that everything that left Shakespeare's hand must have been perfect.
Why, he probably used words carelessly and did all kinds of tricks
with them, as other geniuses do. Why should we assume that he always
wrote a good line? Some of his lines are bad, and it is not necessary
for Dr. Pumpernickell to knock out a couple of words or add a couple
just to make a line go metrically. These scholars have a split vision.
In one note they treat Shakespeare like a god who could not go wrong.
In the next note they treat him like a sophomore versifier whose lines
have to be corrected. Dr. Furness says that the earliest known text of
"Julius Caesar"--that of the First Folio, "is markedly free from
corruptions." What corruptions? The printers' or Shakespeare's? Dr.
Furness lugs in that tiresome phantom, a playhouse copy. "Our only
recourse is to accept the explanation given by Resch, viz., that these
words between Brutus and Messala are an interpolation from a MS.
addition which appeared first in a playhouse copy, and which, by
mistake, became incorporated in the text." Now, is not that a "soft,
downy, pink-cheeked peach of an idea" (Jonson's "Sejanus," act IV.,
sc. 13, I, 23. Potter's edition: Oshkosh, Scholar and Sellum, 1913)?
Resch be hanged! What playhouse copy? When? Whose mistake? How
incorporated? A solid page and two-thirds of a page are devoted to
explaining a difficulty which does not exist.
This is the true history of the passage in question. Shakespeare and
Bacon and Raleigh met in the Mermaid Tavern for the purpose of turning
out a few yards of Elizabethan blank verse in the post-Tennysonian
style of Mr. Alfred Noyes. It was a very difficult job and Will of
Stratford got roaring full. He went home on foot to Stratford, a long
journey, and found Anne with another pair of twins, one of whom was
the poet Davenant. This was very disturbing to Will. He did not know
until after his death which twin was Davenant. He was then in that
fateful year, 1599-1600, writing his play, "Julius Caesar", and making
extensive use of Suetonius's "The Lives of the Caesars" (Dr. Furness
thinks this doubtful, but if you are going to guess, why not guess
good and plenty?). Anne got on Will's nerves and he had a bad morning
head. That is why he made that slightly confused passage, which has
bothered the scholars ever since.
The following example of how Shakespeare's biography is written is not
a parody. It appears in the New York _Nation_ of November 27, 1913,
page 513, in a review of Arthur S. Pier's "Story of Harvard."
"Every good story has a prologue, and the story of Harvard has one
which by no means should be left out. In Stratford-on-Avon stands the
'Old House in the High Street,' identified by the most eminent of our
antiquaries, the late H. F. G. Waters, by certain documentary
evidence, as the early home of Katharine Rogers, mother of John
Harvard, from whom proceeded the little inheritance that first kindled
in the western hemisphere the torch of a liberal culture. For this we
have distinct contemporaneous chapter and verse.
"At circumstantial evidence we look askance, but without pressing the
matter unduly this may be said--that the families of Rogers and
Shakespeare lived in close neighborhood and intimacy at Stratford
during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I.; that the poet knew
Katharine Rogers well, as, on the other hand, he knew well Robert
Harvard, at length her husband, in his shop at Southwark, in London,
hard by the Globe Theatre. So far the conjunction would seem to be
inevitable.
"Then looms up a possibility amounting perhaps to a likelihood, that
no other than Shakespeare was the intermediary who brought together
the Londoner and the fair, well-dowered maid in the remote midlands,
that he was a familiar guest in the home in Southwark which he had
helped to establish, and that he, the genial family friend, held on
his knee the little John Harvard, the first-born in the household.
"Could this touch of their foster-father with the most illustrious
name in literature be fairly established (and who can say after the
feats of Mr. Waters what scraps may yet be found in the dust-heaps?),
Harvard men would indeed have a tradition to prize."
Why not get down to brass tacks? We do not know much about
Shakespeare's life. We do not know anything about his manuscripts, or
the playhouse versions. We cannot even rely on the printed date of a
quarto. We do not know whether a corrupt line was corrupted by
Shakespeare or the printer or somebody else. Many emendations consist
largely in a kind of scholarly punning. For example: Shakespeare wrote
a line that every scholar remembers, for it is a causer of gray hairs
and a prodigal spender of the midnight taper: "The blind Rush hath
proclaimed his Bowells search." Johnson conjectures that four lines
have been omitted. Steev. conj.: For "blind rush," read "mind rush."
