Dent).]
_Joseph Conrad_[14]
Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our
phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or
ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to
take up his lodging in this country. For there was always an air of
mystery about him. It was partly his Polish birth, partly his memorable
appearance, partly his preference for living in the depths of the
country, out of ear-shot of gossips, beyond reach of hostesses, so that
for news of him one had to depend upon the evidence of simple visitors
with a habit of ringing door-bells who reported of their unknown host
that he had the most perfect manners, the brightest eyes, and spoke
English with a strong foreign accent.
Still, though it is the habit of death to quicken and focus our
memories, there clings to the genius of Conrad something essentially,
and not accidentally, difficult of approach. His reputation of later
years was, with one obvious exception, undoubtedly the highest in
England; yet he was not popular. He was read with passionate delight by
some; others he left cold and lustreless. Among his readers were people
of the most opposite ages and sympathies. Schoolboys of fourteen,
driving their way through Marryat, Scott, Henty, and Dickens, swallowed
him down with the rest; while the seasoned and the fastidious, who in
process of time have eaten their way to the heart of literature and
there turn over and over a few precious crumbs, set Conrad scrupulously
upon their banqueting table. One source of difficulty and disagreement
is, of course, to be found, where men have at all times found it, in his
beauty. One opens his pages and feels as Helen must have felt when she
looked in her glass and realised that, do what she would, she could
never in any circumstances pass for a plain woman. So Conrad had been
gifted, so he had schooled himself, and such was his obligation to a
strange language wooed characteristically for its Latin qualities rather
than its Saxon that it seemed impossible for him to make an ugly or
insignificant movement of the pen. His mistress, his style, is a little
somnolent sometimes in repose. But let somebody speak to her, and then
how magnificently she bears down upon us, with what colour, triumph, and
majesty! Yet it is arguable that Conrad would have gained both in credit
and in popularity if he had written what he had to write without this
incessant care for appearances. They block and impede and distract, his
critics say, pointing to those famous passages which it is becoming the
habit to lift from their context and exhibit among other cut flowers of
English prose. He was self-conscious and stiff and ornate, they
complain, and the sound of his own voice was dearer to him than the
voice of humanity in its anguish. The criticism is familiar, and as
difficult to refute as the remarks of deaf people when _Figaro_ is
played. They see the orchestra; far off they hear a dismal scrape of
sound; their own remarks are interrupted, and, very naturally, they
conclude that the ends of life would be better served if instead of
scraping Mozart those fifty fiddlers broke stones upon the road. That
beauty teaches, that beauty is a disciplinarian, how are we to convince
them, since her teaching is inseparable from the sound of her voice and
to that they are deaf? But read Conrad, not in birthday books but in the
bulk, and he must be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not
hear in that rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride,
its vast and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good than bad,
how loyalty is good and honesty and courage, though ostensibly Conrad is
concerned merely to show us the beauty of a night at sea. But it is ill
work dragging such intimations from their element. Dried in our little
saucers, without the magic and mystery of language, they lose their
power to excite and goad; they lose the drastic power which is a
constant quality of Conrad’s prose.
For it was by virtue of something drastic in him, the qualities of a
leader and captain, that Conrad kept his hold over boys and young
people. Until _Nostromo_ was written his characters, as the young were
quick to perceive, were fundamentally simple and heroic, however subtle
the mind and indirect the method of their creator. They were seafarers,
used to solitude and silence. They were in conflict with Nature, but at
peace with man. Nature was their antagonist; she it was who drew forth
honour, magnanimity, loyalty, the qualities proper to man; she who in
sheltered bays reared to womanhood beautiful girls unfathomable and
austere. Above all, it was Nature who turned out such gnarled and tested
characters as Captain Whalley and old Singleton, obscure but glorious in
their obscurity, who were to Conrad the pick of our race, the men whose
praises he was never tired of celebrating:
They had been strong as those are strong who know neither doubts nor
hopes. They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted,
unruly and faithful. Well-meaning people had tried to represent these
men as whining over every mouthful of their food, as going about their
work in fear of their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew
toil, privation, violence, debauchery—but knew not fear, and had no
desire of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but easy to
inspire; voiceless men—but men enough to scorn in their hearts the
sentimental voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate. It was a
fate unique and their own; the capacity to bear it appeared to them the
privilege of the chosen! Their generation lived inarticulate and
indispensable, without knowing the sweetness of affections or the refuge
of a home—and died free from the dark menace of a narrow grave. They
were the everlasting children of the mysterious sea.
