prophet; and a stranger, watching the multitude, wonders wherein lies
the greatness of the great man. The sceptic may be too ignorant to
understand or he may be too clear-sighted to be deceived. Not many
years ago the tom-tom of the Nobel Prize beat before the tent of the
modest and inoffensive Hindoo poet, Rabindranath Tagore. English
critics and poets of first-rate authority have called him wonderful.
For all I know he may be wonderful, for I have not read all his work
in English and I am not well acquainted with Bengali. But I submit
that in "The Crescent Moon" and "The Gardener," there is not one great
line, not one poem that is arresting, compelling, memorable. Moreover,
there is much that is false and weak.
O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute!
O Farthest End, O the keen call of thy flute!
Now that may do in India, but in our part of the world it is feeble
orchestration. The poets of the Bible and English poets since the days
of the Elizabethan translation have equipped the celestial choirs with
more sounding instruments. One cannot without a smile consider the far
end of the cosmos playing a flute or a piccolo. Harken to how a
supreme poet makes music worthy of the wide spaces:
But thou dost set in statelier pageantry,
Lauded with tumults of the firmament;
Thy visible music-blasts make deaf the sky,
Thy cymbals clang to fire the Occident,
Thou dost thy dying so triumphally;
I see the crimson blaring of thy shawms.
This is from Francis Thompson's "Ode to the Setting Sun." You see the
difference. Thompson's lines are poetry. Tagore's simply are not.
Miss May Sinclair, herself a distinguished artist, says that Mr.
Tagore's translation of his Bengali poetry into English "preserves,
not only all that is essential and eternal in his poetry, but much of
the strange music." That may be so, but how does Miss Sinclair know
that? Does she understand Bengali? Does she read it and speak it well
enough to be sure that Mr. Tagore has translated himself adequately?
Is not she affording an instance of criticism that in an excess of
enthusiasm runs beyond its own knowledge? Some of Tagore's lines are
mildly sweet, and there are some pretty fancies in the Child-Poems.
The poem in "The Gardener," which begins:
Why do you whisper so faintly in my ears, O
Death, my Death?
would be faintly impressive if Walt Whitman had never lived.
Not only are Tagore's lines not great but some of his lines are
foolish:
Under the banyan tree you were milking the cow with your hands,
tender and fresh as butter.
Perhaps Mr. Tagore did not know that in English "butter fingers"
greasily signifies manual ineptitude. I can not take that line
seriously, nor understand how Tagore has become one of England's
acknowledged poets. He distorts nature with pathetic fallacies which
have not verbal splendor to carry them, as the verbal splendor of
Shakespeare, Shelley, and Thompson often carries a metaphor that, so
to speak, will not hold water.
I paced alone on the road across the field while the sunset was
hiding its last gold like a miser.
The sunset is not in the least like a miser; and a true lover and
observer of nature would not allow himself such a niggardly fallacious
image. Are not our friends, the poets and critics, victims of the
spell which odd things out of the East put on our occidental minds,
the spell that makes some people run after queer preachers and
philosophers who talk religion through their turbans?
One is reminded that Mr., or Sir Owen Seaman has in his delicious book
of parodies, "The Battle of the Bays", an Edwin-Arnoldy thing that
runs like this:
The bulbul hummeth like a book
Upon the pooh-pooh tree,
And now and then he takes a look
At you and me,
At me and you.
Kuchi! Kuchoo!
It is, I confess, sheer perversity that made that stanza come into my
head while I was reading Tagore. Tagore does not rhyme; he puts his
verses into simple prose, most of which is pleasant enough, but none
of which is rich in thought or magnificent in phrase.
Tagore is a faker in the English sense of the word. I do not know what
he is in Hindoo. He gives lectures in America to audiences that are,
of course, mostly women. Then when he has got all the money he can get
from them (for his schools; he is not selfish) he tells them as a
Parthian shot that they are idle. If they were not, the poor ignorant
dears, he would not have had any audiences or any money. It is caddish
to kick the cow that gives the milk. I should rejoice if he took
millions from the idle ladies of America to help the ladies of India
and to free India from the British murderer and thief. Spoiling the
Egyptians is a good game. But it is not playing the game like a man
and a philosopher to bite the hand that feeds you.
And it is not manly or philosophic to kiss the hand that strikes you.
Tagore with a feeble gesture relinquishes his British title as a
protest against British crime in India. If he had been a real
philosopher and a true patriot he would not have accepted the title in
the first place. The lost leader who sticks a riband in his coat does
not recover leadership by throwing the riband away. The political and
social beliefs of poets, even of Dante and Shelley and Hugo, are of
less importance than their sense of beauty. But there is a connection,
not quite impertinent to a purely literary discussion, between the
quality of a poet's work and his character as it is expressed when he
descends from Parnassus and uses the prose of politicians. It is not
surprising that Tagore, who babbles to American chautauquas and allows
an English king to tap him on the shoulder, should be a weak and
stammering poet. That voice from the east is not impressive. If it is
the best that modern India can do, then India is done for
intellectually as well as economically.
