do not seem to be even remotely conscious,” he told her, “of
the fact that you are next of kin to the man and his destiny, in
which the question of millenniums has been decided--speaking quite
literally, I hold the Future of mankind in my hand.” It is because his
correspondence is so full of passages in this and similar moods that we
find in Nietzsche’s letters little of the intimacy that we expect in
good letters. It is as though he were suffering from an obsession about
his fame. Many of his letters are merely manifestoes about himself. He
was not greatly interested in other people or in the little ordinary
things that interest other people. His most enjoyable passages might
be described as outbursts, and towards the end of his life he chose as
his correspondents Strindberg and Brandes, who also had the genius of
outburst but in a less superb degree. It was Brandes who wrote to him
with regard to Dostoievsky:
He is a true and great poet, but a vile creature, absolutely
Christian in his way of thinking and living, and at the same time
quite _sadique_. His morals are wholly what you have christened
“Slave Morality.”
“Just what I think,” replied Nietzsche.
Not that the letters are without an occasional touch of fun. There is
a delightful early letter in which Nietzsche tells how, being invited
to meet Wagner, he ordered a dress suit. It was brought round to the
house just in time to allow him to dress. The old messenger, however,
brought not only the parcel but the bill, and presented it to Nietzsche:
I took it politely, but he declared he must be paid on delivery. I
was surprised, and explained that I had nothing to do with him as
the servant of my tailor, but that my dealings were with his master
to whom I had given the order. The man grew more pressing, as did
also the time. I snatched at the things and began to put them
on. He snatched them too and did all he could to prevent me from
dressing. What with violence on my part and violence on his, there
was soon a scene, and all the time I was fighting in my shirt, as I
wished to get the new trousers.
At last, after a display of dignity, solemn threats, the utterance
of curses on my tailor and his accomplice, and vows of vengeance,
the little man vanished with my clothes.
There is another amusing letter to his sister, in which he tells her
how, one Christmas Day at Nice, he drank too much:
Then your famous animal drank three quite large glasses of a sweet
local wine, and was just the slightest bit top-heavy; at least, not
long afterwards, when the breakers drew near to me, I said to them
as one says to a bevy of farmyard fowls, “Shsh! Shsh! Shshh!”
This incident is comically symbolic of much of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
It is hardly necessary to go into Dr. Levy’s defence of Nietzsche
against the charge that he was the “man who caused the war.” Dr. Levy
points out quite justly that Nietzsche was as severe a critic of
Prussians and Prussianism as any English leader-writer in war-time.
This, however, does not meet the point of the anti-Nietzscheans. What
they contend is that Prussianism is essentially the vulgar application
of the principles that underlie the Nietzschean philosophy. It is
obviously ridiculous to contend that Nietzsche caused the war. It
is arguable, however, that he was the supreme poet of the supreme
falsehood that is at the bottom of all unjust wars.
In any case, like Carlyle, he will probably survive as an artist rather
than as a teacher. And even men who detest his gospel will delight in
the lightning of his phrase as it shoots out of the thunder-clouds of
his imagination.
XIII
MR. T. S. ELIOT AS CRITIC
Mr. Eliot, in his critical essays, is an undertaker rather than a
critic. He comes to bury Hamlet not to praise him. He has an essay on
“Hamlet and His Problems,” in which he assures us that, “so far from
being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic
failure.” Now, there are several things about _Hamlet_ that call for
explanation. But there is one thing that needs no explanation, and that
is its “artistic failure.” One might as well set out to explain why the
mid-Atlantic is shallow, why Mont Blanc is lower than Parliament Hill,
why Cleopatra was unattractive, why roses have an offensive smell. It
might be possible for a writer of paradoxes to amuse himself and us on
any of these themes. But Mr. Eliot is no dealer in paradoxes. He is a
serious censor of literature, who lives in the gloom of a basement,
and cannot believe in the golden pomp of the sun outside. It might
be unfair to say that what he is suffering from is literary atheism.
