_North American Review_ that books should be written for the benefit
of the reader. The suggestion is not on the face of it paradoxical,
but it will be rank heresy to those who blame the public for not
bowing down before the sacrosanctity of the "serious" author. He
admits that "a book ought to be rich with the full flavour of the
author's personality;" primarily it ought to express him; but
secondarily--and this is Mr. Brander Matthews' point--"it is for the
sole benefit of the reader."
I think we may go a little further than Mr. Matthews, and find a
second reason why certain authors fail to find favour with the general
reader. In the case which Mr. Matthews seemed to be considering there
are authors who have every qualification for writing except that they
cannot write. Secondly, there are authors who, in the ordinary
literary sense of the term, can write, who have gathered knowledge and
formed seriously-grounded opinions about life, who are nevertheless so
out of touch with the broad, common interests of men that they
invariably fail to make a strong emotional or imaginative appeal.
Every reader is acquainted with the tiresome writer who has a great
deal to say but labours infinitely in the saying of it. In a crude,
energetic, excessively eulogised novel published in America a few
years ago--_Queed_--we were introduced to an economist engaged upon a
work so learned that he knew there were only three persons in America
capable of understanding it. There is, doubtless, something to be said
for an appreciative audience of three; but it is safe to assert that
even the exact sciences might be made more widely intelligible. I am,
however, thinking primarily of those studies which have some claim to
rank as literary studies. It is through literature that the historian,
the biographer, the sociologist, and the philosopher must make their
contributions to knowledge. Yet how much research and how much acute
thinking are wasted because the student has not the means of making
his subject alive for others, has not the reconstructive imagination
by means of which truth is communicated! It is because he cannot
write.
But this being able to write is not a matter of putting words and
clauses together with correctness and elegance. That much the mere
scholar generally understands, and it is because he thinks it
sufficient that he fails. What is wanted is a quality of mind which is
too often excluded from the specialist by his habit of thought. "A few
years of journalism," said Mr. W.B. Yeats on one occasion, "is an
invaluable discipline for the man of letters." No one is more fully
alive to the defects of journalism than Mr. Yeats--its frequent
looseness, prejudice, obviousness, and dissipation of interest. But,
in spite of that, he saw that the good journalist's faculty of
addressing himself directly to the subject in hand, of stating it
clearly and in its essentials without waste of words, of so escaping
his own particular mould of thought that he may be easily intelligible
to a variety of minds, required a discipline and a broadening
invaluable to the man who really has something to say. The specialist
is inclined to lack the broad outlook of one who is interested in many
things; he acquires a jargon of his own; his mind runs in the narrow
channel to which that jargon corresponds; the language he uses becomes
stilted and dead. There is no tonic in the truths he tries to
proclaim, no relevance to the rest of knowledge. In other words, what
he has to say may be scientifically valuable, but he fails to convey
it to any but his fellow-specialists.
Mr. Brander Matthews points out that the great students are those who
have combined the Teutonic thoroughness with the French
comprehensiveness and lucidity. Gibbon and Mommsen are the great
examples to which he points. England surely has been very rich in
writers thorough and lucid, but we may observe that they follow rather
the eighteenth-century tradition, with its intelligible common sense,
than the romantic or transcendental tradition, with its mysticism and
obscurity. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, the most lucid of philosophers,
are scarcely easier to follow than John Stuart Mill, Huxley, and
Leslie Stephen. But it is hardly necessary to enter a _caveat_ against
supposing that lucidity of expression is precisely proportional to
clearness of thought. The philosophy of Kant did not admit of the
simple language of Hume, and T.H. Green and Mr. Bradley are not to be
blamed if they are more difficult to understand than Sir Leslie
Stephen.
