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PREJUDICES
FIRST SERIES
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_By H. L. MENCKEN_
PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES
A BOOK OF PREFACES
IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN
A BOOK OF BURLESQUES
THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
[_New edition in preparation for fall of 1921_]
_With George Jean Nathan_
THE AMERICAN CREDO
HELIOGABALUS
_Out of Print_
VENTURES INTO VERSE
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: HIS PLAYS
THE ARTIST
A LITTLE BOOK IN C MAJOR
A BOOK OF CALUMNY
MEN VERSUS THE MAN
[_With R. R. La Monte_]
EUROPE AFTER 8:15
[_With Mr. Nathan and W. H. Wright_]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREJUDICES
FIRST SERIES
by
H. L. MENCKEN
[Illustration]
Published at the Borzoi · New York · by
Alfred · A · Knopf
Copyright, 1919, by
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Published September, 1919
Second Printing January, 1920
Third Printing April, 1920
Fourth Printing March, 1921
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
I CRITICISM OF CRITICISM OF CRITICISM, 9
II THE LATE MR. WELLS, 22
III ARNOLD BENNETT, 36
IV THE DEAN, 52
V PROFESSOR VEBLEN, 59
VI THE NEW POETRY MOVEMENT, 83
VII THE HEIR OF MARK TWAIN, 97
VIII HERMANN SUDERMANN, 105
IX GEORGE ADE, 113
X THE BUTTE BASHKIRTSEFF, 123
XI SIX MEMBERS OF THE INSTITUTE, 129
1. The Boudoir Balzac, 129
2. A Stranger on Parnassus, 134
3. A Merchant of Mush, 138
4. The Last of the Victorians, 139
5. A Bad Novelist, 145
6. A Broadway Brandes, 148
XII THE GENEALOGY OF ETIQUETTE, 150
XIII THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE, 171
XIV THE ULSTER POLONIUS, 181
XV AN UNHEEDED LAW-GIVER, 191
XVI THE BLUSHFUL MYSTERY, 195
1. Sex Hygiene, 195
2. Art and Sex, 197
3. A Loss to Romance, 199
4. Sex on the Stage, 200
XVII GEORGE JEAN NATHAN, 208
XVIII PORTRAIT OF AN IMMORTAL SOUL, 224
XIX JACK LONDON, 236
XX AMONG THE AVATARS, 240
XXI THREE AMERICAN IMMORTALS, 246
1. Aristotelean Obsequies, 246
2. Edgar Allan Poe, 247
3. Memorial Service, 249
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES
I. CRITICISM OF CRITICISM OF CRITICISM
Every now and then, a sense of the futility of their daily endeavors
falling suddenly upon them, the critics of Christendom turn to a
somewhat sour and depressing consideration of the nature and objects of
their own craft. That is to say, they turn to criticizing criticism.
What is it in plain words? What is its aim, exactly stated in legal
terms? How far can it go? What good can it do? What is its normal effect
upon the artist and the work of art?
Such a spell of self-searching has been in progress for several years
past, and the critics of various countries have contributed theories of
more or less lucidity and plausibility to the discussion. Their views of
their own art, it appears, are quite as divergent as their views of the
arts they more commonly deal with. One group argues, partly by direct
statement and partly by attacking all other groups, that the one
defensible purpose of the critic is to encourage the virtuous and oppose
the sinful—in brief, to police the fine arts and so hold them in tune
with the moral order of the world. Another group, repudiating this
constabulary function, argues hotly that the arts have nothing to do
with morality whatsoever—that their concern is solely with pure beauty.
A third group holds that the chief aspect of a work of art, particularly
in the field of literature, is its aspect as psychological document—that
if it doesn’t help men to know themselves it is nothing. A fourth group
reduces the thing to an exact science, and sets up standards that
resemble algebraic formulæ—this is the group of metrists, of
contrapuntists and of those who gabble of light-waves. And so, in order,
follow groups five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, each with its theory
and its proofs.
Against the whole corps, moral and æsthetic, psychological and
algebraic, stands Major J. E. Spingarn, U. S. A. Major Spingarn lately
served formal notice upon me that he had abandoned the life of the
academic grove for that of the armed array, and so I give him his
military title, but at the time he wrote his “Creative Criticism” he was
a professor in Columbia University, and I still find myself thinking of
him, not as a soldier extraordinarily literate, but as a professor in
rebellion. For his notions, whatever one may say in opposition to them,
are at least magnificently un-professorial—they fly violently in the
face of the principles that distinguish the largest and most influential
group of campus critics. As witness: “To say that poetry is moral or
immoral is as meaningless as to say that an equilateral triangle is
moral and an isosceles triangle immoral.” Or, worse: “It is only
conceivable in a world in which dinner-table conversation runs after
this fashion: ‘This cauliflower would be good if it had only been
prepared in accordance with international law.’” One imagines, on
hearing such atheism flying about, the amazed indignation of Prof. Dr.
William Lyon Phelps, with his discovery that Joseph Conrad preaches “the
axiom of the moral law”; the “Hey, what’s that!” of Prof. Dr. W. C.
