LITERATURE AND ACTION
Literature as Speech Made Permanent--All Written Speech Not
Literature--The Essence of Literature for Its Own Sake--Prose
as a Fine Art--Some Interesting Aspects of Literature as an End
in Itself--Their Comparative Triviality--No Literature Great
Which Is Not More Than Literature--Literature as a Vehicle of
Religion--Lucretius--_The Reconstruction of Belief_.
If we go back to the beginning of things, literature, needless to say,
is a development of ordinary speech. It is speech which has been made
permanent, partly, indeed, by oral tradition, but mainly by the art of
writing. Without speech no human co-operation, other than the rudest,
would be possible. Some men at least must speak so as to organize the
tasks of others, and the latter must understand speech so as to do what
the former bid them. When the Deity determined to confound the builders
of Babel, or, in other words, to render co-operative work impossible, he
did not cut off their hands, but he virtually took speech away from
them, by rendering the language of each unintelligible to all the rest.
Moreover, in the case of tasks the nature of which is highly complex, it
is necessary not only that the organizers should make use of speech, but
also that what they speak should systematically be written down. The
writing down, indeed, is often the most important part of the matter, as
in the case of an Act of Parliament or of the delicate and elaborate
formulae on which depends the production of chemicals or of great ships.
If written speech, then, of kinds such as these is literature,
literature is obviously not antithetic to action, but is, on the
contrary, action in one of its most important forms. To state the case
thus, however, is stating no more than half of it. As a matter of fact,
laws and chemical formulae, however carefully written, are not what is
meant by literature in the common sense of the word. Though the writing
down of speech may in such cases be a form of action, it does not follow
that all such written speech is literature. Let us compare the
compositions of a child, whether in prose or verse, with a page out of
the _Nautical Almanac_ or a manual of household medicine. The child's
compositions may intrinsically have no literary value, but they
nevertheless represent genuine attempts at literature. A page from the
_Nautical Almanac_ or the manual of household medicine may be, for
certain purposes, of the highest value imaginable, but the test of
literary beauty would be the last test we should apply to them.
What, then, is the primary difference between written words that _are_
literature and written words that are _not_? The primary difference
relates to the objects at which severally the writers aim or the motive
by which they are impelled to write. The child writes solely because
literary composition is a pleasure to him, as for the sake of a similar
pleasure another child takes to a piano. The astronomer and the doctor
write to help men in navigating ships or mothers in dosing babies.
Between written language which is not literature and written language
which _is_ the initial difference is this: that for the writers written
language is, in the first case, something which it is not in the second.
In the first case, the writer's concern with language, and the sole
interest which written language has for him, are things which have no
dependence on the merits of written language as such, except in so far
as it is a means of accomplishing ulterior objects, with which otherwise
the mere merits of language have nothing at all to do. Sound injunctions
to a nurse, provided that their meaning was clear, would have far
greater value in a hospital than mistaken injunctions written with a
grace or majesty worthy of Plato or Tacitus. In the second case, writing
is a feat the successful achievement of which is, for the writer, an
object and a pleasure in itself; and how far success is achieved by him
depends not alone on the pleasure which he derives from his own
performances personally, but also, and we may say mainly, on the
quantity of kindred pleasure which his writing communicates to his
readers.
These observations become more and more true and pungent in proportion
as language becomes a more complex instrument, its progress resembling
the evolution of an organ from a shepherd's pipe. As it thus progresses,
its delicate possibilities of melody, metaphor, and subtle emphasis
increase, and masters of the literary art enchant with ever new
surprises multitudes who have no capacity for the literary art
themselves. So far, then, as literature is in this sense literature for
its own sake, the contrast between literature and action is, with
certain exceptions, justified. Exceptions, however, to this rule exist,
and these, briefly stated, are as follows. When a writer writes a
book--let us say, for example, a novel--the object of which is to give
pleasure, his primary object in writing it may be either to please
himself or else to make money by ministering to the taste of others. The
importance of this distinction has been clearly brought out by Tolstoy,
who defines art, and literary art in particular, as a means by which the
artist contrives to arouse in others emotions and interests which he has
experienced in his own person. Such being the case, then, there are,
says Tolstoy, many works which partake of the nature of literature, but
which are not examples of true literary art. Such, according to him, are
our modern detective novels, or any novels the interests of which depend
on the solution of a mystery, the reason being that the writer is
acquainted with the mystery at starting, and experiences himself no
emotion whatever with regard to it. His sole object is to titillate an
emotion in others which he does not himself share, and from which,
indeed, he is, by the nature of the case, precluded. This is a criticism
which might doubtless be pressed too far; but it is within limits
fruitful, and, bearing it here in mind, we may say that literature, if
we take it in its pure form and regard it as an end in itself, is
language, as used to express the personal emotions or personal
convictions of the writer, and is raised by him to such a pitch of
beauty, of strength or of delicacy that it is a source of pleasure to
large classes of mankind apart from all thoughts of relationship, if
any, to ulterior objects.
Thus pure literature, as legitimately contrasted with action, is a
matter of great interest for a large number of people whom nobody would
describe as literary or as persons of letters otherwise; and I may,
therefore, say something of pure literature as estimated more
particularly by myself.
Let me begin with prose, which, merely as a pleasurable art, instinct
has urged me, from my earliest days, to cultivate. Of what good prose is
I have always had clear notions; and, whether I have been successful in
my efforts to achieve it or not, my personal experience of the process
may not be without some interest. My own experience is that the
composition of good prose--prose that seems good to myself--is a process
which requires a very great deal of leisure. True excellence in prose,
so I have always felt, involves many subtle qualities which are
appreciable by the reader through their final effects alone, which leave
no trace of the efforts spent in producing them, but which without such
effort could rarely be produced at all.
As examples of these qualities I may mention a melody not too often
resonant, which captivates the reader's attention, and is always
producing a mood in him conducive to a favorable reception of what the
writer is anxious to convey. Next to such melody I should put a logical
adaptation of stress, or of emphasis in the construction of sentences,
which corresponds in detail to the movements of the reader's mind--a
halt in the words occurring where the mind halts, a new rapidity in the
words when the mind, satisfied thus far, is prepared to resume its
progress. To these qualities, as essential to perfection in prose, I
might easily add others; but these are so complex and comprehensive that
they practically imply the rest.
