PART II: INTERPRETATIONS

_Part II: Interpretations_

III

LITTERATEURS: AMERICAN WRITERS

A STORY TELLER’S STORY, by _Sherwood Anderson_.

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, by _Oscar W. Firkins_.

LAFCADIO HEARN’S AMERICAN DAYS, by _Edward Larocque Tinker_.

MARK TWAIN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

HENRY THOREAU, by _Leon Bazalgette_.

THE PILGRIMAGE OF HENRY JAMES, by _Van Wyck Brooks_.

The next best thing to talking about ourselves is talking about others.

Hence the lure of autobiographies, biographies, and autobiographical

fiction. James Joyce wrote a book half the size of Webster’s Dictionary

to tell of a few hours in his own life, and Ben Hecht seemingly cannot

exhaust himself. The genesis and development of personality can be

conveyed only by words. Palette and brush in master hands can preserve

for posterity the lineaments, and in a measure the character, of those

we love and those the world admires or fears; but the written word

alone is the medium to convey the soul. Sherwood Anderson has laid bare

his soul in _A Story Teller’s Story_, and he has drawn a portrait of

his father that surpasses Velasquez’ _Innocent VI_.

Rarely have autistic and purposeful thinking, revery and directed

mental activity, been so skilfully displayed, so successfully made

vocal. In the lines, and between the lines, Mr. Anderson has told all

he knows about himself and more. He has put psychologists and writers,

be they Freudians or behaviourists, subjectivists or objectivists,

under obligation to him, for he has permitted them to observe the

gestation and travail of the poet’s fancy, the birth and growth of

poetical form. His story, taken with Mr. Stieglitz’s portrait, tells

all there is to know about a creature at once as simple as the heart of

a child and as complex as the mid-brain of an adult who first saw the

light of day in Camden, Ohio, nearly half a century ago.

He knows little of his ancestry, but that little goes a long way to

explain him. His father, a fifty-fifty mixture of Colonel Sellers and

Wilkins Micawber, born in the South and given to rum, romancing, and

revery, was once a dandy and always a hokum expert. The origin of

his mother, who had been a bound girl in a farmer’s family until she

married, was something of a mystery, which her children did not care to

solve; but she was kind, indulgent, faithful, and she suffered fools

silently. Her mother was an Italian peasant, one-eyed, polyandrous,

and at times murderous. Once a tramp tried to rob her humble home. She

beat him until he begged for mercy; then she filled him and herself

with hard cider and the two went singing off together down the road.

Marvellous germ-and sperm-plasm for a poet; wondrous parentage for one

destined to be absorbed by the visual fancies of his unconscious, to

see strange features in the clouds with Polonius, and faces in the fire

with William Blake. No wonder Sherwood Anderson has often been called

a “nut.” He is not averse to being thought a little insane, but he has

been stung to the quick by charges of “personal immorality.” One with

such ancestry is perhaps not so likely to be an invert as a poet, but

it is from similar ancestry that they both not infrequently come. Had

Mr. Anderson investigated the forebears of Judge Turner who found the

boys of his town were not of his sort and was unable to understand

them, who had never married, and indeed cared nothing for women, he

would have found them in many respects similar to his own. The judge

was very congenial to him, despite the disparity of age. They saw many

things eye to eye; and the short, fat, neatly dressed man with bald

head, white Van Dyke beard, cold blue eyes, soft round white cheeks,

and extraordinarily small hands and feet, is as typical an example of

the strange genesic anomaly as was M. de Charlus whose acquaintance we

made in Marcel Proust’s much discussed _Swann’s Way_. To understand the

long, long thoughts the judge had when as a boy he meditated poisoning

some of his schoolmates, one must either have “temperament” and

“fixations” like Mr. Anderson’s or else be a psychiatrist.

_A Story Teller’s Story_ is full of portraits, mostly miniature, but

here and there is a life-size done with a few sweeps of the brush. Such

is that of Alonzo Berner, from whom Mr. Anderson learned as much about

men as Mr. Kipling did about women from the “arf caste widow, the woman

at Prome, the wife of the head groom or the girl at home.” Alonzo did

not have that contempt for men that Sherwood had. He knew the great

commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”; he had learned

there was none other greater; and it was vouchsafed him to believe.

“Where had I got my contempt and how had he escaped getting it?” You

got it, Sherwood, from the one-eyed grandmother who tried to kill her

granddaughter with a butcher knife, who had four husbands and was ready

for a fifth. Alonzo escaped it through the father who had, the night

the stallion Peter Point died, “some thought about most human beings,

including myself, that I haven’t ever forgot.”

Next to the evolution of the artist, the determination of Sherwood

Anderson to be a writer, the transformation from slug laborer to

chrysalis writer, these analyses are best in a book which is all

excellent.

Freudians will find Mr. Anderson’s story of his life corroborative

of their teachings. Fanciful birth, vicarious parentage, fantasying

childhood, reverying manhood, sexual fixation, self-observation,

unconscious fantasy following in the wake of conscious thought,

conflict between authority and desire--all these and more are here.

Rather than dwell upon them, and upon his artistic temperament, rather

than attempt a summary of his conduct which would represent his

strivings toward the beautiful, I shall discuss what may be called

his urge to authorship. The most remarkable thing about it is that it

did not seize him until comparatively late in life. What it lost in

forwardness it made up in intensity. After having lived nearly one-half

of the life of man as a laborer and business man, he began to write.

“There never was such a mighty scribbler as I later

became and am even now. I am one who loves, like a

drunkard his drink, the smell of ink, and the sight of

a great pile of white sheets that may be scrawled over

with words, always gladdens me ... oh, what glorious

times I have had sitting in little rooms with great piles

of paper before me; what buckets of blood have run from

the wounds of the villain foolish enough to oppose me on

the field of honour; what fair women I have loved, and

how they have loved me and on the whole how generous,

chivalrous, and open-hearted and fine I have been!”

The song chanted by Solomon that has come down the ages to testify

that the wisest of men was also a poet, is not more pregnant with

sincerity, no more redolent of fervor than Mr. Anderson’s record of his

art which he sought in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places

of the stars. By night on his bed he sought it; he sought it in city

streets and country fields, from watchman and from barman, only to

find it finally within himself; in his own creating, shaping intellect

into which the unconscious had projected its own grist. He began to

write of his observations, experiences, and fantasies; and as he wrote

he seasoned them more and more generously with his aspiration: to

cause his fellow men to share his love of beauty, to thrust beauty

first upon the middle west and then upon the U. S. A., to show that

happiness and prosperity are not synonymous. He was by nature a

word-fellow who could at most any time, be hypnotised by high-sounding

words, and he was to come under the influence of Gertrude Stein, a

“surefire” verbal artist; all of this resulted in _Many Marriages_,

which was the life of the author strung on a fictional clothes horse.

John Webster’s _grand geste_ in fiction is Sherwood Anderson’s in

reality. It came to him like a revelation; it came with a rush: the

overwhelming feeling of uncleanliness engendered by buying or selling.

“I was in my whole nature a tale-teller. My father had been one and

his not knowing had destroyed him. The corrupt unspeakable thing that

happened to tale-telling in America was all concerned with this matter

of buying and selling.” And so he walked out of his factory saying to

his secretary, “You may have it, I am not coming back any more.” As

he walked along a spur of railroad track, over a bridge, out of the

town, he whispered to himself, “Oh, you tricky little words, you are my

brothers and for the rest of my life I will be a servant to you.”

That is what he is to-day and likely will remain--a servant of words.

And though their servant, he is yet their master, for he is able to

assemble them in beauty and in majesty; he can march them rhythmically

in single or double file, or in platoons; he can blend them as a

kaleidoscope blends colors; he can draw from them a harmony that

Rimsky-Korsakoff drew from sounds, that Léon Bakst drew from motion

and colour. Indeed, there is a music in his style which, though not

classical, is charming. There is a measured flow of words in every

sentence; alliterations and rhythms, resonances and luminosities which

no contemporaneous American writing exceeds. But its author has a lack

and a compulsion. The former is in the ideational field, the latter in

the emotional. He lacks capacity for synthesis and integration, and

he is obsessed with sex. No one who reads of Nora, and of the high

school graduate from an Illinois town who had married a young man of

that place and come to Chicago with her husband to make their way in

the great world, can fail to interpret his obsession; neither can the

reader fail to understand how large it has loomed in Mr. Anderson’s

life.

The stories Sherwood Anderson used to hear on every side in stable,

work-shop, and factory concerned, he says, one impulse in life. He grew

unspeakably weary of hearing them, and gradually a doubt invaded his

mind. A similar weariness has come to many readers of his stories; and

the doubt that he had of his fellow keg rollers, I have of him.

Few critics will be able to dispose of Sherwood Anderson in as brief

space as his friend Mr. Ben Hecht: “I can give you all of Sherwood

Anderson in a sentence--the wistful idealisation of the masculine

menopause.” Like so many things Mr. Humpty Dumpty Hecht says, there is

truth in it.

Sherwood Anderson of manic-depressive temperament is an artist who

is a blend of many characteristics, the predominant one of which is

a love of beauty, particularly of form. All of them are inherited.

Had he been able, or enabled, to bring the unconscious of his make-up

into consciousness early in life, he might have earned the immortality

of Hawthorne, Howells, or Crane. Had he studied Fielding instead of

Whitman, Chekhov instead of Clemens, he might have been the bell-cow of

the literary herd of the midwest. The man who first said “It is never

too late to mend” has much to answer for.

* * * * *

Bliss Perry, whose reputation for sanity, soundness, and penetration

as a literary critic has long been established, says that Mr.

Firkins’s study of William D. Howells is a great biography. I feel as

a pariah should feel when I cannot share an authority’s conviction

and sentiment. But there is a discursiveness, a pretentiousness, a

highfalutin tone about it that distract me, and a papal atmosphere

about it that I do not breathe easily or invigoratingly. Little

annoying flaws of grammar and construction obtrude themselves while

one reads it. “I will set down briefly the migrations and occupations

of the family.” “The style has a pre-existence in the psychology, is

in essence the ingress of that psychology into language.” “When an

incident of travel reaches its probe into the sensitiveness of the

author’s profoundest and saddest convictions,” etc.

Self-forgetfulness, it has been said, is the beginning of happiness

among books; and it is because I cannot get lost to myself that I

have found less pleasure in Mr. Firkins’s book than in any save Mr.

Bok’s. When I read “the curious strengthening of the position of the

amphibious Balzac in our day,” I immediately begin searching for the

justification of “curious”--and why “amphibious”? Then there darts

into my memory chamber a line from an _Essay in Criticism_, by Robert

Lynd, that I read two or three years ago in _The London Mercury_:

“All criticism is, from one point of view, an impertinence.” Stuart

P. Sherman, reviewing recently Mr. Mencken’s latest book, said he

was determined to conclude his review with a gesture of amicality. I

am equally determined to say that Mr. Firkins’s book would not have

received such universal praise from the reviewers had it not deserved

it.

* * * * *

We like to read about men of genius and identify our virtues with

theirs; we deny ourselves their sins, and we do not recognise our

limitations in theirs. Lafcadio Hearn was a man of genius who had

tremendous limitations, and undoubtedly the Reverend John Roach Straton

would say he wallowed in sin. But he was an interesting human being;

he had a most uncommon ancestry; and if there were any occidental and

Christian conventions he did not trample upon, transcend and rail at,

it was because he did not encounter them.

In one of his letters to Henry E. Krehbiel, he called himself a dreamer

of monstrous dreams. The reader who gets information of Hearn from

Mr. Tinker’s book will think he should have said “a monster dreamer of

monstrous dreams,” for the Hearn depicted in _Lafcadio Hearn’s American

Days_ was a monster. He ate like one, he loved like one, he had no

family feeling, no capacity for sustained friendship. No hand extended

to help him was withdrawn unbitten; no kindness was ever accepted that

he did not endeavour to repay with cruelty and abuse; no appreciation

and praise were ever accorded him that he did not reciprocate with

scurrility and scorn. Exceptions prove the rule: Mr. Courtney’s hand

bore no teeth marks and Elwood Hendrick still speaks lovingly of him.

All that Mr. Tinker says of him may be true, but it is not a picture

of Lafcadio Hearn as he really was, or as the letters published by

Mrs. Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore discover him, or as _Reminiscences_

by his widow show him to be. He was hybrid, he was oversexed, he had

paranoiac trends, he was pathologically sensitive and morbidly timid,

he was deformed facially and possibly morally, and he saw neither

far nor straight. What has all that to do with Lafcadio Hearn, an

asset of literature? He wrote like a god and he made angelic music.

_Chita_, _Kokoro_, _The Nun of the Temple of Amida_, attest it. He was

a critic in the class of Rémy de Gourmont. He was a translator that

Mrs. Constance Garnett would call master. He had a flair for beauty of

literary style keener than any one since Pater. He could not judge men

and he could not discriminate between women; he had no colour sense,

and his olfactory sense was abnormal; he had greater compassion for

turtles and toads than he had for Jesuits and Jews; but he rarely hurt

any one’s feelings save those of Mr. Alden. That grand old mediator

of writers’ thoughts and reflections said, “Father, forgive him, he

neither knows the nature of his act, nor the enormity of the offence,

for he is a genius.” He may not have been “cultured” to a twisted mind

like that possessed by Dr. George M. Gould, but Goethe would have

thought him cultured, for he was a poet; and George Moore would have

made an affirmation to that effect for, like himself, Hearn was a

story-teller; Aristippus would not have denied him, for he too was a

hedonist, and Anatole France would have proclaimed him, for they both

held that beauty was the touchstone for worth.

Judged by his contribution to literature, he was a man of culture and

he had illumination and understanding.

I can understand that it interests physicians, especially

psychiatrists, to investigate the ancestry and study the conduct of men

who agitated the waters of their time; but I cannot understand what

bearing heritage or behaviour has on the contribution of these men

to literature. How does it concern the seeker of emotional solace or

intellectual sustenance to know that Poe and Verlaine were drunkards,

that Rimbaud and Baudelaire were inverted genesically; that Hearn’s

father was an Irish rake devoid of parental responsibility, his mother

an Ionian of composite ancestry profoundly psychopathic who married a

Jew?

