Chapter 6 of 7 · The Freeman Book by Albert Jay Nock
V. Book Reviews
BOOK REVIEWS
ONE ON A TOWER
THINK, if you will, of the different sorts of places that different authors write in: some in bungalows, some in offices, some in hall-bedrooms; and some few in libraries, as veridically reported through the illustrated literary periodicals. Then, too, their costumes: some in shirt-sleeves; some in sport-clothes; some in dressing gowns or in monks’ robes, like Balzac; some in rags and some in tags and some in velvet gowns. . . .
Of all these men the most fortunate should be the man who writes in a real library, in a real country house conveniently distant from town; who intensifies his seclusion by turning his thoughts to distant lands and remote epochs, and by working in garments that remove him still farther from the Here and Now. One can not be too sure just how Mr. James Branch Cabell is garbed when bending over his desk some dozen miles from Virginia’s Richmond; but one feels confident that such a withdrawal justifies a special costume, borrowed from an earlier age and worn with a special mien.
So situated, one is shut in from the stir of the general air and tends to ignore the beat of the public pulse. The next stage beyond ordinary seclusion is seclusion in the well-known Ivory Tower. However, let us hasten to cancel the “ivory.” Mr. Cabell’s Tower is not of ivory—no, not exactly. Rather is it frescoed, mosaicked, even adorned with equivocal sculptures from strange, far lands. Really it is not the retired abode of utter innocence. It is more nearly the abode of self-idealization.
I find Mr. Cabell’s earlier books, and several of his later ones, sprinkled with personal allusions. Some of these have their obscurities, but all of them have their choicenesses. Some of these allusions are autobiographical; some of them topographical. Some of them are both, as might be expected from a man who pursues genealogy and heraldry and who is conscious of good old English origins and affiliations. Relatives—if ancestors—yield a certain satisfaction. Before such a scenic background as that supplied by family records, a man tends to take on a different aspect and to embellish a different view. He may incline to idealize a little both life and art. Yes, and himself.
It can hardly be said that Mr. Cabell, despite the number of his printed volumes, has ever shown any great tendency to open up his Tower and wave a greeting to the world below. Newspaper-life in Richmond and New York did not bring prominence; neither did the insistent praises of the late editor of Harper’s Magazine, sung through many years. Photographs and biographical notes have been pleasingly rare. Critics of consequence have assured our man that he could never hope to be popular. Perhaps only an inquiring censorship could have brought him into a real publicity.
Mr. Cabell’s Tower has always been ambulant—America, England, France, and the Nowhere-No-time of vague myth and tradition; and he sits in it and writes as it rocks. But its general tendency is to trundle back to France. Here it commands a wide mediæval prospect—a world hung with tapestry and carpeted with legend, a world whose social and amatory ideals he surveys and upholds, just as Mr. Ralph Adams Cram surveys and upholds its artistic and industrial ideals. Both hark back to an age that was unified, a world certain of its beliefs and prepared to act upon them. “Faith,” in the definition of the sharp schoolboy, “is believing what you know isn’t true”; but better to act on a belief which may not be well-founded than to hesitate, as to-day does, from lack of any belief at all.
Well, Mr. Cabell believes firmly enough in mediæval France, and his mediævals believe firmly enough in themselves. Yet a rocking tower plays hob with latitude and longitude, especially moral latitude and longitude, and duty towards the present hour sometimes receives scant consideration. The tower gets off its trolley. Then the Law, conscious of the dislocation, steps in and makes its inquiry. “Mr. Cabell, what does ‘Jurgen’ mean?” Raised eyebrows. “Why, is anything wrong about it? I’m sure I hadn’t the slightest notion of an impropriety”—and those who know Mr. Cabell know that, of all who were shocked and surprised, he was shocked and surprised the most.
Thus the self-absorbed, self-devoted artist, working out his theme—and letting the shocks fall where they may. One can even fancy Mr. Cabell, in the midst of that seclusion which is at once self-idealization and self-realization, as casting open his topmost casement and plaintively asking the Law to go away. But the Law has seemed disposed to throw back a long neck and reach up a long arm and to invite him down to a general consideration of the scope of his own deeds—since words are such.
One more novelist, in fact, to lose his social bearings in the absorbing stress of creation: Flaubert over again. The author of “Madame Bovary” probably had a moral aim superior to that of the author of “Jurgen,” but no higher an artistic aim. “Jurgen” was Mr. Cabell in fullest efflorescence—an ordered landslide of wit, whimsy, daring, erudition, élan, mischievousness, and rich, high, unflagging invention. But it was all art for art, art for cleverness and ingenuity and whimsicality, art for an elaborate, towering, many-storied jest in which personal idiosyncrasy and personal irresponsibility were allowed to count for considerably more than the proprieties, or even—to be a little harsh with our gay, satiric and momentumful friend—the essential decencies.
But circumstances alter cases, and I would scale down any probable harm to a reasoned minimum. I see Mr. Cabell living a life of his own in a self-idealizing retirement, guarded from certain practical contacts with this rude world, surrounded by many shelves of late Latin, mediæval and Renaissance authors of the less edifying class, and gradually losing (by reason of a currency unjustly limited through many years) any sharp sense of definite and responsible relationship to the society of his day. His choice of a remote field—remote alike as regards time and place—has doubtless helped to accentuate his slant. I make no doubt there are mornings when he has a momentary difficulty in distinguishing himself from Nicolas de Caen, and noons when he can not always draw a clear line between himself and the clerk Horvendile, and evenings when he is nearly at one with Felix Kennaston, and dark midnights when he must struggle to keep himself separate from John Charteris . . .
“Figures of Earth”1—if this new work is to be unified along its simplest axis—offers us, in Manuel, another Kennaston: as in “The Cream of the Jest,” we face the creative artist (here a “maker of images”) in the process of adjusting himself as comfortably as he may to the exigent daily facts and demands of social and domestic life. Wherever and whenever that fertile, fantastic Poictesme may be, our author sees it with half an eye still fixed on the vie privée of Virginia: throughout he remains delicately conscious of himself and his own concerns, however much those of the race at large may receive due and exciting recognition. Yet Poictesme handily predominates, and it is manipulated anew with increased freedom, flexibility, and insouciance. Less than ever are we sure just where it is and just when it was: but through the fluttery agitations of this shimmering medium (upon which Mr. Cabell is now as dependent as is Mr. Chesterton on paradox or Mr. Sinclair Lewis on reportage) we catch the outlines of his equivocal presentment.
Shall we not indeed see Mr. Cabell as a prankish priest intent, behind some veil, upon his mystery? Not all cults and their hierophants have invariably worked towards piety, nor under the sense of a keen social and moral responsibility. On the contrary. Yet we might ask our mystic to descend to the foot of his Tower or to the fore-court of his temple, putting his foot on firm, honest ground, looking about regardfully for the presence of friends and neighbours, and asking himself whether, after all, he hasn’t some duty towards them, if only the negative duty of being a bit more discreet.
But here we are, demanding the most footless and futile of things—asking an artist to make himself over, to alter the essential hang of his character, and to change the general sweep of his literary draperies. A man’s character is like a pair of trousers—tinker with them ever so little, and you alter the whole swing; for better, if you know how; for worse, if you don’t. Shall we take the responsibility of altering the pantalon under discussion? On the whole, no. Decorum would doubtless gain; but the world would dull, the Flesh would pale, the Devil would droop, and the high horse of Invention would lower his proud crest beyond the certainty of a pick-up. Only those readers who are well-enough disciplined to follow closely a conscious artist in his work of self-realization will grasp the nature and the intricacies of certain thematic strands; and they, of course, are seasoned, acclimatized, immune. The merely prurient, coursing over such difficult ground as much of Mr. Cabell’s is, get winded almost at the start. All the same, one may congratulate oneself—referring rather to “Jurgen” than to its successor—on not being in charge of a paddock of clever colts and fillies, with sharp eyes, nimble feet and ears a-prick. You might prefer that such should crop Mr. Harold MacGrath or nibble at Mr. Holworthy Hall or browse on Mr. Scott Fitzgerald; and a likely youngster, with justifiable hopes for a future, must deserve—and desire—rather better fodder than that. But Mr. Cabell, meanwhile, remains a cate ambrosial for the experienced and determined adult.
H. B. F. 4. v. 21.
THE PHILOSOPHER OF SEA-POWER
THERE are many reasons why American citizens should welcome the life of Admiral Mahan1 by Mr. Charles Carlisle Taylor, former British Vice-Consul at New York. Momentous questions, particularly with regard to naval armament, are soon to be determined, and many voices, English, German, and Irish, are calling upon the United States to adopt this or that expedient. In the babel of tongues, it is important to know whence cometh the secret wishes that choose the argument and shape the logic. The publication of Admiral Mahan’s correspondence throws a great white light on corners that have long needed illumination, for no other man in the history of the American navy has wielded such a potent influence by his pen upon the form and philosophy of American defence at sea.
Alfred Thayer Mahan was born at West Point on the Hudson in 1840 and died in 1914. He was one-half Irish, one-quarter English, and one-quarter French-American. By the fortunes of matrimony he was brought up in the Protestant Episcopal Church instead of the Catholic fold, and by fate it was decreed, he thought, that the English strain should predominate over all the others in his nature. He was educated at Columbia College, in the days when it was a small Episcopalian institution, and at the United States Naval Academy. From the first, his interests were in the larger and more philosophical aspects of war rather than in the narrower technique of destruction. He did his turn at sea, but he was overjoyed when a call to teach at the Naval War College permitted him to devote himself to the study of the history of naval warfare in all its phases.