Such were the characters of the early books—_Lord Jim, Typhoon, The
Nigger of the “Narcissus”, Youth_; and these books, in spite of the
changes and fashions, are surely secure of their place among our
classics. But they reach this height by means of qualities which the
simple story of adventure, as Marryat told it, or Fenimore Cooper, has
no claim to possess. For it is clear that to admire and celebrate such
men and such deeds, romantically, wholeheartedly and with the fervour
of a lover, one must be possessed of the double vision; one must be at
once inside and out. To praise their silence one must possess a voice.
To appreciate their endurance one must be sensitive to fatigue. One must
be able to live on equal terms with the Whalleys and the Singletons and
yet hide from their suspicious eyes the very qualities which enable one
to understand them. Conrad alone was able to live that double life, for
Conrad was compound of two men; together with the sea captain dwelt that
subtle, refined, and fastidious analyst whom he called Marlow. “A most
discreet, understanding man”, he said of Marlow.
Marlow was one of those born observers who are happiest in retirement.
Marlow liked nothing better than to sit on deck, in some obscure creek
of the Thames, smoking and recollecting; smoking and speculating;
sending after his smoke beautiful rings of words until all the summer’s
night became a little clouded with tobacco smoke. Marlow, too, had a
profound respect for the men with whom he had sailed; but he saw the
humour of them. He nosed out and described in masterly fashion those
livid creatures who prey successfully upon the clumsy veterans. He had a
flair for human deformity; his humour was sardonic. Nor did Marlow live
entirely wreathed in the smoke of his own cigars. He had a habit of
opening his eyes suddenly and looking—at a rubbish heap, at a port, at
a shop counter—and then complete in its burning ring of light that
thing is flashed bright upon the mysterious background. Introspective
and analytical, Marlow was aware of this peculiarity. He said the power
came to him suddenly. He might, for instance, overhear a French officer
murmur “Mon Dieu, how the time passes!”
Nothing [he comments] could have been more commonplace than this remark;
but its utterance coincided for me with a moment of vision. It’s
extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull
ears, with dormant thoughts. . . . Nevertheless, there can be but few of
us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening, when we
see, hear, understand, ever so much—everything—in a flash, before we
fall back again into our agreeable somnolence. I raised my eyes when he
spoke, and I saw him as though I had never seen him before.
Picture after picture he painted thus upon that dark background; ships
first and foremost, ships at anchor, ships flying before the storm,
ships in harbour; he painted sunsets and dawns; he painted the night; he
painted the sea in every aspect; he painted the gaudy brilliancy of
Eastern ports, and men and women, their houses and their attitudes. He
was an accurate and unflinching observer, schooled to that “absolute
loyalty towards his feelings and sensations”, which, Conrad wrote, “an
author should keep hold of in his most exalted moments of creation”. And
very quietly and compassionately Marlow sometimes lets fall a few words
of epitaph which remind us, with all that beauty and brilliancy before
our eyes, of the darkness of the background.
Thus a rough-and-ready distinction would make us say that it is Marlow
who comments, Conrad who creates. It would lead us, aware that we are on
dangerous ground, to account for that change which, Conrad tells us,
took place when he had finished the last story in the _Typhoon_
volume—“a subtle change in the nature of the inspiration”—by some
alteration in the relationship of the two old friends. “. . . it seemed
somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about.” It was
Conrad, let us suppose, Conrad the creator, who said that, looking back
with sorrowful satisfaction upon the stories he had told; feeling as he
well might that he could never better the storm in _The Nigger of the
“Narcissus_”, or render more faithful tribute to the qualities of
British seamen than he had done already in _Youth_ and _Lord Jim_. It
was then that Marlow, the commentator, reminded him how, in the course
of nature, one must grow old, sit smoking on deck, and give up
sea-faring. But, he reminded him, those strenuous years had deposited
their memories; and he even went so far perhaps as to hint that, though
the last word might have been said about Captain Whalley and his
relation to the universe, there remained on shore a number of men and
women whose relationships, though of a more personal kind, might be
worth looking into. If we further suppose that there was a volume of
Henry James on board and that Marlow gave his friend the book to take to
bed with him, we may seek support in the fact that it was in 1905 that
Conrad wrote a very fine essay upon that master.