Brownell, the Amherst Aristotle, with his eloquent plea for standards as
iron-clad as the Westminster Confession; the loud, patriotic alarm of
the gifted Prof. Dr. Stuart P. Sherman, of Iowa, with his maxim that
Puritanism is the official philosophy of America, and that all who
dispute it are enemy aliens and should be deported. Major Spingarn, in
truth, here performs a treason most horrible upon the reverend order he
once adorned, and having achieved it, he straightway performs another
and then another. That is to say, he tackles all the antagonistic groups
of orthodox critics seriatim, and knocks them about unanimously—first
the aforesaid agents of the sweet and pious; then the advocates of
unities, meters, all rigid formulæ; then the experts in imaginary
psychology; then the historical comparers, pigeonholers and makers of
categories; finally, the professors of pure æsthetic. One and all, they
take their places upon his operating table, and one and all they are
stripped and anatomized.
But what is the anarchistic ex-professor’s own theory?—for a professor
must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas. In brief, what he offers
is a doctrine borrowed from the Italian, Benedetto Croce, and by Croce
filched from Goethe—a doctrine anything but new in the world, even in
Goethe’s time, but nevertheless long buried in forgetfulness—to wit, the
doctrine that it is the critic’s first and only duty, as Carlyle once
put it, to find out “what the poet’s aim really and truly was, how the
task he had to do stood before his eye, and how far, with such materials
as were afforded him, he has fulfilled it.” For poet, read artist, or,
if literature is in question, substitute the Germanic word
_Dichter_—that is, the artist in words, the creator of beautiful
letters, whether in verse or in prose. Ibsen always called himself a
_Digter_, not a _Dramatiker_ or _Skuespiller_. So, I daresay, did
Shakespeare.... Well, what is this generalized poet trying to do? asks
Major Spingarn, and how has he done it? That, and no more, is the
critic’s quest. The morality of the work does not concern him. It is not
his business to determine whether it heeds Aristotle or flouts
Aristotle. He passes no judgment on its rhyme scheme, its length and
breadth, its iambics, its politics, its patriotism, its piety, its
psychological exactness, its good taste. He may note these things, but
he may not protest about them—he may not complain if the thing
criticized fails to fit into a pigeon-hole. Every sonnet, every drama,
every novel is _sui generis_; it must stand on its own bottom; it must
be judged by its own inherent intentions. “Poets,” says Major Spingarn,
“do not really write epics, pastorals, lyrics, however much they may be
deceived by these false abstractions; they express _themselves, and this
expression is their only form_. There are not, therefore, only three or
ten or a hundred literary kinds; there are as many kinds as there are
individual poets.” Nor is there any valid appeal _ad hominem_. The
character and background of the poet are beside the mark; the poem
itself is the thing. Oscar Wilde, weak and swine-like, yet wrote
beautiful prose. To reject that prose on the ground that Wilde had
filthy habits is as absurd as to reject “What Is Man?” on the ground
that its theology is beyond the intelligence of the editor of the New
York _Times_.
This Spingarn-Croce-Carlyle-Goethe theory, of course, throws a heavy
burden upon the critic. It presupposes that he is a civilized and
tolerant man, hospitable to all intelligible ideas and capable of
reading them as he runs. This is a demand that at once rules out
nine-tenths of the grown-up sophomores who carry on the business of
criticism in America. Their trouble is simply that they lack the
intellectual resilience necessary for taking in ideas, and particularly
new ideas. The only way they can ingest one is by transforming it into
the nearest related formula—usually a harsh and devastating operation.
This fact accounts for their chronic inability to understand all that is
most personal and original and hence most forceful and significant in
the emerging literature of the country. They can get down what has been
digested and redigested, and so brought into forms that they know, and
carefully labeled by predecessors of their own sort—but they exhibit
alarm immediately they come into the presence of the extraordinary. Here
we have an explanation of Brownell’s loud appeal for a tightening of
standards—_i. e._, a larger respect for precedents, patterns,
rubber-stamps—and here we have an explanation of Phelps’s inability to
comprehend the colossal phenomenon of Dreiser, and of Boynton’s childish
nonsense about realism, and of Sherman’s effort to apply the Espionage
Act to the arts, and of More’s querulous enmity to romanticism, and of
all the fatuous pigeon-holing that passes for criticism in the more
solemn literary periodicals.
As practiced by all such learned and diligent but essentially ignorant
and unimaginative men, criticism is little more than a branch of
homiletics. They judge a work of art, not by its clarity and sincerity,
not by the force and charm of its ideas, not by the technical virtuosity
of the artist, not by his originality and artistic courage, but simply
and solely by his orthodoxy. If he is what is called a “right thinker,”
if he devotes himself to advocating the transient platitudes in a
sonorous manner, then he is worthy of respect. But if he lets fall the
slightest hint that he is in doubt about any of them, or, worse still,
that he is indifferent, then he is a scoundrel, and hence, by their
theory, a bad artist. Such pious piffle is horribly familiar among us. I
do not exaggerate its terms. You will find it running through the
critical writings of practically all the dull fellows who combine
criticism with tutoring; in the words of many of them it is stated in
the plainest way and defended with much heat, theological and
pedagogical. In its baldest form it shows itself in the doctrine that it
is scandalous for an artist—say a dramatist or a novelist—to depict vice
as attractive. The fact that vice, more often than not, undoubtedly _is_
attractive—else why should it ever gobble any of us?—is disposed of with
a lofty gesture. What of it? say these birch-men. The artist is not a
reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the
world as it is, but as it ought to be.
