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THE CRITICAL GAME
by
JOHN MACY
Author of "The Spirit of American Literature," etc.
Boni and Liveright
Publishers New York
Copyright, 1922, by
Boni and Liveright, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
To
ROGER IRVING LEE
CONTENTS
Page
The Critical Game 11
Dante in English 31
Dante's Political Philosophy 43
Nietzsche 55
Tolstoy 65
Maeterlinck's Essays 95
Joseph Conrad 105
A Conrad Miscellany 123
Strindberg 135
Tagore 145
Remy de Gourmont 153
Swift's Relations with Women 163
William James, Man of Letters 175
Biographies of Poe 193
Biographies of Whitman 203
George E. Woodberry 215
Abraham Cahan 227
Thomas Hardy 237
George Borrow 247
Shelley 259
H. G. Wells and Utopia 269
John Masefield 279
Shakespeare and the Scribes 289
George Moore and Other Irish Writers 305
James Joyce 317
D. H. Lawrence 325
THE CRITICAL GAME
Criticism is one form of the game of writing. It differs from other
forms only as whist differs from poker and as tennis differs from
golf. The motives are the same, the exercise of the player's brain and
muscles, and the entertainment of the spectators, from whom, if the
player be successful, he derives profit, livelihood, applause, and
fame. The function of criticism at the present time, and at all times,
is the function of all literature, to be wise, witty, eloquent,
instructive, humourous, original, graceful, beautiful, provocative,
irritating, persuasive. That is, it must possess some of the many
merits that can be found in any type of literature; it must in some
way be good writing. There is no other sound principle to be
discovered in the treatises on the art of criticism or in fine
examples of the art. Whether Charles Lamb writes about Shakespeare or
Christ's Hospital or ears is of relatively slight importance compared
with the question whether in one essay or another Lamb is at one of
his incomparable best moments of inspiration.
Remy de Gourmont says, apropos Brunetiere's views of Renan:
Contre l'opinion commune, la critique est peut-etre le plus
subjectif de tous les genres litteraires; c'est une confession
perpetuelle; en croyant analyser les oeuvres d'autrui, c'est
soi-meme que l'on devoile et que l'on expose au public ... voulant
expliquer et contredire Renan, M. Brunetiere s'est une fois de
plus confesse publiquement.
That is true, except that it may be doubted whether one type of
literature is more subjective than another, since all types are
subjective. Even a work that belongs, according to De Quincey's
definition, to the literature of information as distinguished from the
literature of power, even an article in an encyclopaedia, an article,
say, on Patagonia, has a man behind it; it cannot be quite objective
and impersonal.
Criticism should not be set off too sharply from other forms of
literary expression. It has no special rights, privileges, and
authority; and at the same time it has no special disabilities that
consign it to a secondary place in the divisions of literature. In any
unit of art, a sonnet or an epic, a short story or a novel, a little
review or a history of aesthetics, a man is trying to say something.
And the value of what he says must, of course, depend partly on the
essential interest of his subject; but it depends to a greater extent
on the skill with which he puts words together, creates interest in
himself. Arnold's essay on Keats is less Keats than Arnold. It could
not have been if Keats had not existed. But the beauty of that
sequence of words, that essay in criticism, is due to the genius of
Arnold. Francis Thompson on Shelley adds no cubit to the stature of
Shelley, but Thompson's interpretation is a marvellous piece of poetic
prose which cannot be deducted without enormous loss from the works of
Thompson, from English criticism. We read Pater on Coleridge, not for
Coleridge but for Pater, and we read Coleridge for Coleridge, not for
Shakespeare. Thackeray's lecture on Swift, which is full of animosity
and miscomprehension, is a well-written revelation of Thackeray.
Trollope's book on Thackeray, which is full of friendship and
admiration, is an ill-written revelation of Trollope.
Some men of great ability, like Trollope, who have written good books
themselves, lack the faculty, whatever it may be, of writing in an
entertaining fashion about the books of other men. Swinburne is a
striking example. His knowledge of literature was immense, and he had
the enthusiasms and contempts that make the critical impulse; but
except when the poet in him seized the pen and made a passage of
lyrical prose, his excursions into criticism are bewildering and
difficult to read. His sonnets on Dickens, Lamb, and the Elizabethans
are worth more than all his prose. On the other hand, Lamb, who wrote
like an angel about the Elizabethan dramatists, failed completely as a
dramatist.
Every man who plays with literature at all must be ambitious to
succeed in some form of art that may be called "creative," as distinct
from critical--a distinction which, since Arnold taught us our lesson,
we know does not exist. The reason for this ambition is plain enough.
A novel or a play reaches a wider audience than a volume of essays,
however admirable; it has a more obvious claim to originality, and it
brings the author a greater degree of practical satisfaction. A few
doubly or trebly gifted men, Dryden, Coleridge, Poe, Arnold, Pater,
Henley, Stevenson, Henry James, could do first-rate work in more than
one _genre_, including criticism. And a good case could be made out to
prove that a man who knows how to handle words in many ways is on the
whole the best qualified to comment on the art of handling words.