REMY DE GOURMONT
In "Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas,"[1] Mr.
William Aspenwall Bradley has made an excellent selection from the
work of Remy de Gourmont; one only regrets that space did not permit
him to give us more. He has a gift unfortunately rare among
translators: he knows his original and he knows how to write the
language into which he translates. He even corrects his master in one
place: where de Gourmont, stumbling in a language which he has not
quite mastered, writes that the English words, "sweet," and "sweat,"
are _mots de prononciation identique_, Mr. Bradley gently wipes out
the blunder with "words which resemble each other." Not that de
Gourmont, with his enormous knowledge, made many such mistakes! I
merely note the care and delicacy of the translator.
[1] Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas. Remy
de Gourmont. Translated by William Aspenwall Bradley. New
York: Harcourt Brace & Co. 1921.
Without pretending too much to the wisdom which should have ensued, I
remember like a shock of light, as if a blind man had suddenly gained
his vision, my introduction, a few years ago, to the work of de
Gourmont (for which my thanks are due to Mr. Martin Loeffler, who is a
distinguished musician and only potentially a man of letters). If you
wish to have your darkness illuminated, associate with the wise. If
you are groping in a foreign literature, the first man to meet is
the critic. The little I know about France of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries I owe to having clung to the broad and often
elusive coat-tails of Sainte-Beuve. As a guide to the nineteenth
century and much else beside--back to Rome and Greece--the most
stimulating cicerone is Remy de Gourmont.
When he was born, the gods went crazy and put into one person an elf
and a sage, Ariel and Prospero, Morgan and Merlin. It is no uncommon
thing when you are reading a French book, by an author with whose work
you are not familiar, to find facing the title-page a list of books
_du meme auteur_ and to discover that he has published something
in all the main divisions of imaginative literature, plays, poems,
romances, criticism. It takes a Frenchman to box the literary compass.
He assumes that the business of a writer is to write, and he learns
and practises all the forms, with varying degrees of success, to be
sure, just as a musician, trying all forms, may be at his best in
songs or quartettes for strings or symphonies or operas.
De Gourmont played every instrument in the band and played it well.
His range and versatility are remarkable even for a Frenchman. He took
all knowledge for his province. In spreading his interests wide he
never became thin; even when he played on the surface of an idea he
somehow, in a page or two, showed the depth of mind and matter
underneath. He was, as his American publishers say, poet, critic,
dramatist, scholar, biologist, philosopher, novelist, philologist, and
grammarian. He was an experimenter and explorer. When he died, just
under sixty, he was still looking round with his keen roaming eye, and
he was looking sadly, for the war, according to his brother Jean, who
writes not sentimentally but like a de Gourmont, killed him.
Even the colossal, universal genius, the Hugo, the Goethe, can not be
supreme in every realm of thought, in every type of literary
expression. De Gourmont's poetry, to my ignorant alien ear, is not
among the best in that prolific and still living period of French
poetry which he as critic did so much to encourage. As for de
Gourmont's fiction, "Une Nuit au Luxembourg," which he might have
tossed with a wink into the lap of Anatole France, does not greatly
enrich French fiction, which is already rich in similar achievements.
"Couleurs" consists of delightful twittings on ideas, and surely is
not greatly important in a nation where one man of letters out of four
has mastered the art of the _conte_.
De Gourmont is supremely the critic, the man who digests, interprets,
reorganizes the thoughts of other men and in the process adds to those
thoughts. His favorite method of reorganization is disorganization,
"dissociation" (and by the way, that word is good in English, as in
French, and better than Mr. Bradley's "disassociation"). He pulls
ideas to pieces and skilfully puts them together again. He is an
analyst, a dissector. But the flowers of the garden are not all
plucked to shreds and scattered on the paths, nor are they all taken
to the laboratory and subjected to the microscope. De Gourmont is
interested in things living and in propagating life. "_Toutes nos
fleurs sont fraiches, jeunes et pleines d'amour._" He surveys
wildernesses and lays out gardens. No other man was ever blessed with
such a combination of the safe, sane, intellectually comfortable and
the restless, daring, venturesome.
He loves paradoxes because life is full of contradictions, and his
paradoxes are often elucidations and conciliations of conflicting
ideas, never the cheap and facile paradoxes of a Chesterton. Is
Mallarme obscure? There is never absolute, literal obscurity in an
honestly written work. Besides, there are too few obscure writers in
French. This from a Frenchman whose own writing is a marvel of clarity
even when he is handling subtle and difficult ideas! Moreover, de
Gourmont's essays on language and style are studies in precision, in
definition.
