than Lowell. But he is in fact less of a realist than Lowell; for
Lowell in his time did grapple with the facts of politics. In poetry
it is not necessary, it is better not, to be a realist. But in dealing
with politics and contemporaneous history the true citizen must be a
realist and leave it to the politicians to fly with the eagle. No
wisdom is to be derived from such a statement as this: "There is
always an ideality of the human spirit in all its [Democracy's] works,
if one will search them out." Or this: "Democracy is a mode of dealing
with souls." Or this: "Not that other governments have not had regard
to the soul, but in democracy, it is spirituality that gives the law
and rules the issue." It is, alas, not true that "education, high
education even, is more respected and counts for more in a democracy
than under the older systems," or that "the law becomes the embodied
persuasion of the community," or that "all these blessings [aversion
to war, devotion to public duty and many other enumerated virtues]
unconfined as the element, belong to all our people."
Mr. Woodberry's democracy simply does not exist and never did exist.
Yet there is one existent glory of my country which I believe I
appreciate better than he does. He says: "It behooves us, especially,
to be modest, for our magnificent America has never yet produced a
poet even of the rank of Gray." That was written fourteen years after
the death of Whitman. Mr. Woodberry's democracy had not yet come
along, but one of its great poets had arrived and departed leaving Mr.
Woodberry none the wiser. There is another glory of my country which I
appreciate better than Mr. Woodberry does--Poe, whose poetry Mr.
Woodberry has never understood, though he has written what is
altogether the best biography of the man! To save the six best lyrics
of Poe, I would, if such a sacrifice were necessary, cheerfully sink
Gray in the deepest sea of oblivion, "Elegy," letters and all. But
that is only a slight difference of judgment, and there is no more
futile business than to draw up minor poets in grades and ranks.
Whitman is another matter; the critic who misses him in this day of
the world is simply incompetent. The excuse for Mr. Woodberry is that
he does not belong to this day of the world.
There is something pathetic about Mr. Woodberry's patriotism. He
sincerely believes that "America's title to glory is her service to
human liberty." He has never been delivered from the superstition that
"the sense of justice is the bedrock of the Puritan soul"--the Puritan
soul, narrow, despotic, cruelly unjust! But when Mr. Woodberry leaves
politics and patriotism and religion and returns to art and literature
where he is at home, he puts his finger ruefully on the real rock of
the Puritan soul, recalling the Puritan's hostility to the theatre and
regretting "the American inhibition" "which rejects the nude in
sculpture and painting, not only forfeiting thereby the supreme of
Greek genius and sanity, but to the prejudice, also, of human
dignity." Mr. Woodberry is himself a Puritan, yearning to be free but
chained to New England granite, and since he can not get free on this
planet he looks up to the heavens where the God of his fathers used to
dwell, but where he can find only abstract and vague ideas. Mr.
Woodberry's tendency to abstract phrases, which on pressure yield
nothing, vitiates his literary essays, the essays in which a
professional critic ought to be most concrete, definite, and
nourishing. The trouble may be that his views are too high and too
broad for the limited vision of a common man; but I think his trouble
is that he has not the true philosopher's power to make a long idea,
bridging time and space, stand up under its own weight; there is a
lack of solid timber and concrete. His best essays are those on
individual authors in which he has the selected specific substance of
another man's thought to work on. As ought to happen to a sensitive
critic, it sometimes happens that Mr. Woodberry's style takes the very
tone of his subject. He is whimsical in his charming little essay on
Pepys, an adequate trifle; he is grave and quiet when he writes about
Gray; and Swinburne so stirs him that his prose awakes and sparkles
with metaphor. Even in this essay, however, he can not help
demoralizing poetry by moralizing it into pseudo-philosophic prose.
"The imagery (of 'Laus Veneris') has more affinity with modes of
sacerdotal art, with symbolism and the attributive in imaginative
power than it has with the free vitality that is more properly the
sphere of poetry." What does that mean? What is the sphere of poetry?