However that may be, it is certain that in English literature a critic
who is only a critic seldom wins a conspicuous position. Even Johnson
was something more than a critic, and he was, with all due respect,
somewhat less than a good one. And Hazlitt, who was a good one, wrote
on many subjects besides books and art.
Because so many little people went into the business of reviewing and
presumed to sit in judgment on their betters, criticism early got a
bad name in English literature, and not all the dignified work of
Arnold and others has yet succeeded in restoring the reputation of the
word or the art. Criticism came to mean censure, a connotation which
persists in current speech. The degeneration had already taken place
in Dryden's time, and he protested that "they wholly mistake the
nature of criticism who think that its business is principally to find
fault." Authors of imaginative works became resentful and felt that
the critic was an enemy, a nasty and incompetent enemy, as indeed he
often was. An interesting compilation could be made--and probably
Saintsbury or somebody else has done it--of the retorts and
counter-attacks made by writers of other things than criticism against
the whole critical crew. Here are a few examples:
Gentle Jane Austen in "Northanger Abbey" amusingly defends her
heroine's habit of reading novels:
I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common
with novel writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure,
the very performances to the number of which they are themselves
adding ... if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the
heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and
regard?... Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such
effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to
talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now
groans.
That sounds as if Miss Austen's pride in her craft had been wounded. I
know of no record that anybody ever spoke ill of her while she was
living.
Scott, whose generous soul was hurt by the harsh squabbles of the
Scottish reviewers, took a shot at the tribe in the letter which
appears in the introductory note to "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" in
the Cambridge edition:
As to the herd of critics, it is impossible for me to pay much
attention to them for, as they do not understand what I call
poetry, we talk in a foreign language to each other. Indeed, many
of these gentlemen appear to me to be a sort of tinkers, who,
unable to _make_ pots and pans, set up for _menders_ of them,
and, God knows, often make two holes in patching one.
The idea that the critic is a secondary fellow who cannot make
first-hand literature goes back to Dryden, the champion and exemplar
of sound criticism, who wrote in "The Conquest of Granada":
They who write ill and they who ne'er durst write
Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.
Landor repeats the idea in a "Conversation" between Southey and
Porson, in which Porson says: "Those who have failed as writers turn
reviewers."
Writers and other artists are usually sensitive and often vain. Some
have taken critics too seriously, have given them too much importance
while pretending to despise them, and have allowed themselves to be
stung instead of brushing the flies off. Thanks to Shelley, the idea
became current that the "viperous murderer," the critic, killed Keats.
It was not so. Keats died of tuberculosis. Though he was, like all
poets, delicately organized, he was an unusually sane and self-reliant
man, quite sure of the value of his work. Moreover, in a day when
rough criticism was the fashion, the critics were, though stupid, not
especially rough on Keats. Shelley's "_J'accuse_" is flaming poetry,
but--it is not good criticism. Byron had the right idea. With his
superior wit and vigour he gave the reviewers ten blows for one and
used his opponents as the occasion of a delightful exhibition of
boxing. The reviewers were knocked out in the second round. "English
Bards and Scottish Reviewers" is still in the ring, as I have
pleasantly discovered by re-reading it.
The notion that the critic will, or can, do damage to the artist
persisted long after Shelley and is perhaps still believed. In 1876,
Sidney Lanier, a man of good sense and great bravery, whom the flies,
or the "vipers," had but lightly nipped, wrote in a letter to his
father:
What possible claim can contemporary criticism set up to
respect--that criticism which crucified Jesus, stoned Stephen,
hooted Paul for a madman, tried Luther for a criminal, tortured
Galileo, bound Columbus in chains, drove Dante into a hell of
exile, made Shakespeare write the sonnet, "When in disgrace of
fortune and men's eyes," gave Milton L5 for "Paradise Lost," kept
Samuel Johnson cooling his heels on Lord Chesterfield's doorstep,
reviled Shelley as an unclean dog, killed Keats, cracked jokes on
Gluck, Schubert, Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner, and committed so
many other impious follies and stupidities?
Lanier's charges are not all quite true. He mixed up the sins of
criticism with the sins of politics, economics, and other dreadful
affairs. But his outburst is a good illustration of the quarrel
between the "author" and the "critic." Especially when the author has
for the moment lost his sense of humour.
The best treatment of the critic by the author, as also, perhaps, of
the author by the critic, is humourous. In "One of Our Conquerors,"
Meredith lays out the art critics:
He had relied and reposed on the dicta of newspaper critics; who
are sometimes unanimous, and are then taken for guides, and are
fatal.
Washington Irving, in a delightful little paper called "Desultory
Thoughts on Criticism," quietly places the reviewer in the low seat
where he belongs. I shall not quote from the essay, but merely refer
the reader to it and especially to the introductory quotation from
Buckingham's "Rehearsal," in which the critic is set in a still lower
seat.