With regard, then, to these essentials, the practice which I have had to
adopt in my own efforts to produce them has been more or less as
follows. The general substance of what I proposed to say I have written
out first in the loosest language possible, without any regard to
melody, to accuracy, or even to correct grammar. I have then rewritten
this matter, with a view, not to any verbal improvement, but merely to
the rearrangement of ideas, descriptions, or arguments, so that this may
accord with the sequence of questions, expectations, or emotions which
are likely, by a natural logic, to arise in the reader's mind--nothing
being said too soon, nothing being said too late, and nothing (except
for the sake of deliberate emphasis) being said twice over. The
different paragraphs would now be like so many stone blocks which had
been placed in their proper positions so as to form a polylithic frieze,
but each of which still remained to be carved, as though by a sculptor
or lapidary, so as to be part of a continuous pattern or a series of
connected figures. My next task would be to work at them one by one,
till each was sculptured into an image of my own minute intentions. The
task of thus carving each and fitting it to its next-door neighbors has
always been, merely for its own sake, exceedingly fascinating to myself,
but it has generally been long and slow. Most of my own books, when
their general substance had been roughly got into order by means of
several tentative versions, were, paragraph by paragraph, written again
five or six times more, the corrections each time growing more and more
minute, and finally the clauses and wording of each individual sentence
were transposed, or rebalanced or reworded, whenever such processes
should be necessary, in order to capture some nuance of meaning which
had previously eluded me as a bird eludes a fowler.
As an example of this process I may mention a single sentence which
occurs in my little book on Cyprus. It is a sentence belonging to a
description of certain morning scenes--of dewy plains, with peasants
moving across them, and here and there a smoke wreath arising from
burning weeds. The effect of these scenes in some poignant way was
primitive, and I was able at once to reproduce it by saying that the
peasants were moving like figures out of the Book of Genesis. I felt,
however, that this effect was not produced by the groups of peasants
only. I felt that somehow--I could not at first tell how--some part in
producing it was played by the smoke wreaths also. At last I managed to
capture the suggestion, at first subconscious only, which had so far
been eluding me. I finished my original description by adding the
following words, "The smoke-wreaths were going up like the smoke of the
first sacrifice."
It may be objected that prose built up in this elaborate way loses as
much as it gains, because it is bound to lose the charm and the
convincing force of spontaneity. This may be so in some cases, but it is
not so in all. I have found myself that, so far as my own works are
concerned, the passages which are easiest to read are precisely those
which it has been most laborious to write. And for this, it seems to me,
there is a very intelligible reason. Half of the interests and emotions
which make up the substance of life are more or less subconscious, and
are, for most men, difficult to identify. One of the functions of pure
literature is to make the subconscious reveal itself. It is to make men
know what they _are_, in addition to what spontaneously they _feel_
themselves to be, but feel only, without clear comprehension of it. As
soon as a writer, at the cost of whatever labor, manages to make these
spontaneities, otherwise subconscious, intelligible, the spontaneity of
the processes described by him adds itself at last to his description.
A signal example of this fact may be found, not in prose, but in love
poems. Most people can fall in love. It takes no trouble to do so,
whatever trouble it may bring them. If any human processes are
spontaneous, falling in love is one of them. Most lovers feel more than
they know until great love poetry explains it to them what they are; but
great love poems are great, not because they are composed spontaneously,
but because they express spontaneities which are essentially external to
themselves. In other words, the achievement of perfection, whether in
prose or poetry, is comparable to the task of a piano tuner, who may
spend a whole morning in tightening or relaxing the strings, but who
knows at once, when he gets them, the minutely precise tones which the
laws of music demand.
Whether every reader will agree with me as to these questions or not,
they are, at all events, examples of questions purely literary, which
are in themselves captivating for large numbers of people, without any
reference to ulterior, or what are called practical, objects. To these
questions I may add a few others, which have been specially captivating
to myself.
One of them is the use of metaphor as an immemorial literary device,
especially in the case of poetry. What is the psychology of metaphor?
Let us take an instance from Tennyson, who in one of his poems speaks,
with very vivid effect, of Mediterranean bays as colored like "the
peacock's neck." The color of the bay is at once made present to the
reader's mind. But why? A discussion of this question occurs in a
dialogue between two of the characters in my novel _The Old Order
Changes_. The poet, urges one of them, might, if describing a peacock,
have said with equal effect that the peacock's neck was colored like a
Mediterranean bay. How is it that we gain anything by comparing one
equally familiar thing to another? The secret of the use of metaphor in
the poet's art is, says the speaker, this. When the mind is at rest its
surface is alive with vivid images which have settled on it like sea
birds on a rock, but the moment any one of these detects an approach on
our part, in order that we may examine it carefully, its wings are
spread, and in a flash it is gone. When, however, we use a simile in
order to describe something which is obviously our main concern (say the
color of a Mediterranean bay), the thing which we are anxious to
describe acts as a kind of stalking-horse, which enables us to approach
and capture the thing which we use as an illustration (say the neck of a
peacock) before the peacock so much as suspects our neighborhood. We
have it alive before us, with all its feathers glittering, and these
throw a new light on objects which our direct touch might have
frightened away beyond the confines of our field of vision. The more
vivid of the two objects communicates its color to the less vivid.
Two other purely literary questions are discussed in _The Veil of the
Temple_, the first of these being as follows. One of the speakers calls
attention to a criticism which is often and justly made with reference
to many, and even to the best of novels, that, while the minor
characters are drawn with the utmost skill, the heroes (such as most of
Scott's) have often no characters at all. The reason, he says, is that,
in most cases, the hero is not so much an individual, with
characteristics peculiar to himself, as a certain point of view, from
which all the other characters and incidents of the story are drawn. Or
else, if some of these are, as very often happens, not drawn from the
point of view of the hero, they are drawn from the point of view of some
other ideal spectator, on whose position, moral or local, the whole
perspective of the story, mental or ocular, depends. Let us take, for
example, a typical opening scene of a kind proverbially frequent in the
novels of G. P. R. James. Such scenes were proverbially described very
much as follows: "To the right lay a gray wall, which formed, to all
appearance, the boundary of some great sheep tract. To the left was a
wood of larches. Between these was a road, showing so few signs of use
that it might have been a relic of some almost forgotten world.