The essays on the older poets would make first-rate introductions to
school texts, and I think some of them have been so used. They suffer
from the fact that in Mr. Woodberry's time--and since--so many
standard essays on Milton, Shakespeare, and the rest were written and
rewritten, that unless a critic has a fresh point of view, as Mr.
Woodberry has not, another essay is simply another essay.
It must be pleasant to meditate on the great men of letters and from
time to time write an essay on Virgil or Montaigne or Matthew Arnold.
Some leisure is necessary, for the conscientious critic must read
much, and much reading takes time. It may be that in our nervous age,
in this country, the scholarly critic with a true taste for letters
has disappeared, to return perhaps in a day when Democracy or
something better shall have dawned. The comfortable old tradition is
dead or dying, and since its good works are extant in print, we need
no more contributions to it. As Mr. Woodberry says in an essay called
"Culture of the Old School": "The _Gentleman's Magazine_--both the
name and the thing belong to a bygone time."
ABRAHAM CAHAN
Toward the end of the last century there appeared in the magazines
some remarkable stories of the East Side of New York by Abraham Cahan.
They were not of the crudely comic type of Potash and Perlmutter, nor
were they in the somewhat finer mood of sentimental humor which made
Myra Kelly deservedly popular. They were humorous and pathetic in a
quiet, compelling way, with a gentle austerity of tone even less
familiar to American readers then than it is in the days of the
Russian invasion. Mr. Howells praised these stories and he and others
in editorial authority encouraged the author to write more. A career
in the pleasant art of fiction was open to Mr. Cahan. But he withdrew
from it and, so far as I know, he wrote no more stories for at least
ten years. He has devoted his energy to building up the great
_Jewish Daily Forward_, which is not only the voice of the East
Side, but a powerful vehicle of social and political ideals that have
not yet penetrated the sanctums of Times Square and of the older
newspaper world near City Hall and Civic Virtue.
Then, as he approached sixty, Mr. Cahan gave us "The Rise of David
Levinsky", a solid mature novel, into which are compacted the
reflections of a lifetime. The publisher's notice called it "a story
of success in the turmoil of American life." Probably the writer of
those words intended to help the book by the appeal which "success"
makes to the American mind, for no reader, not even a publisher's
clerk, could miss the immense irony of the story. It is indeed the
story of a failure. The vanity of great riches was never set forth
with more searching sincerity. The helplessness of the individual,
even the strong and prosperous, in the economic whirlpool, the
loneliness and disillusionment only partly assuaged by pride in
commercial achievement, the sacrifice of the intellectual life to the
practical, these are the fundamental themes of the book. Levinsky,
with the instincts of a scholar and a desire for the finest things in
life, is swept into business by circumstances which he hardly
understands himself and against which he is powerless; once in the
game he makes the most of his abilities, but he never ceases to regard
his visible good fortune as poor compensation for the invisible things
he has missed. His wealth forces him to associate with all that is
vulgar and acquisitive in Jewry and isolates him from all that is
idealistic. He finds that he cannot even speak the language of the
woman he most admires. Worse still, he is out of sympathy with the
aspirations of millions of poor Jews from whose ranks he has sprung.
He has no sympathy with those who would break the game up or make new
rules, yet he sees that the game is hardly worth playing, even for the
winner. "Success! Success! Success! It was the almighty goddess of the
hour. Thousands of new fortunes were advertising her gaudy splendors.
Newspapers, magazines, and public speeches were full of her glory, and
he who found favor in her eyes found favor in the eyes of man."
The portrait of David Levinsky is a portrait of society, not simply of
the Jewish section of it, or of New York, but of American business.
And business is business whether done by Jew or Gentile. If Levinsky
is a triumphant failure, he is so because American business, which
shaped him to its ends, is, viewed from any decent regard for
humanity, a miserable monster of success. Not that Levinsky is an
abstraction, or that the novelist is forcing a thesis. Far from it.
The personality of Levinsky is as sharply individualized as the hero
of Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors," though with a different kind of
subtlety, the subtlety not of detached analysis, but of naively simple
self-revelation, which of course is not so simple as it sounds.