Finally--for these quotations--Dr. Holmes, who lived all his life
surrounded by praise and comfort, puts his finger gently on the
parasitism of the critic. The passage is in "The Poet at the Breakfast
Table":
Our _epizoic_ literature is becoming so extensive that nobody is
safe from its _ad infinitum_ progeny. A man writes a book of
criticisms. A _Quarterly Review_ criticises the critic. A _Monthly
Magazine_ takes up the critic's critic. A _Weekly Journal_
criticizes the critic of the critic's critic, and a daily paper
favours us with some critical remarks on the performance of the
writer in the _Weekly_, who has criticised the critical notice in
the _Monthly_ of the critical essay in the _Quarterly_ on the
critical work we started with. And thus we see that as each flea
"has smaller fleas that on him prey," even the critic himself
cannot escape the common lot of being bitten.
To what extent is the critic parasitic? To this extent: he is dealing
with ideas already expressed, with cooked and predigested food. It is
easier for any mind to think of something to say about an idea that
has already gone through cerebral processes than it is to take the raw
material of life and make something. You may sit on a bench in the
park and watch the people and never, for the life of you, conceive a
good story. Then O. Henry comes along and makes twenty stories. After
he has done it, you can write something very brilliant about what O.
Henry saw from the same bench that you sat on. And you can make neat
remarks about the resemblances and differences between O. Henry,
Boccaccio, and H. C. Bunner. That may be worth doing, if your remarks
are really neat. For then you may be readable.
And that is the function of the critic, to be readable, to make
literature of a sort. The critic is always playing his own game,
selfish, egotistical, expressive of his own will, and no more
disinterested than was Arnold himself when he took his pen in hand to
slay a Philistine or to sign a contract with his manager for a lecture
tour in America. In playing his own game the critic may help the game
of another author by crying him up and advertising him. But a hundred
critics, clamouring in the fatal unanimity at which Meredith pokes
fun, cannot make the fortunes of a book or influence at the creative
source the work of a man sufficiently strong and original to be worth
reading. And the same hundred critics with lofty hatred of bad writing
cannot prevent bad books from being written and read. George Eliot
made it a rule not to read criticisms of her work because she found it
necessary to be preserved "from that discouragement as an artist which
ill-judged praise no less than ill-judged blame tends to produce in
me." The implication that criticism, favorable or unfavorable, is
ill-judged gives us an addition to our notes on what authors think of
critics. I doubt whether, if that strong-minded woman had read
everything that was written about her before and after her death, she
would have altered a single sentence. Did Hardy stop writing novels
because of the ignorant attacks on "Jude"? I would not accept without
question Hardy's own word for it. I suspect that it was his own inward
impulse, not determined by the opinions of the other people, that
turned his energy to that stupendous epic, "The Dynasts."
To what extent can the critic play the game of the reader, be guide
and teacher, maintain standards, elevate taste, make the best ideas
prevail? Not to a very great extent. Criticism, good or bad, is read
only by the sophisticated, by people whose tastes are formed and who
can take care of themselves in matters literary and intellectual. Who
that had not already looked into Shakespeare and Plato ever heard of
Pater? The journals that print intelligent articles about literature
and art have a small circulation; they are missionaries to the
converted; their controversial discussions of general principles or of
the merits of an individual are only family feuds. Critics play with
each other in a professional game. The few amateurs who sit as
spectators are a select minority who have seen the game before and
who, though not in the professional class, are instructed, cultivated,
have some knowledge of the plays. The critical game is enjoyed by
those who are themselves critical and least in need of enlightenment.
Nevertheless, it is a great game--when it is played well.
The author of a book on golf illustrates it with the stances and
swings of better players than himself; he makes an anthology. A
collection of essays by various authors would illustrate the game
better than the plays of a single critic, a much more competent critic
than I. I do not pretend that the essays in this book are first-rate
specimens of how the strokes should be made. But even a small fellow
may flatter himself that he has an individual way of looking at things
which may give unity of interest to a collection of papers. At any
rate he has a right to exhibit his methods, and nobody is obliged to
watch him or play with him.
Most of these papers have been published in reviews and magazines,
_The Freeman_, _The Dial_, _The New Republic_, the _Boston Herald_,
the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _Literary Review_ of the _New York Evening
Post_, the _New York Tribune_.
The essay on Joseph Conrad appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in
1906. I am proud only of the date. Sixteen years ago Conrad was not
universally recognized; some of his best work had not been done; and
many finer essays than mine had not yet been written. If I was not the
first American critic to pursue that mysterious mariner across
enchanted seas, at least I can swear before the critical court of
admiralty that the waters were not crowded with little craft like
mine. It is a pleasure to read again a few letters which hail me for
hailing Conrad and which make me believe that I did introduce the
master to a few readers. If so, I have not lived in vain.
But my pride is somewhat reduced by the consideration that any reader
intelligent enough to look at a literary essay in the _Atlantic
Monthly_ must sooner or later have discovered Conrad for himself
without the assistance of a critic. However, I hug with amusement the
memory of a Harvard professor who threw up his hands and said: "My
God! I had no idea there was a man living who could write like that!"