Proceeding along this road on a late October evening might have been
seen three horsemen, of imperfectly distinguishable, yet vaguely
sinister, aspect." In the absence of an ideal spectator, who is tacitly
identified with the novelist, his hero, or his reader, such a
description would mean very little more than nothing. There would be no
left or right unless for a supposed spectator standing in a particular
place and looking in a particular direction. The aspect of the horsemen
could not be sinister or indistinguishable unless there were an assumed
man whose eyes were unable to distinguish it.
The argument here in question will carry us on to certain kindred
problems, connected likewise with the novelist's art, which are these:
The necessary assumption of the author as ideal spectator being given, a
question arises with regard to the range of vision which, in his
capacity of spectator, the novelist professes to possess. Many novelists
mar the effect of their work--and among these Thackeray is notable--by
adopting an attitude which in this respect is constantly vacillating.
Sometimes it is one of omniscience, sometimes of blind perplexity. At
one time he describes the inmost thoughts of his characters which are
suffered or pursued in secret, as though he could see through
everything. At another time he will startle the reader with some such
question as this: "Who shall dare to say--I certainly cannot--what at
that solemn moment the lad's real reflections were?" A partial escape
from the sense of unreality which alternations like these produce is to
be found in the method which many novelists have adopted--namely, that
of dividing the story into so many separate parts, these being told in
succession by so many different characters, each recording events as
wholly seen from the point of his own unchanged perspective. Such is the
method adopted by Wilkie Collins in _The Woman in White_, for example.
The danger of this artifice is that it tends to be too apparent. The
most logically complete escape from the difficulties which we are here
glancing at is to be found, no doubt, in the method of autobiography in
a single and undivided form; unless indeed the assumption of absolute
omniscience on the author's part can be used with a rigid consistency
which it very rarely exhibits.
Another question of a purely literary kind, reflection on which is to
me, at least, pleasurable (though many persons of literary taste may,
perhaps, regard it as a bore), is the relation of modern prosody to
ancient, and more particularly to Latin. It has always seemed to me that
the lengthening and shortening of syllables according to their position,
as happens in classical Latin, with regard to the syllables that follow
them, must always have corresponded with the stresses or absence of
stress which would naturally be made apparent by the voice of an ideal
reciter; and to me, as to some other people, the question has proved
amusing of how far in English verse Latin prosody could be reproduced.
Many attempts have been made at deciding this question by experiments.
The most remarkable of these are two which were made by Tennyson. One of
them, called "Hendecasyllabics," is little more than a trick played with
extreme skill, and in no serious sense does it merit the name of poetry.
The other, "An Ode to Milton," is no less charming as a poem than as a
conquest over technical difficulties. Let us take the first stanza:
Oh, mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies,
Oh, skilled to sing of time and eternity,
God-gifted organ voice of England,
Milton a name to resound for ages.
Here the stresses which the meaning of the English verse demands fall
exclusively on syllables which would, according to Latin prosody, be
long; but there are one or two syllables which in Latin verse would be
long (such as "of" in the second line) which invite no stress in the
English--which do not, indeed, admit of it--and must for that reason be
treated by an English reader as short. Aiming at greater completeness,
but otherwise in a manner very much less ambitious, I attempted an
experiment of a similar kind myself, consisting of a few hexameters, in
which not only do the natural stresses fall, and fall exclusively, on
syllables which in Latin would be long, but in which also every syllable
would be emphasized by an English reciter with a natural stress
corresponding to it. These hexameters were a metrical amplification of
an advertisement which figures prominently in the carriages of the Tube
Railway, proclaiming the charms of a suburb called Sudbury Town, and
remarkable for its surrounding pine woods. The moment I read the words
"Sudbury Town" I recognized in them the beginning of a hexameter
classically pure; and after many abortive attempts I worked out a
sequel--a very short one--as follows:
Sudbury Town stands here. In an old-world region around it
Tall, dark pines, like spires, with above them a murmur of umbrage,
Guard for us all deep peace. Such peace may the weary suburbans
Know not in even a dream. These, these will an omnibus always,
Ev'n as they sink to a doze just earned by the toil of a daytime,
Rouse, or a horse-drawn dray, too huge to be borne by an Atlas,
Shakes all walls, all roofs, with a sound more loud than an earthquake.[5]
The moral of such experiments seems to me to be this: that even if
ancient prosody, such as that of the Virgilian hexameter, could be
naturalized completely in English, the emotional effect of the meter
would in the two languages be different, and that Anglo-Latin hexameters
would, with very rare exceptions, mean no more than successes in a
graceful and very difficult game. It is indeed for that very reason that
I mention this question here. It is a question of pure literature or of
purely literary form. As such, it has proved fascinating to many highly
cultivated persons; yet even by such persons themselves it will not be
seriously regarded as much better than trivial. But this is not all.
From this consideration we are led on to another. If the problems of
Anglo-Classical prosody are trivial even for those who happen to find
them entertaining, may not all literature, even the highest, when
cultivated for its own sake only, be, from certain points of view, a
triviality also?
According to differences of taste and temperament, different persons
will answer this question differently. Since I am not entering here on
any formal argument, but am merely recording my own individual views, I
should, speaking for myself, answer this question in the affirmative. I
may, indeed, confess that the mere artist in literature--the person for
whom literature, as such, is the main interest in life--is a person for
whom secretly I have always felt some contempt, even though, for myself
personally, this magical triviality has been one of life's chief
seductions.
