Matthew Arnold who made it what it has become are not themselves
precisely a congruous pair; but then, neither are the qualities they
bracketed. Or at least they occur together in the minds and tempers
of none but the utterly elect. Most persons who have either of them
have never more than one or at best have only one at a time. Consider,
for instance, your perfect optimist: he is a mine, a quarry, a very
bee-tree of sweetness, a honey-dripping fellow, a foaming pail of the
milk of human kindness. But when now and then the light falls on him
from some alien source he shrivels or scurries to a shady nook where
the illumination is not so deadly. Or consider your perfect pessimist:
he is a vial of light imprisoned, a storage battery charged with the
sun, and unless the properest precautions are taken he explodes when
sweetness touches him.
But then, however, consider those eclectic citizens who go in for both
at once. They usually undertake to be sweet in a light way or to be
light in a sweet way. When they are lightly sweet they flit through
the sunshine with the prettiest iridescence, stopping at all the
prosperous flowers but stopping no longer than a moment and never
really exhausting the deepest stores of sugar at the heart of the
blossom. When they are sweetly light they sport admirably in the sun
in the morning hours while its beams are still young and generous and
again toward the evening after mellowness has set in; but they do not
often care to venture into the noon at its full splendours. Sweetness,
it appears to most of them, is a question of the coat rather than of
the constitution; light, it appears to most of them, comes from the
air itself rather than from the fire which uses the air merely as
its medium. If they had studied the history of sweetness they would
realize that it is the fruit of powerful processes working with matter
not altogether sweet itself and arriving at the final essence only
with patience and strife and victory. If they had observed the methods
and effects of light they would understand that though it can heal it
can also kill and that though it may throw a radiance around plain
things it can quite as truly strip off glamour and halo and luxurious
subterfuge.
It is a lamentable arithmetic which has led millions to put sweetness
and light together and to make out of the combination something less
than either might be by itself. Each has been played off against the
other as an excuse. If you follow light too far, says sweetness, you
will grow fierce and lose me. If you follow sweetness too far, says
light, you will grow soft and forget what I have taught you. Here is
the danger. Left to themselves, sweetness and light quarrel a hundred
times for once they kiss. Even Socrates and Shakespeare must have had
many hours when the war was hot within them. Was Swift, for all his
light, ever really sweet? Was Arnold, for all his sweetness, not now
and then negligent of the light while he mooned it with his Senancours
and Amiels and missed the point of the diamond which Heine actually was?
For my part, while urging no one to refrain from being a Socrates or a
Shakespeare if he can, I hint that light was first in the universe and
that sweetness, invented since, is its creation. If I cannot have them
both I choose light.
CROWNING THE BISHOP
Apse, altar, architrave,
Chasuble, rochet, pyx, chimere,
Clerestory, nave,
Throne, mitre, incense, sheer
Surplices like snow,
Choir boys carolling like throstles:
_It was not so
With Jesus and the lean Apostles_.
VIII. A CASUAL SHELF
HONESTY IS A GIFT
A good many people think that honesty is a trait which a man chooses
out of the various traits offered him by life. Perhaps it is nearer
the truth to think that honesty is a gift, and innate, like a man’s
complexion or the shape of his skull. It can be hurt by abuse or
encouraged by proper treatment, but its roots are deeper than
experience. Clarence Day must have been born honest and he has, so far
as I can see, never done anything to waste his birthright. The eyes
with which he looks at things are as level as E. W. Howe’s, but his
language is lighter and his fancy nimbler. In _This Simian World_ it
was his fancy which perhaps did most to get him a hearing. In _The
Crow’s Nest_, without giving up his fancy, he ranges over more varied
fields than in his first book and seems even wiser. He has a perfect
temper. He has known pain but it has not soured him—or at least his
book. He has known passion but it has left no visible ruts or hummocks
in his mind. He has done all that a human being can do with his reason
but he feels no resentment that reason at its best can do so little.