The second aspect of the question is more important, especially at a
time when we are constantly reminded that the public is indifferent to
the finest creative literature now produced. The fault may be with the
public, and it may also be with the authors. It is worth remembering
that this is a time when special forms of expression are being made to
do work which once belonged to other forms. Fiction, for example, is
being made to carry the load of philosophic psychology, of poetry, of
the economic, moral, or political treatise. Drama is often used as a
vehicle for truths which were once left to the pulpit, the political
platform, or the lecture hall. Both of them, in the case of the
extreme realists, are being used as the store-room or the dissecting
chamber of the experimental scientist. Supposing that an author's
facts are supremely important, his discernment most acute, his ideas
significant, still, before we condemn the public unheard, we are
compelled to ask of him: Have you given to this material a form which
it will accept? Have you addressed the public in a language which has
a wide human appeal? Are you, in fact, a master of that higher
technique which implies an understanding, not only of the fine
essences of truth, but the broad, common facts of human nature? It is
just because they are not masters of this higher technique that many
exponents of so-called "intellectual fiction" and "intellectual drama"
are doomed to failure.
I am well aware that such arguments as this must be qualified. For I
have not forgotten that what are now the commonplaces of culture were
once the unintelligible obscurities of a sage. Much that we now
apprehend at a glance, all that makes our cultural birthright, was
only acquired by slow and arduous processes, in which the pioneers
were laughed to scorn. The original mind sees things in a new light,
and his language is to us strange and unfamiliar, and we do not learn
it till our eyes and ears have become accustomed. And there are others
who do not stand conspicuously in the main stream of mental progress,
who, nevertheless, remote and perhaps secluded as they are, have a
vision rarefied, subtle, strange not only in their own times, but for
all times. Those men have their own communication to make to those
anxious to add to the fineness of their perception, or merely perhaps
to the oddness of experience. If some sting of truth reaches the mind
through writing obscure to the general, through language which may be
barbarous in form, an author has justified himself; and it would be
idle to follow Mr. Brander Matthews in his quotation from the
ever-pleasing Lord Chesterfield: "Speak the language of the company
you are in; speak it purely and unloaded with any other." For, after
all, is it not open to the author to choose his company? If his
receptions are ill-attended, that may not reflect ill on those who
accept the invitation. Not everyone will read the poems of Mr.
Doughty; Mr. Doughty has made it hard for them; but if they do, they
are repaid. Not everyone will tolerate the finesse of Mr. Henry James;
but among those who can understand him, assuredly Mr. James is in very
good company.
VI
SPECIALISM IN PHILOSOPHY AND JUSTICE
In the play called _Justice_, Mr. Galsworthy attacked the professional
mechanism of English law in much the same way as the late William
James attacked professional philosophy. These two kinds of specialism,
or departmentalism, may therefore conveniently be treated together;
for I may leave Mr. Galsworthy and William James to conduct the
attack, contenting myself with the task of linking up their forces.
Both Professor James and Mr. Galsworthy appealed against the
machine--the one against the machine of thought which is divorced from
common perception, the other against the machine of the law which has
no contact with the needs of persons. "We," said William James,
meaning the Pragmatists, or the Humanists, "turn to the great unpent
and unstayed wilderness of truth as we feel it to be constituted, with
as good a conscience as rationalists are moved by when they turn from
our wilderness into their neater and cleaner intellectual abodes." In
_Justice_ the young advocate who appears for the defence is not so
much pleading for the client under the law, as arraigning the present
legal system, setting up a new conception of law based upon common
sense, human insight, and a morality finer than legalism.
"Gentlemen," he says, "men like the defendant are destroyed daily
under our laws for want of that human insight which sees them as they
are, patients, and not criminals.... Justice is a machine that, when
someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself. Is
this young man to be ground to pieces under this machine for an act
which at the worst was one of weakness?"
This attempt to get back to something that _satisfies_ the human mind,
the human idea of good, is to be seen equally in these two thinkers
who belong to different countries and different traditions. The word
"satisfactory" continually occurs in Professor James' writings.
