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POT-BOILERS
by
CLIVE BELL
London
Chatto & Windus
MCMXVIII
Printed at the Complete Press
West Norwood
London
CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD 1
MONTAIGNE IN FACSIMILE 17
IBSEN 28
MISS COLERIDGE 41
PEACOCK 50
BOSWELL'S LETTERS 74
CARLYLE'S LOVES AND LOVE-LETTERS 82
THE LYSISTRATA 99
TRELAWNY'S LETTERS 115
SOPHOCLES IN LONDON 126
THE FLIGHT OF THE DRAGON 135
WILLIAM MORRIS 146
PERSIAN MINIATURES 156
COUNTERCHECK QUARRELSOME 165
PICTURE SHOWS:
I. THE LONDON SALON 174
II. ENGLISH POST-IMPRESSIONISTS 179
III. AN EXPENSIVE "MASTERPIECE" 188
IV. MARCHAND 194
V. THE MANSARD GALLERY 199
CONTEMPORARY ART IN ENGLAND 209
ART AND WAR 231
BEFORE THE WAR 247
FOREWORD
DEAR GEOFFREY WHITWORTH,--Considering for how many ages how many clever
people have been complaining of their publishers, you might have
supposed that no device for getting one of them into a scrape could have
been left untried. Yet, so far as I can remember, no author has had the
bright idea of denouncing his publisher, particularly, and by name, as
accessory before the fact. I am willing to suspect my memory rather than
my profession of being at fault in this matter; but that the practice is
uncommon is most certain and that, surely, is very strange. No author
thinks twice of saddling his friend, his wife, his mother, or even his
mistress with the responsibility of having been the onlie begetter of
some feckless cub or monstrous abortion; but on his publisher, the very
man he should wish to injure, who ever thought of fastening the offence?
Yet you cannot deny, my dear Whitworth, that this book is your fault. I
was all for abandoning the project after I had read Mr. Arnold Bennett's
volume and recognized how much more readable his journalism was than
mine: your reader, I suspect, was of like mind: it was you, and you
alone, who, by enlisting my vanity, conquered my pride.
Of course in the end my vanity might have triumphed without you: it is
not often or easily beaten.
"Obliged by hunger and request of friends,"
I can imagine myself printing under that classic excuse, which has the
merit of being in the grand literary tradition and as disingenuous as
another; for in these days an author is not more hungry than every one
else, and my friends would have been the first to pardon my silence. You
may take it for certain, by the way, that when a man says he is
publishing at the instance of two or three friends he means that he is
offering the public what he knows that the public could have done
perfectly well without. He means that he is printing neither to persuade
nor to inform nor yet to express the truth that is in him, but simply to
gratify an itch for such notoriety as the careless attention of a few
thousand readers may be supposed to give. If I now contrive to escape
the consequences of my own axiom it is thanks to you, My Publisher--or
Publisher's representative must I say? (You are so very modest, my dear
Whitworth, and so exact.) Naturally, by so obliging me you have made me
your friend for life. But that was _ex post facto_.
I said just now that when I read Mr. Bennett's "Books and Persons," I
was for abandoning a project about which, you will do me the justice of
remembering, I was lukewarm from the first. I enjoyed immensely his
lively papers and I felt pretty sure that no one would so enjoy mine.
Your reader was good enough to point out some reasons, besides the
obvious one, why this must be so; and in self-defence I am going to
remind you of them. When Mr. Bennett wrote for the _New Age_ he was a
famous and full-grown author, very much at his ease, very much at his
liberty, well aware that if he said what he pleased as he pleased his
editor would be only too happy to print it. When I wrote most of the
reviews reprinted in this volume I was commencing journalism, and I
wrote them for the _Athenaeum_.
The _Athenaeum_, the editor of which I take this opportunity of thanking
for permission to reprint my articles, is a paper, was, at any rate, a
paper with ancient and peculiar customs; and of these customs perhaps
the most peculiar was that, while allowing its contributors
extraordinary liberty in some matters, it sustained what may perhaps be
described as a literary policy. Like other venerable institutions, the
_Athenaeum_ had a taste for unwritten law; its policy was adumbrated
rather than defined, but few contributors, I believe, were unconscious
of its existence. Not one of us, I am sure, would have expressed
anything but what he thought and felt, but we all hoped that our
thoughts and feelings would not be too dissimilar from those of our
presiding genius, Athene the wise, our eponymous goddess; because, if
they were, her high-priest, albeit one of the most charming and
accomplished people in Fleet Street or thereabouts, stood ready with the
inexorable blue pencil to smite once and smite no more. In the matter of
expression, too, Her Omniscience was, to my mind, something
over-exacting. Concision is an excellent quality in a writer. We all
know what Ben Jonson said about Shakespeare and we all agree with him.
Still, when, by the shape of one's paragraphs, the balance of one's
sentences, and the internal rhythm of one's clauses, one fancies that an
article has been raised almost to the perfection of a work of art, it is
disappointing to find a line cut out here, two more there, half a dozen
missing from the second galley, and from the third a whole paragraph
gone for no better reason than that they are not essential to the
argument--especially when one is persuaded that they are.