For some years, then, it was Marlow who was the dominant partner.
_Nostromo, Chance, The Arrow of Gold_ represent that stage of the
alliance which some will continue to find the richest of all. The human
heart is more intricate than the forest, they will say; it has its
storms; it has its creatures of the night; and if as novelist you wish
to test man in all his relationships, the proper antagonist is man; his
ordeal is in society, not solitude. For them there will always be a
peculiar fascination in the books where the light of those brilliant
eyes falls not only upon the waste of waters but upon the heart in its
perplexity. But it must be admitted that, if Marlow thus advised Conrad
to shift his angle of vision, the advice was bold. For the vision of a
novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his
characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he
relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one
sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction
are strictly limited. So delicate a balance is easily disturbed. After
the middle period Conrad never again was able to bring his figures into
perfect relation with their background. He never believed in his later
and more highly sophisticated characters as he had believed in his early
seamen. When he had to indicate their relation to that other unseen
world of novelists, the world of values and convictions, he was far less
sure what those values were. Then, over and over again, a single phrase,
“He steered with care”, coming at the end of a storm, carried in it a
whole morality. But in this more crowded and complicated world such
terse phrases became less and less appropriate. Complex men and women of
many interests and relations would not submit to so summary a judgement;
or, if they did, much that was important in them escaped the verdict.
And yet it was very necessary to Conrad’s genius, with its luxuriant and
romantic power, to have some law by which its creations could be tried.
Essentially—such remained his creed—this world of civilised and
self-conscious people is based upon “a few very simple ideas”; but
where, in the world of thoughts and personal relations, are we to find
them? There are no masts in drawing-rooms; the typhoon does not test the
worth of politicians and business men. Seeking and not finding such
supports, the world of Conrad’s later period has about it an involuntary
obscurity, an inconclusiveness, almost a disillusionment which baffles
and fatigues. We lay hold in the dusk only of the old nobilities and
sonorities: fidelity, compassion, honour, service—beautiful always, but
now a little wearily reiterated, as if times had changed. Perhaps it was
Marlow who was at fault. His habit of mind was a trifle sedentary. He
had sat upon deck too long; splendid in soliloquy, he was less apt in
the give and take of conversation; and those “moments of vision”
flashing and fading, do not serve as well as steady lamplight to
illumine the ripple of life and its long, gradual years. Above all,
perhaps, he did not take into account how, if Conrad was to create, it
was essential first that he should believe.
Therefore, though we shall make expeditions into the later books and
bring back wonderful trophies, large tracts of them will remain by most
of us untrodden. It is the earlier books—_Youth, Lord Jim, Typhoon, The
Nigger of the “Narcissus”_—that we shall read in their entirety. For
when the question is asked, what of Conrad will survive and where in the
ranks of novelists we are to place him, these books, with their air of
telling us something very old and perfectly true, which had lain hidden
but is now revealed, will come to mind and make such questions and
comparisons seem a little futile. Complete and still, very chaste and
very beautiful, they rise in the memory as, on these hot summer nights,
in their slow and stately way first one star comes out and then another.
[Footnote 14: August, 1924.]
_How It Strikes a
Contemporary_
In the first place a contemporary can scarcely fail to be struck by the
fact that two critics at the same table at the same moment will
pronounce completely different opinions about the same book. Here, on
the right, it is declared a masterpiece of English prose; on the left,
simultaneously, a mere mass of waste-paper which, if the fire could
survive it, should be thrown upon the flames. Yet both critics are in
agreement about Milton and about Keats. They display an exquisite
sensibility and have undoubtedly a genuine enthusiasm. It is only when
they discuss the work of contemporary writers that they inevitably come
to blows. The book in question, which is at once a lasting contribution
to English literature and a mere farrago of pretentious mediocrity, was
published about two months ago. That is the explanation; that is why
they differ.
