his heroes. He is continually asking “What is his secret?” and the
answer is usually a little disappointing, a little exiguous in
surprise, when it comes. Thus he tells us that the secret of Burns
“lies in two words--inspiration and sympathy.” That is true, but it
leaves Burns smooth as a statue. Burns appeals to us surely, not
only through his inspiration and sympathy, but as the spirit of man
fluttering rebelliously, songfully, satirically, against the bars of
orthodoxy. Scotsmen revere him as the champion of human nature against
the Levites. His errors, no doubt, were as gross as those of the
Levites, but human nature turns affectionately to those who protest
on its behalf against tyranny, and Burns with all his sins, was a
liberator. When he comes to Burke, Lord Rosebery again asks, “What is
his secret?” “The secret of Burke’s character,” he says, “is this, in
my judgment--that he loved reform and hated revolution.” This, again,
leaves Burke with the eyes of a statue. We shall understand the secret
of Burke much better if we see him as a man who had far more passionate
convictions about the duties than about the rights of human beings. He
believed in good government and in good citizenship, but he was never
even touched by the Utopian dream of the perfectibility of man. Lord
Rosebery, indeed, brings the figures of the dead to life, not in his
interpretation of their secrets, but usually in some anecdote that
reminds us of their profound humanity.
His happiest speeches, as a result, are about great men whose private
lives have already been laid bare to all the world. When he has to
speak on Thackeray, whose life still remains half a secret, he devotes
more space to literary criticism, and Thackeray remains for the most
part an effigy hung with wreaths of compliments. It is the fashion
nowadays to speak ill of Thackeray, and Lord Rosebery’s extravagances
on the other side would tempt even a moderate man into disparagement.
He refers to Thackeray as “the giant whom we discuss to-day.” There
could not be a more inappropriate word for Thackeray than “giant.” One
might almost as well call Jane Austen a “giantess.” Charlotte Brontë,
as a young author coming under Thackeray’s spell, might legitimately
feel that she was in the presence of a Titan. But a man may be a Titan
to his contemporaries and yet be no Titan in the long line of great
authors. Thackeray, I am convinced, is greatly underestimated to-day,
but he will come back into his own only if we are prepared to welcome
him on a level considerably below that of the Titans--below Dickens and
Tolstoy, below even Sterne. Not that Lord Rosebery finds nothing to
censure in Thackeray. Though he remarks that _Vanity Fair_ “appears to
many of us the most full and various novel in the English language,”
he has no praise for “the limp Amelia and the shadowy Dobbin.” At
the same time, he turns aside his censures with a compliment. “The
blemishes of _Vanity Fair_ exalt the book,” he declares; “for what must
be the merits of a work which absolutely eclipse such defects?” It is
one of the perils of oratory that it leads men to utter sentences of
this kind. They mean little or nothing, but they have the ring of
amiability. On the other hand, Lord Rosebery makes no concession to
amiability in his criticism of _Esmond_. “The plot to me,” he says, “is
simply repulsive. The transformation of Lady Castlewood from a mother
to a wife is unnatural and distasteful to the highest degree. Thackeray
himself declared that he could not help it. This, I think, only
means that he saw no other than this desperate means of extricating
the story. I cannot help it, too. One likes what one likes, and one
dislikes what one dislikes.” An occasional reservation of this kind
helps to give flavour to Lord Rosebery’s compliments. It gives them
the air of being the utterances, not of a professional panegyrist, but
of a detached and impartial mind. Thus he begins his eulogy of Dr.
Johnson with a confession that Johnson’s own writings are dead for him
apart from “two poems and some pleasing biographies.” “Speaking as
an individual and illiterate Briton”--so he makes his confession. It
is as though the tide withdrew in order to come in with all the more
surprising volume.
One thing that must strike many readers with astonishment while
reading these speeches and studies is that an orator so famous for his
delicate wit should reveal so little delight in the wit of authors.
His enthusiasm is largely moral enthusiasm. We think of Lord Rosebery
as a _dilettante_, and yet the _dilettanti_ of literature and public
life make only a feeble appeal to him. He is interested in few but
men of strong character and men of action. His heroes are such men as
Cromwell and Mr. Gladstone. Is it that he is an ethical _dilettante_,
or is it that he is seeking in these vehement natures a strength of
which he feels the lack in himself? Certainly, as we read him, he casts
the shadow of a man who has almost all the elements of greatness except
this strength. He has been Prime Minister, he has won the Derby, he
has achievements behind him sufficient (one would imagine) to fill
three lives with success, and yet somehow we picture him as a brilliant
failure as we picture the young man who had great possessions. These
very _Miscellanies_ bear the stamp of failure. They are the praises of
famous men spoken from a balcony in the Castle of Indolence. They are
graceful and delightful. But they are haunted by a curious pathos, for
the eyes of the speaker gaze wistfully from where he stands towards the
path that leads to the Hill Difficulty and the pilgrims who advance
along it under heavy burdens to their perils and rewards.