Against this notion American criticism makes but feeble headway. We are,
in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself
to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the
messianic delusion is our national disease. Thus the moral
_Privatdozenten_ have the crowd on their side, and it is difficult to
shake their authority; even the vicious are still in favor of crying
vice down. “Here is a novel,” says the artist. “Why didn’t you write a
tract?” roars the professor—and down the chute go novel and novelist.
“This girl is pretty,” says the painter. “But she has left off her
undershirt,” protests the headmaster—and off goes the poor dauber’s
head. At its mildest, this balderdash takes the form of the late
Hamilton Wright Mabie’s “White List of Books”; at its worst, it is
comstockery, an idiotic and abominable thing. Genuine criticism is as
impossible to such inordinately narrow and cocksure men as music is to a
man who is tone-deaf. The critic, to interpret his artist, even to
understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist;
he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion;
as Major Spingarn says, “æsthetic judgment and artistic creation are
instinct with the same vital life.” This is why all the best criticism
of the world has been written by men who have had within them, not only
the reflective and analytical faculty of critics, but also the gusto of
artists—Goethe, Carlyle, Lessing, Schlegel, Saint-Beuve, and, to drop a
story or two, Hazlitt, Hermann Bahr, Georg Brandes and James Huneker.
Huneker, tackling “Also sprach Zarathustra,” revealed its content in
illuminating flashes. But tackled by Paul Elmer More, it became no more
than a dull student’s exercise, ill-naturedly corrected....
So much for the theory of Major J. E. Spingarn, U. S. A., late professor
of modern languages and literatures in Columbia University. Obviously,
it is a far sounder and more stimulating theory than any of those
cherished by the other professors. It demands that the critic be a man
of intelligence, of toleration, of wide information, of genuine
hospitality to ideas, whereas the others only demand that he have
learning, and accept anything as learning that has been said before. But
once he has stated his doctrine, the ingenious ex-professor,
professor-like, immediately begins to corrupt it by claiming too much
for it. Having laid and hatched, so to speak, his somewhat stale but
still highly nourishing egg, he begins to argue fatuously that the
resultant flamingo is the whole mustering of the critical _Aves_. But
the fact is, of course, that criticism, as humanly practiced, must needs
fall a good deal short of this intuitive recreation of beauty, and what
is more, it must go a good deal further. For one thing, it must be
interpretation in terms that are not only exact but are also
comprehensible to the reader, else it will leave the original mystery as
dark as before—and once interpretation comes in, paraphrase and
transliteration come in. What is recondite must be made plainer; the
transcendental, to some extent at least, must be done into common modes
of thinking. Well, what are morality, trochaics, hexameters, movements,
historical principles, psychological maxims, the dramatic unities—what
are all these save common modes of thinking, short cuts, rubber stamps,
words of one syllable? Moreover, beauty as we know it in this world is
by no means the apparition _in vacuo_ that Dr. Spingarn seems to see. It
has its social, its political, even its moral implications. The finale
of Beethoven’s C minor symphony is not only colossal as music; it is
also colossal as revolt; it says something against something. Yet more,
the springs of beauty are not within itself alone, nor even in genius
alone, but often in things without. Brahms wrote his Deutsches Requiem,
not only because he was a great artist, but also because he was a good
German. And in Nietzsche there are times when the divine afflatus takes
a back seat, and the _spirochaetae_ have the floor.
Major Spingarn himself seems to harbor some sense of this limitation on
his doctrine. He gives warning that “the poet’s intention must be judged
at the moment of the creative act”—which opens the door enough for many
an ancient to creep in. But limited or not, he at least clears off a lot
of moldy rubbish, and gets further toward the truth than any of his
former colleagues. They waste themselves upon theories that only conceal
the poet’s achievement the more, the more diligently they are applied;
he, at all events, grounds himself upon the sound notion that there
should be free speech in art, and no protective tariffs, and no _a
priori_ assumptions, and no testing of ideas by mere words. The safe
ground probably lies between the contestants, but nearer Spingarn. The
critic who really illuminates starts off much as he starts off, but with
a due regard for the prejudices and imbecilities of the world. I think
the best feasible practice is to be found in certain chapters of
Huneker, a critic of vastly more solid influence and of infinitely more
value to the arts than all the prating pedagogues since Rufus Griswold.