The explanation is a strange one. It is equally disconcerting to the
reader who wishes to take his bearings in the chaos of contemporary
literature and to the writer who has a natural desire to know whether
his own work, produced with infinite pains and in almost utter darkness,
is likely to burn for ever among the fixed luminaries of English letters
or, on the contrary, to put out the fire. But if we identify ourselves
with the reader and explore his dilemma first, our bewilderment is
short-lived enough. The same thing has happened so often before. We have
heard the doctors disagreeing about the new and agreeing about the old
twice a year on the average, in spring and autumn, ever since Robert
Elsmere, or was it Stephen Phillips, somehow pervaded the atmosphere,
and there was the same disagreement among grown-up people about them. It
would be much more marvellous, and indeed much more upsetting, if, for a
wonder, both gentlemen agreed, pronounced Blank’s book an undoubted
masterpiece, and thus faced us with the necessity of deciding whether we
should back their judgement to the extent of ten and sixpence. Both are
critics of reputation; the opinions tumbled out so spontaneously here
will be starched and stiffened into columns of sober prose which will
uphold the dignity of letters in England and America.
It must be some innate cynicism, then, some ungenerous distrust of
contemporary genius, which determines us automatically as the talk goes
on that, were they to agree—which they show no signs of doing—half a
guinea is altogether too large a sum to squander upon contemporary
enthusiasms, and the case will be met quite adequately by a card to the
library. Still the question remains, and let us put it boldly to the
critics themselves. Is there no guidance nowadays for a reader who
yields to none in reverence for the dead, but is tormented by the
suspicion that reverence for the dead is vitally connected with
understanding of the living? After a rapid survey both critics are
agreed that there is unfortunately no such person. For what is their own
judgement worth where new books are concerned? Certainly not ten and
sixpence. And from the stores of their experience they proceed to bring
forth terrible examples of past blunders; crimes of criticism which, if
they had been committed against the dead and not against the living,
would have lost them their jobs and imperilled their reputations. The
only advice they can offer is to respect one’s own instincts, to follow
them fearlessly and, rather than submit them to the control of any
critic or reviewer alive, to check them by reading and reading again the
masterpieces of the past.
Thanking them humbly, we cannot help reflecting that it was not always
so. Once upon a time, we must believe, there was a rule, a discipline,
which controlled the great republic of readers in a way which is now
unknown. That is not to say that the great critic—the Dryden, the
Johnson, the Coleridge, the Arnold—was an impeccable judge of
contemporary work, whose verdicts stamped the book indelibly and saved
the reader the trouble of reckoning the value for himself. The mistakes
of these great men about their own contemporaries are too notorious to
be worth recording. But the mere fact of their existence had a
centralising influence. That alone, it is not fantastic to suppose,
would have controlled the disagreements of the dinner-table and given to
random chatter about some book just out an authority now entirely to
seek. The diverse schools would have debated as hotly as ever, but at
the back of every reader’s mind would have been the consciousness that
there was at least one man who kept the main principles of literature
closely in view; who, if you had taken to him some eccentricity of the
moment, would have brought it into touch with permanence and tethered it
by his own authority in the contrary blasts of praise and blame.[15] But
when it comes to the making of a critic, nature must be generous and
society ripe. The scattered dinner-tables of the modern world, the chase
and eddy of the various currents which compose the society of our time,
could only be dominated by a giant of fabulous dimensions. And where is
even the very tall man whom we have the right to expect? Reviewers we
have but no critic; a million competent and incorruptible policemen but
no judge. Men of taste and learning and ability are for ever lecturing
the young and celebrating the dead. But the too frequent result of their
able and industrious pens is a desiccation of the living tissues of
literature into a network of little bones. Nowhere shall we find the
downright vigour of a Dryden, or Keats with his fine and natural
bearing, his profound insight and sanity, or Flaubert and the tremendous
power of his fanaticism, or Coleridge, above all, brewing in his head
the whole of poetry and letting issue now and then one of those profound
general statements which are caught up by the mind when hot with the
friction of reading as if they were of the soul of the book itself.