VIII
MR. VACHEL LINDSAY
Mr. Lindsay objects to being called a “jazz poet”; and, if the name
implied that he did nothing in verse but make a loud, facetious, and
hysterical noise, his objection would be reasonable. It is possible
to call him a “jazz poet,” however, for the purpose not of belittling
him, but of defining one of his leading qualities. He is essentially
the poet of a worked-up audience. He relies on the company for the
success of his effects, like a Negro evangelist. The poet, as a rule,
is a solitary in his inspiration. He is more likely to address a star
than a crowded room. Mr. Lindsay is too sociable to write like that.
He invites his readers to a party, and the world for him is a round
game. To read “The Skylark” or the “Ode to a Nightingale” in the
hunt-the-slipper mood in which one enjoys “The Daniel Jazz” would be
disastrous. Shelley and Keats give us the ecstasy of a communion, not
the excitement of a party. The noise of the world, the glare, and the
jostling crowds fade as we read. The audience of Shelley or Keats is as
still as the audience in a cathedral. Mr. Lindsay, on the other hand,
calls for a chorus, like a singer at a smoking-concert. That is the
spirit in which he has written his best work. He is part entertainer
and part evangelist, but in either capacity he seems to demand not an
appreciative hush, but an appreciative noise.
It is clear that he is unusually susceptible to crowd excitement. His
two best poems, “Bryan, Bryan” and “The Congo,” are born of it. “Bryan,
Bryan” is an amazing attempt to recapture and communicate a boy’s
emotions as he mingled in the scrimmage of the Presidential election
of 1896. Mr. Lindsay becomes all but inarticulate as he recalls the
thrill and tumult of the marching West when Bryan called on it to
advance against the Plutocrats. He seems to be shouting like a student
when students hire a bus and go forth in masks and fancy dress to make
a noise in the streets. Luckily, he makes an original noise. He knows
that his excitement is more than he can express in intelligible speech,
and so he wisely and humorously calls in the aid of nonsense, which he
uses with such skill and vehemence that everybody is forced to turn
round and stare at him:
Oh, the long-horns from Texas,
The jay hawks from Kansas,
The plop-eyed bungaroo and giant giassicus,
The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo,
The horned toad, prairie-dog, and ballyhoo,
From all the new-born states arow,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on.
The fawn, prodactyl, and thing-a-ma-jig,
The rakeboor, the hellangone,
The whangdoodle, batfowl and pig,
The coyote, wild-cat, and grizzly in a glow,
In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast,
They leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West.
From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long--
Against the towns of Tubal Cain,
Ah--sharp was their song.
Against the ways of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young,
The long-horn calf, the buffalo, and wampus gave tongue.
In such a passage as this Mr. Lindsay pours decorative nonsense out of
a horn of plenty. But his aim is not to talk nonsense: it is to use
nonsense as the language of reality. As paragraph follows paragraph,
we see with what sureness he is piling colour on colour and crash on
crash in order that we may respond almost physically to the sensations
of those magnificent and tumultuous days. He has discovered a new sort
of rhetoric which enables him to hurry us through mood after mood of
comic, pugnacious and sentimental excitement. Addressed to a religious
meeting, rhetoric of this kind would be interrupted by cries of “Glory,
Hallelujah!” and “Praise de Lord!” Unless you are rhetoric-proof, you
cannot escape its spell. Isolated from its context, the passage I have
quoted may be subjected to cold criticism. It is only when it keeps its
place in the living body of the poem and becomes part of the general
attack on our nerves that it is irresistibly effective.
In “The Congo,” it is the excitement of Negroes--in their dances and
their religion--that Mr. Lindsay has set to words. As he watches their
revels, the picture suggests a companion-picture of Negroes orgiastic
in Africa, in the true Kingdom of Mumbo-Jumbo--a Negro’s fairy-tale of
a magic land:
Just then from the doorway, as fat as shotes,
Came the cake-walk princes in their long red coats,
Canes with a brilliant lacquer shine,
And tall silk hats that were red as wine.