"Humanism," he says, "conceiving the more 'true' as the more
'satisfactory,' has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and
ancient ideals of rigour and finality." He wishes to break with that
view of philosophy which says "the anatomy of the world is logical,
and its logic is that of a university professor." He is one of those
who, having been a lifelong student of philosophy and psychology, has
the energy to know that, however theoretically perfect may be the
logical system evolved by thought, that system will not be sufficient
to prevent a man from saying, "After all, am I sure of it?" The only
things of which we are sure are those things which we directly
experience. We know the appearance of a tree, because we see it; we
know the emotion of pity or love, because we have felt it; we know
that what we call tigers exist in India, because acquaintances have
seen them, and direct experience has taught us that their evidence is
satisfactory, and if we went to India their testimony could be found
true by the evidence of our own senses. "What becomes our warrant for
calling anything reality? The only reply is--the faith of the present
critic or inquirer. At every moment of his life he finds himself
subject to a belief in _some_ realities, even though his realities of
this year should prove to be his illusions of the next." "_The most we
can claim is, that what we say about cognition may be counted as true
as what we say about anything else_." Nothing is true for him unless
it has reference to the world which we know, which we accept on faith,
by the practical evidence of our senses, or, it might be added, our
desires, our aspirations, our intuitions. Nothing is ruled out so long
as it can be pinned down at any moment to what is real, to what is
individual. "Demonstration in the last resort" is to the senses.
Contemned though they may be by some thinkers, these sensations
are the mother-earth, the anchorage, the stable rock, the first
and last limits, the _terminus a quo_ and the _terminus ad quem_
of the mind. To find such sensational _termini_ should be our
aim with all higher thought. They end discussion, they destroy
the false conceit of knowledge, and without them we are all at
sea with each other's meaning. If two men act alike on a
percept, they believe themselves to feel alike about it; if not,
they may suspect they know it in differing ways. We can never be
sure we understand each other till we are able to bring the
matter to this test. This is why metaphysical discussions are so
much like fighting with the air; they have no practical issue of
a sensational kind.
Truth, then, for the Pragmatists is that which has "practical
consequences." A belief is held to be true when it is "found to work."
Transcendent ideas have no validity except as ideas unless they are
found to have a "cash value" in practical life, that is to say, unless
they refer to, and are operative in, the world of immediate
experience. "Reality is an accumulation of our own intellectual
inventions, and the struggle for 'truth' in our progressive dealings
with it is always a struggle to work in new nouns and adjectives while
altering as little as possible the old." You may talk of Absolutes as
much as you like, you may contemplate the fundamental categories of
the mind, you may dwell upon the _a priori_ conceptions to which all
our experiences must conform, but the fact remains, says Professor
James, turning his back on all transcendental idealism, "the concrete
truth _for us_ will always be that way of thinking in which our
various experiences most profitably combine."
The true is the opposite of whatever is instable, of whatever is
practically disappointing, of whatever is useless, of whatever
is lying and unreliable, of whatever is unverifiable and
unsupported, of whatever is inconsistent and contradictory, of
whatever is artificial and eccentric, of whatever is unreal in
the sense of being of no practical account. Here are pragmatic
reasons with a vengeance why we should turn to truth--truth
saves us from a world of that complexion. What wonder that its
very name awakens loyal feeling! In particular what wonder that
all little provisional fools' paradises of belief should appear
contemptible in comparison with its bare pursuit! When
Absolutists reject humanism because they feel it to be untrue,
that means that the whole habit of their mental needs is wedded
already to a different view of reality, in comparison with which
the humanistic world seems but the whim of a few irresponsible
youths. Their own subjective apperceiving mass is what speaks
here in the name of the eternal natures and bids them reject our
humanism--as they apprehend it. Just so with us humanists, when
we condemn all noble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal, rational,
temple-like systems of philosophy.
I am not here seeking to examine closely, still less to criticise,
Professor James' pragmatic doctrines. What I am concerned to show is
that we have in him a trained philosopher adopting towards the theory
of knowledge a point of view strangely similar to that which Mr.