Mr. Tinker says, “Hearn’s peculiarities and mental affinities were

entirely the result of idiosyncrasies of ancestry and youthful

environment.” Well, is Hearn any different in that respect from

the whole world? Does Mr. Tinker aim to do what Mr. White recently

attempted to do for Woodrow Wilson: allot his cardiac virtues to the

Wilsons and his cerebral gifts to the Woodrows? I suppose he would

attribute his bulimia and illassible sexual cravings to Charles Bush

Hearn; his tenderness for cats and his desire to create beauty to Rosa

Tessima; his Jesuit phobia to the strain of English blood; his penchant

for gastronomies to the Turk strain; his _Wanderlust_ to an ancestral

Arab; his passion for personal cleanliness to a gipsy forebear who had

learned that there are few more pleasant experiences than those of

bathing; his pride to a remote Moor; but his sensitiveness came from

his wall eye--all his friends say that.

Mr. Tinker thinks “his warring inherited instincts were to have a large

part in moulding his life, for they made of his soul a battleground.

Frank Oriental sensuousness was shamed, but not curbed, by Anglo-Saxon

self-control. Gallic expansiveness tried to break through Arab

impassivity, and all the while, Gipsy lure of the road and love of

new location lashed his life to restlessness; in short, what one

set of inherited impulses bade him do, another inhibited, until all

constructive action was paralysed.”

Lafcadio Hearn’s soul as it has been revealed to me from a long

intimacy with his writings is not my idea of a battleground.

Undoubtedly his instincts had much to do with shaping his life. They

have in shaping the life of any one who amounts to something. Lafcadio

Hearn had a very high sex coefficient and he did not bend the knee

to church and convention. Well, there are others, and I fancy they

would deny that their souls are battlegrounds. And this paralysis of

constructive action, how does that show itself? Certainly not in New

Orleans, more certainly not in Japan. Perhaps in Martinique? The heat

and the atmosphere there make for lassitude that is tantamount to

paralysis. We are perhaps on safer ground in attributing it to them

than to warring impulses. I need scarcely add that I do not admit

Hearn’s “paralysis of constructive action.”

Mr. Tinker’s book is a wrong picture of Lafcadio Hearn, but it is not

the author’s fault. It is Hearn’s fault. He should not have philandered

with Althea Foley; he should have spurned Dr. Gould’s advances; and

knowing Denny Corcoran’s record he should have avoided him; and we

can never forgive him for not wearing “stylebuilt” clothes. Had he

done so he would not have had Krehbiel’s door slammed in his face, nor

would the great musical critic have had occasion to write the letter,

Cæsarean in brevity and Nelsonian in construction: “Dear Hearn, you can

go to Japan, or you can go to Hell.”

Suppose Mr. Tinker were to get drunk and stay so more or less for a

week, and that I should shadow him with camera and notebook. Does any

one think that my record of his conduct and my picture of him would be

correct or adequate? I do not. It might do him a great injustice.

However, much should be forgiven a biographer who makes such searching

criticism as: Hearn’s constant vigilance to suppress finally came

to inhibit his creative power. This explains the carefully wrought

artificiality--the tenuousness of subject matter, but the exquisite

finish of form--which is characteristic of all his books. The truth is

he was forced to spin gossamer out of hemp when he could have made it

into strong rope.

* * * * *

William Dean Howells said that Mark Twain was the Lincoln of

literature. That is the apogee of praise. The more facets of his

personality we see, the more richly does he seem to deserve the praise.

The immortality of Poe, Whitman, and Mark Twain would seem to be

assured. Other names have been on the roster long enough to make

it fairly certain that they also will be chosen, but Hawthorne’s

reputation wanes as Melville’s enhances. Edwin Robinson a generation

hence may have greater renown than Longfellow, and William James may be

quoted when Emerson is forgotten.

We long for a great emotional writer as the Jews long for a Messiah,

and the fact that Mark Twain was vouchsafed us encourages me to believe

that our chances are greater than those of the Jews. We have never had

a really great poet unless Whitman was one, and not even an approach to

a satirist, and Mark Twain is our signal contribution to humour. He had

also the capacity to convey it, and an unawareness of the supremacy of

either gift. With it all he was a philosopher, a man of culture, and

fundamentally a poet.

His was the antithesis of the Messianic complex. He had a simple

heart, and an intricate soul. None of his writings reveals it as

does his autobiography. It is as unlike the customary autobiography

as Mark Twain was unlike the average man. It does not begin with a

tedious narrative of his forebears, and tiresome descriptions of their

environment. Nor does it dwell upon his mental prodigiousness and moral

sufficiency, followed by the enumeration of the obstacles he surmounted

owing to his health, holiness, habit, and his unusual possessions. It

does not end with a verbal portrait provocative of memories of Dr.

Munyon and his warnings.

It is the picture of a man, happily not a one-hundred-percent-American,

who lived during the second most important epoch of this country’s

history, and who from early childhood was a close observer and from his

youth a faithful transcriber of his observations. He began to write his

autobiography in his teens and continued to write it nearly to the day

of his death. _Roughing It_, _Tom Sawyer_, _Life on the Mississippi_,

_Innocents Abroad_, are just as much description of his life as his

autobiography.

Mark Twain’s conception of how to write biography was to start at no

particular “period,” to wander at will over his life, to talk only

about the thing which interested him for the moment, to drop it when

its interest threatened to pale, and to turn his talk upon the new and

more interesting things that intruded themselves into his mind meantime.

It is not only the picture of Samuel L. Clemens that one gets with the

autobiography. There are little masterpieces of his brother Orion, of

his daughter Susy, of his wife and of his mother, and there is one

of General Grant that should add to his fame as a generous, kindly,

big-hearted, forgiving man.

[Illustration: MARK TWAIN]

Did any one ever describe an amiable person so well as he describes

his fellow schoolboy John Robards; and did any one ever succeed

better in conveying the handicap that excessive amiability puts upon

its possessor? But the kohinoor of this tray of jewels is his

description of his brother Orion. Mark Twain may not have succeeded

in writing an account of his own life that was satisfactory, or

that he considered revelatory, but the description and analysis of

his brother’s personality is a real contribution to psychology and

biography. It is possibly the best description of a human chameleon

in all literature. It may never become as familiar as that of Colonel

Sellers, for Mark Twain did not put him _au naturel_ in his fiction.

Orion Clemens was fifty-fifty optimist and pessimist. Aside from the

fundamental endowments of honesty, truthfulness, and sincerity, he

was as unstable as water, as inconstant as a weather vane. He had an

unquenchable thirst for praise. You could dash his spirits with a

single word; you could raise them unto the sky with another. He was

a Presbyterian one Sunday, a Methodist the next, and a Baptist when

the fancy seized him. He was a Whig to-day, Democrat next week, and

anything fresh he could find in the political market the week after.

He invariably acted on impulse and never reflected. He woke with

an eagerness about some matter or other every morning; it consumed

him all day; it perished in the night; and before he could get his

clothes on he was on fire with a fresh interest next morning. He

literally took no thought for the morrow, and it was inevitable that

his illustrious brother should have to support him during his waning

days. Psychologically, he was a splendid example of adult infantilism,

manic-depressive temperament; genius is often associated with these

possessions.

The outline and the penumbra of these same qualities are to be seen

in Mark Twain himself. He was emotional, impulsive, explosive, avid

of praise, subject to depression and exaltation, and unprovident. But

he was teachable and his eldest brother was not; experience taught

him and environment influenced him, but they had no more effect upon

Orion than headache has upon a drunkard. Above all, the possession that

distinguished Samuel from Orion was humor.

There is much inquiry these days whether man has ceased to progress,

and biologists ask themselves if evolution is at a standstill. From

the standpoint of intellectuality it has apparently ceased. We have

had nothing the past two thousand years that compares with the eight

hundred years of unfettered thought which the human race enjoyed

while Greek philosophy was supreme. That progress has ceased from the

standpoint of emotionality is not so apparent, and this is the ray of

hope that reaches us; for if it has not ceased, we can confidently

look forward to a new code of ethics that will be livable, a new

dispensation that will allow the sheep and the goats to pasture in the

same field and sleep in the same shed, a new religion that will be

reconcilable with science.

It transcends understanding that so much attention is given to

the intellect and so little to the emotions. It is the latter,

together with articulateness, that distinguish us from the beast,

and approximate us to God. Humour and love are the two most precious

emotional possessions. Mark Twain had them both, and none of his

writings reveals them more conspicuously than his autobiography.

His account of Orion’s adventure at the house of Dr. Meredith, his

description of how he himself caught the measles, how he found the

fifty-dollar bill and the thoughts that it engendered, how he was

temporarily cured of the habit of profanity by his wife, are examples

of his humour; and his accounts of Susy, of his wife, of Patrick,

reveal his love. His narratives about the burglarisation of his house,

the interview with President Cleveland’s wife, the potato incident at

the Kaiser’s dinner party, his description of the illness and death of

his little boy--as well as the testimony of his family and intimates

show how enslaved he was by revery.

One of the many things that make this autobiography so delightful,

is its revelation of how human Mark Twain was in his sympathies and

antipathies, in his loves and hatreds. His words about Susy and Livy

are as tender as anything I have read in a long time, and his account

of Patrick makes one regret that the juggernaut Progress has eliminated

the coachman. In the jargon of the day, Theodore Roosevelt “got his

goat”; and the things he said about those who sought to crush him after

they had brought about his financial ruin would not be considered

printable in the Victorian era.

Mark Twain was in deadly earnest about many things he said “in fun.”

I choose to believe that when he wrote, “I intend this autobiography

shall become a model for all future autobiographies, and I also intend

that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its

form and method,” he meant what he said. Whether he meant it or not

it is true, and his country, proud of him, should be pleased with the

account he left of himself to be published posthumously. It is ideal

though it is not adequate. Those who would know what sort of man Mark

Twain was may find out by reading it; those who wish to learn what

he accomplished, how he did it and where, may learn from Mr. Paine’s

biography of him. It is to be hoped that the rumour that there are

other volumes to follow is founded in fact.

Mark Twain was a spiritual composite of Patrick, the coachman and

gentleman; of Mr. Burlingame whose ways were all clean, whose motives

were high and fine; of Dr. John Brown who immortalised his own name

with _Rab and His Friends_; and of his brother Orion, as they are

described by himself. The best of Hermes was beaten up in the mixture.

Joe Miller and Miguel Cervantes alternated as batter beaters.

* * * * *

The further removed we get from the time of Henry David Thoreau, the

more appealing his personality and his experiment will be to us and

to our descendants. He was difficult to approach, more difficult to

companion, impossible to love, and hard to admire. Death took the

offence out of his egotism, the meaninglessness out of his paradoxes,

the repulsion out of his self-sufficiency. We forget his congenital

and laboriously acquired incapacity for enthusiasm when we read how he

championed John Brown. It no longer irritates us that he was determined

to base the laws of the universe on his own experiences and convictions

when we see through the vista of nearly a century how he lived his

hermit-like life. Time pales his peculiarities and limitations, and

tints his possessions and virtues. It may safely be prophesied that, as

we grow individually more sophisticated and nationally less democratic,

the books that have been made from his diary will be read with greater

avidity and more understanding.

A new biography of the Poet-Philosopher-Naturalist and America’s first

famous recluse, written by a foreign pen, justifies these statements.

Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has made a translation of the book which mirrors

his culture and testifies his mastery of literary technique. It is

the work of a Frenchman who stresses the Gallic and Celtic strain in

Thoreau, and who sympathises with his determination to create and

develop himself, to live, to make of existence the most beautiful

work of art. M. Bazalgette pitches his song of praise in a high key.

At times, it taxes the reader’s credulity; at other times, the high

notes long sustained exhaust him. The biographer loves to dwell on

Thoreau’s affectivity. He not only tells how Thoreau felt, he describes

his thoughts, and the thoughts he should have had. But he makes no

estimate of him as a poet, philosopher or naturalist. He submits the

facts of his life, the contacts of his activity, and lets the reader

draw his own conclusions. It is a picture of Thoreau that many will

prefer to that drawn by Sanborn, or Channing who knew him intimately,

or by Marble or Salt who were dependent upon his diaries and letters

for their information; for many prefer portraits that are idealised,

and he depicts his physical features as no other biographer has done.

M. Bazalgette essays to reincarnate and display the poet’s thoughts

on his peregrinations and pilgrimages. Some of these reflections are

infantile, a few puerile, such as the description of his knapsack

and the little bundle he carried in his hand; the discussion of the

advantages of an umbrella over a raincoat; the discourse on shoe

strings and on old newspapers.

There can be little doubt that Thoreau was sometimes playful and

joyous with human beings, but I doubt if he were ever so capable of

self-forgetfulness as it is alleged he was on a visit to New Bedford

when he executed, before his hostess at the piano, a Zulu dance in the

presence of Mr. Alcott. The story reminds one of the conduct of the

First Ranger in Von Weber’s romantic opera.

It was a strange freak of nature that manifested itself in Concord,

Mass., July 12th, 1817, by the birth of a Thoreau child to which was

given the name of Henry David. In breeding parlance he was a “sport,”

but from the social standpoint, he was far removed from it. He did

not have the varied ancestry that Sinclair Lewis gives Doctor Martin

Arrowsmith, but it was diversified enough to satisfy any one. Three

distinct chromosonic streams, French, Scotch and Saxon, confluented in

him. His father was the son of a Frenchman born in the Isle of Jersey

who married Jane Burns, daughter of a Quaker Scotch who emigrated to

Massachusetts. His mother’s forebears, the Dunbars and the Jones, had

been long enough in this country to be entitled to the designation

American.

There was little of Hermes in Henry Thoreau, but that little he got

from a maternal uncle, Charles Dunbar, and from him also he got his

unconventionally, his _wanderlust_, his self-command, his equilibrium

and determination. Uncle Charles had a disdain for taking thought of

the morrow that amounted to contempt and nephew Henry inherited it.

Where he got his self-sufficiency, his indifference to man and his

comforts, his amatory dysesthesia we are still uninformed.