The content and significance of such a feeling are presented in concrete
form by such institutions as authors' or writers' clubs. In London and
in other capitals so many of these have been established, and continue
to flourish, that they obviously perform certain useful and welcome
functions; but my own criticism would be that to call them clubs for
"authors" or "writers" is a misnomer which fails to particularize the
real basis of membership. In the modern world, no doubt, all writers,
merely as writers, have certain interests in common. They have, in the
first place, to get their works published, and the business of
publication is a very complex process, which has necessarily a legal and
financial side. Questions are inevitably involved of financial loss or
gain, and even writers who are indifferent to profit, and are ready to
bear a loss, will desire to be treated fairly. They may be ready to bear
a loss, but not a loss which is inequitable, and if any gain should
ensue, they will desire an equitable share of it. In connection with
such matters, authors' clubs may perform many useful offices for their
members. In so far, however, as their functions are limited to offices
such as these the proper name for them would be not clubs, but agencies.
On the other hand, in the modern world authorship to a great extent is a
systematic writing for journals. It has to be performed, in respect both
of time and other conditions, in accordance with strict arrangements
between the writers themselves and the officials by whom, whether as
editors or owners, these journals are managed. For this reason persons
who practice journalism--daily journalism in particular--will probably
be persons more or less similar in their habits, and clubs for admission
to which the main qualification consists in the fact of authorship may
provide them with special conveniences which they one and all desire.
But for persons whose literary pursuits are carried on in isolation, and
who aim at expressing by authorship no thoughts or no sentiments but
their own, it seems to me that a club for authors or writers as such
represents a conception as wrong as would that of a club for speakers as
such or for politicians as such. What bond of union would there be
between a Tory and a ferocious Democrat if they neither of them put pen
to paper--if they were not authors at all? They would keep, so far as
was possible, to different sides of the street. Why, then, should they
wish to meet in a club coffee room and lunch at adjacent tables, simply
because each, besides holding opinions absolutely odious to the other,
should, instead of keeping them to himself, endeavor to disseminate them
by writing among as many of his fellow creatures as was possible?
It may be said that two such men might very well wish to do so because,
though what each expressed was odious to the other in itself, each was a
consummate master of literary art in expressing it, and each admired,
and was aware of, the presence of this technical mastery in the other.
Now, so far as it goes, this, in numerous cases, may be true. Indeed,
such an admission is the very point from which the present argument
started. Pure literature, as such, is, no doubt, susceptible of
consummate beauties, in their natural admiration of which men who are
otherwise the bitterest adversaries may agree. What does this admission
cover? It applies, in my own opinion, to minor literature only, though
masterpieces of minor literature may be in their own way supreme, as
Keats has shown us in such poems as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," but, as
applied to literature in its higher and greater forms, the admission
fails to be true, because it fails to be adequate. A poem by Keats may
be admirable so far as it goes, but really great literature, such as
Goethe's "Faust," for example, would possess but a minor value unless
there were at the back of it something that is more than literature. In
the case of a poem like "Endymion" the poem is greater than the man who
writes it. In the case of a poem like "Faust" the man is greater than
the poem. Behind the poet stands the man of profound reflection, the man
of the world, the philosopher, the passionate or disillusioned lover. He
is all of these before he is a literary artist. His writing is only the
vehicle by which he communicates what he is in all these capacities to
others, and so leaves a practical impression on the thoughts and
emotions of the world.
And what is true of verse is more obviously true of prose. Of all prose
works which have captured attention by their mere merits as literature,
no better example can be given than the great masterpiece of Gibbon. But
though Gibbon may be read by many for the sake of his mere literary
charm, his place in the world as a great writer depends but in a
secondary way on this charm in itself. He lives because this charm was
used by him to convey the results of research so penetrating and
comprehensive, and guided by a mind so sagacious and powerful, that for
the most part these results have stood the test of criticism, however
keen and hostile; and in accomplishing this feat Gibbon has rendered a
service which is still indispensable to the historical students and
historical thinkers of to-day, whereas otherwise his merely literary
merits would have been merits displayed in vain or relegated to a
literary museum which few men cared to enter.
This conception of pure literature as written language which is mainly
appreciated for its own sake, and is for that reason in a relative
sense trivial, no doubt widens out again when we come to consider the
fact that emotion of some kind is, in the last resort, the one thing
which gives value to life. But the fact remains that all the desirable
emotions are determined by things which are not in themselves emotions,
such as knowledge, intellectual beliefs, and the laws, economic and
otherwise, which alone render a civilized society possible; and even the
greatest of merely literary charms make great literature only in so far
as they endow mankind with fundamental things like these.
Throughout these memoirs there has been constant allusion to the
relation borne by literary expression to life in the case of the author
himself. I have said already that for mere literature as such, and for
its practitioners, I have from my youth onward had a certain feeling of
contempt, and I now may explain once more what, at least in my own case,
such a feeling really means. It means, not that mere literature at its
best is not beautiful and delightful, but that it must, in order to be
worthy of a serious man's devotion, be a mere part of some whole, the
other part of which is incomparably the larger of the two. It means that
literature, in order to be great literature, must at the same time be
practically a form of action. I have no ambition to impose this opinion
on others. I would merely record it as an opinion on which, since the
ending of my early days at Oxford, I have myself by instinct acted.
Whatever I have written I have written with one or other ulterior
object, to which the mere pleasure of literary opposition as such has
been altogether subordinate. Of the nature of these objects I have said
enough already, but I may once again define them.
One of them relates to religion, to the quality of the lives and the
loves of ordinary men and women as affected by it, and also to
metaphysics and science, in so far as they leave, or do not leave, the
doctrines of religion credible.
The second of these objects relates to the existing conditions of social
and industrial life, more especially to those suggested by the loosely
used word "Labor," and the frantic fallacies with regard to these by
which the ideas of extreme reformers are vitiated, and from which,
instead of meeting them, too many Conservatives shrink in ignominious
terror.
With regard to religion, philosophy, science, and the widespread ideas
underlying what is vaguely described as Socialism, I have endeavored to
discredit, or else to modify, the views which, for something like fifty
years, leaders who are called "advanced" have been making more and more
widely popular. I have resorted for this purpose to the methods of
fiction and of formal argument. The implication of all the writings by
which I have attempted to do this is that the mischief, religious,
social, and political, which "advanced" thought has done may in time, by
a rational development of conservative thought, be undone, and the true
faiths be revived on which the sanctities, the stabilities, and the
civilization of the social order depend.