I have said that the editor of the _Athenaeum_, in my time, was a
charming and accomplished writer; he is also my very good friend and too
generous critic, and I should be a wretch if I did not love him. But on
the evening when a weekly paper goes to press, when the pages are
pouring in, and some one, as likely as not, is waiting at the Cafe
Royal, even the most cultivated and considerate of editors will be an
editor. Wherefore I must now plague you and my readers with a word or
two in explanation of my method of correction and revision. Re-reading
these articles--some of which were written nine or ten years ago--I come
on such phrases as "this is a notable achievement," "his equipment is
not really strong," and I wonder, of course, what the devil I did say.
No doubt it was something definite and particular, for in those days I
was a most conscientious writer; but what subtle limitation, what
delicately suggested reference, what finely qualifying phrase, what
treasure of my critical nonage lies buried beneath this "getting out"
formula I cannot now remember. I read the article again and again but I
want the courage and energy to read again the book about which it was
written. And, if I did, should I recapture precisely what I thought or
felt and tried, by means of that lost clause or sentence, not to leave
quite unexpressed? The idea is gone, and with it, no doubt, the
complete significance of the article. I have botched and cobbled, but at
best I have but patched a rent. I hope, however, that I have not spared
many of those trusty veterans who, occasionally even in our best weekly
and regularly in our morning and evening papers, are expected to do duty
for sense.
Wherever the blue pencil or standardized phrase has left too deep a
wound or gross a blemish I have had to rewrite. And, as I have rarely
succeeded in recovering the original idea, I have had to borrow from my
later thought. Of such patching I have been as thrifty as possible:
also, I have not attempted to square the opinions and sentiments of
early days with my later pronouncements, so, I make no doubt, some very
clever readers will have the pleasure of catching me in inconsistency.
If they are really clever they will catch me in worse things than that,
in puerility for instance, and affectation, to say nothing of blasphemy
and sedition. As for consistency, I seem consistently to have cared much
for four things--Art, Truth, Liberty and Peace. I was never much in
sympathy with my age.
With my youthful style I should not venture to tamper even were I
conscious of any important change in my theory of composition or power
of expression. And I am not. I write more fluently nowadays and
therefore, probably, worse. It cannot be helped. It charms me to notice
as I read these essays with what care and conscience they are done.
_Magna cum cura atque diligentia scripsit_--they are not far from Latin
Grammar days. Precisely on account of these qualities they have suffered
much from editorial amendment, and on their account I have been
conservative in a matter where another policy would, I dare say, have
been more to the taste of some connoisseurs. The matter in question is
that of the grand editorial "We." That, as you may suppose, was the
person in which Pallas habitually addressed her attentive suppliants;
that was the person in which these articles were written; and experiment
has shown that to substitute "I," "my," and "mine" for "we," "our," and
"ours," destroys invariably the texture of the prose. Whether this early
prose of mine was good is not for me to decide; but that it was closely
knit is indisputable, and a sensitive critic who cared to tease himself
with trifles could discover, I fancy, from stylistic evidence, just
which passages have been interpolated.
The articles borrowed from the _Burlington Magazine_, the _Nation_, the
_New Statesman_, the _International Journal of Ethics_, and the
_Cambridge Magazine_--to the editors of which I herewith tender
customary thanks for customary favours--all having appeared over my
signature were, of course, all written in the first person singular. Any
one who did me the honour of reading my book, "Art," so attentively as
now to notice that to its making went certain quarryings from these
articles, will have enjoyed it enough, I hope, not to resent being
occasionally reminded of it.
And here I might end a tedious letter: but first, if you will bear with
me, I should like to say a word on a subject in which both you and I are
interested. I have shown so much humility in contrasting these reviews
with those of Mr. Bennett that I will permit myself one comment, by no
means in disparagement of "Books and Persons," but in the hope that he,
or indeed any one who concerns himself with literary criticism, may
profit by it. In one respect I do fancy myself a better critic than Mr.
Bennett; for though, doubtless, I lack most of those qualities that make
his book a positive pleasure to read, I lack also his indiscrimination.
Partly, this comes of my not being what he calls himself--"a creative
artist," just as it results in my not using that term when I mean "an
intelligent person"; but chiefly it is that I am, I believe, almost free
from that "provincialism in time"--if I may coin a phrase--which is what
is most amiss with Mr. Bennett's critical apparatus. It is a great pity
Mr. Bennett should be provincial in any sense, for in the common he is
not; on the contrary, he is one who has lived in France, even as
Frenchmen live there, without being more than a little shocked. He has
read a good many books, both old and new; he is one who cares for
literature manifestly: then why does he call Mr. H. G. Wells a great
imaginative artist? I will not swear to the epithets--I have not his
book by me--but I am sure he is too candid to deny that if he has not
used them he has used their equivalents. This much I know he has
said--for I made a note when I read the essay--"astounding width of
observation, a marvellously true perspective, an extraordinary grasp of
the real significance of innumerable phenomena utterly diverse, profound
emotional power, dazzling verbal skill." Now, my dear Whitworth, if I
were to say that sort of thing about Marivaux you would raise your
eyebrows--you know you would. Yet I suppose no competent judge of
literature will pretend that the novels of Marivaux--to say nothing of
the comedies--are inferior to those of Mr. Wells. Pray read again "Le
Paysan Parvenu"--all except the eighth and last part, about which I
can't help thinking there is some mystery--and then try "Mr. Britling."