His voluminous works on the influence of the sea-power in history, and his numerous articles on that and related subjects were the fruits of many years of study and reflection. The thesis which he developed (1890–2) was, in brief, this: the sea-power has been one of the most potent factors in shaping the destiny of nations; it is the secret of England’s supremacy; it was the instrument of her triumph over Napoleon; every country that would be great must give immense strength to this arm of defence. The practical conclusion which Mahan drew from this thesis was that the maintenance of the British navy constituted “one of the best hopes for the peace of the world,” and that its strength would be our strength. At the same time, he believed that the United States should build a navy of great power.
This thesis, put forward with undoubted cogency and buttressed by much learning, made a profound stir in the world. The Kaiser read it and was at once fired with zeal to increase the potency of his Empire on the sea. In England it was greeted with hearty praise from all advocates of continuous naval construction. Mahan was wined and dined in England as few Americans had ever been before. Oxford and Cambridge conferred degrees upon him. Queen Victoria invited him to her table. He met the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York. In fact he was, as our biographer tells us, the lion of the London season. Quite rightly, therefore, Mr. Taylor regards Mahan as among the greatest assets of the British naval empire. He also considers it no less significant that Admiral Sims “was born under the British flag, and that his mother was British; her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Snowden, the Admiral’s grandfather and grandmother, both being English.” If we had the Sims correspondence, as we now have the Thayer correspondence, edited by a British admirer, we should doubtless know a great deal more than we now do about the inner history of the present creed that accepts for America the supremacy of the British navy.
Laying all that on one side, let us consider for a moment the meaning of this thesis. The naval arm in an age of world-commerce is the supreme arm. Whoever wields it can dictate, even though it may be wisely and beneficently. America accepts British naval supremacy. America has wide-reaching commercial and territorial interests. If a clash arises with Great Britain, the power of ultimate decision rests with the possessor of the potent arm, the superior navy. Thus, in fact, sovereignty in the world-arena has passed to Great Britain. This is the cold, hard truth. Any final accommodation with England that leaves her supreme on the sea accepts her sovereignty in a sphere of vital concern to America. To that extent America is, in effect, a province of the British Empire. The only offset for the United States is the possible conquest of Canada.
If this is what we are to have; if this is what our fighting men on the sea are to be taught by American admirals, if this is to be our accepted policy, it is time that we should face it frankly and enter upon the compact with full understanding of its implications. Moreover, if we hope for the continued freedom and integrity of this nation, we must firmly and honestly believe that Great Britain will not do to us what she has done to Spain, Holland, France, and Germany in their aspirations for world-trade and dominion. We must assume that under no circumstances would England attempt to draw around our country the circle of diplomacy and steel which she drew around the German Empire. We must read the history of the last thirty years of European diplomacy now streaming from the presses, and yet say that England would never treat her American rival as she has treated her formal rivals.
By all means let us lift the veil boldly and face the light without flinching. Admiral Mahan may be right. The course he lays down for us may be the true course. But let us walk in it with our eyes open, and frankly accept our provincial status as the greater blessing. Certainly it would be well to have the fever over so that we may quit tossing violently on this bed of uncertainty, hovering between war and peace, armament and disarmament. Nothing is so good for a strong man as decision even though the medicine he chooses proves to be bitter.
Mr. Taylor has helped us to clear our minds by presenting this excellent biography. The letters published are genuine historic documents and the style befits the subject. He makes Mahan an attractive figure to the public interested in him. The versatility of the Admiral is revealed in all its fullness. He could stop amid his profound historical researches to make a trenchant criticism of Mr. Churchill’s novel, “The Inside of the Cup,” or to refute Dr. Eliot’s Unitarian arguments. He was a faithful member of the Protestant Episcopal Church, regular in his attendance on divine worship, deeply interested in its missionary enterprises, a contributor to the spread of the gospel in heathen lands. He was a Roman of the old type, sincere, devout, reserved, a good husband, a strict but affectionate father, and conservative in politics. Woman suffrage, Irish Home Rule, and the decline of the British House of Lords in power were all alike painful for him to contemplate. Though a profound student always near the midnight lamp, he was no academician. As a delegate at the Hague peace conferences, he refused to approve the prohibition of gases in warfare, and kept our country from going on record against this now accepted instrument of destruction. Admiral Mahan, besides being a seer, was therefore a practical man of war. His Christianity was of the robust, red-blooded type. Thanks to the labours of an English gentleman, the distinguished sea captain stands before us in full length, revealed as an heroic figure in the devoted band working for the Anglo-American entente—that band which includes Mr. J. M. Beck, Admiral Sims, and Bishop Manning.
C. A. B. 10. viii. 21.
THE FOUNDERING GRANDSONS
WAS there ever a society in which the man of thought, as such, stood in less esteem than in contemporary America? Was there ever a society in which the life of meditation was more wantonly unprovided for, or the claims of the creative life more brutally ignored? In sombre moments one doubts it, and one speculates uneasily on what can possibly be the destiny of so despiritualized a people as we have become. Industrialism, which is largely responsible, has of course operated with the same devastating force wherever it has with any completeness moulded the institutions of a country, but in America its roots had penetrated the soil before any vital and valid tradition of the spirit had asserted itself. That is the real reason why, for all our noisy “individualism,” we have never produced a dissenting philosopher or a destructive critic of the first order. It is the reason, too, why the whole cultural side of our life has been, at its best, acen-trous and invertebrate; at its worst, shoddy, childish, and insincere. Every people, the cynics say, gets the kind of government it deserves, and we in America, on the plane of thought and letters, may pertinently wonder whether we have deserved nothing better than some of our syndicated philosophers and our Sunday-supplement professors. The truth is, we have had better than we deserved (there are higher types than these), and we have penalized the finer spirits, when they have appeared, by depriving them of exactly that sense of social relevance which their free development requires.
The plight of the philosopher and the artist among us is too apparent to be denied, and it is what especially occupies Mr. Harold Stearns in his recent volume on “America and the Young Intellectual.”1 This book is written with exceptional vigour, astuteness, and insight: one can only wish that Mr. Stearns had presented his point of view in a less fragmentary and unintegrated manner. But in his challenge to the conscience of America, Mr. Stearns is on the side of the angels. “Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilization when its youth begins to desert it.” That, he points out, is precisely what is happening, and his inclination is to blame, not the youth, but the civilization. Not even Mr. Mencken could be more aware of how barren, how brutal, how bigoted and repressive that civilization is. “The institutional life of America is a combination for the black-jacking of our youth into the acceptance of the status quo, not of 1920, but of the late eighteenth century in government, of the early nineteenth century in morals and culture, and of the stone age in business.” Mr. Stearns asks, in one of his titles, “What can a young man do?”—and in words that are a sad commentary on Horace Greeley’s earlier adjuration, he answers, “Get out.”
And stay out? Well, probably not, for it is included in Mr. Stearns’s point of view that “our genuine national culture” does contain a principle of integrity, and one which, though it has grown harmless through long disuse, can be rejuvenated and refurbished and made to do duty once more as an object of allegiance. It is here that one begins to part company with him, as definitely as one does with Mr. Stuart P. Sherman, whose observations called forth the first chapter in this book. Mr. Sherman as most of us know, discovered once, in a fleeting pythonic mood, that the heart of the American people burned with an intense moral idealism, and this is what he has since held up reproachfully to young dissenters as the centripetal principle of American culture. To many less erudite and perhaps more realistic minds it occurred to glance about the American scene for traces of that high ethical ardour, and, to date, their search has been unrewarded. Besides, it was suspected, to begin with, that Mr. Sherman’s conception of morality was a cramped and parsimonious one, and that, in relation to it, his interest in the creative life was perfunctory.
Mr. Stearns makes short shrift of Mr. Sherman’s “moral idealism”:
Surely he is not so naïve as to confuse the reformistic and uplift tendencies of our national life—the Pollyanna optimism; prohibition; blue-laws; exaggerated reverence for women; home and foreign missions; Protestant clericalism—with anything a civilized man can legitimately call moral idealism. If he looks these things squarely in the face, he must recognize these manifestations of American life as in no way related to moral idealism; they are the fine flower of timidity and fear and ignorance.
Nothing could well be more forthright or more final than this, and one is grateful to Mr. Stearns for it; yet his own analysis of our culture presents itself as a not wholly attractive alternative. “As well as a single phrase can describe it, our genuine national culture, I think, is one of almost belligerent individualism.” Now Mr. Stearns may have in mind phases or periods of American life which were characterized by an honest individualism, not just a trumpery one, but for our part we can not suspect what they were or are. Mr. Stearns thinks of his “New England forefathers who kept their blunderbuss well polished and hung in a conspicuous place on the wall, ready for highly individualistic use against the exactions of any too tyrannical Government”; but one wonders what sort of individualism this illustrates, and remembers how tolerant these New Englanders were of Thomas Paine, and, later, of Emerson, Thoreau, Garrison, and Whitman. Mr. Stearns alludes also to the energetic individualism of the frontier, but this, again, appears to us to have been a shallow individualism of adventure and enterprise, not a sound and spiritual one of thought and creation. As for contemporary America—is it possible even to think of a society more enamoured of conformity, more cruel towards dissent, more anti-individualistic?