That is, the impetuousness of his thought makes one aware of how his
instinct is struggling for the solution of his difficulties. Malone
conj.: "Bowells lurch." Evidently referring to the sea-sickness of
Antony after the battle of Actium. Craik conj.: "Rowell's search,
meaning that his blind rush, that is headlong rush, is caused or
indicated by the speed of his horse into which he has thrust his
rowels." Cf. B. Jonson, "Every man out of His Humor"; "One of the
rowels catched hold of the ruffle of my boot." Oechelhauser
(_Einleitung_, p. 1185): But this must refer to the speed of the
intellect going through purely idealistic experiences. There is no
question here of either sea or land. Macbeth has not been near the sea
and Henry V. has not yet set sail for France. As for horses, it is now
well established that there were no horses in England; otherwise why
should Richard have cried, "My kingdom for a horse"? If there had been
horses, one could surely have bought one, especially a King, for 80
marks, the then ruling price in Schleswig-Holstein; and even the
ecstasies of expression would not have made appropriate the offer of
an entire kingdom.
So they go "conjing" and "conjing" through desolate miles of notes.
In spite of the fact that now and again a genuine bit of historic
information, a light of interpretative intuition flashing from a
scholar's note, does vivify and elucidate a puzzling line, or a line
that you might pass over in an oblivious mood, nevertheless, is it not
true that this whole institution of literary theology is a stupid
superstition? There are plenty of unsolved problems in Shakespeare,
fascinating questions of biography and interpretation to which
conjectural answers are legitimate. But for illuminating answers, or
partial answers, one has to go outside orthodox scholarship, to Walter
Begley, to "The Shakespeare Problem Restated," by George C. Greenwood,
to "Shakespeare's Mystery Play: A Study of The Tempest" by Colin
Still, and to other heretical inquirers whom the pundits dismiss as
cranks.
The scholars do not confine their thick-headed learning to old poets
whose language is strange and who are made clearer by a note here and
there. For some stranger reason scholars are hired to edit the modern
poets in the popular series, those valuable and inexpensive reprints
which help to spread poetry over the face of the earth and make it
accessible to increasing numbers of readers. I pick up the "Selected
Poems of Christina Rossetti," edited with introduction and notes by
Charles Bell Burke, Ph.D., professor of English in the University of
Tennessee. The volume is in Macmillan's Pocket Classics. I come upon
"A Green Cornfield," a lovely lyric that must have made Shelley look
down with interest "from the abode where the eternal are." There is
reference to a note. I turn to it and find this: "An inverted simile?
Consult Genung's 'Working Principles of Rhetoric,' p. 79, 2, example."
I will not consult Genung. I will advise all the pupils in my school
never to consult Genung while they are reading poetry.
I commend to those hard-working young men and women in the
universities who are now studying under editors of Shakespeare to fit
themselves to be editors of Shakespeare these sentences from Mr. Max
Eastman's "Enjoyment of Poetry": "A misfortune incident to all
education is the fact that those who elect to be teachers are
scholars. They esteem knowledge not for its use in attaining other
values, but as a value in itself; and hence they put an undue emphasis
upon what is formal and nice about it, leaving out what is less
pleasing to the instinct for classification but more needful to the
art of life. This misfortune is especially heavy in the study of
literature. Indeed the very rare separation of the study of literature
from that of the subjects it deals with suggests the barren and formal
character of it. As usually taught for three years to postgraduates in
our universities, it is not worth spending three weeks upon."
GEORGE MOORE AND OTHER IRISH WRITERS
"Though I may have lost the habit of reading," says Mr. Moore, "I have
acquired, perhaps more than any other human being, another habit, the
habit of thinking. I love my own thoughts." It must be a great
pleasure to be Mr. George Moore, to have confidence in one's
intellectual habits, to enjoy the memories and opinions that the mind
excogitates, and to be able to phrase them with beautiful precision.
The mind that honestly likes itself is sure to attract other minds and
to interest even those that are antipathetic. If Mr. Moore does not
persuade you that all his judgments are to be accepted, he provokes
you to examine your own. He is stimulant, irritant, but there is no
depressant reaction from him. One can stand a large dose of him, both
of his exquisite fiction and of his repetitive reminiscences, which
may or may not be fiction.