To the professorial mind in those days English literature stopped
officially with the death of Browning or, at the latest, with the
deaths of Stevenson and Pater. The essay itself is a little
professorial, enfeebled by a sort of Boston-Harvard timidity, utterly
failing to express the wild joy which I felt. The second paper on
Conrad, written fifteen years later, is not so hesitant. It is
interesting to look again at the bibliographical footnote to the first
essay and see how Conrad's few books were scattered among the
publishers. I could not find "An Outcast of the Islands" except in the
Tauchnitz edition. Today his work is collected. There is a handsome
subscription edition. And Mr. Doubleday tells me that a new book by
Conrad has an assured immediate sale of twenty to thirty thousand.
Perhaps, after all, we who cheered long ago when it was not the
fashion to cheer have justified our miserable existence as critics.
The essay on Tolstoy was written in the two months immediately after
his death. Mr. Ellery Sedgwick asked me to write it for the _Atlantic
Monthly_ and then rejected it. It was published in the _New York
Call_. I bear no bitter grudge against Mr. Sedgwick for returning an
article that he had ordered. But I am convinced, as I read the
article over again, that he is an incompetent critic of criticism.
Sometimes editors and publishers, whose business it is to provide the
arena and assemble the spectators, play their part of the game
stupidly. But on the whole I think they are more than generous to
second-rate performers. If I owned a magazine I should be very
grudging of the space I gave to literary chatter--except my own.
A critical friend--we critics suffer from each other--admonishes me
that in the foregoing remarks I have treated an important art in a
flippant manner. Certainly I am not so foolish as to take my essays
very seriously, and I believe that much modern criticism is too
solemn, that if we fooled with literature in a lighter spirit we
should enjoy it more and be happier.
Charles Lamb was not afraid to kick up his heels, and yet nobody will
accuse him of being a trivial clown. Oscar Wilde was a man of wit,
sometimes a buffoon, and he could puncture a stupid piece of work with
ridicule. But the prevailing tone of his best essays is one of dignity
and sobriety.
Good criticism is as important as anything that man can put on paper.
Moreover, certain subjects must be treated by the critic with the
utmost gravity. It would be owlishly humourless, uncritical, not to
take Tolstoy seriously. Essays about the greater men of genius and the
deeper problems of art must be substantial, solid, or they are
inappropriate, out of key.
But it is possible to be sane and erudite without being leaden, to
approach a noble subject earnestly without striking an attitude of
priestly austerity. Some of our sincerest contemporaries, both the
academic and the rebellious, seem to me to worry about literature, as
if it were an invalid that needed nursing or a dead man about whom the
last word must be said before next Thursday afternoon. They do not get
enough fun out of it. They forget that Pater, who was not a mad wag
and not a dilettante, could sometimes see the gaiety of things and was
willing to be inconclusive.
Criticism is important. The best contemporaneous English criticism is
not good enough. And even in France, where we have been taught to look
for sound critics, Flaubert thought as late as 1869 that criticism was
still in its infancy. He wrote to George Sand: "You speak of criticism
in your last letter to me, telling me that it will soon disappear. I
think, on the contrary, that it is, at most only dawning.... When will
they (critics) be artists, only artists, but really artists? Where do
you know a criticism? Who is there who is anxious about the work in
itself, in an intense way?... The _unconscious_ poetic expression?
Where it comes from? its composition, its style? The point of view of
the author? Never. That criticism would require great imagination and
great sympathy." To which George Sand replied with good sense: "The
artist is too much occupied with his own work to forget himself in
estimating that of others."
Since then France has had a generation of critics, some of whom were
artists. If Hennequin, who thought he was a scientific critic, was not
an artist, if De Gourmont, who smiled wisely at the whole game, was
not an artist, then the word means nothing. In England and America
criticism has not made much progress since Pater died. I know that I
am punctuating literature in the manner of the academic fogies. But
one of the humours of this sport is that you sometimes do things which
are fouls when your opponent is guilty of them.
I come back gladly to the analogy of the game. We have, I believe,
made progress in one direction. In the direction of fair play. We
cannot write like Hazlitt, but we will not hit below the belt as he
did sometimes. We cannot write like Arnold, and his combination of
literary charm and scholarship makes us feel desperately small, but in
our descent from his altitude we have freed ourselves from his major
vice, his dogmatic snobbery, his bigoted liberalism. The
pulpit-pounder still thrives in religion and politics; in criticism he
is becoming obsolete. I am sure, or at least hopeful, that this is
true in America. I think I see a slight but appreciable improvement in
candour, simplicity, generosity, geniality, and fairness in attack. On
the whole we are a little more sportsmanlike than some of our elders.
That is all that I claim for us. Our real consolation is that the
ancient and honorable game is still young, still to be played.
DANTE IN ENGLISH
I am tempted to call the following remarks "Reading Dante for Fun."