And they pranced with their butterfly partners there,
Coal-black maidens with pearls in their hair,
Knee-skirts trimmed with the jessamine sweet,
And bells on their ankles and little black feet.
But it is the grotesque comedy of the American Negro, not the fantasia
on Africa, that makes “The Congo” so entertaining a poem. The
description of the “fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room” has often
been quoted. There is the same feeling of “racket” in the picture of a
religious camp meeting:
A good old negro in the slums of the town
Preached at a sister for her velvet gown;
Howled at a brother for his low-down ways,
His prowling, guzzling, sneak-thief days;
Beat on the Bible till he wore it out
Starting the jubilee revival shout.
And some had visions as they stood on chairs,
And sang of Jacob, and the golden stairs.
And they all repented, a thousand strong,
From their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong,
And slammed on their hymn books till they shook the room
With “glory, glory, glory,”
And “Boom, boom, _Boom_.”
Whatever qualities Mr. Lindsay lacks, he has humour, colour and gusto.
When he writes in the tradition of the serious poets, as in “Abraham
Lincoln Walks at Midnight” and “Epilogue,” he is negligible: he is
only one of a thousand capable verse-writers. He is dependent on his
own idiom to a greater extent even than was Robert Burns. Not that his
work in rag-time English is comparable in other respects to Burns’s in
Scots. Burns’s themes were, apart from his comic verse, the traditional
themes of the poets--the aristocrats of the spirit. Mr. Lindsay is
a humorist and sentimentalist who is essentially a democrat of the
spirit--one of the crowd.
And, just as he is the humorist of the crowd, so is he the humorist of
things immense and exaggerated. His imagination is the playground of
whales and elephants and sea-serpents. He is happy amid the clangour
and confusion of a railway-junction. He rejoices in the exuberant and
titanic life of California, where:
Thunder-clouds of grapes grow on the mountains.
and he boasts that:
There are ten gold suns in California,
When all other lands have one,
For the Golden Gate must have due light
And persimmons be well done.
And the hot whales slosh and cool in the wash
And the fume of the hollow sea,
Rally and roam in the loblolly foam
And whoop that their souls are free.
Mr. Lindsay himself can whoop like a whale. He is a poet in search
of superlatives beyond the superlatives. He cannot find them, but he
at least articulates new sounds. As one reads him, one is reminded
at times of a child in a railway-train singing and shouting against
the noise of the engine and the wheels. The world affects Mr. Lindsay
as the railway-train affects some children. He is intoxicated by the
rhythm of the machinery. As a result, though he is often an ethical
poet, he is seldom a spiritual poet. That helps to explain why his
verse does not achieve any but a sentimental effect in his andante
movements. As his voice falls, his inspiration falls. In “The Santa Fé
Trail” he breaks in on the frenzy of a thousand motors with the still,
small voice of the bird called the Rachel Jane. He undoubtedly moves us
by the way in which he does this; but he moves us much as a sentimental
singer at a ballad concert can do. It is not for passages of this kind
that one reads him. His words at their best do not minister at the
altar: they dance to the music of the syncopated orchestra. That is Mr.
Lindsay’s peculiar gift. It would hardly be using too strong a word to
say that it is his genius.
IX
MR. PUNCH TAKES THE WRONG TURNING
There are those who gibe at _Punch_. There are also those who gibe at
those who gibe at _Punch_. The match is a fairly even one. _Punch_
is undoubtedly not as good as it used to be, but it is not quite so
certain that it is not as clever as it used to be. Very few people
realise that _Punch_ was once a good paper--that it was a good paper,
I mean in the Charles-Kingsley sense of the adjective. It began in
1841, as Mr. C. L. Graves prettily says, by “being violently and
vituperatively on the side of the angels.” If _Punch_ had kept pace
with the times it would, in these days, at the age of eighty, be
suspected of Socialism. Its championship of the poor against those
who prospered on the poverty of the poor was as vehement as a Labour
speech at a street-corner. One of the features of the early _Punch_ was
a “Pauper’s Corner,” in which “the cry of the people found frequent
and touching utterance.” It was in the Christmas number of _Punch_ in
1843 that Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” was first published. Mark Lemon,
the editor, insisted on publishing it, though all his colleagues were
opposed to him on the point. In the following years we find the same
indignant sense of realities expressing itself in Leech’s cartoon, “The
Home of the Rick Burner,” which emphasised the fact that the cause of
an outburst of incendiarism in Suffolk was the greed of the farmers
who underpaid their labourers. _Punch_ also took up the cause of the
sweated labourers in verse:
I’ll sing you a fine old song, improved by a modern pate,
Of a fine Old English Gentleman, who owns a large estate,
But pays the labourers on it a very shabby rate.