Here, as in the case of Poe, a sensitive and intelligent artist
recreates the work of other artists, but there also comes to the
ceremony a man of the world, and the things he has to say are apposite
and instructive too. To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce
a moral judgment. To dispute the categories is to set up a new
anti-categorical category. And to admire the work of Shakespeare is to
be interested in his handling of blank verse, his social aspirations,
his shot-gun marriage and his frequent concessions to the bombastic
frenzy of his actors, and to have some curiosity about Mr. W. H. The
really competent critic must be an empiricist. He must conduct his
exploration with whatever means lie within the bounds of his personal
limitation. He must produce his effects with whatever tools will work.
If pills fail, he gets out his saw. If the saw won’t cut, he seizes a
club....
Perhaps, after all, the chief burden that lies upon Major Spingarn’s
theory is to be found in its label. The word “creative” is a bit too
flamboyant; it says what he wants to say, but it probably says a good
deal more. In this emergency, I propose getting rid of the misleading
label by pasting another over it. That is, I propose the substitution of
“catalytic” for “creative,” despite the fact that “catalytic” is an
unfamiliar word, and suggests the dog-Latin of the seminaries. I borrow
it from chemistry, and its meaning is really quite simple. A catalyzer,
in chemistry, is a substance that helps two other substances to react.
For example, consider the case of ordinary cane sugar and water.
Dissolve the sugar in the water and nothing happens. But add a few drops
of acid and the sugar changes into glucose and fructose. Meanwhile, the
acid itself is absolutely unchanged. All it does is to stir up the
reaction between the water and the sugar. The process is called
catalysis. The acid is a catalyzer.
Well, this is almost exactly the function of a genuine critic of the
arts. It is his business to provoke the reaction between the work of art
and the spectator. The spectator, untutored, stands unmoved; he sees the
work of art, but it fails to make any intelligible impression on him; if
he were spontaneously sensitive to it, there would be no need for
criticism. But now comes the critic with his catalysis. He makes the
work of art live for the spectator; he makes the spectator live for the
work of art. Out of the process comes understanding, appreciation,
intelligent enjoyment—and that is precisely what the artist tried to
produce.
II. THE LATE MR. WELLS
The man as artist, I fear, is extinct—not by some sudden and romantic
catastrophe, like his own Richard Remington, but after a process of
gradual and obscure decay. In his day he was easily the most brilliant,
if not always the most profound, of contemporary English novelists.
There were in him all of the requisites for the business and most of
them very abundantly. He had a lively and charming imagination, he wrote
with the utmost fluency and address, he had humor and eloquence, he had
a sharp eye for the odd and intriguing in human character, and, most of
all, he was full of feeling and could transmit it to the reader. That
high day of his lasted, say, from 1908 to 1912. It began with
“Tono-Bungay” and ended amid the last scenes of “Marriage,” as the
well-made play of Scribe gave up the ghost in the last act of “A Doll’s
House.” There, in “Marriage,” were the first faint signs of something
wrong. Invention succumbed to theories that somehow failed to hang
together, and the story, after vast heavings, incontinently went to
pieces. One had begun with an acute and highly diverting study of
monogamy in modern London; one found one’s self, toward the close,
gaping over an unconvincing fable of marriage in the Stone Age. Coming
directly after so vivid a personage as Remington, Dr. Richard Godwin
Trafford simply refused to go down. And his Marjorie, following his
example, stuck in the gullet of the imagination. One ceased to believe
in them when they set out for Labrador, and after that it was impossible
to revive interest in them. The more they were explained and vivisected
and drenched with theories, the more unreal they became.
Since then the decline of Wells has been as steady as his rise was
rapid. Call the roll of his books, and you will discern a progressive
and unmistakable falling off. Into “The Passionate Friends” there crept
the first downright dullness. By this time his readers had become
familiar with his machinery and his materials—his elbowing suffragettes,
his tea-swilling London uplifters, his smattering of quasi-science, his
intellectualized adulteries, his Thackerayan asides, his text-book
paragraphs, his journalistic raciness—and all these things had thus
begun to lose the blush of their first charm. To help them out he heaved
in larger and larger doses of theory—often diverting enough, and
sometimes even persuasive, but in the long run a poor substitute for the
proper ingredients of character, situation and human passion. Next came
“The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman,” an attempt to rewrite “A Doll’s House”
(with a fourth act) in terms of ante-bellum 1914. The result was 500-odd
pages of bosh, a flabby and tedious piece of work, Wells for the first
time in the rôle of unmistakable bore. And then “Bealby,” with its
Palais Royal jocosity, its running in and out of doors, its humor of
physical collision, its reminiscences of “A Trip to Chinatown” and
“Peck’s Bad Boy.” And then “Boon,” a heavy-witted satire, often
incomprehensible, always incommoded by its disguise as a novel. And then
“The Research Magnificent”: a poor soup from the dry bones of Nietzsche.
And then “Mr. Britling Sees It Through”....