He has undoubtedly gods of his own. But he worships them in the dark
spirit of the sectarian, and his interest in them is theological
rather than religious in kind. He is like the traditional Plymouth
Brother whose belief in God is hardly so strong as his belief that
there are “only a few of us”--perhaps “only one of us”--saved. We see
the Plymouth-Brother mood in his reference to “the few people who talk
intelligently about Stendhal and Flaubert and James.” This expresses an
attitude which is intolerable in a critic of literature, and should be
left to the _précieuses ridicules_.
Mr. Eliot, however, does not merely say that _Hamlet_ is an artistic
failure and leave it at that. He goes on to explain what he means. He
believes that:
Shakespeare’s _Hamlet_, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is a play
dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and that
Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the
“intractable” material of the old play.
In so far as this is an attempt to explain the specifically new
Shakespearian emphasis in _Hamlet_, in contrast to those elements which
he borrowed from an earlier play, the first part of the assertion is
worth considering. But, as regards the completed play that we possess,
novelties, borrowings, and all, the entire sentence gives us merely a
false simplification. Shakespeare’s finished _Hamlet_ is a play dealing
with many things besides the effect of a mother’s guilt on her son. It
is a play dealing with the effect of a whole circle of ruinous events
closing in on a man of princely nature, who was a foreigner amid the
baseness that surrounded him. Shakespeare showed in _Hamlet_ that it
was possible, contrary to all the rules, to write a play which combined
the largeness of a biography with essential dramatic unity. Mr. Eliot,
however, clings to the idea that Shakespeare failed in _Hamlet_ because
he was divided in interest between the theme of the guilty mother and
other intractable stuff “that the writer could not drag to light,
contemplate, or manipulate into art.” Now, every great work of art is
like the visible part of an iceberg; it reveals less than it leaves
hidden. The greatest poem in the world is no more than a page from that
inspired volume that exists in the secret places of the poet’s soul.
There is no need to explain the mysteries that crowd about us as we
read _Hamlet_ by a theory of Shakespeare’s failure. To summon these
mysteries into the narrow compass of a play is the surest evidence of
a poet’s triumph. Let us see, however, how Mr. Eliot, holding to his
guilty-mother theme, attempts to explain the quality of Shakespeare’s
failure. He writes:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding
an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a
situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
_particular_ emotion; such that when the external facts, which
must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is
immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more
successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you
will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her
sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of
imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of
his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events,
these words were automatically released by the last event in the
series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy
of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is
deficient in _Hamlet_.
“Hamlet (the man),” he adds, “is dominated by an emotion which is
inexpressible, because it is in _excess_ of the facts as they appear.”
Mr. Eliot has a curious view of the things that justify violent
emotion. I should have thought that the murder of a father by his
usurping brother, the infidelity of a mother and a mistress, the use
of former companions to spy on him, the failure of all that had
once seemed honest and fair, plots to murder him, the suicide of his
beloved, might have caused considerable perturbation even in the soul
of a fish. If ever there was a play in which the emotion is not in
excess of the facts as they appear, that play is _Hamlet_. The emotion
is “in excess” only in the sense that it expresses for us not merely
the personal emotion of one man, but the emotions of generation after
generation of fine and sensitive spirits caught in the gross toils of
disaster. Hamlet is a universal type as well as an individual. In this
he resembles such a figure as Prometheus to a degree which cannot be
claimed for Lear or Macbeth or Othello. That, perhaps, is the real
mystery that has bewildered Mr. Eliot.
Mr. Eliot will have it, however, that Shakespeare, and not he himself,
is to blame for his bewilderment. He concludes his essay:
We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem
which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an
insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted
to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need
a great many facts in his biography; and we should like to know
whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal
experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii, “Apologie de Raimond
Sebond.” We should have, finally, to know something which is by
hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which,
in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to
understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.