No biographer has ever found much material for his pen in the plastic

years of Thoreau. M. Bazalgette has been no more successful than his

predecessors. Thoreau’s most distinctive urge: love of nature, and

the most conspicuous feature of his personality: self-sufficiency,

revealed themselves early in life and accompanied him to the day of

his death, and that is all there is to be said. Neither in school nor

in college did his conduct suggest scholarship or antinomianism, but

on leaving Harvard his Commencement Oration, in which he unrolled his

map of life, suggested them both. His auditors perceived but did not

apprehend that the future itinerant surveyor had had other engrossments

than examinations at Harvard. For him “this curious world which we

inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than

it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used. The

order of things should be somewhat reversed: the seventh should be

man’s day of toil wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow,

and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul.” The

distinguishing feature of the paranoiac is that he reasons logically,

often trenchantly, but his premises are always wrong. One could argue

that the world is the most congenial place we know, that its usefulness

is testified by the mouths that it feeds, that those whom it supports

would not go very far should they substitute admiration for use of it.

Radicalism which had budded slowly in college flowered quickly at home.

It disturbed his family and annoyed his town-folk but water on a duck’s

back was a riot compared to the sensations that their disturbance

and annoyance caused in him. Had he been in the habit of invoking

supernatural aid he probably would have said, “God help me, I can do no

other.” A college course nearly a century ago was supposed to prepare

for a vocation, but Henry Thoreau manifested no sign that it had

prepared him. He began to teach in the public school, but his ideas and

conduct were offensive to parent and taxpayer, so he started a school

of his own and began to be keenly attentive to his sole confidant, his

diary; and he built a boat. In it, he and his brother John went from

Concord, Mass., to Concord, New Hampshire. The description of that

trip is the only tiresome section in M. Bazalgette’s book. This is all

the more astonishing to one who read _The Week_ in his boyhood, was

fascinated by it, and who has read parts of it many times since then.

Thoreau’s contact with the transcendentalists is described most

sympathetically, and the sketches which the author makes of some of

the leading figures, Emerson, Alcott, Channing, Margaret Fuller, are

animated and vigorous. If ever one falls in love with Thoreau it is

when he goes to the Emersons, to work for his board, as it were. Here

for the first time, he seems to be human: his playfulness with the

children, his praise of Mrs. Fuller, his appreciation of Aunt Mary

testify his kinship to man. The chip which he seemed always to carry

on his shoulder when he frequented the haunts of man, was consigned

to the woodbox and quickly burnt up. Here he indulged his tastes and

developed his ambition. The fields and the woods told him their secrets

and his host took him on adventurous excursions through the clouds into

the realms of philosophy. The children adored him, birds trusted him,

beasts loved him. Thoreau was happy and admitted it. But happiness like

all other things in the world is transitory and cyclical. He found it

out when he went to Staten Island to tutor the Philosopher’s nephew.

Neither the child nor the parents was sympathetic, and he was soon

back in Concord helping his father make pencils. Manual labour was, in

his opinion, the thing which agrees best with an intellectual worker.

It would seem to have been congenial to him--at times. Agrippa would

probably have agreed with him but scarcely any one this side of the

Roman. But that no one was in accord with him would not have disturbed

Henry Thoreau. Like all possessors of paranoiac trends, he had faith

and confidence in himself that transcended in intensity and depth every

other kind of faith and confidence. He was not like other men. He was

an American who cared nothing about getting on; a Yankee without the

slightest relish for trading; a man who seemed bent on remaining poor;

an individual in whose veins flowed the blood of the Celt and the Gaul,

whose temperature had never been raised by any of Eve’s descendants; he

was the one man in all the world who did not need a friend. He could

heed nothing that was said by man and he could hear everything that was

said by Nature. Public opinion was against him, but he had a contempt

for public opinion and for those who made it that words are impotent

to express. He liked all animal life, man least of all. The higher

one goes in the scale of animal life, the less the species understood

him and trusted him. His fellows found him conceited, sarcastic,

uppish; animals found him kind, companionable and simple. Men doubted

his sincerity and his sanity, but their doubt was founded on their

own fatuity. Animals trusted him. He was in love with the world and

satisfied with himself. He was more incapable of love than Amiel.

He had some family feeling as a child, but as years went by, it was

replaced by an affectionate feeling for poor, ignorant, simple people,

and small folk. They were his real family. He did not want to live with

them; he wanted to live alone, but he wanted to think of them. They

were like regular work, they would prevent him from living his life.

The simple life as Roosevelt understood it was a riot of luxury for

Thoreau.

It is well-known that solitude whether of desert or mountain often

increases self-consciousness to such a degree that the individual

doubts his own identity. But the eternities did not press down on

Thoreau, or submerge the boundaries of his reason. Neither solitude

nor poverty, neither dreaming nor distress of mind could make a

mystic of Thoreau. He was practical and pragmatic, but the world of

his acquaintance would not admit it. He patted the non-conformist of

religion on the back; he spat in the face of the non-conformist of life.

The whole world knows that he built himself a cabin on Walden Pond; as

John the Baptist did in the wilderness, he nourished himself on locusts

and wild honey with an occasional cereal and vegetable. For two years

he devoted himself to finding out what life is and how it should be

lived. Thoreau’s poetic biographer would have us believe that every

hour in Walden was like the measure of sand passed through the sieve of

the gold seeker--it left enough of residue to make a boy comfortable

for the rest of his days; perhaps it did, but many of his readers other

than those from Missouri will want to have other proof of it than is

given in a book entitled _Walden, or Life in the Woods_. It is the

romantic Frenchman who sees him there in this setting.

“You would say then that the earth had chosen this poor,

shy boy whom you see absorbed there, on the threshold

of his cabin, as an instrument for thinking in peace

of its own unity and eternity. How can he say where he

is? The planet is silent, time and space are strangely

annihilated, the notion of any journey is lost, he may

be at the antipodes. Under the pines of Walden, this man

who is lost in his dream is Mir Mohammed Ali, perhaps,

the painter of Ispahan; his American profile is drawn

in miniature in the colours of a precious stone on the

blue of the pond. Or is he some Chinese poet-philosopher

in whom mingle the souls of animals, and plants, and

hermits sitting under an arbour near a little lake? There

comes to this man as he listens to sounds beyond music,

a music that is deeper and more ample than the music of

his everyday life; he feels on his palate as it were a

taste of immortality--it grows clearer than the clear

morning about him. This beetle that buzzes by, this sweet

flag swaying on the pond are like messengers charged

with transmitting to him the friendship of men who have

dreamed the same dreams in the depth of the old Orient.”

But the friendship of the forest became irksome to Thoreau and he went

back to the Sage’s house while the Sage himself was abroad. Again it

fitted him like an old glove. He was not ecstatic there as he was in

his cabin on the pond, but he was happy; this happiness was interrupted

by a lady who thought to marry him, but like so many other little

annoyances of life, the trouble was transitory. After a short time he

tried lecturing but he did not hit it off with his audiences. They

could not stomach either his paradoxes or his ferocious affirmations.

He irritated, not amused them; he bored, not instructed them.

When he was in contact with a superior like Emerson or Agassiz, he

curbed his tongue, but how he really felt about scientists may be

learned from his journal; he considered them pedantic and pretentious.

He went to Boston to consult a book but, in the Library he was so

self-conscious that he could not concentrate his attention. The city,

though it reeked of respectability, was full of shams and shoddy.

“What,” he demanded, “is the real?”

The one great enthusiasm of Thoreau’s life was engendered by John

Brown. He had no more patriotism than he had family feeling, but he had

an enormous sense of justice. The speeches and conduct of that veteran

abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, moved him considerably, but the

seizure of the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on October 18th,

1859, frenzied him. He had met John Brown, he had learned something

of his thought and of his plans, without being particularly moved by

them. But he was agitated to the depth of his soul by the thought of

the gallows’ rope strangling the rough neck of his old friend and he

began a verbal and scriptural drive to prevent the violence. It was the

only real storm of his blood. M. Bazalgette describes it with great

artistry. Likewise Thoreau’s meeting with Whitman is well rendered,

but with not quite the same attention to verity. The account of the

naturalist’s encounter with his hereditary enemy, tuberculosis, of his

trip to the Middle West, of his last days, is masterfully done.

The great hiatus in Thoreau’s nature, moral and physical, was his

incapacity for friendship. Emerson liked him but not enthusiastically,

and he was Emerson’s handy man. Harrison Blake made a hero of him,

and Daniel Ricketson of Cape Cod tried to deal with him on terms of

equality; but the former’s admiration annoyed him, and a little of the

latter’s _bonne camaraderie_ sufficed him for a long time. The man who

came nearest to him was William Ellery Channing: whimsical, fanciful,

unsociable, infantile but charming--of whom Thoreau wrote: “He will

accept sympathy and aid, but he will not bear questioning. He will

ever be reserved and enigmatic and you must deal with him at arm’s

length.” It is not improbable that he understood Thoreau but one is not

convinced of it by reading _Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist_, published in

1876.

M. Bazalgette’s sympathy with his subject facilitates understanding,

and the concluding pages of the seventh section of his book is the

best soul-portrait of Henry Thoreau in existence. But it is not the

last. Others will attempt it. Some day an interpreter of behaviour will

explain the man who wrote, “For joy I could embrace the earth, I shall

delight to be buried in it. And then I think of those among men who

will know that I love them, though I tell them not.” The interpreter

will tell why he did not tell them and why he could not.

Henry Thoreau was an intellectual monster. It showed in his face,

in his prehensility, dexterity, sense-acuteness and in his conduct.

He was a misogynist, teetotaler, vegetarian. He had no family or

community feeling. He was wholly devoid of the sense of humour. He

had no generosity, no sense of obligation, no bowels of compassion,

save for animals. He was a universal dissenter, saturated with keen

self-appreciation and devoted to self-indulgence. He had none of the

weaknesses called vices, few of the strengths called virtues, and

despite it all in life he was happy and in death he is a national

asset. He will therefore always be an interesting subject for the

moralist, the behaviourist and the psychologist.

His was a strange personality. He could not come out of himself, mingle

with the world, lose his soul and thus save it. He had no wife, no

children, no home, no town, no country as a part of himself, and yet

despite this his “self” seemed not to suffer mutilation. A modern

philosopher, Bradley, says: “A man is not what he thinks of, and yet is

the man he is because of what he thinks of.” Thoreau was a man made by

thought and he was that man because of what he thought.

Henry Thoreau did not add to the world’s knowledge, nor did his

activities increase or facilitate its dissemination, but he made a

contribution to the art of living at a time that was propitious and

in a country that sadly needed it. He was a primitive in an artless

land, an idealist in a country of materialists, a pagan in a community

of puritans, a singer of nature to philistines with ears stuffed with

cotton wool. He sought the ideal with the same ardour as man seeks the

pleasure of the senses. He was a thinker, not a sensualist; a poet not

a priest; a Pagan not a Christian; a genius not well poised who blazed

the way for Burroughs and Muir and scores of others who have opened our

eyes to the beauty of nature and have shown us how to appreciate and

profit by familiarity with it. Personality defects fortunately do not

long outlive the body. We quickly forget, when those we love are no

longer with us, the things that annoyed us and we remember only their

virtues. Time will remove the sting from Thoreau’s contempt, the hurt

from his disdain, the injury from his indifference to the beliefs and

welfare of his fellow-man. It will deal with him as it is dealing with

Woodrow Wilson.

* * * * *

“For God’s sake, try to get at him” said Convick to his young friend

when he threw Vereker’s (Henry James’) new novel into his hand and

asked him to review it for the _Times Literary Supplement_. The young

friend did it and he was convinced that he _had_ got at him; but later

when Vereker said across the dinner table at a country house where

he was staying, when the review came under discussion, “Oh, it’s

all right--the usual twaddle,” Convick’s young friend did not feel

so puffed up. Yet he need not have felt humiliated, for Henry James

himself was more lacking in specificity when he discussed his books

than when he talked of anything else. The earlier ones were written

that he might indulge his creative instinct (which was to produce works

of art); the next that he might discover new avenues leading to art’s

treasury; the last that he might guess the riddle that he propounded.

There was an idea in his work just the same as there was in Goya’s.

Goya was not able to describe it, neither was Henry James. A great many

persons have succeeded in giving us a fairly comprehensive account of

Goya’s idea; and a few, for instance, Mr. Follett, Mr. Beach, Miss

Rebecca West, have laboured with considerable success to make us see

the treasures of patience and ingenuosity that Henry James displayed in

the perpetuation of _his_ idea. Many readers of Henry James do not see

that the texture of his books constitutes a complete representation of

what he believed to be an exquisite scheme, but the initiated do and

that is all he had a right to expect.

A sensitive, scholarly, sympathetic student of literature, Van Wyck

Brooks, who has made a serious and laborious study of his writings

which he calls _The Pilgrimage of Henry James_, attempts to explain why

Henry James made a failure of life. If the interested reader objects

that the word “failure” is too strong, he has only to study the last

years of the master’s life, during which he expressed frequently to

his friends a dissatisfaction with his accomplishments, and allowed

them to discern that he had not received from the world the beer and

skittles that he had anticipated in order to be convinced the term is

not misapplied.

Mr. Brooks would have us believe that Henry James had a delusion and

that it conditioned his conduct. The delusion was that somewhere in the

world he could find a cordial, inviting culture; a people who would

have urbanity, understanding, and charm; an arena where vulgarity of

speech and conduct were rigorously excluded, where they would die of

inanition did they succeed in forcing an entrance; where there would

be no jostling, elbowing, or hurrying; where no one was better than

his neighbour; where boasting was barred and boosting prohibited;

a land where every prospect pleased and not even man was vile; the

ideal land for which no one but a Henry James ever searches. Then Mr.

Brooks thrusts an illusion on him as well, an optical illusion: he sees

England as such a land.