There is a remark ascribed to Lady Gregory: "Some men kiss and do not
tell; George Moore does not kiss, but he tells." It is the business of
the writer of fiction to "tell," and it makes little difference to the
reader who reads for fun whether the gallant adventures are
biographical or not. Early in his literary career Mr. Moore tried the
confessional form of narrative and succeeded masterfully. The young
man who "confessed" twenty-five years ago grew older, and in "Memoirs
of My Dead Life" looked back upon his youth from the quiescence of
middle age. Mr. Moore says that "if the reader of 'Vale' be wishful to
know what happened at Orelay he can do so in a volume entitled
'Memoirs of My Dead Life,' but he need not read this novel to follow
adequately the story of 'Vale.'" So the "Memoirs" is fiction. What,
then, is "Hail and Farewell"? Simply an extension of the
autobiographic novel, it includes real persons living and dead and
calls them by their names, but it is as obviously a "made-up" book as
anything in literature. It is the work of an artist and critic, the
artist who gave us two masterpieces, "Esther Waters" and "Evelyn
Innes," and the critic, who, apropos books and pictures, writes, if
not with infallible judgment, ever with an unfailing sense of beauty.
Mr. Moore's lady-loves have not, according to his own testimony,
direct and unconscious, been the most interesting affairs of his life.
He writes better about Manet than about an amatory encounter of
yesteryear. The women of his "regular" novels are more vivid than the
women who perturb his mature reminiscences. He says that the critics
complain that "instead of creating types of character like Esther
Waters," he is wasting his time describing his friends, "mere portrait
painting," and he asks an argumentative question: "In writing 'Esther
Waters' did I not think of one heroic woman?"
For once the critics are on the right side. Lady Gregory is
interesting in her own person and her own work, but Mr. Moore can
never make her so interesting in a book as he has made Esther and
Evelyn. And the ladies of his experience are more alive when he uses
them as matter for fiction than when he sits behind a cigar dictating
memories. That in creating Esther he was thinking of an heroic woman
is his concern, not ours. His private kisses undoubtedly taught him
something of the art of making fictitious kisses public; they
furnished him, as such experiences furnish every author, with the
story which as an artist he was to "tell." But his purely personal
revelations are not startling. Ladies flit into his memory, receive
the most delicate literary treatment and flit out again. Nothing
unusual happens at Orelay or anywhere else, and what happens is
handled finely, timidly even, with what may have been audacity in
1890, but no longer strikes us as valiantly candid. The introduction
to "Memoirs of My Dead Life" now seems much ado over little; it is out
of proportion and is a wobbly piece of thinking such as Mr. Moore's
Irish born and French trained mind is seldom guilty of. The "Memoirs"
and "Hail and Farewell" are to be enjoyed and admired. Even an
Irishman ought not to find in them occasion for more than a contest of
wit.
No page of "Hail and Farewell" is flat; no opinion of Mr. Moore's
leaves you quite indifferent. The most interesting pages, more
interesting than his portrait of himself as a lover in France or a
member of the landed gentry of county Mayo, are those which criticize
the personalities and the ideas of the so-called Celtic Revival. His
comments on Lady Gregory and "Willie" Yeats just miss being insults.
To say that "Lady Gregory has never been for me a very real person" is
gratuitous and not quite consonant with that honesty which Mr. Moore
advocates and for the most part practises. For in his portrait of her
and his comments on her he shows that she is a very real person to him
and a writer who compels his consideration. In the act of putting a
pin through the humbuggery of others he buzzes himself.
However, his literary criticism of their work is delightful. Whether
it is true or not we Yankees have no sure means of judging. He says
that Lady Gregory's style which Mr. Yeats so highly values, the speech
that she learned from the people and puts into the mouths of her
characters, "consists of no more than a dozen turns of speech, dropped
into pages of English so ordinary, that redeemed from these phrases it
might appear in any newspaper without attracting attention." Well, is
not that true of the speech of the Irish or any province of England or
America? Our dialectic differences are few but important. The speech
of Lady Gregory's characters is effective, and more than that, the
humor and the pathos of them is deeper than their speech or any
peculiar turns of phrase.