I have nevertheless always myself recognized, ever since early
enthusiasm felt the chill of experience, that such a counter-revolution
must be slow, nor have I ever underrated the obstacles which certain
false idealisms now at work in the world may oppose to it. On the
contrary, I have always felt that no man is fit to encounter an
adversary's case successfully unless he can make it for the moment his
own, unless he can put it more forcibly than the adversary could put it
for himself, and takes account, not only of what the adversary says, but
also of the best that he _might say_, if only he had chanced to think of
it.
On this principle I have endeavored myself to act. The process, however,
may in some cases be not without the seeming danger that the converter,
in thus arming himself for his task, may perform it somewhat too
thoroughly, and end by being himself perverted. He must, at all events,
go near to experiencing a sense of such perversion dramatically. Of this
fact I have myself provided an example in one of my writings, to which I
just now alluded, and which herein differs from the rest. Having
elsewhere argued in defense of religious faith, as though feeling that,
through argument and knowledge, mankind will some day recover it, I
wrote the work here in question as a man might write who had himself
made a final--even a complacent--surrender to the forces which he had
dreamed of dissipating.
This work is a poem called "Lucretius on Life and Death," and was partly
suggested by the vogue acquired by Fitzgerald's rendering of the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The doctrine of Omar is, as everybody knows, a
doctrine of voluptuous pessimism. There is no life other than this. Let
us kiss and drink while it lasts. The doctrine of Lucretius is to a
certain extent similar, but is sterner and more intellectual in its
form. I accordingly selected from his great scientific poem, which
contains in embryo all the substance of the modern doctrine of
evolution, those passages which bear on the meaning of man's existence.
I arranged these in logical order, and translated or paraphrased them in
the meter with which Fitzgerald has familiarized and fascinated the
English ear, so that the philosophy of the Persian and the Roman might
be reduced to something like a common denominator. Lucretius is so far a
pessimist that, under existing conditions, human life is for him no more
than a hideous nightmare; but he is so far an optimist that he looks
upon all this misery as due to one removable cause, this cause being the
prevalence of one mistaken belief, which a true scientific philosophy
will altogether eradicate. The belief in question is a belief in a
personal God, who is offended by the very nature of man, and who watches
with a wrathful eye by the deathbed of each human creature, in order to
begin a torture of him which will last for all eternity. Man's true
savior, Lucretius argues, is science, which makes this belief ridiculous
by showing clearly that all individual things--human beings
included--are nothing but atomic aggregations, which, having been formed
for a moment, dissolve and disappear for ever. How, then, can any
avenging God be anything more than the distempered dream of children?
How could such a God torture men when they die, since as soon as they
are dead there is nothing left to torture? Let them cast this incubus of
irrational fear behind them, and the mere process of life may then be
tolerable enough. It may even, in a sober way, be happy. It certainly
need not be, as it now is, miserable; and at all events it will be
pleasing as a prelude to the luxury of an endless sleep. Of my own
rendering of the great Lucretian message, I may here give a few stanzas
as specimens:
Nothing abides. The seas in delicate haze
Go off. Those mooned sands forsake their place;
And where they are shall other seas in turn
Mow with their sands of whiteness other bays.
How, then, the poet asks, shall the individual man be more enduring than
these?
What, shall the dateless worlds in dust be blown
Back to the unremembered and unknown,
And this frail Thou--this flame of yesterday--
Burn on forlorn, immortal and alone?
What though there lurks behind yon veil of sky
Some fabled Maker, some immortal Spy,
Ready to torture each poor thing he made?
Thou canst do more than God can. Thou canst die.
Will not the thunders of thy God be dumb
When thou art deaf for ever? Can the sum
Of all things bruise what is not? Nay, take heart,
For where thou go'st thither no God can come.
And no omnipotent wearer of a crown
Of righteousness, or fiend with branded frown
Swart from the pit, shall break or reach thy rest,
Or stir thy temples from the eternal down.
In writing this poem I experienced the full sensation of having become a
convert to the Lucretian gospel myself, against which throughout my life
it had been my dominant impulse to protest.
There are, doubtless, many others who experience this disconcerting
vicissitude--for whom the deductions of science as a moral message are
ludicrous, but for whom its homicidal negations prove in the end
ineluctable. If this is their permanent, if this is their final
condition, they will perhaps deserve commiseration, but they will hardly
deserve castigation, for their attitude is one which will bring its own
castigation with it. I can only hope that I am entitled to the truly
charitable satisfaction of regarding them as a class to which I do not
myself belong, and that the literary industry of a life otherwise idle
may prove to be a form of action, or rather a reaction, which, alike as
to religion and politics, will have not been unserviceable to the world.
To sum the matter up, the Lucretian philosophy of life, appealing as it
may to men when in certain moods, is one which, when submitted to what
Kant calls the "practical reason," shrivels up into an absurdity, and I
have shown at length, in my work _The Reconstruction of Belief_, that
this becomes only the more apparent when we consider the attempts which
have been made by modern thinkers to vivify it by an idea of which in
Lucretius there is no trace. Put into language less imposing than his
own, the gospel of Lucretius virtually comes to this, that men may eat
and drink and propagate their kind in comfort if only they will hold
fast to the belief that men, when they die, slip into their burrows like
rabbits, and will, though they have done with pleasure, be out of the
reach of pain--that whatever they may have done or not done, they will
all, as individuals, be as though they never had been. The only
enlargement of this gospel which modern thought can suggest is rooted in
a transference of men's serious interests in life from the life of the
individual to the life of the community or the race, and in the thought
that, though the individual perishes, the race will continue and
progress.