Some seven shillings each a week for early work and late,
Gives this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.
Nor did _Punch_ shrink from looking a good deal higher than the fine
Old English Gentleman for his victims. He had a special, almost a Lloyd
Georgian, taste for baiting dukes. He attacked the Duke of Norfolk
with admirable irony for suggesting to the poor that they should eke
out their miserable fare by using curry powder. He made butts in turn
of the Duke of Marlborough, the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of
Sutherland, the Duke of Richmond and the Duke of Atholl. He did not
spare even the Duke of Wellington. “The old Duke,” he declared, “should
no longer block up the great thoroughfare of civilisation--he should be
quietly and respectfully eliminated.” It was in the same mood that the
Marquis of Londonderry was denounced both as a tyrannical coal-owner
and an enemy of the Queen’s English--“the most noble, but not the most
grammatical Marquis.” _Punch’s_ view of the House of Lords is expressed
with considerable directness in his scheme for reforming the Chamber,
which begins:
It is an indisputable truth that there can be no such thing as a
born legislator. As unquestionable is the fact that there may be a
born ass.
But your born ass may be born to your legislator’s office, and
command a seat in the house of legislators by inheritance, as in
not a few examples, wherein the coronet hides not the donkey’s ears.
This is not particularly brilliant. It is interesting not so much in
itself as because it is the sort of thing with which _Punch_ used
regularly to regale its readers. _Punch_ in those days was a paper
with a purpose. Its humour, like Dickens’s was to a certain extent a
missionary humour. _Punch_ saw himself as the rescuer of the underdog,
and, if he could not achieve his object comically, he was prepared to
do it angrily. He did not hesitate to fling his cap and bells rudely in
the face of royalty itself. He might be accused of vulgarity, but not
of being, as he has since become, the more or less complacent advocate
of Toby, the top-dog.
Mr. Graves seems to think that the change in the spirit of _Punch_ is
due to the mellowness that comes with increasing years. But the real
reason, I fancy, is that, while _Punch_ began under an editor whose
sympathies were with the bottom-dog, the sympathies of later editors
have been much more respectable. It is not that _Punch_ has lost the
fire of youth, but that it has lost the generosity of the Victorian
man of letters. It was, it may be admitted, easier to be generous in
those days. A Victorian could make himself the champion of the ill-used
poor without any feeling that he was assisting in bringing about a new
order in society. A middle-class Georgian who attaches himself to the
same cause cannot do so without realising that it is not a question of
patching an old suit of clothes, but of making a new and a better one.
The Victorian committed himself to charity. The Georgian has to commit
himself to the cold-blooded charity of equality. _Punch_, indeed, seems
to have begun to take alarm as soon as the Chartist movement made it
appear likely that the workers were going to demand, not sympathetic
treatment, but something like self-determination. By 1873, according
to Mr. Graves, “references to the champagne-habit among the miners
abound.” In a cartoon, “From the Coal Districts,” we are shown a lady
in a fruiterer’s saying, “I’m afraid I must give up the pineapple, Mr.
Green! Eight shillings is really too much!” She is interrupted by a
“successful collier” who bids the fruiterer, “Just put ’em up for _me_,
then, Master. ’Ere’s ’arf a sovereign; and look ’ere--yer may keep the
change if yer’ll _only tell us ’ow to cook ’un_.” _Punch_, as we know
it to-day, had been born.
It is interesting to trace the change in the temper of _Punch_, not
only in domestic, but in foreign, affairs. _Punch_ appears to have
given up his pacifism--or, as Mr. Graves calls it with reforming zeal,
his “pacificism”--as a result of his generous sympathy with insurgent
Italians and Hungarians. That was the thin end of the wedge. Having
once drawn the sword, _Punch_ found it even more enjoyable than drawing
cartoons. He drew it fiercely against the Russians in the Crimean War.