Having a perfect temper he sits at ease in his crow’s nest and surveys
the deck, the sailors, rival ships, the waves, the horizon, and the
sky, without heat, of course, but also without pride in his position or
in his self-control. Having a perfect temper he is not harried into any
violence of style by his instinct to express himself. As shrewd as a
proverb, he never plays with epigrams. As much of a poet as he needs to
be, he yet seems to have no need for eloquence. Such lucidity as his is
both prudent and elevated.
He is primarily an anthropologist, as he showed in _This Simian
World_. The race of man is for him “a fragile yet aspiring species on
a stormy old star.” It has lived a long while and has gone a long way
from its original slime, but plenty of the old stains still colour
its nature. Its impulses are tangled with the impulses of the ape and
with the inhibitions of the amoeba. “The test of a civilized person
is first self-awareness, and then depth after depth of sincerity in
self-confrontation.” By this test Mr. Day is thoroughly civilized. Nor
does he merely search in his own mind and admit what he finds there. He
observes others with the same awareness and the same sincerity. Hardy,
he sees, takes his pleasure in portraying gloom. “That’s fair,” says
Mr. Day. Shaw has had a vision of the rational life that men might lead
and can never stop insisting that they lead it: a master of comedy when
he paints the contrast and rather tiresome when he insists too much.
Maeterlinck is king in the realms of romance he has created, like any
other child; he is also a child when it comes to judging the “real”
world. We know what Fabre thinks of wasps, but we wish we knew what
the wasps think of Fabre. Mr. Day’s ideas are never gummed together
with their hereditary associations. He talks always as if he had just
come into this universe and were reporting it for other persons as
intelligent as he. What a compliment to mankind! And what a compliment
to mankind, too, that he should find it quite unnecessary to lecture
it! A whimsical fable, a transparent allegory, a scrap of biography, a
few verses, a humorous picture—these are his only devices.
GOLDEN LYRICS
Snuffy, prosy men always keep pawing over the poets. It is bad enough
when they are only literary critics, but when they are theologians
there is no length to which they will not go. Think what has happened
to that radiant anthology which the late Morris Jastrow translated and
edited as his final work, _The Song of Songs_. Originally, it seems
clear, a collection of popular lyrics which the Hebrew folk prized
so highly as to insist on giving them a place in the sacred canon,
these poems have been argued and allegorized to what would have been
the death of anything less indestructible. While the Stoics were
“explaining” Homer, partly Hellenized Jews began to interpret the
_Song of Songs_ as an expression of Yahweh’s love for Israel and then
Christians as an expression of Christ’s love for his Church. Learned
scholiasts wallowed in commentary, declaring, for instance, that the
phrase “eyes like doves” referred to the wise men of the Sanhedrin or
to the thoughts of God directed toward Jerusalem. Augustine saw in
“where thou reclinest at noon” a hint that the true Church lay under
the meridian—that is, in Augustine’s Africa! Bernard of Burgundy
composed eighty-six homilies on the first two chapters. The Jewish
Saadia, writing in the tenth century, detected in the _Song of
Songs_ a complete history of the Jews from the Exodus to the coming
of a twelfth-century Messiah; and Thomas Brightman in 1600 drew the
prophecy down to Luther and Melancthon. Not until the Enlightenment,
in the hands of Lowth and Herder, did criticism become more direct
and reasonable. Even after that the passion for finding some kind of
unity in the book led even such scholars as Ewald, Delitzsch, Renan
to explain it as a rudimentary drama, with Solomon as one of the
characters. There were, of course, always heretics, like Thomas Hardy’s
Respectable Burgher, who slyly rejoiced to learn
“That Solomon sang the fleshly Fair
And gave the Church no thought whate’er,”
but they were generally outside the beaten track of doctrine.