And to all this, too, the critics generously agree. A great critic, they
say, is the rarest of beings. But should one miraculously appear, how
should we maintain him, on what should we feed him? Great critics, if
they are not themselves great poets, are bred from the profusion of the
age. There is some great man to be vindicated, some school to be founded
or destroyed. But our age is meagre to the verge of destitution. There
is no name which dominates the rest. There is no master in whose
workshop the young are proud to serve apprenticeship. Mr. Hardy has long
since withdrawn from the arena, and there is something exotic about the
genius of Mr. Conrad which makes him not so much an influence as an
idol, honoured and admired, but aloof and apart. As for the rest, though
they are many and vigorous and in the full flood of creative activity,
there is none whose influence can seriously affect his contemporaries,
or penetrate beyond our day to that not very distant future which it
pleases us to call immortality. If we make a century our test, and ask
how much of the work produced in these days in England will be in
existence then, we shall have to answer not merely that we cannot agree
upon the same book, but that we are more than doubtful whether such a
book there is. It is an age of fragments. A few stanzas, a few pages, a
chapter here and there, the beginning of this novel, the end of that,
are equal to the best of any age or author. But can we go to posterity
with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the
whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for
our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully
put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.
At first the weight of pessimism seems sufficient to bear down all
opposition. Yes, it is a lean age, we repeat, with much to justify its
poverty; but, frankly, if we pit one century against another the
comparison seems overwhelmingly against us. _Waverley, The Excursion,
Kubla Khan, Don Juan, Hazlitt’s Essays, Pride and Prejudice, Hyperion_,
and _Prometheus Unbound_ were all published between 1800 and 1821. Our
century has not lacked industry; but if we ask for masterpieces it
appears on the face of it that the pessimists are right. It seems as if
an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and
extravagance by cleanliness and hard work. All honour, of course, to
those who have sacrificed their immortality to set the house in order.
But if we ask for masterpieces, where are we to look? A little poetry,
we may feel sure, will survive; a few poems by Mr. Yeats, by Mr. Davies,
by Mr. De la Mare. Mr. Lawrence, of course, has moments of greatness,
but hours of something very different. Mr. Beerbohm, in his way, is
perfect, but it is not a big way. Passages in _Far Away and Long Ago_
will undoubtedly go to posterity entire. _Ulysses_ was a memorable
catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster. And so, picking
and choosing, we select now this, now that, hold it up for display, hear
it defended or derided, and finally have to meet the objection that even
so we are only agreeing with the critics that it is an age incapable of
sustained effort, littered with fragments, and not seriously to be
compared with the age that went before.
But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip
service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly
conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying. It is a
barren and exhausted age, we repeat; we must look back with envy to the
past. Meanwhile it is one of the first fine days of spring. Life is not
altogether lacking in colour. The telephone, which interrupts the most
serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has
a romance of its own. And the random talk of people who have no chance
of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often,
of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which
will weave itself into the moment for ever. But this is life; the talk
is about literature. We must try to disentangle the two, and justify the
rash revolt of optimism against the superior plausibility, the finer
distinction, of pessimism.
