occasional amusement. Erasmus had a mild theory of the satirist’s
rights. “Wits,” said he, “have always been allowed this privilege,
that they might be smart upon any transactions of life, if so be their
liberty did not extend to railing”; and he disclaimed a desire to imitate
Juvenal by “raking into the sink of vices to procure a laughter.” With
these qualifications, he let out all around him with some vigour. The
personification of Folly is rather feebly sustained, though the character
is pleasantly introduced with the sentence: “I was born neither in the
floating Delos nor on the frothy sea, nor in any of the privacies where
too forward mothers are wont to retire for undiscovered delivery.” But
the _obiter dicta_ on various classes of men who have often been the
butts of satirists since his day are still entertaining and must in his
own time have been shocking. He refers to priests as “wisely foreseeing
that the people, like cows, which never give down their milk so well as
when they are gently stroked, would part with less if they knew more,
their bounty proceeding only from a mistake of charity.” He speaks of
“The Carthusians, which order alone keeps honesty and piety among them,
but really keeps them so close that nobody ever yet could see them,” and
he is especially down on the scholastic theologians. Sterne, it will be
remembered, described a dispute “as to whether God could make a nose as
big as the steeple of Strasburg.” This is scarcely a caricature of the
kind of discussion ridiculed by Erasmus:
“Whether this proposition is possible to be true; that the
first person of the Trinity hated the second?
“Whether God, who took our nature upon him in the form of a
man, could as well have become a woman, a devil, a beast, an
herb, or a stone. And were it possible that the Godhead had
appeared in the shape of an inanimate substance, how he then
should have preached his gospel? Or how have been nailed to the
cross? Whether if St. Peter had celebrated the eucharist at the
same time our Saviour was hanging on the cross, the consecrated
bread would have been transubstantiated into the same body that
remained on the tree?”
Word-spinning he detested, and he refers the Nominalists, the Realists,
the Thomists, the Albertists, the Scotists, etc., to the primitive
disciples who were “well acquainted with the Virgin Mary, yet none of
them undertook to prove that she was preserved immaculate from original
sin.”
“The disciples baptized all nations, and yet never taught
what was the formal, material, efficient, and final cause of
baptism, and certainly never dreamt of distinguishing between a
delible and an indelible character in this sacrament.”
Chaucer, with his observations about relics and “pigges bones,” and the
novelists who never hesitated to put friars in the most ignominious
positions (e. g. in chimneys and under tables) had made sport of the
clergy, but Erasmus’s particular method of battering current theology
had not been so devastatingly employed since Lucian. He showed, like
Rabelais, that it is possible to reconcile the profession of Christianity
with something of what a recent writer calls “the old Voltairean love of
humanity.”
Erasmus made the familiar sport of lawyers and pedantic critics. He would
have agreed with Sterne: “Of all the cants which are canted in this
canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of
criticism is the most tormenting.” “When any of them,” he says,
“has found out who was the mother of Anchises, or has lighted
upon some old unusual word, such as bubsequa, bovinator,
manticulator, or other like obsolete cramp terms, or can,
after a great deal of poring, spell out the inscription of
some battered monument: Lord! what joy, what triumph, what
congratulating their success, as if they had conquered Africa,
or taken Babylon the Great!”
It was for such people’s benefit that he must have made his irritating
final remark: “I hate a hearer that will carry anything away with him.”
Erasmus was the mildest of the famous satirists, but he has his place
in the great succession, though his works cannot now compete for
readableness with those of Lucian, Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, and Voltaire.
Satirists have usually been considerable plagiarists, and _The Praise of
Folly_ has an important historical place in the development of this kind
of literature. Richard Burton cribbed a good deal from it, in spite of
his own drastic remark about persons who “lard their lean bookes with fat
of others’ workes” and his question: “If that severe doom of Synesius
be true it is a greater offence to steal dead men’s labours than their
cloaths, what shall become of most writers?” But Burton has an account on
the other side, for Sterne later on reprinted chunks of his work almost
literally without any acknowledgement whatever.
The new Oxford edition gives a modernized reprint of the Caroline
Version by John Wilson. In the introduction Mrs. P. S. Allen gives some
interesting bibliographical particulars. Over forty editions of the
_Encomium Moriæ_ were published in the author’s lifetime; within forty
years of its first Latin issue French, Italian, and English translations
had been published; and later versions have appeared in (amongst other
languages) Swedish, Czech, Polish, and Modern Greek.
Was Cromwell an Alligator?
Some people—who at least avoid the error of ascribing the invention to
Steele or Addison—say that Abraham Cowley was the Father of the English
Essay. It might alternatively be suggested that Q. Horatius Flaccus was
one of its parents and Montaigne the other; Bacon having, so to speak, a
watching brief at the birth. But the other statement is true in a sense:
for though in patches Bacon (and Burton) anticipated the tone and method
of that type of writing which was brought to its fullest perfection by
Charles Lamb, Cowley was the man who fixed the type. His essays have
just been republished in a beautiful little edition of the Collected
Prose Works, issued by the Oxford University Press, and edited by Mr.
A. B. Gough. Mr. Gough is a most painstaking editor, and his notes are
abnormally full. They are so full that one feels that most people who are
likely to acquire such a book will find nine-tenths of them unnecessary;
but one ought not to grumble at that, since they have the complementary
advantage of always supplying information when one looks for it.
The edition is especially to be welcomed as there are many persons
capable of appreciating Cowley who have never come into contact with
him. “Who now reads Cowley?” Pope asked in 1737; if the question were
repeated to-day you certainly would not get a forest of hands raised,
even in an audience replete with pince-nez and bulging brows. It was
Cowley’s misfortune, as it was his ambition, to be known in his own days
as one of the greatest poets of his time; when men discovered that he
was not that, they at once concluded that he was nothing else. Not that
his poems are as negligible as some critics assert; his mere skill and
neatness make him worth reading. Even if he had, as Mr. Gough remarks,
“too little passion and spontaneity to be a great lyric poet,” he was at
any rate a good metrist and a most admirable phrasemaker. But his prose
writings are certainly superior to the others; and this is true not only
of the Essays. His _Vision Concerning Oliver Cromwell_, for example, is
full of witty and whimsical things. Occasionally he employs very drastic
language, as when he refers to the Protector as an “alligator” and when
he abuses him for meditating the calling in of the Jews. This is how
Cowley disports himself. The italics are mine:
“From which he was rebuked by the universal outcry of the
Divines, and even of the Citizens too, _who took it ill that a
considerable number at least among themselves were not thought
Jews enough by their own Herod_. And for this design, they say,
he invented ... to sell St. Pauls to them for a synagogue, if
their purses and devotions could have reacht to the purchase.
And this indeed if he had done onely to reward that Nation
which had given the first noble example of crucifying their
King, _it might have had some appearance of gratitude_, but
he did it onely for love of their Mammon; and would have
sold afterwards for as much more St. Peters (even at his own
Westminster) to the Turks for a Mosquito [Mosque]. Such was
his extraordinary Piety to God, that he desired he might be
worshipped in all manners, excepting only that heathenish way
of the Common Prayer Book.”
But this strong language is not the strong language of a man whose
breast is a burning fiery furnace; it is the invective of a man who is
amused by his opponents and who regards them chiefly as pegs for cunning
sentences. His hard words would certainly have broken no bones; and one
can even imagine that, in the secrecy of their chambers, the Puritans
themselves—at all events, the less ironsided of them—may have shaken
their sides over his character-sketch of the man whom they doubtless
referred to in public as “our great leader.”
But if such qualities are defects when a man is writing political tracts
or attempting the higher flights of poetry, they are invaluable to him if
he is writing essays. Cowley’s Essays—and his Prefaces are as good—are
most delightful, and they have as personal a turn as Lamb’s. They all,
virtually, have one text: the Sabine Farm text; the retired _Urbs in
Rure_ text. They speak of the country’s charms in the ex-townsman’s way;
they gibe at the turmoil and press of cities in a manner which attests
a still lively interest in these contemptible things; they praise the
pleasures of horticulture, solitary meditation, and à Kempis’s “little
book in a corner.” Their learning is lightly worn; their language
natural; their arguments not so serious as to stand in the way of any
jest that offers itself; and many passages in them might almost as well
have been written in 1720 or 1820 as in 1660. These, for instance:
“There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear
often that a man does not know how to pass his Time. ’Twould
have been but ill spoken by Methusalem in the nine hundred
sixty ninth year of his Life.