Mr. Jastrow brought to his labours on the _Song of Songs_ at once the
erudition and common sense with which he had already edited _Job_
and _Ecclesiastes_ and in addition a feeling for youth and love and
poetry which his latest theme particularly required. In a masterly
introduction, utilizing all that is known about the book and reducing
it to convenient form for a wide audience, he cuts away the accretions
of centuries while tracing the fortunes of this golden treasury with
its cloud of commentators. Then he offers a new translation divided
into twenty-three separate lyrics, each of which he equips with
adequate yet simple notes, purging the text of intrusive variants and
glosses, explaining the allusions, sympathetically pointing out the
grace and spontaneity of the poems. In his treatment the _Song of
Songs_ is restored to an ancient status which gives it a fresh, modern
meaning. Once more the Palestinian villagers have come together at a
wedding; once more they sing exquisite songs about the joys of love
which no thought of theology invades. Lover and beloved praise one
another’s charms in glowing imagery. Alone, each longs for the other;
united, they rush to ecstatic, unabashed consummation of their desire.
This is love at its rosy dawn, tremulous, candid, exultant. This is
what Wilfrid Scawen Blunt had in mind when he declared in his diary
that he would rather have written the _Song of Songs_ than all the rest
of literature.
THE CHRISTIAN DIPLOMAT
Regarding Europe as an intricate republic with all its interests
close-knit and its equilibrium exquisitely sensitive, François de
Callières in 1716 published at Paris a vade-mecum for diplomats which
has been translated and issued in a handsome edition by A. F. Whyte as
_On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes_. “Secrecy,” says Callières,
“is the very soul of diplomacy”; and his manner of expounding the
manners of negotiation might almost be that of some accomplished
mole long employed by his monarch in listening for ground-tremors in
all parts of the garden, learning where traps were set and ploughs
expected and where the roots grew sweetest and lushest, and finding
out the shortest way to them and back in safety. Discretion, however,
not deceit is the method Callières urges. The ideal diplomatist must
be “a man of probity and one who loves truth.” “It is true that this
probity is not often found joined to that capacity for taking wide
views which is so necessary to a diplomatist.” He should have learning,
experience, penetration, eloquence, as well as the most equable temper,
the most easy gallantry, the quickest repartee, the most tireless
patience; he must be courageous without being rash, dignified without
being mysterious, wealthy without being too proud of his purse,
well-bred without being haughty. He must dispense gifts generously,
though he should rarely take them, and he should do his bribing like a
gentleman, in the due fashion of the court to which he is accredited.
In a democratic state he should flatter the Diet—and feed it, for
good cheer is an admirable road to influence. He should have a flair
for nosing out secrets as well as a genius for hiding them; his use
of spies is the test, almost the measure, of his excellence. “The
wise and enlightened negotiator must of course be a good Christian.”
Machiavelli explained princely policy and Chesterfield worldly polish
no more lucidly than Callières, who was private secretary to the Most
Christian King Louis XIV and ambassador and plenipotentiary entrusted
with the Treaty of Ryswick, explained the devices and virtues of his
craft. He had high standards for diplomatists; he wanted them to be
better-trained, better valued, and better rewarded than they were.
He thought they should be men of letters and men of peace. He would
not have held himself to blame for assuming that the relation between
even friendly princes was that of ceaseless rivalry and that the first
interest of each was to take something from the others. Those were the
assumptions of the age. Callières was merely pointing out, with tact
and charm, how the members of the diplomatic corps might best observe
all the punctilios that go with honour among the most precious thieves.
LAWYER AND ELEGIST
Every one knows Clarence Darrow as a fighting labour lawyer, a
double-handed berserker of the bar. Only his friends know that at heart
he is an elegiac poet. Yet any one who wishes may find this out by
reading his exquisite half-novel, half-autobiography, _Farmington_. It
has unstinting veracity; it has mellow moods and ivory texture. The
book rises naturally from the spirit, dear to the American tradition,
of tender affection for some native village. Thousands of men daily
dream thus of childhood, but the pictures which come before them are
dimmed by short memory or distorted by sentimentalism or falsified
by some subsequent prejudice. Mr. Darrow’s _Farmington_, it is true,
lies continually in a golden haze, melts and flows, increases and then
diminishes like a living legend. The colours, however, have grown truer
not fainter, and the forms of his remembered existence more substantial
if less sharp-edged. Richly and warmly as he visualizes that perished
universe, he has not brought in illusions to multiply his pleasure
in it. What gave him pain as a boy he remembers as pain and will not
make out to have been a joke. What gave him delight he remembers as
delight, not as an offence to be expiated by an older conscience. Such
dreams do not lie. They are the foundations on which truth mounts above
facts. To _Farmington_ they impart a firmness which enables an honest
reader to move confidently among its lovely pictures without the sense
that a breath may shatter them. The ringing laughter of Mark Twain’s
_Hannibal_ never sounds through Mr. Darrow’s softer pages: herein lies
a limitation of _Farmington_, its lack of a large masculine vitality.
