LITERATURE AND ETHICS
_Without the blessing of reading the burden of life would be
intolerable and the riches of life reduced to the merest penury._
GLADSTONE.
_The taste for reading stores the mind with pleasant thoughts,
banishes ennui, fills up the unoccupied interstices and enforced
leisures of an active life; and if it is judiciously managed it is
one of the most powerful means of training character and
disciplining and elevating thought. To acquire this taste in early
life is one of the best fruits of education._
LECKY: "THE MAP OF LIFE."
From his childhood Paul Jones had been a voracious and an omnivorous
reader. He read with amazing rapidity. The first book he enjoyed
whole-heartedly was Mabel Dearmer's "Noah's Ark Geography," one of the
best children's books written in the past twenty years. He read and
re-read this book as a little boy and used to talk lovingly of Kit and
his friends, Jum-Jum and the Cockyolly Bird. Alas! Kit (Mrs. Dearmer's
son Christopher) and his gifted mother have been claimed as victims by
the World War. Paul revelled in "AEsop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe,"
"The Swiss Family Robinson," "Don Quixote," "Treasure Island," "The
Arabian Nights," "Gulliver's Travels," and classical legends. As he
grew older he passed on to "The Mabinogion," "The Pilgrim's Progress,"
Lamb's "Tales of Shakespeare," and writers like Henty, Manville Fenn,
Clark Russell, W. H. Fitchett and P. G. Wodehouse. He followed with
delight the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, whose charm never faded for
him. He made a point of reading everything written by Conan Doyle. But
he gave first place among living writers to George Bernard Shaw, and
next place to H. G. Wells. He would never miss a Shaw play. His
delight at the first performance he saw of _John Bull's Other Island_
was boisterous. He loved to read that play as well as to see it
performed. The glimpses of Ireland and the portraits of Irish
character enchanted him. Broadbent--typifying the self-complacency of
the well-meaning but Philistine Victorian who had solved to his own
satisfaction all mysteries in earth and heaven--he regarded as a
masterpiece of creative art. For Kipling his admiration was qualified;
but he loved "M'Andrews' Hymn," and often recited lines from the
"Recessional." Of the great novelists Dickens was easily his first
favourite; a long way behind came Scott, Stevenson and Jules Verne.
Dickens he knew and loved in every mood. Pickwick like Falstaff was to
him a source of perennial delight. He loved and honoured Dickens for
his rich and tender humanity, the passion of pity that suffused his
soul, the lively play of his comic fancy. Endowed with a keen sense of
humour, he read Mark Twain and W. W. Jacobs with gusto. As a
relaxation from historical studies he would sometimes devour a bluggy
story, and as he read would shout with laughter at its grotesque
out-topping of probabilities. He tried his own hand at sensational
yarns. I recall one of them, rich in gory incidents, with a villain
who is constantly leaping from a G.W.R. express to elude his pursuers.
Among his papers I found the manuscript of a detective story,
vivaciously written after the Sherlock Holmes and Watson manner.
At one time Paul liked to read Homer and Thucydides, Virgil and
Tacitus; but as soon as he was at home in the wide realm of English
literature he thrust the old classics from him, and subsequently his
hard historical reading gave him no opportunity, even if he had felt
the desire, to revert to Greek and Latin writers. But he was fully
conscious of the world's debt in culture to Greece and in law and
government to Rome. He wrote: "The influence of Greek thought, Greek
form, Greek art, is universal and eternal."
