← catalogue

The Critical Game

by John Albert Macy · English · Gutenberg #38487 · 353,770 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Critical Game
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Critical Game

Author: John Albert Macy


        
Release date: January 3, 2012 [eBook #38487]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38487

Credits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/americana)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRITICAL GAME ***


E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by
Internet Archive/American Libraries
(http://www.archive.org/details/americana)



Note: Images of the original pages are available through
      Internet Archive/American Libraries. See
      http://www.archive.org/details/criticalgame00macy





THE CRITICAL GAME

by

JOHN MACY

Author of "The Spirit of American Literature," etc.







Boni and Liveright
Publishers      New York

Copyright, 1922, by
Boni and Liveright, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America.




To

ROGER IRVING LEE




CONTENTS


                                         Page

The Critical Game                          11

Dante in English                           31

Dante's Political Philosophy               43

Nietzsche                                  55

Tolstoy                                    65

Maeterlinck's Essays                       95

Joseph Conrad                              105

A Conrad Miscellany                        123

Strindberg                                 135

Tagore                                     145

Remy de Gourmont                           153

Swift's Relations with Women               163

William James, Man of Letters              175

Biographies of Poe                         193

Biographies of Whitman                     203

George E. Woodberry                        215

Abraham Cahan                              227

Thomas Hardy                               237

George Borrow                              247

Shelley                                    259

H. G. Wells and Utopia                     269

John Masefield                             279

Shakespeare and the Scribes                289

George Moore and Other Irish Writers       305

James Joyce                                317

D. H. Lawrence                             325




THE CRITICAL GAME


Criticism is one form of the game of writing. It differs from other
forms only as whist differs from poker and as tennis differs from
golf. The motives are the same, the exercise of the player's brain and
muscles, and the entertainment of the spectators, from whom, if the
player be successful, he derives profit, livelihood, applause, and
fame. The function of criticism at the present time, and at all times,
is the function of all literature, to be wise, witty, eloquent,
instructive, humourous, original, graceful, beautiful, provocative,
irritating, persuasive. That is, it must possess some of the many
merits that can be found in any type of literature; it must in some
way be good writing. There is no other sound principle to be
discovered in the treatises on the art of criticism or in fine
examples of the art. Whether Charles Lamb writes about Shakespeare or
Christ's Hospital or ears is of relatively slight importance compared
with the question whether in one essay or another Lamb is at one of
his incomparable best moments of inspiration.

Remy de Gourmont says, apropos Brunetiere's views of Renan:

    Contre l'opinion commune, la critique est peut-etre le plus
    subjectif de tous les genres litteraires; c'est une confession
    perpetuelle; en croyant analyser les oeuvres d'autrui, c'est
    soi-meme que l'on devoile et que l'on expose au public ... voulant
    expliquer et contredire Renan, M. Brunetiere s'est une fois de
    plus confesse publiquement.

That is true, except that it may be doubted whether one type of
literature is more subjective than another, since all types are
subjective. Even a work that belongs, according to De Quincey's
definition, to the literature of information as distinguished from the
literature of power, even an article in an encyclopaedia, an article,
say, on Patagonia, has a man behind it; it cannot be quite objective
and impersonal.

Criticism should not be set off too sharply from other forms of
literary expression. It has no special rights, privileges, and
authority; and at the same time it has no special disabilities that
consign it to a secondary place in the divisions of literature. In any
unit of art, a sonnet or an epic, a short story or a novel, a little
review or a history of aesthetics, a man is trying to say something.
And the value of what he says must, of course, depend partly on the
essential interest of his subject; but it depends to a greater extent
on the skill with which he puts words together, creates interest in
himself. Arnold's essay on Keats is less Keats than Arnold. It could
not have been if Keats had not existed. But the beauty of that
sequence of words, that essay in criticism, is due to the genius of
Arnold. Francis Thompson on Shelley adds no cubit to the stature of
Shelley, but Thompson's interpretation is a marvellous piece of poetic
prose which cannot be deducted without enormous loss from the works of
Thompson, from English criticism. We read Pater on Coleridge, not for
Coleridge but for Pater, and we read Coleridge for Coleridge, not for
Shakespeare. Thackeray's lecture on Swift, which is full of animosity
and miscomprehension, is a well-written revelation of Thackeray.
Trollope's book on Thackeray, which is full of friendship and
admiration, is an ill-written revelation of Trollope.

Some men of great ability, like Trollope, who have written good books
themselves, lack the faculty, whatever it may be, of writing in an
entertaining fashion about the books of other men. Swinburne is a
striking example. His knowledge of literature was immense, and he had
the enthusiasms and contempts that make the critical impulse; but
except when the poet in him seized the pen and made a passage of
lyrical prose, his excursions into criticism are bewildering and
difficult to read. His sonnets on Dickens, Lamb, and the Elizabethans
are worth more than all his prose. On the other hand, Lamb, who wrote
like an angel about the Elizabethan dramatists, failed completely as a
dramatist.

Every man who plays with literature at all must be ambitious to
succeed in some form of art that may be called "creative," as distinct
from critical--a distinction which, since Arnold taught us our lesson,
we know does not exist. The reason for this ambition is plain enough.
A novel or a play reaches a wider audience than a volume of essays,
however admirable; it has a more obvious claim to originality, and it
brings the author a greater degree of practical satisfaction. A few
doubly or trebly gifted men, Dryden, Coleridge, Poe, Arnold, Pater,
Henley, Stevenson, Henry James, could do first-rate work in more than
one _genre_, including criticism. And a good case could be made out to
prove that a man who knows how to handle words in many ways is on the
whole the best qualified to comment on the art of handling words.
However that may be, it is certain that in English literature a critic
who is only a critic seldom wins a conspicuous position. Even Johnson
was something more than a critic, and he was, with all due respect,
somewhat less than a good one. And Hazlitt, who was a good one, wrote
on many subjects besides books and art.

Because so many little people went into the business of reviewing and
presumed to sit in judgment on their betters, criticism early got a
bad name in English literature, and not all the dignified work of
Arnold and others has yet succeeded in restoring the reputation of the
word or the art. Criticism came to mean censure, a connotation which
persists in current speech. The degeneration had already taken place
in Dryden's time, and he protested that "they wholly mistake the
nature of criticism who think that its business is principally to find
fault." Authors of imaginative works became resentful and felt that
the critic was an enemy, a nasty and incompetent enemy, as indeed he
often was. An interesting compilation could be made--and probably
Saintsbury or somebody else has done it--of the retorts and
counter-attacks made by writers of other things than criticism against
the whole critical crew. Here are a few examples:

Gentle Jane Austen in "Northanger Abbey" amusingly defends her
heroine's habit of reading novels:

    I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common
    with novel writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure,
    the very performances to the number of which they are themselves
    adding ... if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the
    heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and
    regard?... Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such
    effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to
    talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now
    groans.

That sounds as if Miss Austen's pride in her craft had been wounded. I
know of no record that anybody ever spoke ill of her while she was
living.

Scott, whose generous soul was hurt by the harsh squabbles of the
Scottish reviewers, took a shot at the tribe in the letter which
appears in the introductory note to "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" in
the Cambridge edition:

    As to the herd of critics, it is impossible for me to pay much
    attention to them for, as they do not understand what I call
    poetry, we talk in a foreign language to each other. Indeed, many
    of these gentlemen appear to me to be a sort of tinkers, who,
    unable to _make_ pots and pans, set up for _menders_ of them,
    and, God knows, often make two holes in patching one.

The idea that the critic is a secondary fellow who cannot make
first-hand literature goes back to Dryden, the champion and exemplar
of sound criticism, who wrote in "The Conquest of Granada":

    They who write ill and they who ne'er durst write
    Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

Landor repeats the idea in a "Conversation" between Southey and
Porson, in which Porson says: "Those who have failed as writers turn
reviewers."

Writers and other artists are usually sensitive and often vain. Some
have taken critics too seriously, have given them too much importance
while pretending to despise them, and have allowed themselves to be
stung instead of brushing the flies off. Thanks to Shelley, the idea
became current that the "viperous murderer," the critic, killed Keats.
It was not so. Keats died of tuberculosis. Though he was, like all
poets, delicately organized, he was an unusually sane and self-reliant
man, quite sure of the value of his work. Moreover, in a day when
rough criticism was the fashion, the critics were, though stupid, not
especially rough on Keats. Shelley's "_J'accuse_" is flaming poetry,
but--it is not good criticism. Byron had the right idea. With his
superior wit and vigour he gave the reviewers ten blows for one and
used his opponents as the occasion of a delightful exhibition of
boxing. The reviewers were knocked out in the second round. "English
Bards and Scottish Reviewers" is still in the ring, as I have
pleasantly discovered by re-reading it.

The notion that the critic will, or can, do damage to the artist
persisted long after Shelley and is perhaps still believed. In 1876,
Sidney Lanier, a man of good sense and great bravery, whom the flies,
or the "vipers," had but lightly nipped, wrote in a letter to his
father:

    What possible claim can contemporary criticism set up to
    respect--that criticism which crucified Jesus, stoned Stephen,
    hooted Paul for a madman, tried Luther for a criminal, tortured
    Galileo, bound Columbus in chains, drove Dante into a hell of
    exile, made Shakespeare write the sonnet, "When in disgrace of
    fortune and men's eyes," gave Milton L5 for "Paradise Lost," kept
    Samuel Johnson cooling his heels on Lord Chesterfield's doorstep,
    reviled Shelley as an unclean dog, killed Keats, cracked jokes on
    Gluck, Schubert, Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner, and committed so
    many other impious follies and stupidities?

Lanier's charges are not all quite true. He mixed up the sins of
criticism with the sins of politics, economics, and other dreadful
affairs. But his outburst is a good illustration of the quarrel
between the "author" and the "critic." Especially when the author has
for the moment lost his sense of humour.

The best treatment of the critic by the author, as also, perhaps, of
the author by the critic, is humourous. In "One of Our Conquerors,"
Meredith lays out the art critics:

    He had relied and reposed on the dicta of newspaper critics; who
    are sometimes unanimous, and are then taken for guides, and are
    fatal.

Washington Irving, in a delightful little paper called "Desultory
Thoughts on Criticism," quietly places the reviewer in the low seat
where he belongs. I shall not quote from the essay, but merely refer
the reader to it and especially to the introductory quotation from
Buckingham's "Rehearsal," in which the critic is set in a still lower
seat.

Finally--for these quotations--Dr. Holmes, who lived all his life
surrounded by praise and comfort, puts his finger gently on the
parasitism of the critic. The passage is in "The Poet at the Breakfast
Table":

    Our _epizoic_ literature is becoming so extensive that nobody is
    safe from its _ad infinitum_ progeny. A man writes a book of
    criticisms. A _Quarterly Review_ criticises the critic. A _Monthly
    Magazine_ takes up the critic's critic. A _Weekly Journal_
    criticizes the critic of the critic's critic, and a daily paper
    favours us with some critical remarks on the performance of the
    writer in the _Weekly_, who has criticised the critical notice in
    the _Monthly_ of the critical essay in the _Quarterly_ on the
    critical work we started with. And thus we see that as each flea
    "has smaller fleas that on him prey," even the critic himself
    cannot escape the common lot of being bitten.

To what extent is the critic parasitic? To this extent: he is dealing
with ideas already expressed, with cooked and predigested food. It is
easier for any mind to think of something to say about an idea that
has already gone through cerebral processes than it is to take the raw
material of life and make something. You may sit on a bench in the
park and watch the people and never, for the life of you, conceive a
good story. Then O. Henry comes along and makes twenty stories. After
he has done it, you can write something very brilliant about what O.
Henry saw from the same bench that you sat on. And you can make neat
remarks about the resemblances and differences between O. Henry,
Boccaccio, and H. C. Bunner. That may be worth doing, if your remarks
are really neat. For then you may be readable.

And that is the function of the critic, to be readable, to make
literature of a sort. The critic is always playing his own game,
selfish, egotistical, expressive of his own will, and no more
disinterested than was Arnold himself when he took his pen in hand to
slay a Philistine or to sign a contract with his manager for a lecture
tour in America. In playing his own game the critic may help the game
of another author by crying him up and advertising him. But a hundred
critics, clamouring in the fatal unanimity at which Meredith pokes
fun, cannot make the fortunes of a book or influence at the creative
source the work of a man sufficiently strong and original to be worth
reading. And the same hundred critics with lofty hatred of bad writing
cannot prevent bad books from being written and read. George Eliot
made it a rule not to read criticisms of her work because she found it
necessary to be preserved "from that discouragement as an artist which
ill-judged praise no less than ill-judged blame tends to produce in
me." The implication that criticism, favorable or unfavorable, is
ill-judged gives us an addition to our notes on what authors think of
critics. I doubt whether, if that strong-minded woman had read
everything that was written about her before and after her death, she
would have altered a single sentence. Did Hardy stop writing novels
because of the ignorant attacks on "Jude"? I would not accept without
question Hardy's own word for it. I suspect that it was his own inward
impulse, not determined by the opinions of the other people, that
turned his energy to that stupendous epic, "The Dynasts."

To what extent can the critic play the game of the reader, be guide
and teacher, maintain standards, elevate taste, make the best ideas
prevail? Not to a very great extent. Criticism, good or bad, is read
only by the sophisticated, by people whose tastes are formed and who
can take care of themselves in matters literary and intellectual. Who
that had not already looked into Shakespeare and Plato ever heard of
Pater? The journals that print intelligent articles about literature
and art have a small circulation; they are missionaries to the
converted; their controversial discussions of general principles or of
the merits of an individual are only family feuds. Critics play with
each other in a professional game. The few amateurs who sit as
spectators are a select minority who have seen the game before and
who, though not in the professional class, are instructed, cultivated,
have some knowledge of the plays. The critical game is enjoyed by
those who are themselves critical and least in need of enlightenment.

Nevertheless, it is a great game--when it is played well.

The author of a book on golf illustrates it with the stances and
swings of better players than himself; he makes an anthology. A
collection of essays by various authors would illustrate the game
better than the plays of a single critic, a much more competent critic
than I. I do not pretend that the essays in this book are first-rate
specimens of how the strokes should be made. But even a small fellow
may flatter himself that he has an individual way of looking at things
which may give unity of interest to a collection of papers. At any
rate he has a right to exhibit his methods, and nobody is obliged to
watch him or play with him.

Most of these papers have been published in reviews and magazines,
_The Freeman_, _The Dial_, _The New Republic_, the _Boston Herald_,
the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _Literary Review_ of the _New York Evening
Post_, the _New York Tribune_.

The essay on Joseph Conrad appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in
1906. I am proud only of the date. Sixteen years ago Conrad was not
universally recognized; some of his best work had not been done; and
many finer essays than mine had not yet been written. If I was not the
first American critic to pursue that mysterious mariner across
enchanted seas, at least I can swear before the critical court of
admiralty that the waters were not crowded with little craft like
mine. It is a pleasure to read again a few letters which hail me for
hailing Conrad and which make me believe that I did introduce the
master to a few readers. If so, I have not lived in vain.

But my pride is somewhat reduced by the consideration that any reader
intelligent enough to look at a literary essay in the _Atlantic
Monthly_ must sooner or later have discovered Conrad for himself
without the assistance of a critic. However, I hug with amusement the
memory of a Harvard professor who threw up his hands and said: "My
God! I had no idea there was a man living who could write like that!"
To the professorial mind in those days English literature stopped
officially with the death of Browning or, at the latest, with the
deaths of Stevenson and Pater. The essay itself is a little
professorial, enfeebled by a sort of Boston-Harvard timidity, utterly
failing to express the wild joy which I felt. The second paper on
Conrad, written fifteen years later, is not so hesitant. It is
interesting to look again at the bibliographical footnote to the first
essay and see how Conrad's few books were scattered among the
publishers. I could not find "An Outcast of the Islands" except in the
Tauchnitz edition. Today his work is collected. There is a handsome
subscription edition. And Mr. Doubleday tells me that a new book by
Conrad has an assured immediate sale of twenty to thirty thousand.
Perhaps, after all, we who cheered long ago when it was not the
fashion to cheer have justified our miserable existence as critics.

The essay on Tolstoy was written in the two months immediately after
his death. Mr. Ellery Sedgwick asked me to write it for the _Atlantic
Monthly_ and then rejected it. It was published in the _New York
Call_. I bear no bitter grudge against Mr. Sedgwick for returning an
article that he had ordered. But I am convinced, as I read the
article over again, that he is an incompetent critic of criticism.
Sometimes editors and publishers, whose business it is to provide the
arena and assemble the spectators, play their part of the game
stupidly. But on the whole I think they are more than generous to
second-rate performers. If I owned a magazine I should be very
grudging of the space I gave to literary chatter--except my own.

A critical friend--we critics suffer from each other--admonishes me
that in the foregoing remarks I have treated an important art in a
flippant manner. Certainly I am not so foolish as to take my essays
very seriously, and I believe that much modern criticism is too
solemn, that if we fooled with literature in a lighter spirit we
should enjoy it more and be happier.

Charles Lamb was not afraid to kick up his heels, and yet nobody will
accuse him of being a trivial clown. Oscar Wilde was a man of wit,
sometimes a buffoon, and he could puncture a stupid piece of work with
ridicule. But the prevailing tone of his best essays is one of dignity
and sobriety.

Good criticism is as important as anything that man can put on paper.
Moreover, certain subjects must be treated by the critic with the
utmost gravity. It would be owlishly humourless, uncritical, not to
take Tolstoy seriously. Essays about the greater men of genius and the
deeper problems of art must be substantial, solid, or they are
inappropriate, out of key.

But it is possible to be sane and erudite without being leaden, to
approach a noble subject earnestly without striking an attitude of
priestly austerity. Some of our sincerest contemporaries, both the
academic and the rebellious, seem to me to worry about literature, as
if it were an invalid that needed nursing or a dead man about whom the
last word must be said before next Thursday afternoon. They do not get
enough fun out of it. They forget that Pater, who was not a mad wag
and not a dilettante, could sometimes see the gaiety of things and was
willing to be inconclusive.

Criticism is important. The best contemporaneous English criticism is
not good enough. And even in France, where we have been taught to look
for sound critics, Flaubert thought as late as 1869 that criticism was
still in its infancy. He wrote to George Sand: "You speak of criticism
in your last letter to me, telling me that it will soon disappear. I
think, on the contrary, that it is, at most only dawning.... When will
they (critics) be artists, only artists, but really artists? Where do
you know a criticism? Who is there who is anxious about the work in
itself, in an intense way?... The _unconscious_ poetic expression?
Where it comes from? its composition, its style? The point of view of
the author? Never. That criticism would require great imagination and
great sympathy." To which George Sand replied with good sense: "The
artist is too much occupied with his own work to forget himself in
estimating that of others."

Since then France has had a generation of critics, some of whom were
artists. If Hennequin, who thought he was a scientific critic, was not
an artist, if De Gourmont, who smiled wisely at the whole game, was
not an artist, then the word means nothing. In England and America
criticism has not made much progress since Pater died. I know that I
am punctuating literature in the manner of the academic fogies. But
one of the humours of this sport is that you sometimes do things which
are fouls when your opponent is guilty of them.

I come back gladly to the analogy of the game. We have, I believe,
made progress in one direction. In the direction of fair play. We
cannot write like Hazlitt, but we will not hit below the belt as he
did sometimes. We cannot write like Arnold, and his combination of
literary charm and scholarship makes us feel desperately small, but in
our descent from his altitude we have freed ourselves from his major
vice, his dogmatic snobbery, his bigoted liberalism. The
pulpit-pounder still thrives in religion and politics; in criticism he
is becoming obsolete. I am sure, or at least hopeful, that this is
true in America. I think I see a slight but appreciable improvement in
candour, simplicity, generosity, geniality, and fairness in attack. On
the whole we are a little more sportsmanlike than some of our elders.
That is all that I claim for us. Our real consolation is that the
ancient and honorable game is still young, still to be played.