But if by Mr. Bennett's standards we are to give Marivaux his due, what
is there left to say about Shakespeare?
Provincialism in time is as fatal to judgment as the more notorious
sort, and a defective sense of proportion is at the root of both.
Consider English novelists of the last hundred years. Who but a fool
dare predict confidently for any living Englishman, save Hardy, so much
immortality as belongs to Galt's "Annals of the Parish," or Mrs.
Oliphant's "Beleagured City"? Now what figure, think you, would a critic
cut who besprinkled these writers with such compliments as Mr. Bennett
peppers his contemporaries withal? You need not answer. Mr. Bennett is a
friend of the firm.
Had Mr. Bennett lost his head about contemporaries who were attempting
to solve new artistic problems I could understand it. Young writers wax
over-enthusiastic about Laforgue and Charles-Louis Philippe--both of
whom, by the way, died some years ago--and are not much to blame on that
account; neither should I have the least difficulty in forgiving myself
were it to turn out--as it will not--that I had said too much in praise
of Matisse or Picasso. The artist who even appears to have discovered or
rediscovered an instrument of expression or to have extended by one
semitone the gamut of aesthetic experience is bound to turn the best
heads of his age. Were it possible to overrate Cezanne, not to do so
would be a mark of insensibility. I was never much impressed by those
superior persons of an earlier age who from the first saw through
Wagner; there was a time when to dislike Wagner was, in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred, a sign not of superiority but of stupidity. The
artists, however, whom Mr. Bennett belauds so uncritically, are not of
this sort. In my judgment, Mr. Wells, Mr. George Moore, and the late Sir
John Galsworthy are not artists at all: be that as it may, past question
they are artistically conventional and thoroughly in the tradition of
British fiction. Of course they write of motor-cars and telephones where
an older generation wrote of railway-trains and telegrams, and of the
_deuxiemes_, _troisiemes_ or _quatre-vingt-dixiemes_ where their
grandmothers wrote of _les premiers amours_; also, they can refer to the
Almighty in the third person without bursting into capitals. But in this
there is no more artistic novelty than there would be in a picture of an
aeroplane painted in the manner of Ingres. Neither is there any
discredit; very much the same might be said of our three best living
novelists--Hardy, Conrad, and Virginia Woolf, all of whom are more or
less traditional, as is Anatole France, perhaps the best novelist
alive. A first-rate unconventional work of art is not a straw better
than a conventional one, and to become slightly light-headed about
either is not only permissible but seemly. Nevertheless, to go silly
over a mediocre innovation is far more excusable than to be taken in by
its equivalent in a familiar style. While to rave about Messrs. Wells,
Moore and Galsworthy seems to me shocking. Surely there can be no
difficulty about treating these writers as ordinary citizens of the
Republic of Letters--a state, let us try to remember, that not only
extends in space beyond the horizons of Tooting but in time beyond the
Edwardian and even the Victorian era.
A critic, I submit, should judge a work of art, not in relation to the
age and circumstances in which it was produced, but by an absolute
standard based on the whole _corpus_ of that art to which the particular
work belongs. We do not want to hear how good "Tono-Bungay" seems by
comparison with Mrs. Ward's last production. Marvellous, no doubt: so,
no doubt, are Mrs. Ward's intellectual gifts by comparison with those of
a walrus. But we want to have Mrs. Ward judged as a specimen of Humanity
and "Tono-Bungay" as a specimen of Literature. It must be tried by the
standards we try "Tristram Shandy" and "La Princesse de Cleves" by.
How, then, does it stand? With "Liaisons Dangereuses"? Hardly. Well, is
it of the class of "Evelina" or of "Adolphe," or of "Consuelo" even? Mr.
Bennett can be as sharp as a special constable with Thackeray: is it as
good as "Pendennis"? And, unless it be infinitely better, what sense is
there in despising Thackeray and extolling Mr. Wells? Pray, Mr. Bennett,
how good is this book? Let us see; I think I have a note on the subject:
"his scientific romances" are "on the plane of epic poetry" and "in
'Tono-Bungay' he has achieved the same feat, magnified by ten--or a
hundred"; "there are passages toward the close of the book which may
fitly be compared with the lyrical freedoms of no matter what epic, and
which display an unsurpassable dexterity of hand." And now what are we
to say of "Manon Lescaut"? That it is a million times better than Milton
and knocks spots off Homer? But all this though distressing is not
conclusive; it proves provinciality but it proves nothing worse. Mr.
Bennett may really have been thinking all the time of "Robert Elsmere"
and "The Epic of Hades." About another of his favourites, however, he is
more precise: "I re-read 'A Man of Property,'" he says, "immediately
after re-reading Dostoievsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and immediately
before re-reading Bjornson's 'Arne.' It ranks well with these European
masterpieces." I repeat that in one respect I am a better critic than
Mr. Bennett.