The most austere of poets should not be treated with levity. But,
after all, poetry, even poetry of profound ethical and religious
import, is to be enjoyed. And the simple point that I wish to make, as
a mere reader with but a stumbling knowledge of Italian and almost no
knowledge of the vast library of Dante scholarship, is that Dante is
accessible in English. His book of magic is at least half open even to
one who must forever remain partly blind and deaf to the beauty of the
original. It is a great pleasure to read the convenient little volumes
of the Temple Classics with the Italian text on the left-hand page and
the English on the right, to read idly or study deeply, according to
mood and temperament. At any rate, let us not be overcome by the
solemnity of the occasion or discouraged by the difficulties, some of
which the commentators have cleared away and some of which they have
made more difficult.
Dr. Toynbee[1] finds that since 1802 the _Commedia_ as a whole has
been translated into English about once every four years. And he
excludes from his record American translators and critics. Why did Dr.
Toynbee or the British Academy make this commemorative volume so
narrowly insular? English and American scholarship is one institution.
And American Dantists have done good work. Though it is the fashion to
scorn the Yankee bards and seers, Lowell's essay and the translations
by Longfellow, Norton, and Parsons are important in the history of
Dante in English, not British, literature. They had literary gifts,
they knew Italian, and they were able to appreciate a universal mind.
For all their provinciality their shades can afford to smile at their
young countryman, Mr. Mencken, who writes: "If I have to go to hell
for it, I must here set down my conviction that much of the 'Divine
Comedy' is piffle." Well, he ought to go to hell--to Dante's hell,
which is an entertaining and hospitable place. In the cold prose of
Norton or John Carlyle, where the melody is necessarily lost, there
may be some passages in which an alert modern reader cannot find great
interest, but the number of lines of "piffle" is exactly none.
[1] Britain's Tribute To Dante in Literature and Art. A
Chronological Record of 540 Years. By Paget Toynbee. London:
Published for the British Academy, 1921.
It is not to be expected that all men, even all literary men, will
respond to Dante. Horace Walpole called him "extravagant, absurd,
disgusting; in short, a Methodist parson in Bedlam." This is amusing,
even refreshing, in view of the too pious devotion of some later
Englishmen. But the eighteenth century was not the time for English
appreciation of Dante, and Walpole, witty _prosateur_, was not the man
to enjoy him. Dante was known, of course, to Chaucer and to the
Elizabethans and Milton, and his influence on English poetry was
perhaps even greater than Dr. Toynbee's record makes evident. But it
is with the nineteenth century, which, _bien entendu_, was born
intellectually a few years before its numerical date, that Dante
becomes a power in English literature. He is, indeed, a part of the
revival of English romanticism. The translations of Boyd and Cary
appeared early in the century, and from then on Dante belonged to
English literature, as well acclimated as any other foreign classic.
The index of Dr. Toynbee's record contains the names of almost all the
important English poets from Scott to Francis Thompson.
And it contains hundreds of other names, not perhaps of great
importance in literature, but important in this respect, that they
show the appeal of Dante to a great variety of minds, of minds not
mediaeval, not Catholic, not Italian. Nobody can dip into him, however
superficially, without getting something. He has so much that
everybody can be happy, from the Pope to the most pagan young poet.
Though the true Dantist will insist that the greatest of poets must be
understood, or accepted, entire, like his own God and his own
universe, I propose that the anthological view of him is proper and
delightful. If he is so rich and structurally perfect that no side of
him can be neglected, then he is so rich and so strong that any side
of him can be neglected. You can sit under a tree on the side of a
mountain without comprehending the mountain, but deriving much
happiness from the tree, the altitude, and the view.
The interpreters of Dante's stupendous unity are all true to Dante, in
that they try to find some complete explanation of him and will
tolerate no neglect of his least detail. Dante himself, for all his
mystery and multiple meanings, is quite explicit about the
indivisibility, the integrity, of his work. So that the episodic,
incomplete view of him, which I recommend to other casual readers, is
unphilosophic and amateurish. Let us concede that and at the same time
let us reserve the right to be cheerfully weary of systems where the
"benumbed conceiving soars." Ruskin speaks the indubitable truth: "The
central man of all the world, as representing the imaginative, moral,
and intellectual faculties, all at their highest, is Dante." But such
a genius is too awful to contemplate, and it is more comfortable to
keep this side idolatry.
Moreover, the interpreters, seeking to comprehend Dante's vast
totality, do not discover complete unity among themselves. Mr. Walter
Arensberg[2] thinks that he has unlocked the mystery, and I think that
he has. But as I had a little to do with filing that key I will not
say how well I think it turns in the wards of the lock; I will leave
him to the mercies of other critics and merely note that six centuries
after Dante's death we have a novel interpretation.
[2] The Crytography of Dante. By Walter Arensberg. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1921.