Doubtless (as would say Sir Sidney Lee, whom Mr. Moore despises),
doubtless Mr. Yeats makes too much of Lady Gregory's discovery of
dialect and of his own discovery of Lady Gregory. In the revised
version of "Red Hanrahan," he thanks Lady Gregory "who helped me to
rewrite The Stories of Red Hanrahan in the beautiful country speech of
Kiltartan, and nearer to the tradition of the people among whom he, or
some likeness of him, drifted and is remembered." It is little I care,
myself being a literary man, whether the metaphors and the syntax and
the sentence rhythms were contrived by Mr. Yeats or Lady Gregory or
the people of Kiltartan, or whether they are natural to the English
tongue of other times and other regions of the world. They are
impressive, they convey the story, and they give to the story the
strange color appropriate to it. Mr. Yeats plays with verbal color,
with lights and darkness in a way that should appeal to so sympathetic
a student of the French impressionists as Mr. Moore.
To be sure, there is always the danger of affectation, and the
concluding sentences of Mr. Yeats's dedicatory letter to "AE" are
pretty close to buncombe. "Ireland, which is still predominantly
Celtic, has preserved, with some less excellent things, a gift of
vision which has died out among more hurried and more successful
nations; no shining candelabra have prevented us from looking into the
darkness, and when one looks into the darkness there is always
something there." Not always; there may not be anything there worth
talking about, not even a black cat. And the man of poetic vision may
be a citizen of a relatively successful nation. The eye does not
thrive in the dark, but is gradually atrophied. It was not by
scrutinizing the dark, but by using his ear and his wonderful visual
imagination that Mr. Yeats learned to write the verses in "Red
Hanrahan's Curse," verses the like of which no other man can write.
In such verses lives and will live the real Yeats. That some of his
verses are obscure and weak does not matter. Greater poets than he
have failed at times. And the best of his later verse is his very
best; he grows and keeps young, for he has been dipped in some magic
well. That he has foibles a plenty is of little moment; greater poets
than he have allowed the fool to triumph over the genius sometimes.
The divine fool is one of the common themes in poetic legend. Later
criticism will assess the value of the "school" that he has founded
and appraise his influence in the literary history of Ireland. The
function of criticism at the present time is to proclaim the lyric
poet and persuade readers to subject themselves to the enchantment of
his songs. It is surprising that Mr. Moore, who preaches the gospel of
beauty with a fervor worthy of Keats, should not balance his witty
strictures with a little more hearty appreciation. He quotes one of
his friends as saying that Yeats "took his colleen to London and put
paint upon her cheeks and dye upon her hair and sent her up
Piccadilly."
And another critic added that the hat and feathers were supplied by
Arthur Symons. That is funny enough and serves the purpose of
criticism by arousing interest. It also gives other critics
opportunity to remind their readers that Yeats's colleen, whether in
Sligo or London, is a lovely witch.
One story that Mr. Moore tells of Mr. Yeats is beyond my un-Celtic
sense of humor. He represents Mr. Yeats as coming down to luncheon at
Lady Gregory's house and saying: "I have had a great morning. I have
written eight lines." Where is the joke? It does not seem to be at the
expense of the poet. Eight of his lines may seem a poor day's work to
so great a man as George Moore. But some of us who have not earned the
right to be patronizing would cheerfully devote a month of Sundays, if
we knew how, to making one line as good as the best of Yeats. These
Irish people rag each other delightfully, and it is more delightful to
poke fun than to admire too mutually; perhaps it is more Irish.
Of living Irishmen the two most distinguished writers of prose are
George Moore and Bernard Shaw. They resemble each other in two or
three particulars. Both are out of sympathy with the modern movement
in Irish literature, with the "Celtic revival," with all that revolves
about the person of Mr. Yeats. In the introduction to "John Bull's
Other Island," Mr. Shaw says (I quote from memory) that he is an
old-fashioned Irishman who sees other Irishmen as they really are and
not as the young people of the Abbey Theatre imagine them to be. Mr.
Moore somewhat grudgingly concedes that Synge was a man of genius and
that Lady Gregory's plays, though inferior to the "Playboy" are all
meritorious. But he implies, if he does not directly say, that the
only man who really understands the diction of the Irish is George
Moore, Esq., of Moore Hall. Another point of resemblance between Shaw
and Moore is that both insist on calling themselves shameless; they
boast their independence and find satisfaction in contemplating their
difference from other people. It is amusing to think that the reading
world has long taken them for granted and is no longer shocked. Both
are masters of the English tongue, not of a new style full of strange
idioms, natural or artificial, but of the straightest sort of classic
English, firm as the best prose of the eighteenth century.