Mr. Cahan knows how to think through his characters, by letting them
do the thinking, as if it were their affair and not his. At the same
time he does not perform (nor does any other artist) that foolish and
meaningless operation, as expressed by a great poet through a young
critic, of holding "the mirror up to nature." Nature in a mirror is
just nature, not nature thought out, excogitated, turned to human
uses, interpreted in human words. And this is the place to say that
Mr. Cahan knows how to use words. There are no great phrases in this
book. A simple and (intellectually) honest business man writing his
autobiography would not use a great phrase; such a phrase might issue
from some enviable person in that intellectual life from which
Levinsky was excluded. But there is no banal or inept phrase. Such a
man as Mr. Cahan intends Levinsky to be, a man trained in the Talmud,
which means verbal sense, and hammered by the facts of life, which
means a sense of reality, and a wistful failure, which means
imaginative retrospection, says things in a direct, firm, accurate
style.
There is no lack of emotion; strong feeling, expressed or implied,
runs through the book from beginning to end. But there is a complete
absence of eloquence, a deliberate refraining from emphasis, an even
manner of setting forth ideas and events impartially for the value
inherent in them, an admirable method, the method of a philosophic
artist. Here is life, some of it is good, some of it is bad; it is all
somewhat pitiable, to be laughed at rather than cried over; nobody is
deserving of indignant blame or abuse. It is our business to
understand it as well as we can; and though we never can see it in its
entirety or with complete clearness, if we make an honest effort to
record events and delineate personalities, the events will arrange
themselves in a more or less intelligible sequence, and the
personalities will be their own commentary upon themselves. An obvious
method, but you will read many a book to find one skilful application
of it.
It seems to me the method most often employed and carried to the
highest degree of perfection by the great Russians. I am driven to the
timidity of "seems" because we do much talking about Russian novels
without having read many of them or understanding what we have read.
But better-informed critics than I have noted that one characteristic
of the Russian novel is a benevolent impartiality in its treatment of
all kinds of people and a calm contemplation of events horrible, gay,
sad, comic. A revolutionist can portray, in fiction, a commissioner of
police, whom in real life he would be willing to kill, with a fairness
that is more than fair, with a combination of Olympian serenity and
human sympathy. He can be a virulent propagandist when he is writing
pamphlets, and when he writes fiction he can forget his propaganda or
subdue it to art, that is, to a balanced sense of life.
When I say that Mr. Cahan's novel sounds like a good translation of a
Russian novel, and that he is a disciple of the Russian novelists, I
accuse him of the crime of being an artist and a seer. As a matter of
biography, he is a child of Russian literature. And that is why his
novel, written in faultless English, is a singular and solitary
performance in American fiction. If that strange demand for "the" or
"a great American novel," a demand which is at once foolish and the
expression of a justifiably proud feeling that a big country ought to
have big books, is to be satisfied, perhaps we shall have to ask an
East Side Jew to write it for us. That would be an interesting
phenomenon for some future Professor Wendell to deal with in a History
of American Literature. And by the way, Mr. Cahan is a competent
critic. I hope he will give us not only more novels, but a study of
Russian literature for the enlightenment of the American mind. I
remember with gratitude an article of his which I read when I was even
more ignorant than I am now, on the modern successors to the group of
Titans, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. He put Maxim Gorky in his place
and told us (this was before the Russian invasion) about Andreyev and
Chekhov. If Mr. Cahan will write a book on Russian literature, I will
do my best to establish him in his merited place in American
literature.
THOMAS HARDY
Mr. Bernard Shaw says, apropos Samuel Butler, that the English people
do not deserve to have a genius. Butler himself in a note remarks that
America, even America, will probably have men of genius, has indeed,
already had one, Walt Whitman, but that he cannot imagine any country
where a genius would have more unfortunate surroundings than in
America. Mr. Arnold Bennett sends a shot from the same gun in
"Milestones," when he makes the millionaire shipbuilder puff his chest
and say that there is no greater honor to English character than the
way we treat our geniuses. Egad! The unworthiness of the British and
American nations to have artists born to them was never more
shamefully manifested than by the reception accorded thirty years ago
to Hardy's "Jude, the Obscure." Harper's Magazine, which seems to have
begun printing the story before the editors had seen the complete
manuscript, fell into temporary disfavor with some outraged readers.