Of all names in literature he reverenced most that of Shakespeare, in
whom he saw "the spirit of the Renaissance personified," and whom he
described "as romantic, philosophic, realistic, and as varied and
impersonal as Nature." He was never weary of reading the tragedies and
historical plays. He resented any word in disparagement of
Shakespeare, and could not understand the inability of a supreme
artist like Tolstoy to appreciate his greatness. Though he has written
a noble sonnet in homage to Shakespeare's genius, Matthew Arnold once
permitted himself to say that "Homer leaves Shakespeare as far behind
as perfection leaves imperfection." Paul wrote in a marginal note,
"Bosh! to put it bluntly." He would say with Goethe, "The first page
of Shakespeare made me his for life, and when I had perused an entire
play I stood like one born blind, to whom sight by some miraculous
power had been restored in a moment." Paul and I often exchanged ideas
on Shakespeare. He was lost in wonder at Shakespeare's creative power,
his inexhaustible fertility, the universality of his range, the
perfection of his portraiture, his mastery over all moods, his cunning
artistry in the use of words, his exuberant imagery and effortless
ease. He made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon to see with his own
eyes the spots and scenes amid which Shakespeare's youth and declining
years were spent. The smiling beauty of Stratford and the rich rural
charm of its surroundings left on his mind a delightful impression
that was never erased.
Next to Shakespeare his admiration flowed out to Milton. When he went
into the battle-line he took with him only two books--his Shakespeare
and his Milton. With Milton's character he had some marked
affinities--the virginal purity of Milton's youth, his love of
learning, his hatred of all tyrannies, secular and spiritual, making a
strong appeal to the sympathies of my son. "Milton," he wrote, "is
perhaps the very grandest figure in English history." "In Milton the
spirit of Puritanism is combined with a purely Hellenic love of
beauty." "'Paradise Lost' may be regarded (1) as a reflection of the
Puritan point of view; (2) as a poem pure and simple; (3) as an epic
of the classical school."
Profound as was his admiration for "Paradise Lost," he could not
forbear smiling at Taine's quip that the Miltonic Adam is "your true
Paterfamilias, a member of the Opposition, a Whig, a Puritan, who
entered Paradise via England."
Paul extolled Pope's ingenuity and metrical felicity--he has
thoroughly annotated the "Essay on Man"--but was acutely conscious of
aridity and the absence of rapture and vision in Pope as in Dryden. He
singled out as "the finest passage in the 'Essay on Man'" the eight
lines in which Pope contrasts the majesty of the Universe with the
insignificance of man, beginning:
Let earth unbalanced from her orbit fly,
Planets and suns run lawless through the sky.
He had not much respect for Pope's philosophy, and, commenting on one
passage in the same poem, writes: "Pope, like many other unsound
reasoners, when his position becomes dangerous, seeks to vindicate
himself by insults."
Above all nineteenth-century poets he loved Wordsworth, the revelation
of whose richness and glory only came to him after he was seventeen.
There were no bounds to his admiration for the Wordsworth sonnets.
Many a time since the War he would recite the glorious sonnet which
proclaims that
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifest.
The magic of Keats and his adoration of beauty struck a responsive
chord in Paul's nature. Tennyson did not stir him to the depths of his
being like Wordsworth. "Ulysses," "The Revenge," and "Crossing the
Bar" were the only Tennyson poems that he cared for. In an essay
written when he was eighteen he defined poetry as "the soul of man put
into untrammelled speech, the voice of angels, the music of the
spheres." He read with critical discernment, sometimes agreeing,
sometimes disagreeing, with the author. It was his habit when reading
a book to mark passages that impressed him and make comments in the
margin. Some of his _obiter dicta_ shall be given. In judging them it
should be remembered that they were all pronounced before he was
nineteen.
How aptly said that Dante seems to have tried to write a poem
with a sculptor's chisel or a painter's brush.
Froissart observes clearly, but his observation is limited to the
world of nobles and chivalry; he ignores the life, the sufferings
and the joys of the people.
Ben Jonson, master of dignified declamatory drama, was the
greatest of the post-Shakespeare school. We may justly say
post-Shakespeare, though Jonson was nearly contemporaneous with
the Bard of Avon, because the influence of such a man clearly
belongs to an age in which the freedom and romantic magnificence
of Shakespeare have been forgotten.
Gibbon is the first of historians. The "Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire" runs its course like some majestic river.
Burns is a microcosm of Scotland.
Burke--a stainless and beautiful character. A theorist in
practice; a practical man in theory.
Burke's view of Rousseau was biased and unjust.
