ON REREADING MALLOCK
It seems the "dark backward and abysm of time" when writing the name
of William Hurrell Mallock, yet not forty years ago he was the most
discussed author of his day. The old conundrum, Is Life Worth
Living? he revived, and newly orchestrated with particular reference
to the spiritual needs of the hour. And A Romance of the Nineteenth
Century was denounced as immoral as Mademoiselle de Maupin. Gautier
was read then and Swinburne's lilting paganism quite filled the
lyric sky. Mr. Mallock's role was that of a philosophical novelist
and essayist who reproved the golden materialism of his age, not
with fuliginous menace, as did Carlyle, nor with melodious
indignation, like Ruskin, but with a more subtle instrument of
castigation, irony. He laughed at the gods of the new scientific
dispensation, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, and he put
them in the pages of his New Republic for the delectation of the
world, and most appealing foolery it was; this and the sheer
burlesque of The New Paul and Virginia. Mr. Mallock was an
individualist. The influence of John Stuart Mill had not yet waned
in the seventies--he occupied then a place midway between Bentham
and Spencer. His birth, breeding, and temperament made Mallock a foe
to socialism, to the promiscuous in politics, religion, society,
therefore an apostle of culture, not missing its precious side;
witness Mr. Rose in The New Republic, and one who abhorred the crass
and the irreverent in the New Learning. He enjoyed vogue. His ideas
were boldly seized and transformed by the men of the nineties, yet
to-day it is difficult to get a book of his. They are mostly out of
print--which is equivalent to saying, out of mind.
With what personal charm he invested his romances! He is the
literary progenitor of a long line of young men, artistic in taste,
a trifle sceptical as to final causes, wealthy, worldly, widely
cultured, and aristocratic. The staler art of Oscar Wilde gives the
individual of Mallock petrified into a rather unpleasant type.
Walter Pater's fear that the word "hedonist" would be suspected as
immoral came true in Wilde's books. The heroes of A Romance of the
Nineteenth Century, Tristram Lacy and The New Republic have a strong
family resemblance. They were supermen before Nietzsche was
discovered. They are prepossessed by theological problems, they love
the seven arts, and are a trifle decadent; though when action is
demanded they do not fail to respond. As stories go, A Romance is
the best of Mallock's; the canvas of Tristram Lacy is larger, the
intrigue less intense, and the characterisation more human. The
unhappy girl, Cynthia Walters, who so shocked our mothers, is not
duplicated in Tristram. Mr. Mallock wrote a preface to the second
edition of A Romance, a superfluous one, for the book needs no
apology. It never did. It is as moral as Madame Bovary, though not
as pleasant. The Triangle is a revered convention in French fiction,
but the naturalistic photographs in A Romance are not agreeable, and
Cynthia's epitaph, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall
see God," leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. It is in the mode
ironical almost projected to the key of cynicism. No doubt the
leisurely gait of these fictions would be old-fashioned to the
present generation, with its preference for staccato English, morbid
sensationalism, and lack of grace and scholarship. Mr. Mallock is a
scholar and a gentleman who writes a prose of distinction, and he is
also a thinker, reactionary, to be sure, but a tilter at sham
philosophies and sham religions. Last, but not least, he has
abundant humour and a most engaging wit. Possibly all these
qualities would make him unpopular in our present century.
What a gathering of choice spirits in The New Republic: Matthew
Arnold, Professor Jowett--a fine character etching--Huxley, Tyndall,
Carlyle, Pater--rather cruelly treated--Ruskin, Doctor Pusey, Mrs.
Mark Pattison, W. K. Clifford, Violet Fane--how the author juggles
with their personalities, with their ideas. It's the cleverest
parody of its kind. Otho Laurence and Robert Leslie are closely
related in aspirations to Ralph Vernon, Alie Campbell, and the
priest Stanley of A Romance. As portraits, those of the Premier Lord
Runcorn in Tristram Lacy, and the faded dandy, poet, and man about
town, Lord Surbiton, of A Romance, are difficult to match outside of
Disraeli. Epigrams drop like snowflakes. The decor is always
gorgeous--Monte Carlo, Provence, Cap de Juan, countries flowing with
milk and honey, marble ruins, the ilex, cypress, and palm. Palaces
there are, and inhabited by languid, fascinating young men who
anxiously examine in the glass their expressive countenances, asking
the Lord whether He is pleased with them. And lovely girls,
charming, and in Cynthia Walters's case a lily with a cankered
calyx. Then there are the Price-Bousefields and the inimitable Mrs.
Norham, "celebrated authoress and upholder of the people." One of
the notable blackguards in fiction is Colonel Stapleton; and the
Poodle and the new-rich Helbecksteins--a complete picture-gallery
may be found in these interesting novels. Romance rules; poetry,
tenderness in the appreciation of the eternal feminine, and a pity
for living things. Poor Cynthia Walters, the "dear, dead woman,"
lingers in the memory, as modern as yesterday, and as effaced as a
daguerreotype.