And then comes Professor Courtney Langdon[3] with another. One of his
ideas seems to me just, though debatable--namely, that any modern man
has the right to find anything in Dante that he can find, to derive
the sort of joy and wisdom that suit him, the reader, whether or not
Dante would recognize that reader's meaning. The poet exists for our
benefit and, like the Bible, does not forbid but justifies the
multitude of sects and individual expositors. That idea alone is worth
Professor Langdon's labor, and it will be interesting to see how he
develops it. Unfortunately, his translation is worse than useless. He
simply has not the gift of English verse. His own verses, prefixed to
the several canticles, are absurd doggerel; they remind one of
Longfellow's lovely sonnets (the best poems he ever wrote) only by
their position of naive rivalry with the splendor that follows. And,
what is more strange, Professor Langdon writes abominable prose, such
assaults upon the ear as "verse's rhythm" and "Divine Comedy's last
part." If the poet exists for us, in English or Italian, one of the
things to learn from him is how to write.
[3] The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The Italian Text
with a Translation in English Blank Verse and a Commentary.
By Courtney Langdon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 3
vols.
The poet exists for us. That is an excellent idea. It is our privilege
to take what we enjoy and reject what we do not like or understand. I
cannot be interested in Dante's ethics, which interested him so
profoundly and is the bone of his thought. His "stern indignant
moral," as Carlyle called it, is for me no part of the beauty of the
"mystic song." I cannot regard without suspicion, even in a New
Englander, Norton's statement to Dr. Dinsmore that the quality of the
_Commedia_, other than its beauty, which attracted him to Dante was
"his powerful exposition of moral penalties and rewards." Other than
its beauty? What does that mean? If the qualities of the _Commedia_
can be separated (Dante happened to believe that they can not be), let
us throw the ethics, the penalties, and rewards to the four winds. Let
us keep as much as we can grasp of the beauty of the episodes, the
images, the phrases, the structure, whatever gives delight.
The beauty of the fifth canto of _Inferno_ does not depend on the
ethical fact that the carnal sinners are punished, but on the poetic
fact that their pathetic loves on earth are recalled and that their
punishment is vividly, physically dramatized. The tragic pity and
terror of it break through the baldest translation stripped of the
enchantment of the original verse. Many English poets have been
tempted to try to render that famous fifth canto. Mr. Arensberg has
made the best version that I have seen. His version is in the _terza
rima_, a difficult thing to manage in English, and he succeeds in
making a good English poem, a shade finer than a mere _tour de force_.
I doubt whether he or any other poet can so well translate the entire
_Commedia_ in the same form, though the attempt has been made. The
_terza rima_ has never been quite naturalized in our language. Even
such a master as Shelley can not turn it perfectly. We imported the
sonnet as easily as the apple and we made some French forms grow
thriftily in our hardy garden. The _terza rima_ remains artificial and
foreign, peculiarly Italian and more peculiarly Dante; he made it his
own and moved at ease in its exacting rigidities. He was in thought
and form a diabolical magician.
In order to show the _terza rima_ in English and to suggest (not to
solve!) the problem of translation, let us look at three versions of
the last ten lines of the fifth canto of _Inferno_, the story of Paolo
and Francesca. Francesca is speaking and tells how she and her lover
read the story of Lancelot and Guinevere--romance within romance!
First, Norton's clear, deliberately uninspired prose:
"When we read of the longed-for smile being kissed by such a
lover, this one, who never shall be divided from me, kissed my
mouth all trembling. Gallehaut was the book, and he wrote it. That
day we read no farther in it!"
While the one spirit said this, the other was so weeping that
through pity I swooned as if I had been dying, and fell as a dead
body falls.
Then Longfellow in traditional blank verse (and it is good verse; he
knew his business):
"When as we read of the much longed-for smile
Being by such a noble lover kissed,
This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided,
Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating.
Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.
That day no farther did we read therein."
And all the while one spirit uttered this,
The other one did weep so that, for pity,
I swooned away as if I had been dying,
And fell, even as a dead body falls.
Finally, Arensberg in _terza rima_:
"When we had read how one so amorous
Had kissed the smile that he was longing for,
This one, who always must be by me thus,
Kissed me upon the mouth, trembling all o'er;
Galeot the book, and he 'twas written by!
Upon that day in it we read no more."
So sorely did the other spirit cry,
While the one spoke, that for the very dread
I swooned as if I were about to die,
And I fell down even as a man falls dead.
Those versions, I submit, are all good; and I risked the tedium of
repeating the same idea of Dante in the English of three different
translators. Because my simple point is that Dante in English is
interesting--to anybody who cares for English literature.
DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Dante's _De Monarchia_ is usually treated by the commentators as a
mere footnote to the _Commedia_; and this subordination is justifiable
because the poet in Dante overwhelms all other expressions of his
genius and also because the _Commedia_ contains much political
philosophy, some of which _De Monarchia_ elucidates. But _De
Monarchia_, considered by itself, is a work of great importance. Even
if by some unthinkable accident the _Commedia_ had been lost and _De
Monarchia_ had survived, it would remain a significant treatise on the
state and the papacy and would deserve to be regarded as we regard the
political writings of philosophers from Plato to Hobbes. To be sure,
the chief interest of the work for us lies in the fact that Dante
wrote it, and it would lose some of its value if it were isolated from
the rest of his thought; the amazing unity of his mind and the
coherence of his purpose make a piecemeal view of any part of him
essentially false. His vision of earth and heaven has a thousand
aspects but no fragments. Even the unfinished works, _Il Convivio_ and
_De Vulgari Eloquentia_, are not fragments but are rather to be read
as partial manifestations of a singular and consistent plan.
_De Monarchia_ is a vision of earthly well-being. It is an argument,
prosaic and heavy in the English translations and very difficult in
the original, I should suppose, even to an excellent Latin scholar.
But the argument embodies a dream of the greatest of dreamers. The
first part sets forth the necessity of empire. Only under a single
world-governing monarch are possible the solidarity of mankind and the
fullest possible development of the human spirit. In unity man can
find peace and justice. Man is made in the image of God, and God is
one; wherefore man in imitation of God must make the secular world
conform to the universe and set up a unique earthly dominion. In the
nature of things empire is divinely ordained and this is further
proved by the fact that Christ willed to be born under the Emperor
Augustus.
The second part seeks to show that the Roman empire was appointed by
God to rule the world. It was established by the aid of miracles,
which confirm it as especially created by the will of God. Christ died
under the empire; if the empire had not been the rightful temporal
authority, Christ would have been punished by the agent of an unjust
power, his suffering would have been unlawful and therefore the sin of
Adam would not have been duly expiated. Rome was born to command,
because it did, in point of fact, conquer the world, and also because
the histories of its many heroes and patriots show that the Roman
citizen loved right and justice.
The third part is an argument for the separation of church and state,
which are independent authorities both deriving directly from God.
Many false arguments for the temporal power of the church are refuted.
Though the emperor, as a man, is the first son of the church and
should obey it like other Christians, yet as emperor he owes
allegiance only to God, whom he represents on earth in temporal
matters as the pope represents God in spiritual matters. The very
nature of the church, its essential spiritual function, forbids it the
possession of temporal power.
Have we here, then, nothing but a defence of an empire that has been
dust these many centuries, and stale scholastic arguments for the
separation of church and state, a long settled question in theoretic
politics and practically settled in most countries? There is much more
than that in _De Monarchia_ even for the most confident modern
democrat, who may regard emperor and pope as twin tyrants and for whom
the word "mediaeval" has derogatory connotations. It is true that the
empire under which Dante actually lived is dead as the empire of the
Caesars and that the empire of Dante's dream was never realized in the
workaday world. As a political pamphlet _De Monarchia_ is obsolete
without even the persistent contemporaneity of some eighteenth century
tracts. In a sense Dante's treatise died at birth. Bryce, who gives an
excellent summary of it in his "Holy Roman Empire," shows that this
plea for empire, conceived by the supreme mind of the age, was the
epitaph of the existing empire. It was, indeed, a swan-song, not of
the author, who was still to take us to Paradise and put his dream in
lovelier form, but of empire in the Catholic Christian sense of
"holy." The empire that persisted after the thirteenth century grew
further and further away not only from a poet's dream but from any
practical possibility of united political authority. The solidarity of
mankind was not to be achieved through Rome or Christ, and Dante was
not, as he thought, announcing a new era, but summing up a passing
era.
But the truth of a dream inheres in the dream itself and is measured
only in a secondary way by the course of events. _De Monarchia_ has
for us at least the value of a pacifist tract, the noble core of which
is not obscured by the strangeness of some of the reasoning or by the
destruction of Dante's political milieu. Like some other pacifist
documents it is the work of an aggressive militant mind. Dante had
lived and suffered in a world continuously at war. The contesting
powers, great and small, were so complicated that the historian has
difficulty in keeping them clear. To the major quarrels between church
and state and the strife of the city-republics with one or the other
or both were added an internal warfare between economic classes and
feuds between castes and families, all hopelessly intricate.
In this bloody confusion Dante had played the part not of closet
philosopher _au-dessus de la melee_, but of soldier and civil official.
And to the last he was temperamentally a fighter, though forced by
circumstances to drop the sword for the pen. He was not in the eyes of
his contemporaries what he has become for us, the supreme solitary
genius exiled by an ungrateful city, but was simply one of a thousand
members of a beaten party. He was not a pathetic, unappreciated poet
but a pertinacious partisan who happened to be on the losing side. He
knew war and misery and defeat. Yet his plea for peace is by no means
that of a weary belligerent; it is that of a bellicose champion of
certain principles. And so, though those principles do not appeal to us
and though the expression of them is laborious, even turgid, _De
Monarchia_ is still hot with conviction.
The instrument of peace was the one form of government that Dante
knew, the empire. Even if his genius had taken the form of
vaticination (he was indeed, as it turned out, a poor prophet), he
naturally could not in his time have made himself familiar with
leagues of nations and Wellsian "world-states." He had to ride on a
horse, not in a motor-car. And he rode, as a worldly rider, to a fall.