DANTE IN ENGLISH


I am tempted to call the following remarks "Reading Dante for Fun."
The most austere of poets should not be treated with levity. But,
after all, poetry, even poetry of profound ethical and religious
import, is to be enjoyed. And the simple point that I wish to make, as
a mere reader with but a stumbling knowledge of Italian and almost no
knowledge of the vast library of Dante scholarship, is that Dante is
accessible in English. His book of magic is at least half open even to
one who must forever remain partly blind and deaf to the beauty of the
original. It is a great pleasure to read the convenient little volumes
of the Temple Classics with the Italian text on the left-hand page and
the English on the right, to read idly or study deeply, according to
mood and temperament. At any rate, let us not be overcome by the
solemnity of the occasion or discouraged by the difficulties, some of
which the commentators have cleared away and some of which they have
made more difficult.

Dr. Toynbee[1] finds that since 1802 the _Commedia_ as a whole has
been translated into English about once every four years. And he
excludes from his record American translators and critics. Why did Dr.
Toynbee or the British Academy make this commemorative volume so
narrowly insular? English and American scholarship is one institution.
And American Dantists have done good work. Though it is the fashion to
scorn the Yankee bards and seers, Lowell's essay and the translations
by Longfellow, Norton, and Parsons are important in the history of
Dante in English, not British, literature. They had literary gifts,
they knew Italian, and they were able to appreciate a universal mind.
For all their provinciality their shades can afford to smile at their
young countryman, Mr. Mencken, who writes: "If I have to go to hell
for it, I must here set down my conviction that much of the 'Divine
Comedy' is piffle." Well, he ought to go to hell--to Dante's hell,
which is an entertaining and hospitable place. In the cold prose of
Norton or John Carlyle, where the melody is necessarily lost, there
may be some passages in which an alert modern reader cannot find great
interest, but the number of lines of "piffle" is exactly none.

          [1] Britain's Tribute To Dante in Literature and Art. A
          Chronological Record of 540 Years. By Paget Toynbee. London:
          Published for the British Academy, 1921.

It is not to be expected that all men, even all literary men, will
respond to Dante. Horace Walpole called him "extravagant, absurd,
disgusting; in short, a Methodist parson in Bedlam." This is amusing,
even refreshing, in view of the too pious devotion of some later
Englishmen. But the eighteenth century was not the time for English
appreciation of Dante, and Walpole, witty _prosateur_, was not the man
to enjoy him. Dante was known, of course, to Chaucer and to the
Elizabethans and Milton, and his influence on English poetry was
perhaps even greater than Dr. Toynbee's record makes evident. But it
is with the nineteenth century, which, _bien entendu_, was born
intellectually a few years before its numerical date, that Dante
becomes a power in English literature. He is, indeed, a part of the
revival of English romanticism. The translations of Boyd and Cary
appeared early in the century, and from then on Dante belonged to
English literature, as well acclimated as any other foreign classic.
The index of Dr. Toynbee's record contains the names of almost all the
important English poets from Scott to Francis Thompson.

And it contains hundreds of other names, not perhaps of great
importance in literature, but important in this respect, that they
show the appeal of Dante to a great variety of minds, of minds not
mediaeval, not Catholic, not Italian. Nobody can dip into him, however
superficially, without getting something. He has so much that
everybody can be happy, from the Pope to the most pagan young poet.
Though the true Dantist will insist that the greatest of poets must be
understood, or accepted, entire, like his own God and his own
universe, I propose that the anthological view of him is proper and
delightful. If he is so rich and structurally perfect that no side of
him can be neglected, then he is so rich and so strong that any side
of him can be neglected. You can sit under a tree on the side of a
mountain without comprehending the mountain, but deriving much
happiness from the tree, the altitude, and the view.

The interpreters of Dante's stupendous unity are all true to Dante, in
that they try to find some complete explanation of him and will
tolerate no neglect of his least detail. Dante himself, for all his
mystery and multiple meanings, is quite explicit about the
indivisibility, the integrity, of his work. So that the episodic,
incomplete view of him, which I recommend to other casual readers, is
unphilosophic and amateurish. Let us concede that and at the same time
let us reserve the right to be cheerfully weary of systems where the
"benumbed conceiving soars." Ruskin speaks the indubitable truth: "The
central man of all the world, as representing the imaginative, moral,
and intellectual faculties, all at their highest, is Dante." But such
a genius is too awful to contemplate, and it is more comfortable to
keep this side idolatry.

Moreover, the interpreters, seeking to comprehend Dante's vast
totality, do not discover complete unity among themselves. Mr. Walter
Arensberg[2] thinks that he has unlocked the mystery, and I think that
he has. But as I had a little to do with filing that key I will not
say how well I think it turns in the wards of the lock; I will leave
him to the mercies of other critics and merely note that six centuries
after Dante's death we have a novel interpretation.

          [2] The Crytography of Dante. By Walter Arensberg. New York:
          Alfred A. Knopf, 1921.

And then comes Professor Courtney Langdon[3] with another. One of his
ideas seems to me just, though debatable--namely, that any modern man
has the right to find anything in Dante that he can find, to derive
the sort of joy and wisdom that suit him, the reader, whether or not
Dante would recognize that reader's meaning. The poet exists for our
benefit and, like the Bible, does not forbid but justifies the
multitude of sects and individual expositors. That idea alone is worth
Professor Langdon's labor, and it will be interesting to see how he
develops it. Unfortunately, his translation is worse than useless. He
simply has not the gift of English verse. His own verses, prefixed to
the several canticles, are absurd doggerel; they remind one of
Longfellow's lovely sonnets (the best poems he ever wrote) only by
their position of naive rivalry with the splendor that follows. And,
what is more strange, Professor Langdon writes abominable prose, such
assaults upon the ear as "verse's rhythm" and "Divine Comedy's last
part." If the poet exists for us, in English or Italian, one of the
things to learn from him is how to write.

          [3] The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The Italian Text
          with a Translation in English Blank Verse and a Commentary.
          By Courtney Langdon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 3
          vols.

The poet exists for us. That is an excellent idea. It is our privilege
to take what we enjoy and reject what we do not like or understand. I
cannot be interested in Dante's ethics, which interested him so
profoundly and is the bone of his thought. His "stern indignant
moral," as Carlyle called it, is for me no part of the beauty of the
"mystic song." I cannot regard without suspicion, even in a New
Englander, Norton's statement to Dr. Dinsmore that the quality of the
_Commedia_, other than its beauty, which attracted him to Dante was
"his powerful exposition of moral penalties and rewards." Other than
its beauty? What does that mean? If the qualities of the _Commedia_
can be separated (Dante happened to believe that they can not be), let
us throw the ethics, the penalties, and rewards to the four winds. Let
us keep as much as we can grasp of the beauty of the episodes, the
images, the phrases, the structure, whatever gives delight.

The beauty of the fifth canto of _Inferno_ does not depend on the
ethical fact that the carnal sinners are punished, but on the poetic
fact that their pathetic loves on earth are recalled and that their
punishment is vividly, physically dramatized. The tragic pity and
terror of it break through the baldest translation stripped of the
enchantment of the original verse. Many English poets have been
tempted to try to render that famous fifth canto. Mr. Arensberg has
made the best version that I have seen. His version is in the _terza
rima_, a difficult thing to manage in English, and he succeeds in
making a good English poem, a shade finer than a mere _tour de force_.
I doubt whether he or any other poet can so well translate the entire
_Commedia_ in the same form, though the attempt has been made. The
_terza rima_ has never been quite naturalized in our language. Even
such a master as Shelley can not turn it perfectly. We imported the
sonnet as easily as the apple and we made some French forms grow
thriftily in our hardy garden. The _terza rima_ remains artificial and
foreign, peculiarly Italian and more peculiarly Dante; he made it his
own and moved at ease in its exacting rigidities. He was in thought
and form a diabolical magician.

In order to show the _terza rima_ in English and to suggest (not to
solve!) the problem of translation, let us look at three versions of
the last ten lines of the fifth canto of _Inferno_, the story of Paolo
and Francesca. Francesca is speaking and tells how she and her lover
read the story of Lancelot and Guinevere--romance within romance!
First, Norton's clear, deliberately uninspired prose:

    "When we read of the longed-for smile being kissed by such a
    lover, this one, who never shall be divided from me, kissed my
    mouth all trembling. Gallehaut was the book, and he wrote it. That
    day we read no farther in it!"

    While the one spirit said this, the other was so weeping that
    through pity I swooned as if I had been dying, and fell as a dead
    body falls.

Then Longfellow in traditional blank verse (and it is good verse; he
knew his business):

    "When as we read of the much longed-for smile
    Being by such a noble lover kissed,
    This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided,
    Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating.
    Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.
    That day no farther did we read therein."
    And all the while one spirit uttered this,
    The other one did weep so that, for pity,
    I swooned away as if I had been dying,
    And fell, even as a dead body falls.

Finally, Arensberg in _terza rima_:

    "When we had read how one so amorous
      Had kissed the smile that he was longing for,
    This one, who always must be by me thus,

      Kissed me upon the mouth, trembling all o'er;
    Galeot the book, and he 'twas written by!
      Upon that day in it we read no more."

    So sorely did the other spirit cry,
      While the one spoke, that for the very dread
    I swooned as if I were about to die,
      And I fell down even as a man falls dead.

Those versions, I submit, are all good; and I risked the tedium of
repeating the same idea of Dante in the English of three different
translators. Because my simple point is that Dante in English is
interesting--to anybody who cares for English literature.




DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY


Dante's _De Monarchia_ is usually treated by the commentators as a
mere footnote to the _Commedia_; and this subordination is justifiable
because the poet in Dante overwhelms all other expressions of his
genius and also because the _Commedia_ contains much political
philosophy, some of which _De Monarchia_ elucidates. But _De
Monarchia_, considered by itself, is a work of great importance. Even
if by some unthinkable accident the _Commedia_ had been lost and _De
Monarchia_ had survived, it would remain a significant treatise on the
state and the papacy and would deserve to be regarded as we regard the
political writings of philosophers from Plato to Hobbes. To be sure,
the chief interest of the work for us lies in the fact that Dante
wrote it, and it would lose some of its value if it were isolated from
the rest of his thought; the amazing unity of his mind and the
coherence of his purpose make a piecemeal view of any part of him
essentially false. His vision of earth and heaven has a thousand
aspects but no fragments. Even the unfinished works, _Il Convivio_ and
_De Vulgari Eloquentia_, are not fragments but are rather to be read
as partial manifestations of a singular and consistent plan.

_De Monarchia_ is a vision of earthly well-being. It is an argument,
prosaic and heavy in the English translations and very difficult in
the original, I should suppose, even to an excellent Latin scholar.
But the argument embodies a dream of the greatest of dreamers. The
first part sets forth the necessity of empire. Only under a single
world-governing monarch are possible the solidarity of mankind and the
fullest possible development of the human spirit. In unity man can
find peace and justice. Man is made in the image of God, and God is
one; wherefore man in imitation of God must make the secular world
conform to the universe and set up a unique earthly dominion. In the
nature of things empire is divinely ordained and this is further
proved by the fact that Christ willed to be born under the Emperor
Augustus.

The second part seeks to show that the Roman empire was appointed by
God to rule the world. It was established by the aid of miracles,
which confirm it as especially created by the will of God. Christ died
under the empire; if the empire had not been the rightful temporal
authority, Christ would have been punished by the agent of an unjust
power, his suffering would have been unlawful and therefore the sin of
Adam would not have been duly expiated. Rome was born to command,
because it did, in point of fact, conquer the world, and also because
the histories of its many heroes and patriots show that the Roman
citizen loved right and justice.

The third part is an argument for the separation of church and state,
which are independent authorities both deriving directly from God.
Many false arguments for the temporal power of the church are refuted.
Though the emperor, as a man, is the first son of the church and
should obey it like other Christians, yet as emperor he owes
allegiance only to God, whom he represents on earth in temporal
matters as the pope represents God in spiritual matters. The very
nature of the church, its essential spiritual function, forbids it the
possession of temporal power.

Have we here, then, nothing but a defence of an empire that has been
dust these many centuries, and stale scholastic arguments for the
separation of church and state, a long settled question in theoretic
politics and practically settled in most countries? There is much more
than that in _De Monarchia_ even for the most confident modern
democrat, who may regard emperor and pope as twin tyrants and for whom
the word "mediaeval" has derogatory connotations. It is true that the
empire under which Dante actually lived is dead as the empire of the
Caesars and that the empire of Dante's dream was never realized in the
workaday world. As a political pamphlet _De Monarchia_ is obsolete
without even the persistent contemporaneity of some eighteenth century
tracts. In a sense Dante's treatise died at birth. Bryce, who gives an
excellent summary of it in his "Holy Roman Empire," shows that this
plea for empire, conceived by the supreme mind of the age, was the
epitaph of the existing empire. It was, indeed, a swan-song, not of
the author, who was still to take us to Paradise and put his dream in
lovelier form, but of empire in the Catholic Christian sense of
"holy." The empire that persisted after the thirteenth century grew
further and further away not only from a poet's dream but from any
practical possibility of united political authority. The solidarity of
mankind was not to be achieved through Rome or Christ, and Dante was
not, as he thought, announcing a new era, but summing up a passing
era.

But the truth of a dream inheres in the dream itself and is measured
only in a secondary way by the course of events. _De Monarchia_ has
for us at least the value of a pacifist tract, the noble core of which
is not obscured by the strangeness of some of the reasoning or by the
destruction of Dante's political milieu. Like some other pacifist
documents it is the work of an aggressive militant mind. Dante had
lived and suffered in a world continuously at war. The contesting
powers, great and small, were so complicated that the historian has
difficulty in keeping them clear. To the major quarrels between church
and state and the strife of the city-republics with one or the other
or both were added an internal warfare between economic classes and
feuds between castes and families, all hopelessly intricate.

In this bloody confusion Dante had played the part not of closet
philosopher _au-dessus de la melee_, but of soldier and civil official.
And to the last he was temperamentally a fighter, though forced by
circumstances to drop the sword for the pen. He was not in the eyes of
his contemporaries what he has become for us, the supreme solitary
genius exiled by an ungrateful city, but was simply one of a thousand
members of a beaten party. He was not a pathetic, unappreciated poet
but a pertinacious partisan who happened to be on the losing side. He
knew war and misery and defeat. Yet his plea for peace is by no means
that of a weary belligerent; it is that of a bellicose champion of
certain principles. And so, though those principles do not appeal to us
and though the expression of them is laborious, even turgid, _De
Monarchia_ is still hot with conviction.

The instrument of peace was the one form of government that Dante
knew, the empire. Even if his genius had taken the form of
vaticination (he was indeed, as it turned out, a poor prophet), he
naturally could not in his time have made himself familiar with
leagues of nations and Wellsian "world-states." He had to ride on a
horse, not in a motor-car. And he rode, as a worldly rider, to a fall.
The tragedy of the fall has in it a large element of dramatic irony
because he was so splendidly sure of his ideas at exactly the moment
when they were least secure.

Dante's conception of an ideal empire had nothing in common with what
we now call imperialism, which is mere commercial conquest and can be
led by Kaiser or democratic prime minister with equally disastrous
results. Dante believed in an imperial headship for the good of all
humanity. The ruler of the world was to be the servant of the world,
not its master and exploiter; a supreme monarch was to be protected by
his lonely authority from the temptations that beset a weak man
clothed with limited and contentious authority; aloof from strife and
cupidity, having all and so being beyond pride and ambition, he could
be a disinterested and just administrator.

The aim of empire is universal peace--Dante begins his argument almost
in the terms of Burke and with something like Burke's combination of
generosity and elaborate futility--peace, "the best of those things
that are ordained for our beatitude." For on peace depends the destiny
of mankind to realize the full power of the human mind in thought and
deed. Dante's world state is Utopia, compounded, as all Utopias must
be, of wisdom and utter impossibilities, of sublime faith and facts
half-understood. While he dreamed he did not believe himself a
dreamer, any more than did Shelley. He believed intensely in the
practical value of his vision, in its originality and its finality as
a solution of the problems of the political world. He says that
knowledge of monarchy has been shunned because it has no direct
relation to profit, and that he will be the first to bring it from
obscurity to light for the good of the world and for his own glory.
The humble servant and the arrogant doctor at the bedside of the
patient! It is one of the most consistent contradictions of proud
souls. The reformer has found a new and sure cure and cries "Eureka!"

In spite of the practical failure of his dream, which in a sense
defeats him, I do not believe that Dante's pell-mell acceptance of all
stories about the greatness of Rome, with no apparent discrimination,
is proof that he did not know what he was about. He was making a
special plea and he pillaged history and legend to get material for
the purposes of his argument. He is a dialectician animated, like all
reformers, by unselfish motives, but willing to score a point if he
can. We may be fairly sure that Dante was not a credulous person with
a childish view of history, but a sophisticated controversialist
handling his evidence for effect. Though he mingles fact and fiction
and though his documentary resources were more limited than ours, yet
he knew perfectly what he was trying to do, and modern attempts to
gloss him in a patronizing and apologetic manner are generally
mistaken.

There is a grim humour in the fate that overtakes the works of wise
men. The treatise which Dante believed would bring peace to a vexed
world became a matter of strife. Later Ghibellines used his argument,
unfairly, of course, to support the supremacy of the empire over the
church, and ecclesiastical authority retorted by condemning the book
and even threatening the repose of Dante's bones. A somewhat similar
quarrel arose over Hobbes's "Leviathan" three centuries later. Seeking
to unite all men, the political philosopher is attacked from both
sides, and if he lives he finds that he has poured oil not on troubled
waters but on a fire.

Though _De Monarchia_ is much more than a footnote to the _Commedia_
and is worth study for its own sake, yet the unity which it seeks in
the world is closely allied to the unity of Dante's celestial vision
by which he tried to lead mankind to God. Mankind refused to be cured
of its political pains by _De Monarchia_ and even ignored it in spite
of Dante's secure and growing fame (there was no English translation
until the late nineteenth century). But mankind also never accepted
and never will accept the supreme vision of the _Commedia_. It is a
beautiful poem enjoyed by the literary, and even in Italy it is
valued, quite properly, as a mere work of art. The world has never
paid much attention to Dante's declared purpose to bring mankind
through art to God. So that in one way of regarding him, which may
perhaps be his way, he failed in the _Commedia_ as he did in _De
Monarchia_. The world of thinking and acting men, whose salvation
Dante believed he could work by verse and prose, remains disunited and
contentious, weaponed with such bitterness of heart and methods of
destruction as the dreamer of _Inferno_ never dreamed.




NIETZSCHE


It is more than thirty years since Nietzsche's work was finished and
darkness fell upon that mighty intellect. In 1917, Mr. W. M. Salter,
who certainly knows the bibliography of Nietzsche, wrote:

    I can not make out that his influence is appreciable now--at least
    in English-speaking countries.... He has, indeed given a phrase
    and perhaps an idea or two to Mr. Bernard Shaw, a few scattering
    scholars have got track of him (I know of but two or three in
    America), the great newspaper and magazine-writing and reading
    world has picked up a few of his phrases, which it does not
    understand.

The preface of Frau Foerster-Nietzsche's edition of her brother's
correspondence with Wagner is dated, Weimar, 1914, and the English
translation was published in 1921. Dr. Oscar Levy's preface to his
selection from the five volumes of Nietzsche's correspondence,[1]
published in Germany between the years 1900-1909, is dated August,
1921.

          [1] "Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche." Edited by Dr.
          Oscar Levy. Authorized Translation by Anthony M. Ludovico.
          New York: Doubleday Page & Co.

So, although Nietzsche's works are now all, or nearly all, to be read
in English, he is not quite an old story which every literate child
should know. Professional students of philosophy seemed to have missed
him or to have tardily recognized him, and the mere casual reader of
philosophy may quietly dodge Mr. Mencken's bludgeon: "Only blockheads
to-day know nothing of them [Nietzsche's ideas] and only fools are
unshaken by them." That sort of aggressiveness on the part of a
champion of Nietzsche will not help the master's ideas to prevail;
though it may seem to be a disciple's repetition of Nietzsche's superb
arrogance, it is really not true to his spirit. For Nietzsche attacked
thoughts and thinkers, quarrelled with opponents who were somewhere
near his size, ignored the opinions of the brainless multitude, and
was content to wait for time and the slow-moving world to find him
out.