No, with every wish in the world to agree with Mr. Stearns, and with even a willingness to be persuaded by Mr. Sherman, one can not easily allow that American life has ever given convincing evidence of being dominated either by moral idealism or by belligerent individualism. Whatever figures in our national life may be asserted to have embodied one or the other of these principles seem to us to have been exceptional and accidental, not representative. Instead of moral idealism we exhibit, socially, the cynicism and the soullessness of the most aged and weary societies; instead of belligerent individualism, we exhibit a passion for uniformity and standardization that can scarcely have been paralleled in history. What can a young man do, indeed? Well, the truth is, as Mr. Stearns himself realizes, that ninety-nine young men out of a hundred are as unperturbed by the situation as ever their elders could be; that they are, in fact, wholly unaware of its existence, and would be but mildly aroused if it were called to their attention. The hundredth young man, when he is not reduced very early to a disgruntled silence, can choose between shouting at the waves with pebbles in his mouth, or, in Mr. Stearns’s words, getting out. It is a disconcerting choice.
N. A. 18. i. 22.
THE ART OF TRANSLATION
THE difficulties of a translator are almost entirely due to the liveliness of the material with which he works. Life in greater or less degree clings to the words of his original, is gradually evoked by the rhythm and the sound of a phrase; and unless he transfers that life to his translation he is not only a traitor but a murderer. Of course there is such a thing as dead language, dead in the sense that it contains no overtones of human emotion; and a book written in such language, a textbook of mathematics, for example, may be translated accurately and completely into another language. Translation of dead language therefore verges on copying. The symbol of infinity does not kick up its heels and refuse to mean in one place what it means in any other place; it is as uniform and stable as well-ground paint. But take a plain little word like “heart,” and translate “sick at heart” into “mal au cœur”; what is wrong with the result? The trouble is that the words are alive, that they move about and intermarry with each other into an infinity of combinations, so that the meaning of the whole is in each case a novelty, not dependent upon the sum of the parts, and requiring a separate act of comprehension from the translator to match each expression of the original.
Here, then, is the first great reason of the rarity of good translations. The good float isolated on a huge gulf of the bad, because the successful performance of an act of comprehension will always be rare. If we analyse this act of comprehension more closely, we shall discover that it contains a surprising moral element, which is particularly worth notice on account of the modern horror of relating any moral quality to art. To comprehend, one must be possessed not only of the requisite knowledge and intellectual capacity, but also of humility. To comprehend is at least temporarily to submit. The vulgar translator, like the vulgar critic, fails because he is incapable of surrendering his ego, even for a moment, to the current of meaning which flows through his original. Houdar de la Motte, when he set himself to do Homer, insisted on elevating the morality of Homer’s gods to eighteenth-century standards, and transformed Agamemnon’s threat to make Chryseis his concubine into a tender declaration after the best French pattern.
When such conceit as La Motte’s is generalized in the form of a theory, it may easily damage the translations of better men than La Motte. The eighteenth century, peeping over the barrier raised by its theories of taste, could discern only so much of antiquity as was essentially akin to itself. It saw Horace, for example, very clearly; but it could not endure genius that obeyed other rules and was subject to other limitations than its own. The learned Greeks of Alexandria suffered from the same disease, and solemnly cast out of Homer’s text every line that they thought he could not or should not have written. In our own day, the theory that Homer is somehow or other pompous and old-fashioned has slain its thousands, and has spread over the otherwise excellent version of Lang, Leaf and Myers a thick coating of “saidst” and “spake” and “bethink.” This is not the place, however, for a history of translation. So far as English literature is concerned, such a history would demonstrate how the art of translation declined as the history of progress waxed great, until at last we had completely replaced the luxuriant prose of North and Holland with the vast aridity of Bohn. That was the natural result, for the theory of progress was little more than a form of collective conceit, and an obstacle to understanding. Pick up a volume of Bohn, and you will see how small a fraction of the original could survive.
Next to the difficulties of understanding come the difficulties of reproduction. The miracle is but half done; the wine must not be turned into water. Unluckily for us, the art of translation is by necessity deprived of exactly those men who would be its best practitioners. A man who can work miracles prefers to work his own miracles; an artist who could reproduce the passionate simplicity of Homer is pretty certain to spend his time on his own imaginings. Occasionally some genius will break all rules and previsions by being a professor, and will sacrifice himself upon the altar of his adored. Mr. Gilbert Murray with his Euripides is a modern instance; another is Mr. William Ellery Leonard, whose triumphant version of Lucretius is too little known. Such work as Messrs. Murray’s and Leonard’s is, however, a lucky accident. We have no right to count on anything more than talent. Talent is a vague term, but I mean by it the ability to translate good verse into good prose. Conington had talent, not genius; and his prose Virgil is far superior to his rhetorical verse. Jowett had talent, and Lang, and Jebb; a few recent names might be added from the Loeb Classical Library. Nevertheless, it is pretty clear that we are not being adequately paid in the coin of talent for what we lose through the scarcity of genius. The current translations from Latin and Greek into English are competent enough on the score of scholarship; but they are fatally sleepy; they drag. They render the original, but only after a perceptible pause, during which our attention evaporates. Once more we need to take a lesson from France.
The French know how to turn competent scholarship into a work of art. Pick up any volume of the new series published under the auspices of the Association Guillaume Budé,1 and put it to the severe test of reading aloud; you will find in the French version precisely what is lacking in ours, a flowing tautness of style and thought, a power not so much of holding the attention as of buoying it up and carrying it on. The obvious explanation of their success in reproducing the liveliness of the original is that they know French better than we know English, and there is something in it in spite of its being obvious. If a writer of English has any artistic conscience at all, he is liable to overdo; he bows and scrapes and becomes precious. The French, on the other hand, go straight ahead; they use a phrase without apologizing to it. Their technical mastery is facilitated by the study of manuels pratiques de la version, in which foreign idioms! are carefully classified and furnished with the proper solution in French. But technical mastery, though indispensable to the writer, is from the reader’s point of view a negative quality. It does not enchant, it merely prevents an existing enchantment from being broken. The interest with which we follow Maurice Croiset’s version of Plato, or Mazon’s Æschylus, or the Juvenal of Labriolle and Villeneuve, is not really due to the fact that they write French well, but to another and still more difficult achievement.
No work of art can be reproduced without being seen and retained as a whole. A poem is an act, single and indivisible; its appearance of multiplicity is due to the fact that the idea, the schema which came to birth in the mind of the author can not be communicated directly to the mind of the reader, but is compelled to disperse itself into the words and sentences which are to the original idea as turbines to a waterfall. We have already spoken of the act of comprehension which is required of the translator; now it is evident that the translator must not only grasp but hold. He must not only ascend along the words, which are many, till he reaches the source of those words, but he must somehow manage to stay at that pitch. If he is incapable of retaining his intuition of the original in its integrity, the resulting version may be correct, but will infallibly be dull. It may be of some value as a grammatical analysis or as a commentary, but it will not be literature. The interest with which we follow Croiset or Mazon is our response to their vivifying feat of attention; we actually participate in their attention. The process which goes on in us is not unlike the sympathy which at an athletic contest transforms an indifferent spectator into a tense, excited figure who is hurt by the player’s defeat and exults in the player’s victory. It is, in the case of literature, a subtler process; we can not witness the strain of attention and of memory which enables the work of art to live again in its new form, but our own feeling will testify accurately enough to its presence or absence.
The translator then must be humble that he may understand; he must have ardour and strength that he may communicate what he has understood. The ideal translator, that is, has the qualities and ambitions of a humanist; he has made himself at home in two ages, and prevents the treasures accumulated in the earlier age from being buried and forgotten in the later. Benjamin Rogers composed his brilliant version of the “Thesmo-phoriazusae” from memory, when he had no copy of Aristophanes at hand; Mr. Gilbert Murray, in the preface which he wrote for Rogers, speaks very wisely of such scholars as having steeped themselves in Greek literature till it became “a sort of instinct, a life-companion and a permanent joy.” That is humanism. But when Mr. Murray says that such scholarship “is old-fashioned, and is very English,” he commits a serious error. Messrs. Murray and Leonard are not old-fashioned; Croiset and Mazon are not very English. There is no essential conflict between the use of card-indexes and humanism. It is the function of the humanist to widen and deepen the thin stream of memory, until men who are separated by time or by language may drown in it their petty prejudices and hatreds and misunderstandings. The fashions of the moment and the chatter about scientific method do not make or unmake scholarship; rather it should be said that the scholar depends not upon his indexes but upon his capacity to unite with his special knowledge something of the artist’s power to see accurately and to communicate his vision to others. Scholarship which is devoid of that capacity is about as useful to mankind as science applied to engines of destruction. We could get along very well without it. But we can not get along without humanists, and a good translation is a sign that their race is not extinct.