The tragedy of the fall has in it a large element of dramatic irony
because he was so splendidly sure of his ideas at exactly the moment
when they were least secure.
Dante's conception of an ideal empire had nothing in common with what
we now call imperialism, which is mere commercial conquest and can be
led by Kaiser or democratic prime minister with equally disastrous
results. Dante believed in an imperial headship for the good of all
humanity. The ruler of the world was to be the servant of the world,
not its master and exploiter; a supreme monarch was to be protected by
his lonely authority from the temptations that beset a weak man
clothed with limited and contentious authority; aloof from strife and
cupidity, having all and so being beyond pride and ambition, he could
be a disinterested and just administrator.
The aim of empire is universal peace--Dante begins his argument almost
in the terms of Burke and with something like Burke's combination of
generosity and elaborate futility--peace, "the best of those things
that are ordained for our beatitude." For on peace depends the destiny
of mankind to realize the full power of the human mind in thought and
deed. Dante's world state is Utopia, compounded, as all Utopias must
be, of wisdom and utter impossibilities, of sublime faith and facts
half-understood. While he dreamed he did not believe himself a
dreamer, any more than did Shelley. He believed intensely in the
practical value of his vision, in its originality and its finality as
a solution of the problems of the political world. He says that
knowledge of monarchy has been shunned because it has no direct
relation to profit, and that he will be the first to bring it from
obscurity to light for the good of the world and for his own glory.
The humble servant and the arrogant doctor at the bedside of the
patient! It is one of the most consistent contradictions of proud
souls. The reformer has found a new and sure cure and cries "Eureka!"
In spite of the practical failure of his dream, which in a sense
defeats him, I do not believe that Dante's pell-mell acceptance of all
stories about the greatness of Rome, with no apparent discrimination,
is proof that he did not know what he was about. He was making a
special plea and he pillaged history and legend to get material for
the purposes of his argument. He is a dialectician animated, like all
reformers, by unselfish motives, but willing to score a point if he
can. We may be fairly sure that Dante was not a credulous person with
a childish view of history, but a sophisticated controversialist
handling his evidence for effect. Though he mingles fact and fiction
and though his documentary resources were more limited than ours, yet
he knew perfectly what he was trying to do, and modern attempts to
gloss him in a patronizing and apologetic manner are generally
mistaken.
There is a grim humour in the fate that overtakes the works of wise
men. The treatise which Dante believed would bring peace to a vexed
world became a matter of strife. Later Ghibellines used his argument,
unfairly, of course, to support the supremacy of the empire over the
church, and ecclesiastical authority retorted by condemning the book
and even threatening the repose of Dante's bones. A somewhat similar
quarrel arose over Hobbes's "Leviathan" three centuries later. Seeking
to unite all men, the political philosopher is attacked from both
sides, and if he lives he finds that he has poured oil not on troubled
waters but on a fire.
Though _De Monarchia_ is much more than a footnote to the _Commedia_
and is worth study for its own sake, yet the unity which it seeks in
the world is closely allied to the unity of Dante's celestial vision
by which he tried to lead mankind to God. Mankind refused to be cured
of its political pains by _De Monarchia_ and even ignored it in spite
of Dante's secure and growing fame (there was no English translation
until the late nineteenth century). But mankind also never accepted
and never will accept the supreme vision of the _Commedia_. It is a
beautiful poem enjoyed by the literary, and even in Italy it is
valued, quite properly, as a mere work of art. The world has never
paid much attention to Dante's declared purpose to bring mankind
through art to God. So that in one way of regarding him, which may
perhaps be his way, he failed in the _Commedia_ as he did in _De
Monarchia_. The world of thinking and acting men, whose salvation
Dante believed he could work by verse and prose, remains disunited and
contentious, weaponed with such bitterness of heart and methods of
destruction as the dreamer of _Inferno_ never dreamed.
NIETZSCHE
It is more than thirty years since Nietzsche's work was finished and
darkness fell upon that mighty intellect. In 1917, Mr. W. M. Salter,
who certainly knows the bibliography of Nietzsche, wrote:
I can not make out that his influence is appreciable now--at least
in English-speaking countries.... He has, indeed given a phrase
and perhaps an idea or two to Mr. Bernard Shaw, a few scattering
scholars have got track of him (I know of but two or three in
America), the great newspaper and magazine-writing and reading
world has picked up a few of his phrases, which it does not
understand.
The preface of Frau Foerster-Nietzsche's edition of her brother's
correspondence with Wagner is dated, Weimar, 1914, and the English
translation was published in 1921. Dr. Oscar Levy's preface to his
selection from the five volumes of Nietzsche's correspondence,[1]
published in Germany between the years 1900-1909, is dated August,
1921.
[1] "Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche." Edited by Dr.
Oscar Levy. Authorized Translation by Anthony M. Ludovico.
New York: Doubleday Page & Co.