Certainly he can not be jammed down our throat, and quite as certainly
his stimulating and cathartic doses can not be snatched from our lips
by moralistic prohibitionists. It is possible, of course, for a doctor
to take advantage of one's innocence and ignorance and put one to
sleep with drugs. That was my own experience. Dr. Paul Elmer More
stole up on me in the dark with a soporific little book, the first I
had ever read about Nietzsche. When I came to, the world was at war. A
wild German philosopher, who had been quoted by a brutal German
general named Bernhardi, was responsible for the violation of Belgian
women. This was manifestly absurd, but there was no time to
investigate and explain, even for one's private satisfaction, the
causes of this ridiculous misunderstanding not only of an individual
philosopher but of the relation of book-philosophy to appallingly
unphilosophic crimes.

It is amazing to find that the absurdity persists, that it is
necessary for Dr. Levy to try to prove in 1921 that Nietzsche did not
incite the Germans to a war of conquest! Has not the hysteria
sufficiently subsided for wise men to quit wasting their energies in a
contest with spooks? It was part of Nietzsche's work to ridicule
ghosts and blow away myths, and that he should have become a myth
himself is an irony that he might have enjoyed. He gloried in being
misunderstood. The true philosopher has always been in lonely
opposition to the dominant ideals of his time. It is in a tone not of
resentment or complaint but of haughty satisfaction that he writes to
Georg Brandes, in the last year of his intellectual life:

    Your opinion of present-day Germans is more favourable than mine
    ... all profound events escape them. Take, for example, my "Beyond
    Good and Evil." What bewilderment it has caused them. I have not
    heard of a single intelligent utterance about it, much less of an
    intelligent sentiment. I believe that it has not dawned on the
    most well-intentioned of my readers that here is the outcome of a
    sane philosophic sensibility, and not a medley of a hundred
    outworn paradoxes and heterodoxes. Not a soul has ever experienced
    the same sort of thing that I have. I never meet anyone who has
    been through a thousandth part of the same passionate struggle.

Nietzsche's philosophic solitude accounts in part for the excellence
of his letters. In his struggles with the world, and his wilful
alienation from it, he clung passionately to the few who were allied
to him by the ties of blood, friendship, or intellectual sympathy. The
letters contain no philosophic ideas which he did not express again
and again in his professional writings. They do contain something
else, however, moods, emotions, pleasures and private difficulties,
intimacies which are never quite apart from the incessant battle of
thought yet belong to moments of comparative ease when the soldier is
off duty. This philosopher, whose work is so intensely personal, who
says that he wrote his books with his whole body and life, did not
completely express himself in his books. He poured his soul into them
and was honestly naked and unashamed. But for all his autobiographical
candor, his work is not a promiscuous confession. He labored over his
paragraphs like an artist, calculated their effect, and made them
personal only in so far as suited his philosophic purpose. There
remains a sensitive and reticent Nietzsche who revealed himself to his
friends alone.

He was fortunate in his friends. When he writes in the preface of
"Human, All-Too-Human," that he has evolved an as yet non-existent
company of free spirits, because he needs them and because they are
some compensation for lack of friends, he is posing in a philosophic
attitude which is quite justified by his experience as a thinker and
writer but which is not quite true to the private history of Friedrich
Nietzsche. He never lacked friends, and his isolation was in great
measure self-imposed. The most distinguished friend he lost was
Wagner; the break came late in the older man's life, and it seems to
have been the younger man who disrupted the friendship.

Even without Wagner, Nietzsche's correspondents are numerous and
varied, as many and of as many kinds as a wise man needs, if he
chooses to make the most of them. The lonely philosopher was not
neglected as man and brother. He preferred to flock by himself. His
ill health rather than the animosity of his countrymen drove him out
of Germany; and he was happiest, as close as he ever came to
happiness, when he concentrated his energy in his work. He makes a
philosophic virtue of necessity, affects to despise what he can not
have, laments his solitude and is proud of it. To his sister he writes:

    You can not think how lonely and out of it I always feel when I am
    in the midst of all the kindly Tartufferie of those people whom
    you call 'good,' and how intensely I yearn at times for a man who
    is honest and who can talk even if he were a monster, but of
    course I should prefer discourse with demi-gods.... Oh, this
    infernal solitude!

A few months later, when this aged philosopher is forty, he writes to
an old friend that all the people he loves belong to the past and
regard him with merely merciful indulgence.

    We see each other, we talk in order to avoid being silent--we
    still write each other in order to avoid being silent. Truth,
    however, glances from their eyes, and these tell me (I hear it
    well enough): 'Friend Nietzsche, you are now quite alone!'

    That's what I have lived and fought for!

The last sentence may be taken in two ways. It may mean that Nietzsche
strove for isolation, or it may be interpreted bitterly: "So _that's_
what I get from my friends for all my labor and struggle!" Perhaps
both meanings are there. The letter ends: "Ah, dear friend, what an
absurdly silent life I lead! So much alone, so much alone! So
'childless'! Remain fond of me; I am truly fond of you." That sounds
like a not too human cry of hunger for affection. The man who prefers
demi-gods and is confident that he would be worthy of their
companionship is not immune from the pangs of ordinary mortals.

Nietzsche had a self-critical knowledge of his own needs and nature,
and, so far as circumstances permitted, he followed the course that
pleased him. He sometimes groaned but he never whined. In a letter to
his sister, who had evidently suggested the possibility of marriage,
he says that he cheerfully accepts the disadvantages of independence.
The list of requirements that he lays down are enough to make us
congratulate the impossible she whom he wisely refrained from
marrying. "I know the women folk of half Europe," he writes, "and
wherever I have observed the influence of women on men, I have noticed
a sort of gradual decline as the result." That is one of the
philosopher's amusing errors. He did not know women folk at all; the
most fatuous, almost the only fatuous, passages in his works and his
letters are those about the ladies, and his letters to ladies are the
declarations of a free spirit shying off from something "agreeable
though perhaps a trifle dangerous."

Nietzsche is at his best, of course, when he writes to distinguished
men, the few who recognized his genius and made him glow in his cold
solitude. Nietzsche craved recognition; his contempt for fame was
largely a contempt for sour grapes. Brandes and Strindberg put wreaths
on his head, and he was proud of them. He writes to Strindberg:

    I am the most powerful intellect of the age, condemned to fulfill
    a stupendous mission.... It is possible that I have explored more
    terrible and more questionable worlds of thought than anyone else,
    but simply because it is in my nature to love the silent
    backwater. I reckon cheerfulness among the proofs of my
    philosophy.

A man who can write like that of himself is the happiest of mortals,
for he knows that he belongs among the immortals.




TOLSTOY


I.

Tolstoy closes the second part of "Sevastopol" with these words: "The
hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I
have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and ever
will be beautiful, is Truth." That sentence was written when Tolstoy
was twenty-seven. For fifty years, in novels, tales, essays, and
exhortations, he celebrated his hero with unflagging devotion. The
deeds and lineaments of the hero are not always as other men have seen
them, but the identity, the character of the hero is never in doubt.
The hero changes and utters conflicting wisdom, not because of the
worshiper's inconstancy, but because Tolstoy develops, because he
outgrows and disavows his previous selves and violates consistency
between one book and another in his zeal to find consistency between
his next book and Truth.

In ceaseless pursuit of Truth, Tolstoy is led through the most
stirring intellectual and moral experiences which modern man has
undergone. He is part of all that we have met; from the remotest of
European countries, from a moment in the world's thought that is
already well behind us, his messages have encircled the globe and
modify the living ideas of today. He touched all departments of
thought and left none as it had been.

He plunged into the nineteenth century warfare of religion and
science, found that both parties were priest-ridden and arrogant, and
wrested from both the right of the individual to a simple faith and to
knowledge free from the cant of the laboratory. The increasing grumble
of the contest between privilege and labor--the most portentous war
the world has seen and not yet at its crisis--assaulted his ears; he
hearkened while most other members of the narrow circle of culture
were deaf or indifferent, and he took his stand on the side of the
workers against his own rank and kin. He laid bare the motives of war,
in which he had drawn a guilty sword, and became a militant champion
of peace. The unholy alliance of culture, religion, and civil
authority he strove to dissolve by broadsides against each member of
the triune tyranny, and so he conceived a new theory of art, a new
reading of the gospels, and an anarchism so individual that it
excludes most other anarchists. Under the solemnity of marriage and
the thin poetry of romance he discerned the cloven hoof of
self-indulgence, and he shocked the world with a virile puritanism, so
powerful in its terms, so subversive of our timid codes that bashful
Morality shrank from her bravest defender.

All the main thoroughfares of nineteenth century thought crossed
before the doorway of Tolstoy's house. He trafficked with all the
passengers, but joined no special group. Even his own disciples he
allowed to go their own way; he took no part in their organization and
left them to make their own interpretation and their own application
of his teachings. Loving all mankind, having sympathetic knowledge of
all sorts and conditions of men, he was nevertheless strangely
solitary. At the end of his life his devotion to his ideas alienated
from his family this most tender, home-loving man.[1] The young
idealists of the world left him behind, for they broke out new
highways of thought which he could not travel; young Russia sees in
him a splendid survival of an elder age of storm and struggle, calls
him master but not leader.

          [1] As this book goes to press, Madam Tolstoy's
          "Autobiography" is being published in _The Freeman_.
          Her views of the great man should be illuminating,
          especially if she does not try to minimize his defects.

He justified in his own life his theoretic individualism, because he
was great and strong enough to stand alone. The spirit of irony can
not but deal gently with the sincerest, bravest of men. Yet may she
note under the gray garment of humility a mien incorrigibly
aristocratic and domineering. The most powerful mind in the world
proclaimed self-submersion as the perfect virtue, because it is the
most difficult virtue for a daring and vigorous spirit to attain. The
foe of privilege, preaching that all men are brothers in love and
alike before the Lord as they should be before the law of man, enjoyed
a unique privilege--he was almost the only man in Russia who could
with impunity say what he thought. He won this right because he was an
aristocrat with friends at court and because the Russian government
dared not disregard the admiration of the world which had made Tolstoy
an international hero. He warned the mighty to walk in the fear of
God, but they walked in the fear of Leo Tolstoy.

To remind ourselves of the titles of some of his books and the order
in which they appeared, we may divide his work into seven parts. The
first part includes military tales and autobiographic sketches:
"Sevastopol," "Two Hussars," "The Raid," "The Cossacks," "Childhood,"
"Boyhood," "Youth." The second part, beginning in 1861, embraces his
experience as school teacher, his discourses on education, school
books, and stories for children and peasants. The third part, from
1864 to 1878, comprises "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." The
fourth part begins with his religious conversion in 1878, and is
devoted to theological, ethical and sociological essays: "My
Confession," "Union and Translation of the Four Gospels," "My
Religion," "What, Then, Must We Do?" The subjects treated in these
books he expounds over and over for the rest of his life. Because it
is salient from his other work we may say that the "Kreutzer Sonata"
(1889) constitutes a fifth part. "What is Art?" and "Resurrection" may
be thought of as a sixth part. Then follows the concluding decade of
warfare in pamphlets, essays, letters, upon civil and ecclesiastical
authority and other powers of darkness.

Any such partition of Tolstoy's work is untrue to its organic
continuity, its massive unity. His books are embedded in his life.
Though each novel stands alone in self-sustaining integrity,
intelligible to all the world, yet each gains in clearness and power
for being understood in relation to the mind that produced it. This
colossus of solitary protest, rising rough and volcanic above the
flats of modern thought, is vaster when seen close to his intellectual
base. Viewed from a distance some sides of him, some contours, are
blurred and deceptive. No part of his work can be wholly apprehended
unless all parts are brought into the range of vision.

On the day of his death he was the most famous man of letters in the
world. From the first report of his final illness bulletins flew over
the cables in hourly succession. Yet for several weeks after his
death, repeated inquiry among the dealers in English and foreign books
in Boston (reputed center of culture and high thinking) showed that
there never had been much demand for Tolstoy's books, except his
novels, and that the momentary rise of interest caused by his death
had not disturbed the dust on such books as "What, Then, Must We Do?"
and "My Confession."

This seems to indicate that not all the articles and sermons which
followed the ultimate news from Russia were grounded upon first-hand
knowledge of Tolstoy. The truth is that his opinions have trickled
through to us Westerners in diluted streams. He is already a
tradition, and it is the habit of tradition to weaken as it spreads,
to lose the effect which a drinker at the sources feels in their
concentration, in their full and proportioned measure of ingredients.
Tolstoy is abroad in the world; he has permeated the thought of the
best minds and tinged the currents of our present beliefs. But few
Westerners know him in his overwhelming entirety. This man who laid
open his whole mind and heart with prodigal frankness is borne
westward on the winds of rumor as a mythical prodigy. The outlines of
his thought are misty and wavering to many of those who call him
great. He spared no pains to clarify his beliefs; he expounded the
same principle many times with undiminished force and ever new
transparency; he gave sweeping permission to the world to translate
and print his books. Yet there is no complete authorized edition of
his works in any language, even in Russian, thanks to the censors and
his own indifference to practical concerns.[2]

          [2] This is no longer true in the troubled year of grace,
          1922. Every scrap of Tolstoy is published in Russia. And
          probably before long there will be complete translations in
          many modern languages.

Thus for the moment a partial chaos has descended upon the work of
Tolstoy, a coherent luminous body of work, which left his hand as free
from ambiguity as his extraordinary skill and industry could make it,
but which has been scattered in transmission. It will take some years
for his loyal followers in England and America to give us a complete
and adequate translation; and in spite of Matthew Arnold's naive
confidence in the French, the most patient collator will have
difficulty in finding Tolstoy's work or recognizing even the titles,
in the books which the Parisian publishers have sent forth under his
name. One who has assembled such of his books as are procurable in
French and English would say with all emphasis possible:

"Withhold judgment about any particular belief expressed or supposed
to have been expressed by Tolstoy until you have read as many of his
books as you can get--and do not fail to read them." He is the one
noble speaker who has happened in our time, "who may be named and
stand as the mark and acme" of modern literature.

A little knowledge of Tolstoy is more than proverbially dangerous. He
laid his vigorous hand upon every problem that vexes and strengthens
the soul. His utterance on each problem is intense and aggressive. He
boldly pursues an idea whither it leads, or drives it with passionate
conviction to a foreseen conclusion, and stays not for the beliefs of
any majority or minority of men. His magnitude overflows the accepted
area of such an adjective as intolerant. Yet approached for the first
time by a reader accustomed to the persuasive amenities of other
saints and sages, he seems to bristle with outrageous denial; some of
his opinions, isolated from the rest, stand as repellant outposts,
forbidding many minds which, entering from another side, would go
straight to the heart of him. For example, our traditional reverence
for Shakespeare is wounded by his downright statement that Shakespeare
was not an artist; the offended judgment retorts that thereby Tolstoy
proves that he is himself no artist, or that in crotchety old age he
outgrew the poetry of his virile years. It must be understood that the
essay on Shakespeare is in the nature of an appendix to his essay,
"What Is Art?" That in turn is closely related to his ethical and
social teachings. Those again are inseparably bound with his tales and
novels. And his fiction, finally, is rooted in Russian life, not only
because, as is obvious, it deals with Russian people, but because
during Tolstoy's prime, there was, as we shall presently see, an
attitude toward the novel and all literary art which was peculiar to
intellectual Russians.

Happily for English readers the foundation for complete understanding
of Tolstoy has been laid by Mr. Aylmer Maude in his "Life," the second
volume of which appeared a few days before his master's death. Mr.
Maude has entire knowledge of his subject and perfect sympathy; he is
a sane and independent thinker, and his work is admirable for its
balance, its candor, its sturdy devotion, which, however, admits no
surrender of the biographer's private beliefs. To the reader who cares
merely for an interesting story Tolstoy's career offers more than that
of most men of letters. It is laid amid the plots and counterplots of
bloody Russia, the most melodramatic background of modern history. The
man is spectacular, compelling, in all violation of his own doctrines
of self-abasement. The peasant's smock, which he wore as symbol of his
unity with common man, served only to make him the more picturesque.
This ascetic religious philosopher was a master of thrilling war
stories. He knew equally well the heart of a lady in the high life of
Moscow, and the soul of a peasant woman. He was of athletic stature,
and his huge hand was sensitive to the finger tips; with it he gripped
a scythe, played the piano, wrote a tirade against modern music, and
indited an exposition of the gospel of love which estranged some of
his best friends! It is no wonder that his fiction bears the seal of
reality, that it has the abundance, the variety, the jostling
contrasts of life itself.


II.

In Russia prose fiction has been for a century the vehicle of the
soberest reflections upon contemporary problems. It was dangerous for
a Russian radical to express his beliefs directly in essays and
expositions; what he was not allowed to utter in editorial and
parliamentary debate he set forth indirectly through the novel, which
thus became a sort of realistic parable. Suppression increased his
emotional intensity. Feeling himself a member of a down-trodden class,
he became the champion of other down-trodden classes. When Tolstoy
began to write, the novel was already a tempered weapon against abuse,
the skilful handling of it was a tradition among the literati, and
there were masters to coach and encourage the beginner. The Russian
novel records the deepest motives of Russian history. Tourgenef voiced
the philosophic resignation and scepticism of the educated Russian and
the evils of serfdom. Tolstoy portrayed the vices of the educated
Russian and the evils of wage-slavery which followed the emancipation
of the serfs. Russian fiction is great, because it treats the gravest
struggles of life and because its authors have trained themselves in
the art of expounding ideas in the form of fiction without
transgressing the laws of narrative; they have learned to be the
mouthpiece of life and to let life preach the sermons. To Tolstoy and
other Russians the greatest American book is "Uncle Tom's Cabin,"
because it is the chronicle of a bleeding issue; I have seen many
references to that book by Russian writers but scarcely a mention of
Hawthorne.

Mr. Maude quotes a letter to Tolstoy from Drouzhinin, critic,
novelist, and translator of Shakespeare: "An Englishman or an
American," he says, "may laugh at the fact that in Russia not merely
men of thirty, but gray-haired owners of 2,000 serfs sweat over
stories of a hundred pages, which appear in the magazines, are
devoured by everybody, and arouse discussion in society for a whole
day. However much artistic quality may have to do with this result,
you cannot explain it merely by art. What in other lands is a matter
of idle talk and careless dilettantism, with us is quite another
affair. Among us things have taken such shape that a story--the most
frivolous and insignificant form of literature--becomes one of two
things: either it is rubbish, or else it is the voice of a leader
sounding through the empire."

Tolstoy's realism is, then, the result both of his own temperamental
passion for truth and of a theory of art which prevailed in his
literary circle. There were, to be sure, silly novelists in Russia;
there, as everywhere, only the best minds regarded fiction as a vital
matter. But there were enough such serious minds to welcome Tolstoy
and encourage him. Nekrasof, editor of _The Contemporary_, found in
Tolstoy's first work, "the truth--the truth, of which, since Gogol's
death, so little has remained in Russian literature." Tourgenef
repeatedly called Tolstoy the greatest of Russians, and on his
deathbed pencilled the pathetic letter in which he pleaded with
Tolstoy to return to his art. "I am glad," he said, "to have been your
contemporary." Had he lived sixteen years longer, "Resurrection" might
have made him happy.

In Tolstoy's discourses on religion appear many times the words "sense
of life"--religion is the sense of life, the principle upon which the
details of the moral world are ordered and by which they are to be
interpreted. In a slightly different meaning "the sense of life"
expresses the total effect of Tolstoy's fiction. He wrote to a young
disciple: "Do not bend to your purpose the events in the story, but
follow them wherever they lead you.... Lack of symmetry and the
apparent haphazardness of events is a chief sign of life."

In "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" there are many plots. The unity
is that of the loose-jointed English novel rather than that of the
French, which travels on a straight track. Tolstoy's stories move like
a river with many tributaries; he explores now one, now another of the
branch streams, but the course of the main current is continuous, and
runs in one general direction, as if the slope of the country had been
determined before the recorder came upon the scene to measure and
report.

"War and Peace" is greater than a novel; it is an epic, it is
nation-wide and long as the growth from childhood to maturity. We see
from a peak of the face of eastern Europe and the swarming of peoples
and armies. The sensation of vastness, of humanity surging and flowing
in obedience to obscure collective interests is produced by only one
other modern book that I know, Hardy's "The Dynasts." From the high
pinnacles of omniscience the imagination descends by swift unperceived
transitions to the intimacies of a house in Moscow--to the heart of
the girl Natacha--to the mind of Pierre saturated with alcohol
plotting to assassinate Napoleon. The adventures and purposes of the
characters cross and conflict, interweave and unite, but each goes as
it must and there is no confusion in the telling.

In "Anna Karenina," the story of Levin is but loosely related to the
principal tragedy, and the story of Levin's brother is an excursion
from the highway of Levin's career. One can see that after the book is
done. During its course the reader has no sense that any part is not
precisely placed. The illusion of inevitability is perfect. Levin's
brother is related to him by natural ties in life; it is natural,
then, that he should appear in Levin's story.

The illusion of inevitability springs from Tolstoy's all-encircling
comprehension of events, from his justice to each character and from
his extraordinary physical vividness. He writes with his five senses.
A critic warned him early that he was in danger of making a man's
thigh feel like going on a journey to India.

But his recognition of physical sensations and his power to convey
them (they traverse bodily the stylistic obstacles of translation)
take the story off the flat page and give it three dimensional
reality. The acrid smell of an old man's breath, the coldness of a
man's hand when he is in mental distress, the cracking of Karenin's
knuckles when he clasps his hands in moral satisfaction or the anguish
of wounded pride--such details cling to the mind, and the memory of
them recalls the whole story.

Tolstoy's conception of human character is at once relentlessly
analytic and profoundly pitiful and kind. The whole content of his
thought from its bold surface to its deepest depth is instinct with
compassion. Once when he was walking with Tourgenef they came to an
old broken-down horse in a pasture. Tolstoy went up to it, stroked it,
and uttered its thoughts and sufferings with such moving tenderness
that Tourgenef cried: "You must once have been a horse yourself."

In "Master and Man," a beautiful story of two men lost in a snowstorm,
the horse is a third character--an animal character, be it understood,
for Tolstoy is antipodal to nature-faking. He has confidence that
nature and man will tell their own story and disclose their inherent
lessons. Dogmatic and uncompromising in his private ethical beliefs,
he never sacrifices humanity even upon the altars where he tried to
immolate himself. Valid morality springs spontaneously from his
narrative, and is thereby a hundredfold more impressive than teachings
forced from artificially moulded events. Even in his rewriting of
traditional myths and parables he restores inorganic sermons to life,
creates a living thing in which the ethical intention is assimilated
and vitalized. He told these stories to the peasants, listened with
delight to their retelling of them, and incorporated their racial
turns of phrase. To an old peasant woman with a native gift for
narrative, he said: "You are a real master, Anisya; thank you for
teaching me to speak Russian and to think Russian."

He learned from life and he trusted life to teach the reader. Anna
Karenina commits suicide, not because she is a naughty woman whom the
novelist as guardian of morals must punish for the satisfaction of a
virtuous world, but because the society that surrounds her, the
everyday life of visiting and tea-drinking, inexorably forbids her to
be happy. Tolstoy is a champion of the poor, and he began his career
at a time when, as Mr. Cahan tells us, "the idealization of the
peasant" was one of the staple phrases in essays and editorials. But
in Tolstoy's stories there is no false sublimation of the peasant. He
does not cry, like Dickens, or the professional charity-monger: "Pity
these poor starved brothers." He simply recites their lives. Sometimes
he chronicles the most terrible things in a grim restrained
matter-of-fact tone, more moving than any passionate appeal to the
reader's sympathy. He is, of course, a master of argument and
exhortation, but all that is found in his other books, not in his
fiction.

A critic, whose democracy is too narrowly partisan, complains that in
"War and Peace" all the important characters are aristocrats, and that
the story fails to reveal the motives of the people, of those
inarticulate millions who Tolstoy himself says are the real makers of
history. But this apparent fault is an instance of Tolstoy's
integrity. When he wrote "War and Peace" he knew only aristocrats, or
was chiefly interested in them. He had already begun to discern the
relations between the multitude and the leaders whom history
signalizes; but he had not lived close to peasants and workmen; he had
approached them as lord and master, not yet as brother and
interpreter. Moreover, if there be a moral hero in "War and Peace"
whom the author seems to favor, it is Karataief, the illiterate
soldier, whose simple faith dawns as a regenerative light upon Pierre,
a rich man of the world who has met all philosophies and found them
heartless.

Tolstoy could not write what he did not know or did not feel. His
stories, though not autobiographic in the usual sense of the world,
are the quintessence of his adventures and experiences, accurately
recalled and profoundly meditated. When the manuscript of the
"Kreutzer Sonata" was read in his house to a company of friends,
Tolstoy said in answer to some objections:

"In a work of art it is indispensable that the artist should have
something new, of his own. It is not how it is written that really
matters. People will read the 'Kreutzer Sonata' and say, 'Ah, that is
the way to write!' The indispensable thing is to go beyond what others
have done, to pick off even a very small fresh bit. But it won't do to
be like my friend Fet, who at sixteen wrote, 'The spring bubbles, the
moon shines, and she loves me,' and who went on writing and writing,
and at sixty wrote: 'She loves me, and the spring bubbles, and the
moon shines.'"

It was impossible for Tolstoy, the novelist, to write of people whom
he did not know, merely because he happened to have sympathy with some
of their ideals and habits. It was impossible for him to violate human
nature when he portrayed characters that he did know. Hating
professional psychology and all other sciences and quasi-sciences, he
is the greatest of so-called psychological novelists; his psychology
was made before text-books, and it used to be called "truth to human
nature." You cannot suggest, as you read a novel by Tolstoy, anything
a character ought have done which was not done, any emotion he should
have felt which Tolstoy has not suggested at exactly the right moment.
He penetrates the characters of living men and the characters of
history and romance. The pseudo-psychology of the critics of "Hamlet,"
does not deceive him. Napoleon, mythical monster and genius
unapproachable, fails to over-awe him; Tolstoy draws him, man size,
amid events that dwarf heroes.

In "Resurrection," Nekhludof is represented as holding social theories
which in point of fact Tolstoy held. Nekhludof reads Henry George and
tries to give his land to the peasants as communal property. Tolstoy,
the social reformer, would admit no obstacle to the justice and the
practicability of the plan; a lesser artist would have yielded to the
reformer, the plan would have worked and the story would have proved
the theory. But Tolstoy, the novelist, confronts Nekhludof with the
suspicion, the ignorant shrewdness of the peasants; the plan
encounters all the difficulties, legal and psychological, which life
would offer.

"Resurrection" is the crowning proof of Tolstoy's artistic power. For
twenty years he had developed theories about every problem of life; he
held his opinions tenaciously; hugging them in resolute defiance he
strode roughshod through the domains of church, state and family. His
convictions were strong enough to silence him as an artist, and for
years he obeyed the mandate of conscience that forbade him to write
novels at all. But when, to raise money for the Doukhobors, he
consented to write "Resurrection," his artistic sense was stronger
than the rest of him (if, indeed, there was any antagonism between the
two sides of his nature), and theories powerful enough to disrupt the
universe were kept in bounds by his sense of proportion, his sense of
life.

The feeling that Tolstoy, the artist, and Tolstoy, the reformer, are
in any true sense engaged in struggle is largely due to the false
dialectic of traditional criticism, which he by precept and practice
has confuted. His great moral principles are the sure foundation of
his greatness in art. For us Westerners modern realism--Hardy and Zola
come first to mind--is associated with a godless though very humane
scepticism. Religious sentiment has been left in the weak hands of
romance, and the longer it has been left there the more false it has
become. From the beginning, even before his religious conversion,
Tolstoy had a sound ethical outlook. At the age of forty he wrote of
Tourgenef's "Smoke": "The strength of poetry lies in love, and the
direction of that strength depends on character. Without strength of
love there is no poetry. In 'Smoke' there is hardly any love of
anything and very little poetry. There is only love of a light and
playful adultery, and therefore the poetry of that novel is
repulsive." The spirit in that criticism is the guiding spirit in
"Anna Karenina," and it is the same spirit which dictated this passage
in the magnificent sermon on the Russian-Japanese war: "The great
struggle of our time ... is not the struggle in which men engage with
mines, bombs and bullets; it is the spiritual struggle which goes on
incessantly, which is going on now, between the enlightened conscience
of humanity, about to be made manifest, and the shadows and oppression
which surround it and crush it."


III.

To western liberals Tolstoy's assaults on church and state seem too
vehement, partly because the tyranny he attacked is more obviously
brutal than that from which we suffer, partly because we are
complacently blind to facts which he revealed, facts which are present
at our doors. Our mild meliorations delude us. We wave an idle hand
and say: "Ah, yes, Russia is a savage country, but we are not like
that."[3] And all the while the coldest labor statistics, if we dared
to open them, show that in the exploitation of workmen, women and
children, ours is as barbarous a country as any in the world. Our
horrors and injustices are smoothed over by a disingenuous press,
which is owned or indirectly controlled by the powers that be.
American philanthropy steals with one hand and builds universities
with the other. We have no kings and no dukes, but America is the
sport of capital; it lies abjectly prostrate before a power-drunk
bourgeoisie. We celebrate Tolstoy in harmless little magazine articles
and wear shirts woven by children. We think we need no school like the
one Tolstoy conducted for poor, backward Russian peasants, because we
have our public schools and compulsory education laws--in some states.
Hundreds of our children are at work; they have succeeded, thanks to
the glorious free competition of business, in taking their fathers'
places at the machines. The children that are in school wave the flag
and read about George Washington.

          [3] And we are still saying it, 1922!

Tolstoy's teachings can not at present shake the somnolent conscience
of America. He believed in his innocence that our industrial masters
have reached the outrageous limits of exploitation, and that America
must be the first country to rise and throw off its parasites. But
that is a foreigner's opinion and not to be taken seriously in the
land of the free and the home of the National Civic Federation. His
indictment of our civilization is only nine-tenths true, and we shall
take advantage of the one-tenth that is overstatement to throw his
indictment out of court. He sees that every government is a commercial
agency by means of which a privileged minority conducts its business
at the expense of the majority. We are ashamed to believe that that
can be true of our Congress and our irreproachable Supreme Court. It
is easier to dismiss Tolstoy, because he is "eccentric" and "goes too
far." Did he not sweepingly assert that there is no such thing as a
virtuous statesman? That absurdity permits us to ignore the book in
which it appears.

Besides, it is more "optimistic" to read articles about the "history
of achievement in the United States," to take democratic short cuts to
superficial knowledge, than to read disconcerting books. Our
healthy-minded confidence in American morals bids us be content with a
little gossip about Carlyle and his wife, and not trouble ourselves
with such a difficult book as "Past and Present." In like fashion we
shall understand Tolstoy's ideals without reading "What, Then, Must We
Do?" or "The Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You." Sufficient for us a few
newspaper discussions about "Why Tolstoy Left the Countess and the
Relations Between Family Life and Anarchism." For Tolstoy was an
anarchist, and that disposes of him! We know all about anarchists;
they live in Paterson, N.J., and in the imaginations of journalists,
home secretaries, and framers of immigration laws.

Yet despite our republican wisdom, we cannot quite understand Tolstoy
until we know the true meanings of such words as labor, capital,
exploitation, rent, property, interest, and proletariat. In Russia
these words are understood by many people, also in Germany. But we
Americans, though highly cultivated, are not well informed about
contemporary facts and current philosophies. We have still to be
taught that the Russian revolution is our revolution, that it is part
of a mighty economic change which is in process all over the world. A
study of Tolstoy and his critics will help to instruct us--some
day--about these momentous relations.

The present status of the revolution is more confused in Russia than
in any other country.[4] The repressive measures of the government
forced a temporary alliance between all types of revolutionaries. It
was this alliance which isolated Tolstoy from other reformers and made
him a retarding force, almost a reactionary, against the progress of
the Social Democracy, that party of orderly Marxians under German
tutelage which was the hope of young Russia. The Czar's government,
which was no respecter of principles, grouped him with all the
malcontents and libertarians. And he returned the compliment. Because
he despised all economics, he could not join a "scientific" party.
Failing to distinguish between the peaceful and the militant
revolutionists, he charged them all with murder and grouped them with
the government. And thus he stood alone, distrustful of peaceful
anarchists because they were not religious, and distrustful of most
religions because they were organized on a property basis. He stood
alone. Yet all liberal men, antithetical to each other as are the
socialists and the anarchists, united in loving him as they united in
hatred of the government. They applauded his terrific indictment of
the society under which we live, though they disagreed from various
points of view with his solution. It was said of him on his eightieth
birthday that whatever conflict there might be between his beliefs and
those of other reformers, the foes of liberty were his foes and the
friends of liberty were his friends.

          [4] This refers, of course, to the revolution before the
          Great War. I wonder now, 1922, just what Lenin, Trotsky,
          Chicherin, et. al., think of Tolstoy, and what he would have
          thought of them!

Tolstoy's solution for our ills is Christian anarchy, a voluntary
communism allied with the teachings of Jesus, or with Tolstoy's
interpretation of them. He taught that all violence is wrong, all
government is robbery, and that the only possible moral order is
founded on love of man and renunciation of legal rights. That he
should have been a champion of Henry Georgeism, a plan that depends on
organized government, is one of his many inconsistencies; what drew
him to the single-tax theory was probably not so much the economic
principles as George's arraignment of landlordism.

It is Tolstoy's own arraignment of our so-called civilization rather
than his proposed remedies which will quicken the conscience of the
world.[5] His individualism, his doctrine of private goodness, looks
backward and not forward. He is, like Carlyle, the voice of a bygone
time.

          [5] Will it? I am not so confident as I was once.

He had lived through the failures of many political revolutions, and
he abhorred anything that pretended to be scientific. He turned his
eyes from the science of men to their souls. In his magnificent self
he justified his individualism, but were we a billion Tolstoys,
saintly and self-disciplined, we must work in organization, or we
cannot work effectively. The world is religious, but religion is a
matter of opinion. The world is also economic, and economics is not a
matter of opinion, but of unavoidable facts over which the individual
has little control.[6] Like Ruskin, Tolstoy rejected economics because
most professorial economists do not tell the truth. He blamed the
dismal science for the dismal facts and for the inadequacies of its
classic expounders. Had he understood the economic structure of
society (which nobody does understand), he would have seen the
futility of trying to abandon his estates. His singular abnegation
could not put an end to the evils of landlordism, even to the extent
of his own plot of ground. He could not make the burden of landless
people one ounce lighter by dismounting in his own person from their
backs. Nothing can be done until an effective majority of men agree to
abolish private ownership of land and establish communal ownership.

          [6] That sounds like good sense. Some of Tolstoy's
          countrymen at Genoa seem to have proved it.

Tolstoy preached with splendid fervor the power of the individual
soul. But his practice is proof of our impotent severalty. It was
disorganization that caused the famine which he labored to relieve,
and it was his efficient organization that kept the hungry from
starving. That our greatest man of letters should sweat behind a
prehistoric plow is good for his soul and for ours; but, even if we
should all grow perfect in spirit and eager for our share of manual
labor, we should still feed ourselves better by communal use of steam
plows. Tolstoy's belated Proudhonism is not the solution for the evils
of property. It is his negative teaching that has positive value. He
is an abolitionist, not a constructive philosopher. But to say that is
not to answer him, not to deny him. He remains unanswered as long as
the labor of this world is done at the behest of the few and for their
profit. His work is not done, his books cannot be outgrown, until
every man of us looks at the facts honestly and cries with him: "It is
impossible to live so! It is impossible to live so!"




MAETERLINCK'S ESSAYS


If we had to lose one part or the other of Maeterlinck's work, I think
we should less reluctantly surrender the plays than the essays. The
essays are richer in substance than the dramas and they are as truly
poetic. The sunny garden, where the poet lives with his bees and
flowers, is a more splendid domain than moonlit pseudo-mediaeval
empires, peopled with the wraiths of women. And the little bull-pup of
the essay is a truer dog than the one in "The Blue Bird."

Some years ago, when the essay on the dog was first published in
English, I read it aloud to a woman who owned a Boston terrier, and I
gave it to a professional breeder of dogs. Both liked it. It is an
essay that any one can understand; it illuminates a ground where all
kinds of people meet. Even Bill Sikes would have liked it. Maeterlinck
says what almost everybody thinks, and says it as it has not been said
before, not in "Rab and His Friends." The simple eloquence, the
sincerity, the affectionate humor are the positive virtues of the
essay; and its negative virtue is freedom from a kind of rhetorical
artificiality in which Maeterlinck indulges when he gets away from the
solid realities of life.

Maeterlinck is an amateur botanist and bee-keeper and a professional
poet. He knows, or seems to know, the facts, and he sees them with an
imaginative vision, wondering at them like a child, in the very act of
giving quite lucid "scientific" explanations. He hovers often on the
enchanted borderland between knowledge and fancy, and plays to and fro
between regions which, though adjacent parts of the same universe,
have different habits of thought. I am acquainted with an American
poet and philosopher who does not know the common kinds of dogs such
as any boy of ten knows. I also knew and argued with an eminent
biologist who objected to Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," on the
ground that the poetic phrasing falsified the facts. True, he
conceded, the queen-bee does fly and the strongest male overtakes and
fertilizes her. But for Maeterlinck to poetize the fact as a "nuptial
flight" seemed to the man of science not only untruth to nature, but a
blasphemy against the sacred love of man and woman.

My friend, the biologist, and my acquaintance, the American poet and
philosopher, both seem to be unfortunately incomplete human beings.
The poet and philosopher does not know what any duffer knows, what
anybody who cares not only for animals but for ordinary folks that own
dogs cannot refrain from knowing. He is a man of cosmopolitan
experience and has surely been in the _Bois_ more than once. In
the Garden of Acclimatation is a wonderful kennel; there are at least
fifteen kinds of dogs, each with his specific or sub-specific name
hung on his cage. If you had never seen a dog you could not walk about
that kennel five minutes without learning the names of a half-dozen
varieties (and without discovering in yourself a highly moral desire
to steal one or two of those beautifully kept beasts). Some ignorance
is unpardonable, and some philosophy and some poetry would be more
vital for a little plain back-yard knowledge. On the other hand, what
a pity it is that any man's sense of fact should be so strait as to
forbid entrance to his soul of a honey bee which Maeterlinck sends
forth equipped with these gorgeous unentomological wings of words:
"The yellow fairies of the honey." It's as bad as a democrat who
should object to the phrase "queen-bee."

Maeterlinck has knowledge of nature, not only such knowledge as
Wordsworth had, but a fair acquaintance with contemporaneous science.
He has learned lessons from Fabre, whom he admires. He has studied his
own garden in the light of what botanists have told him and in the
other light, which is not hostile to botany, but is different, the
light of poetry. He loves to speculate about unsettled questions. And
his speculations have a very great intellectual merit. He is, on the
whole, content to be uncertain about uncertain things and to express
his inclinations toward one or another conclusion in a persuasive,
wistful manner. Like many other poets, he leans toward the belief that
nature, which includes us, knows more than we do, and that to ascribe
intelligence, in a restricting way, to man alone is probably to leave
out a good deal of the magic of growing things, and to omit some
potential explanations of their mystery, their mystery in the poet's
sense and in the stern truth seeker's sense. The essay on "The
Intelligence of Flowers" revivifies the old moot question about what
knowledge is, what instinct is. It's a very fine question, and it
becomes hottest when the men of imagination and the men of science
(happily they are not mutually exclusive) argue about whether a dog
knows that he loves you. A British poet began a verse to a dog:

    The curate says you have no soul--
      I know that he has none.