Though contemptuous of Wordsworth, Byron himself is a romantic of
the romanticists. He was the guiding star of rebels the world
over.
In the calm purity of his verse, Shelley is more classic than
romantic. What ecstatic melody in his lyrics!
Dickens is often mawkish and often portrays oddities; but these
oddities do exist, especially in London (_e.g._, Sam Weller, Mrs.
Todgers, Jo, etc.), and Dickens unearthed them for the first
time. How his heart warms for the poor and the wretched! He is
the great poet of London life.
Macaulay is not a philosophic writer; but then the English genius
is certainly non-philosophic.
Froude in his essay on Homer says: "The authors of the Iliad and
the Odyssey stand alone with Shakespeare far away above mankind."
Paul's marginal note: "Add to them Milton, Goethe, the author of
the Nibelungen-lied, Browning."
Froude, I think, has misunderstood the Nibelungen-lied entirely.
There is really much savagery and much glory in both the German
and the Greek epic.
How strange that men like Rabelais and Swift, Goldsmith and
Dickens, who have done so much to make the world laugh,
experienced in their own lives great unhappiness.
Browning is always an optimist. His manliness and vigour are
unfailing:
I find earth not grey but rosy,
Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.
Do I stand and stare? All's blue.
Paul considered that Macaulay lacked ideas and vision. He liked the
lilt and swing of the Lays and Ballads, and enjoyed the Essays with
their superb colouring. Disputing Macaulay's dictum that neither
painters nor poets are helped by the advances in civilisation, science
and refinement, he wrote: "This argument disproved by the examples of
men like Shakespeare and Goethe, like Browning and Kipling. And did
not Leonardo da Vinci become a student of anatomy in order to learn
how to depict the human body properly on his canvas?"
Macaulay in his Essay on Mackintosh's "History of The Revolution"
describes the condition of England in 1678, after eighteen years of
Charles the Second's reign, in graphic words, beginning "Such was the
nation which, awaking from its rapturous trance, found itself sold to
a foreign, a despotic, a Popish court, defeated on its own seas and
rivers by a State of far inferior resources, and placed under the rule
of pandars and buffoons."
Paul's comment reads: "This superb passage is one of the most inspired
of Macaulay's utterances. Contrast with it in the same Essay the vivid
sentence beginning 'In the course of seven centuries,' in which he
pronounces a magnificent panegyric on the greatness of Britain."
He thought the music of Macaulay's prose had often a metallic sound,
and that it suffered from excess of epithet and addiction to
antithetical phrases. In pithiness of style, sureness of touch and
dispassionate judgment, he contrasted Acton as an historical writer
with Macaulay, to the latter's disadvantage. He found every page of
Acton packed with thought, every essay richly freighted with ideas.
Moreover, Acton was sternly impartial and impersonal in his judgment
of persons and in his estimate of influences. Paul wrote:
There has never been in historical writing such inexorable logic,
such compact phraseology, so much pith and point, as are to be
found in Acton's Essays.
His view of Carlyle was thus expressed: "Take away his style and half
his greatness vanishes. Carlyle's works are not English in spirit, nor
have they any point of resemblance to those of any other English
writer." As for his views: "he has, alas! no love for democracy."
Carlyle's habit of apotheosising heroes and his worship of the Strong
Man made Paul pose the familiar problem: "Is the great man the
fashioner of his age, or its product?" He thought something was to be
said on both sides, and that it was impossible to lay down a positive
proposition on what he called "this terribly difficult question." But
he agreed with Guizot that "great events and great men are fixed
points and summits of historical survey." He emphasises the fact that
in his "French Revolution" Carlyle, in spite of his hero-worship,
accepts the evolutionary view of history.