R. K. H. 15. iii. 22.
THE CONFESSIONS OF JAMES JOYCE
MR. JAMES JOYCE’S “Ulysses”1 belongs to that class of literature which has always aroused more interest than any other. Although “Ulysses” is new and original in its form, it is old in its class or type: it actually, if not obviously, belongs to the Confession class of literature, and although everything in it takes place in less than twenty-four hours, it really contains the life of a man. It is the Confessions of James Joyce, a most sincere and cunningly-wrought autobiographical book; it is as if he had said, “Here I am; here is what country and race have bred me, what religion and life and literature have done to me.” Not only his previous book, “Portrait of the Artist,” but all of Joyce’s work, gives the impression of being literally derived from experience; and from internal evidence in “Ulysses,” notably the conversation of Stephen Dedalus on Shakespeare in the National Library, one suspects that Joyce believes only in the autobiographical in art.
Such being the nature of the book, it is clear that the difficulty of comprehending it will not be allowed to stand in the way by anybody who can get possession of it. Joyce has so many strange things to say that people would struggle to understand him, no matter in what form or tongue he wrote. Yet the difficulties in the way are very real; “Ulysses” is one of the most racial books ever written, and one of the most Catholic books ever written; this in spite of the fact that one would not be surprised to hear that some official of the Irish Government or of the Church had ordered it to be publicly burned. It hardly seems possible that it can be really understood by anybody not brought up in the half-secret tradition of the heroism, tragedy, folly and anger of Irish nationalism, or unfamiliar with the philosophy, history, and rubrics of the Roman Catholic Church; or by one who does not know Dublin and certain conspicuous Dubliners. The author himself takes no pains at all to make it easy of comprehension. Then, too, the book presupposes a knowledge of many literatures; a knowledge which for some reason, perhaps the cheapness of leisure, is not uncommon in Dublin, and, for whatever reason, perhaps the dearness of leisure, is rather uncommon in New York. In addition, it is almost an encyclopædia of odd bits and forms of knowledge; for the author has a mind of the most restless curiosity, and no sort of knowledge is alien to him.
“Ulysses” is a kind of epic of Dublin. Never was a city so involved in the workings of any writer’s mind as Dublin is in Joyce’s; he can think only in terms of it. In his views of newspaper-offices, public houses, the National Library, the streets, the cemetery, he has got the psychology of that battered, beautiful eighteenth-century city in its last years of servitude, when, as Padraic Pearse said, using Geoffrey Keating’s words, Ireland was “the harlot of England.” “Ulysses” is a record of a certain number of hours—fewer than twenty-four—in the lives of Stephen Dedalus, the hero of “Portrait of the Artist,” and Leopold Bloom, and of a shorter space of time in the lives of certain other Dubliners, nearly all of whom are called by their real names. The day opens in a disused Government tower by the sea a few miles outside Dublin, occupied for the summer by a few young men as their bathing-quarters. In this first brilliant, blasphemous section, we have Stephen, Malachi Mulligan, and an Englishman called Haines. The key to the life and mind of Stephen is in these first pages.
Stephen, an elbow raised against the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow . . . pain that was not yet the pain of love fretted his heart. Silently as in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown grave-clothes, giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful . . . a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across his threadbare cuff-edge he saw the sea, hailed as a great sweet mother by the well-fed voice beside him.
Wherever Stephen comes in, we have the vision of his dying mother; her death was the great episode of his life. True to his race, death is the one thing that rocks him to the foundations of his being; la gloire may be the great emotional interest of the French, love of the English, but death is that of the Celt. Stephen further reveals himself in the conversation with Haines the Englishman. “I am the servant of two masters . . . an Englishman and an Italian . . . the imperial British State and the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.”
He is the servant of these two; and where has the peculiar spiritual humiliation that the English occupation of Ireland inflicted on sensitive and brilliant Irishmen ever been expressed as in this book? Where has the aesthetic and intellectual fascination of the Roman Catholic Church ever found subtler fascination? “The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen’s memory the triumph of their brazen bells . . . et unam sanctam catholicam et apastolicam ecclesiam! The slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts.” Has the Catholic Church ever been described with such eloquence as in the paragraph that has that beginning?
The slender portrait of Haines, the Englishman friendly to Ireland, given in this section, is done with a subtlety beside which Shaw’s Broadbent is a crude daub. Stephen regards him with a suspicion and contempt that in their sinuosities never once become either hatred or tolerance. The lines with which he is drawn are barely visible—a rambling conversation, some words of description, a few jagged phrases in Stephen’s subconsciousness, some of which must be cryptic to non-Irish readers, like those in which his mind takes farewell of him. “Horn of a bull . . . hoof of a horse . . . smile of a Saxon”—a variant of that old Irish proverb muttered by nurses in the ears of their sleeping charges: “Of three things beware; the teeth of a dog, the horns of a bull, the word of an Englishman.”
Stephen leaves the tower to go to his task of giving lessons in a Unionist school. As he leaves after a conversation with the head master on many things, including Jews, the head master runs after him to inform him that the reason Ireland has the reputation of being the only country which never persecuted Jews, is that she never let them in. Then with delicate irony, we are given, in a few sections later, almost the whole history of modern Ireland and of Dublin, as it passes through the subconsciousness of a Jew, Leopold Bloom, a typical and perfect Dubliner in spite of the sex-obsession with which Joyce endows him in common with all his other characters. Bloom and Stephen, like good Dubliners, parade over the whole city in the course of the day; Bloom’s itinerary brings him from the north side, Stephen’s from the south side. They almost meet at various places, are actually in the newspaper-office and in the library at the same time; finally, at night they do meet in a brothel in a low part of the city. There Stephen has a fight with two English soldiers, and is rescued from the hands of the police by the tact of Bloom. He and Bloom then stroll around the north side of the city, and have coffee in a cabman’s shelter which is supposed to be run by “Skin-the-Goat,” that mysterious character in the history of Irish attacks upon English authority. Bloom then takes Stephen to his own home for a cup of cocoa, and the episodes of the book end at about three in the morning, some twenty hours from the time when the story begins.
There is little in the way of incident, but everything in the way of revelation of life and character. Joyce gives us the characters of Stephen and Bloom as they appear externally and in their own subconsciousness. One of the remarkable feats of the book is the manner in which the separate subconsciousnesses of Stephen and Bloom are revealed, with every aimless thought, every half-formed idea and every unformed phrase indicative of their separate character and personality, and of the influences that have gone into their making. This is most marked when they think of the same things. Stephen’s mind, young, sad, visionary, is held in a fast grip by the books he has read; his emotions are all locked up by the one overwhelming emotion—his mother’s death in sordid poverty. Men and things pass through his consciousness in vivid imaginative pictures; hjs whole temper is coloured by the humiliations he has undergone; his mind is so sensitive that everything is impressed upon it as with a branding-iron. Bloom’s mind is bright, jerky, limited; unformed by literature, but strongly affected by music, and concerned mostly with concrete things. Bloom is drawn with the most careful solicitude for every shade of his character and with a humour that is all-embracing, and yet never approaching the extravagant. He is so real that no Dubliner can fail to recognize in him a father or an uncle—with his plans for improving the city, the extreme political views of his youth when he was more advanced than Michael Davitt, the milder ones of his middle-age (though his wife speaks resentfully of his taking up with Sinn Feiners), his attempts to be fair to the English, as becomes a sensible man, his conviction that he can invent something, or anyhow compose a song for a pantomime, his dash of artistry, his sketchy occupation, his industrious idleness, his anxiety over getting a free pass for something or other—a railway journey, a concert, or a voyage to England. There is also a subtly suggested foreignness about Bloom, particularly in the sections where he goes to drink in public houses with other middle-aged Dubliners; and there is a striking passage where Bloom, remembering the other race to which he belongs, comes out with a quite impressive philosophy of life. He is the one character whom Joyce really loves and whom he endows with kindliness; and we remember his terrible concern for Mrs. Beaufoy who has spent three days in childbirth, and his buying biscuits to feed wild birds, and his care for the blind boy whom he meets in the street.
Almost every section of the book has a different form and manner. The account of events in Barney Kiernan’s public house is given by one of the bar-haunters in the vivid and circumstantial parlance of a public-house idler, interlarded with mock-epical narration. There is a point where the rage against Bloom for not treating mounts up to a quarrel, and a peacemaker gets them all off on a jaunting car, followed by the citizen’s barking mongrel, “and all the ragamuffins and sluts of the nation around the door, and Martin telling the jarvey to drive ahead, and the citizen bawling, and Alf and Joe at him to whisht.”
The scene in the hospital where Bloom goes to see Mrs. Beaufoy is described in parodies of almost every style of narrative in English, from Latin and Anglo-Saxon to the method of the Irish provincial reporter; an accomplishment in itself possible only to a man with a minutely technical knowledge of the development of the language. From this half-way chapter to the end, “Ulysses” ceases to be of paramount literary interest; to what extent a writer can parody different styles in the historic development of English is not of literary interest, it is of scientific interest. The catechism relating to Bloom and Stephen, being merely informing, is not of literary interest. The revelation of the mind of Marion Bloom in the last section would doubtless interest the laboratory, but to normal people it would seem an exhibition of the mind of a female gorilla who has been corrupted by contact with humans. The Walpurgis night scene (not called by that name) is too long and too incomprehensible; one feels that Joyce has here driven his mind too far beyond the boundary-line that separates fantasy and grotesquerie from pure madness. For the enlightenment of readers who may never see the book, it may be said that this scene is written in a manner somewhat like the second part of Goethe’s “Faust.” It takes place in a brothel; real people jostle against folk resurrected from the grave, ideas and thoughts that came to Stephen and Bloom during the course of the day take material form and join in the talk, as ideas and concepts do in “Faust.” There is a salient abutting on the real and the fantastical, where they all meet, jumble in and out of each other’s consciousness and subconsciousness, and disappear. For Stephen there appears inevitably the vision of his mother, as well as Shakespeare and old Gummy Granny (a satirical impersonation of Kathleen-ni-Houlihan). It is in parts wonderful, terribly impressive and revealing, but the prolonged scene gives too much the impression of a feat of intellectual and psychological gymnastics.