That is good; but it is spiteful. Let us admit the curate. For the dog
would. A dog does not care a wag of his tail whether a man is curate
or editor of a newspaper. Therein the dog is our superior.

Maeterlinck, though overtaken by the wan doubt of our times, is a
true believer in other kinds of intelligence than ours. He holds that
"nature, when she wishes to be beautiful, to please, to delight and
to prove herself happy, does almost what we should do had we her
treasures at our disposal." There, you see, he begs the whole
question and ascribes to "nature" wishes, desires, intentions. He
does the trick that poets always do; he answers the question that he
asks and that he pretends to be discussing. "All that we observe
within ourselves," he says, "is rightly open to suspicion; we are at
once litigant and judge, and we have too great an interest in
peopling our world with magnificent illusions and hopes. But let the
least external indication be dear and precious to us."

In this the poet says all, while, on another page, the man of science,
with firm integrity, minimizes evidence and refuses to be convinced.
There is a region where the poet knows almost everything worth
knowing. There is a region where the man of science knows, not
everything worth knowing, but all that is known. There is a misty
mid-region where a full-minded, large-hearted man can live happily. He
gets the message going and coming. He receives what the poet has to
say and what the man of fact has to say and he constructs his world
from the fragmentary contributions of both regions. Maeterlinck
himself in "Our Eternity," dwells on this central ground. Shakespeare
and Isaiah are on his right hand. On his left hand are William James
and other psychological students of the evidence of spooks.

Poets are enamored of death. Nine-tenths of all the imaginative
literature of the world is concerned with love and death, the begetter
and the extinguisher. The sweetest lines in Shakespeare deal with
love; the stateliest lines, Hamlet's and Macbeth's, are upon death.
The chief interest of life is in dying. We get our highest emotions
from some other person's death, and we adapt our entire course, from
the cradle to the grave, with a view to the fact that we are going to
quit in some year determined by fate or God or other power not quite
understood, a year carefully figured out by the actuaries of the life
insurance companies.

Man is a perfect coward in the face of death, his own or that of
somebody he loves. The believer and the unbeliever alike bewail the
great adventure. The tears shed by the believer in immortality and by
the disbeliever are the same hot, saline, human drops. Everybody wants
an answer, and only the adherents of certain sects receive an answer
that satisfies them. Those answers do not satisfy me or you, not
because there is anything wrong in the answers, but because the people
that hold the answers behave as all the rest of us do in the presence
of death. Maeterlinck, on the basis of modern evidence, argues for
two-hundred and fifty-eight pages that we do not know what happens
when we die. "In any case, I would not wish my worst enemy, were his
understanding a thousand-fold loftier and a thousand-fold mightier
than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which he
had surprised an essential secret and of which, as a man, he had begun
to grasp an atom."

Amen! That leaves us where we started. But the fact, the cold,
interesting, magnificent fact, is that we are alive, and some of us
are working and some are playing. Maeterlinck is a great child playing
with flowers and with words. He is also a competent workman, and he is
assisted by another skilful craftsman to whom English readers owe
much, Mr. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, who translates Maeterlinck
into English. He is a fine artist. Following faithfully the run of our
English idiom, he succeeds in keeping for our Anglo-Saxon eyes and
ears the color, tone, or whatever it is, of Maeterlinck's beautiful
style.




JOSEPH CONRAD


To the newest generation of adult readers the dawn of a literary light
is a rare experience. It is as if the courses of our literature were
Arctic in their slowness, as if the day came at long intervals, and
then without warmth or brilliance. Our fathers knew the joy of
welcoming the latest novel of Dickens or a new volume of essays by
Carlyle. The only[1] great day whose beginning young men have
witnessed is the day of Kipling; his light mounted rapidly to a high
noon, and if the afternoon shadows have begun to deepen prematurely,
that sun is still beautiful and strong. Other lights have kindled in
the last fifteen years, and have gone out before they had fairly
dislodged the darkness, or have continued to burn dimly.

          [1] I ask the reader to remember that this was written in
          1906.

Eyes accustomed only to darkness and uncertain lights are in condition
to be deluded by the phantoms of false dawn; it is therefore unwise to
greet with too much enthusiasm the arrival of Mr. Joseph Conrad. Even
if the dawn is real, it is certainly overcast with heavy clouds, and
it has not proved bright enough to startle the world. Nevertheless,
his light is of unique beauty in contemporary literature, and the
story of its kindling makes interesting biography.

Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski was born fifty years ago in Poland. His
father, a critic and poet, and his mother, who was exiled to Siberia,
were engaged in revolutionary journalism. At nineteen Conrad left
home, to escape an unsettled life, and also, it is fair to assume, to
satisfy his love of adventure. He found work on English vessels, and
this fact gave to contemporary English letters a man who might
otherwise have written in French. To-day he appears in hand-books of
biography as Master in the British Merchant Service, and Author. At
nineteen he had not mastered English; at thirty-eight he had published
no book. Since then he has published about a volume a year. In
preparation for his books he sailed as able seaman, mate, and master,
for twenty years, on steam and sailing craft, and meanwhile he was
reading deep in French and English literature,--all, we are told, with
no intent to become a writer. Indeed it was a period of ill health
resulting in an enforced idleness from the familiar sea that gave him
opportunity to put some of his adventures into words. Perhaps he is a
lesser illustration of a theory of Thoreau's that a word well said
"must have taken the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by
some misfortune, so that the truest writer will be some captive
knight, after all." However that may be, the intellectual and physical
adventures of Conrad's life were abundant, and they reappear,
discernible though transfigured, in the substance and the qualities of
his work.

His ten books are for the most part concerned with the waters of the
earth, and the men that sail on the face of the waters, and with
lands, far from English readers, to be reached only by long journeying
in ships.[2] His first book, "Almayer's Folly," tells the story of a
disappointed Dutch trader in Borneo, whose half-caste daughter runs
away with a Malay chief. His second book, "An Outcast of the Islands,"
deals further with the career of Almayer and with that of another
exiled Dutchman. "Nostromo," has for its scene an imaginary South
American state, and its heroes are an Englishman and an Italian. "The
Nigger of the Narcissus" (published in America as "The Children of the
Sea") and "Typhoon" are each the chronicle of a voyage. "Lord Jim" is
the story of a young mate who disgraces himself by one unseamanlike
act, and becomes a wanderer in the eastern islands, and finally a kind
of king in a village of savages. "Tales of Unrest" contains five
stories, two of which are about Malays, and another about white
traders in an African station. The hero of "Falk"--the title story of
a volume of three pieces--is a Scandinavian sailor who has been a
cannibal, and who wins the daughter of a German ship captain in an
Eastern port. "Youth," the first story in a volume of three, is the
memory of a young mate's voyage in an unseaworthy ship, which burns
and leaves the crew to seek an Eastern seaport in the boats. The
second story, "The Heart of Darkness," is an account of a journey into
the Belgian Congo State and a curious study of the effect of solitude
and the jungle and savagery on a white trader. The third piece in the
volume is the story of a ship-captain who steers his ship with the
help of a Malay servant and lets no one guess until the end that he is
blind. Of two books written in collaboration with Mr. Ford M. Hueffer,
the only one worth considering, "Romance," comes the nearest to being
the kind of fiction that the advertisements announce as "full of heart
interest, love, and the glamor of a charming hero and heroine." It
begins with a smuggler's escapade in England, and ends in an elopement
in the West Indies; the best parts, probably Mr. Conrad's share in the
work, are those about the sea and all that on it is, fogs, ships, and
bearded pirates. In these books are men and women of all civilized
nations, the acquaintance of a globe-trotter, and there are, besides,
enough Malays, Chinamen, and Negroes to make the choruses of several
comic operas. But in Conrad they are serious people, every Malay with
a soul and a tragedy; even the Nigger of the Narcissus is equipped
with psychological machinery.

          [2] Almayer's Folly. The Macmillan Co. 1895.
          An Outcast of the Islands. Tauchnitz. 1896.
          The Nigger of the Narcissus (Children of the Sea). Dodd,
            Mead & Co. 1897.
          Tales of Unrest. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1898.
          Lord Jim. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1899.
          The Inheritors (with F. M. Hueffer). McClure, Phillips & Co.
            1901.
          Typhoon. G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1902.
          Falk. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1903.
          Youth. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1903.
          Romance (with F. M. Hueffer). McClure, Phillips & Co. 1904.
          Nostromo. Harper & Brothers. 1904.

Conrad's subject-matter, the secretion of experience, is rich enough
and of sufficiently strange and romantic quality to endow a writer of
popular fiction; and his style,--that is, the use of words for their
melody, power, and charm,--is fit for a king of literature. Stevenson,
who found so little sheer good writing among his contemporaries, would
have welcomed Conrad and have lamented that he could not or would not
tell his stories in more brief, steady, and continuous fashion.

For there is the rub. Conrad is not instinctively a story-teller. Many
a writer of less genius surpasses him in method. He has no gift of
what Lamb calls a bare narrative.

There are writers with magnificent power of language who do not attain
that combination of literary and human qualities which is
readableness, and there are others who interest many people in many
generations, and yet do not write well. To most readers Dickens is as
delightful when he writes slovenly sentences as when he writes at his
best. Scott, the demigod, pours out his great romances in an
inexpressive fluid. On the other hand, Walter Pater writes infallibly
well. These illustrations are intended to suggest a difference which
is a fact in literature, and are not to be carried to any conclusive
comparison. The difference exists and it is not a strange fact. It is
strange, however, that Conrad, who spins yarns about the sea, master
of a kind of subject-matter that would make his books as popular as
"Robinson Crusoe" and "Treasure Island," should be one of those who
can write but cannot make an inevitably attractive and winning book
for the multitude.

Either he knows his fault and can not help it, or he wills it and
does not consider it a fault. There is evidence on this question.
Several of his stories are put in the mouth of Marlow, an eloquent,
reflective, world-worn man. In one place Conrad says, "We knew that
we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of
Marlow's _inconclusive_ experiences." The story Marlow tells is no
more inconclusive and rambling than most of the other stories, so
that one is forced to conclude that Marlow's character as narrator is
Conrad's concession to his own self-observed habit of mind. In
another place Conrad says: "The yarns of seamen have a direct
simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a
cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin
yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not
inside a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it
out as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these
misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral
illumination of moonshine." Evidently Conrad prefers or pretends to
prefer the haze to the kernel.

In an essay on Henry James he openly scorns the methods usual to
fiction of "solution by rewards and punishments, by crowned love, by
fortune, by a broken leg or sudden death," and says: "Why the reading
public, which as a body has never laid upon the story-teller the
command to be an artist, should demand from him this sham of divine
omnipotence is utterly incomprehensible." Thus Mr. Conrad flings down
the gauntlet to those demands of readers which greater men than he and
Mr. James have been happy to satisfy without sacrifice of wisdom and
reality.

A further announcement of his literary creed he made in a kind of
artistic confession published a few years ago. "His (the prose
writer's) answer to those who in the fulness of a wisdom which looks
for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled,
amused, who demand to be promptly improved or encouraged, or
frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus: 'My task which I am
trying to achieve is by the power of the written word to make you
hear, to make you feel--it is before all to make you see.... If I
succeed, you shall find there, according to your deserts,
encouragement, consolation, fear, charm--all you demand; perhaps also
that glimpse of truth[3] for which you have forgotten to ask."

          [3] These Slavs (see above on Tolstoy) are all for Truth,
          but they are not Chadbandians. They are artists. And so was
          the Anglo-Saxon who made Chadband.

A writer with ideals so high and strongly felt commits himself for
trial by exacting standards. It is necessary to remind Mr. Conrad that
if a reader is to feel, he must first understand; if he is to hear, he
must hear distinctly; and if he is to see, his eye must be drawn by
interest in the object, and it can look only in one direction at once.
"Nostromo" is told forward and backward in the first half of the book,
and the preliminary history of the silver mine is out of all
proportion to the story of Nostromo, the alleged hero of the book.
"Lord Jim" is confused.[4] The first few chapters are narrated in the
third person by the author. Then for three hundred pages Marlow, a
more or less intimate spectator of Jim's career, tells the story as an
after-dinner yarn. It would have taken three evenings for Marlow to
get through the talk, and that talk in print involves quotation within
quotation beyond the legitimate uses of punctuation marks. In other
stories the point of view fails. In "The Nigger of the Narcissus" are
conferences between two people in private which no third person could
overhear, yet the narrative seems to be told in the first person by
one of the crew. In "Typhoon," where a steamer with deck almost
vertical is plunging through a storm, we are on the bridge beside the
simple dogged captain while he shouts orders down to the engine-room
through the tube. Without warning we are down in the engine-room,
hearing the captain's voice from above, and as suddenly we are back on
the bridge again. A man crawls across the deck in a tempest so black
that he cannot see whose legs he is groping at. We are immediately
informed that he is a man of fifty, with coarse hair, of immense
strength, with great lumpy hands, a hoarse voice, easy-going and
good-natured,--as if the man were visible at all, except as a blot in
the darkness!

          [4] No, it is not. It is clear as daylight.

Conrad has a mania for description. When anything is mentioned in the
course of narrative, though it be a thousand miles from the present
scene, it must be described. Each description creates a new scene, and
when descriptions of different and separated places appear on the same
page, the illusion of events happening before the eye is destroyed. If
a writer is to transport us instantaneously from one quarter of the
globe to another he should at least apprise us that we are on the
magic rug, and even then the space-o'erleaping imagination resents
being bundled off on hurried and inconsequential journeys. Often when
Conrad's descriptions are logically in course, they are too long; the
current of narrative vanishes under a mountain (a mountain of gold,
perhaps, but difficult to the feet of him who would follow the
stream); and when the subterranean river emerges again, it is
frequently obstructed by inopportune, though subtle, exposition.

Conrad's propensity for exposition is allied, no doubt, with his
admiration for Mr. Henry James, of whom he has written an extremely
"literary" appreciation. Too much interest in masters like Flaubert
and Mr. James is not gentlemanly in a sailor, and it cannot help a
sailor turned writer, who pilots a ship through a magnificent struggle
with a typhoon, leads us into the bewitching terror of the African
jungle, and guides us to Malay lands where the days are full of savage
love, intrigue, suicide, murder, piracy, and all forms of picturesque
and terrific death. Mr. Conrad finds that there are "adventures in
which only choice souls are involved, and Mr. James records them with
a fearless and insistent fidelity to the _peripeties_ of the contest
and the feelings of the combatants." That is true and fine, no doubt,
but the price which Mr. Conrad pays for his ability to discover it is
the fact that hundreds of thousands of readers of good masculine
romance are not reading "Lord Jim," or finding new "Youth" in a young
mate's wondrous vision of the East, or welcoming a new hero in Captain
Whalley. A man who can conceive the mournful tale of Karain and the
fight between the half crazy white men at an African trading post has
a kind of adventure better, as adventure, than the experiences of Mr.
James's choice souls. Stevenson knew all about Mr. James and his
"peripeties," but he could stow that knowledge on one side of his
head, and from the other side spin "Treasure Island" and "The
Wrecker". "The Sacred Fount" never could have befuddled the chronicle
of the amiable John Silver, but in Mr. Conrad's "An Outcast of the
Islands," where it seems to be a question which white man will kill
the other, after a dramatic meet-in the presence of a Malay heroine,
each man stands still before our eyes and radiates states of mind.

The lover who finds fault with his sweetheart because he is so proud
of her is perfectly human and also perfectly logical. So my reason for
dwelling on Mr. Conrad's shortcomings is because his books are
thoroughly worth consideration. His advent is really important. More
than any other new writer he is master of the ancient eloquence of
English style; no one since Stevenson has surpassed in fiction the
cadence and distinction of his prose. Never has an English sailor
written so beautifully, never has artist had such full and
authoritative knowledge of the sea, not even Pierre Loti. Stevenson
and Kipling are but observant landsmen after all. Marryat and Clark
Russell never write well, though they tell absorbing tales. There was
promise in Jack London, but he was not a seaman at heart. Herman
Melville's eccentric genius, greater than any of these, never led him
to construct a work of art, for all his amazing power of thought and
language. Conrad stands alone with his two gifts of sea experience and
cultivation of style. He has lived on the sea, loved it, fought it,
believed in it, been baffled by it, body and mind. To know its ways,
to be master of the science of its winds and waves and the ships that
brave it, to have seen men and events and the lands and waters of the
earth with the eye of a sailor, the heart of a poet, the mind of a
psychologist--artist and ship-captain in one--here is a combination
through which Fate has conspired to produce a new writer about the
most wonderful of all things, the sea and the mysterious lands beyond
it.

If we grant that he is not master of the larger units of style, that
is, of construction, we can assert that in the lesser units, sentence
for sentence, he is a master of the English tongue. There is a story
that he learned English first from the Bible, and his vigorous primal
usages of words, his racial idioms and ancient rich metaphors warrant
the idea that he came to us along the old highway of English speech
and thought, the King James version. His sentences, however, are not
biblical as Stevenson's and Kipling's often are, but show a modern
sophistication and intellectual deliberateness. He frequently reminds
us that he is a Slav who learned French along with his native tongue,
that he has read Flaubert and Maupassant and Henry James. Approaching
our language as an adult foreigner, he goes deep to the derivative
meanings of words, their powerful first intentions, which familiarity
has disguised from most of us native-born to English. He has achieved
that ring and fluency which he has declared should be the artist's
aim. Conrad's prose lifts to passages of great poetic beauty, in which
the color of the sea, its emotional aspects, its desolation and its
blitheness, are mingled with its meaning for the men who sail it, its
"austere servitude," its friendliness and its treachery.

"The ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and
swift like a small planet. Round her the abysses of sky and sea met in
an unattainable frontier. A great circular solitude moved with her,
ever changing and ever the same, always monotonous and always
imposing. Now and then another wandering white speck, burdened with
life, appeared far off,--disappeared, intent on its own destiny....
The august loneliness of her path lent dignity to the sordid
inspiration of her pilgrimage. She drove foaming to the southward, as
if guided by the courage of a high endeavor. The smiling greatness of
the sea dwarfed the extent of time."

No fairer temptation can be offered to a reader who does not know
Conrad than to quote a passage from the end of "Youth," and no more
honest praise can be offered to Conrad than to say that it is a
selected, but by no means unique, specimen of his genius.

A crew that have left a burning ship in boats find an Eastern port at
night. The weary men tie to the jetty and go to sleep. This is the
young mate's narrative years after, the narrative of the reflective
and eloquent Marlow: "I was lying in a flood of light, and the sky had
never looked so far, so high, before. I opened my eyes and lay without
moving. And then I saw the men of the East--they were looking at me.
The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze,
yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the color of an Eastern
crowd. And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sigh,
without a movement. They stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men
who at night had come to them from the sea. Nothing moved. The fronds
of palms stood still against the sky. Not a branch stirred along the
shore, and the brown roofs of hidden houses peeped through the green
foliage, through the big leaves that hung shining and still like
leaves forged of heavy metal. This was the East of the navigators, so
old, so mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full
of danger and promise.... I have known its fascinations since: I have
seen the mysterious shores, the still water, the lands of brown
nations, where a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait, pursues, overtakes so
many of the conquering race, who are proud of their wisdom, of their
knowledge, of their strength. But for me all the East is contained in
that vision of my youth. It is all in that moment when I opened my
young eyes on it. I came upon it from a tussle with the sea--and I was
young--and I saw it looking at me. And this is all that it left of it!
Only a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour, of youth!"




A CONRAD MISCELLANY


Nothing that Joseph Conrad writes is negligible; he is one of few
living writers whom we must have complete to the last, or the latest,
published word. Readers who care only for the yarn-spinner will not
find much in his volume of essays, "Notes on Life and Letters," but
even they will find something. And for those to whom Conrad is more
than a story teller, an incomparable magician, these small bits from
his laboratory will have much of the charm of the larger pieces, if
only the reminiscent charm that brings any book of his, the least read
or read longest ago, swiftly to the surface of memory. If a mere
landlubber may hazard the similitude, the captain will always show his
qualities whether he is on the bridge of a liner or in a rowboat.

The essays on books are unpretentious notes--eight pages on Henry
James, seven on Maupassant, twelve on Anatole France, short excursions
in criticism made between the longer voyages to the islands of the
blessed. Like most criticism written by men of genius, these papers
are interesting for what they say about another man of genius and also
for what they say about the critic. One of the most satisfactory
essays in what it reveals of Conrad is least satisfactory as objective
criticism--the one about Marryat and Cooper, in which there is a
declaration of descent in terms of surrender. To be sure, since the
elder men are seamen and writers of the sea, Conrad's delight in them
is understandable and not to be denied. But there are some things that
must be denied even by a critic who gets seasick a mile off shore. One
is Conrad's reiterated judgment that the greatness of Marryat "is
undeniable." If Marryat is great, then so is Oliver Optic. And when
Conrad speaks of the "sureness and felicity of effect" of the prose of
Cooper--Cooper, whose style grates on the ear and who drags us by the
sheer power of his story through his verbal infelicities--then I jump
overboard and leave these literary sailors to fight it out.

When we get back on land to another of Conrad's masters, Guy de
Maupassant, I feel less shaky. In "Tales of Unrest" are two stories,
"The Return" and "The Idiots," in which I long ago thought I
discovered the right kind of influence from the French master--what
Conrad praises as Maupassant's austere fidelity to fact. Yet one is
puzzled by the implied praise in the very dubious statement that "this
creative artist [Maupassant] has the true imagination; he never
condescends to invent anything." Just what does that mean? If "A Piece
of String" and "The Necklace" are not diabolically ingenious
inventions, then the word invention means nothing as applied to
fiction. In point of invention how far apart are the story of the
girls in "La Maison Tellier" and the story of the girl in the pathetic
troupe in "Victory"? Both stories are equally invented, equally true
to nature, equally free from "the miserable vanity of a catching
phrase." But what is a catching phrase? I suppose that a Frenchman
gets somewhat the same shiver of delight from fine rhythms in
Maupassant's prose that we get from fine rhythms in Conrad. Both
men--I could quote many examples--strike out amazing metaphors, the
poetry of prose, which are not decorations hung on the outside but are
the unremovable intestines of their story. Such metaphors in rhythm
are surely "catching phrases," but they are not miserable vanities. I
wonder if Conrad has a moment now and then when he distrusts his own
eloquence--an eloquence which has brought against him from more than
one critic the charge of being a phrase maker.

Conrad's prose is not so hard and compact as Maupassant's, and except
the two short stories I have mentioned I recall nothing in Conrad
which in manner or substance obviously illustrates his own statement
that he has been "inspired by a long and intimate acquaintance with
the work" of Maupassant. His greatest short stories, "Youth" and "The
Heart of Darkness," seem worlds away from the French master. But
inspiration, the influence of one artist on another, does not mean
imitation in method or any visible resemblance in effect. It may mean
a fundamental similarity in artistic attitude. The elements of
similarity between the French writer and the British are the plain
virtues, honesty and courage, which Conrad rightly ascribes to
Maupassant; for these are the central virtues in the creed which
Conrad announced many years ago and to which he has loyally adhered in
the remotest strange seas of romance.

Another of Conrad's masters, acknowledged in the phrase "twenty years
of attentive acquaintance" (and the phrase was written in 1905) is
Henry James. This seems a curious discipleship if we consider only the
material: James static, land-bound, class-bound; Conrad adventurous,
errant, familiar with all breeds and degrees of men. But much the same
thing happens to both kinds of material. For in the first place the
material is not essentially different; it is the history of a
two-legged animal staggering on land or aboard ship. And in the second
place what happens is simply (though it is not so simple) that an
artist tries to put this animal steady on its feet and make it give a
reasonable account of itself--through himself. It gets transmitted
through an intelligence, a personality, a style, into something more
interesting than the actual poor creature who wabbles along the street
or on the deck of a steamer. The courageous interpreters make their
fellow men stand up, and the real hero of a romance is the romancer.

This is one of the paradoxes of fiction which the mere reader of
fiction and of criticism written by masters of fiction can enjoy, that
the modern self-conscious story tellers, forever proclaiming their
devotion to an objective reality, to the naked fact, and even, like
Conrad, pretending scorn of the phrase, are wilful persons who distort
life into a new reality. There is something almost naive in the honest
belief of Tolstoy, James, Conrad, that nature, human nature, is
something outside the artist, lying _over there_, and that the artist
standing _over here_ observes it, renders it, "mirrors" it. James
himself, a most sophisticated realist, was not always so insistent as
Conrad seems to think on the function of the novelist as historian;
some years later than Conrad's essay, James found fault with the
younger novelists because their work was too undigested, because it
was not sufficiently remade, transformed by an individual
interpreter--that is, though he did not say it so harshly, the younger
men were not interesting individuals, not men of first-rate
imagination.

But we must not get too far away from Conrad and his particular
relation to James. He has a generously envious admiration for James's
inconclusiveness, for the novel that stops but does not end because
life does not end; it seems to be, like his admiration for
Maupassant's accuracy and directness, a declaration of something that
he has striven for and not always accomplished. Conrad winds his own
stories up pretty sharply, wipes out his people with annihilation more
desolating than the conventional piling of corpses at the end of
"Romeo and Juliet" or "Hamlet." Recall the obliterating finality of
"Lord Jim," of "Victory," which ends with the blank word "nothing."
Or, where death does not conclude it all but the character lives on,
remember the abrupt inevitable termination of "The Rescue": "Steer
north!" Another relation which I have suggested and which Conrad as
critic does not hint is this: Conrad's material, though superficially
it is made up of adventure, wreck, blood, piracy, mystery, and
Stevensonian yo-heave-ho, is, as he treats it, often as static as
anything in James; it is stationary, concerned with the moods of men,
analytic, psychological (that tiresome word has to do for it), even
while the storm rages; and this is one of the reasons why readers with
a taste for ripping yarns have not welcomed him with the unanimous
popularity which they accorded to Stevenson and Kipling, to name fine
artists and not, of course, to mention cheap favorites. If we really
understood Conrad's fiction we have no difficulty in understanding his
filial relation to Henry James. Begin with the paragraph on page 13 of
"Notes on Life and Letters:" "Action in its essence, the creative art
of the writer of fiction," etc., and see if the rest that follows is
not, with a change or two, as good an account of Joseph Conrad as of
Henry James--better, indeed, since one master of fiction writing of
another speaks with two voices or with a voice proceeding from a
two-fold authority and wisdom.

Joseph Conrad, novelist, child of English and Continental literature,
is not more unaccountable than any other literary genius. But how to
explain, or even remember at all, that the head of living English men
of letters, next to Hardy, is a Pole named Korzeniowski? It is fair to
remember that and be inquisitive about it because in "Notes on Life
and Letters" he pretends to write autobiography, and reminds us of his
origin in a paper called "Poland Revisited." It is a baffling
narrative, even more baffling than the vague book which he chose to
call "A Personal Record." Conrad in quest of his youth never gets back
to Poland at all except as a British tourist. The paper consists of
thirty-two pages. Mr. Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski reaches Cracow on the
twenty-fourth page. There are two or three pages of reminiscence,
chiefly about his father's death. Then war is declared (this is in
1914), and the British subject, with the assistance of the American
Ambassador, escapes from Poland and amid the booming of distant guns
in Flanders sails safely back through the Downs "thick with the
memories of my sea-life."

Mr. Conrad is the least patriotic of Poles and the most patriotic of
Englishmen. His political opinions, which he was evidently invited to
express by some English editor who remembered the fading fact of
Korzeniowski and appreciated the luminous fact of Joseph Conrad, the
writer, are no better and no worse than any competent journalist might
have delivered. His hatred of Russia, expressed long before his
adopted country became the ally of the Czar, may have its origin in
some boyhood bitterness. But it is an Englishman who speaks, not a
Pole. His prophecy of the downfall of Russian autocracy and of the
menace of Prussianism shoots into the future with as true an aim as
any man could have had in 1905, and a prophet is to be excused for
having said at that time that there was in Russia "no ground ready for
a revolution." "Conrad political" is less interesting than "Conrad
controversial," since his controversial utterances were provoked by
the sinking of the Titanic, the question of the safety of ships, and
the stupidity of marine officials on land, subjects which he can
discuss with the cool knowledge of the expert and the vehemence of an
offended master of ships and words.

But the true men of the four into which in his preface he divides
himself are "Conrad literary" and "Conrad reminiscent." The
reminiscence is not of a dimly, even indifferently, remembered Poland,
but of England and the sea. On the twenty-four-page journey to the
five-page sojourn in Cracow what happens? London, flashed on you in a
few sentences with an original vividness as if Englishmen had never
described it before, realized in brief transit, an immense solid
thing, compared to which Cracow is an insubstantial dream. He cannot
recapture his boyhood, but he gives you instantly the London of to-day
and the London of his youth when the British-Polish apprentice was
looking for a berth. And then the voyage across the North Sea. Here we
are at home. "The same old thing," he says. "A grey-green expanse of
smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white foam-ridges, and over
all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently made of wet blotting
paper."

"The same old thing!" The sea is the same old thing, water deep and
shoal, storm and calm, fog and clear weather, light and darkness,
starshine and sunshine. It is understandable that from time to time a
new poet should be born, Byron, Tennyson, Swinburne, Whitman, Conrad,
Masefield, who, being a different man from all the rest, should phrase
some mood of the sea in words that no other poet in centuries had
used. But Conrad has written fifteen volumes mostly about the sea,
many pages necessarily about some aspect which he has treated more
than once. His treatment is so unmistakably his own that you could
recognize any passage as his if you saw it on a piece of torn paper
blown from nowhere. Yet it is truer of him than of Shakespeare that he
never repeats, has no _cliches_, no pet phrases, but in each book
finds astonishing new images, as if he himself had not written before.
How does he do it?




STRINDBERG


Some men of genius at forty or fifty arrive at a view of life, an
attitude toward the human comedy, as inclusive and definite as it is
possible for them to conceive. Hardy at seventy is quite recognizable
the man that he was at forty. The Meredith of 1860 is the Meredith of
1890. They grow, they improve or change their artistic methods. But
their natures do not undergo violent revolutions. Other men, Tolstoy
for example, experience a catastrophic annihilation of some part of
themselves and emerge from the confusion, remade, fired with new
beliefs. Tolstoy had one great battle with himself which divided his
life into two main periods, and after the struggle his philosophy,
whatever its worth, was fairly settled, and he knew how to express it
clearly over and over again.

Strindberg seems to have been continuously at war with Strindberg; and
the peace that he found was but the death-bed repentance of a man
whose forces were spent. He went through many phases. "The Growth of a
Soul", which is autobiographical, might better be called "The
Conflicts of a Soul". It seethes with ideas, ends in a half-formed
philosophy, and is only a section of Strindberg's intellectual
adventures. He was ten men at ten different times, and he was ten men
all the time. He expressed every aspect of himself. His manifold
genius was master of all forms of literature. As Emerson said of
Swedenborg, in whom Strindberg found all the light that his dark soul
ever knew, he lies abroad on his times, leviathan-like. Undoubtedly to
know him, one must know him entire, and I do not pretend to complete
knowledge of his life and works.

Some fragments of his total artistic expression are not intelligible
when they are read apart from his other books. "The Inferno" is a
confused and murky nightmare which takes on form and purpose only when
the light of biography is turned on it. Other works of Strindberg,
read by themselves, are clear and shapely.

"By the Open Sea" is an intensely powerful study of an overcultivated
man and a primitively passionate woman. It is, moreover, the work of a
poet who loves the sea. The passage in which the ichthyologist
observes through his telescope the wonder-world beneath the surface of
the water is rich with the essential poetry of natural fact. The
translator, Ellie Schleussner, would probably say, as Strindberg's
admirers all say, that his resonant poetic prose cannot be rendered in
another language. Yet the things that he sees in nature and his
interpretations of them are in their naked substance the imaginative
stuff which is poetry. This Titan was not content to be poet,
novelist, dramatist, essayist, philosopher. He was also a man of
science, no mean rival, they say, of the professional student of
biology and chemistry. The eye that looks through Borg's telescope has
been trained in a laboratory and can also roll with a fine frenzy:

"The blenny, which has developed a pair of oars in front, but is too
heavy in the stern and reminds one of first attempts at boat building,
raised its architectural stone head, adorned with the moustachios of a
Croat, above the heraldic foliage among which it had lain, and lifted
itself for a short moment out of the mud only to sink back into it the
next instant.

"The lump-fish with its seven backs stuck up its keel; the whole fish
was nothing but an enormous nose, scenting out food and females; it
illuminated for a second the bluish-green water with its rosy belly,
surrounding itself with a faint aureole in the deep darkness; but
before long its sucker again held safely to a stone, there to wait the
lapse of the million years which shall bring delivery to the laggards
on the endless road of evolution."

Strindberg has been called both misogamist and misogynist. Yet it is
not possible to collect and compress within the bounds of such
definite words a man whose ideas on any one subject fly far apart as
the poles. If he sometimes, often, expresses virulent detestation of
women and all their ways, he is not more tender toward men. He is not
a caresser of life. He hangs the whole human race. But he analyzes;
tries it before the twelve-minded jury in himself before he pronounces
sentence. Point by point, detail for detail, he is just in perception
of character and motive. His final view is simply not final, but
contradictory as life itself. He thinks that woman is a snare to the
feet of a man who would walk upright and accomplish something in the
world. Yet he believes in the freedom of woman, would give her the
vote, and emancipate her from economic bondage to the man. He even
champions the liberty of the child, condemns "the family as a social
institution which does not permit the child to become an individual at
the proper time," and draws both parents as victims of "the same
unfortunate conditions which are honored by the sacred name of law."

"Marriage" contains twenty short stories of married life, so many
variations of Strindberg's thesis against the institution. So
regarded, the book leaves one rather sore than enlightened. But these
stories are stories, not tracts. Strindberg is a great, if rough and
savage, artist. His opinions, whatever they are, do not devitalize his
fiction. His short narratives are as skilful as Maupassant's in at
least one respect, compression, sinewy economy. He can put in ten
pages the domestic tragedy of a lifetime. He is a fine or, rather, a
firm craftsman, and though the man rages, the artist has the artist's
restraint and every other literary virtue short of ultimate beauty. He
sets down terrible things with a cool succinctness. One story ends
thus: "The children had become burdens and the once beloved wife a
secret enemy despised and despising him. And the cause of all this
unhappiness? The want of bread! And yet the large storehouses of the
new world were breaking down under the weight of an over-abundant
supply of wheat. What a world of contradictions! The manner in which
bread was distributed must be at fault. Science, which has replaced
religion, has no answer to give; it merely states facts and allows the
children to die of hunger and the parents of thirst."

"The Red Room" is a satire on life in Stockholm, on life everywhere.
The pathetic struggle of the artistic and literary career, its follies
and pretenses, the fatuity of politics, the dishonesty of journalism,
the disillusion that awaits the aspiring actor, all these things run
riot through the lively pages. Strindberg's satire is severe, it is
sometimes hard, but it is not mean. He has a large if rather distant
sympathy for the poor fellows whose aspirations, failures,
dissipations, and friendships he portrays. Of two young critics he
says: "And they wrote of human merit and human unworthiness and broke
hearts as if they were breaking egg-shells." He writes of their
unconscious inhumanity and blindness in a way that reveals his own
clearness of vision and fundamental humanity. The laughter of a somber
humorist has in it a tenderness unknown to merry natures.

The dramatic and literary critic may profitably read the chapter
called "Checkmate," in which the young journalist is made to say: "The
public does not want to have an opinion, it wants to satisfy its
passions. If I praise your enemy you writhe like a worm and tell me
that I have no judgment; if I praise your friend, you tell me that I
have. Take that last piece of the Dramatic Theatre, Fatty, which has
just been published in book form.... It's quite safe to say that there
isn't enough action in it: that's a phrase the public knows well;
laugh a little at the 'beautiful language'; that's good, old
disparaging praise; then attack the management for having accepted
such a play and point out that the moral teaching is doubtful--a very
safe thing to say about most things."

Strindberg's imagination visualized and dramatized everything. He made
plays of an astonishing variety of ideas ranging from wild poetic
fantasy to grim realism--a range as great as Ibsen's and greater than
Hauptmann's.

Glance at those in the third volume of Mr. Bjorkman's translations,
not to analyze them but merely to note their diversity. "Swanwhite" is
a fairy fantasy of love, confessedly inspired by Maeterlinck, yet in
no sense an imitation of him. "Advent" is a Christmas miracle play,
which embodies a gentle sermon on the forgiveness of sins--a strange
sermon from the man who wrote the last chapter of "By the Open Sea!"
"Debit and Credit" is a realistic sketch portraying the man who
succeeds at the expense of other people. "The Thunderstorm" plays upon
an old theme, one that Strindberg knew by experience, the failure of
marriage between an elderly man and a young woman. It ends rather
serenely for Strindberg, whose last years were not peaceful: "It's
getting dark, but then comes reason to light us with its bull's-eyes,
so that we don't go astray.... Close the windows and pull down the
shades so that all memories can lie down and sleep in peace of old
age."

In "After the Fire" the vanity and dishonesty of petty people are
ruthlessly exposed. The Stranger who finds all reputations to have
been based on sham and all pride founded on wind, is said to be
Strindberg himself. "Vanity, vanity.... You tiny earth; you, the
densest and heaviest of all planets--that's what makes everything on
you so heavy--so heavy to breathe, so heavy to carry. The cross is
your symbol, but it might just as well have been a fool's cap or a
strait-jacket--you world of delusions and deluded!"




TAGORE


Sometimes the world, or a section of it, goes wildly cheering after a
prophet; and a stranger, watching the multitude, wonders wherein lies
the greatness of the great man. The sceptic may be too ignorant to
understand or he may be too clear-sighted to be deceived. Not many
years ago the tom-tom of the Nobel Prize beat before the tent of the
modest and inoffensive Hindoo poet, Rabindranath Tagore. English
critics and poets of first-rate authority have called him wonderful.
For all I know he may be wonderful, for I have not read all his work
in English and I am not well acquainted with Bengali. But I submit
that in "The Crescent Moon" and "The Gardener," there is not one great
line, not one poem that is arresting, compelling, memorable. Moreover,
there is much that is false and weak.

    O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute!
    O Farthest End, O the keen call of thy flute!

Now that may do in India, but in our part of the world it is feeble
orchestration. The poets of the Bible and English poets since the days
of the Elizabethan translation have equipped the celestial choirs with
more sounding instruments. One cannot without a smile consider the far
end of the cosmos playing a flute or a piccolo. Harken to how a
supreme poet makes music worthy of the wide spaces:

    But thou dost set in statelier pageantry,
      Lauded with tumults of the firmament;
    Thy visible music-blasts make deaf the sky,
      Thy cymbals clang to fire the Occident,
    Thou dost thy dying so triumphally;
      I see the crimson blaring of thy shawms.

This is from Francis Thompson's "Ode to the Setting Sun." You see the
difference. Thompson's lines are poetry. Tagore's simply are not.

Miss May Sinclair, herself a distinguished artist, says that Mr.
Tagore's translation of his Bengali poetry into English "preserves,
not only all that is essential and eternal in his poetry, but much of
the strange music." That may be so, but how does Miss Sinclair know
that? Does she understand Bengali? Does she read it and speak it well
enough to be sure that Mr. Tagore has translated himself adequately?
Is not she affording an instance of criticism that in an excess of
enthusiasm runs beyond its own knowledge? Some of Tagore's lines are
mildly sweet, and there are some pretty fancies in the Child-Poems.
The poem in "The Gardener," which begins:

    Why do you whisper so faintly in my ears, O
    Death, my Death?

would be faintly impressive if Walt Whitman had never lived.

Not only are Tagore's lines not great but some of his lines are
foolish:

    Under the banyan tree you were milking the cow with your hands,
    tender and fresh as butter.

Perhaps Mr. Tagore did not know that in English "butter fingers"
greasily signifies manual ineptitude. I can not take that line
seriously, nor understand how Tagore has become one of England's
acknowledged poets. He distorts nature with pathetic fallacies which
have not verbal splendor to carry them, as the verbal splendor of
Shakespeare, Shelley, and Thompson often carries a metaphor that, so
to speak, will not hold water.

    I paced alone on the road across the field while the sunset was
    hiding its last gold like a miser.

The sunset is not in the least like a miser; and a true lover and
observer of nature would not allow himself such a niggardly fallacious
image. Are not our friends, the poets and critics, victims of the
spell which odd things out of the East put on our occidental minds,
the spell that makes some people run after queer preachers and
philosophers who talk religion through their turbans?

One is reminded that Mr., or Sir Owen Seaman has in his delicious book
of parodies, "The Battle of the Bays", an Edwin-Arnoldy thing that
runs like this:

    The bulbul hummeth like a book
      Upon the pooh-pooh tree,
    And now and then he takes a look
      At you and me,
    At me and you.
      Kuchi! Kuchoo!

It is, I confess, sheer perversity that made that stanza come into my
head while I was reading Tagore. Tagore does not rhyme; he puts his
verses into simple prose, most of which is pleasant enough, but none
of which is rich in thought or magnificent in phrase.

Tagore is a faker in the English sense of the word. I do not know what
he is in Hindoo. He gives lectures in America to audiences that are,
of course, mostly women. Then when he has got all the money he can get
from them (for his schools; he is not selfish) he tells them as a
Parthian shot that they are idle. If they were not, the poor ignorant
dears, he would not have had any audiences or any money. It is caddish
to kick the cow that gives the milk. I should rejoice if he took
millions from the idle ladies of America to help the ladies of India
and to free India from the British murderer and thief. Spoiling the
Egyptians is a good game. But it is not playing the game like a man
and a philosopher to bite the hand that feeds you.

And it is not manly or philosophic to kiss the hand that strikes you.
Tagore with a feeble gesture relinquishes his British title as a
protest against British crime in India. If he had been a real
philosopher and a true patriot he would not have accepted the title in
the first place. The lost leader who sticks a riband in his coat does
not recover leadership by throwing the riband away. The political and
social beliefs of poets, even of Dante and Shelley and Hugo, are of
less importance than their sense of beauty. But there is a connection,
not quite impertinent to a purely literary discussion, between the
quality of a poet's work and his character as it is expressed when he
descends from Parnassus and uses the prose of politicians. It is not
surprising that Tagore, who babbles to American chautauquas and allows
an English king to tap him on the shoulder, should be a weak and
stammering poet. That voice from the east is not impressive. If it is
the best that modern India can do, then India is done for
intellectually as well as economically.




REMY DE GOURMONT


In "Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas,"[1] Mr.
William Aspenwall Bradley has made an excellent selection from the
work of Remy de Gourmont; one only regrets that space did not permit
him to give us more. He has a gift unfortunately rare among
translators: he knows his original and he knows how to write the
language into which he translates. He even corrects his master in one
place: where de Gourmont, stumbling in a language which he has not
quite mastered, writes that the English words, "sweet," and "sweat,"
are _mots de prononciation identique_, Mr. Bradley gently wipes out
the blunder with "words which resemble each other." Not that de
Gourmont, with his enormous knowledge, made many such mistakes! I
merely note the care and delicacy of the translator.

          [1] Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas. Remy
          de Gourmont. Translated by William Aspenwall Bradley. New
          York: Harcourt Brace & Co. 1921.

Without pretending too much to the wisdom which should have ensued, I
remember like a shock of light, as if a blind man had suddenly gained
his vision, my introduction, a few years ago, to the work of de
Gourmont (for which my thanks are due to Mr. Martin Loeffler, who is a
distinguished musician and only potentially a man of letters). If you
wish to have your darkness illuminated, associate with the wise. If
you are groping in a foreign literature, the first man to meet is
the critic. The little I know about France of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries I owe to having clung to the broad and often
elusive coat-tails of Sainte-Beuve. As a guide to the nineteenth
century and much else beside--back to Rome and Greece--the most
stimulating cicerone is Remy de Gourmont.

When he was born, the gods went crazy and put into one person an elf
and a sage, Ariel and Prospero, Morgan and Merlin. It is no uncommon
thing when you are reading a French book, by an author with whose work
you are not familiar, to find facing the title-page a list of books
_du meme auteur_ and to discover that he has published something
in all the main divisions of imaginative literature, plays, poems,
romances, criticism. It takes a Frenchman to box the literary compass.
He assumes that the business of a writer is to write, and he learns
and practises all the forms, with varying degrees of success, to be
sure, just as a musician, trying all forms, may be at his best in
songs or quartettes for strings or symphonies or operas.

De Gourmont played every instrument in the band and played it well.
His range and versatility are remarkable even for a Frenchman. He took
all knowledge for his province. In spreading his interests wide he
never became thin; even when he played on the surface of an idea he
somehow, in a page or two, showed the depth of mind and matter
underneath. He was, as his American publishers say, poet, critic,
dramatist, scholar, biologist, philosopher, novelist, philologist, and
grammarian. He was an experimenter and explorer. When he died, just
under sixty, he was still looking round with his keen roaming eye, and
he was looking sadly, for the war, according to his brother Jean, who
writes not sentimentally but like a de Gourmont, killed him.

Even the colossal, universal genius, the Hugo, the Goethe, can not be
supreme in every realm of thought, in every type of literary
expression. De Gourmont's poetry, to my ignorant alien ear, is not
among the best in that prolific and still living period of French
poetry which he as critic did so much to encourage. As for de
Gourmont's fiction, "Une Nuit au Luxembourg," which he might have
tossed with a wink into the lap of Anatole France, does not greatly
enrich French fiction, which is already rich in similar achievements.
"Couleurs" consists of delightful twittings on ideas, and surely is
not greatly important in a nation where one man of letters out of four
has mastered the art of the _conte_.

De Gourmont is supremely the critic, the man who digests, interprets,
reorganizes the thoughts of other men and in the process adds to those
thoughts. His favorite method of reorganization is disorganization,
"dissociation" (and by the way, that word is good in English, as in
French, and better than Mr. Bradley's "disassociation"). He pulls
ideas to pieces and skilfully puts them together again. He is an
analyst, a dissector. But the flowers of the garden are not all
plucked to shreds and scattered on the paths, nor are they all taken
to the laboratory and subjected to the microscope. De Gourmont is
interested in things living and in propagating life. "_Toutes nos
fleurs sont fraiches, jeunes et pleines d'amour._" He surveys
wildernesses and lays out gardens. No other man was ever blessed with
such a combination of the safe, sane, intellectually comfortable and
the restless, daring, venturesome.

He loves paradoxes because life is full of contradictions, and his
paradoxes are often elucidations and conciliations of conflicting
ideas, never the cheap and facile paradoxes of a Chesterton. Is
Mallarme obscure? There is never absolute, literal obscurity in an
honestly written work. Besides, there are too few obscure writers in
French. This from a Frenchman whose own writing is a marvel of clarity
even when he is handling subtle and difficult ideas! Moreover, de
Gourmont's essays on language and style are studies in precision, in
definition.

De Gourmont is a wise man, who, like Socrates and William James, is
not afraid to joke, and some of his perversities are uttered with his
ironic tongue in his cheek. Like all fine humorists he is profoundly
serious, and the delicate play of his fingers is backed by terrific
muscular scholarship. His method is to appear to be casual, to make
the review of a book "_une occasion de parler un peu_" and then
to pack into six pages the reading of a lifetime. He manipulates
Brunetiere into the corner and annihilates him before you have time to
realize that there is no button on the rapier.

For all his tolerant smile and sceptical shrug, de Gourmont is
fighting valiantly for ideas. He wants ideas liberated but not loose,
and in the very act of freeing them he defines and fixes them. He
divides long-mated notions in order to reassemble them according to
his private logic. For he is the most wilful and individual of
critics. The journalistic multiplicity of his subjects is unified by a
great personality. The "dissociator" of ideas is a constructive
thinker, one of the greatest of critics in a nation of critics and
sufficient in himself to stand as smiling refutation of Croce's dictum
that "French criticism is notably weak whenever the fundamentals of
art are concerned." If there is a fundamental of art that de Gourmont
missed, I doubt whether it is to be discovered in any German or
Italian book. For de Gourmont's reading embraced the literature of
Europe, and he was especially alert to philosophic criticism. He was
forever in search of principles; but the result of his quest is not a
massive disquisition. The solidity of his learning and the systematic
coherence of his ideas are concealed from the unwary reader by the
lightness of his tone and also by his brevity, the gift, which belongs
to the race of Montaigne and Voltaire, of saying everything in a few
sentences. His essays are light as a feather and yet they carry tons
of information. The aeroplane looks like a bird but it is a heavy and
elaborate piece of machinery.

De Gourmont lived in an ivory tower, the tower of a wizard who
combined the knowledge of an ancient necromancer with that of a modern
chemist. He was much alone, for only in solitude can a man read as
much as de Gourmont read and write about it in serene meditation.
Nevertheless, he was in and of the world of writers; he was an active
and friendly editor; he made the _Mercure de France_; he encouraged
the youngest and bravest of his day; many of his notes record
conversations with the finest men of his time. He spent his days with
_la jeunesse_ and his nights with aged wisdom. When he retired to his
ivory tower he carried under one arm a volume of mediaeval Latin, to
add to his enormous library, already neatly stowed in his head, and
under the other arm the manuscript of the youngest French poet.

In one of his essays de Gourmont plays charmingly with the reviewer's
too facile use of "great"; "great writer," "very great writer."
Despite that delightful warning I dare say that de Gourmont is a
_tres grand ecrivain_, not a great poet nor a great novelist, but
the greatest critic that has been born, even in France where critics
are wont to be born.




SWIFT'S RELATIONS WITH WOMEN


"Controversy," says the editor of the Swift-Vanessa letters,[1] "might
have been more moderate in tone and more fruitful of result, if
writers had always remembered that, though grounds of conjecture are
abundant, the data for forming a judgment are manifestly incomplete."
Leslie Stephen, a shrewd and cautious biographer, with a lawyer's gift
for handling evidence, says "This is one of those cases in which we
feel that even biographers are not omniscient; and I must leave it to
my readers to choose their own theory, only suggesting that readers,
too, are fallible."

          [1] Vanessa and Her Correspondence with Jonathan Swift.
          Letters edited for the first time from originals. With an
          introduction by A. Martin Freeman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
          Co.

I propose an explanation of Swift, but propose it only as a
conjecture, an hypothesis. I shall not even argue it up to the point
of positive belief; certainly I shall not push it beyond the line
where belief borders knowledge. Conjecture is good if it remains
clearly in the realm of conjecture, an honest area of thought, and
does not try to sneak over into the land of things proved.

All of Swift's relations with women, and much else in his life, may be
accounted for by the supposition that early he discovered or suspected
that he was insane, that he believed his insanity might be
transmissible, that he was consequently afraid to have children, that
he was honest and strong enough to keep himself in check, that the
resulting suppression made him irascible and bitter, that he was a
vigorous and passionate man, that his quick shifts from tender fooling
to savage satire, his friendly and brutal moods, his strutting
arrogance that amazed the coffee houses, were not due to any
tom-foolery of politics or thwarted ambition in the petty matter of
advancement in the church but were due to a conflict, honorably won by
Swift, in the place where a man lives. The "early" in this supposition
is important. Leslie Stephen, quoting the familiar dark prophecy of
Swift at the age of fifty: "I shall be like that tree; I shall die at
the top," justly observes that "a man haunted perpetually by such
forebodings might well think that marriage was not for him." But
Stephen is dealing with Swift in middle age and offering an
explanation of why, assuming that Swift was not already married to
Stella, he did not marry Vanessa. Let us place the beginning of the
perpetual foreboding early in Swift's life and see if the main facts,
so far as we know them, will lie upon this supposition.

Swift's attacks of vertigo began in his youth. He attributed his
illness to an over-consumption of fruit when he was twenty-one. Swift
knew better than that. Even if we assume that medical science in the
eighteenth century was stupid and backward, Swift was too intelligent
to believe that an early period of indigestion accounted for the
suffering which afflicted him all his life. He knew, or suspected and
feared, what was the matter with him. In 1699, when he was thirty-two,
he wrote some resolutions, headed "when I come to be old." Among them
is this: "Not to be fond of children or let them come near me hardly."
Stephen quotes a friendly commentator as saying: "We do not fortify
ourselves with resolutions against what we dislike but against what we
feel in our weakness we have reason to believe we are really inclined
to." That friendly commentator was right and understood human nature,
though he had never lived (Stephen does not name him) to hear about
libido, suppression, defence, inversion, and other wise words now
current.

Stephen goes wrong, it seems to me, in his following friendly
commentation: "Yet it is strange that a man should regard the purest
and kindliest of feelings as a weakness to which he was too much
inclined." I have not space to quote the rest, which is on page 31 of
Stephen in the English Men of Letters. Swift was not fighting against
a weakness, he was fighting against a strength. He resolves "not to
marry a young woman." In a letter he calls a woman's children her
"litter," and that has been quoted by some critics as an example of
his brutality. He loves Tom, Dick, and Harry but he hates mankind. Is
it not clear? He can not have what he wants, and what he wants is what
normally results in children, in more mankind. His resolution,
superficially harsh and misanthropic, is a masked, or inverted,
expression of desire. Such expression is not, of course, peculiar to
literary satirists, but it should be remembered that Swift had
supremely the ironic trick of thought, the gift of saying a thing by
saying exactly the opposite.

The resolution should be read in the light of the fact that Stella was
eighteen years old, a grown and comely woman. But the interpretation
of it depends much more closely on the termination of Swift's affair
with Varina. The date, 1699, suggests this. He had proposed to Varina,
Miss Waring, in 1696, in a letter which is passionate enough, and had
been rejected, at least provisionally, on the score of her ill health
and his poverty. Four years later, after he had received the living at
Laracor and seemed to be on the way to other preferments, she wished
to hold him to his word, and he jilted her. There are three
explanations. One is that he had fallen in love with Stella and so out
of love with the other woman. The second explanation, Leslie
Stephen's, is that his ambitions had not been realized, his
advancement had not been brilliant, and marriage would have kept his
nose to the grind-stone in an obscure living. That explanation is not
good, for, though Swift always had an eye to the main chance and was
worried about money, power, and position, it is only men of cool blood
or men who have extra-marital opportunities to gratify their desires
who are ever deterred by considerations of thrift and economy from
marrying the beloved woman. Swift was not cold but passionate. And it
is inconceivable that he, a clergyman in a small parish, was finding
his pleasure in illicit intercourse.

The third explanation, which I venture to suggest, is that between his
proposal to Varina in 1696 and his insulting rejection of her in 1700,
between his twenty-ninth and thirty-third years, he had discovered a
reason why he must not live with a woman. His resolutions, remember,
not to marry a young woman and not to be fond of children were written
in 1699. How could Stephen believe that those resolutions, with others
"pithy and sensible," were "for behavior in a distant future?" Swift's
heading, "when I come to be old," means nothing; he is writing from
the misery of the moment. Why is the letter in which Swift puts an end
to poor Varina so brutal and insulting that, in Stephen's words, no
one with a grain of self-respect could accept the conditions of
marriage which he lays down? Because he could not tell her the real
reason, a reason based on fear rather than on physiological certainty.
It is an honestly dishonest letter. It is a perfect example of that
perplexing contradiction which appears everywhere in his life and
writings, that he was brutally honest, saw through the postures and
masks of everybody else, and yet postured, attitudinized, and lied
himself. He carried his secret agony with fortitude and alternately
raged against the world and fooled with it. In relation to the Varina
episode Stephen misses the point, though what he says is true enough:
"Swift could be the most persistent and ardent of friends. But when
anyone tried to enforce claims no longer congenial to his feelings,
the appeal to the galling obligation stung him into ferocity, and
brought out the most brutal side of his imperious nature." Though a
man has but one heart, yet his relations with his friends are quite
different from his passions for women. A proud, ferocious and
imperious nature is not the whole story of Swift. It does not give us
the real foundation of the story of Varina, of Stella, of Vanessa and
the man they loved.

On the foundation which I propose the story of Stella will rest
securely, intelligibly. If Swift was married secretly to Stella in
1716--the evidence is not conclusive--the marriage was only a legal
ceremony performed perhaps for the purpose of securing her in case her
fortunes went wrong or gossip or other circumstances made necessary
the protection of his name. Almost certainly there was no physical
marriage, no union legal or illegal. Why? He was free and she was
free. She was, by his own account, a charming person who would have
been quite presentable to his friends and in all ways helpful to a man
in middle age who is supposed to need a woman to take care of him. The
answer is simply that Swift feared to propagate his tainted stock,
that he refrained and suffered. And the "Journal to Stella" is a
record of suffering, of passion disguised and writhing. A busy man,
with other things to write, does not write that much to a woman he
does not love, and he does not write that way to a woman he openly and
avowedly loves. The "little language," the silliness, the foolings,
the avoidance of direct declaration of love, the semi-paternal
injunctions, the gossip about big people, much of it whimsical chatter
in which we get only by implication the serious view of Swift and his
times that has made it an important historical document, the two or
three hintful promises of felicity which commit Swift to nothing, the
passages of melancholy and half-humorous old man's grouch--all this is
a veiled love letter. It is tingling and nervous and alert and full of
pain, not the idle recreation of a tired man of affairs entertaining a
child, but the heartbreak of a powerful man of forty-five expressed
by indirections to a woman of thirty. Perhaps she understood his
spleen and his complaints of ill-health. We may be on the way
to understanding them now. Certainly Stephen is off the track
when he says that there are "grounds for holding that Swift was
constitutionally indisposed to the passion of love." Unless he means
by that that Swift knew that there was something in his constitution
which made the ultimate realization of love impossible. And Stephen
does not mean that, for he speaks of the absence of traces of passion
from writings "conspicuous for their amazing sincerity." An amazing
example of a sincere biographer missing the trace! Swift's insistence
on his "coldness" and his assertion that he did not understand love
are precisely an affirmation of what the words deny.

Now enters the third woman of record--there may have been more--in
Swift's unhappy sexual life, Vanessa, Esther Vanhomrigh. At the same
time that he is writing his long love letter, the "Journal to Stella,"
he is seeing Vanessa. Of course. It is all explicable. The man can not
have the woman he wants and is tantalized by another woman who wants
him. He plays and he won't play. He is tormented by the same restraint
that keeps him out of Stella's bed. He is handsome, virile, and
distinguished. The woman is crazy about him. He is unable to keep away
from her, but he is fighting, for reasons known to him, against the
impulse to possess her. He plays again, as with Stella, a game which,
viewed superficially, is fraudulent and unfair. He is teacher, guide,
philosopher, and Dutch uncle. But she is not a docile, gentle girl
like Stella. Mr. Freeman, who handles his documents admirably and is
not slanted from the truth by moralistic concern for hero or heroine,
is, nevertheless, naive and blind to the facts which he has so
carefully considered. He says: "The tragedy, then, was inevitable from
the day when Vanessa attempted to arouse in him a love of which he was
incapable. It might have been hastened, or its form might have been
different, if he had sternly broken with Vanessa as soon as he
discovered the nature of her desires." Swift was not incapable, in
that sense, and he knew the nature of her desires, for he was not a
fool. What he knew also was the nature of his own desires and their
possible consequences. That is, I conjecture, the heart of the story
of Swift's heart.




WILLIAM JAMES, MAN OF LETTERS


I.

The letters of a philosopher usually have the primary, if not
exclusive, interest of elucidating and extending in an informal way
the ideas expounded in his professional writings. It is for this
interest that one would turn to the letters of a thinker who was
nothing but a thinker, such as Kant (if, indeed, there is a collection
of Kant's letters), and to the correspondence of such a philosopher as
Nietzsche, who, aside from his technical contributions to human
wisdom, presents fascinating problems in human character, personality,
biography. The letters of Williams James[1] have two distinct values.
They appeared at the same moment with his "Collected Essays and
Reviews"[2] and the two publications, taken together, complete the
intellectual record of the man. Though master and man can not be
separated, yet, as good disciples of James's pluralism, we may be
permitted to divide an individual into two "aspects." First let us
enjoy the letters, simply as the letters of a man who was,
incidentally, a philosopher.

          [1] The Letters of William James. Edited by his son Henry
          James. Two Vols. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press.

          [2] Collected Essays and Reviews. William James. New York;
          Longmans, Green and Co.

And what letters! The letters of Lamb, of Edward Fitzgerald, are not
more delightful. The easiest and pleasantest way to prove that would
be to fill the rest of this essay with quotations, and that way would
be in consonance with the whimsical spirit of James, who wrote to his
youngest son: "Your Ma thinks you'll grow up into a filosofer like me
and write books. It is easy enough, all but the writing. You just get
it out of other books and write it down." To write a jolly letter to a
child, to ridicule yourself and your profession and at the same time
to defend an idea with vigor and determination, to poke fun at
colleagues and heartily respect them, to be dignified in mental shirt
sleeves, to wink one eye and keep two keen eyes on the page or the
fact that has to be studied, to fling words with apparent carelessness
and never for a moment to lose control of words or thought--all this
means a great character and a fine literary artist.

James says of Duveneck, the painter: "I have seen very little of him.
The professor is an oppressor of the artist, I fear." It may be that
the professor, which James was and officially had to be, oppressed the
artist in him. But the artist would not down. If all the philosophic
work of James were wiped out by an act of God or by the arguments of
philosophers, James, the man of letters, would still survive. I
believe that part of the success of James as philosopher was due to
his ability to say what he meant not only with logical clarity but
with charm, with the skill of the literary artist. Technical
Philosophy may immortalize or bury his work. The man, the startling,
original person must be imperishable. No matter what subject he
touches, his way of saying things is superb. He had an artist's
interest in the art of writing. Of a volume of his essays he says: "I
am sure of your sympathy in advance for much of their contents. But I
am afraid that what you will never appreciate is their wonderful
English style! Shakespeare is a little street-boy in comparison!" The
wise man has his tongue in his cheek, of course, but there is a
serious idea behind the fooling. Of a correspondent's "strictures on
my English" he writes: "I have a tendency towards too great
colloquiality." What sort of laborious philosopher was it who worried
James about his style, his fluent, accurate, imaginative vehicle of
thought? It may be that some of James's philosophic ideas are quite
wrong. But there is a presumption in favor of the truth of an idea
which is well expressed.

James argues somewhere that a style as thick as Hegel's can not be the
"authentic mother-tongue of reason." If that is unfair to Hegel, it is
a fair revelation of the mind of James. He was an advocate and an
exemplar of lucidity of expression, and was always putting to himself
and other philosophers the plain question: "Just what do you mean?"
But his sharpness of mind, though often aggressive, was never
offensive. He seems at times to have dulled the edge of his wit in
order not to hurt the other fellow. The editor of the letters has,
perhaps wisely, "not included letters that are wholly technical or
polemic." Probably the ideas expressed in the technical letters are
repeated in James's books. But I should like to see the polemic
letters. The editor himself in the act of withholding them has defined
their merits: "He rejoiced openly in the controversies which he
provoked and engaged in polemics with the good humor and vigor that
were the essence of his genius." The touches of polemic writing which
appear in the correspondence that is given us reveal this good humor
and vigor and make one hungry for more. He was staunch and dexterous
in argument and never yielded an inch, but he could stop and laugh at
his opponent and at himself. He objected to Huxley's somewhat solemn
devotion to "Truth," yet he had a kind of skill in argument that was
not unlike Huxley's. He could give a man a smashing blow in the ribs,
and even show a quite human irritation, but his exquisite courtesy
never failed. His letters to Godkin, of the _Nation_, protesting
against unfair criticism of the work of the elder Henry James, are a
lesson for critics, and no doubt Godkin's reply was a model of
magnanimous contrition.

James had an immense variety of interests outside philosophy, though
perhaps it is unphilosophical to imply that anything can lie outside
the range of a true philosopher's vision. His letters are written to
many different kinds of persons; the best of them, naturally, are to
philosophers and men of letters, who evoked from him an amazing
multiplicity of ideas and to whom he let fly a delicious compound of
sound reason and jocularity. In characterizing other men he
characterized himself. For example, what he says about Royce embraces
both men perfectly: "that unique mixture of erudition, originality,
profundity and vastness, and human wit and leisureliness." He was
fortunate in his human and intellectual contacts. An early and
abidingly fortunate contact was that with his father, who was also a
"filosofer." His last letter to his father is beautiful. It brings
tears, of which the most stoical philosopher need not be ashamed;
indeed, one might rather be ashamed if the tears did not come. No one
outside the family and a few friends has a right to read that letter,
but print has extended the privilege. If Mr. E. V. Lucas or any other
anthologist makes a new collection of examples of "the gentlest art,"
the letter from James to his father should be included. In it two men
are portrayed, father and son, both magnificently; if either man had
been less than great the letter could not have been written.

James was born a philosopher; philosophy was in the blood and in the
very air of the household. There is no better instance of the heredity
of genius and of predestination to a career. Yet James did not find
himself immediately; he floundered about in the world of thought long
after the age at which most men have hung out shingles. He was thirty
when he was appointed instructor in physiology at Harvard, and his
tardiness in establishing himself as a bread-winning citizen fretted
him. Lesser men who feel that the expression of their talents has been
thwarted or postponed may take comfort from the fact that James's
first printed book, the "Psychology," appeared in 1890, when he was
forty-eight years old.

The fact that James was an intellectual roamer and did not proceed
docilely from a doctor's degree to a position as teacher, in a groove
forever, accounts, in part, for the flexibility and variety of his
thought. His "dribbling," as he calls it, during years when he
suffered from physical illness and a depressing sense of impotence,
was not altogether bad for the man or for the philosopher. He wandered
about Europe, became bilingual, if not trilingual (he was never quite
happy in German speech or German philosophy). His learning was
enriched with odds and ends of information such as belong rather to
the man of the world than to the professor. If he had lived all his
life in Koenigsberg or Cambridge he would have been neither Kant nor
James. To him philosophy was never an affair of remote abstract
heavens or of little dusty class rooms. He served academic interests
faithfully and did more than any other man to make the department of
philosophy at Harvard the finest thing in American university life.
But he was in constant rebellion against the academic world and,
indeed, against all institutionalism. He wrote to Thomas Davidson:
"Why is it that everything in this world is offered to us on no medium
terms between either having too much of it or too little? You pine for
a professorship. I pine for your leisure to write and study." Yet he
had more leisure and freedom than most men. He went abroad whenever he
wanted to go, and never knew what it was to be down to his last
dollar.

His lateness in finding himself professionally and philosophically is,
perhaps, related to his perpetual youth, his eagerness for new ideas,
his inability to be fixed and settled. He sometimes grasped at ideas
too hastily and welcomed such new arrivals as Wells and Chesterton
with a heartiness which, perhaps, they did not quite deserve. But that
was the fault of his enthusiastic catholicity. He hated shut minds and
shut doors of thought and feared nothing except that some possibly
valuable inquiry might be hindered or stopped by stupidity and
prejudice. His colleague, Professor Palmer, called him "the finest
critical mind of our time." Let the philosophers decide whether that
is excessive praise. We mere laymen can know him and enjoy him as he
reveals himself in his letters, a vivacious, humorous, affectionate
man.


II.

The supreme service of William James to philosophy is the restoration
of philosophy to the uses of life. At least that is the tendency of
his philosophy. Even though much wisdom still remains shut up in a
tower, indifferent to life, and though life may often be ungrateful to
and suspicious of such wisdom as is offered to it, nevertheless
James's attempt to bring about a _rapprochement_ was his finest
contribution and is expressed in some of his most glowing pages. He
came at the right time and illustrated in himself one of his hearty
beliefs that Humanity will produce all the types of thinker that it
needs. At the moment when he entered the realm of philosophy, the
physical sciences had arrogantly assumed, if not all wisdom, the
possession of the correct method of searching for wisdom. On the other
hand, the transcendental philosophers held themselves aloof from the
physical sciences and ignored psychology. This division of interest in
a world which James himself tried to keep manageably split up and
pluralistic, was his first philosophic perplexity and, in his
treatment of the problem, he committed himself to inconsistencies and
self-contradictions, which were partly inherent in the situation and
partly due to his temperament.

Through all his writings, from one of his earliest papers (that on
Renan's "Dialogues," republished in "Collected Essays and Reviews") to
the last chapters of "The Meaning of Truth," James saw philosophers as
so many individuals, each fighting under his own banner of truth, and
he was puzzled because they would not be reconciled and fight together
against the powers of darkness which must be conquered if philosophy
is ever to be worth anything, and if there is ever to be any reason
why there should be philosophers to sit in comfortably endowed chairs.
No critic took more keenly humorous delight than James did in the
disputes of the schools, or stirred up with more lively argument the
factions whose lack of solidarity he deplored.

Take two examples. While James was young and still under the influence
of his laboratory studies he made out a good case for psychology as a
natural science, admitting that in its present stage of development it
is rather a loose subject, but demanding for its best interests an
application of the scientific method. Then he saw that he had gone
counter to his own belief in the unity of knowledge, or the unity of
study. It occurred to him that something valuable might be lost to
psychology if metaphysical and epistemological inquiries were
debarred. So in an address to the American Psychological Association,
he openly renounced his first position, adding, however, as a
half-smiling reservation, that metaphysics should give up some of its
nonsense as a condition of admission.

In one of his last papers, that on "Bradley or Bergson," James takes a
shrewd pleasure in tracing their resemblances as far as they go, and
then laments that they diverge, because if they had kept together they
could between them have buried post-Kantian rationalism. For a
complexity of partisanship in unity that can not be surpassed! But
James's willingness to be pallbearer at the funeral of a philosophic
idea was not inconsonant with his determination that some other ideas
of doubtful character should be allowed to grow up and thrive. For the
old idea had had its say. The new ideas might be strangled in infancy.
Let each new idea have its time and opportunity. Let everything be
tried. It is better to be credulous than bigoted, but to be
excessively one or the other is not befitting a philosopher.

Aside from certain technical problems, James's philosophic attitude
was always determined by his answer to the question: On which side
lies the greater force and fullness of life, the possibility of
richness, novelty, adventure? In 1895, at the height of his power as a
man--though perhaps he grew wiser as he grew older--he ends a paper on
"Degeneration and Genius" thus: "The real lesson of the genius-books
is that we should welcome sensibilities, impulses, and obsessions if
we have them, as long as by their means the field of our experience
grows deeper and we contribute the better to the race's stores; that
we should broaden our notion of health instead of narrowing it; that
we should regard no single element of weakness as fatal--in short,
that we should _not be afraid of life_." The italics are his. If
that is not good psychological argument, then there is something the
matter with the science of psychology. It is only just such good sense
as this that a common man can understand, and the humanity and
eloquence of it are better than argument.

Can a common man understand philosophy? James believed that he can
both understand it and express it. Two or three times he quotes the
saying of his friend the carpenter: "There is very little difference
between one man and another, but what little difference there is is
very important." He has a hot contempt for Renan's cool contempt for
_l'homme vulgaire_, and he admires Clifford's "lavishly generous
confidence in the worthiness of average human nature to be told all
the truth, the lack of which in Goethe made him an inspiration to the
few but a cold riddle to the many"--and the possession of which by
James made him a greater teacher of youth.

He was an instinctive democrat and was always on the side of what, in
his social environment, was the unpopular minority. Like Whitman, of
whom he often speaks with admiration, he was a born individual
aristocrat, with no delusions about the intelligence of the herd but
an immense faith in its possibilities. His generosity towards the
delusions of common men was warmer than towards the delusions of
philosophers, because philosophers have opportunities for study--and
should know better. He had only one fear, which sometimes took a
belligerent form (there is something in his book on psychology about
the relation between belligerency and fear); and that fear was lest he
or some other philosopher should try to interfere with a possibly good
idea, to put sand, not on the tracks, but in the machinery. The
vaguely comforting fatalistic belief that good ideas will prevail and
bad ones die he regarded as untrue to the history of human thought,
and not good for people whose business it is to express thought. James
held that it did make a real difference in the world that a saint or a
monster, St. Paul or Bonaparte, did not die in his cradle. It does
make a difference--the one illustration that James would have laughed
at--that James lived to be a philosopher. Ideas do sometimes seem just
to happen, to grow without human guidance, but the precious ideas have
to be fought for. Matthew Arnold's idea, that it is our duty to make
the best ideas prevail, may seem priggish and dictatorial, yet
fundamentally James had the same idea. Pluralism, he says, is not for
sick souls but for those in whom the fighting-spirit is alive.
Philosophy does not flourish by accident. Men make it.

Therefore, philosophy begins in the human mind, and is the history of
the action of mind on experience. James was from the very beginning a
student of the human mind. He began in epistemology and he ended
there. One of his earliest essays is a rather too easy slipping of his
knife into the "operose ineptitude" of Spencer's definition of mind,
and his last word about a philosophic puzzle was: "We shall not
understand these alterations of consciousness either in this
generation or the next."

The right self-contradiction consists not in turning in obedience to
others, but in going against the wind from whichever direction it
blows. James attacked the too-much in any philosophy, even his own. To
the over-credulous he preached caution; to the over-sceptical, faith.
This sort of antagonism between two ideas is not contradiction but
balance of mind. Apropos Professor Schiller and others he demands an
"all-round statement in classic style," and, himself the jolliest
joker that ever was in philosophy, he recommends that Mr. Schiller
"tone down a little the exuberance of his polemic wit." But to the too
sober he says, "Our errors are not such awfully solemn things. A
certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive
nervousness in their behalf."

As a philosopher, James had to use the terms peculiar to his craft,
but he so strongly sustained those terms in a structure of words which
can be found in a pocket-dictionary that the peculiar terms of the
craft become intelligible to simple literate men, and it may be that
thereby they become more intelligible as mere philosophic terms. Like
Bergson he is a poet and a humorist in his analogies and
illustrations. When we read that "the feeling of 'q' knows whatever
reality it resembles," many of us, including the philosophers, I
suspect, are lost in the dark. But when we read that "the Kilkenny
cats of fable could leave a residuum in the shape of their undevoured
tails, but the Kilkenny cats of existence as it appears in the pages
of Hegel are all-devouring, and leave no residuum"--then we begin to
believe that philosophy may be a human and amusing study and that to
be great in philosophy it is not necessary always to be thinking of
the other side of the moon.




BIOGRAPHIES OF POE


The biography of Poe got a wrong start immediately after his death
when Griswold slandered him or at least put a false emphasis on
certain aspects of his character. Since then, every book about Poe has
had an argumentative tone, a defensive spirit, which in a way is as
unfair to Poe as was the first misrepresentation. One sometimes feels
like crying: "For heaven's sake read his work and let the man alone!"
Yet it is not possible to let Poe alone if you have once looked into
his life; his story is one of the fascinating chapters of literary
history. Professor Smith says that his book, "Edgar Allen Poe, How to
Know Him," "is an attempt to substitute for the travesty the real Poe,
to suggest at least the diversity of his interests, his
future-mindedness, his sanity, and his humanity." On the whole,
Professor Smith's attempt is successful and he does help us to realize
Poe's personality, "that co-ordination of thought and mood and
conduct, of social action and reaction, of daily interest and aim,"
which Professor Smith justly says, "finds no portrayal in the
biographies of Poe."

It is an odd fact that after Griswold two of the more authoritative
biographers of Poe did not like him. One was Richard Henry Stoddard;
the other, Mr. George E. Woodberry. Neither one, I suspect, chose Poe
as a congenial, or even as an interesting subject. The task of writing
his biography seems to have fallen to both men as a literary chore; to
Stoddard as an official critic who knew Poe, and to Mr. Woodberry as a
rising young man of literary talent who thirty years ago was selected
by the editor of the "American Men of Letters" to write the life of
Poe. Of course, Mr. Woodberry is a competent workman. When, in the
year of Poe's centennial, he enlarged his "Life" to two volumes, he
put together in a judicial, objective style probably all the facts
that we need to know. But his aesthetic judgments are at best
unsympathetic. It may be that the lyric "To Helen" has been
overpraised, though it is difficult to understand how there can be too
much praise for a masterpiece. And when Mr. Woodberry says of our
American writers that they were concerned "not with the transitory,
but the eternal; and, excepting Poe, they were all artists of the
beautiful," we seem to have an example of that sort of moralistic
aesthetics which sounds lofty but is only bosh. "If Poe was not an
artist of the beautiful," Professor Smith asks, "what was he an artist
of?"

That is a good, sensible question and Professor Smith's answer, if not
as eloquent as some things that have been written by Poe's European
admirers, is sound and appreciative. If it be an American tendency to
overrate our national men of genius, we have certainly not displayed
that tendency in relation to the American writer who more than any
other has captured the imagination of Europeans, for undoubtedly the
finest criticism of Poe has come from our brethren overseas. Stoddard
had but a grudging sense of Poe's merits and ends his account with a
remark which contains a partial truth but which, although it is quoted
from Dr. Johnson, is a flat anti-climax: "All that can be told with
certainty is that he was poor." There seems to be a good deal more to
tell than that, and, indeed, the implications of Poe's poverty, as it
affected the artist, are better expressed by Stoddard himself when he
says that Poe "wrote with fastidious difficulty, and in a style too
much above the popular level to be well paid."

American criticism of Poe is thick with moralisms. Thus Lowell wrote:
"As a critic Mr. Poe was aesthetically deficient ... he seemed wanting
in the faculty of perceiving the profounder ethics of art." But, we
may well ask, what is "the profounder ethics of art," and who, except
a New England preacher, wants to be bothered with it in lyric poetry?
Poe always focused his attention on beauty, on excellence of
workmanship, both in the work of other craftsmen and in his own. The
Scottish critic, Mr. John M. Robertson, seems to be nearer the truth
than Lowell when he says that Poe "has left a body of widely various
criticism which, as such, will better stand critical examination
to-day than any similar work produced in England or America in his
time." I am glad to see that Professor Smith regards Mr. Robertson's
essay on Poe as "the ablest brief treatment in any language." The only
exception, which Mr. Robertson himself would be the first to make, is
the essay by the French critic Emile Hennequin.

But Professor Smith does not quite escape American moralism in his
effort to accentuate Poe's virtues. He makes too much of Poe's
interest in religion, which was surely nothing but a purely
intellectual and critical interest, and his recurrent emphasis on
Poe's Americanism is too tiresomely patriotic even for a professor in
the United States Naval Academy. Poe was keen for the best interests
of American literature, zealous in searching out any note of promise
in a new poet and in pointing to the weak spots in men of acknowledged
talent. He sometimes exhibits a kind of local Southern patriotism
which does not much interest us now. But on the whole, he was detached
from the issues of politics, an unlocalized, almost disembodied genius
whose apparition in the United States of America is still an endless
wonder to European critics.

One possible influence of Poe's environment on his art Professor Smith
is, so far as I know, the first to point out; and it is a very
valuable suggestion, even if it can not be thoroughly proved. In
Virginia, more than in any other American State, the English and Scots
ballads survive by oral tradition. It is possible that as a child Poe
heard these ballads recited or sung, and from them derived his sense
of refrain and repetition. To the influence of the ballad Professor
Smith adds the possible influence of plantation melodies as
"subsidiary sources of Poe's lyrical technique." He is certainly right
in thinking that Poe's originality consists not in the contribution of
a new form to poetry but in his individual development of forms
already established. His charm resides in the color of his words
rather than in the shape of his stanzas. But of course the two things
are inseparable and whoever tries to analyse them is hopelessly
baffled. Poe's own attempt to explain how the trick is done is far
from explaining it, and if he could not expound in prose the secret of
poetry, nobody can.

For Poe was first and always a critic, inquis

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/38487