Would it be possible to write a paragraph in which there was a greater
air of intellectual pursuit and a tinier reality of intellectual
achievement? It would not be easy to say more essentially irrelevant
things on a great subject. Mr. Eliot is like a man dissecting--and
dissecting with desperate earnestness--a corpse that isn’t there.
And his essays in praise have scarcely more of that vitality which is a
prerequisite of good criticism than his essays in blame. He obviously
admires Blake and Ben Jonson, but he leaves them as rigid and as cold
as though he were measuring them for their coffins. The good critic
communicates his delight in genius. His memorable sentences are the
mirrors of memorable works of art. Like the poet, he is something
of a philosopher, but his philosophy is for the most part implicit.
He is a light-bringer by means of quotation and aphorism. He may
destroy, but only in order to let in the light. His business among
authors is as glorious as was the business of Plutarch among men of
action. He may be primarily æsthetic, or primarily biographical, or
primarily expository; but in no kind of criticism can he reach more
than pedantry, unless he himself is a man of imagination, stirred by
the spectacle of the strange and noble passions of the human soul. He
knows that literature is not the game of a coterie, but is a fruit of
the tree of life, hanging from the same boughs as the achievements
of lovers and statesmen and heroes. There is so little truth in Mr.
Eliot’s statement that “a literary critic should have no emotions
except those immediately provoked by a work of art--and these ...
are, when valid, perhaps not to be called emotional at all,” that one
would be bound to tell ten times more truth merely by contradicting
it. The ideal critic would always be able to disentangle relevant from
irrelevant emotions as he studied a work of art; but in practice all
critics, save a few makers of abstract laws, are human, and the rich
personal experience of the critic enters into his work for good as well
as evil.
Mr. Eliot fails as a critic because he brings us neither light nor
delight. But this does not mean that he will always fail. He has some
of the qualities that go to the making of a critic. He has learning,
and he enjoys intellectual exercise. His essay on “Tradition and
the Individual Talent” shows that he is capable of ideas, though he
is not yet capable of expressing them clearly and interestingly.
Besides this, as one reads him, one is conscious of the presence of
a serious talent, as yet largely inarticulate, and wasting itself on
the splitting of hairs and metaphysical word-spinning. His failure at
present is partly a failure of generosity. If a critic is lacking in
generous responsiveness it is in vain for him to write about the poets.
The critic has duties as a destroyer, but chiefly in the same sense as
a gold-washer. His aim is the discovery of gold. Mr. Eliot is less of
a discoverer in this kind than any critic of distinction who is now
writing. Otherwise he could hardly have written the sort of attack
he writes on Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of Euripides, in
which he overlooks the one supreme fact that calls for a critic’s
explanation--the fact that Professor Murray alone among English
translators has (whether imperfectly or not) brought Euripides to birth
as an author for the modern world. Let Mr. Eliot for the next ten years
take as his patron saint the woman in the New Testament who found the
piece of silver, instead of Johannes Agricola in joyless meditation. He
will find her not only better company, but a wiser counsellor. He may
even find his sentences infected with her cheerful excitement, for want
of which as yet they can break neither into a phrase nor into a smile.
XIV
MR. NORMAN DOUGLAS’S DISLIKES
Mr. Norman Douglas has, in _Alone_, written a book of hatred
tempered with archæology and laughter. Luckily, there is very little
archæology and enough laughter to make the hatred enjoyable without
being infectious. It is not that Mr. Douglas does not like some of
his fellow-creatures. He likes heretics and jolly beggars. He liked
Ouida. But, if Mr. Douglas likes you, the danger is that he will
throw you at somebody else’s head. That is what he does with Ouida,
whom he glorifies as “the last, almost the last, of lady authors.” He
throws her at the head of the age in general--at “our anæmic and wooly
generation,” at “our actual womanscribes” with “their monkey-tricks and
cleverness,” at “our vegetarian world-reformers who are as incapable
of enthusiasm as they are of contempt, because their blood temperature
is invariably two degrees below normal,” and finally at an American
novelist described as “this feline and gelatinous New Englander.” That
gives a fair enough impression of Mr. Douglas’s attitude to the human
race as seen at close quarters.
He has in a measure justified his attitude by making an amusing book
of it. Mr. Douglas has a well-stored and alert mind, full of by-ways,
that makes for good conversation. As we read him we feel that we are
listening to the racy monologues of a traveller with a special gift for
pouring out the comedy of his discomforts in abusive form. He tells us
how he landed--“with one jump--in Hell,” which is his name for Siena in
winter. “I hate Viareggio at all seasons,” he tells us farther on, and
he describes the inhabitants as “birds of prey: a shallow and rapacious
brood.” At Pisa, when he arrives, “the Arno is the emblem of Despair
... like a torrent of liquid mud--irresolute whether to be earth or
water.” He finds a good landlady at Corsanico, but he immediately
remembers how he had “lived long at the mercy of London landladies and
London charwomen--having suffered the torments of Hell, for more years
than I care to remember, at the hands of those pickpockets and hags
and harpies and drunken sluts” ... “those London sharks and furies.”
At Rome the remembrance of a “sweet old lady friend” sets him thinking
also of her husband, “a worm, a good man in the worst sense of the
word,” “the prince of moralisers, the man who first taught me how
contemptible the human race may become”--“what a face: gorgonising in
its assumption of virtue”--“he ought to have throttled himself at his
mother’s breast.” The absence of mosquitoes and the fewness of the
flies at Rome reminds him again of his sufferings at the hands, so to
speak, of flies in other places. “One of the most cherished projects
of my life,” he declares, “is to assemble, in a kind of anthology, all
the invectives that have been hurled since the beginning of literature
against this loathly dirt-born insect, this living carrion, this blot
on the Creator’s reputation--and thereto add a few of my own.” The
noise of the Roman trams leads him, while lying in bed, to devote the
morning hours to “the malediction of all modern progress, wherein I
include, with firm impartiality, every single advancement in culture
which happens to lie between my present state and that comfortable
cavern in whose shelter I can see myself ensconced as of yore,
peacefully sucking somebody’s marrow, while my women, round the corner,
are collecting a handful of acorns for my dessert,” after which he goes
on to denounce the telephone as “that diabolic invention” and the Press
for “cretinising” the public mind. At Olevana, it is the nightingale
that rouses him to imprecations:
One of them elects to warble in deplorably full-throated ease
immediately below my bedroom window. When this particular fowl
sets up its din at about 3.45 a.m. it is a veritable explosion:
an ear-rending, nerve-shattering explosion of noise.... It
is that blasted bird clearing its throat for a five-hours’
entertainment.... A brick. Methinks I begin to see daylight....
Mr. Douglas, it is only fair to say, explains that Italian nightingales
do not sing like English nightingales. But I fancy that Mr. Douglas
sat down, when he began these sketches, in the mood for writing comic
scarifications, and neither bird nor man, city nor river, was safe from
his harsh laughter. He hurls a pen where King Saul in similar mood
hurled a spear, and we must concede that he hurls it with force.
Even nightingales, however, do not infuriate him as Victorians and
Puritans do. When he writes angrily about nightingales you feel that
he is only being amusing. When he writes about Victorians, you realise
that he is positively white with anger. “It was not Nero ...” he
cries, “but our complacent British reptiles, who filled the prisons
with the wailing of young children, and hanged a boy of thirteen for
stealing a spoon.” And again: “What a self-sufficient and inhuman
brood were the Victorians of that type, hag-ridden by their nightmare
of duty; a brood that has never been called by its proper name.” Mr.