This question of criticism fascinates me. It interests Mr. Bennett, too,
and he has written several competent and surprisingly confident articles
on the subject. I could almost wish to discuss one of them with him. I
would help him to understand Coleridge and tell him about Dryden's
essays and Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," and I would assure him, too,
it was not I who wrote that unfortunate review of Conrad that gets such
an exemplary drubbing at his hands for its self-complacent imbecility.
He ought to know that, or he will think that I speak out of malice. He
says that England has need of a literary critic. I agree. And I agree
that this critic must not be of that professorial breed with which he
deals so faithfully, not one who will date you every line in Shakespeare
on internal evidence and then obligingly pronounce Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle our greatest living writer. He will need the intelligence, the
first-hand views, the open mind, the genuine taste for books, the
respect for art and irreverence for persons of Mr. Bennett himself; and,
as I have hinted, he will need one or two qualities for which Mr.
Bennett is not so well off. He must be a resolute critic of literature
and not an authority on current reputations; he must have enough natural
taste to recognize a work of art in odd company, new clothes, or fancy
dress; he must be the sort of person who would have seen at a glance
that Kipling or Paul Bourget was not the real thing; he must be a
scholar and a man of the intellectual world: and he must be as incapable
of calling Mr. George Moore "a great artist" or speaking of "a
first-rate beautiful thing" by that gentleman as Mr. Bennett is of
eating peas with his knife.
The critic of our dreams--Mr. Bennett's and mine--has yet to be found.
You will not imagine, surely, that I am putting myself forward as a
candidate? Here you will find very few of the virtues and some, I
suspect, of the critical vices to which I have alluded in this letter.
But you need not fear, my dear Whitworth, that I am now going to tax
your good nature by an elaborate defence of these essentially
insignificant papers. They are an odd lot, and I think there are but
two--the two last--that I am not a little ashamed of reprinting.
Clearly, were I now to write on the same themes I should have something
very different to say and should say it differently. Honestly, I believe
these things are worth reading; I can say no more for them and I shall
hold him generous who says as much. But the pleasure I shall derive from
seeing them printed and off my hands will be as great almost as that
which I felt when, four years ago, you, or your firm rather, did me the
honour of publishing a book to which I attached, and continue to attach,
a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that
deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner
must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be
ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach
life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far,
that is, as the European situation permits.
C. B.
_February 1918._
MONTAIGNE IN FACSIMILE[1]
[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Jan. 1913_]
Let it be understood at once that the appearance of this magnificent
work is a bibliophilic rather than a literary event. The literary event
was the publication by M. Fortunat Strowski, in 1909, of "L'Edition
Municipale," an exact transcription of that annotated copy of the 1588
quarto known to fame as "L'Exemplaire de Bordeaux." What the same
eminent scholar gives us now is a reproduction in phototype of
"L'Exemplaire." Any one, therefore, who goes to these volumes in search
of literary discoveries is foredoomed to disappointment. Indeed, the
same might have been said of "L'Edition Municipale"; for the "Motheau et
Jouaust" edition, reprinted by MM. Flammarion in their "Bibliotheque
classique," was complete enough to satisfy all but the most meticulous
scholars, while for general literary purposes the edition published in
1595, three years after the author's death, by his niece, Mlle. de
Gournay, is sufficient and adequate.
Though five editions of the "Essais" were printed during their author's
life--1580 and 1582 at Bordeaux, 1584 (probably) and 1587 at Paris, 1588
at Bordeaux--to critics in search of dramatic spiritual changes a
comparative study will afford but meagre sport. To be sure, the editions
of '84 and '87 were nothing more than what we should now call reprints;
but the edition of 1588, of which "L'Exemplaire de Bordeaux" is a copy,
represents so thorough an overhauling and so generous an enlarging of
the old book that some have been tempted to reckon it a new one. Yet,
though it garners the fruit of eight fertile years of travel and public
service, it reveals no startling change in the outlook, nor in what is
more important, the insight, of its author. We need feel no surprise.
Had Montaigne been the sort of man whose views and sentiments are
profoundly affected by travel or office, he would not have been the
object of that cult of which the three volumes before us are the latest,
and perhaps the most significant, monument. That is a peculiar man whose
crossings and dottings and deletions are judged worthy of photographic
record by the authorities of a great industrial city.
Montaigne was thoroughly normal, not to say commonplace, in his ability
to pass through foreign countries without suffering anything so alarming
as a conversion. He left home on his travels in Germany, Switzerland,
and Italy, a learned and extremely intelligent man of affairs, who had
taken, rather late in life perhaps, to playing the part of a French
country gentleman; he returned with a store of acute observations and
pleasant anecdotes, a little older, a little mellower, otherwise
unchanged. Of those magically expanded views, those sudden yawnings of
sympathetic depths, that nowadays every one may count on winning, if not
by a week in Brittany, at any rate by a month in Manitoba, we find
scarcely a trace. In the sixteenth century that sort of thing was
unusual. Even in those days there were people of extraordinary
sensibility for whom life was a succession of miracles, who with
difficulty recognized themselves from year to year, to whom going abroad
was an emotional adventure, a supreme revelation: but of these Montaigne
was not one. Him, like some others, change seems merely to have
confirmed in his native predispositions and prejudices. As he grew older
he grew vainer, rather more garrulous, fonder of his favourite authors,
and a little less open-minded; and his travels were nothing more than a
long and agreeable stage on the longest journey. There are people for
whom travel provides nothing but supplementary evidence in a cause that
has already been judged. Those who can find nothing good at home will
smack their lips over the sourest wines abroad; and "Old Meynell" need
not have left his garden to arrive at that conclusion commended by Dr.
Johnson: "For anything I see, foreigners are fools." Montaigne was not
of these, either; too normal to be above patriotism, he was too proud
and too intelligent to be blindly patriotic.
Montaigne was the ideal man-in-the-street. We do not mean that he was
typical; but if there are men-in-the-street in heaven, they will
resemble Montaigne. And though we rank a third-rate saint or artist a
great deal higher than a first-rate good fellow, we recognize that there
is something about any kind of perfection that dazzles even those who
are most alive to its essential inferiority. Montaigne is the exemplar
of good feeling and good sense; in him we see those qualities chatting
on terms of familiarity with genius and inspiration. He held the views
that all sensible people would hold if only all were as intelligent and
benevolent as they honestly believe themselves to be; he expressed them
in a form appropriate to, and therefore limited by, his subject, but,
within those limits, perfect.
The form in which Montaigne expressed himself was new to French
literature. In the sixteenth century there was a recognized literary
style based on the Latin period. Sentences were long, sonorous, and
circuitous. It was a language well suited to those who followed the
profession of letters, but unserviceable to one who would communicate
his thoughts and feelings to others. Montaigne was not a professional
author; he was a country gentleman with something of his own to say. The
literature of the professionals was an ingenious and abstract
superstructure built up over an idea or an emotion. Montaigne wished to
set down the original thought or feeling as it sprang, hot, from the
mind; and, as original thoughts and feelings present themselves always
with the force of sensations, he gave them the forms of sensations--that
is to say, he wrote in images. He expressed his philosophy of good sense
in short, hard, coloured sentences, keeping them as close as possible to
the naked thoughts they conveyed. That in print they appear as long as
those of his contemporaries is a mere accident of typography; for almost
every semicolon in the "Essais" one may substitute a full stop: very
rarely is the long sentence in Montaigne a period.
Like most sensible men, Montaigne had an unreasonable fondness for
reason; unlike most, he possessed an intellect that showed him the final
consequences of his fancy. Not only have we no sufficient reason for
believing that we know anything, we have none for affirming that we know
nothing. By sheer reasonableness we are reduced to a state of pure
Pyrrhonism, where, like the poor donkey, we must die of starvation
midway between two equally large and equally appetizing bundles of hay.
An affectation of superior ignorance has been a favourite literary
device from the days of the Preacher to those of Anatole France.
Montaigne loves to tease and confound us with a "Que scay-ie," he has
the common literary taste for humiliating unsympathetic readers; but he
has also a taste for honesty not so common, even in literature. Doubt is
a mark of good sense: honest doubt is a mark of genius almost. In his
reflective moments the reasonable man inclines to believe that reason
can prove nothing--except what he believes. How fearlessly did those
nineteenth-century apostles of Reason make havoc in the parlours of meek
curates and spinsters, thundering against the altogether insufficient
grounds on which were accepted the surprising adventures of Noah and his
Ark! But when they were told that Reason was as unfriendly to their
moral code and the methods of science as to the Book of Genesis, they
clapped her in jail without more ado. Reason affords no solid grounds
for holding a good world better than a bad, and the sacred law of cause
and effect itself admits of no logical demonstration. "Prison or the Mad
House," cried the men of good sense; Montaigne was more
thorough--"Tolerance," said he.
Like the man-in-the-street, Montaigne found refuge from reason in
conviction. Until we have formulated a proposition reason has no excuse
for interference; and emotional convictions precede intellectual
propositions. Only, as we have no means of judging between convictions,
we must remember that the firm and disinterested convictions of others
are as respectable as our own: again we must tolerate. To credit
Montaigne with that sublime liberality which is summed up in the most
sublime of all Christian aphorisms--"Judge not, and thou shalt not be
judged"--would be absurd. Montaigne was a Pagan, and his high conception
of tolerance and humanity was derived entirely from the great pagan
philosophers. Of them he was a profound and sincere disciple, so it is
not surprising that his ideas were far in advance of those of his age,
and of ours. For instance, he hated brutality. Both his own nature and
that fine Athenian humanity which by study he had made his own were
revolted by barbarous punishments. That there may be men too vile to
live seemed to him, doubtless, a tenable opinion--he could forget all
about the fallibility of human judgments--but "Quant a moy," he says,
"en la iustice mesme, tout ce qui est au dela de la mort simple, me
semble pure cruaute." To hurt others for our own good is not, he dimly
perceived, to cut a very magnanimous figure. To call it hurting them for
their own, he would have thought damnable; but that piece of hypocrisy
is the invention of a more enlightened age. Torture he abhorred.
Assuredly Montaigne would have been more at home in the streets of
Periclean Athens than in those of sixteenth-century Bordeaux or
twentieth-century London.