But if his heroes sow their oats tamely Mr. Mallock as an antagonist
is most vigorous. He went at the scientific men with all the weapons
in his armoury. To-day there no longer exists the need of such
polemics. In the moral world there are analogies to the physical,
and particularly in geology, with its prehistoric stratifications,
its vast herbarium, its quarries and petrifications, its ossuaries,
the bones of vanished forms, ranging from the shadow of a leaf to
the flying crocodile, the horrid pterodactyl--now reduced to the
exquisite and iridescent dragon-fly; from the monstrous mammoth to
the tiny forerunner of the horse. Philosophy and Religion, too, have
their mighty dead, their immemorial tombs wherein repose the bones
of the buried dead skeletons of obsolete systems. And on the sands
of time lie the arch-images of antique thought awaiting the condign
catastrophe. There are Kant and his followers, and near the
idealists are the materialists; next to Hegel is Buechner, and at the
base of the vast structure so patiently reared by Herbert Spencer
the mists are already dense, though not as obscuring as the clouds
about the mausoleum of Comte. That great charmless woman, George
Eliot, smiles a smile of sombre ennui before the Spencer tomb, and
the invisible voice of Ernest Haeckel is heard whispering: Where is
your Positivism? Where is your Rationalism? What has become of your
gaseous invertebrate god? Surely there is sadly required in the
cynical universities of the world a Chair of Irony with subtle Edgar
Saltus as its first incumbent.
Now, Mr. Mallock knows that religion and philosophy may travel on
parallel lines, therefore never collide. He took the catch-word "the
bankruptcy of science" too seriously. Notwithstanding the persuasive
rhetoric of that silken sophist Henri Bergson, a belated visionary
metaphysician in a world of realities, the trend of latter-day
thought is toward the veritable victories of science. A new world
has come into being. And what discoveries: spectral analysis, the
modes of force, matter displaced by energy, the relations of atoms
in molecules--a renewed geology, astronomy, palaeontology, biology,
embryology, wireless telegraphy, the conquest of the air, and, last
but not least, the discovery of radium. The slightly war-worn
evolution theory is now confronted by the Transformism of Hugo de
Vries, who has shown in a most original manner that nature also
proceeds by sudden leaps as well as in slow, orderly progress. And
the brain, that telephonic centre, according to Bergson, is become
another organ. Ramon y Cajal, the Spanish biologist, with his
neurons--little erectile bodies in the cells of the cortex, stirred
to motor impulses when a message is sent them from the sensory
nerves--has done more for positive knowledge than a wilderness of
metaphysicians.
That famous interrogation, "Is life worth living?"
may be viewed to-day from a different angle. Mr. Mallock
acknowledged that the question must be answered in the terms of the
individual only. Here we encounter a new crux. What is the
individual? The family is the unit of society, not the individual.
And the autonomous "I" exists no longer, except as a unit in the
colony of cells which are "We." Man is a being afloat in an ocean of
vibrations. Society demands the co-operation of its component cells,
else relegates to solitude the individual who cannot adapt himself
to play a humble part in the cosmical orchestra. That protean theory
Socialism has changed its chameleonic hues many times since Mr.
Mallock wrote Is Life Worth Living? His idea is worked out with
great clearness in the apprehension of details, but with little
feeling for their relations to each other. Sadly considered, we may
take it for granted that life has a definite aim. We live, as a
modern thinker puts it, because we stand like the rest of cognisable
nature under the universal law of causality; this idea is founded
not on a metaphysical but a biological basis. Metaphysics is a
pleasing diversion, though it doesn't get us to finalities.
Happiness is an absolute. Therefore it has no existence. There never
was, there never will be an earthly paradise, no matter what the
socialists say. Content is the summum bonum of mankind; the content
that comes with sound health and a clear conscience. The wrangling
over Free Will is now considered a sign of ghost-worship.
Schopenhauer and his mystic Will-to-Live are both rather amusing
survivals of antique animism. The problem is not whether we can do
what we want to do, but whether we can will what we want to will.
But the illusion of individual freedom of will is the last illusion
to be dissipated in this most deterministic of worlds and most
pluralistic of universes. It's a poor conception of eternity that
doesn't work both ways. As there will be no end to things, there
never was a beginning. Eternity is now. Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott
wrote in his brilliant refutation of Bergson that "the feeling we
have of a necessity for such an explanation [the attempt to explain
the universe] arises from the conformation of our brains, which
think by associating disjoined ideas; ... no last explanation is
possible or perhaps even exists," which will please the relativists
and pain the absolutists. But deprive mankind of its dreams and it
is like the naughty child in Hans Christian Andersen's fable. A
fairy punished this child by giving him dreamless slumber. Without
vision, old as well as young limp through life.
Pessimism as a philosophy, it has been pointed out, is the last
superstition of primordial times. It is a form of egomania. From
Byron to D'Annunzio pessimism filled poetry; from Werther to Sanine
it has ruled fiction. It is less a philosophy than a matter of
temperament. It was the mode during the last century, and as an
issue is as dead as the humanitarianism that followed. Is life worth
living? was properly, if somewhat cynically, answered: It depends on
the liver. Pessimism is the pathetic fallacy reduced to medicinal
formula. It is now merely in our stock of mental attitudes, usually
a pose; when it is not, it's bound to be pathological. Yet Bossuet
has spoken of "the inexorable ennui which forms the basis of life."
Mr. Mallock was once accused of dilettanteism, aesthetic and ethical;
nevertheless, there is no mistaking his moral earnestness at the
close of Is Life Worth Living? Furthermore, he foresaw the muddle
the world is making to-day in the conduct of life. All the
self-complacent chatter about self-annihilation during the Buddhist
upheaval some decades ago has been translated into a veritable
annihilation. The holy name of Altruism--social emotion made
functional--has vanished into the intense inane. The higher forms of
discontent have modulated into the debasing superstition of
universal slaughter. With Bergson the divinity of diving into the
subconscious--what else is his intuition?--is set before the lovers
of the mystic to worship. Years ago the Sufi doctrine declared that
the judging faculty should be abandoned for the intuitive. Don't
reason! Just dream! The poet Rogers replied to a lady who asked his
religion that his was the religion of all sensible men. "And what is
that?" she persisted. "That no sensible men ever tell." But Mr.
Mallock has told, and four decades after his confession he is still
worth rereading.