Douglas, at any rate, has done his best. He even gives us “a nation of
canting shop-keepers,” but becomes more original with “hermaphrodite
middle-classes.” But his real objection is neither to Victorianism
nor to Puritanism; it is to Christianity, as we see when he writes of
self-indulgence:
Self-indulgence, I thought. Heavily fraught is that word; weighted
with meaning. The history of two thousand years of spiritual
dyspepsia lies embedded in its four syllables. Self-indulgence--it
is what the ancients blithely called “indulging one’s genius.”
Self-indulgence! How debased an expression nowadays. What a text
for a sermon on the mishaps of good words and good things. How all
the glad warmth and innocence have faded out of the phrase. What a
change has crept over us.
Mr. Douglas is frankly on the side of the pagans--not the real pagans
who were rather like ordinary Christians, but the modern pagans who
detest Christianity. This paganism is merely egoism in its latest form.
It is anti-human, as when Mr. Douglas exclaims:
Consider well your neighbour, what an imbecile he is.... The sage
will go his way, prepared to find himself growing ever more out of
sympathy with vulgar trends of opinion, for such is the inevitable
development of thoughtful and self-respecting minds.
Such is his creed, and in the result his laughter, though often
amusing, is never happy. There is the laughter of sympathy, which is
Shakespeare’s, and there is the laughter of antipathy, which is Mr.
Douglas’s. That is, perhaps, why his publishers say that his is “a book
for the fastidious in particular.” You could not say of Shakespeare
that he is “for the fastidious in particular.”
We must grant an author his point of view, however, and the fact
remains that, however we may differ from Mr. Douglas’s preaching, we go
on reading him with pleasure, protest and curiosity. He puts his life
into his sentences, and so he stamps with experience even such a piece
of topographical information as:
From here, if you are in the mood, you may descend eastward over
the Italian frontier, crossing the stream which is spanned lower
down by the bridge of St. Louis, and find yourself at Mortola
Superiore (try the wine) and then at Mortola proper (try the wine).
He is nearly always amusing about wine, whether it is good or bad. But
that is only one of his moods. He also talks to you as a naturalist, as
an archæologist, as a biologist, or will begin to make some odd book
that you are never likely to read live for you; he has discovered an
author called Ramage who is perhaps the most real and comical person of
whom he writes. There is a vein of cruelty or of selfishness in some of
the others who follow one another through his pages. The worst of them
is the “phenomenally brutal” sportsman who, along with Mr. Douglas,
gave a dead rat to a sow to eat:
She engulfed the corpse methodically, beginning at the end, working
her way through breast and entrails while her chops dripped with
gore, and ending with the tail, which gave some little trouble
to masticate, on account, of its length and tenuity. Altogether
decidedly good sport....
That is disgusting, but it is interesting. We may say the same of the
sardonic account of the way in which lizards are played with in Italy:
It is not very amusing to be either a snake or a lizard in Italy.
Lizards are caught in nooses and then tied by one leg and made to
run on the remaining three; or secured by a cord round the neck and
swung about in the air--mighty good sport, this; or deprived of
their tails and given to the baby or cat to play with; or dragged
along at the end of a string, like a reluctant pig that is led to
market. There are quite a number of ways of making a lizard feel at
home.
On the whole, one prefers to read Mr. Douglas on the subject of wine,
or on the rarity of the use of red things (wine excepted) in Italy, or
on the little flames that are supposed to be seen at night over the
graves in cemeteries. Mr. Douglas may be gross at times, but he is
never a bore. He gives us a meal of many courses, and allows none of
the courses to last too long. But it would be a more enjoyable meal if
we did not hear in the crabbed laughter of our host the undertones of
despair--the despair that comes of “considering your neighbour, what
an imbecile he is,” and failing to realise that in order to enjoy his
imbecility to the full you must first see him a little lower than the
angels. Cervantes did this. Dickens did it. Mr. Chesterton does it.
That is why they are not “for the fastidious in particular.”
XV
M. ANDRÉ GIDE MAKES A JOKE