“I have been drawn twice or thrice by company to go to Bedlam,
and have seen others very much delighted with the fantastical
extravagancie of so many various madnesses, which upon me
wrought so contrary an effect, that I always returned, not only
melancholy, but e’en sick with the sight. My compassion there
was perhaps too tender, for I meet a thousand Madmen abroad,
without any perturbation; though, to weigh the matter justly,
the total loss of Reason is less deplorable than the total
depravation of it.
“I thought when I went first to dwell in the country, that
without doubt I should have met there with the simplicity
of the old Poetical Golden Age: I thought to have found no
inhabitants there, but such as the Shepherds of Sir Phil.
Sydney in Arcadia, or of Monsieur d’Urfé upon the Banks of
Lignon; and began to consider with myself, which way I might
recommend no less to Posterity the Happiness and Innocence of
the Men of Chertsea; but to confess the truth, I perceived
quickly, by infallible demonstrations, that I was still in Old
England.
“The civilest, methinks, of all Nations, are those whom we
account the most barbarous. There is some moderation and
good Nature in the Toupinamhaltians who eat no men but their
Enemies, whilst we learned and polite and Christian Europeans,
like as many Pikes or Sharks prey upon everything we can
swallow.”
The last sentence reads, perhaps, more like a certain living writer than
like, say, Charles Lamb.
The best of Cowley’s Essays are _Of My Self_ and _Of Greatness_. I have
no room to quote them at length. The first—in which he is writing of
poetry and of his childhood’s memories—is more full of feeling than
is usual with him. The other is one of the most picturesque pieces of
light moralizing in the language, full of what we all call the Playful
Irony of the Gentle Elia, as in sentences like: “The Ancient Roman
Emperours, who had the Riches of the whole world for their Revenue, had
wherewithal to live (one would have thought) pretty well at ease, and to
have been exempt from the pressures of extream Poverty”; and it describes
the pleasures of littleness most alluringly. But somehow, in spite of
his assertions, one never quite believes in the genuineness of his
middle-aged preference for “Prettiness,” as against “Majestical Beauty.”
One suspects the existence in him of a disappointed ambition, a hankering
after action, which frequently afflict men who are constitutionally
fitted for nothing but looking on and making charming comments. But he
had certainly been very badly treated by the Stuart family, which he had
faithfully served. The Restoration gave him neither employment nor money.
It gave him, however, a very fine funeral. Evelyn says that his coffin
was followed to the Abbey by a hundred noblemen’s coaches and large
numbers of wits, bishops, and clergymen.
The Depressed Philanthropist
I do not see why any one but myself should be interested in the mere
fact that, except in the way of casual reference, I have always avoided
writing a line about Mr. John Galsworthy. But as one’s feelings commonly
typify those of some section or other of one’s fellows it may be relevant
to one’s purpose. I frequently begin writing something about Mr.
Galsworthy and then tear it up. I constantly feel like abusing him, and
am then checked by the thought that after all he is too good a man to
go for. He is a sensitive and humane man of very great intelligence. He
is a conscientious writer and an acute observer. He has a great respect
for truth and a desire to state it at all costs. He detests pettinesses,
hypocrisies, and shams. On almost every issue that might arise I am sure
I should find myself voting on the same side as he, though perhaps we
might differ in our views of the relative importance to be attached to
the problem of World Peace and that of the hardships inflicted by mankind
on ants, wasps, and bees. And yet as I read his books I feel as if I were
in some cheerless seaside lodging-house on a wet day.