But that, of course, is just the quality which we have no right to ask
for in an exquisite elegiac poem.
WOMEN IN LOVE
The hunger of sex is amazingly set forth by D. H. Lawrence, whose novel
_The Rainbow_ was suppressed in England and who has now brought out his
_Women in Love_ in the United States in a sumptuous volume delightful
to eye and hand. Mr. Lawrence admits no difference between Aphrodite
Urania, and Aphrodite Pandemos; love, in his understanding of it,
links soul and body with the same bonds at the same moments. And in
this latest book of his not only is there but one Aphrodite; there is
but one ruling divinity, and she holds her subjects throughout a long
narrative to the adventure and business and madness and warfare of
love. Apparently resident in the English Midlands, Gudrum and Ursula
Brangwen and their lovers Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich actually
inhabit some dark wood sacred to Dionysiac rites. If they have an
economic existence, it is of the most unimportant kind; at any moment
they can come and go about the world as their desires drive them.
If they have any social existence, it is tenuous, or at best hardly
thicker than a tissue of irritations. War and politics and art and
religion for the time being are as if they had never been. Each pair
recalls those sundered lovers of whom Aristophanes told the guests at
Plato’s Symposium—lovers who, in reality but halves of a primordial
whole, whirl through space and time in a frantic search each for its
opposite, mad with delay, and meeting at last with a frantic rush which
takes no account of anything but the ecstasy of reunion.
If references to Greek Cults come naturally to mind in connection with
_Women in Love_, these lovers none the less have the modern experience
of frantic reaction from their moments of meeting. They experience
more than classical satiety. Mad with love in one hour, in the next
day they are no less mad with hate. They are souls born flayed, who
cling together striving to become one flesh and yet causing each
other exquisite torture. Their nerves are all exposed. The intangible
filaments and repulsions which play between ordinary lovers are by
Mr. Lawrence in this book magnified to dimensions half heroic and
half mad. He has stripped off the daily coverings, the elaborated
inhibitions, the established reticences of our civil existence, and
displays his women as swept and torn by desires as old as the race and
older, white-hot longings, dark confusions of body and spirit. Gudrum
and Ursula are women not to be matched elsewhere in English fiction
for richness and candour of desire. They are valkyries imperfectly
domesticated, or, in Mr. Lawrence’s different figure, daughters of men
troubling the sons of God, and themselves troubled. No wonder then
that the language which tells their story is a feverish language; that
the narrative moves with a feverish march; that the final effect is
to leave the witness of their fate dazed with the blazing mist which
overhangs the record. Most erotic novels belong to the department of
comedy; _Women in Love_ belongs to the metaphysics and the mystical
theology of love.
MOSES IN MASSACHUSETTS
More than thirty years after Brooks Adams first flayed his ancestors
in _The Emancipation of Massachusetts_ a new edition of the book has
appeared with the original text and a novel preface. What Mr. Adams
has added, besides an expression of regret for his earlier acrimony
of speech, is an account of the philosophy to which he has arrived
after three meditative decades. Although he belongs to the ineffably
disillusioned generation which bred also Charles Francis 2d and Henry
Adams, Mr. Brooks Adams is still an Adams: he thinks with the hard
lucidity and writes with the cold downrightness of his tribe. The
central point of his doctrine is touched upon almost in passing: “And
so it has always been,” he says, “with each new movement which has been
stimulated by an idealism inspired by a belief that the spirit was
capable of generating an impulse which would overcome the flesh and
which would cause men to move toward perfection along any other path
than the least resistant. And this because man is an automaton, and can
move no otherwise.” The emancipation of Massachusetts, Mr. Adams has
presumably come to believe, was merely an irresistible movement of the
commonwealth away from the idealistic impossibilities to which it was
originally pledged and to which the conservatives vainly tried to hold
it. Once they seemed villains; now they seem fools and dupes.