One of the chief occupations of critics of this book is making parallels between the sections and characters of “Ulysses,” and the Odyssey. The chief reason for this performance is that the author exhibits a notebook with all these parallels and many other symbolical explanations. When it comes to symbolizing, authors have from all time talked the greatest nonsense; think of the nonsense that Goethe achieved when explaining the second part of “Faust”! Just as plausible correspondences could be made between “Faust” and “Ulysses” as between the Odyssey and “Ulysses.”
What actually has James Joyce accomplished in this monumental work? He has achieved what comes pretty near to being a satire on all literature. He has written down a page of his country’s history. He has given the minds of a couple of men with a kind of actuality not hitherto found in literature. He has given us an impression of his own life and mind such as no other writer has given before; not even Rousseau, whom he resembles.
The Confession-mind in literature is of two classes. We have the Saint Augustine-Tolstoy type and the Rousseau-Strindberg-Joyce type. The difference between Rousseau and Joyce is, of course, extraordinary, but the resemblances are also extraordinary—a psychoanalyst would say that they had the same complexes. Like Rousseau, Joyce derives everything from his own ego; he lives in a narrow world in which he himself is not only the poles, but the equator and the parallels of latitude and longitude; like Rousseau, he has a passion, not only for revealing himself, but for betraying himself; like him also, he deforms everything he touches. Joyce’s method of deforming is chiefly with a sexual smear; where Rousseau romanticizes, Joyce de-romanticizes. In Joyce, as in Rousseau, we find at its highest a quality which in lesser men is the peculiar fault of the literature of their time; in Rousseau this was sentimentalism, in Joyce it is intellectualism. In the quality of pure intellect, whilst one remembers that a man can be a great writer with little intellect, Joyce is probably unsurpassed by any living writer. Some attempt is being made by admirers to absolve Joyce from accusations of obscenity in this book. Why attempt to absolve him? It is obscene, bawdy, corrupt. But it is doubtful that obscenity in literature ever really corrupted anybody. The alarming thing about “Ulysses” is very different; it is that it shows the amazing inroads that science is making on literature. Mr. Joyce’s book is of as much interest as science as it is as literature; in some parts it is of purely scientific and non-artistic interest. It seems to me a real and not a fantastic fear that science will oust literature altogether as a part of human expression; and from that point of view “Ulysses” is a dangerous indication. From that point of view, also, I do not consider it as important to literature as “Portrait of the Artist.” After “Ulysses,” I can not see how anyone can go on calling books written in the subconscious method, novels. It is as plain as day that a new literary form has appeared, from which the accepted form of the novel has nothing to fear; the novel is as distinct from this form as in his day Samuel Richardson’s invention was from the drama.
M. M. C. 19. vii. 22.
“THE OUTLINE OF SCIENCE”
SPECIALIZATION in modern science has become so great that the scientist speaks a language unintelligible not only to the layman but even to his own colleagues whose researches lie in other fields. Every one owes a debt of gratitude to the editor of “The Outline of Science”1 for attempting to bring into a small compass the results of modern research. Professor Thomson is known as a writer of numerous popular and semipopular works on biology, of which the most recent is the delightful volume on “The Haunts of Life.”2 The “Outline” itself is very interestingly written; the style is lucid and straightforward though often somewhat jerky; in places the reader’s head is being continually twisted about to contemplate some new marvel. The illustrations are always vivid and clear, and the two volumes so far published, especially in the sections dealing with natural history, are very readable indeed.
But natural history is the easiest part of science to write about because it is the least technical; we have long had interesting and accurate books dealing not only with animals and plants, but also with astronomical and geological subjects. It is the less descriptive and more theoretical parts of the work that constitute the real test of its success; and these, it must be admitted, are not so well done. The evidence is not always properly marshalled or critically handled, the reasoning is sometimes confused and incorrect, verbal descriptions are made to do duty where diagrams are needed, parables take the place of plain speaking, and difficult subjects are quickly passed over with statements so condensed that the reader is given a false impression. The bibliographies also often show important omissions. Moreover, the commendable attempt to maintain an impartial attitude sometimes breaks down at critical points. Thus, while the book avoids being dogmatic about the non-inheritance of acquired modifications, a subject on which scientific dispute has practically ceased, the discussion of vitalism versus mechanism, a question on which scientific opinion leans decidedly toward the latter side, is characterized by a definitely vitalistic bias. Of course the editor might be forgiven or even commended for being frank about his own views; but to the reader Professor Thomson’s beliefs are of less importance than an adequate presentation of the mechanistic theory.
Moreover, “The Outline of Science” fails to convey an impression of unity. The great achievement of science is its correlation of apparently unrelated facts, its disclosing of connexions where none have been suspected. To the unsophisticated reader it might well appear from the “Outline” that each science is a law unto itself. Except in that portion of the first volume which relates to the history of the earth and its inhabitants, the articles are arranged with no pretence to any system. The “plain story simply told” becomes a series of stories, each of which is simple merely because its relations to the others have been overlooked.
In another way also the editor of these volumes has shown a lack of a truly philosophic grasp. For although there have been nationalistic controversies over the credit for various discoveries, and in times of stress scientists have, like their non-scientific fellows, been swayed by their political emotions, nevertheless science has always constituted an international fellowship. The fact that, as in the case of wireless telegraphy, an idea may be theoretically worked out by an Englishman, experimentally demonstrated by a German, and practically applied by an Italian, is not only typical of the method of scientific progress but teaches a lesson of international co-operation which ought not to be neglected. The “Outline,” however, seems loath to take the world for its province; it is national in the sense of being British, and sometimes even provincial in the sense of being Scots. The casual reader might well receive the impression that only rarely have contributions to the advancement of knowledge been made outside the boundaries of Britain. Not that credit is given to those who do not deserve it; but it seems strange to read the section on physiology without seeing a mention of Claude Bernard or Johannes Müller, or to go through the discussion of energy without meeting the names of Mayer and Helmholtz. Moreover Continental scientists get very-scant representation in the picture gallery; in fact almost the only non-British portraits are those of prehistoric men.
The same defect appears in the sections on natural history. Here “our birds” are always British birds, “our mammals” British mammals, “our insects” British insects. These sections might have been utilized to give a more general idea of the life of the earth and to bring out some of the results of the study of geographical distribution. Instead, there seems to be rather too much emphasis on the United Kingdom even at the expense of the Dominions beyond the seas.
But after all, as Professor Thomson says in his preface, scientific information is less significant than the scientific habit of mind. As W. K. Clifford pointed out in his essay on the “Ethics of Belief,” and as Mr. Bertrand Russell maintained in a recent issue of the Freeman, it is of the utmost practical importance that people should harbour no views for which there is no evidence. If the “Outline” contributes towards such a rational attitude, all its weaknesses may be cheerfully forgiven it. However, a habit of mind, like any other habit, can be acquired only by practice; with all due regard for the services rendered by popular scientific treatises, we must admit that such works often produce a habit of mind quite the reverse of scientific. The oversimplification that necessarily characterizes non-technical exposition puts the reader under the impression that he has fundamental knowledge where he really has only superficial information. Hence this type of writing may defeat its own purpose. The general reader, who is not capable of weighing evidence critically, comes to be easily swayed to any notion that is plausibly trapped out in the paraphernalia of learning; and as a result, he may be induced to hold very definite ideas on subjects concerning which there is no real proof. Professor Thomson himself can scarcely contribute to clear thinking when, for example, he says: “The human sense of race is so strong that it convinces us of reality even when scientific definition is impossible.”
Those who greet popular expositions and compilations so enthusiastically as providing a remedy for ignorance lose sight of the fact that reading can never furnish that familiarity with scientific materials and methods that results from work in the laboratory or training in the solution of scientific problems. It may be unfortunate, but it seems to be a fact that we can learn only by taking ideas at intervals, by turning them over in our minds until all their aspects are familiar, by establishing a system of relations between them and our own interests. An outline of history may be both scholarly and readable because the notions with which it deals are familiar to every one; but any general treatment of science worthy of the name must be so full of ideas unfamiliar to the layman as to be quite unassimilable if presented in the guise of ordinary reading-matter. Whatever it may be that the uneducated person can read as he runs, it is not science.