After nursing the delusion for more than a quarter of a century, and

after having lived intimately with the illusion for a similar period,

the cloud began to lift from his mind, the scales to drop from his

eyes. The delusion gradually left him and the illusion faded and

vanished. Then his mind became the prey of a question: whether he might

not have developed more harmoniously and survived more effectively

had he remained in America. The question obsessed him and, strangely

enough, since obsessions do not usually condition deliberate conduct,

it compelled him to formulate a plan to “go back to America, to retrace

the past, to see for himself, to recover on the spot some echo of

ghostly footsteps, the sound as of taps on the window-pane heard in

the glimmering dawn.” He had been in cotton-wool too long, he must

experience some of the perils of exposure, otherwise, he would succumb

to the first draught; moreover, he was hungry for material, for an

“all-round renovation of his too monotonised grab-bag”; he needed

shocks.

Had I not such a high regard for Mr. Brooks as author and interpreter,

I should reply to him as M’Liss did to the school-examiner who sought

to humble her beloved schoolteacher by posing the question: “Has the

sun ever stood still in the heavens?” But as I have such esteem of

him, of his sincerity and artistry, I content myself with saying, “It

is not true.” To bring Mr. Hueffer (I assume he means Ford Madox Ford)

forward to give corroborative testimony does not bolster up the case.

Mr. Ford is a discredited witness; his reputation for veracity has had

a tremendous dent put in it recently by Mrs. Conrad. And I am in as

favourable a position to give testimony as even Mr. Gosse. When Henry

James made this “come back” attempt which Mr. Brooks elaborates in

the chapter entitled “The Altar of the Dead,” the arterial disease to

which he finally succumbed had already progressed to such a stage as to

give great anxiety and concern to his intimates. He put himself under

my professional care and I saw him at close range nearly every day

for two months; and talked with him, or listened to him, on countless

subjects. I believe that it would not have been possible for him to

have harboured and essayed the plan that Mr. Brooks credits him with

having, or to have ruminated on it as he says he did, without my having

become aware of its existence in his mind.

Henry James was a man out of the ordinary. He was the type of man that

one, no matter how widely travelled, meets but once or twice in a

lifetime. It would take a long time to enumerate his virtues, for he

had them all, the cardinal and the trivial. He loved bread, music and

the laugh of a child, hence no one kept him three paces distant. It

would also take a long time to enumerate his defects, for though he had

few of the major ones, he had a multitude of the minor.

I have always questioned whether it facilitates an understanding of

Henry James the artist to understand Henry James the man. In my own

case, I am sure I had as comprehensive a peep into his artistic soul

after I had read _The Turn of the Screw_, _The Princess Casamasima_,

_The Ambassadors_, and _The Golden Bowl_, as after I had come to know

him intimately, when he was engrossed in the problem of abstract design

and fundamental organisation.

Henry James had an enormous amalgam of the feminine in his make-up; he

displayed many of the characteristics of adult infantilism; he had a

singular capacity for detachment from reality and with it a dependence

upon realities that was even pathetic. He had a dread of ugliness in

all forms, banality and vulgarity that the devil is reputed to have for

Holy Water, and he was solitary-hearted. Unlike Hartley Coleridge’s

queen of noble nature’s crowning, he had love and he had understanding

friends, but he had small capacity to avail himself of the gifts which

they desired to lavish on him. His life had been devoted to the pursuit

of an ideal; he had never been able to formulate with precision,

or to describe that ideal with words. He came as near to it in the

little story called _The Figure in the Carpet_ as he could come to

it. If he were not able to describe this ideal with the lucidity and

comprehensibility with which Leonardo described his, when he was at the

zenith of his creative power, why are we astonished at his inability to

do it when these powers were undermined by arteriosclerosis?

The great defect in the make-up of Henry James was in the amatory

side of his nature. His amatory coefficient was comparatively low;

his gonadal sweep was narrow. Had he had a quarter of the former that

Goethe possessed or one-half the sweep of Anatole France, it would be

safe to say that Henry James would have been the greatest literary

figure that ever came out of America, and that there would now be many

James carrying his name to perpetuity. It is a measureless impediment,

inability to fall in love; it is a dreadful handicap to have feminine

and masculine characteristics nearly equally proportioned in one’s

make-up; adult infantilism makes tremendously for dissatisfaction with

what life brings, and a low basal metabolic rate which gives rise to a

race of fletcherisers or other faddists is a burden that many find too

hard to bear.

Henry James had them all. Had he not had them, he would have been

happier and possibly he would have had a more successful career as

an author, if success is measured by the rule of popularity. If his

grandfathers had not been Irish; if he had spent his youth in Hoboken

and not in Newport; if he had gone to school in the fifth ward and not

in Switzerland; if he had had a little judicial starving meted out to

him in his early maturity, he might have had a happier old age and

fewer yearnings, fewer regrets that his life had not been fuller. Not

that I admit for one moment that his old age was unhappy, or that he

had such regrets or yearnings. The idea is Mr. Brooks’. It is in his

book we find that here was a sort of a lost soul, beating its enfeebled

wings against a cage from which time had not only removed the gild, but

which it had rusted as well.

Henry James did not dislike America, but the people he met here

with few exceptions did not interest him, and most of them annoyed

him, sometimes to the point of explosion. He had had many pleasant

experiences in Italy and in France, and he treasured them as a prima

donna treasures programmes and testimonials. He often took them from

the strongboxes of his memory and re-invoked the pleasurable sensations

that he had had in acquiring them. Above everything in the world he

valued good form, and all that it implies; good taste, good manners,

good breeding, good conduct, and he had convinced himself from taking

thought and from experience that it was to be had in England, even

without the asking. He took his tree of life there and planted it

and only one root developed, the social root. The political, the

scholastic, the religious, the marathon roots, did not develop. In

other words, the roots that make the tree of life so compelling of

admiration in England did not grow from the tree that Henry James

planted there. The tree that did grow was, however, sturdy and

majestic. It has given shade and protection to many travellers since

its full growth. The man who planted it insured, so far as he could,

that it should not soon be cut down, by making, a few months before

his death, the supreme genuflection to the country of his adoption.

He forfeited citizenship in the country of his birth and obtained

citizenship in the country that had sheltered him during the years

of his fruition. How could any such thesis as that of Mr. Brooks be

maintained in view of this last great gesture of Henry James, and why

is the act not mentioned in a book that aims to describe his pilgrimage?

Had James known that England is full of men like Jacob Heming,

one of Stella Benson’s Pipers, he probably would not have settled

there; he might have gone to Spain. There are many things about that

priest-infested, ceremonious country that would have appealed to Henry

James. He would have fitted Toledo as an oyster its shell.

No one need concern himself with proving to me that a man sheds his

inherited possessions only with the greatest difficulty. Among his

inherited possessions I place his religion, his politics, and his

“Patrie.” If a man whose father was known to me as a Democrat tells me

he is a Republican, I do not believe him. If a man whose parents were

Roman Catholics and who was brought up in that faith tells me that he

is a Baptist, I suspect his veracity. If I encounter a man living in

England without obvious reason who tells me that he is an American, I

immediately surmise that his conduct has been an offence to his own

land. And all this despite the fact that I have known the sons of a

Democrat who have always voted the Republican ticket, that I am on

terms of intimacy with an Unitarian clergyman who was formerly a Roman

Catholic priest, and that Mr. George Santayana seems to find England

more sympathetic as a permanent residence than Massachusetts. Moreover,

I do not recall having heard of a lament from Joseph Conrad that he

was not back in Poland or that he could not see Marseilles every now

and then. I know an American family named James whose members have

identified themselves conspicuously with the material and scientific

progress of this country who sent a branch to England two generations

ago and its members are more English than Winston Churchill; but that

knowledge does not separate me from the belief that one of the most

difficult things in the world to accomplish is to transfer a human

tree, after it has had vigorous growth, from the soil of one country

to another with the confident anticipation that it will bear abundant

fruit. In the majority of cases, it will die; very rarely will it bear

lusciously as it did in the case of Joseph Conrad. In some instances it

will bear every few years, but then not copiously as it did in the case

of Henry James.

Henry James had a happier life than any celibate who does not dedicate

his days to verbal praise of God is entitled to have. Responsibilities

as well as possessions are necessary for our happiness. They create

facets which permit us contact with life; they tend to frustrate the

increasing activities of the canker worm, egocentrism; and they succeed

in convincing him who possesses them that he is but a leaf on the tree

of humanity and not a branch or a bough. Had Henry James done his share

in peopling the earth he would have been as happy as any man I have

ever known save William Osler.

To uphold as a major thesis that, by forsaking the land of his birth he

had not given an adequate earnest of his talent, that he had failed to

saturate himself with life, that in his old age he found himself astray

in the gloomy wood, and that “it had been too much for him over there,”

must appear contrary to common sense or sound judgment to any one who

knew Henry James, who admired him as an artist and loved him as a man.

Is it not natural that a sensitive man, supremely susceptible to the

seductiveness of society, should, when the pulse of life begins to

intermit, dwell upon the terrors of loneliness; become apprehensive of

a future that would find him bereft of the sympathy that is the balm

of life, of that understanding which is the support of the inelastic

artery? Henry James knew that such society, sympathy, and staff were

in Cambridge, that they were composited in the family of his brother

William, that he might _have_ to go to them, as we all have to go to

the spring if there is no one to bring us the water.

He minimised the defects of his countrymen and exalted the virtues of

his country as he grew older. It is the way of a man with the world.

How often have I heard widows whose wounds I had dressed in their

matrimonial days, speak of their husbands as Anthony Burgesse spoke of

the Staffordshire Puritan Thomas Blake? “His kindness towards you could

not be considered without love, his presence without reverence, his

conversation without imitation. To see him live was a provocation to a

godly life, to see him dying might have made one weary of living.”

Any pilgrim who sets out on a journey may properly anticipate the

necessities of life even though he does not take them with him, but it

would be fatuous for him to hope for the comforts, and beyond belief

that he should expect the luxuries. Henry James in his pilgrimage found

the necessities, the comforts, and the luxuries, and we can never be

sufficiently grateful to the country of his adoption for having given

them to him without the asking.

François Mauriac, one of France’s coming great novelists, one indeed

who may be considered as having already arrived, said something in

explanation of his latest novel with which Henry James, at least in his

old age, would have agreed: “Even after years of living in Paris of

friendships, of loves and of travels, when the novelist is convinced

that he has accumulated enough human experience to fill a thousand

plots, he is astonished that his heroes always come from beyond this

tumultuous life--that they take shape in the darkest period of years

lived far from Paris and that they draw all their wealth from so much

poverty and aridity.” This constant going back to the years of youth

and early adolescence which obsesses François Mauriac has been felt by

Henry James and it is something of that sort that he had in mind when,

wishing to pump the pure essence of his wisdom and experience into his

most brilliant disciple, Edith Wharton, he said: “She must be tethered

to native pasture, even if it reduces her to a backyard in New York.”

Henry James was a master craftsman. He was concerned more with the

pattern than with the material with which he worked. He was continually

searching--not material but new ways of arranging it. M. Poiret reminds

me of Henry James. Material does not concern him much. It is the way it

is cut and basted. The finish is important too, but that is a detail.

The pattern is the thing.

IV

LITTERATEURS: FOREIGN WRITERS

ANATOLE FRANCE HIMSELF, by _Jean-Jacques Brousson_.

ANATOLE FRANCE AND HIS CIRCLE, by _Paul Gsell_.

ANATOLE FRANCE, THE MAN AND HIS WORK, by _J. Lewis May_.

ANATOLE FRANCE À LA BÉCHELLERIE, by _Marcel Le Goff_.

SAINTE-BEUVE, by _Lewis Freeman Mott_.

LEONID ANDREYEV, by _Alexander Kaun_.

JOSEPH CONRAD, by _Ford Madox Ford_.

JOHN DONNE, by _Hugh l’Anson Fausset_.

THE WIND AND THE RAIN, by _Thomas Burke_.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, by _John A. Steuart_.

Anatole France was picturesque, enigmatic and intriguing. He attracted

illuminators and interpreters. His protracted age gave biographers

ample time to prepare their revelations, interpretations and judgments

which came with a rush soon after his death--and before, and which

still come. The last of all these biographies is the best, that is, it

gives the best picture of him, both as individual and as savant. M.

Brousson, his Secretary for many years, had abundant opportunity to see

Anatole France without the mask he habitually wore. He has embodied

his observations and reflections in _Anatole France Himself_, and all

readers save literary historians and critics will find it satisfying.

Much was written of Anatole France during the latter years of his life.

His mode of life, methods of work, political, religious and social

ideas; his theoretical antinomianism and his practical conformity to

convention; and more than all his erudition excited curiosity, and from

attempt to satisfy it, there resulted envy in some, dislike in others,

admiration in all.

[Illustration: ANATOLE FRANCE]

_From a miniature Courtesy of Edward Wassermann_

The best interpretation of him and his work in English is by Mr. L.

P. Shanks, a graceful writer, a penetrating critic. The works of

Anatole France have been translated into English by Mr. Lewis May who

published _Anatole France, the Man and His Work_ in the year that

preceded his death. It is an agreeable introduction to the great

novelist, even though it is such a left handed and inadequate one.

The chief reason why Mr. May’s contribution to our knowledge and

understanding of Anatole France falls short of its aim, is that the

writer has not heeded the difference which exists between a biography

and a panegyric. It is a custom sanctified by time that the death of a

great contemporary figure should be the signal of a truce as it were;

foes lay down their arms for a period of time, friends and admirers

join in lauding the man who has gone to his reward. No one takes much

stock in an obituary dictated by the emotional reaction engendered by

death, and no one looks to such writing for constructive criticism, but

when a biography is written during the lifetime of the subject--be he

as old as Anatole France was when Mr. May published his--there should

be less puffing and more illumination, less heat and more light. Mr.