I have just been reading his new miscellany _The Little Man_. The book
does not show his qualities at their best, but it shows his defects at
their worst. The principal contents are _The Little Man_ and _Studies
in Extravagance_. The first is a short play showing how a German, an
American full of altruistic platitudes, and two self-contained and
“proper” English people shrink in the most selfish and cowardly way from
a forlorn baby suspected (falsely, of course, for the sake of the extra
irony) of typhus. The “studies” are examinations of various “types” such
as “The Artist,” “The Plain Man,” “The Housewife,” “The Preceptor,” and
“The Latest Thing.” And there is none of them good—no, not one. Mr. Max
Beerbohm once did a cartoon of Mr. Galsworthy Looking upon Life and
Finding it Foul, Life being represented as a fat and ferocious goblin
with horns, a forked tail, and teeth like a wild boar’s. It was just a
little wrong. Mr. Galsworthy’s vision should not have had so much of
the positive about it. He does not find Life vigorously diabolical, but
meanly cruel and pallidly contemptible. Many great men have been gloomy
or pessimistic. Mr. Hardy is not exactly a merry grig, Schopenhauer was
consistently disgruntled, and the man who would look for _joie de vivre_
in Leopardi would look in vain. And as Mr. Galsworthy suggests himself—it
is a commonplace—it is often the duty of a serious contemporary writer to
be horrifying, unpleasant, and shocking. The regeneration of mankind—to
continue the commonplace—is not possible if we hold the view that things
may be done that may not be discussed, and that the failings of man and
the diseases of society should, as far as possible, be stowed away in
the cupboard, where the skeletons are. What is wrong with Mr. Galsworthy
is that one cannot quite believe him. One suspects him of cooking the
evidence. One does not mind a man presenting a black view of life if
(_a_) he is temperamentally inclined to it and can be melancholy with
a certain gusto, or (_b_) if, being a professed realist, he appears to
have taken cognizance of every aspect that has presented itself to him.
But Mr. Galsworthy presents so one-sided a case that we at once suspect
his _bona fides_ and react against his views. It would be unfair to
classify him with that school of novelists who give their books titles
like _Dull Monotony_ and live up to their titles by giving a photographic
reproduction of an intolerable tedium peculiar to, and comprehensible by,
the households which they themselves afflict. He usually escapes being
thoroughly boring partly because of his gift for occasionally happy and
incisive phrase and partly because here and there, behind the grey brow
of the dejected Hanging Judge, one catches a gleam of something more
exhilarating than his expressed sentiments. But he is often very nearly
dull, all the same: for his realism is often bogus. He starts with an
intention to paint a caricature in greys, and a caricature which is not
amusing. Even in his very well-made plays the characters are not, to my
mind, usually interesting in themselves. One does not believe in them as
persons. They are just a set of types, as stagy and unreal as the old
stage figures of melodrama, though they are called charwomen, clerks,
magistrates, and company directors instead of being called Irishmen,
highwaymen, and wicked baronets. His plays argue cases, but they do not
present life as we know it. I find the same sort of unreality about his
prose; and, since the unreality takes the form of making mankind look
utterly paltry and uninteresting, one wonders why on earth a man who has
such an opinion of it bothers about it at all.
So in _The Little Man_ and in these studies. All these average people
do not get a dog’s chance; we have all sinned and fall short of the
glory of God, but we really are not quite so dull, feeble, and silly
as all this. Some characteristics—as those of the Plain Man—are very
cleverly recorded, but the whole of the man is not here, nor even the
most important parts of him. As an illustration of Mr. Galsworthy’s
pseudo-realistic method take him on the ground most favourable to
him—that of the beef-and-whisky-fed sportsman:
“What led to him was anything that ministered to the coatings
of the stomach and the thickness of the skin ... to be ‘hard’
was his ambition, and he moved through life hitting things,
especially balls—whether they reposed on little inverted tubs
of sand or moved swiftly towards him, he almost always hit
them, and told people how he did it afterwards. He hit things,
too, at a distance, through a tube, with a certain noise....”
Now, apart from the fact that a full and accurate description of a
sportsman would put in many things Mr. Galsworthy leaves out (e. g. some
indication that he was a human being, as we know the species), this is
not good, though it is superficially plausible description, even so
far as it goes. The plain statement that the gentleman played golf and
cricket and shot a good deal would convey a better idea of him than
this specious circumlocution. To say that a man is smoking a cigarette
positively contains a greater measure of suggestion than to say that he
is inhaling grey fumes through a cylinder of paper filled with dried
herbs. Much of Mr. Galsworthy’s attack upon all kinds of men and women,
self-centred authors, idealists who oppress their wives, worldly women
who have never found their souls, cultured people who chase the new,
and Philistines who run away from the new, has the same sort of defect.