De Gourmont is a wise man, who, like Socrates and William James, is
not afraid to joke, and some of his perversities are uttered with his
ironic tongue in his cheek. Like all fine humorists he is profoundly
serious, and the delicate play of his fingers is backed by terrific
muscular scholarship. His method is to appear to be casual, to make
the review of a book "_une occasion de parler un peu_" and then
to pack into six pages the reading of a lifetime. He manipulates
Brunetiere into the corner and annihilates him before you have time to
realize that there is no button on the rapier.
For all his tolerant smile and sceptical shrug, de Gourmont is
fighting valiantly for ideas. He wants ideas liberated but not loose,
and in the very act of freeing them he defines and fixes them. He
divides long-mated notions in order to reassemble them according to
his private logic. For he is the most wilful and individual of
critics. The journalistic multiplicity of his subjects is unified by a
great personality. The "dissociator" of ideas is a constructive
thinker, one of the greatest of critics in a nation of critics and
sufficient in himself to stand as smiling refutation of Croce's dictum
that "French criticism is notably weak whenever the fundamentals of
art are concerned." If there is a fundamental of art that de Gourmont
missed, I doubt whether it is to be discovered in any German or
Italian book. For de Gourmont's reading embraced the literature of
Europe, and he was especially alert to philosophic criticism. He was
forever in search of principles; but the result of his quest is not a
massive disquisition. The solidity of his learning and the systematic
coherence of his ideas are concealed from the unwary reader by the
lightness of his tone and also by his brevity, the gift, which belongs
to the race of Montaigne and Voltaire, of saying everything in a few
sentences. His essays are light as a feather and yet they carry tons
of information. The aeroplane looks like a bird but it is a heavy and
elaborate piece of machinery.
De Gourmont lived in an ivory tower, the tower of a wizard who
combined the knowledge of an ancient necromancer with that of a modern
chemist. He was much alone, for only in solitude can a man read as
much as de Gourmont read and write about it in serene meditation.
Nevertheless, he was in and of the world of writers; he was an active
and friendly editor; he made the _Mercure de France_; he encouraged
the youngest and bravest of his day; many of his notes record
conversations with the finest men of his time. He spent his days with
_la jeunesse_ and his nights with aged wisdom. When he retired to his
ivory tower he carried under one arm a volume of mediaeval Latin, to
add to his enormous library, already neatly stowed in his head, and
under the other arm the manuscript of the youngest French poet.
In one of his essays de Gourmont plays charmingly with the reviewer's
too facile use of "great"; "great writer," "very great writer."
Despite that delightful warning I dare say that de Gourmont is a
_tres grand ecrivain_, not a great poet nor a great novelist, but
the greatest critic that has been born, even in France where critics
are wont to be born.
SWIFT'S RELATIONS WITH WOMEN
"Controversy," says the editor of the Swift-Vanessa letters,[1] "might
have been more moderate in tone and more fruitful of result, if
writers had always remembered that, though grounds of conjecture are
abundant, the data for forming a judgment are manifestly incomplete."
Leslie Stephen, a shrewd and cautious biographer, with a lawyer's gift
for handling evidence, says "This is one of those cases in which we
feel that even biographers are not omniscient; and I must leave it to
my readers to choose their own theory, only suggesting that readers,
too, are fallible."
[1] Vanessa and Her Correspondence with Jonathan Swift.
Letters edited for the first time from originals. With an
introduction by A. Martin Freeman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Co.
I propose an explanation of Swift, but propose it only as a
conjecture, an hypothesis. I shall not even argue it up to the point
of positive belief; certainly I shall not push it beyond the line
where belief borders knowledge. Conjecture is good if it remains
clearly in the realm of conjecture, an honest area of thought, and
does not try to sneak over into the land of things proved.
All of Swift's relations with women, and much else in his life, may be
accounted for by the supposition that early he discovered or suspected
that he was insane, that he believed his insanity might be
transmissible, that he was consequently afraid to have children, that
he was honest and strong enough to keep himself in check, that the
resulting suppression made him irascible and bitter, that he was a
vigorous and passionate man, that his quick shifts from tender fooling
to savage satire, his friendly and brutal moods, his strutting
arrogance that amazed the coffee houses, were not due to any
tom-foolery of politics or thwarted ambition in the petty matter of
advancement in the church but were due to a conflict, honorably won by
Swift, in the place where a man lives. The "early" in this supposition
is important. Leslie Stephen, quoting the familiar dark prophecy of
Swift at the age of fifty: "I shall be like that tree; I shall die at
the top," justly observes that "a man haunted perpetually by such
forebodings might well think that marriage was not for him." But
Stephen is dealing with Swift in middle age and offering an
explanation of why, assuming that Swift was not already married to
Stella, he did not marry Vanessa. Let us place the beginning of the
perpetual foreboding early in Swift's life and see if the main facts,
so far as we know them, will lie upon this supposition.