Galsworthy takes up towards the social ethics of modern England. Is it
not Mr. Galsworthy's function to "condemn all noble, clean-cut, fixed,
eternal, rational, temple-like systems" of morality and etiquette?
Professor James' rationalist antagonists are exactly like the
administrators of law and order criticised by Sweedle in the play:
"They've forgot what human nature's like." Just as your Hegelian
wishes for nothing but the perfection of knowledge, and leaves you in
an inconceivable, unknowable Absolute, so, according to Falder, who
has been in prison, "Nobody wishes you any harm, but they down you all
the same." In precisely the same way as Professor James pleads for a
view of truth which rests on the unfailing vividness of finite
experience, so Mr. Galsworthy pleads for a justice which shall be
applicable, not to an infinite number of imaginary cases, but to the
individual, to the person whom we might chance to know, and meet, and
work with--to the necessitous human being. He pleads for a law which
shall be elastic, not rigid; dealing with men, not cases; for which
mercy shall come to be a part of the idea of justice. That which is
good enough for human beings in their dealings one with another ought
not to be too good for the law. Intercourse with concrete reality is
Professor James' requirement for the truth of an idea; intercourse
with human beings is Mr. Galsworthy's requirement as the basis of
social morality and of law. That does not of course mean that the
legislator must be acquainted with all those for whom he legislates
any more than that we can directly experience the facts of history
which we claim to know. But every rule--in knowledge, in morality, in
law--must be referable to this test of intercourse. Let your judgment
of human beings be such as you would award to those who are
sufficiently human to be among your friends. Let it be directed solely
towards the well-being of the individual so far as that is consistent
with the well-being of society. Again and again Mr. Galsworthy has
shown us how stereotyped views, abstractions of the human mind, settle
down upon classes and individuals and warp their judgments and their
conduct. In _Fraternity_ he showed how the idea of class differences
becomes an obsession in the human mind, obliterating the truer idea of
human community, of those common qualities in character which are not
skin-deep, like class, but fundamental. In _Strife_ he showed how the
idea of the rights of an employer, of the rights of a workman, is an
abstraction hiding from master and workman the human bond which human
intercourse would have revealed. In _Justice_, again, he showed how
that lowest of all existing codes, the legal code, erects a
"temple-like" abstraction of the law to which all individuals, however
different they may be, however various their requirements, are made to
conform.
We may notice that in the cases both of the philosopher and the
dramatist there is a return to what I may call a rudimentary common
sense. Professor James' views come as a reaction in the course of the
long evolution of ideas. If on the one side we had not had thinker
after thinker who emphasised the necessity of approaching reality as a
relation of the conscious mind, and on the other side sceptics who
asserted that there is nothing knowable but the continuum of
disconnected sensations which present themselves--a blind array of
atoms--there would be no meaning in a thesis like that of Professor
James, which refutes the follies of the two extremes, and stands upon
a ground which is very nearly a denial of the possibility of
philosophy. In like manner Mr. Galsworthy's ethics are only valuable
as a chain in the progress of morality and institutions. Primitive
society conceived punishment as an antidote to the horrors of
unchecked violence. Mediæval law devised fearful penalties for the
forger, because forgery was a fearful menace to the stability of a
commerce not yet backed by a high commercial morality. But now we have
reached the time when we are menaced by the machinery set up by our
ancestors. The law works with a violence and a brutality which were
invented in, and proper to, an age of violence and brutality; and we
are confronted with the daily spectacle of judges compelled to
administer an antiquated and ferocious law, which awards to the
criminal the double penalty of chastisement and shame. The old
barbarism clings to the machine and works havoc. And because it is
old, and because we are accustomed to it, we tolerate it. We do not
put it to the test, which must be a personal test: How does it work in
the case of this individual and of that? Is the application of these
rules "satisfactory" when they are made to operate on the human beings
for whom they were devised? Has this code any social "cash value" when
it is brought to bear on the lawyer's clerk who forged a cheque to
save a woman?