May allowed his personal feeling of friendship and his pleasure and

pride of semi-intimacy with Anatole France to colour his estimate

of the writer. He admires his versatility, his manysidedness, the

rapidity with which he changed his point of view. These are no grounds

for unqualified admiration. At most they would be occasion for wonder

and amazement, but the biographer should point to the danger of such

chameleon-like conduct, the weakness of such a nature. He “played all

parts in turn and played them all well,” but this very versatility

shows a lack of intimate convictions and standards. A philosophy

which consists of having none, a religion which insists on the

unsatisfactoriness of all belief--these are destructive and bewildering

forms of reasoning; but Anatole France combined these traits with

qualities and achievements which amply balanced their influence. What

we should have liked Mr. May to do, a thing which we are still waiting

for a biographer to do, is to have summed up, after consideration, the

contradictions, the theories, the principles and the talent of Anatole

France, from which we might obtain clear, critical, impartial, sober

judgment of the writer. He was more than any other author the Proteus

of modern time, an image and symbol of the constant change in man, and,

like Proteus, he could undergo a metamorphosis of ideas and judgments

which baffled the world at large, and made his personality a puzzle.

However, he did not have the reticence that the Greek hero had, nor the

loathing for answering questions; and he was so articulate that his

evolution is not difficult to master.

Every one agrees with Mr. May that Anatole France was a stylist of

talent, a psychologist of merit and a philosopher of profundity and

penetration, of smiling scepticism and amused tolerance; but to say

that a fairy bent over his cradle and endowed him with some of the

“douceur angevine” sung by Du Bellay, and that his voice is “the voice

of all humanity” is disregarding the claims of criticism. That is

just what Anatole France lacked most of all--the inspiring, soothing,

beneficial, unforgettable smile of a fairy over his cradle. Had he had

it, Mr. May’s estimation of Anatole France’s poetry, “that it will

endure so long as literature continues to interest mankind,” might find

a more responsive acceptation.

Anatole France the man was so closely linked with Anatole France the

writer that his biographers have been unable to separate them; and for

this we should be thankful. From the best pictures that are presented

to us, we gather an idea of the master-writer of the past generation

that is complete and convincing; his life was devoted to writing; and

his writing was always of life, as it appeared to him through intimacy

with ancient masters; through study of history; through contemplation

of his time; through deduction and observation of humanity. It is

difficult to divorce him from his own personality, and the biographers

who have succeeded in painting a picture of him that will endure have

all recognised this impossibility.

Of the many authors who have attempted to set down some of the most

interesting traits and characteristics of Anatole France, and who

have done it when their personal recollections were still fresh and

undimmed by time, Jean-Jacques Brousson has been the most successful.

He lived in close intimacy with the Master for many years; he is

himself endowed with critical faculty, with keen powers of observation

and, like Anatole France, he has a leaning toward the aspect of life

that puritans call the “unspeakable,” but which the French call

“_gauloiserie_.” If _Anatole France Himself_ is not a tribute of

respect and of deference Anatole France’s admirers would wish it to

be, at least, it does more than any other book has done to convince

us of the flesh-and-bone reality of the savant, to destroy the legend

that he was heartless. M. Brousson has written a biography in everyday

language, he has Boswellised his Master with fidelity, wit and a

certain amount of irony and of mockery which Anatole France would

probably have enjoyed and lauded. He has made him appear not only

in the flesh, but in the spoken word, so that the reader is able to

“listen in” and if he has an imagination vivid enough, he may believe

that he is living in the shadow of Anatole France. M. Brousson tells of

his first days of work at the Villa Saïd, of the tempers and tolerance

of his master, of his simplicity and his sarcasm; of his generosity

and his avarice; of his method of work and manner of play. The latter

has a large place in this biography, especially the only sort of

play in which Anatole France in his declining years could indulge:

imagination and ratiocination. We see him at times like a sensuous

and pleasure-bent faun; then he becomes the ascetic monk, with one

hand raised to an imaginary heaven in which the wisdom of time and the

wickedness of the world blend; now he is the writer, the historian, the

novelist, intent on his self-imposed task and working with industrious

and painstaking love. Then he becomes the child, reprimanded by

“Madame” because he refuses to tell a story with which she wishes

to impress her audience, or because he procrastinates in writing an

article for a Viennese newspaper; in turn he is the lover of antiques

and the searcher after old “estampes”; then he is the disillusioned

art-collector who finds that what his fancy believed to be genuine does

not bear the stamp of antiquity, and who overwhelms his secretary with

the objects that have ceased to please--generally in payment of his

services. We like him best when he is shown to be a real man, with a

heart and a nervous system reacting to emotional disturbance. “If you

could only read in my soul,” he said to his secretary one day, “you

would be terrified.”

“He takes my hands in his, and his are trembling and

feverish. He looks me in the eyes. His are full of tears.

His face is haggard. He sighs: ‛There is not in all the

universe a creature more unhappy than I. People think me

happy. I have never been happy for one day, not for a

single hour’.”

This reminds one of the text that Mark Twain constructed for his

autobiography:

“A person’s real life is led in his head, and is known

to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the

mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not

those other things that are his history. His acts and his

words are merely the visible, thin crust of his world

with its scattered snow summits and its vacant wastes of

water--and they are so trifling a part of his bulk; a

mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden--it

and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never

rest, night nor day.”

Anatole France hid his soul well: his volcano was frequently on the

point of eruption, but nearly always he succeeded in smothering it.

Jean-Jacques Brousson has written a valuable exposition of Anatole

France’s personality, of the home and the semi-public life of his hero,

and his intention to bring him as close and make him as familiar to us

as he could is evident in the French title of _Anatole France Himself,

Anatole France en Pantoufles_. This is the way in which we remember

him most vividly, with his felt slippers lined with purple, and his

multicoloured skull cap.

Another of his admirers is Paul Gsell, who was a frequent and faithful

visitor at the morning meetings at the Villa Saïd. Introduction to

these famous “audiences” was not difficult to get--the difficulty was

to get there a second time if the Master found the visitor a bore

or a fool. He could suffer neither, unless they were hidden in the

pulchritudinous envelope of an attractive woman--then everything was

allowed and overlooked to leave place for admiration and gallantry.

Paul Gsell has written _Anatole France and His Circle_, and his book

reads like a court report, or a newspaper interview, withal it is

full of the charm of the conversation of Anatole France, and of his

unforeseen and original reactions to ideas and beliefs. Among a great

many anecdotes and conversations which are interesting and instructive,

the episode of Mr. Brown, the Australian “stout, robust man of florid

complexion with close-shaven lips and chin,” who wore gold-rimmed

spectacles and who showed in his Anglo-Saxon elegance his assiduity

to golf and polo, and who came to see Anatole France in search of

the mystery ... the secret of literary genius, is one of the most

diverting. He may have found what he wanted, but his visit resulted, at

all events, in a disclosure of literary geniuses of the past as studied

by Anatole France which is remarkable in its scope and in its truth.

Paul Gsell’s book has had imitators and it has given an incentive to

assiduous followers of Anatole France to set down for posterity, some

of the memorable conversations and discussions at which they were

present. The most successful has been Marcel Le Goff, who, in the

last ten years of the Master’s life, saw him at his country home near

Tours, frequently and with increasing interest and admiration. He has

recorded his talks, but fortunately, he could not resist the temptation

of allowing us to peep into the intimacy of Anatole France, and into

his life at “La Béchellerie.” His tastes, and the trivialities which

form part of every life, have been divulged and even though M. Le Goff

is one of France’s admirers, he has avoided Mr. Lewis May’s pitfall and

has not allowed his personal feeling to blind him absolutely:

“Perhaps M. France has had weaknesses; it would be sad to

lay too much stress on them, to reveal them and to find

pleasure in their recital. One might better see in him,

the illustrious and permanent witness of the beauty of

our language and of the genius of our people.”

But the best biography of Anatole France is still the one he wrote

himself, under guise of four novels, _Le Petit Pierre_, _Le Livre de

Mon Ami_, _Pierre Nozière_ and _La Vie En Fleur_. They reveal the

formation of the clever novelist, of the profound thinker, of the

cultured critic, of the great stylist. Style was his obsession and

perfect expression of thought was his constant care; he reached the

heart of his subject as few younger authors have done, and never left

it until he had obtained all he could from it; surveying it from one

angle, then from another, he saw its shades and meanings, and this

explains some of his contradictions. Anatole France, partial as he was

as a man, was impartial when he wrote of universally interesting and

profoundly significant events.

By his allegiance to the teachings of the past, he deserved to be

called the last of the classicists; by his fidelity in maintaining

the traditions of novels, he is entitled to be called “romantic”; by

his love for the perfect phrase, for purity of form and loftiness of

sentiments, he proved himself a true son of the ancient masters; and by

his keen appreciation of intelligence, analysis and objectivity, he

made a definite place for himself in the modern school. His mind has

been influenced by the greatest minds of history and of literature. He

adopted their thoughts, and adapted their interpretation of life to his

own style, and he had neither scruples nor shyness in copying what had

already been said: “When a thing has been said, and well said, have no

scruples, take it. Give references? What for? Either your readers know

where you have gathered the passage and the reference is useless, or

else they do not know it, and you humiliate them by giving it.” That

was one tenet of his creed and many have said he lived up to it. He

did, indeed, and for that reason posterity is likely to rate him as an

interpreter more than as a creator, and to set him below men of real

creative genius, such as Ibsen, Dostoievsky, or Chekhov.

We do not need Jean-Jacques Brousson to point out to us France’s

principal fault in his literary work. It is evident in all his books.

He lacked a formulated plan, and had he had one, he probably would not

have pursued it with the energy, determination and single-mindedness

that Dostoievsky or Ibsen displayed. It was not his versatility that

shortened his reach for the crown of glory, it was his distractibility.

He could be diverted from a determination by whim, fancy, sentiment

or appeal, and most of all by the bigotries, stupidities, vanities

and selfishness of his people. He must hold them up to ridicule, lash

them with stinging words, scorch them with scorn and sting them with

sarcasm, before he could find peace in his “objets d’art,” satisfaction

in his bibelots, and contentment in contemplation of concrete beauty.

* * * * *

The star of Sainte-Beuve in the literary firmament of France shone

brilliantly during his lifetime; since his death its luminosity has

increased. Indeed, one may say that it has become a sort of sun which

lights the literary way with great brilliancy. Much has been written

about Sainte-Beuve in the brief half century since his death--brief

because of the tremendous changes which have taken place in his country

during that time and which have left relatively little leisure to

discuss and estimate the influence and achievement of a contemporary.

Moreover, the French are loath to commit themselves by placing a

crown of immortality on the brow of their artists, before time and a

certain unanimity of public opinion have confirmed the judgment of

early admirers. Yet, in the case of Sainte-Beuve it was different.

Immediately after his death he became for them the greatest critic of

the nineteenth century--possibly the greatest of all ages. It has not

been thought premature to attribute to him paternity of the modern

school of criticism, represented by Rémy de Gourmont. In the early

seventies, Matthew Arnold popularised Sainte-Beuve in England and

reverberations of this publicity soon reached this country; but it is

doubtful that he has the reputation here, especially among the younger

writers, that he deserves.

Until recently the biography by Count d’Haussonville has been our

most important document about Sainte-Beuve. It requires a delicate

and refined pen to write about Sainte-Beuve and it requires an

inborn distinction of mind and a responsiveness of heart such as

d’Haussonville possessed to understand and render the aristocracy

of Sainte-Beuve’s art--the art of one who was above all an artist,

with great intellectual powers at the service of his art, and who,

not content with his natural endowments, took endless pains and by

prodigious industry acquired vast learning.

And now we have another biography. A cultured and scholarly American

has written the most voluminous life of Sainte-Beuve that has appeared

in any language. Lewis Freeman Mott has gathered all the information

that previous biographers have given; garnered the most minute details,

elaborated and interpreted them. He has followed his subject from

birth to death, minute by minute, with closest attention. Mr. Mott’s

_Sainte-Beuve_ gives an impression of concentrated effort. He has

worked close enough to the subject to detect nuances difficult to

perceive, not close enough to hear the beating of the heart, and too

close to comprehend, in one large inclusive sweep, the atmosphere, the

local colour and the surroundings. It is a laboriously conceived study,

painstakingly faithful, rigorously integral, but not alluring.

Mr. Mott is one of the few biographers to lay emphasis on

Sainte-Beuve’s artistic endowment, but even he has done it more in the

letter than in the spirit. We wish that this last biographer had traced

Sainte-Beuve’s emotional reactions, instead of setting the finished

work before us with no clue to its genesis and fabrication. We know

that the French critic had more regard for good taste in literature

than for talent; that he was constantly seeking truth, that he frowned

on falsification of history and human nature; that he revolted against

the unnatural, abhorred abstract language and found delight even in the

most fugitive appearance of poetry, but all this we must divine, for

Mr. Mott does not prove it. He states the case as it appears to him and

is neither partisan nor judicial. He carries impartiality to the point

of indifference.

In the days of Sainte-Beuve’s early maturity, literary clans were

the fashion in Paris, and the _Cénacle_ of which he was one of the

shining lights, together with Alexandre Dumas, Gérard de Nerval,

Alfred de Vigny, Alfred de Musset and Victor Hugo, was one of the most

fashionable. The young men who met there to discuss their ambitions, to

find relaxation and stimulus and to air their views, were “strangely

garbed, wearing a ‛Merovingian prolixity of hair,’ and were ferociously

prepared to eat any stray Academician. They drank healths out of a

skull, tore the green coat from the back of Dumas” and showed an

effervescence and enthusiasm which has disappeared from the manners

of modern writers. But the _Cénacle_ was short lived, and Mr. Mott

has skilfully rendered the change of moods in Sainte-Beuve, whose

enthusiasm took him along different channels after the crisis of 1830.

He soon saw the danger of isolation, and of breaking up into groups;

“literature must become broader, more profound, accessible to all. The

time of the _Cénacle_ is past; the Romantic reversion to the Middle

Ages, the solitary inward revery, the detachment from reality” have

been replaced by sentiment for progressive and struggling humanity.

Sainte-Beuve then became revolutionary and proletarian, but lost none

of his delicate and artistic powers.

Sainte-Beuve had the capacity to shift quickly from one viewpoint to

the other, from one belief to another, from one political opinion

to its antithesis. This is common enough in men of great emotional

make-up, but it seldom goes with the sangfroid, the coolness, the

good sense and the clear judgment that he displayed. In him, these

sudden turns had their key in his emotions. He was sick at heart, a

prey to the passion that first Madame Hugo, then other women inspired

in him. In order to distract or benumb himself, he played with every

conceivable sort of thought. In all his love affairs, he was ardent

and sincere, and entered them without reserve or calculation. Though

he sought relief from the passion that possessed him, his emotional

disturbance was not allowed to interfere with his intellectual labour.