Among essayists he had a special liking for Froude, Matthew Arnold and
Edmund Gosse. He often turned for refreshment to Froude's "Short
Studies," and felt the fascination of his "Erasmus." In his essay on
the Book of Job, Froude writes: "Happiness is not what we are to look
for; our place is to be true to the best which we know; to seek that
and do that." On this my son comments: "I don't hold with this idea;
for, while happiness is not the end, yet it always in its purest and
brightest form comes to the really good or great man in the
consciousness of the work he has done." Froude in his essay on
"Representative Men" enlarges on the importance of educating boys by
holding up before them the pattern of noble lives. By picturing the
career of a noble man rising above temptation and "following life
victoriously and beautifully forward," Froude thinks you will kindle a
boy's heart as no threat of punishment here or hereafter will kindle
it. On this Paul writes: "A noble plea for an education of youth far
more effective than the cursed nonsense of forbidding this or that on
penalty of hell-fire."
Matthew Arnold, whom in some moods he admired, occasionally got on
his nerves. I find this footnote on a page of "Culture and Anarchy":
"This is self-satisfied swank." On another page: "Matthew Arnold
himself often wanting in sweetness and light." On another: "Admirably
put; here I do agree with M. A." He liked Arnold's essay on "The
Function of Criticism," although he differed from some of the author's
judgments. "The French Revolution took a political, practical
character," wrote Arnold; on which my son's comment is: "Surely the
French Revolution was only one aspect of a great world-movement of
liberation! One side of it is Romanticism; another the Revolution
itself; yet another, the Industrial Revolution. No movement has ever a
character _sui generis_." On Joubert's remark: "Force and Right are
the governors of this world, Force till Right is ready," his comment
is: "A regular German theory." Paul's final note on "The Function of
Criticism" reads:
I consider that Matthew Arnold insists too much on the
non-practical element of criticism. After all, it is the lesson
of life that the practical man wins in the end. When we are
brought face to face with the realities of things--as in a war
like the present one--all thought of art and letters simply
vanishes. How is it that the mass of the world is always
inartistic? How is it that the one people in the world--the
Greeks--who built up their State on what Arnold regards as ideal
conditions, collapsed in headlong ruin before the inartistic but
practical Romans?
This comment illustrates one effect of the War on Paul's mind: he was
becoming less of an idealist and more of a realist.
For Mr. W. H. Hudson's "Introduction to the Study of Literature" he
had high esteem. This book he has carefully annotated. Of Mr. Hudson's
remarks on the contrast between the style of Milton and that of
Dryden, between Hooker and Defoe, he writes: "A comparison of
remarkable discernment. The difference between the Miltonic and
Drydenic styles, _i.e._, pre-1660 and post-1660, was simply due to the
change in ideas caused by the reaction against Puritanism." Agreeing
with Hudson that there is much poetry which is prosaic and much prose
which is poetical, he cites as examples: "Prose in Poetry: Pope,
Dryden, Walt Whitman. Poetry in Prose: Carlyle, Macaulay, Goethe." He
did not concur with Hudson's remark that the "full significance of
poetry can be appreciated only when it addresses us through the ear,"
and that "the silent perusal of the printed page will leave one of its
principal secrets unsurprised." Paul's comment on this:
Too sweeping a statement. Take, for example, poets like Milton
and Browning, where every line is fraught with some deep
philosophic meaning and must be pondered over for some time
before the whole of the greatness of the poetry is realised. In
these cases reading aloud is not nearly so good as private,
silent study.
He demurred to the proposition that while the function of Ethics is to
instruct, that of Art is to delight. "I hold," he writes, "that Art's
duty is to instruct as much as, if not more than, that of Ethics. Art
to be great must elevate and edify." Hudson wrote: "The common view
that the primitive ages of the world were ages of colossal
individualism is grotesquely unhistorical; they were, on the contrary,
ages in which group-life and group-consciousness were in the
ascendant." "Quite true," notes Paul. "See Maine's 'Ancient Law,'
where he points out that ancient history has nothing to do with the
individual but only with groups." Another annotated book is
Maeterlinck's "Wisdom and Destiny." To Maeterlinck's remark, "It is
often of better avail from the start to seek that which is highest,"
he adds: "Always, not often." He heartily subscribed to Maeterlinck's
doctrine that our attitude to life ought to be one of "gladsome,
enlightened acceptance, not a hostile, gloomy submission."