One British journal distinguished itself by reviewing the book under
the caption, "Jude, the Obscene."
It is inconceivable that any nation on the continent of Europe could,
through its critics or through any considerable number of readers, so
dishonor a masterpiece. For "Jude" is a masterpiece; if it is not
Hardy's greatest novel, it is one of his three or four greatest, and
that means one of a score of supreme works of prose fiction in the
language. If profundity of substance and skill in narrative are both
considered, Hardy is without rival among British novelists. His is the
crowning achievement in the century of fiction that began with Jane
Austen and, happily, has not yet terminated with Joseph Conrad. In his
hands the English novel assumed a form which, perhaps without good
critical reason, one thinks of as French. Despite the racy localism of
scene and character, Hardy's work seems alien to the Anglo-Saxon
temperament; it has less in common with the spacious days of great
Victoria than with a younger time, whose living masters, Mr. Conrad
and Mr. Galsworthy, for example, have taken lessons in art across the
channel.
In a prefatory note to "Desperate Remedies," dated February, 1896,
Hardy lets fall a casual phrase which indicates that he and others had
noted his kinship to the French, but that he was not disposed to
acknowledge it fully. He seems to say, with that kind of modest pride
which distinguishes him, that he found his method for himself, played
the game alone. "As it happened," runs the note, "that certain
characteristics which provoked most discussion in my latest story
['Jude'?] were present in this my first--published in 1871, when there
was no French name for them--it has seemed best to let them stand
unaltered." What characteristics does he intend? And was there no
French name for them in 1871? Or had not the British critics begun to
use the French name? Are these characteristics his candor, his logic,
his classic finish of phrase, a certain cool stateliness of manner, an
impersonal, distant way of treating most tender and poignant subjects,
a lucid, ironic view of life, perfect proportion, large intellectual
pity and freedom from cant, from sentimentality? These are some of his
virtues and they are the virtues of several modern French novelists
and some of the Russian pupils of the French.
If the ill reception of "Jude" caused Mr. Hardy to foreswear fiction,
then the fools have in a way done us harm by cheating us of two or
three great novels. Yet genius takes its revenge on a dull world,
especially if it is prosperous genius, too well established to be
starved out by the stupidity of an inartistic people. If Hardy had
been encouraged to write more novels perhaps we should not have had
"The Dynasts." And by and by we shall discover what a loss that would
have been. It is the greatest epic that we have been privileged to
read since Tolstoy's "War and Peace." And it is the best long poem in
English since Morris's "The Earthly Paradise." Though it is cast in
scenes and acts it is not a drama except in a vast untechnical sense
of the word. But epic it is, creation of an enormous imagination which
sweeps the universe and manages a cosmic panorama as commandingly as
the same imagination dominates a rural kingdom of farms and desolate
heaths. If "The Dynasts" and Hardy's shorter poems lack one thing,
that one thing is the magical and haunting line, that concatenation of
words which is everlastingly beautiful in the context or detached from
it. Morris knew that magic. He was born with it, and no reader of
Morris, except a critic, will be deceived by his own denial of his
divinity when he said in his honest, off-hand way, sensible as Anthony
Trollope, that inspiration is nonsense and verse is easy to write.
"The Dynasts" is an extraordinary poem. It is not French, it is not
Greek, it is not like anything else in English. Hardy has discarded
Christian mythology. He is not childish enough to revert to the Greek.
He has invented a new one. His celestial machinery is as strange an
apparition in the heavens as the first aeroplane. His hero, Napoleon,
rises above the human stature by which the realistic novelist measures
man and becomes not only a tool of destiny but a demigod who seems to
understand destiny and share the secrets of that impersonal goddess.
Those who are curious about Hardy's philosophy (we like his art; his
philosophy may lie down and die on the shelf with the other
philosophies) will find the closing chorus of "The Dynasts"
significant:
But--a stirring thrills the air
Like to sounds of joyance there
That the rages
Of the ages
Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that were,
Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things fair!