Mr. Mott should have taken the following quotation from Sainte-Beuve,

pondered and meditated it, for within it lies the secret of great

biographies:

“I have always been fond of the correspondence of

great men, of their conversations, their thoughts, all

the details of their character and manners, of their

biography in short; and especially when this biography

has not already been compiled by another, but may be

composed and constructed by oneself. Shutting yourself up

for a fortnight with the writing of some dead celebrity,

some poet or philosopher, you study him, turn him over

and over, and question him at leisure; you make him pose

for you; it is almost as though you passed a fortnight in

the country making a portrait or a bust of Byron, Scott

or Goethe; only you are more at ease with your model

and the tête-à-tête at the same time that it requires

strict attention, permits much closer familiarity. Soon,

an individuality takes the place of the vague, abstract

type. The moment the familiar motion, the revealing

smile, the vainly hidden crack or wrinkle is seized,

at that moment, analysis disappears in creation, the

portrait speaks and lives, you have found the man.”

Somehow the reader feels that Mr. Mott did not make Sainte-Beuve _pose_

for him.

It was the man in Sainte-Beuve, not the intellectual, who broke

with Victor Hugo and it was the jealousy of a human being, not the

superiority of a poet, that made him hate Madame Hugo when his affair

with her had lost its allurement. Mr. Mott has laid much stress on that

affair, and some may question the taste that guided him in this phase

of Sainte-Beuve’s life; but it must be said that Mr. Mott is firm in

his belief that there was more imagination, sentiment and words in the

romance of the two lovers than reality. He believes that their love was

based on a spiritual understanding, and one is inclined to agree with

him after reading his remarks on Sainte-Beuve’s inflamed state of mind,

after becoming familiar with the behaviour of the characters in his

only novel, _Volupté_, and after learning of the health of Madame Hugo.

Mr. Mott contrasts skilfully the sort of affair in which Victor Hugo

plunged with robustious frankness, with that of Sainte-Beuve and Madame

Hugo, it makes the latter appear like the pretty frolics of adolescence.

Sainte-Beuve had a genuine flair for literature. He justified La

Bruyère’s dictum: “the test of a man’s critical power is his judgment

of contemporaries.” _Les Lundis_, his greatest contribution to critical

literature, shows rare discernment in picking literary winners. He

was one of the first to express doubts regarding the permanency of

Chateaubriand’s works, and this despite the affection he had for him,

and his prominent place in the literature of the day. Mr. Mott’s

account of Sainte-Beuve’s position in the salon of Madame Récamier,

the guardian angel of the great men of her time, shows the biographer

at his best. His description of the “salon” and of the charm of Madame

Récamier are a fine bit of writing. Sainte-Beuve did not remain long

under her influence. About the time he forsook social intercourse

with her, he abandoned poetry and turned to criticism. The poet in

him was perpetually in conflict with the critic, sentimentality

trying to overcome reason. His heart was continually haunted by

visions of romantic situations--but prose was a medium in which he

was particularly happy, and to prose he remained faithful--prose and

interpretation.

Occasionally, Mr. Mott rewards his readers for attention to arid pages

of bibliography by giving them a piece of characterisation which is all

the more welcome because of its rarity. Some critics, even Sainte-Beuve

himself, have given the impression that he was devoid of merriment and

of gaiety, but Mr. Mott has found traces of joyousness. “This gaiety is

a note, unobtrusive though it be, that should not be omitted if we are

to appreciate the full harmony of Sainte-Beuve’s character. In spite of

_Volupté_ and certain poems, he was a normal human being, with plenty

of faults and weaknesses, it is true, but sincere with himself and

others, remarkably endowed, universally interested and indefatigably

laborious.” This is as near as Mr. Mott ever comes to letting us see

behind the mask of the intellectual into the make-up of the man. But

the biographer makes up for his lack of allurement with his profound

and clear knowledge and understanding of _Port-Royal_, and some of his

pages on it are not only the best in the book, but of the quality that

makes literature.

Sainte-Beuve’s _Port-Royal_ is his most permanent contribution to

literature, _Les Lundis_ excepted. The summary Mr. Mott makes of the

book might apply to his own _Sainte-Beuve_:

“We would not convey the impression that the book is

especially entertaining ... to sit down and labour

consecutively through the present volumes is somewhat

of a task. We appreciate and we admire, but we not

infrequently look ahead to discover how many more pages

the chapter contains. An unregenerate appetite might be

satisfied with a smaller quantity of this very plain

spiritual nutriment.”

We appreciate Mr. Mott’s remarkable labour also; and we admire his

mastery of the subject, but appreciation and admiration are not

synonymous with entertainment.

Mr. Mott creates a relationship between Sainte-Beuve and La

Rochefoucauld, and in the examples he has chosen to illustrate this

similarity of their views, he has been successful. The former had a

gift for imitation and he often took on the mentality of those he

admired, so that many of their thoughts can be paralleled in their

work. The same comparison might be made between Mr. Mott and his

subject. He, like Sainte-Beuve, supplies his books copiously with

summaries and with indications of location.

“Not infrequently, a chapter may open or close with

a paragraph, much in the manner of Macaulay, telling

us what the author is about to do, but rarely does

Sainte-Beuve persist, like Macaulay, in a consecutive

fulfilment of his prospectus. The side paths are too

alluring for his truant disposition.”

It is not a truant disposition that prompts Mr. Mott to follow the side

paths, it is a laudable desire of going to the heart of his subject and

presenting it as a whole, but the result is the same. Indeed, it may

be said that the summary of the chapters in _Sainte-Beuve_ is one of

its greatest attractions, for it states in a few words the main points

which the chapter never fails to develop.

Sainte-Beuve made enemies, but he did not fear them. His attacks on

Balzac especially brought a suit for damages to the magazine in which

he published his wrath, but the suit was mocked in an article which

he undoubtedly wrote and which concluded: “He (Balzac) will find

that we never in the least dreamed of contesting the _intrepidity_

of his bad taste.” Had Sainte-Beuve lived in this age, he would

have the same grounds for indignation; for “systems of inward

degeneration--emulation, self-esteem, charlatanism, log-rolling,

intimidation, avidity for popularity and gold” still exist.

Artistic preoccupation was one of Sainte-Beuve’s distinguishing

characteristics. He joined art to literary criticism, giving his

portraits creative value, and he does not renounce art when he speaks

the truth. He believed in Chateaubriand and Lamennais, yet he told

the truth about them, for believing with him was merely a way of

understanding. And he insisted that literary criticism should never

become static and dogmatic, but like art must remain dynamic and

plastic. All this, Mr. Mott has explained clearly. And by so doing,

he has written a book which will serve as a _vade mecum_ to all

students of Sainte-Beuve. It may not interest the general public for

it lacks the divine spark which changes bread into manna, coal into

diamonds. The picture he paints of Sainte-Beuve does not make those

unacquainted with his writings want to read them; those who know and

love Sainte-Beuve, know him and love him for the qualities which Mr.

Mott’s book has revealed.

* * * * *

Dr. Kaun, Professor of Slavic languages at the University of

California, put the American reading public under obligations when he

wrote Andreyev’s biography. It is the best I have encountered since

Mr. Janko Lavrin’s psycho-critical study of Ibsen, and as it is more

kindly, sympathetic and tolerant than that important contribution, it

is pleasanter to read and quite as illuminating.

Next to Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev is more widely known in this

country than any recent Russian writer. Many of his novels, sketches

and plays have been translated and some, such as _The Seven That Were

Hanged_, _Satan’s Diary_, _The Little Angel_, _Samson in Chains_, and

various plays, have been extensively read.

The question has often been asked: “What kind of author was this

soul-analyst, this student of the brute in man, this writer who caused

more discord in the camp of Russian criticism than any of his fellows?”

Mr. Kaun’s book not only provides the answer but gives a glimpse of

literary tendencies in the Russia of yesterday which is as welcome as

it is instructive.

Leonid Andreyev was forty-eight years old when he died in 1919;

although he began literary work soon after his admission to the bar

in 1897, it was not until the publication of _Once There Lived_ in

1901 that the critics had intimation that a new force had appeared in

Russian literature. In the next fifteen years he won a place in the

literary hierarchy of his country, which since his death has become

more secure. When the history of Russia in the generation from 1895 to

1920 comes to be dispassionately and judicially written the name and

influences of Leonid Andreyev will frequently be mentioned.

The Slav is an enigma to most Americans and the more we learn

of Andreyev the less soluble seems the riddle. He was of the

manic-depressive temperament; at least three times in his life he

attempted suicide; he was addicted to strong drink; he had the naïveté

and egotism of a child; he was mulishly obstinate. Maxim Gorky, who

was one of the first to recognise his ability, who counselled and

befriended him, has recently written: “Strangely, and to his own

torment, Leonid split in two; in one and the same week he could sing

hosanna to the world and pronounce anathema against it.” In this

respect he resembled another writer of manic-depressive temperament,

Giovanni Papini.

This lack of co-ordination in Andreyev’s moods is continually shown

by Dr. Kaun, who follows him through all the periods of his life. His

childhood was gloomy, filled with serious thoughts and arid reading.

At times he put aside all his interests in literature and became a

“rough boy.” He displayed a remarkable gift for the stage and an early

inclination to draw and to paint. The death of his father, which

occurred when Leonid was very young, gave him a taste of poverty,

privation and humility and made him realise that his future was what he

alone would make it. Soon after graduation he became a court reporter

and then an editorial writer. Mr. Kaun devotes an instructive and

interesting chapter to this plastic period, during which he displayed

few indications of possessing constructive ability.

The transformation that Russia witnessed during the years of Andreyev’s

adolescence and early maturity must of necessity have influenced a mind

such as his. He saw aristocracy fail to convince itself that slavery

was legitimate; he saw the slow but constant development of a sentiment

of democracy which soon extended to all branches of society and turned

all eyes and sympathies to the peasantry.

They became the idols of the day in Russia; literature was concentrated

around their activities and that new discovery, their souls. The

Intelligentsia, to which Andreyev belonged, recognised and praised

their long disdained brothers. In his introduction Dr. Kaun has

expressed all this in clear and simple language; he has shown the

tendencies of Russian literature with such authority and coolness that

what seemed an abyss of darkness passing understanding becomes at

once easy to penetrate. Some of his definitions dismiss the cloud of

vagueness that before surrounded the object. “The term Intelligentsia

may be applied to the unorganised group of Russian men and women

who, regardless of their social or economic status, have been united

in a common striving for the betterment of material and spiritual

conditions.”

When Russian literature became as it were “single tracked,” when all

its interests turned abruptly to the “street” (save for the exception

of a few writers who refused to give up “art for art’s sake” and take

up the defence of any one class of society), the danger was that

Russian literature would become “a didactic sermon.” But Dr. Kaun

hastens to reassure us that “What saved it ... was the genius of its

creators, who remained artists under all circumstances.”

There was need, however, for a man who would not allow his passions

to rule his emotions, whose voice could be heard and heeded above the

popular outbursts, who would attempt a search into the motives and

the value of life, and Leonid Andreyev was the man, the voice and the

writer.

From his earliest childhood he had been obsessed by interrogations

about life and he expressed them constantly in his writings; he seldom

attempted an answer or a solution to the problems that pressed upon

his mind, and when he did it, it was ambiguous. Dr. Kaun points out

that Andreyev’s failure to define or to classify was due to his lack

of philosophical theory and to his incapacity for detaching himself

and viewing life in perspective; he dwelled in the reality, and

disdained philosophy and theories. He was neither a student nor a

reader. He would have his friends believe that he had been influenced

by Schopenhauer and there is no doubt that he showed envy of Nietzsche,

affection for Tolstoi and admiration for Gorky; but it is doubtful that

he read them, save casually.

One appealing quality in Dr. Kaun as a critic is his unbiased opinion;

he allows neither his admiration for the author nor his sympathy for

the man to influence his judgment. He seeks no excuse for Andreyev’s

lack of humour and lightness or for his egotism. He states his defects,

and finds a reason for his admitted eminence among modern authors in

his realism, which makes him address the public not as a teacher or a

reformer but as an observer from the rank and file, who related what

he saw and did not draw conclusions. He was neither propagandist nor

missionary.

Andreyev’s aim was to describe man as he was, with all the repulsive

instincts that make him a beast and all the qualities that identify him

with divinity; but it was the worse side of human nature that chiefly

appealed to him, and that he described at length. If we agree with

Samuel Butler that “virtue has never yet been adequately represented

by any who have had any claim to be considered virtuous,” and that “it

is the subvicious who best understand virtue. Let the virtuous people

stick to describing vice--which they can do well enough,” we must

consider Leonid Andreyev the personification of virtue.

He stood aloof from literary circles, parties or affiliations all his

life. Not even the revolution of 1905, which brought a split in the

ranks of the intelligentsia, changed him; he retained his impersonal

attitude, probing the conscience of man, “ringing his alarm bell”

of man’s vices, analysing life, and attempting to explain only its

illusions. He continually peered beneath the surface and questioned the

reactions of mankind, discovering vices where virtue seemed to lie.

He was a firm believer in the power of ideas over the actions of an

individual, and he has shown in _Thought_ how one unaccountable impulse

will ruin the career of a man.

Andreyev was non-conformist to the last degree. He refused consistently

to give way to the public’s tastes and held that sincerity was the

first quality that one should find in an author. His sincerity was not

to the taste of his readers. Andreyev neither approved of the “splendid

isolation” of the Russian symbolists, decadents or other definite

schools who refused to see beyond the limit of their ivory towers, nor

did he join hands with the people. He confined his observations to

their individual and immediate surroundings. But he also generalised

events and expressed opinions that included the world in connection

with an event that merely affected his country or his people. He

extracted the essence of upheavals and carried them beyond his time.

His passionate and ardent pen could describe horrors and cruelty better

than the pen of any author of his time.