Our optimism, then, is largely instinctive. It springs from the fine day
and the wine and the talk; it springs from the fact that when life
throws up such treasures daily, daily suggests more than the most
voluble can express, much though we admire the dead, we prefer life as
it is. There is something about the present which we would not exchange,
though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in. And modern
literature, with all its imperfections, has the same hold on us and the
same fascination. It is like a relation whom we snub and scarify daily,
but, after all, cannot do without. It has the same endearing quality of
being that which we are, that which we have made, that in which we live,
instead of being something, however august, alien to ourselves and
beheld from the outside. Nor has any generation more need than ours to
cherish its contemporaries. We are sharply cut off from our
predecessors. A shift in the scale—the war, the sudden slip of masses
held in position for ages—has shaken the fabric from top to bottom,
alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of
the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking
things that would have been impossible to our fathers. And we feel the
differences which have not been noted far more keenly than the
resemblances which have been very perfectly expressed. New books lure us
to read them partly in the hope that they will reflect this
rearrangement of our attitude—these scenes, thoughts, and apparently
fortuitous groupings of incongruous things which impinge upon us with so
keen a sense of novelty—and, as literature does, give it back into our
keeping, whole and comprehended. Here indeed there is every reason for
optimism. No age can have been more rich than ours in writers determined
to give expression to the differences which separate them from the past
and not to the resemblances which connect them with it. It would be
invidious to mention names, but the most casual reader dipping into
poetry, into fiction, into biography can hardly fail to be impressed by
the courage, the sincerity, in a word, by the widespread originality of
our time. But our exhilaration is strangely curtailed. Book after book
leaves us with the same sense of promise unachieved, of intellectual
poverty, of brilliance which has been snatched from life but not
transmuted into literature. Much of what is best in contemporary work
has the appearance of being noted under pressure, taken down in a bleak
shorthand which preserves with astonishing brilliance the movements and
expressions of the figures as they pass across the screen. But the flash
is soon over, and there remains with us a profound dissatisfaction. The
irritation is as acute as the pleasure was intense.
After all, then, we are back at the beginning, vacillating from extreme
to extreme, at one moment enthusiastic, at the next pessimistic, unable
to come to any conclusion about our contemporaries. We have asked the
critics to help us, but they have deprecated the task. Now, then, is the
time to accept their advice and correct these extremes by consulting the
masterpieces of the past. We feel ourselves indeed driven to them,
impelled not by calm judgement but by some imperious need to anchor our
instability upon their security. But, honestly, the shock of the
comparison between past and present is at first disconcerting.
Undoubtedly there is a dullness in great books. There is an unabashed
tranquillity in page after page of Wordsworth and Scott and Miss Austen
which is sedative to the verge of somnolence. Opportunities occur and
they neglect them. Shades and subtleties accumulate and they ignore
them. They seem deliberately to refuse to gratify those senses which are
stimulated so briskly by the moderns; the senses of sight, of sound, of
touch—above all, the sense of the human being, his depth and the
variety of his perceptions, his complexity, his confusion, his self, in
short. There is little of all this in the works of Wordsworth and Scott
and Jane Austen. From what, then, arises that sense of security which
gradually, delightfully, and completely overcomes us? It is the power of
their belief—their conviction, that imposes itself upon us. In
Wordsworth, the philosophic poet, this is obvious enough. But it is
equally true of the careless Scott, who scribbled masterpieces to build
castles before breakfast, and of the modest maiden lady who wrote
furtively and quietly simply to give pleasure. In both there is the same
natural conviction that life is of a certain quality. They have their
judgement of conduct. They know the relations of human beings towards
each other and towards the universe. Neither of them probably has a word
to say about the matter outright, but everything depends on it. Only
believe, we find ourselves saying, and all the rest will come of itself.
Only believe, to take a very simple instance which the recent
publication of _The Watsons_ brings to mind, that a nice girl will
instinctively try to soothe the feelings of a boy who has been snubbed
at a dance, and then, if you believe it implicitly and unquestioningly,
you will not only make people a hundred years later feel the same thing,
but you will make them feel it as literature. For certainty of that kind
is the condition which makes it possible to write. To believe that your
impressions hold good for others is to be released from the cramp and
confinement of personality. It is to be free, as Scott was free, to
explore with a vigour which still holds us spell-bound the whole world
of adventure and romance. It is also the first step in that mysterious
process in which Jane Austen was so great an adept. The little grain of
experience once selected, believed in, and set outside herself, could be
put precisely in its place, and she was then free to make of it, by a
process which never yields its secrets to the analyst, into that
complete statement which is literature.