Here, for a happy moment, there seemed to be something better—almost, in
fact, a recrudescence of the Wells of 1910. But that seeming was only
seeming. What confused the judgment was the enormous popular success of
the book. Because it presented a fifth-rate Englishman in an heroic
aspect, because it sentimentalized the whole reaction of the English
proletariat to the war, it offered a subtle sort of flattery to other
fifth-rate Englishmen, and, _per corollary_, to Americans of
corresponding degree, to wit, the second. Thus it made a great pother,
and was hymned as a masterpiece in such gazettes as the New York
_Times_, as Blasco Ibáñez’s “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” was
destined to be hymned three years later. But there was in the book, in
point of fact, a great hollowness, and that hollowness presently begat
an implosion that disposed of the shell. I daresay many a novel-reader
returns, now and then, to “Tono-Bungay,” and even to “Ann Veronica.” But
surely only a reader with absolutely nothing else to read would return
to “Mr. Britling Sees It Through.” There followed—what? “The Soul of a
Bishop,” perhaps the worst novel ever written by a serious novelist
since novel-writing began. And then—or perhaps a bit before, or
simultaneously—an idiotic religious tract—a tract so utterly feeble and
preposterous that even the Scotchman, William Archer, could not stomach
it. And then, to make an end, came “Joan and Peter”—and the collapse of
Wells was revealed at last in its true proportions.
This “Joan and Peter” I confess, lingers in my memory as unpleasantly as
a summer cold, and so, in retrospect, I may perhaps exaggerate its
intrinsic badness. I would not look into it again for gold and
frankincense. I was at the job of reading it for days and days,
endlessly daunted and halted by its laborious dullness, its flatulent
fatuity, its almost fabulous inconsequentiality. It was, and is, nearly
impossible to believe that the Wells of “Tono-Bungay” and “The History
of Mr. Polly” wrote it, or that he was in the full possession of his
faculties when he allowed it to be printed under his name. For in it
there is the fault that the Wells of those days, almost beyond any other
fictioneer of the time, was incapable of—the fault of dismalness, of
tediousness—the witless and contagious coma of the evangelist. Here, for
nearly six hundred pages of fine type, he rolls on in an intellectual
cloud, boring one abominably with uninteresting people, pointless
situations, revelations that reveal nothing, arguments that have no
appositeness, expositions that expose naught save an insatiable and
torturing garrulity. Where is the old fine address of the man? Where is
his sharp eye for the salient and significant in character? Where is his
instinct for form, his skill at putting a story together, his hand for
making it unwind itself? These things are so far gone that it becomes
hard to believe that they ever existed. There is not the slightest sign
of them in “Joan and Peter.” The book is a botch from end to end, and in
that botch there is not even the palliation of an arduous enterprise
gallantly attempted. No inherent difficulty is visible. The story is
anything but complex, and surely anything but subtle. Its badness lies
wholly in the fact that the author made a mess of the writing, that his
quondam cunning, once so exhilarating, was gone when he began it.
Reviewing it at the time of its publication, I inclined momentarily to
the notion that the war was to blame. No one could overestimate the cost
of that struggle to the English, not only in men and money, but also and
more importantly in the things of the spirit. It developed national
traits that were greatly at odds with the old ideal of Anglo-Saxon
character—an extravagant hysteria, a tendency to whimper under blows,
political radicalism and credulity. It overthrew the old ruling caste of
the land and gave over the control of things to upstarts from the lowest
classes—shady Jews, snuffling Methodists, prehensile commercial gents,
disgusting demagogues, all sorts of self-seeking adventurers. Worst of
all, the strain seemed to work havoc with the customary dignity and
reticence, and even with the plain commonsense of many Englishmen on a
higher level, and in particular many English writers. The astounding
bawling of Kipling and the no less astounding bombast of G. K.
Chesterton were anything but isolated; there were, in fact, scores of
other eminent authors in the same state of eruption, and a study of the
resultant literature of objurgation will make a fascinating job for some
sweating _Privatdozent_ of to-morrow, say out of Göttingen or Jena. It
occurred to me, as I say, that Wells might have become afflicted by this
same demoralization, but reflection disposed of the notion. On the one
hand, there was the plain fact that his actual writings on the war,
while marked by the bitterness of the time, were anything but insane,
and on the other hand there was the equally plain fact that his decay
had been in progress a long while before the Germans made their fateful
thrust at Liége.
The precise thing that ailed him I found at last on page 272 _et seq._
of the American edition of his book. There it was plainly described,
albeit unwittingly, but if you will go back to the other novels since
“Marriage” you will find traces of it in all of them, and even more
vivid indications in the books of exposition and philosophizing that
have accompanied them. What has slowly crippled him and perhaps disposed
of him is his gradual acceptance of the theory, corrupting to the artist
and scarcely less so to the man, that he is one of the Great Thinkers of
his era, charged with a pregnant Message to the Younger Generation—that
his ideas, rammed into enough skulls, will Save the Empire, not only
from the satanic Nietzscheism of the Hindenburgs and post-Hindenburgs,
but also from all those inner Weaknesses that taint and flabbergast its
vitals, as the tapeworm with nineteen heads devoured Atharippus of
Macedon. In brief, he suffers from a messianic delusion—and once a man
begins to suffer from a messianic delusion his days as a serious artist
are ended. He may yet serve the state with laudable devotion; he may yet
enchant his millions; he may yet posture and gyrate before the world as
a man of mark. But not in the character of artist. Not as a creator of
sound books. Not in the separate place of one who observes the eternal
tragedy of man with full sympathy and understanding, and yet with a
touch of godlike remoteness. Not as Homer saw it, smiting the while his
blooming lyre.