I do not wish to be understood as criticizing Professor Thomson’s ability as a scientific expositor. But I do wish to suggest that the subtitle, “A Plain Story Simply Told,” is a mistaken one. Science is often a very complicated story requiring complicated exposition, and no amount of expert teaching can take the place of actual thought on the part of the student. The question is not so much whether one can explain Kant’s philosophy to a peasant in his own language, as Tolstoy said that one could, but whether, after one has done so, the peasant can understand one’s explanation. So far from being always capable of enunciation in plain English or French or German, science has, in many cases, in order to make any progress at all, had to emancipate itself from the ordinary forms of speech and to construct a language of its own. This is particularly true of mathematics and mathematical physics. It is generally recognized that their advance has been due largely to the invention of such notations as the decimal system, logarithms, the calculus, and the vast array of higher mathematical symbols that are utterly meaningless to the layman.
It is in those fields where ideas have become most precise that new methods of recording thought have been found necessary; and if great and highly trained minds like Newton and Einstein have required special languages to formulate and solve particular types of problems, is it likely that lesser and untrained minds can express these problems and present their solutions in terms of everyday speech? It is no mere accident of history that the attempts to popularize mathematics have been very few indeed: “The Outline of Science,” at least so far as its contents have been announced, makes not even a pretence at including this subject. Neither is it an accident that those who have written on birds and flowers have left thermodynamics, a much more fascinating topic, rather severely alone.
In his preface, Professor Thomson quotes Leibnitz to the effect that as knowledge advances, it becomes possible to condense it into little books. The implication is that, as the books would be little, they would be easy to understand. But this conclusion does not necessarily follow. In fact the “Outline” itself, far from being compressed in its treatment, is quite discursive and its material is spread very thin. Professor Thomson might have quoted a more extreme opinion even than that of Leibnitz, for Laplace said that with sufficient knowledge he could condense all science into a differential equation. Yet we have never seen it suggested that this equation would be easy to grasp. The nearest that science has come to such a mathematical formula of the universe, is in the equations of the general theory of relativity; and not even the most sanguine of popularizers has pretended that these are intelligible to any but the expert mathematician.
We have, in modern times, come a great distance along the road of popular education. Yet we must not be deluded into making a fetish of the ordinary man and his everyday speech. It is no injustice to the average intellect to point out that it is incapable of thinking scientifically for very long at a time. Some would claim that this trait can not be altered at all, that the great majority of individuals would under no circumstances be capable of straight thinking. But although there is, of course, a large range of variation in inherited mental ability, yet the general increase in rational thought that has occurred in the course of history does not seem to warrant an attitude of extreme pessimism. It ought to be possible to abolish what we call education, which seems to be a scheme invented for the purpose of preventing the young from learning too quickly until it is too late for them to learn at all, and to devise some system for teaching people what constitutes scientific method, and for giving them the elementary notions of mathematics, physics, and chemistry, of biology, and of astronomy and geology. Until we do something of this sort, popular science can scarcely be anything more than an outline—form without substance. We must realize that knowledge, like death, is no respecter of persons; and if there is no royal road to science, neither is there a special highway for the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.
A. W. 27. ix. 22.
THE POTTER’S THUMB
WHILE he lived, William De Morgan gave us good measure; and it is only fitting that the biography1 so long awaited should be a voluminous one, informed with something of the protean qualities of his literary work. It is discursive, and De Morgan was never in a hurry (using the phrase of a late distinguished literary agent) “to cut the cackle and come to the ’osses.” It is digressive, and it was not the least of the veteran novelist’s achievements that at a time when publishers were chastening the neophyte with shibboleths of “punch” and “pep,” caught at second hand from trans-Atlantic connexions, he succeeded in imposing upon them that leisurely ambient in which the British novel moves most naturally. A life whose elements were so disproportionately mingled was bound to entail very special difficulties on its biographer, and it can not be thought that every one will be satisfied at the way Mrs. Stirling has met them. Those who hailed the series of novels beginning with “Joseph Vance,” as the rising of a literary star of first magnitude, will feel that she has given us a little too much of De Morgan the potter, and correspondingly little of De Morgan the novelist. Those whom affection for the gentle and garrulous old annalist of mid-Victorian manners has never deluded into any misconception of his literary rank, will probably be the most indulgent. They would ill spare one paragraph of the long prologue whose testimony to a whole-hearted self-effacement in the cause of beauty, seems to reach us from the golden era of craftsmanship.
De Morgan’s family-background was rich and colourful. His blood was of the generous Huguenot strain which repaid Britain so amply for its protection, filling its crafts with skilled workers and its far-flung armies with professional soldiers who worked at their profession. The Empire took heavy toll of the novelist’s immediate forebears. A great-grandfather was blown up in the taking of Pondicherry, a grand-uncle disappeared in a cavalry-skirmish with Tippoo Sultan’s troops, two uncles were drowned, and the family-records lost in the wreck of home-coming East Indiamen; and the writer’s father was disqualified for continuing the family tradition of military service by a tropical disease which resulted in the loss of an eye.
It is probably from this father, Augustus De Morgan, the distinguished mathematician, that the son inherited the stubborn un-worldliness that marked his long battle for the arts against Philistinism. The sire refused the opportunities for advancement that the older universities would have afforded him, rather than subscribe to the religious tests then demanded, leaving his confession of faith in the divinity of Christ to be read from his will at a time when it could no longer be “the way up in the world.” Taking a chair in mathematics at the newly-founded non-sectarian University of London, Professor De Morgan settled down with his wife, who was the daughter of William Frend, an actuary and ex-clergyrman, in a modest house in Gower Street, where that erratic tribune of the people, Sir Francis Burdett, Lord Brougham, Coleridge, Browning and Wordsworth were familiar guests. It is pleasant to recall that in Charlotte Street near by, at about the same time, and round a still humbler professorial hearth, refugees whose social rank ranged from marquis to image-seller were gathered nightly to read Dante and scheme for a united Italy, entertained by their frugal hostess with thick slices of bread and butter, and coffee, while little Gabriel and Michael Rossetti listened, wide-eyed and wondering.
In the British middle class of to-day, riddled by tawdry ideals, shams and “swank,” such a circle as Mrs. Stirling draws for us would not only be undiscoverable but inconceivable. The father, absorbed in his texts and theses, is rather a shadowy figure. But the mother, Sophia De Morgan, stands out with a fine distinctness. Of advanced views, as befitted the daughter of a pastor whom intellectual integrity had exiled from Cambridge and Episcopacy, she was part founder of Bedford College for women, a fellow-worker with Elizabeth Fry in prison- and workhouse-reform, and a pioneer for woman suffrage. Devoted to her six children, she keeps a nursery journal in which “peccadilloes and corrections” are chronicled day by day, together with phrenological charts of the young De Morgans. The family write verses and parodies after the manner of Edward Lear, give concerts of chamber music, exchange whimsical letters ornamented with pen-and-ink drawings, and dabble in psychic phenomena. Worldly advancement, far less social climbing, does not enter into the De Morgans’ scheme of life. It is significant that in a long letter written by the professor to his son on the selection of a career, financial reward is never once mentioned as a motive that should influence his choice. Imperialism, the stock-market and the “stunt” press have ravaged all this once and for all.
After a brief study at the academy schools, which seems at first blush a mistaken locale in which to test an artistic vocation, William De Morgan compromised by selecting the more formal field of stained glass. The relics of this period, we are told, still attest a flair for recovering lost processes through sheer force of honest workmanship. The long and financially disastrous essay in tile-making began with a re-discovery of iridescent Persian glaze in 1872; and from this time on for nearly thirty years, De Morgan’s history becomes an Odyssey from one suburban kiln to another, generally marked by unforeseen accidents and never far from the ragged edge of bankruptcy.
Probably no enterprise has ever been conducted with so complete a disregard for commercial foresight or decorum. The first kiln set fire to a house in Fitzroy Square. A second fire narrowly missed destroying an old house at Chelsea, to which the tile works were removed. At Wandsworth, an error in measurements entailed the rebuilding of the ovens and wiped out all profits on the first big order. With an absorption in production so complete that meals were often forgotten went an apparently absolute indifference to its eventual disposal; though there was a vague and typically Victorian dream of whole streets eventually to glow in myriad-hued tile-fronts. There was no sales-organization, the pottery being sold at haphazard by such local stores as would take it on consignment. There were weeks when the employees went wageless because checks had been distributed unsigned. Royal patrons called, exhibited a typical instance of royal meanness, and were sent snubbed away. Pieces of ceramic of which De Morgan had grown fond were withdrawn from sale. At other times, a sort of orgy of destruction seized upon the eccentric master potter. An afternoon was spent on the eve of the removal to Wandsworth in putting a hammer through dishes and vases over whose fusing he had hung like a mother over a cradle, while limy assistants were bidden, “Help yourselves, boys.” A business conducted on similar lines to-day, and skilfully press-agented, might make its fortune by dint of sheer oddity. But the nineteenth century had not learned that everything, even eccentricity, can be capitalized, nor was De Morgan the man to teach it. Hand in hand with this commercial charivari, up to the very end, went improvements and new processes. The pottery produced before the final failure, Mrs. Stirling tells us, was the most beautiful of all. De Morgan had inherited an inventive brain, and had enough “notions” to make fortunes for three shrewd Yankees. An improvement in the visual field of binoculars, used by the Germans during the war, and the first free wheel for bicycles, were among the discoveries he never troubled himself to patent; and he was working on a design for an improved airplane at the time of his death.