It is really “guying” which passes for photography merely because it
is heavy-footed and unamusing. I object to Mr. Galsworthy’s ostensible
view of life partly because I don’t believe he takes it, and partly
because if he did I should think it an absurdly unjust view. At heart
a humanitarian, he has got into a dismal and costive kind of literary
method which makes him look like a fretful and dyspeptic man who curls
his discontented nostrils at life as though it were an unpleasing smell.
As Ibsen used so often to remark, there is a great deal wrong with the
drains; but after all there are other parts of the edifice.
A Polyphloisboisterous Critic
I remember—that is to say, I wish I remembered, for I have forgotten
most of it—a poem that I used to recite at my mother’s knee. Its subject
was an antediluvian man of sesquipedalian height, who let out the blood
of an ichthyosaurus with a polyphloisboisterous shout; and its claim to
attention was a plethora of polysyllables very embarrassing to an infant,
and indeed to any, tongue. It was of that poem that I was reminded whilst
reading _European Dramatists_, by Archibald Henderson.
Mr. Henderson, an American professor, is not a stranger to the British
public. It was he who produced, a few years ago, a biographical
study of Mr. Bernard Shaw so vast that a single copy might well have
served—were not Mr. Shaw still happily with us—as Mr. Shaw’s tombstone.
The work, indeed (to use the phrase Mr. Henderson himself applies to
a play of Strindberg’s), was “colossal in its incommensurability.”
It was the kind of book one had thought could only be produced by a
large committee of Chinese scholars; and although it did not lead one
to respect the author’s powers of judging the relative importance of
his various facts, it at least compelled one to admire his colossal
energy and his incommensurable supply of these facts. From _European
Dramatists_ one gets precisely the same feeling. Parts of the book have
appeared in journals published in Boston and in Berlin, in Stuttgart
and in Stockholm, in Helsingfors, Paris, New York, and Ghent. And one
may be sure that Mr. Henderson could have talked to the editors of all
these papers and beaten all of them hollow in knowledge of the modern
literature of their respective countries. The actual subjects of his
papers are familiar enough: Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, Maeterlinck,
Granville Barker, and Wilde. But in discussing them he shows an amazing
acquaintance with everybody who has recently written anything in any
country. He can refer you to the December 1913 issue of the _Przemysl
Review_; he can tell you what the Servian critic, Ivan Peckitch, thinks
of the Finnish poet, D. D. Bilius. He knows all about everything, though
one is not quite sure that he knows anything else. But what chiefly
pleases one about him is not so much what he says as the charming
way he says it. Like Hudibras, he cannot ope his mouth but out there
flies a trope. Everything happens with him in metaphors; people are
always digging into soils, moulding things in fires or clothing them in
vestures. And above all he is polysyllabic and rotund of speech.
He begins well with Strindberg, of whose first married years he
observes that they “were undoubtedly happy—certainly in the passional
sense, if not in the restful consciousness of hallowed union.” “In
1886,” he proceeds, “Strindberg began to be obsessed with the monomania
of animadversion against the female sex.” Later, “goaded by titanic
ambition, he cast off the shackles of provinciality for the freedom
of cosmopolitanism”—i. e. he travelled. Ibsen and Strindberg were “so
antipodal in temperament, yet so cognate in the faculties of intuitive
perception and searching introspectiveness.” One of Strindberg’s works
blurs the vision of the average spectator, “with its kinetoscopic
heterogeneity of spiritual films”: Peer Gynt (on the other hand, shall I
say?) stood for “the disciplinary bankruptcy of laxity.” “Concretizes”
and “inscenation” are the kind of words he rejoices in, but perhaps two
or three longer extracts will better illustrate the quality of his style:
“To peep into the workshop of the great master’s brain and
assist at the precise balancing of the arguments _pro_ and
_con_, to observe how an idea first finds lodgment in the
brain, and to note the gradual symmetrical accretion of the
fundamental nuclei for the final creation—this is a privilege
that has perhaps [_sic_] never fully been realized by an
observer.
“America is young and hopeful, at least; it is not peopled, we
are confidently assured, with soul-sick tragedians mouthing
their futile protests against the iron vice of environment,
the ineradicable scar of heredity, the fell clutch of
circumstance.
“Yet the reiterant ejaculations, the hyper-ethereal imaginings
of the symbolist manner, are the symptoms of a tentative
talent, not of an authoritative art.”