I point, as I say, to page 272 of “Joan and Peter,” whereon, imperfectly
concealed by jocosity, you will find Wells’ private view of Wells—a view
at once too flattering and libelous. What it shows is the absorption of
the artist in the tin-pot reformer and professional wise man. A descent,
indeed! The man impinged upon us and made his first solid success, not
as a merchant of banal pedagogics, not as a hawker of sociological
liver-pills, but as a master of brilliant and life-like representation,
an evoker of unaccustomed but none the less deep-seated emotions, a
dramatist of fine imagination and highly resourceful execution. It was
the stupendous drama and spectacle of modern life, and not its dubious
and unintelligible lessons, that drew him from his test-tubes and
guinea-pigs and made an artist of him, and to the business of that
artist, once he had served his apprenticeship, he brought a vision so
keen, a point of view so fresh and sane and a talent for exhibition so
lively and original that he straightway conquered all of us. Nothing
could exceed the sheer radiance of “Tono-Bungay.” It is a work that
glows with reality. It projects a whole epoch with unforgettable effect.
It is a moving-picture conceived and arranged, not by the usual
ex-bartender or chorus man, but by an extremely civilized and
sophisticated observer, alert to every detail of the surface and yet
acutely aware of the internal play of forces, the essential springs, the
larger, deeper lines of it. In brief, it is a work of art of the
soundest merit, for it both represents accurately and interprets
convincingly, and under everything is a current of feeling that
coordinates and informs the whole.
But in the success of the book and of the two or three following it
there was a temptation, and in the temptation a peril. The audience was
there, high in expectation, eagerly demanding more. And in the ego of
the man—a true proletarian, and hence born with morals, faiths,
certainties, vasty gaseous hopes—there was an urge. That urge, it seems
to me, began to torture him when he set about “The Passionate Friends.”
In the presence of it, he was dissuaded from the business of an
artist,—made discontented with the business of an artist. It was not
enough to display the life of his time with accuracy and understanding;
it was not even enough to criticize it with a penetrating humor and
sagacity. From the depths of his being, like some foul miasma, there
arose the old, fatuous yearning to change it, to improve it, to set it
right where it was wrong, to make it over according to some pattern
superior to the one followed by the Lord God Jehovah. With this sinister
impulse, as aberrant in an artist as a taste for legs in an archbishop,
the instinct that had created “Tono-Bungay” and “The New Machiavelli”
gave battle, and for a while the issue was in doubt. But with
“Marriage,” its trend began to be apparent—and before long the
evangelist was triumphant, and his bray battered the ear, and in the end
there was a quite different Wells before us, and a Wells worth
infinitely less than the one driven off. To-day one must put him where
he has begun to put himself—not among the literary artists of English,
but among the brummagem prophets of England. His old rival was Arnold
Bennett. His new rival is the Fabian Society, or maybe Lord Northcliffe,
or the surviving Chesterton, or the later Hillaire Belloc.
The prophesying business is like writing fugues; it is fatal to every
one save the man of absolute genius. The lesser fellow—and Wells, for
all his cleverness, is surely one of the lesser fellows—is bound to come
to grief at it, and one of the first signs of his coming to grief is the
drying up of his sense of humor. Compare “The Soul of a Bishop” or “Joan
and Peter” to “Ann Veronica” or “The History of Mr. Polly.” One notices
instantly the disappearance of the comic spirit, the old searching
irony—in brief, of the precise thing that keeps the breath of life in
Arnold Bennett. It was in “Boon,” I believe, that this irony showed its
last flare. There is a passage in that book which somehow lingers in the
memory: a portrait of the United States as it arose in the mind of an
Englishman reading the _Nation_ of yesteryear: “a vain, garrulous and
prosperous female of uncertain age, and still more uncertain temper,
with unfounded pretensions to intellectuality and an idea of refinement
of the most negative description ... the Aunt Errant of Christendom.” A
capital whimsy—but blooming almost alone. A sense of humor, had it been
able to survive the theology, would certainly have saved us from Lady
Sunderbund, in “The Soul of a Bishop,” and from Lady Charlotte Sydenham
in “Joan and Peter.” But it did not and could not survive. It always
withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the
truth in front of patriotic passion. What takes its place is the oafish,
witless buffoonishness of the chautauquas and the floor of Congress—for
example, the sort of thing that makes an intolerable bore of “Bealby.”