The thing that strikes one most forcibly in reading of Andreyev is the

very brief period of his creative activity, fifteen years at the most.

After 1902 his writings were merely repetitions or elaborations of

former themes and his premise was always the same; a negative attitude

toward man, life, human intellect and institutions. He involuted early,

and the proof of it in his writing was that he no longer looked in the

direction of hope and encouragement. He was like a man who hurries on

an unfamiliar road hoping that he will arrive at a safe and comfortable

stopping place before the darkness which is fast approaching enshrouds

him. He became aware that his thinking faculties that once were

brilliant had lost their flexibility: “I feel as though I were in

a grave up to my waist.” “I am thinking of suicide, or is suicide

thinking of me?” “I am living in a jolly little house with its windows

opening on a graveyard”--these are entries in his diary that indicate

his increasing melancholy. But this was not his only cross; he lacked

money for the basic need of life. He was on the point of coming to

this country “to combat the Bolsheviki, to tell the truth about them

with all the power within him and to awaken in America a feeling of

friendship and sympathy for that portion of the Russian people which is

heroically struggling for the rejuvenation of Russia,” when he died of

arteriosclerosis, as his friend, admirer and interpreter, Mr. Herman

Bernstein, wrote in a letter to the New York _Times_.

A worthy biography of a great writer; it has the fascination of fiction

and the satisfaction of fact.

* * * * *

Contrast of Ford Madox Ford’s book on Joseph Conrad with Henry Festing

Jones’ book on Samuel Butler will show the difference between inspired

and studious writing. One is life, the other is death; one is clay

into which the breath of life has been breathed, tenuous, elastic,

receptive, emissive; the other is inanimate, inert, rigid, and crumbles

when you handle it.

Mr. Ford has megalomania and glories in it. He has systematised

delusions of grandeur to which his conduct conforms. He believes he

is, and has been in his generation, the finest stylist in the English

language and he expresses himself as if convinced that not only did

he teach Joseph Conrad to write, but that the renown of the romancer

was due in large measure to his collaboration. They are harmless

delusions and do not interfere one jot or tittle with my enjoyment of

his books. Indeed, as he grows older and fatter he writes better and

better. Few contemporary English writers could excel _Some Do Not_ ...,

none save possibly Cunninghame Graham could equal _Joseph Conrad: A

Personal Remembrance_. I am moved to that statement after reading Mr.

Galsworthy’s tribute.

The Joseph Conrad that Mr. Ford presents may not be the Conrad that

Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Doubleday, Mrs. Jones, or Mrs. Smith knew, but I

am convinced that he would be pleased that I should know him as his

alleged friend depicts him.

“A biography should be a novel.” That seems fair, since most novels are

biographies. Mr. Ford has written a novel about Joseph Conrad and he

has achieved a work of art. It will have the same effect upon readers

as Rodin’s sculptures have upon searchers for æsthetic stimulation or

appeasement. Some will be moved to smash, others will be thrilled.

All will admit merit. It is an informative, not a documented, book,

informative of a soul, not a body; it tells not how many days he lived

and where he lived, but how he lived and thought; how he dreamed and

loved; how he interpreted men’s conduct and how he shaped his own.

The work is a remembrance, a logical unfolding of Joseph Conrad as

he appeared to Mr. Ford from the first days of their acquaintance to

the last. We are told little about Conrad’s political, religious, and

social ideas. Mr. Ford was no more curious to know what his friend’s

past was than we are to know that an English dramatist made a shapeless

play out of one of Mr. Ford’s novels. Yet the latter episode becomes

important when we learn that this, and Mr. Ford’s interest in the

publication of a review, were the cause of the only “scolding” he

ever got from Conrad. Forbearing and forgiving Conrad, diffident and

reticent Mr. Ford!

The life of a man is an open book for no one, not even for himself. The

characteristics and peculiarities of Conrad intrigued his biographer

from the beginning. He binds them with tenuous threads to Conrad’s

hereditary traits and the influence of his environment, and finally

presents the picture complete, allowing his readers to draw their own

conclusions.

Joseph Conrad, according to the portrait, was not the sort of man

about whom a conclusion could be readily reached; and when it was, you

could not bank on it. He was of cosmopolitan appearance: considerable

British insularity, but more Slav and Eastern in his make-up. He gave

the impression of a Frenchman, born and brought up in Marseilles!

His hatreds seem to have exceeded his loves, but his life was a

contradiction of his tastes and he has more friends than enemies. Mr.

Ford avows that Conrad hated the sea and disliked to write. “_Un métier

de chien_,” he used to call it. When he had made up his mind to write

for a living, he had his choice of three languages: he discarded Polish

instantly, French with a sigh of regret which he never overcame, and

decided on English. And he hated English as a medium of prose, even

more than he hated the sea! He thought in French, sometimes in Polish,

never in English, unless his thoughts were confined to the most common

of everyday commonplaces; when they occupied a higher sphere they were

always in French. It was because of the difficulty with which Conrad

was constantly confronted that he first thought of collaborating with

one who was reputed to be “the finest stylist in the English language.”

Mr. Ford does not marvel at Conrad’s desire to write in English,

despite the fact that he knew French so much better. Ford himself

writes French better than he does English, not that he knows it

better--he does not--but because “in English, he can go gaily on,

exulting in his absolute command of the tongue; he can write like

Ruskin or like the late Charles Garvice, at will.” In writing, but not

in speaking French, he must pause for a word; it is in pausing for a

word that the salvation of all writers lies. The proof of prose is in

the percentage of right words--not the precious word; not even the

startlingly real word. That we might have a whole book on Mr. Ford

without a word about any one else!

Mr. Ford bears heavily on their collaboration, and one unfamiliar with

the writings of the two authors might gather that Mr. Ford was the

_fons et origo_ of much of Conrad’s work. I have no doubt that Conrad

put an appreciative valuation on Mr. Ford’s assistance, but I have the

same certainty that he did not evaluate it as did his biographer.

Some will think that Mr. Ford has lately had a bad quarter of an hour

reading a recent number of _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ which is

devoted wholly to Conrad. There, his colleagues and admirers, French

and English, tell of Conrad’s personality and his writings but never a

word of his “collaborator.” Water enters a duck’s back a thousand times

more penetratingly than failure to accord him what he believes to be

his right penetrates the dura mater of Mr. Ford Madox Ford.

Stephen Crane said, “You must not be offended by Hueffer’s manner.

He patronises Mr. James, he patronises Mr. Conrad. Of course, he

patronises me, and he will patronise Almighty God when they meet, but

God will get used to it, for Hueffer is all right.” We are ready to

agree with Stephen Crane even after we read as an antithesis that the

words in which Henry James always referred to Mr. Ford were “_votre

ami, le jeune homme modeste_.”

Conrad’s life revolved around his books, he was constantly occupied

with the best manner in which to introduce a character of fiction.

It was necessary to get the character in with a strong impression,

and then work backward and forward over his past; this theory was the

result of thought and experiment on the part of the collaborators.

In the same manner, they devised the best opening for each type of

writing; their theory was that the opening paragraph of book or story

should be of the tempo of the whole performance, so that the ideal

novel should begin either with a dramatic scene or with a note that

should suggest the entire book. They agreed that style has no other use

than to make the work interesting. Hence, they sought to render their

thought in the manner which appeared the most sincere and interesting,

not to make a display of erudition or of cleverness, or of juggling

with words.

Mr. Ford’s book is adorned with flights into the land of constructive

writing, and there is much to learn from the theories and principles

expressed on the authority of both Joseph Conrad and Mr. Ford. For,

there is no denying that the latter’s style is fluent and clear,

picturesque enough to be original yet kept constantly within the bounds

of pure English. Mr. Ford says that their greatest admiration for a

stylist in any language was given to W. H. Hudson, of whom Conrad

said that his writing was like the grass that the good God made to

grow--when it was there, one could not tell how it came. The consensus

of opinion however would seem to be that Conrad got his greatest

inspiration from Turgenev.

Conrad’s philosophy was résuméd in one word, “fidelity.” He was

faithful in his adhesion to Herrick’s maxim: To live merrily and

trust to good letters. He never believed in using novels as a medium

of preaching; if his standards of morality suffered from some of his

heroes’ breaches, he would create one who would express the opinions

Conrad might have been willing to express himself. Thus did Conrad

expound his beliefs anonymously, and because he was a gentleman he

always created another hero who would refute the preacher’s arguments.

His belief was that one of the most important qualities for a novelist

to cultivate was humility, to make himself as little conspicuous as

possible to the reader.

Mr. Ford has a heart. Unlike his mind, it is assiduously concealed,

but it pierces through the coarse envelope of the purely intellectual

interest to which he attempts to confine his biography of Joseph

Conrad. None of his memoir may be true, but that does not detract

from it as a work of art. He shows no trace of real emotion, and his

remembrances carry with them no suggestion of the broken heart which

some authors would have assumed had they been writing on the same

subject with the material Mr. Ford had at his disposal. His book,

whether biography or autobiography, is a beautiful tribute to the man

he liked and the author he loved. He says that there never was a word

of spoken affection between them, never a personal note which would

have revealed to either the inner sentiment the other entertained for

his collaborator and playmate. But if Mr. Ford will never know what

were Conrad’s feelings for him, readers of the biography will know that

Mr. Ford’s book found its first inspiration in his heart, and, shaped

by his affection, found expression in his intelligence. The duty which

prompted him to write it was one of love, and the real sentiment, never

expressed in words, is constantly watching over the author’s shoulder.

My disappointment in Mr. Ford’s book is the treatment of Conrad’s art.

Conrad had a form of realism that was nearly unique, blended with an

impressionism that was at once captivating and awesome. Colours,

sounds, voices, visions, atmospheres, are manipulated to make a harmony

and an effectiveness that are sometimes overwhelming, always stirring.

He accomplished realism through impressionism, and in this he was as

nearly original as one can be in literature. Then he had another great

merit; he did not draw conclusions about his characters. He submitted

the evidence without plea or prejudice, the reader renders the verdict.

He saw life as it is, and man as he wishes to be, and he took them both

in at a glance, just as Marlow did in _Chance_. He registered them and

in his hectic leisure reproduced them, and thus made posterity his

debtor. And Fidus Ford has made us his debtors for showing Conrad as

he appeared to him. I have no doubt he was quite a different Conrad to

Stephen Crane, John Galsworthy, Mr. Doubleday, and Mrs. Conrad, but not

more lovable and not more worthy of the admiration the whole literary

world gives him to-day.

* * * * *

Mr. Hugh l’Anson Fausset, whose English reads like translation from the

French and who handles polysyllabic words as a juggler handles gilded

balls, has made a study of the seventeenth century’s poet and divine,

that is sure to be widely read by the cultured public and to provoke

discussion and dissension. He calls his book _A Study in Discord_ and

it purports to depict the conflict that went on in Donne, throughout

his whole life, between the physical and the spiritual impulses of his

nature. Mr. Fausset’s thesis is that neither as poet nor preacher did

Donne succeed in resolving these discords. He enjoyed neither physical

nor spiritual harmony but was torn in strife between his intelligence

and his impulses. The Christian ideal acted as a poison on the natural

man in process of proving a purge. Self-consciousness was the only

discipline by which his egoism might learn the wisdom of selfishness.

The tale of that battle was Donne’s legacy to literature.

“His style, whether as poet or preacher, never achieved

either the fresh effusive gaiety, or the assured serenity

of absolute Beauty. He could not create beauty out of

life; he could not even see the beauty in which the limbs

of life were veiled which flamed through and over the

bleak anatomy of fact, consecrating the perishable dust

and redeeming it of squalor and grossness.”

It is the verdict of a judge, not of a jury and Mr. Fausset can not

expect that the world of letters will receive it without protest.

But he cites with skill and adroitness the evidence on which it is

based, holding Donne up in the successive phases of Pagan, Pensioner

and Preacher. Were he more advocate than judge he might have added

Penitent, for the sake of both alliteration and fuller justice, for

the death of the poetic dean was artistic to a high degree and in the

last months of his life after he had preached his last sermon, “Unto

the Lord belong the issues of Death,” he achieved an absolute harmony

of his life in the ebb-tide. The strings of his character then vibrated

with small amplitude in unison.

Donne may be a study in discord, but there is nothing of discord in

the writing of Fausset. He uses Donne as a peg on which to hang his

concrete thought, and his organised ideas of nature, philosophy and

religion. While it is a biography it is also a series of essays in

which the vagaries, character and personal appearance of his subject

are used to point the moral and adorn the tale. It is never left to

the reader to form his own opinion of Donne, his life or his acts; for

Fausset blares facts about the motive and the soul and his trumpet

gives forth no uncertain sound. Even when Donne in a verse letter to a

friend states, “and with vain outward things be no more moved,” Fausset

immediately states “yet excessive solitude can so affect a character

like Donne’s that only a restoration of ‛vain outward things’ can save

it from myopia or even madness.”

It required courage to write the life of a man who furnished the

material for a masterpiece of English biography. Izaak Walton’s

affection for his friend transported him to immoderate commendation of

the events of his career, but Mr. Gosse’s _Life and Letters of John

Donne_ is just and true. It will immortalise the personality of the

poet, just as his somatic features will be perpetuated by the picture

in a shroud he so studiously had made.

Fausset can not credit the picture of Donne given by the “gentle

Walton” for the reason that Walton wrote on Donne in the spirit of

love and admiration. Fausset writes of him neither with love nor hate,

but with the scalpel always in hand, dissecting, getting beneath the

surface. He is not the tender physician, he is the scientist at work in

the laboratory of research with Donne as the cadaver. There is a charm,

a beauty, and at times a poetic fervour of expression in the writing

which reminds one of the Essay on Shelley by Francis Thompson. One can

not help feeling that Donne was doomed from the first if we believe the

picture painted of him with unerring hand by Fausset.

But Mr. Fausset is a student and exponent of personality and it is as

such that we should estimate his work. Judged by the two studies that

he has published: the one under consideration and _Keats; A Study in

Development_, he has insight, sound psychology and a logical mind. With

years he will grow more kindly and less turbulent. Meanwhile he shall

have the benefit of our prayers that the happy day may hasten.