He drew it fiercely against the Indians in the Indian Mutiny. He drew
it on behalf of General Eyre after the negro outbreak in Jamaica. He
drew it against Lincoln in the American Civil War. Mr. Graves ought,
for historical reasons, to have reprinted _Punch’s_ parody on one of
Lincoln’s speeches. He is content, however, to describe it as “a truly
lamentable performance, in which the President claims dictatorial
powers, calls for whipcord to whip the rebels, abuses the ‘rotten old
world,’ talks with the utmost cynicism of the blacks, and in general
behaves like a vulgar buffoon.” Mr. Graves, with an impartiality which
cannot be too highly praised, reminds the _Punch_ of those days that
“the magnanimous Lincoln would never allow” the Southerners to be
called rebels in his presence--a significant reminder when we recall
how Mr. Lloyd George drew on the Lincoln parallel in defending his
treatment of the Irish. But, for the ironist, the most amusing of
all _Punch’s_ blunders in regard to foreign policy is the welcome he
offered to the birth of the German Navy in an article called “Bravo,
Bismarck!” “Britannia through her _Punch_,” he wrote, “rejoices to
weave among her naval azures a new shade--Prussian blue.” It is only
fair to say that _Punch_ was not consistent in his attitude to Germany.
But he has shown a curious capacity for backing the wrong horse--the
horse that seemed to “get away” at the start, but that was ultimately
disqualified by the stern judge, history. He gave up championing lost
causes and took to championing causes that would be lost a generation
later.
In the result, Mr. Graves, though a wit of distinction, has produced
in _Mr. Punch’s History of Modern England_ a book that is pathetic
rather than amusing. It is a cemetery of dead jokes--the offspring of
a little gentleman with a long nose who was cross more often than he
was funny. _Punch_, indeed, has been for the most part a grinner rather
than a wit. It has had, and still has, brilliant writers on its staff.
But its temper is not the temper of its most brilliant contributors.
Its attitude is that of the prosperous clubman who dislikes the advance
both of the new rich and of the old poor. It has undoubtedly made
itself the most successful comic paper in the world, but one sometimes
wonders whether it has done so as a result of allying itself with
comedy or of allying itself with success. Yet the fact remains that
other men have started rivals to _Punch_, and that they have not only
been not so successful as _Punch_ but not so comic. _Punch_ always
baits the hook of its odious politics with a reasonable amount of
comedy about things in general, and in the comedy of things in general,
even if we think it might be done still better, it has at least always
been ahead of its rivals. There have been men who have dreamed of a
_Punch_ that would bring the spirit of comedy to bear on all sides
impartially. There are others who have dreamed of bringing the spirit
of comedy to bear on the right side. One would not, perhaps, mind what
side _Punch_ was on if only it were a little more generous--if only
it purveyed the human comedy as a comedy, and not, as in the case of
working men, Irishmen, and non-Allied foreigners, as a sinister crook
melodrama.
X
MR. H. M. TOMLINSON
Mr. Tomlinson is a born traveller. There are two sorts of
travellers--those who do what they are told and those who do what they
please. Mr. Tomlinson has never moved about the world in obedience to a
guide-book. He would find it almost as difficult to read a guide-book
as to write one. He never echoes other men’s curiosity. He travels for
the purpose neither of information nor conversation. He has no motive
but whim. His imagination goes roaming; and, his imagination and his
temper being such as they are, he is out on his travels even if he gets
no farther than Limehouse or the Devonshire coast. He has, indeed,
wandered a good deal farther than Limehouse and Devonshire, as readers
of _The Sea and the Jungle_ know. Even in his more English volumes of
sketches, essays, confessions, short stories--how is one to describe
them?--he takes us with him to the north coast of Africa, to New York,
and to France in war time. But the English sketches--the description of
the crowd at a pit-mouth after an explosion in a coal mine, the account
of a derelict railway station and a grocer’s boy in spectacles--almost
equally give us the feeling that we are reading the narrative of one
who has seen nothing except with the fortunate eyes of a stranger. It
is all a matter of eyes. To see is to discover, and all Mr. Tomlinson’s
books are, in this sense, books of discoveries.
As a recorder of the things he has seen he has the three great gifts
of imagery, style and humour. He sees the jelly-fish hanging in the
transparent deeps “like sunken moons.” A boat sailing on a windy day
goes skimming over the inflowing ridges of the waves “with exhilarating
undulations, light as a sandpiper.” A queer Lascar on a creeping errand
in an East-end street “looked as uncertain as a candle-flame in a
draught.” How well again Mr. Tomlinson conveys to us in a sentence or
two the vision of Northern Africa on a wet day: