(New York _Herald_, October, 1922)
They don’t come very often, the books that speak so generously and
beautifully to the inner certainties of the mind. And when they do, it
is desirable not to do them dishonour by words too clumsy or sweeping.
But that Mr. Montague’s _Disenchantment_ has come to us in just the
way that it has is a curiously mixed satisfaction and disappointment
to the present reviewer. Satisfaction, in that for the past several
years I have been saying to every publisher who was going abroad: “Why
the devil do you go only to London and nowhere else? Are you aware
that there are very exciting centres of literary activity in Glasgow,
Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham--all sorts of places outside London.
Some day” (I kept saying to publishers) “one of the great books will
bob up a long way from London. You might remember, for instance,
Stevenson and Barrie. Now when you are in England why don’t you go to
call on Mr. Montague at the Manchester _Guardian_? He’d know what was
going on. Very likely he could tell you of someone who was writing a
fine book--someone London wouldn’t know about.”
I take no particular credit for saying this: it was obviousness itself
to any one who had noticed Mr. Montague’s earlier books. But the
publishers, with their stereotyped habit of calling on a few literary
agents in London, and thinking they have then done their possible, paid
no attention. One of the odd things about publishers is that they have
so little adventurous spirit about spooring for the really fine stuff.
Well, the book, quietly written and published, turned out to be by
Mr. Montague himself. Half a year went by, but we in America heard
nothing about it. There are always wide and well-polished alleys for
the transmission of information amusing or trivial. Comparatively
unimportant news spins along the parquet floor, and a crash resounds
like that of tenpins tumbling. But humanity, probably with a wise
instinct, averts its ear from matters that require meditation. The
American publishers, seriatim, had their look at the sheets of
_Disenchantment_. All apparently agreed that it was magnificent, but
with their cheery assumption of knowledge as to what we want to read
opined that it was too British or too full of intricate allusion or too
much about the war, of which we were asserted to be weary. Or that the
British publisher was asking an unwarrantable price for it; that only
a few readers here would appreciate it; that it would be impossible to
come clear on the expense.
These are all sound, sagacious reasonings. The one thing our publisher
friends did not realize was that it is by publishing, every now and
then, a book of this sort that they save their souls. It is an honour
to put such a book on one’s list, even if it should prove presently
unprofitable.
_Disenchantment_ is an enchanting book. It is an _Anatomy of
Melancholy_ in the exact sense. It is a spiritual history of the
war: a penetrating, intellectual, richly allusive, wise, sober, and
compassionate study of that slow process of disintegrating certainty
that marked every mind capable of independent action. People who have
never read it probably imagine that the _Anatomy of Melancholy_ is
a dismal and grievous work. It is, however, one of the most richly
amusing of all books; and it is only fair to say (accepting the danger
of being misconceived) that Mr. Montague’s delicious humour makes
_Disenchantment_ one of the most witty of contemporary writings. For
war, after all, is a human institution and subject to the complexity of
all planetary matters. It has, in Mr. Robert Nichols’s great phrase,
its ardours and endurances; also its selfishnesses, stupidities, and
laughters. It is not to be supposed that men who are pompous and silly
and hilarious and craven in business, book reviewing, education and
theology will be otherwise when they go to war.
So Mr. Montague, in anatomizing the melancholy that has fallen upon
the world, employs, with perfect skill and perfect restraint, every
shaft in the quiver of a literary artist. The old devil of herd-poison
lingers among us yet: there will be some simple spirits who will think
this book bitter, some who will think it blasphemous; some who will
maintain that it plays into the hand of Apollyon (whose residence,
they will probably insist, is somewhere along Unter den Linden). But
there will also be some, and not few I think, who will see in this
book the breadth and burning spirit of one who has long gone beyond
the conception of war as a merely national matter; who looks upon it
as a movement of tragedy among men where the innocent suffer no less
outrage than the guilty. And yet even those who may find Mr. Montague’s
disrobing of official frailty almost too disturbing will take pleasure
in the beauty of his text. Let no one prate to you of the luxuriant
splendour of some of our accredited stylists. The deity of prose moves
in Mr. Montague’s pages. His savoury marrow of allusion--Shakespeare,
for instance, has become part of his actual thinking tissue--will be
undigested by some unpracticed readers. He will be, we might say,
shrimp to the sundry; but no harm will ensue: the casual reader will
merely pay Manchester compliment for what belongs first to Stratford.
And Mr. Montague deserves all the compliment that is possible in an
uncourtly world.
This book could only have been written by a man who has been through
the scorching and weariness. Its simplicity, its calm, temperate
understanding of human weakness, the optical vividness of its narrative
passages, the generous sympathy that moulds even its ironies--these are
the possession of experience. And it occurs to me to ponder the courage
and fortitude of one who could sit down, in the sobriety of retrospect,
to write a book recalling beauties and sufferings that most of us would
have been glad to let slide into the discard of memory. There could
have been only one motive, and only one sustaining power, potent enough
to carry the hand through so bitter a task. A love of humanity and a
generous hope of humanity’s increase of sanely innocent happiness
could beget a book as noble as this; no other emotion could avail.
And still the troubled reviewer feels--this being three months after
his reading of the book, and no mere snapped off opinion--that he has
not done justice to the subject. For this book is not merely one of
the noblest passages of political writing that he knows of, and not
merely one of the most clearly and beautifully moving exhibitions of
honest thinking. It is a book that is sanative and antitoxic for the
present time. He is a shallow observer indeed who does not see, in the
post-bellum world, muddy currents of cynicism and discontent; revulsive
twitchings, literature no less jangled than politics. Mr. Montague does
not disenchant us from any enchantments that were worth keeping. Except
the politicians and the ultra-parsonical parsons, we had slipped their
leash long ago. He offers a lucid enlarging mirror of truth and sense
in which a thoughtful reader may see enlarged and brightly snuffed the
small sooty flame of his own natural candle, as William Penn called the
inward spirit. He magics us for the moment by his charm and the lovely
humanity of his vision into thinking that we, too, can, if we will, be
just, liberal, and humane.
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