His philosophy of life was expressed in that beautiful passage in
Carlyle's essay on "Characteristics":
Here on earth we are as soldiers fighting in a foreign land; that
understand not the plan of the campaign and have no need to
understand it; seeing well what is at our hand to be done, let us
do it like soldiers, with submission, with courage, with a heroic
joy. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy
might." Behind us, behind each one of us, lie 6,000 years of
human effort, human conquest. Before us is the boundless Time,
with its as yet uncreated and unconquered continents and
Eldorados, which we, even we, have to conquer, to create; and
from the bosom of Eternity there shine for us celestial guiding
stars.
My inheritance, how wide and fair!
Time is my fair seed-field, of Time I'm heir.
The ethical side of Paul's character is reflected in the appended
quotations from some of his essays:
Sacrifice is always the lot of the divine man.
What is "to do good"? It is to think of other people.
Joy only comes to Faust when at last he is labouring for others.
As Wolsey puts it in _Henry VIII_: "Love thyself last," and "bear
peace in thy right hand."
The Epicurean idea is vile and detestable. If everyone thinks
only of his own indulgence, how can the wherewithal for that
indulgence be forthcoming? What is the use of man having all his
glorious gifts of character and intellect if he does not use
them? Why is man made so different from the animals if he is to
be the mere slave of his passions?
Stoicism finally degenerates into mere pessimism.
The great defect of Puritanism was its hostility to Art; for Art
glorifies and ennobles Life.
"What is the final cause of the Universe?" This is the old
problem of the philosophers. Goethe's lines leap to the mind:
"How, when and where?
The Gods make no reply;
To causes give thy care,
And cease to question why."
Carlyle in "Heroes and Hero Worship" shows the folly of
condemning a man for the faults noted down by the world about
him--by those blind to the true inner secret of his life. "Who
art thou that judgest thy fellow?"
Naturalism is illogical because it postulates Nature without
mind.
If you do not place faith in humanity, what really is the use of
any philosophy of life?
Let us remember St. Paul's injunction, "Bear ye one another's
burdens."
It is a thought to make one ponder, that by far the finest Life
of Christ was written by an agnostic, Renan.
Action is a great joy in life.
When prehistoric man took up a flint and laboriously beat it into
a shape that his brain told him would be of use to him, he laid
the foundations of all civilisation. Man's progress is the story
of brute force laid low by Thought--which is the one really
irresistible influence in the Universe:
"In the world there is nothing great but Man;
In Man there is nothing great but Mind."
It is a perplexing reflection that there is no absolute moral
standard. The moral law appears to vary with environment and
according to conditions of time and place. I am reminded of
Pope's lines:
"Where the extreme of vice was ne'er agreed.
Ask where's the North? At York 'tis on the Tweed;
In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there
At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where."
The greater a man is in one direction, the more prone he usually
is to weakness in another: that is why we must never condemn
indiscriminately.
The laws governing the Universe, so far from being mechanical
and dead, are elements filled with Truth and Beauty.
Materialism is fatal to the higher instincts, because it
introduces that most sordid element--earthly pomp, circumstance
and recompense.
The Universe, History, Life are before us. Why should they not be
investigated? It is not true that science leads to Atheism or
Fatalism. What science does is to destroy that fabric of
_Aberglaube_ or superstition which chokes and asphyxiates the
best parts of religion. What science does is to set up a new,
purer creed based on certainty and truth.
Of French writers Paul liked most Taine, Sainte-Beuve, and Victor
Hugo. His love of reading he took with him into the War. A box of
books returned to us with his other effects from France included "The
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius," Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason,"
Macaulay's "Essays," Saint-Simon's "Memoirs," Sainte-Beuve's
"Causeries," "The Imitation of Christ," Lecky's "History of European
Morals," and works by Goethe, Victor Hugo, Dumas the elder, Flaubert,
Maurice Barres, and Mrs. Humphry Ward.