Nothing illustrates better Montaigne's essential paganism than his
passionate admiration for magnanimity. That was the virtue he loved.
High courage and fortitude, dignity, patience, and generosity--these are
qualities, examples of which never fail to strike a spark of enthusiasm
from his calm nature. He is never tired of extolling the constancy of
Socrates and Cato, the courage of Caesar, the generosity of Alexander,
the great and grandiose actions of the heroes of antiquity. Indeed,
this admiration for courage and dignity so transports him that once, at
any rate, he surpasses most pagan philosophers, and joins hands with the
latest and most Christian of Christian moralists:
"A quoy faire nous allons nous gendarmant par ces efforts de la
science? Regardons a terre, les pauvres gens que nous y voyons
espandus, la teste panchante apres leur besongne: qui ne scavent ny
Aristote ny Caton, ny exemple ny precepte. De ceux-la, tire Nature
tous les iours, des effects de constance et de patience, plus purs
et plus roides, que ne sont ceux que nous estudions si curieusement
en l'escole. Combien en vois ie ordinairement, qui mescognoissent
la pauvrete: combien qui desirent la mort, ou qui la passent sans
alarme et sans affliction? Celui la qui fouit mon iardin, il a ce
matin enterre son pere ou son fils. Les noms mesme, dequoy ils
appellent les maladies, en addoucissent et amollissent l'asprete.
La phthysie, c'est la toux pour eux: la dysenterie, devoyment
d'estomach: un pleuresis, c'est un morfondement: et selon qu'ils
les nomment doucement, ils les supportent aussi. Elles sont bien
griefves, quand elles rompent leur travail ordinaire: ils ne
s'allitent que pour mourir."
This passage is exceptional; it is not the less sincere. Of its
sincerity no one who reads and feels can doubt. But generally the
instances of eximious virtue are what Montaigne delights to honour.
Nothing in him is more lovable than this passionate hero-worship; and
what quality is more lovable or more common in the ordinary man?
"Le plus sage des Francais," Sainte-Beuve called him; the judgment is
typical of the critic and his age. We need not stay to quarrel with it.
We can hold that there is a higher wisdom than the quest of golden
mediocrity without disparaging either Horace or his disciple. If the
man-in-the-street be one who approaches the obvious in the spirit of a
pioneer, we must admit that Montaigne rises superior to his class, for
he not only explored that country, but possessed and cultivated it too,
and forced it to yield an ampler harvest of good sense and humanity than
any other husbandman before or since. France has ever been rich, and is
as rich as ever, in men who have known how to sacrifice the shadow to
the substance; in fanatics who have pursued without pause or divagation
dreams of impossible Utopias and unattainable good; in idealists who
have joyfully given all to love, to art, to religion, and to logic. It
is not inappropriate, therefore, that France should have produced in an
age of turmoil and terrible madness the man who exalted the cult of
moderation to the heights of sublime philosophy.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] "Reproduction en Phototypie de l'Exemplaire, avec Notes manuscrites
marginales, des Essais de Montaigne appartenant a la Ville de Bordeaux."
Publiee, avec une Introduction, par Fortunat Strowski. 3 vols. (Paris,
Hachette.)
IBSEN[2]
[Sidenote: _Athenaeum June 1912_]
Was it chance made Mr. Ellis Roberts mention Cezanne on the fourth page
of a book about Ibsen? One cannot think so. Similarities in the work and
circumstances of the two men can hardly have escaped him. Born within a
dozen years of each other (Ibsen was born in 1828), both matured in a
period when the professions of writing and painting were laboriously
cultivated at the expense of art. Each, unguided except by his own sense
of dissatisfaction with his surroundings, found a way through the
sloughs of romance and the deserts of realism, to the high country
beyond them. Both sought and both found the same thing--the thing above
literature and painting, the stuff out of which great literature and
painting are made.
The Romantics and Realists were like people coming to cuffs about which
is the more important thing in an orange, the history of Spain or the
number of pips. The instinct of the romantic, invited to say what he
felt about anything, was to recall its associations. A rose made him
think of quaint gardens and gracious ladies and Edmund Waller and
sundials, and a thousand pleasant things that, at one time or another,
had befallen him or some one else. A rose touched life at a hundred
pretty points. A rose was interesting because it had a past. On this the
realist's comment was "Mush!" or words to that effect. In like
predicament, he would give a detailed account of the properties of _Rosa
setigera_, not forgetting to mention the urn-shaped calyx-tube, the five
imbricated lobes, or the open corolla of five obovate petals. To an
Ibsen or a Cezanne one account would appear as irrelevant as the other,
since both omitted the thing that mattered, what philosophers used to
call "the thing in itself," what now they would call "the essential
reality":
SOLNESS. ... Do you read much?
HILDA. No, never! I have given it up. For it all seems so
irrelevant.
SOLNESS. That is just my feeling.
It was just what the books left out that Ibsen wanted to express.