As Mr. Fausset sees him, John Donne was physically a genius;

intellectually “possessed”; one who ranged almost every scale of

experience, and upon each struck some note: harsh, cunning, arrogant

or poignant, which reverberates down the roof of time; a poet who was

at times near a monster, full-blooded, cynical and gross; a thinker,

curious, ingenious and mathematical; a seer brooding morbidly over

the dark flux of things; a saint aspiring to the celestial harmony.

He served the flesh with the same ardour with which he sought the

ideal. He was a sensualist and a thinker, a poet and a priest, a pagan

and a Christian. More than any contemporary he reflected the three

aspects of life which met in confused association in seventeenth

century England: Mediævalism, the Renaissance and the Reformation. The

physical, intellectual and spiritual elements each in turn dominated

his personality. The purpose of his life was to bring this trinity of

forces into harmony and by so doing discover a new and deeper unity

in the Universe itself. It is Mr. Fausset’s belief that he did not

succeed in this purpose but the tortured history of such a genius

lays bare the potentialities of humanity and of civilisation. His

life was one long battle with death: the death of physical grossness

and mental conceit, of worldly ambition and spiritual complacence.

He had explored the secret of the senses and the subtleties of the

mind. And so, psychologist and sensualist as he was, he was competent

in the later days of his spirituality to report adequately of the

soul. He related poetry to religion, and religion to truth, and he

showed us how to relate ourselves to God. His life teaches us that

spiritual satisfaction is unworthy of the name, if it be achieved at

the sacrifice of intellectual honesty and that religious experience is

the prize of perpetual conflict. Such is the man that Mr. Fausset has

composited from the creations of Walton, Gosse, Chambers and Grierson.

John Donne was born in London in 1573 and died there in 1631. His

life was a stormy one, tempestuous in youth, squally in maturity,

blusterous in old age. Calm overtook him but a few weeks before his

death. He was a neurotic individual and his neural disequilibrium is

testified by his portraits and by his conduct. A portrait of him made

at the age of nineteen shows a brow slightly receding and narrowing

at the temples, prominent eyes, gigantic nose coarsely flattened at

the base, thick lips and pointed chin. His resistance to emotional

influences was defective and he reacted strongly to inner as well as

to outer influences. From boyhood there was lack of equanimity in the

development of the psychic personality although his intellect made

him always a conspicuous figure and he “pursued mathematics, law or

theology with the same tenacious passion as an ephemeral liaison.” He

was combative, satirical, arrogant, Sybaritic, Dionysiac. The sap did

not ascend his tree of life gently or harmoniously; it gushed upward,

often geyser-like, drenching conventions and submerging morality. He

insisted upon licence to do as he pleased and clamoured for freedom and

promiscuity, especially in love.

“Who ever loves, if he do not propose

The right true end of love, he’s one that goes

To sea for nothing but to make him sick.”

He, like St. Paul, believed that woman is the glory of the man and was

created for him, and he had a contempt for women’s vaunted constancy.

“Foxes, and goats--all beasts--change when they please.

Shall woman, more hot, wily, wild than these,

Be bound to one man...?”

But he was soon to encounter one who was not polyandrous. Anne Moore,

in a period of sixteen years, bore him twelve children. He was about

thirty years old when he married her. The literary fecundity of his

third decade is represented by _Songs and Sonnets_ and _Elegies_. Mr.

Fausset is probably correct in his claim that the poetry of Donne’s

early maturity was, like Goethe’s, a reflection and refraction of his

loves. Donne’s contention was that sex neither can be nor should be

transcended and the _Elegies_ are his earnest of it.

But his moral nature was awakening even before he met Anne and he began

to question:

“Why should our clay

Over our spirits so much sway

To tie us to that way?”

And he denied that he had formerly protested

“Change is the nursery

Of music, joy, life and eternity.”

The manner in which he broke with the nameless lady whose husband was

a deformed man and was stationary all day in a basket-chair, affords

Mr. Fausset an opportunity to discharge some verbal pyrotechnics, and

to disgorge some righteous wrath. “So, at last, he turned upon the poor

woman, whom so short a time before he had bent to his purpose with a

militant ardour and a shameless licence. The cold and cruel cynicism,

the elemental spite of his last farewell to one who must at least have

given as much as she received, has no parallel in our literature. In

truth, no one is so ruthlessly vindictive, so callous to every claim of

sentiment and generosity as the moralist new risen from the ashes of

the brute.” He then quotes “The Apparition” in which Donne taunts her

as “feign’d vestal” and threatens one day to square accounts with her.

It was not a pretty letter but Mr. Fausset is likely a very chivalric

man and “brute” is scarcely justified.

Donne married in haste but never repented, probably because Anne never

questioned her husband or tried to improve him.

The first years of their married life were lean. Parental blessing was

slow in coming, and slower still was paternal allowance. But they both

came and soon after conversion. “Anne Moore served as the bridge which

Donne, at least as the lover, climbed from the abyss to the cheerful

daylight and even to a homely eminence.” As the fruit of his passion

for his mistresses had been disgusted cynicism, that of his devotion

to his wife was ecstatic platonism, which now became reflected in his

poetry.

Mr. Fausset takes us through the fourth decade of his life, documenting

the transformation that took place in his soul from cynicism to

platonism, from realist to mystic, from Catholicism to Protestantism,

by quotations from his poetry, by pen pictures of his friends,

particularly Mrs. Herbert who was “an idyllic retreat of sanity and

piety and sympathy in a sultry world” and by descriptions of his

reactions to illness, “illness the sword of God.” His religious

conversion was the important thing and these are the words that Mr.

Fausset uses to describe its onset:

“The young Dionysus, who had broken from the restraints

of Rome, seeking his way back to some primal ecstasy,

which conventions seemed at best to adulterate, was

now attempting to translate his ecstasy into ideas. He

had turned at first to those tortured saints of the

Dark Ages in whom sensuality and science melted into

mysticism, and then to the pure but tenuous conceptions

of Plato. But not for him were those enchanted bridals

of the soul with God, of the mind with Beauty, in

which the body passed away in flame or in smoke. There

was too much of the satyr in his seership, and of the

casuist in his mysticism. His branches might strain up

heavenward but they never forgot their native earth. His

only hope was to subdue his lawlessness to logic, until

the two, blended together in a rational whole, achieved

an equilibrium between mind and body as he had already

discovered for his passions.”

Rome suffocated him and Protestantism seemed a pallid, political

compromise, but thanks to frequent prayers, to use his own words, he

effected the transition. Donne succeeded in generating the spiritual

from the struggle of the rational with the natural, and by so doing Mr.

Fausset believes he waged a battle of human consciousness two hundred

years in advance of his time.

The turn of the tide in Donne’s worldly affairs dated from 1610 when

he wrote a poem, “The Funeral Elegy,” commemorative of the charms and

potentialities of a girl whose death had resulted from a box on the

ear administered by her adoring father. It was a shot in the dark on

the part of Dr. Donne but he “got” his man. Sir Robert Drury provided

him a home for three years, then took him abroad. These were years of

spiritual growth, emotional equilibrium and physical exhilaration.

Soon after his return he took Holy Orders and after much manœuvring,

King James, before whom he preached his first sermon, capitulated.

His worldly fortunes were assured. It now only remained to make his

heavenly ones.

Mr. Fausset indulges in one of his frequent rhetorical rhapsodies in

describing Donne’s first appearance under the stole:

“The figure who mounted the pulpit in these early days of

his ministry was not the spectral divine, the emaciated,

almost sardonic mystic, who was later to hypnotise his

audience by the reverberations of his eloquence, the

intensities of his imagination, and the sepulchral

tones of his voice. He was a man, despite the ravages

of ill-health, still in his prime, his beard indeed

touched with grey, but his face and carriage retaining

that air of buccaneering insolence, almost of dignified

roguery, which we have remarked in the young man. Arrayed

in vestments and uplifted by the sense of an august

occasion, his appearance must have been singularly

striking, suggesting indeed some challenging John the

Baptist or one of Dürer’s swarthy evangelists. At the

same time he did not forget the courtier in the priest.

There was a ‛sacred flattery’ in his address, which if it

‛beguiled men to amend,’ also gratified their vanity. His

learning was beyond dispute, but the crabbed style of his

correspondence, no less than the angular conceits of his

poetry, could scarcely have prepared his friends for the

miracle of eloquence which he was speedily to achieve,

pungent, rhythmical, varied, and, even in its passages of

scholastic argument, strangely sinuous and compelling.”

It is Donne’s spiritual life that his latest biographer finds worthy of

unstinted praise, and it is perhaps for that reason that Part Four of

his book entitled _The Preacher_ will be found least interesting by the

general reader.

Although his friend Izaak Walton wrote: “Donne’s marriage was the

remarkable error of his life,” it is difficult to believe him. Anne

put out the fire of his concupiscence though it cost her her life, and

from its ashes his soul arose. After her death, he withdrew from the

world and “in this retiredness,” Walton writes, “which was often from

the sight of his dearest friends, he became crucified to the world and

all those vanities, those imaginary pleasures that are daily acted

on that ruthless stage; and they were as perfectly crucified to him.

Now his soul was elemented of nothing but sadness; now grief took so

full possession of his heart as to leave no place for joy; if it did,

it was a joy to be alone, where, like a pelican in the wilderness,

he might bemoan himself without witness or restraint, and pour forth

his passions like Job in the days of his affliction.” It was through

an agony of remorse that Donne strove for harmony of body and mind.

He preached to others to express and reassure himself. Mr. Fausset

believes that his exhortation “was not the flower of any abstract love

of humanity,” but of intense personal preoccupation.

Preaching did not provide an adequate vent for his emotions so again he

turned to poetry which, in keeping with his spiritual integration, he

now cast in sonnet form. In these sonnets, Donne was primarily absorbed

in asserting his emancipation from worldly values, and lamenting past

sin. Mr. Fausset sees him “wooing his God with both the fervour and the

self-disgust with which he had before addressed his mistresses”; even

the erotic imagery recurs. His religion had become a personal passion

and a personal hazard to which theology was no more than a prop. Of the

many judgments his interpreter has passed upon him, this is the fairest.

Serious illness thrust itself upon him soon after his promotion to the

deanship of St. Paul’s. Even in those days, before “nervous breakdown”

was fashionable and a euphemism for episodic mental disorder, it was

attributed to overwork and emotional tension, two very rare causes of

disease. But he began to be seriously ill, ill of the disease that

twelve years later conditioned his death. Before Mr. Gosse published

his biography of Donne, he submitted the facts of his illnesses to

a London diagnostician who satisfied himself that it was malignant

disease of the stomach. But in 1899 when that diagnosis was made,

we knew practically nothing about the most insidious, and the most

prevalent form of chronic sepsis: that which has its origin in the

tonsils and teeth. With the temerity of one whose statement can not be

disproven, I boldly assert that, had his tonsils been removed after

the alleged attack of typhoid fever and his teeth X-rayed when he felt

himself at forty-five lapsing into an infirm and valetudinarian state,

he would have lived out the time allotted by the psalmist. Had he been

vouchsafed these natural years of piety and preparation, he would have

accomplished that synthesis of the physical and spiritual which Mr.

Fausset denies him, and the world would not have had _The Devotions_ in

which Donne incorporated the features and fears of his illness. England

waited three hundred years for some one to parallel his performance of

clinical self-observation and then found it in the young man who under

the pen name of W. N. P. Barbellion wrote a book as self-revelatory as

the _Confessions of Saint Augustine_.

Donne came to many fertile oases in his travel through the desert

of sin, to many pools of Bethesda in wading the rivers of disease.

The Herbert family was the most refreshing and restoring. In George

Herbert, fifteen years his junior, he saw what he would like to have

been; and in Herbert’s mother, he saw his ideal of spiritual womanhood.

“The Autumnal,” his poem of homage to Magdalen Herbert, embodies his

idea of the platonism of the soul as distinct from that of the mind.

Through it, there breathes, as Mr. Fausset says, a quiet, tender as

the evening sky before it has begun to pale with premonition of night.

Donne devoted the last five years of his life to dying, and he did it

with the same intensity and artistry as that with which he devoted the

first five years of his maturity to living. He interpreted himself

the seventeenth century representative of him that was spoken of by

the prophet Esaias and bent himself to the last atom of his strength

to make straight the Lord’s paths. It is a stirring and touching

narrative and Mr. Fausset has made the most of it; reading it, one is

forced to agree that he has established his contention that Donne never

achieved a harmonious conscience; for, even in his hours of profoundest

religiosity, he was dependent in a measure upon intuition for his

faith; the dread of death, and the doubt of God’s mercy were constantly

recurring, even though he maintained the priestly attitude with

outward calm and enviable courage. In the years of his wisdom he did

his best to crucify nature and to implore grace from Him who suffered

crucifixion that man might live eternally.

His whole life was a series of _beaux gestes_ and the last the most

picturesque. Standing upon an urn, with closed eyes and folded hands,

shrouded as for the grave, he had his portrait painted. And of that

portrait his latest biographer says:

“It was a face at once grotesque and sublime, sinister

and sanctified, fiendish and devout; seared and purified,

cynically ecstatic. The craftiness and arrogance of his

youth were sobered into a hungry, a cadaver simper, while

his mysticism seemed to glimmer through the shadowy

hollows with a phosphorescent life.”

For Mr. Fausset, Donne reflects and condenses the long labour of the

man to outgrow the beast and approach the divine. In his unrest we see

our own reflected.

This _Study in Discord_ puts Mr. Fausset in the class of biographers at

whose head stands Mr. Lytton Strachey. The reader may be annoyed by

his obvious inimicality to the realistic strain in Donne’s character;

he may be wearied by the turbulence of his exposition, but he can not

fail to realise that in reading this book he is companioning a man

of education, imagination, sentiment and vision, though his heart

sometimes dominates his head.

Throughout the biography we capture as interesting a revelation of

the mind of Fausset as we do of Donne, and his desire in writing the

biography is summed up in one sentence in the epilogue, “And this

soul is worthy of all honour; for though defeated it never accepted a

fraudulent peace.”