But Massachusetts is the least of the concerns of this preface, one
half of which is devoted to the deeds and character of Moses, an
optimist who thought he had found some supernatural power and could
control it, tried leadership, discovered that he must after all depend
on his own wits, sought vainly to “gratify at once his lust for power
and his instinct to live an honest man,” and, after bilking the
Israelites in the little matters of the Brazen Serpent and the Tables
of the Law, went up into Mount Nebo and committed suicide. (Tom Paine
would have liked to write this account of Moses.) The Mosaic idealism
having failed, there followed the Roman confidence in physical force,
which the Romans erected into a sort of vested interest, in turn also
overthrown by the Christian confidence in divine aid secured through
prayer—“a school of optimism the most overwhelming and the most
brilliant which the world has ever known and which evolved an age whose
end we still await.” Thus optimisms rise and fall, but the life of
mankind rolls forward without observable acceleration or retardation,
only now and then heated here or there to an explosion by some sort of
conflict between powerful interests, generally economic. The past shows
no variation from this procedure; the future holds forth no hope except
in a change to some form of non-competitive civilization which Mr.
Adams does not venture to propound. Depressing enough in details, the
preface as a whole is one of the most provocative arguments in American
literature. Some day the allied and associated pessimism of Brooks
Adams and his two brothers will seem hardly a slighter contribution
to America than the diplomacy of their father or the statesmanship of
their grandfather and great-grandfather.
BROWN GIRLS
The ardours celebrated in _Coloured Stars: Versions of Fifty Asiatic
Love Poems_, by Edward Powys Mathers, have not been uttered in original
English poetry since the days when the young Marlowe and the young
Shakespeare lavished the wealth of Elizabethan eulogium upon the
gorgeous bodily beauties of Hero and Venus—and even those ladies,
all red and white, seem a little cool and proud compared with the
browner girls who kindle such infinite desires in Asian lovers. The
poets whom Mr. Mathers has here rendered with delicate skill represent
almost every corner of the continent, yet the most frequent note in
the collection is the flaming praise of radiant mistresses, pictured
not so much in the lover’s hours of longing as in the hot moments of
the fruition of his desire. For sheer intensity it would be hard to
equal the two Afghan poems, _Black Hair_ and _Lover’s Jealousy_, or
the Kurdistan _Vai! Tchod-jouklareum_—full of raptures as barbarously
naked as the girls they praise. Out of the same fury comes the Altai
_War Song_, which sets forth the most tempting charms of love, only
to vow that still better are the arrows and sabres and black horses
of battle. The Burmese _My Desire_, only a little less passionate,
is more philosophical. What most differentiates this anthology from
any similar one that could be made from European literature is the
comparative absence from it of the deep humility of the lover before
the person or the thought of his beloved. These lovers are nearly all
superbly confident. More civil moods, however, appear in the Hindustani
pieces, which are not without a note of fear and distrust of women as
chilly jilts. True to our preconceptions, the Japanese poems are the
daintiest, all but one in the accustomed five-line stanza, and each one
an exquisite picture associated with tender longings; and the Chinese
poems seem most familiar, most universal, in feelings and ideas.
Without the abandon of the poems from western Asia, and with less than
the hard, bright compactness of the Japanese, they are exquisitely
truthful and humane. It is notable that only the eastern Asiatics are
here represented as giving expression to the woman’s emotions, as if in
the west, women, at the worst the victims of desire, were at best only
an ear to hear of it, never a voice to speak it out.
INVENTION AND VERACITY