He soon worked through the romantic tradition. It hampered him long
enough to prevent _Peer Gynt_ from becoming a great poem; after that he
found himself on the threshold of a world where everything mattered too
much in itself for its associations to be of consequence. Attempting to
analyse Ibsen's characters used to be a pastime for fools; to-day, we
all know that they come from that world where everything has been
reduced to an essence that defies analysis. There Ibsen was never so
completely at home as Cezanne; he lacked the imagination by which alone
one arrives and remains in the world of reality. His vision was more
uncertain and so his faith was weaker. He was a less ferociously sincere
artist. When vision began to fail he took refuge in a catalogue of facts
or in unconvincing symbolism: Cezanne tossed his picture into a bush.
Perhaps that is why a new generation, hungry for great contemporary art,
turns more hopefully to painting than to literature.
Thirty years ago it would have been misleading to say, what is
undoubtedly true, that it is as an artist that Ibsen is great. To call a
man a good artist came to much the same thing as calling him a good
ping-pong player: it implied that he was proficient in his own business;
it did not imply that he was a great man who affected life greatly.
Therefore many people who understood Ibsen and were moved by his plays
preferred to call him a political thinker or a social reformer; while
their enemies, the aesthetes, were very willing to call him a great
artist, since by doing so they excused themselves from paying the least
attention to anything that he said. Ibsen was a reformer in the sense
that all great artists are reformers; it is impossible to speak of
reality without criticizing civilization. In the same way he was a
politician; it is impossible to care passionately about art without
caring about the fate of mankind. But Mr. Roberts is certainly right in
holding that to appreciate Ibsen we must consider him as an artist.
Ibsen approached humanity in the spirit of an artist. He sought that
essential thing in men and women by which we should know them if the
devil came one night and stole away their bodies; we may call it
character if we choose. He imagined situations in which character would
be revealed clearly. The subjects of his plays are often "problems,"
because he was interested in people who only when "problems" arise are
seen to be essentially different from one another, or, indeed, from the
furniture with which they live. There is no reason to suppose that Ibsen
had any love for "problems" as such; and we are tempted to believe that
some modern "problems" are nothing more than situations from Ibsen's
plays. Ibsen's method is the true artist's method. The realist writing
about people tends to give an inventory of personal peculiarities, and a
faithful report of all that is said and done. The romantic hopes,
somehow, to "create an atmosphere" by suggesting what he once felt for
something not altogether unlike the matter in hand. Ibsen sets himself
to discover the halfpennyworth of significance in all this intolerable
deal of irrelevance. Which is the word, which the gesture, that,
springing directly from the depths of one character, penetrates to the
depths of another? What is the true cause of this hubbub of inconsequent
words and contradictory actions? Nothing less remote than the true cause
will serve, nothing else is firmly rooted in reality. Is that man
expressing what he feels or is he paying out what he thinks he is
expected to feel? Have I pushed simplification as far as it will go? Are
there no trappings, no overtones, nothing but what is essential to
express my vision of reality? And, above all, is my vision absolutely
sharp and sure? These were the questions Ibsen had to answer. When he
succeeded he was a great artist, not, as Mr. Roberts suggests, in the
manner of Shakespeare, but in the manner of Aeschylus.
There is no more obvious proof of the greatness of Ibsen's art than the
perfection of its form. To assert that fine form always enfolds fine
thought and feeling would imply a knowledge of literature to which it
would be effrontery in a critic to pretend. He may be allowed, however,
to advise any one who is ready with an instance of great form enclosing
a void to verify his impressions: it was thus that one critic at any
rate came to appreciate Goldoni and Alfieri. Be that as it may, this is
certain: a perfectly conceived idea never fails to express itself in
perfect form. Ibsen did not shirk the labour of making his conceptions
as hard, and definite, and self-supporting as possible. No matter how
autobiographical some of his best plays may be, he is too good an artist
to allow them to lean on his personal experience; they have to stand
firmly on their own feet. Ibsen, therefore, worked his conceptions to
such a degree of hardness and self-consistency that he could detach them
from himself and study them impersonally. That is why his plays are
models of form. And if there be an Academy of Letters that takes its
duties seriously, _Rosmersholm_ and _Ghosts_ are, we presume, in the
hands of every young person within its sphere of influence. The students
are shown, we hope, that Ibsen's form is superb, not because Ibsen paid
any particular attention to the precepts of Aristotle, but because,
like Sophocles, who had the misfortune to predecease the Stagirite, he
knew precisely what he wanted to say, and addressed himself exclusively
to the task of saying it. To achieve great form is needed neither
science nor tradition, but intense feeling, vigorous thinking, and
imagination. Formlessness is not a sign of spirited revolt against
superstition; it is a mere indication of muddleheadedness.
The subject-matter of Ibsen's plays is reality; unfortunately, his
imagination was not always strong enough to keep a sure hold on it. When
the vision faded he took refuge in symbolism or literality. There was a
commonplace background to his mind, of which we see too much in such
plays as _An Enemy of the People_ and _Pillars of Society_. It is this
commonplace and rather suburban quality that tempts us occasionally to
explain Ibsen's popularity by the fact that he represented the revolt of
the supremely unimportant, of whom there happen to be quite a number in
the world. With the symbolism of _The Master-Builder_ no fault can be
found. It is a legitimate and effective means of expressing a sense of
reality. The theme is never lost. The artist who sacrifices his human
relations, but dare not give all, dare not give his vanity or his life
to the ideal, moves steadily to his inevitable doom. Whether he move in
the form of Halvard Solness, the cowardly architect of genius, fearless
of ideas but fearful of action, or in the form of the symbolical
master-builder, the artist who tries to have the best of both worlds,
matters not a straw. The medium of expression changes, but the theme is
constant: the conception is whole. That is more than can be said of _The
Lady from the Sea_, where the symbolism comes perilously near padding;
or of _When We Dead Awaken_, where it often expresses nothing relevant,
merely standing picturesquely for commonplaces, and filling gaps.