I have not considered Professor James' merits as a dialectician, or
Mr. Galsworthy's as a dramatist. I have attempted to hint at that
quality in them which is called "humanism," humanism in thought,
humanism in ethics--the quality which makes men seek to judge ideas,
institutions and things by what they are worth to human beings for
their most pressing, their most vital needs. It is evident that this
same "humanism" is beginning to manifest itself in politics, religion
and even literary criticism. Clearly it tends at all times to set up
individual conviction against authority, freedom against discipline.
It has as its virtue the quality of being opposed to red tape,
professionalism, departmentalism pedantry, officiousness, intolerance,
lethargy, and the tyranny of custom; it has its dangers in that,
resting as it does in the last resort on the personal and the
concrete, it tends in ill-balanced minds to neglect the value of
ancient and dear illusions, and to degenerate into chaos and caprice.
Chaos, however, is not so much to be feared as those "little
provisional fools' paradises of belief" exposed so brilliantly by
William James.
PART THREE
LITERATURE AND MEN
I
BERNARD SHAW
It is doubtful if any person in England exercises so many-sided and so
considerable an influence as that of Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is not that
his books are read by very many thousands of readers; that his plays
have long runs or can compete in popularity with those of Mr. Barrie
or the Gaiety Theatre; that his lectures and speeches are reported so
fully as those of an ordinary Cabinet Minister; that his letters to
the newspapers are as numerous as those of Mr. Algernon Ashton or Dr.
Clifford in his prime. He seldom demonstrates his power by passing
Acts of Parliament or organising garden parties. He figures less often
in the Social and Personal columns than Sir H. Beerbohm Tree. He is
not so well known in the law courts as Mr. Horatio Bottomley. Yet
there is no other man in England who is so conspicuous in so many
spheres of activity, and wherever he appears he is always _facile
princeps_ in the public eye. Everyone who has any knowledge of him is
compelled to think about him, and those who have no direct knowledge
of him--so insidious is his influence--are to be found constantly
thinking in terms of Bernard Shaw. The active, talking, persuading,
book-writing, lecturing, propagandist population of England has been
bitten by him; it re-writes and popularises him; it even talks his
jargon when it is criticising him. It began by regarding him as a
brilliant and witty writer whom no one could take seriously; it now
regards him as a serious, and indeed responsible, thinker whose wit is
a matter of harmless inspiration, and often a tactical advantage.
Mr. Shaw, in fact, has thrust himself upon English public life.
Wherever anything is doing or being talked about he is in the thick of
it. Whenever he rises to speak, he is supreme. He sweeps away all the
false issues in a few sentences; he attacks the very heart of the
problem under discussion, and makes the most practical proposals. He
can cover a hostile argument with ridicule, and drive it out of the
field with good-tempered laughter. But his method is not only that of
raillery. He is remorselessly logical. He can pursue the logical
sequence of his case, and set it forth with a fusillade of perfectly
relevant and illuminating instances and analogies. He never loses his
thread like Mr. Chesterton; he never wanders off into vague rhetoric
like Mr. Wells. He chases his enemies and his subject until he has
subdued the first and set forth the second so that it shines with
crystal clearness. There is no man in England who can state a case, on
the platform or in the Press, with such perfect lucidity, such logical
order, with such brightness and lightness, or with such force as Mr.
Bernard Shaw. He is the greatest debater in England, the greatest
pamphleteer, the most observable personality in public life.
That is not all. As an organiser there is no one who has more driving
power. He can set himself to committee work, and keep every member of
a committee active, himself included. He can, when necessary, pester
responsible persons till they are goaded into action. Whilst his
attention is always fixed on the central object, he has an eye for the
most trifling details.
He is a first-rate business man. He knows as much about the trade of
publishing as any publisher. He refuses to employ a literary agent,
and personally transacts the business of placing his work--and
sometimes that of his friends--in the literary and dramatic market all
over the world.
Also he is a man personally benevolent. No one was ever less
sentimental or romantic, but he is charitably disposed to everyone
whom he does not regard as a fool.