Swift's attacks of vertigo began in his youth. He attributed his
illness to an over-consumption of fruit when he was twenty-one. Swift
knew better than that. Even if we assume that medical science in the
eighteenth century was stupid and backward, Swift was too intelligent
to believe that an early period of indigestion accounted for the
suffering which afflicted him all his life. He knew, or suspected and
feared, what was the matter with him. In 1699, when he was thirty-two,
he wrote some resolutions, headed "when I come to be old." Among them
is this: "Not to be fond of children or let them come near me hardly."
Stephen quotes a friendly commentator as saying: "We do not fortify
ourselves with resolutions against what we dislike but against what we
feel in our weakness we have reason to believe we are really inclined
to." That friendly commentator was right and understood human nature,
though he had never lived (Stephen does not name him) to hear about
libido, suppression, defence, inversion, and other wise words now
current.
Stephen goes wrong, it seems to me, in his following friendly
commentation: "Yet it is strange that a man should regard the purest
and kindliest of feelings as a weakness to which he was too much
inclined." I have not space to quote the rest, which is on page 31 of
Stephen in the English Men of Letters. Swift was not fighting against
a weakness, he was fighting against a strength. He resolves "not to
marry a young woman." In a letter he calls a woman's children her
"litter," and that has been quoted by some critics as an example of
his brutality. He loves Tom, Dick, and Harry but he hates mankind. Is
it not clear? He can not have what he wants, and what he wants is what
normally results in children, in more mankind. His resolution,
superficially harsh and misanthropic, is a masked, or inverted,
expression of desire. Such expression is not, of course, peculiar to
literary satirists, but it should be remembered that Swift had
supremely the ironic trick of thought, the gift of saying a thing by
saying exactly the opposite.
The resolution should be read in the light of the fact that Stella was
eighteen years old, a grown and comely woman. But the interpretation
of it depends much more closely on the termination of Swift's affair
with Varina. The date, 1699, suggests this. He had proposed to Varina,
Miss Waring, in 1696, in a letter which is passionate enough, and had
been rejected, at least provisionally, on the score of her ill health
and his poverty. Four years later, after he had received the living at
Laracor and seemed to be on the way to other preferments, she wished
to hold him to his word, and he jilted her. There are three
explanations. One is that he had fallen in love with Stella and so out
of love with the other woman. The second explanation, Leslie
Stephen's, is that his ambitions had not been realized, his
advancement had not been brilliant, and marriage would have kept his
nose to the grind-stone in an obscure living. That explanation is not
good, for, though Swift always had an eye to the main chance and was
worried about money, power, and position, it is only men of cool blood
or men who have extra-marital opportunities to gratify their desires
who are ever deterred by considerations of thrift and economy from
marrying the beloved woman. Swift was not cold but passionate. And it
is inconceivable that he, a clergyman in a small parish, was finding
his pleasure in illicit intercourse.
The third explanation, which I venture to suggest, is that between his
proposal to Varina in 1696 and his insulting rejection of her in 1700,
between his twenty-ninth and thirty-third years, he had discovered a
reason why he must not live with a woman. His resolutions, remember,
not to marry a young woman and not to be fond of children were written
in 1699. How could Stephen believe that those resolutions, with others
"pithy and sensible," were "for behavior in a distant future?" Swift's
heading, "when I come to be old," means nothing; he is writing from
the misery of the moment. Why is the letter in which Swift puts an end
to poor Varina so brutal and insulting that, in Stephen's words, no
one with a grain of self-respect could accept the conditions of
marriage which he lays down? Because he could not tell her the real
reason, a reason based on fear rather than on physiological certainty.
It is an honestly dishonest letter. It is a perfect example of that
perplexing contradiction which appears everywhere in his life and
writings, that he was brutally honest, saw through the postures and
masks of everybody else, and yet postured, attitudinized, and lied
himself. He carried his secret agony with fortitude and alternately
raged against the world and fooled with it. In relation to the Varina
episode Stephen misses the point, though what he says is true enough:
"Swift could be the most persistent and ardent of friends. But when
anyone tried to enforce claims no longer congenial to his feelings,
the appeal to the galling obligation stung him into ferocity, and
brought out the most brutal side of his imperious nature." Though a
man has but one heart, yet his relations with his friends are quite
different from his passions for women. A proud, ferocious and
imperious nature is not the whole story of Swift. It does not give us
the real foundation of the story of Varina, of Stella, of Vanessa and
the man they loved.