The answer given to this argument in _The Reconstruction of Belief_ is
that, even if we suppose such corporate progress to be a reality, it
cannot be invested with any practical meaning unless we postulate the
individual, and consider his fortunes first. We have here the Asses'
Bridge of all philosophy whatsoever, and until the philosopher has
crossed it the philosopher can do nothing but bray. The whole external
universe, the race of men included, has for no man any perceptible
existence except in so far as it is reflected in the thoughts and the
sensations of the individual. The conception of the race is nothing, so
far as we can know it, beyond what the individual conceives. Let us
suppose it, then, to be in some relative sense true that the human race
is undergoing some change always for the better in respect of its
material or moral conditions, which change will continue so long as the
race exists. In that case the course of Humanity will be comparable to
an upward road which the race will be always ascending toward heights of
welfare at present hardly imaginable. Such will be the course of the
race, but the course of the individuals will be something totally
different. It will for each be a progress not _up_ such a road, but
_across_ it, no matter at what altitude this crossing is made. Humanity
will always be nothing more than a procession passing from one turnstile
to another, the one leading out of, and the other leading into, a
something which always must be, for each individual, a nullity. Apart
from the individual, nothing which the human race knows as desirable can
exist; and, logically and practically alike, the only efficient
connection between the individual and the race must first of all be a
connection not with the race as such, and not with external nature, but
with something which is beyond both, and is not comprehended in either.
The only conceivable human being who will, apart from religion, ever be
able to describe himself as coextensive with the human race will, as
Nietzsche puts it in one of his most memorable sentences, be the last
man left alive when the rest of the human race is frozen. He, and he
only, will be able to say truly: "_Homo sum. Humani nihil a me alienum
puto._"
[5] In connection with the above questions, I may mention certain
others, all bearing on the relation of prose to poetry. It was said of
Plutarch that his sense of sound was so delicate that if it had been
necessary for the sake of mere verbal melody, he would have made Caesar
kill Brutus instead of Brutus killing Caesar. Closely bearing on this
criticism is the fact that in old English tragedies from the days of
Dryden onward a careful reader will note that, while parts of the
dialogue are in blank verse and parts in prose, the writers themselves
show, in many cases, a very defective appreciation of where verse ends
and prose begins, many passages which are printed as prose being really
unconscious verse. An interesting example of this may be found in a
passage from Bacon's _Essays_, which Macaulay quotes as an example of
the literary altitude to which Bacon's prose could rise. This passage is
in reality blank verse pure and simple. It is as follows:
Virtue is like precious odors,
Most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed.
Prosperity doth best discover vice.
Adversity doth best discover virtue.
This passage, with Macaulay's comments on it, may be commended to the
notice of those who contend that Bacon could not have written
_Shakespeare_, because Bacon's acknowledged verses are of a very
inferior kind. If they look in Bacon's prose for verse which was
unacknowledged, and which was unintended by himself, they may find
reason for modifying this argument.
INDEX
Aberdeen, speech at, 192.
Acland, family of, 3.
---- Sir Henry at Oxford, 78.
Aide, Hamilton, 98, 130.
Alexandria, 228.
Alford, Lady Marian, on society, 119.
America, political visit to, 308.
American architecture, 322.
Amherst, Lord and Lady, 292.
Ardverikie, Sir John Ramsden's lodge, 145, 307.
_Aristocracy and Evolution_, 265.
Arnold, Matthew, as Mr. Luke in _The New Republic_, 88.
Ashburton, Louisa, Lady, 117.
---- Rawlin Mallock, Whig member for, 4.
Astor, Mr. John Jacob, in New York, 314.
Austin, Alfred, Poet Laureate, 120.
Baker, Sir Samuel, 226-227.
Baltimore, 309, 320.
Batthyany, Prince and Princess, 241-242.
Beaufort Castle (Lord Lovat's), 129.
Beaulieu, villa at, 203.
Beckett, Ernest, second Lord Grimthorpe, 195.
Benbecula, island of, 304.
Bevan, Mr. (the last of the "dandies"), 60.
Bismarck, Countesses Marie and Helen, 55.
Blatchford, Lord, 30.
Blayney, Lord, friend of Cromwell's, 4.
Blenheim, 132.
Blunt, Wilfrid, poet, and breeder of Arab horses, 53, 129.
Boroughs, rotten Cornish, 159.
Breakfast party at Lord Houghton's, 103.
Bright, John, as land agitator; his absurd statistics, 182.
Brittany, visit to, 329.
Broglio, castle of, 237.
Browning, Robert, 71.
Buller, Emma and Antony, 30.
Bulwer, Sir Henry, in Cyprus, 227.
Burdett-Coutts, Miss, at Torquay, 61.
Bute, Lord, original of Lord Beaconsfield's Lothair, 131;
at Chiswick, 131;
at Cardiff Castle, 151.
Butler, Dr. Nicholas Murray, 313.
Byram, Sir John Ramsden's, in Yorkshire, 161.
Cannes, first visit to, 167;
miniature villa at, 167;
subsequent visits, 241.
Cardiff Castle, 157.
Carlyle, introduction to, 64.
Carriages, old traveling, 16.
Cary, Mr., of Tor Abbey, and R. Mallock as smugglers, 5.
---- Sir Henry, sells Cockington to R. Mallock, _temp._ Charles I, 4.
Castles, different classes of, 152.
Catholic society in London, 130.
Champernowne family related to Mallocks, 7.
Chelston Cross, built by Mr. W. Froude, 49.
Chillingham Castle, 155.
Civic Federation of New York, 308.
Clark, Mr. George, meeting at Cardiff, 158.
Cleveland, Duchess of, 149.
Cockington Church, 17.
---- Court, 13.
---- Estate, no building leases granted till 1860, 49.
Cockington village, 15.
Conservative party, besetting weakness of, 214, 268.
Conversation, the arts of, 101.
Country houses, description of various, 146-167.
Currie, Philip, afterward Lord Currie, 130.
Cyprus, winter visit to, 227, 235.
Dandies, 63.
Dartington Hall, 12.
---- Parsonage, 10.
Dartmouth as a rotten borough, 50.
De Vere, Aubrey, 54.
Dempster, Miss C., 241.
Denbury Manor, 7.
"Denzil Place," poem by "Violet Fane," 129.