To read one of Ibsen's great plays is always thrilling; to read one for
the first time is an event. If a savage who took locomotives and
motor-cars for granted, as inexplicable creatures of whim and fancy,
suddenly were shown, not by vague adumbration, but by straightforward
exposition, that they were expressions of intelligible laws controlled
by comprehensible machinery, he could not be more amazed than was the
nineteenth century by Ibsen. For Ibsen took nothing for granted. He saw
little on the surface of life that corresponded with reality; but he did
not cease to believe in reality. That was where he differed both from
the Philistines and from the elect. He saw that the universe was
something very different from what it was generally supposed to be: he
saw the futility of popular morals and popular metaphysics; but he
neither swallowed the conventions nor threw up his hands in despair,
declaring the whole thing to be an idiotic farce. He knew that truth and
goodness had nothing to do with law and custom; but he never doubted
that there were such things; and he went beneath the surface to find
them. It was Ibsen's revelation of a new world, in which moral values
were real and convincing, that thrilled the nineteenth century, and
thrills us yet. Can any one read sedately that scene in _Ghosts_ in
which Mrs. Alving shows with bewildering simplicity that, however
respectable the Pastor's morality may be, it is pure wickedness?
PASTOR MANDERS. You call it "cowardice" to do your plain duty? Have
you forgotten that a son ought to love and honour his father and
mother?
MRS. ALVING. Do not let us talk in such general terms. Let us ask:
Ought Oswald to love and honour Chamberlain Alving?
MANDERS. Is there no voice in your mother's heart that forbids you
to destroy your son's ideals?
MRS. ALVING. But what about the truth?
MANDERS. But what about the ideals?
MRS. ALVING. Oh--ideals, ideals! If only I were not such a coward!
Ibsen's social and political ideas follow necessarily from the nature
of his art. He knew too much about the depths of character to suppose
that people could be improved from without. He agreed with our
grandmothers that what men need are new hearts. It is good feeling that
makes good men, and the sole check on bad feeling is conscience. Laws,
customs, and social conventions he regarded as ineffectual means to
good. There is no virtue in one who is restrained from evil by fear. He
went further: he regarded external restraints as means to bad, since
they come between a man and his conscience and blunt the moral sense.
"So long as I keep to the rules," says the smug citizen, "I am of the
righteous." Ibsen loathed the State, with its negative virtues, its mean
standards, its mediocrity, and its spiritual squalor. He was a
passionate individualist.
Perhaps no one has seen more clearly that the State, at its best, stands
for nothing better than the lowest common factor of the human mind. What
else can it stand for? State ideals must be ideals that are not beyond
the intellect and imagination of "the average citizen"; also, since
average minds are not pervious to reason, the reasoning of statesmen
must be rhetoric. State morals--law and custom that is to say--are
nothing more than excuses for not bothering about conscience. But
Ibsen, being an artist, knew that he who would save his soul must do
what he feels to be right, not what is said to be so. Feeling is the
only guide, and the man who does what he feels to be wrong does wrong,
whatever the State may say.
The plain, though by no means frank, determination of society to
suppress the individual conscience lest it should clash with the
interests of the community seems positively to have shocked him. To be
fine, he believed, men must think and feel for themselves and live by
their own sense of truth and beauty, not by collective wisdom or
reach-me-down ideals.
"What sort of truths do the majority rally round? Truths so
stricken in years that they are sinking into decrepitude. When a
truth is so old as that, gentlemen, it's in a fair way to become a
lie (_Laughter and jeers_)."
How could Ibsen help being something of a politician? He seems really to
have wished his fellow-creatures to be fine, and to have been angry with
them because they wished to be nothing of the sort. He did not
understand that this passionate individualism, this sense of personal
responsibility, this claim to private judgment, is what no modern State,
be it democratic, bureaucratic or autocratic, can tolerate. Men long
for the ease and assurance of conformity and so soon as they are
sufficiently organized enforce it. Truth is the enemy--_ecrasez
l'infame!_ Poor, silly old Stockmann in _An Enemy of the People_ blurts
it out, blurts out that the water-supply is contaminated and his native
health-resort no better than a death-trap, for no better reason than
that he feels it is what he ought to do. He fails to consider the
feelings and, what is even more important, the financial interests of
his neighbours, and the neighbours make short work of him, as they
generally do of people who think and feel and act for themselves--of
saints and artists in fact. Thus it comes about that the prophets are
stoned and the best plays censored, while people such as Ibsen loathe
the State with its herd-instincts, now decently baptized however, and
known as Morality and Idealism.