Unalloyed domestic happiness came to the ageing craftsman through his marriage with Miss Evelyn Pickering, herself an artist of talent within the narrow Burne-Jones formulæ into which Pre-Raphaelitism had hardened. But it seemed that the utilitarian world to whose rules he would not subscribe, was always to be pressing on De Morgan’s heels. During an illness of his wife, an avalanche of bricks and mortar overwhelmed the Vale, a little oasis of park trees and old-world gardens in Chelsea, where he had set up his home; and when the couple finally migrated to Italy in search of health and peace, they stepped across their doomed threshold into a wilderness of demolition. In Florence, amid fresh difficulties and complications, manfully grappled with for a time by means of code-instructions to the Chelsea kiln, and samples of special thinness sent through the mail, the hapless adventure finally flickered out. The tiles and bowls that none would buy, found their way into museums, dealers’ hands and the collections of the wealthy. The craftsmen whom De Morgan had taught to make them, took to driving motor-cars and trolleys. Ichabod!
It was during this Italian interlude that it was my own good fortune to meet William De Morgan. The occasion was an “artists’ revel” in a hospitable studio on the Tornabuoni, where the outstanding feature was the wearing of more or less symbolic wreaths by the guests. Under De Morgan’s garland of ivy leaves, the domed and fragile brow, the iron-grey beard, the whimsical and rather wild eye, the long and sensitive nostrils, assumed a druidic and hierocratic air. He was gay and garrulous, entering with zest into the somewhat childish fun and artistic small beer. But in repose, the lines of his face were eloquent of fatigue and ill health. He had the indefinable air of those who have accepted defeat and are looking forward, not ungratefully, to the close of its aftermath.
As a matter of fact, that phase of his life which was to make his name a household word with English-speaking readers, had not yet begun. The history of “Joseph Vance” is familiar. Scribbled on notebooks and the backs of washing-lists as a relaxation for empty hours of illness, its merits were perceived by the faithful and appreciative wife. Publishers shied, not unnaturally, at the pile of manuscript a foot and a half high into which it was expanded. But De Morgan was deaf as ever to worldly counsels, and his stubbornness for once was justified when his novel, unabridged, took the reading world by storm. He enjoyed his success frankly and unreservedly. He wrote with extraordinary facility. Letters from all over the world poured in upon the lonely old writer, as once they had done on the prim author of “Clarissa Harlowe” in near-by Fulham; and, like Richardson, he was never aloof, always ready to discuss his Lossies and Gwens and Sallies with the far-away friends they had made for him. His sensibilities were not wrung by the jargon of “royalties” and “large printings.” At times, he spoke of using his literary profits to start the all-devouring kilns once more, but it never so happened, and perhaps in the end he would not have wished it. No publisher ever prevailed upon him to “tighten” his style, but he was grateful for criticism, and especially for any ex post facto justifications of his bizarre plots. One departure from his popular medium he made, an historical novel of the seventeenth century, hailed by a benighted Fortnightly reviewer as serious work. But the reading-public had grown accustomed to its De Morganisms; it would have its De Morganisms; and with a chuckle, the lovable old author took up his fountain pen and gave again of his inexhaustible store to that generous, whimsical and many-headed monster. He became something of a national figure. His views were sought on woman suffrage, on preparedness for war; he was invited to take the chair at Dickens celebrations; he engaged in a controversy on rubrics with a polemical Redemptorist. His accessibility, in the end, was the cause of his death. An officer on leave, determined to see in the flesh the writer whose books had eased hours of drudgery at the front, called, was hospitably entertained, and left behind him the seeds of deadly trench-fever. Seventeen days later, and after a week of delirium during which this descendant of many brave soldiers fancied himself a soldier in the fighting line, William De Morgan lay dead.
In assigning a place in literature to De Morgan’s work, or in intimating how far in real significance he falls short of even such fleeting and frustrate Victorian figures as Dowson or James Douglas, it is impossible altogether to dissociate the belated essay in letters from the long life that preceded it. Harsh things a-plenty have been said about the insufficiency of the younger writers, but it is not altogether a misfortune that until the hard lesson of selection has been learned, the substance that is to be given literary form should be meagre. De Morgan’s own content, the accumulation of sixty years of unremitting observation and experience, was prodigious. It burst and overran the mould into which it was poured; and the result is something strangely formless and chaotic, with only here and there a provokingly perfect fragment of contour projecting from the mass. His digressions are inveterate. One may read the long novels from cover to cover with sustained interest (they are really no harder to read than shorter and duller romances) and yet have the sense, as the last page is turned, not so much that a human experience has been achieved as that a vast clamour has suddenly ceased. He might be termed the master of the reverberant style, in which the echoes blur the measure. His humour is authentic, but marred by that relish for witless persiflage which all the Pre-Raphaelites shared, and which led them to correspond with one another in misspelled cockney English. It is plain that he was never subject to any kind of discipline, but triumphed, as he had failed, entirely on his own terms. He had little sense of proportion. He can not note the buzzing of a fly on a pane without surmising that “like the Bourbons,” it had “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” He devotes pages to the locutory efforts of a stammering child.
De Morgan undoubtedly possessed much of the equipment of a great artist in words. To be convinced of this, it is necessary only to study the work of his imitators, who have succeeded in aping his mannerisms without capturing the secret of his charm. Had the call to write polarized itself round some experience still poignant, or some disillusion still hotly resented, it is more than possible that great literature would have been the result. But he was sixty-five years old before he took pen in hand. He had learned all too well the lesson that life is a workaday affair, and that anticlimax is its norm. His sympathies were grown over-broad. He could not bear to allot to any of his creations a minor or a silent rôle, so his action is held up at every moment by actors who must speak their little piece and take their little “hand.” A certain impatience is of the method of those who paint on the grand scale; illumination and arabesque are the resource of the serene and resigned. We can be thankful that in his case the decorations are so gracious and the hues so vivid and real. For many years to come, tired folk will be glad to hold his hand and take their ease between the clipped hedges of his innocent labyrinths. With him at least, they need never be afraid. The company with which they will find themselves face to face at every turn and twist, is of the very salt of the earth. De Morgan was unworldly by deliberate choice, but never naïve. He knew the society in which his life was spent, through and through; and his aversions to all that is mean and insincere are instant and instinctive. He wrote of his youth, of the great Victorian period which, for all its misplaced complacency and loose thinking, had a hopefulness and elasticity denied to our ruthless age. Possibly on a final estimate his most competent achievement will prove to have been just this—to have shown us how much that was sunny and essentially sane the resistless wheel has ground into dust, in order that we might be brought face to face with the stark alternative of solving our problems or perishing with them.
H. L. S. 17. i. 23.
ON THE STONES OF THE ROAD
A people is like man. When he has disappeared, nothing is left of him unless he has taken the precaution to leave his imprint on the stones of the road.
IT is possible to write the history of mankind in many ways. One can assemble together the confused and contradictory data concerning man’s endlessly repeated attempts to create stable forms of external government, and show, more or less partially, how all these have failed. This is the method practised long ago by Gibbon in his history of Rome, and recently by a writer who possessed neither Gibbon’s philosophic irony, nor his epic breadth of vision, nor his aristocratic instinct for the significant—Mr. H. G. Wells. Or one can write history from the standpoint of pure social or economic theory. I have myself read works of this nature. They unfortunately bear about as much relation to humanity which loves, suffers, and is disillusioned, as a theorem in geometry bears to a banquet. Or one can attempt to write history from the standpoint of some universal law, as Henry Adams did; and in this respect the historian becomes as much the plotter of futurity as the recorder of the past.
Elie Faure’s1 method of writing history is akin to none of these. He is less concerned, happily, with the empirical theories by which science attempts to define reality, than with the patient attempt to understand that which has already come about. Mankind has lived upon the earth now for many thousands of years. It has passed through centuries of enthusiastic structural faith and centuries of disillusion and decay. What remains behind are utensils of daily life, carved and polished stones, pictures drawn upon walls, temples, tombs, and here and there some fragment of the universal aspiration frozen into the form of organized language or organized tone. These are the only records of what man has sought, what he has needed, what he has dreamed concerning his destiny. They are his creations, his attempts to arrest the universal flux of things, and to stamp upon them the image which his aspiration holds at some particular moment. There is, of course, no finality, no logical law which can ever enable us to say which of the many works of art that man, in his desire to perpetuate his most significant moments of vitality, has created, are the most important. But as Faure says in his introduction, that is of no immediate significance. What is significant is not to know that Michelangelo might have despised Egyptian sculpture, or that Phidias would have burnt Rembrandt if he had known of him. It is significant for us to know that each one of us is in turn Egypt, Michelangelo, Phidias and Rembrandt—that all these sides of the unknown reality which art has attempted to body forth, are contained in us to-day, for the reason that they have been expressed by humanity.