Diagrams, statistical, used at public meetings, 191.
_Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption_, 276.
Dorlin, Lord Howard's lodge in the Highlands, 175.
Dreams, poems written in, 259.
Dunrobin, 146.
Eaglehurst, 241.
Eaton, Alfred Montgomery at, 152.
Elvaston Castle, 157.
Erskine, Lady, hostess at Torquay, 54.
Everingham Park, old Yorkshire Catholic house, 154.
Exeter, Henry Philpotts, Bishop of, 31-34.
---- R. Mattock's connection with, _temp._ Elizabeth and James I, 4.
Famaugusta, enormous ruins of, 233.
"Fane, Violet," 130.
Farmer, Devonshire, on free will, 24;
on the fall of Jericho, 24.
Fielding, a child's imitation of his novels, 35.
Florence, interesting houses in and near, 236.
Froude, Antony, historian, and Carlyle, 64.
---- Archdeacon, equestrian, dilettante, artist, magistrate, 6.
Froude, Hurrell, leader of Tractarian movement, 6.
---- Mr. and Mrs. William, interesting society at their house, 50.
---- William, his discoveries in naval architecture, 51.
Fryston, 161.
Gaskell, C. Milnes; Lord Houghton's characteristic advice to him, 59.
George, Henry, limitations of his attack on private wealth, 173;
his ignorance of statistics, 188.
Georges, Sir Ferdinando:
his immense landed properties in Maine, 4;
Mallock's partner _temp._ Charles I, 4.
Glasgow, the author speaks at, 192.
Glenthorne, its lonely and singular situation, 153.
Governesses, high Tory, 28.
Gratz, 246.
Greenock, Lord, 195.
Grimthorpe, Lord, 194.
Hare, Augustus, his indiscretions as a writer of memoirs, 136.
Harvard, 317-318.
Hatchments in Cockington Church, 17.
_Heart of Life, The_, 280.
Hebrides, the Outer, 304.
Heligan, the John Tremaynes' house in Cornwall, 159.
Herbert, Auberon, a devotee of "the simple life," 122-124.
---- of Lee, Lady, 177.
Hewel Grange, 160.
Hibbert, Mrs. Washington, 130.
Highlands, the, first visit to, 175.
Hoch-Osterwitz, extraordinary castle of, 245.
Hotels, old-fashioned, private, in London, 94;
extravagant gilding of American, 316.
Houghton, Lord, at Torquay, 58;
his enormous acquaintance, 59;
his dry wit and humor, 60;
his social advice to the author, 60;
breakfast party given in London by, 103;
his remarkable defense of one of the author's novels, 172;
in the Highlands, 177.
Houghton, old Catholic house in Yorkshire, 155.
---- Sir Robert Walpole's, in Norfolk, 151.
Howard, Kenneth, 96.
Hoy, island of, its colossal cliffs, 300.
Hugel, Baron von, Austrian diplomat, 237.
_Human Document, A_, 255-278.
Huxley as Mr. Storks in _The New Republic_, 87-88.
_In an Enchanted Island_, 229.
_Individualist, The_, 281.
Ireland, visits in, 164.
_Is Life Worth Living?_ 169.
James, William, at Harvard, 317.
Jerningham, C. E., 200.
Jerome, William Travers, 321.
Jersey, Julia, Lady, 126.
Jowett, as Doctor Jenkinson in _The New Republic_, 88.
Kidd, Benjamin, on Social Evolution, 264.
Kippax, Yorkshire, a product of architectural rivalry, 162.
Kirkwall and its cathedral, 299.
Knebworth, its pseudo-Gothic architecture, 257, 260;
"Ouida's" visit to, 256;
a night of conversation at, 288.
Koermend, castle of, in Hungary, 246.
_Labor and the Popular Welfare_, 261.
Land agitation in the Highlands, 180.
---- agitator on Fort William coach, 184.
---- the old basis of London society, 93;
decline in rent of agricultural since 1880, 93.
Lane Fox, George, 211.
Larnaca in Cyprus, 229.
Laureateship, competitors for, 121.
Library, secret hours in a, 36.
_Limits of Pure Democracy_, 333.
Literature and action, 341-371.
Literature and utilitarianism, 343.
---- as speech made permanent, 342.
Littlehampton, private tutor at, 39.
Lloyd Bryce, 310.
Long Island, country house in, 310.
Lowther, Mrs. William, 117.
_Lucretius on Life and Death_, 366.
Lulworth Castle, 154.
Lyme, 163.
Lytton, as contrasted with Carlyle, 65;
second Lord, early acquaintance with, 66;
his poetry and his generous temper, 67;
poem composed by him in a dream, 259.
---- first Lord, at Torquay, 54.
Mallock family, 3-5.
---- Richard, as member for Torquay division of Devonshire, 209;
support given him by George Lane Fox and J. Sandars, 211.
Mallocks as members of Parliament for Lyme, Poole, Totnes, and Ashburton, 3.
---- of the eighteenth century:
their ecclesiastical patronage, and their patronage of the turf, 5.
Manchester, speech at, on the land question, 192.
Manning, Cardinal, 131.
Marx, Karl, his influence in England about 1880, 173, 179.
Memoirs, difficulties of writing, 135.
Metaphors, the secret of their force in literature, 349.
Molesworth, Sir Louis, 159.
Monte Carlo, 194-208.
Montrose, Duchess of (Caroline), 99.
Morgan, J. Pierpont, 323, 327.
Naval architecture, Mr. Froude's experiments in, 51.
Negro, spiritual ambitions of a, 327.
Nevill, Lady Dorothy, 101.
---- Miss Meresia, her lesson in oratory at Strathfieldsaye, 110.
_New Domesday Book_, studied by the author at Ardverikie, 187.
Newman, Cardinal, 50.
_New Paul and Virginia, The_, 90.
_New Republic, The_, 87.
New York: the opera there a social function, 312;
dinner parties in, and other entertainments, 312;
good taste in fashionable entertainments, 316;
author's address at Columbia University, 313;
Evelyn Nesbit and the Thaw trial, 321;
ladies' club in, author's address at opening of, 324.