Nor are Wells’ ideas, as he has so laboriously expounded them, worth the
sacrifice of his old lively charm. They are, in fact, second-hand, and
he often muddles them in the telling. In “First and Last Things” he
preaches a flabby Socialism, and then, toward the end, admits frankly
that it doesn’t work. In “Boon” he erects a whole book upon an
eighth-rate platitude, to wit, the platitude that English literature, in
these latter times, is platitudinous—a three-cornered banality, indeed,
for his own argument is a case in point, and so helps to prove what was
already obvious. In “The Research Magnificent” he smouches an idea from
Nietzsche, and then mauls it so badly that one begins to wonder whether
he is in favor of it or against it. In “The Undying Fire” he first
states the obvious, and then flees from it in alarm. In his war books he
borrows right and left—from Dr. Wilson, from the British Socialists,
from Romain Rolland, even from such profound thinkers as James M. Beck,
Lloyd-George and the editor of the New York _Tribune_—and everything
that he borrows is flat. In “Joan and Peter” he first argues that
England is going to pot because English education is too formal and
archaic, and then that Germany is going to pot because German education
is too realistic and opportunist. He seems to respond to all the varying
crazes and fallacies of the day; he swallows them without digesting
them; he tries to substitute mere timeliness for reflection and feeling.
And under all the rumble-bumble of bad ideas is the imbecile assumption
of the jitney messiah at all times and everywhere: that human beings may
be made over by changing the rules under which they live, that progress
is a matter of intent and foresight, that an act of Parliament can cure
the blunders and check the practical joking of God.
Such notions are surely no baggage for a serious novelist. A novelist,
of course, must have a point of view, but it must be a point of view
untroubled by the crazes of the moment, it must regard the internal
workings and meanings of existence and not merely its superficial
appearances. A novelist must view life from some secure rock, drawing it
into a definite perspective, interpreting it upon an ordered plan. Even
if he hold (as Conrad does, and Dreiser, and Hardy, and Anatole France)
that it is essentially meaningless, he must at least display that
meaninglessness with reasonable clarity and consistency. Wells shows no
such solid and intelligible attitude. He is too facile, too
enthusiastic, too eager to teach to-day what he learned yesterday. Van
Wyck Brooks once tried to reduce the whole body of his doctrine to a
succinct statement. The result was a little volume a great deal more
plausible than any that Wells himself has ever written—but also one that
probably surprised him now and then as he read it. In it all his
contradictions were reconciled, all his gaps bridged, all his shifts
ameliorated. Brooks did for him, in brief, what William Bayard Hale did
for Dr. Wilson in “The New Freedom,” and has lived to regret it, I
daresay, or at all events the vain labor of it, in the same manner....
What remains of Wells? There remains a little shelf of very excellent
books, beginning with “Tono-Bungay” and ending with “Marriage.” It is a
shelf flanked on the one side by a long row of extravagant romances in
the manner of Jules Verne, and on the other side by an even longer row
of puerile tracts. But let us not underestimate it because it is in such
uninviting company. There is on it some of the liveliest, most original,
most amusing, and withal most respectable fiction that England has
produced in our time. In that fiction there is a sufficient memorial to
a man who, between two debauches of claptrap, had his day as an artist.
III. ARNOLD BENNETT
Of Bennett it is quite easy to conjure up a recognizable picture by
imaging everything that Wells is not—that is, everything interior,
everything having to do with attitudes and ideas, everything beyond the
mere craft of arranging words in ingratiating sequences. As stylists, of
course, they have many points of contact. Each writes a journalese that
is extraordinarily fluent and tuneful; each is apt to be carried away by
the rush of his own smartness. But in their matter they stand at
opposite poles. Wells has a believing mind, and cannot resist the
lascivious beckonings and eye-winkings of meretricious novelty; Bennett
carries skepticism so far that it often takes on the appearance of a
mere peasant-like suspicion of ideas, bellicose and unintelligent. Wells
is astonishingly intimate and confidential; and more than one of his
novels reeks with a shameless sort of autobiography; Bennett, even when
he makes use of personal experience, contrives to get impersonality into
it. Wells, finally, is a sentimentalist, and cannot conceal his
feelings; Bennett, of all the English novelists of the day, is the most
steadily aloof and ironical.