It is that English which shall save these Celtic iconoclasts who are
now respectable old gentlemen. Irish to the back-bone, they took for
foster mother the finest prose of the race that betrayed their
country; they became favorite sons of an empire superior to the
political and racial divisions of the world. Mr. Moore thinks that the
English are a tired race and their weariness betrays itself in the
language. "God help the writer who puts pen to paper in fifty years'
time, for all that will be left of the language will be a dry
shank-bone that has been lying a long while on the dust-heap of
empire." A dismal prophecy which is cheerfully contradicted by the
facts of literary history. The political empire may be disrupted,
Ireland may be freed from English yoke and split in twain. But the
language is safe. Artists like Mr. Moore preserve its integrity and
renew its vitality. And we have not heard the last of James Joyce and
James Stephens, or of one or two young men who were born on the island
that lies east of Dublin.
JAMES JOYCE
In the preface of "Pendennis" Thackeray says: "Since the author of
'Tom Jones' was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been
permitted to depict to his utmost power a Man. We must drape him and
give him a certain conventional simper. Society will not tolerate the
Natural in our Art." If Thackeray felt that, why did he not take his
reputation and his fortune in his hands and, defying the social
restrictions which he deplored, paint us a true portrait of a young
gentleman of his time? He might have done much for English art and
English honesty. As it was, he did as much as any writer of his
generation to fasten on English fiction the fetters of a hypocritical
reticence. It was only in the last generation that English and Irish
novelists, under the influence of French literature, freed themselves
from the cowardice of Victorian fiction and assumed that anything
human under the sun is proper subject-matter for art. If they have not
produced masterpieces (and I do not admit that they have not), they
have made a brave beginning. Such a book as "A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man" would have been impossible forty years ago. Far from
looking back with regret at the good old novelists of the nineteenth
century (whom, besides, we need never lose), I believe that our
fiction is in some respects freer[1] and richer than the fiction of
our immediate forefathers.
[1] If it gets too free, as in Joyce's "Ulysses," it has an
official hand clapped on its mouth!
Joyce's work is outspoken, vigorous, original, beautiful. Whether it
faithfully reflects Irish politics and the emotional conflicts of the
Catholic religion one who is neither Irish nor Catholic can not judge
with certainty. It seems, however, that the noisy controversies over
Parnell and the priests in which the boy's elders indulge have the
sound of living Irish voices; and the distracted boy's wrestlings with
his sins and his faith are so movingly human that they hold the
sympathy even of one who is indifferent to the religious arguments. I
am afraid that the religious questions and the political questions are
too roughly handled to please the incurably devout and patriotic. If
they ever put up a statue of Joyce in Dublin, it will not be during
his lifetime. For he is no respecter of anything except art and human
nature and language.
There are some who, to turn his own imaginative phrase, will fret in
the shadow of his language. He makes boys talk as boys do, as they did
in your school and mine, except that we lacked the Irish imagery and
whimsicality. If the young hero is abnormal and precocious, that is
because he is not an ordinary boy but an artist, gifted with thoughts
and phrases above our common abilities. This is a portrait of an
artist, a literary artist of the finest quality.
The style is a joy. "Cranly's speech," he writes, "had neither rare
phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish
idioms." In that Joyce has defined his own style. It is Elizabethan,
yet thoroughly modern; it is racily Irish, yet universal English. It
is unblushingly plain-spoken and richly fanciful, like Shakespeare and
Ben Jonson. The effect of complete possession of the traditional
resources of language is combined with an effect of complete
indifference to traditional methods of fiction. Episodes, sensations,
dreams, emotions trivial and tragic succeed each other neither
coherently nor incoherently; each is developed vividly for a moment,
then fades away into the next, with or without the mechanical devices
of chapter divisions or rows of stars. Life is so; a fellow is pandied
by the schoolmaster for no offense; the cricket bats strike the balls,
pick, pock, puck; there is a girl to dream about; and Byron was a
greater poet than Tennyson anyhow....
The sufferings of the poor little sinner are told with perfect
fidelity to his point of view. Since he is an artist his thoughts
appropriately find expression in phrases of maturer beauty than the
speech of ordinary boys. He is enamored of words, intrigued by their
mystery and color; wherefore the biographer plays through the boy's
thoughts with all manner of verbal loveliness.