Nicosia, 230.
Noble, Mr. and Mrs. Saxton, 294.
Noltland Castle, in the Orkneys, 301.
Normans and Saxons, 28.
Oban, 175.
_Old Order Changes, The_, analysis of, 214-217.
Orford, Lord, his views of society, 97.
Osborne, Father B., son of a prominent Evangelical, 240.
"Ouida" in London, 126;
at Florence, 256;
at Knebworth, 256.
Oxford, undergraduate life at, 68;
suppers and concerts at, 70-71;
Robert Browning and Ruskin at, 71-79;
rejection of dogmatic Christianity at, 82;
suicide of Balliol undergraduate at, 80;
orthodox apologists at, 83;
_The New Republic_ at, 87.
Paget, Sir Augustus and Lady, 228.
Pater, as Mr. Rose, in _The New Republic_, 88.
_Pelham_ (Lord Lytton's novel), social advice to her son
from the hero's mother, 97.
Philpot, Mr., private tutor at Littlehampton, 39;
his taste for poetry, 39;
the author's happy years under tuition of, 39-49;
his professed Radicalism in polities and religion, 43;
his fastidiousness in choice of pupils, 43.
Philpotts, Henry, Bishop of Exeter, examples of his polished wit, 32.
Poetry, author's early devotion to, 35-37.
Poor, the rural, of Devonshire, 20-29.
Pope as author's earliest model, 35.
Popoff, Admiral, his visit to Mr. W. Froude at Chelston Cross, 51.
Primrose League meeting at Cockington, humors of the occasion, 211.
Prose, methods of writing good, 347.
Prosody, attempts to write English verse according to Latin, 355.
_Provence_, the, French transatlantic steamer, 328.
Queen of Holland at Cockington, 17.
Raby Castle, 150.
Ramsden, Lady Guendolen: the author helps her in editing family memoirs, 100;
has to reject the most amusing parts, 100.
---- Sir John, an ideal country gentleman, 161.
_Reconstruction of Belief, The_, 291.
_Religion as a Credible Doctrine_, 284.
Religion as an element of civilization, 291.
Riegersbourg, castle of, 252.
Roden, Lady, the charm of her conversation, 101.
---- Lord and Lady, in Ireland, 164.
_Romance of the Nineteenth Century, A_, 169;
violent attacks on, 170;
analysis of its philosophical purport, 170;
defended by Catholic priest and Lord Houghton, 171-172.
Roosevelt, President, author's meeting with, at Harvard, 318.
Ruskin, meeting with, at Oxford, 78;
his extreme charm of manner, 79;
temperamentally opposed to Jowett, 79;
his insistence on the need of definite religious belief, 86;
as Mr. Herbert in _The New Republic_, 88.
St. Andrews Boroughs, invitation to stand for, 191.
St. Helier, Lady, and Duke of Wellington, 108.
St. Hilarion, castle of, 232.
St. Michael's Mount (Cornwall), 148.
St. Vincent, first Lord, 14.
_Sartor Resartus_, Carlyle's, 64.
Savile, Augustus, 96.
Season in London, 138.
Seaton, first Lord, 14.
Sermon, Jowett's, in _The New Republic_, 88;
semisocialist, by priest in _The Old Order Changes_, 219.
Servants, Old World, 18.
Shelley, Sir Percy and Lady, 114.
Sherborne House, 163.
---- Susan, Lady, 163.
---- the late Lord, 163.
Shropshire, county ball in, 142.
Sloane, Mr. and Mrs., of New York, 315.
Smuggling by two country gentlemen in Devonshire, 5.
"Social Democratic Federation," 173.
_Social Equality_, 181.
_Socialism, A Critical Examination of_, 329.
---- elements of, in _The Old Order Changes_, 222.
Society in London, its traditional basis, 92.
Society in the country, 144.
Somers, Lady, 117.
Somerset, Duchess of, her conversational humor, 100.
Spencer, Herbert, letters from, about _Aristocracy and Evolution_, 266.
Stanway, picture of life at, in the eighteenth century, 162.
"Statistical Monographs," 333.
Stowe, 151.
Strafford, Cora, Lady, 151.
Suicide, her funeral at Monaco, 207.
Summer on the borders of Caithness, 292.
Sutherland, Duchess (Annie), at Torquay, 212.
Swinburne, admiration of his poetry at Littlehampton, 47;
at Jowett's dinner table and afterward, 72;
at an undergraduate's luncheon, 74;
his humor, 75;
recitation of his own verses, 77.
System played at Monte Carlo, 196-197.
Tchiacheff, Madame de, well-known Florentine hostess, 236.
Tennyson, quoted as illustrating the force of metaphor in poetry, 352.
Tiffany's, two queer customers at, 242.
Torquay, extension of, over Cockington and Chelston property, 13-14;
winter society at, 54-55.
Torre a Cona, near Florence, 238.
Trevarthenick, Sir L. Molesworth's, 159.
Trevelyans of East Devon, 3.
Ugbrooke, the Cliffords, in Devonshire, 154.
Valentines, two living, 202.
Vay di Vaya, Monsignor, 314.
_Veil of the Temple_, passage on Darwin quoted in, 284;
table talk on free will in, 287;
verses from, quoted, 288-289;
President Roosevelt's interest in, 319.
Verses, three volumes of the author's, 340.
Vicenza, 243.
Villa at Beaulieu, 205.
---- Maser, near Asolo, 244.
Vyner, Clair, 130.
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 272.
---- Wilfrid, 134.
Wellington, second Duke of, his conversational wit, 105-112;
his last Waterloo banquet at Apseley House, 107;
as a translator of Horace, 112.
Wemyss, Lord, 135.
Wentworth, Lord, 53, 69.
Westminster, Constance, Duchess of, 99.
White, Stanford, 321-322.
Whyte Melville, 124.
Will, freedom of, 284.
Wilton, Laura, Lady, 202.
Wordsworth, 35.
Wrath, Cape, 296.
Young, Rev. Julian, 54.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's Memoirs of Life and Literature, by W. H. Mallock