This habit of irony, in truth, is the thing that gives Bennett all his
characteristic color, and is at the bottom of both his peculiar merit
and his peculiar limitation. On the one hand it sets him free from the
besetting sin of the contemporary novelist: he never preaches, he has no
messianic delusion, he is above the puerile theories that have engulfed
such romantic men as Wells, Winston Churchill and the late Jack London,
and even, at times, such sentimental agnostics as Dreiser. But on the
other hand it leaves him empty of the passion that is, when all is said
and done, the chief mark of the true novelist. The trouble with him is
that he cannot feel with his characters, that he never involves himself
emotionally in their struggles against destiny, that the drama of their
lives never thrills or dismays him—and the result is that he is unable
to arouse in the reader that penetrating sense of kinship, that profound
and instinctive sympathy, which in its net effect is almost
indistinguishable from the understanding born of experiences actually
endured and emotions actually shared. Joseph Conrad, in a memorable
piece of criticism, once put the thing clearly. “My task,” he said, “is,
by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it
is, above all, to make you _see_.” Here seeing, it must be obvious, is
no more than feeling put into physical terms; it is not the outward
aspect that is to be seen, but the inner truth—and the end to be sought
by that apprehension of inner truth is responsive recognition, the
sympathy of poor mortal for poor mortal, the tidal uprush of feeling
that makes us all one. Bennett, it seems to me, cannot evoke it. His
characters, as they pass, have a deceptive brilliance of outline, but
they soon fade; one never finds them haunting the memory as Lord Jim
haunts it, or Carrie Meeber, or Huck Finn, or Tom Jones. The reason is
not far to seek. It lies in the plain fact that they appear to their
creator, not as men and women whose hopes and agonies are of poignant
concern, not as tragic comedians in isolated and concentrated dramas,
but as mean figures in an infinitely dispersed and unintelligible farce,
as helpless nobodies in an epic struggle that transcends both their
volition and their comprehension. Thus viewing them, he fails to
humanize them completely, and so he fails to make their emotions
contagious. They are, in their way, often vividly real; they are
thoroughly accounted for; what there is of them is unfailingly
life-like; they move and breathe in an environment that pulses and
glows. But the attitude of the author toward them remains, in the end,
the attitude of a biologist toward his laboratory animals. He does not
_feel_ with them—and neither does his reader.
Bennett’s chief business, in fact, is not with individuals at all, even
though he occasionally brings them up almost to life-size. What concerns
him principally is the common life of large groups, the action and
reaction of castes and classes, the struggle among societies. In
particular, he is engrossed by the colossal and disorderly functioning
of the English middle class—a division of mankind inordinately mixed in
race, confused in ideals and illogical in ideas. It is a group that has
had interpreters aplenty, past and present; a full half of the
literature of the Victorian era was devoted to it. But never, I believe,
has it had an interpreter more resolutely detached and relentless—never
has it had one less shaken by emotional involvement. Here the very lack
that detracts so much from Bennett’s stature as a novelist in the
conventional sense is converted into a valuable possession. Better than
any other man of his time he has got upon paper the social anatomy and
physiology of the masses of average, everyday, unimaginative Englishmen.
One leaves the long series of Five Towns books with a sense of having
looked down the tube of a microscope upon a huge swarm of infinitely
little but incessantly struggling organisms—creatures engaged furiously
in the pursuit of grotesque and unintelligible ends—helpless
participants in and victims of a struggle that takes on, to their eyes,
a thousand lofty purposes, all of them puerile to the observer above its
turmoil. Here, he seems to say, is the middle, the average, the typical
Englishman. Here is the fellow as he appears to himself—virtuous,
laborious, important, intelligent, made in God’s image. And here he is
in fact—swinish, ineffective, inconsequential, stupid, a feeble parody
upon his maker. It is irony that penetrates and devastates, and it is
unrelieved by any show of the pity that gets into the irony of Conrad,
or of the tolerant claim of kinship that mitigates that of Fielding and
Thackeray. It is harsh and cocksure. It has, at its moments, some flavor
of actual bounderism: one instinctively shrinks from so smart-alecky a
pulling off of underclothes and unveiling of warts.
It is easy to discern in it, indeed, a note of distinct hostility, and
even of disgust. The long exile of the author is not without its
significance. He not only got in France something of the Frenchman’s
aloof and disdainful view of the English; he must have taken a certain
distaste for the national scene with him in the first place, else he
would not have gone at all. The same attitude shows itself in W. L.
George, another Englishman smeared with Gallic foreignness. Both men, it
will be recalled, reacted to the tremendous emotional assault of the
war, not by yielding to it ecstatically in the manner of the unpolluted
islanders, but by shrinking from it into a reserve that was naturally
misunderstood. George has put his sniffs into “Blind Alley”; Bennett has
got his into “The Pretty Lady.” I do not say that either book is
positively French; what I do say is that both mirror an attitude that
has been somehow emptied of mere nationalism. An Italian adventure, I
daresay, would have produced the same effect, or a Spanish, or Russian,
or German. But it happened to be French. What the Bennett story attempts
to do is what every serious Bennett story attempts to do: to exhibit
dramatically the great gap separating the substance from the appearance
in the English character. It seems to me that its prudent and
self-centered G. J. Hoape is a vastly more real Englishman of his class,
and, what is more, an Englishman vastly more useful and creditable to
England, than any of the gaudy Bayards and Cids of conventional war
fiction. Here, indeed, the irony somehow fails. The man we are obviously
expected to disdain converts himself, toward the end, into a man not
without his touches of the admirable. He is no hero, God knows, and
there is no more brilliance in him than you will find in an average
country squire or Parliament man, but he has the rare virtue of common
sense, and that is probably the virtue that has served the English
better than all others. Curiously enough, the English reading public
recognized the irony but failed to observe its confutation, and so the
book got Bennett into bad odor at home, and into worse odor among the
sedulous apes of English ideas and emotions on this side of the water.
But it is a sound work nevertheless—a sound work with a large and
unescapable defect.