So then our contemporaries afflict us because they have ceased to
believe. The most sincere of them will only tell us what it is that
happens to himself. They cannot make a world, because they are not free
of other human beings. They cannot tell stories because they do not
believe the stories are true. They cannot generalise. They depend on
their senses and emotions, whose testimony is trustworthy, rather than
on their intellects whose message is obscure. And they have perforce to
deny themselves the use of some of the most powerful and some of the
most exquisite of the weapons of their craft. With the whole wealth of
the English language at the back of them, they timidly pass about from
hand to hand and book to book only the meanest copper coins. Set down at
a fresh angle of the eternal prospect they can only whip out their
notebooks and record with agonised intensity the flying gleams, which
light on what? and the transitory splendours, which may, perhaps,
compose nothing whatever. But here the critics interpose, and with some
show of justice.
If this description holds good, they say, and is not, as it may well be,
entirely dependent upon our position at the table and certain purely
personal relationships to mustard pots and flower vases, then the risks
of judging contemporary work are greater than ever before. There is
every excuse for them if they are wide of the mark; and no doubt it
would be better to retreat, as Matthew Arnold advised, from the burning
ground of the present to the safe tranquillity of the past. “We enter on
burning ground,” wrote Matthew Arnold, “as we approach the poetry of
times so near to us, poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth,
of which the estimates are so often not only personal, but personal with
passion,” and this, they remind us, was written in the year 1880.
Beware, they say, of putting under the microscope one inch of a ribbon
which runs many miles; things sort themselves out if you wait;
moderation and a study of the classics are to be recommended. Moreover,
life is short; the Byron centenary is at hand; and the burning question
of the moment is, did he, or did he not, marry his sister? To sum up,
then—if indeed any conclusion is possible when everybody is talking at
once and it is time to be going—it seems that it would be wise for the
writers of the present to renounce for themselves the hope of creating
masterpieces. Their poems, plays, biographies, novels are not books but
notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in his
hands, point to their blots and erasions, and tear them across; but he
will not throw them into the waste-paper basket. He will keep them
because other students will find them very useful. It is from notebooks
of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made. Literature,
as the critics were saying just now, has lasted long, has undergone many
changes, and it is only a short sight and a parochial mind that will
exaggerate the importance of these squalls, however they may agitate the
little boats now tossing out at sea. The storm and the drenching are on
the surface; and continuity and calm are in the depths.
As for the critics whose task it is to pass judgement upon the books of
the moment, whose work, let us admit, is difficult, dangerous, and often
distasteful, let us ask them to be generous of encouragement, but
sparing of those wreaths and coronets which are so apt to get awry, and
fade, and make the wearers, in six months time, look a little
ridiculous. Let them take a wider, a less personal view of modern
literature, and look indeed upon the writers as if they were engaged
upon some vast building, which being built by common effort, the
separate workmen may well remain anonymous. Let them slam the door upon
the cosy company where sugar is cheap and butter plentiful, give over,
for a time at least, the discussion of that fascinating topic—whether
Byron married his sister—and, withdrawing, perhaps, a handsbreadth from
the table where we sit chattering, say something interesting about
literature. Let us buttonhole them as they leave, and recall to their
memory that gaunt aristocrat, Lady Hester Stanhope, who kept a
milk-white horse in her stable in readiness for the Messiah and was for
ever scanning the mountain tops, impatiently but with confidence, for
signs of his approach, and ask them to follow her example; scan the
horizon; see the past in relation to the future; and so prepare the way
for masterpieces to come.
[Footnote 15: How violent these are two quotations will show. “It [Told
by _an Idiot_] should be read as the _Tempest_ should be read, and as
_Gulliver’s Travels_ should be read, for if Miss Macaulay’s poetic gift
happens to be less sublime than those of the author of the _Tempest_,
and if her irony happens to be less tremendous than that of the author
of _Gulliver’s Travels_, her justice and wisdom are no less noble than
theirs.”—_The Daily News._
The next day we read: “For the rest one can only say that if Mr. Eliot
had been pleased to write in demotic English _The Waste Land_ might not
have been, as it just is to all but anthropologists, and literati, so
much waste-paper.”—_The Manchester Guardian._]
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