Such is the ultimate word of this artist who so keenly loves beauty,
yet, like some neo-Puritan and latter-day ascetic, cannot draw a
lovely woman without reminding you that the skull under the cheeks and
behind the passionate eyes is not pretty and will probably endure a
long time under ground. Is he of like mind with his chorus at last,
and does he believe that the Will is going to grow intelligent and
make all things fair?
Perhaps Hardy's proneness to dwell on the skeletonic grin of life is
due to his exceeding sensitiveness to beauty. Like Poe and other
poets, he cannot abide the ugliness that is in the world, and so he
insists on The Conqueror Worm, as a man cannot refrain from thrusting
his tongue into the sore tooth. Perhaps Hardy is a reaction against
the saccharine optimism of his contemporaries and of those just before
his time. They falsified life in their fictions by making everything
come out nicely, thank you, on the last page. He leans over backward
from that kind of untruth and comes dangerously near to being as
false. As between falsity in one direction and falsity in the other,
there is no choice, except that we have had so much of the sweet kind
that Hardy is refreshing. He tends to restore the balance.
Ask any man, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, how life has gone
with him, and, if he is honest, he will tell you that life did not go
definitely one way or the other. Things sometimes came out well and
sometimes not. Hardy is biased in favor of the things that do not come
out well. "Life's Little Ironies" is a good title, but it is a title
that implies a thesis, an attitude from which humanity is surveyed.
The stories are perfection and they sound true. Hardy is a logician
and he will back any tale of his with evidence, even the first story
in "Wessex Tales," in the preface of which the authority of physicians
is invoked. But when you take all his stories together you find nine
failures out of ten human careers, and life has a better batting
average than that. No one doubts that the "Fellowtownsmen" got into
such horrid confusion, that things happened as they shouldn't, that
every shot at happiness was a miss. And "The Waiting Supper" is so
convincing that you cannot escape. But the two stories together,
regarded for the moment not as the excellent works of art which they
are, but as a view of human destiny, weaken each other. One convinces
you. The two together make you ask questions about the author.
In "The Waiting Supper" there is one line that is as great a pathetic
fallacy as the more familiar and cheery kind which represents nature
as smiling upon the lovers. Hardy's lovers have to submit to this:
"Thus the sad autumn afternoon waned, while the waterfall hissed
sarcastically of the inevitableness of the unpleasant." Did you ever
hear a waterfall like that? The only waterfalls I have heard quote
Darwin and discuss the election returns. I know that the happy poet is
a liar when he says that the nightingale is celebrating my love for
Mamie, for the nightingale is concerned with other matters. But as
between a nightingale who is sympathetic with my emotions and a
sarcastic waterfall, I prefer the nightingale. And I do not like
either in realistic fiction.
Thomas Hardy, the idol of the younger realists and the liberator of
British fiction from the Victorian hoopskirt and the happy ending, is
not a realist. He is a great romantic, with a taste for pretty girls,
moonlight, heroes and dragoons. He is incurably superstitious. He is
pained by many modern things, especially by modern restorations of
ancient buildings. He takes Tess to the Druidical stones on Salisbury
Plain because he dearly likes that kind of moonlit antiquity. His
pronominal substitution of It for He does not achieve a revolution in
theology. He manages the destinies of human folk as arbitrarily as any
maker of fiction that ever lived. But he never made a story in which
he did not convince you that life is overwhelmingly interesting and
that nature, girls, and dragoons are beautiful if sad things to
contemplate.
GEORGE BORROW
Any book about George Borrow is worth reading. The two volumes by Dr.
Knapp are forbiddingly dense with documentary minutiae, yet it is a
pleasure to loaf through them at least once. Borrow's burly
personality makes itself felt in the driest philological note and
vitalizes the pages even of a commonplace critic, as, indeed, it
vitalizes many flatly ordinary pages in his extraordinary books. Mr.
Clement K. Shorter's "George Borrow and His Circle" is interesting
because it is about Borrow and not in the least because it is by Mr.
Shorter. Mr. Shorter's declared ambition was to write a book that
should appeal not to "Borrovians," but to "a wider public which knows
not Borrow."