Mr. Cunninghame Graham is a grandee of contemporary literature. He is
also a grandee of revolutionary politics. Both in literature and in
politics he is a figure of challenge for the love of challenge more than
any other man now writing. Other men challenge us with Utopias, with
moral laws and so forth. But Mr. Graham has little of the prophet or the
moralist about him. He expresses himself better in terms of his
hostilities than in terms of visionary cities and moralities such as
Plato and Shelley and Mazzini have built for us out of light and fire.
It is a temperament, indeed, not a vision or a logic, that Mr. Graham
has brought to literature. He blows his fantastic trumpet outside the
walls of a score of Jerichos:--Jerichos of empire, of cruelty, of
self-righteousness, of standardized civilization--and he seems to do so
for the sheer soldierly joy of the thing. One feels that if all the
walls of all the Jerichos were suddenly to collapse before his
trumpet-call he would be the loneliest man alive. For he is one of those
for whom, above all, "the fight's the thing."
It would be difficult to find any single purpose running through the
sketches which fill most of his books. His characteristic book is a
medley of cosmopolitan "things seen" and comments grouped together under
a title in which irony lurks. Take the volume called _Charity_, for
example. Both the title of the book and the subject-matter of several
of the sketches may be regarded as a challenge to the unco' guid (if
there are any left) and to respectability (from which even the humblest
are no longer safe). On the other hand, his title may be the merest
lucky-bag accident. It seems likely enough, however, that in choosing it
the author had in mind the fact that the supreme word of charitableness
in the history of man was spoken concerning a woman who was taken in
adultery. It is scarcely an accident that in _Charity_ a number of the
chapters relate to women who make a profession of sin.
Mr. Graham is unique in his treatment of these members of the human
family. If he does not throw stones at them, as the Pharisees of virtue
did, neither does he glorify them as the Pharisees of vice have done in
a later generation. He simply accepts them as he would accept a
broken-down nation or a wounded animal, and presents them as characters
in the human drama. It would be more accurate to say "as figures in the
human picture," for he is far more of a painter than a dramatist. But
the point to be emphasized is that these stories are records, tragic,
grim or humorous, as the portraits in Chaucer are--acceptances of life
as it is--at least, of life as it is outside the vision of policemen and
other pillars of established interests. For Mr. Graham can forgave you
for anything but two things--being successful (in the vulgar sense of
the term) or being a policeman.
It would be wrong, however, to suggest that Mr. Graham achieves the very
finest things in charity. It is the charity of tolerance, or the minor
charity, that is most frequent in his pages. The larger charity which we
find in Tolstoi and the great teachers is not here. We could not imagine
Mr. Graham forgetting himself so far in his human sympathies as Ruskin
did when he stooped and kissed the filthy beggar outside the church door
in Rome. Nor do we find in any of these sketches of outcasts that sense
of humanity bruised and exiled that we get in such a story as
Maupassant's _Boule de Suif_. Mr. Graham gloriously insists upon our
recognizing our human relations, but many of them he introduces to us as
first cousins once removed rather than as brothers and sisters by the
grace of God.
He does more than this in his preface, indeed, a marvellous piece of
reality and irony which tells how a courtesan in Gibraltar fell madly in
love with a gentleman-sponger who lived on her money while he could, and
then took the first boat home with discreet heartlessness on coming into
a bequest from a far-off cousin. "Good God, a pretty sight I should have
looked...." he explained to a kindred spirit as they paced the deck of
the boat to get an appetite. "I like her well enough, but what I say is,
Charity begins at home, my boy. Ah, there's the dinner bell!" Mr. Graham
has a noble courtesy, an unerring chivalry that makes him range himself
on the side of the bottom dog, a detestation of anything like
bullying--every gift of charity, indeed, except the shy genius of pity.
For lack of this last, some of his sketches, such as _Un Autre
Monsieur_, are mere anecdotes and decorations.
Possibly, it is as a romantic decorator that Mr. Graham, in his art as
opposed to his politics, would prefer to be judged. He has dredged half
the world for his themes and colours, and Spain and Paraguay and Morocco
and Scotland and London's tangled streets all provide settings for his
romantic rearrangements of life in this book. He has a taste for uncivil
scenes, as Henley had a taste for uncivil words. Even a London street
becomes a scene of this kind as he pictures it in his imagination with
huge motorbuses, like demons of violence, smashing their way through the
traffic. Or he takes us to some South American forest, where the vampire
bats suck the blood of horses during the night. Or he introduces us to a
Spanish hidalgo, "tall, wry-necked, and awkwardly built, with a nose
like a lamprey and feet like coracles." (For there is the same note of
violence, of exaggeration, in his treatment of persons as of places.)
Even in Scotland, he takes us by preference to some lost mansion
standing in grotesque contrast to the "great drabness of prosperity
which overspreads the world." He is a great scene-painter of
wildernesses and lawless places, indeed. He is a Bohemian, a lover of
adventures in wild and sunny lands, and even the men and women are apt
to become features in the strange scenery of his pilgrimages rather than
dominating portraits. In his descriptions he uses a splendid rhetoric
such as no other living writer of English commands. He has revived
rhetoric as a literary instrument. Aubrey Beardsley called Turner a
rhetorician in paint. If we were to speak of Mr. Graham as a painter in
rhetoric, we should be doing more than making a phrase.
But Mr. Graham cannot be summed up in a phrase. To meet him in his books
is one of the desirable experiences of contemporary literature, as to
hear him speak is one of the desirable experiences of modern politics.
Protest, daring, chivalry, the passion for the colour of life and the
colour of words--he is the impersonation of these things in a world
that is muddling its way half-heartedly towards the Promised Land.