But Faure’s history is far more than a mere compilation of facts and dates concerning particular art-periods and particular artists. He has written, as he says, a sort of epic poem of artistic achievements, or, if you prefer to call it so, an autobiography of man’s attempts to transmute and re-create in permanent form the world that he sees within and without himself. It is impossible to read many pages of this book without realizing that something in the author’s own character and life-experience has given him a profound sympathy with the obscure and overwhelming aspiration towards life which every human being carries about within him. The solution of this sympathy is to be found in the fact that Faure is a physician, a social agitator, and a self-cultivated man. Moreover, he is himself the descendant of two contrasting racial stocks: one Protestant, positive, scientific (he springs from the same Huguenot stock that produced Elisée Reclus, the famous French geographer and anarchist), and the other Catholic, tender and mystical. Thus he is always attracted outwardly by the beauty of objective fact; inwardly by the necessity of giving that fact some emotional, mystical interpretation. In another of his books, “Le Danse sur le Feu et l’Eau,” which I hope some day to see translated into English, he describes the artist as one who is continually striving to maintain a balance between knowledge and desire. That balance is in Faure himself. He has written the history of art as an artist.
In the two volumes now published of this English translation, Faure traces the history of art from its beginnings to the close of the Middle Ages. In the first volume, he takes us first to the epoch before history in order to show us how the art of that period, from the “Venus of Willendorf” to the bison-frescoes of Altamira, sprang from the daily needs of the men of that time, and how it disappeared, to be replaced by the sombre tomb- and temple-architecture of the menhir and dolmen when the first groping religious faiths had discovered the continuity of the soul. Then he takes us to Egypt, sitting immobile, staring from out its living tomb into futurity for twenty centuries; probably, as he points out, the most perfect civilization in itself which man has produced, from which all the rest have been but deviations, and the “whole of it contained in the sigh which the colossus of Memnon exhales before sunrise.” After a slight excursion to the ancient East, we get upon classic soil; we come to Ancient Greece and Rome.
These chapters contain the kernel of Faure’s contribution to the metaphysics of art-creation. Consider this passage, for example, on Phidias:
Philosophic sculpture is born of liberty and dies because of it. The slave in Assyria could describe vividly that which he was permitted to see; in Egypt, he could give a definition of form as firm as the discipline which bowed him down, as full of nuances and as moving as the faith that sustained him. The free man alone gives life to the law, lends to science the life of his emotion, and sees that in his own mind we reach the crest of that continuing wave which attaches us to things in their entirety—until the day when science kills his emotion.
The artist of to-day is afraid of words, when he does not fall a victim to them. He is right to refrain from listening to the professional philosopher and especially to refrain from following him. He is wrong to be afraid of passing for a philosopher. Also if we have no right to forget that Phidias followed the discourses of Anaxagoras, we recognize that he might without loss, have been ignorant of metaphysics. He looked upon life with simplicity, but what he could see of it developed in him so lucid a comprehension of the relationships which, for the artist, make up its unity and continuity, that minds skilful in generalizing could extract from his work the elements out of which the modern world has come. Phidias formed Socrates (it must be recalled that Socrates worked as a sculptor) and also Plato—unknown to themselves, doubtless—when he materialized for them in the clearest, the most veracious, and the most human of languages, the mysterious affinities which give life to ideas.
It is obvious that we have here a theory which accounts for the regular alternation of creative and non-creative epochs in art-history. The moment, according to Faure, when the individual becomes sufficiently free of the social structure to pursue art for its own sake, that moment he makes art subservient to his own philosophic speculations on life. These speculations, in return, affect art to the point of killing it by making it too cerebral, too formulated, too academic. Thus it happened with Greece, and with that other high period, the Renaissance. Egypt, too, might have known such a period of liberated creation resulting in decline, had the movement vaguely sketched out by Akhnaton pursued its course without reaction. In Greece, after the moment of time which stood between the temple-front of Olympia and Phidias, there was to be everywhere a decline.
The evolution of the great periods is approximately the same everywhere; but in Greece from the seventh to the third century, it appears with an astonishing relief. Man, when he realizes himself, proceeds like nature, from anarchy to unity, from unity to anarchy. At first the scattered elements have to seek one another in the darkness of the mind. Then the whole mass of the chaotic creature is weighed down by the soil, which clogs its joints and clings to its heavy steps. Then the forms disengage themselves and find their proper places and agreement: their logical relationships appear, and each organ adapts itself more and more closely to its function. In the end, the rhythm is broken, form seems to fly from form, the mind seems to wander at random, the contracts are lost, the power disintegrates. Thus there are in Greek art four definite epochs: the Primitives, Ægina, the Parthenon, the Mausoleum. First, the stammering analysis, followed in the archaic men by a brief and rough synthesis. Then, when the mind is mature, a new and short analysis, luminous and compelling, which ends, with a single bound, in the conscious synthesis of a society in equilibrium. Finally, a last research which is not to reach its goal, which is to dissipate itself more and more until it has reduced its fragments ad infinitum, has broken all the old bounds, and has, little by little, lost itself through lack of comprehension, fatigue, and the urgent need of a great, new power of feeling.
We may well question whether this analysis of Greek decline does not apply equally well to art at the present day; but let that pass. What is interesting to observe is that with the advent of Rome on the scene, the rhythm again changes. Rome was the first country so overweighted with an alien tradition that she never fully expressed herself, except in politics and in law. What she did give was a hard concreteness to the dawning Christian faith. It was Rome which held Christianity from disruption and which gave to it a form, logical and firm. Here the first volume of Faure’s survey ends, and we approach the Middle Ages.
If, in the first volume of this survey, we feel here and there the effort to subject the undying rhythm of artistic development to a schematization too narrowly logical, the second gives us the full measure of Faure’s genius for synthesis and his profound comprehension of the struggle out of which all art is born. In this volume he deals with MediæVal Art, and his definition of MediæVal Art is so vast that it takes in India, China, Japan, Mexico and Peru, Africa, Polynesia, Byzantium, Mohammedan art, MediæVal France and Italy. What he finds held in common by all of these contrasted aspirations is this: he finds in each case (with the exception of Africa and Polynesia which, through lack of organization, stand upon a lower level) that art was produced by anonymous workmen expressing their desire for a clear representation of concrete human needs as opposed to the lifeless dogmatism by which their lives were controlled. Or, to put the matter in another way, while the Middle Ages everywhere were oppressive in external theocratic government, in their creative inner intensity, they voiced a long ecstatic cry for human liberation. “The Middle Ages re-created consciousness despite the gods they adored.”
It is almost impossible to summarize the wealth of illustration by which this brilliant thesis is sustained. In India, for example, a pessimistic pantheism tending towards atheism was upheld by the Brahman caste. Nevertheless, beneath this yoke of negation, the stoneworkers sculptured the caves of Ellora, covered the rocks of Mahavellipore with figures, “disembowelled mountains to make them fruitful,” carried their style and craft into Cambodia and Java. In China, again, there was the sharp division into castes, and a morality of frigid positivism—Confucianism—imposed from above upon the masses. Yet the people produced the exquisitely formed masterpieces of Tang and Sung. In Yucatan and Mexico there again existed feudal theocracy with a fixed dogma based upon torture, blood-thirst, human sacrifice. Yet that did not prevent the Maya workmen from putting up at Copan monuments combining Egyptian grandeur with Hindu exuberance of detail, or the later Aztecs from creating forms of monstrous barbaric terror. In France again, there was the dogma of a religion of pessimism and negation taught by a haughty priesthood who were supported in their position by oppressive feudal nobles. But again, there was reaction from below: the communes, Amiens, Sens, Rheims, Paris, asserted their elementary human freedom and put up in the course of two centuries the most wonderful structures ever yet built to enshrine the very gods in whose name they had been oppressed.
The chapter on Christianity and the commune is the summit of Faure’s whole work. However familiar he may be with other epochs and countries, it is France he knows best; and he realizes profoundly that France has never surpassed her art-achievements of the thirteenth century. How did these achievements come about? Up to the late twelfth century the pervading architectural forms of France were the Romanesque Church and the feudal castle. The one is narrow, gloomy, built by clerics for clerics, the other oppressive, brutal: theological force supported by armed force. Then, when the crusades had to a slight extent shaken the power of the nobility, certain cities fortified themselves against clergy and nobles and declared themselves free. It was in these free communes that Gothic architecture was born, and the cathedrals were put up not to enshrine a dogma, but to be the meeting-place of the crowd, and to glorify its spirit. The French cathedral is not only, as Faure says, the epitome of the French spirit—the spirit of Montaigne as well as that of Hugo, of Rabelais as well as of Pascal—but it is also the greatest collective and communal poem ever created by man. What was attempted by unknown workmen in India, China, Yucatan, here assumes, under more favourable conditions, its final expression. It is a hymn in stone, built by humble and forgotten crowds to the god they had within their own hearts: the god who is in turn Jesus, Dionysus, Prometheus; the god who lives through excess of outward suffering and dies through excess of inner joy.
So far I have been attempting to follow the course of Faure’s thought; but here I prefer to pause and ask the value of this thought for to-day. This “History of Art” is a great man’s great contribution to the necessary understanding of ourselves which we must undertake if we are in any way to equal—I do not say improve on—the past. What is it that it tells us? What, essentially, is its message in a sentence? It tells us that the spirit in which a work is done, in whatever period of art-creation, is more important than any temporary form which it takes. The Aztec sculptor carving a writhing mass of serpents, skulls, dismembered hands, is one in spirit with the workmen at Chartres carving the Virgin. Each is striving to embody in permanent form the god that is common to humanity as he knows it. Each is realizing that art is the most profoundly social, and, because of its being social, also religious function of mankind. Each is performing his duty, as a unit in society, of recording the aspirations of the society about him in permanent form; and each is essentially anonymous.
This lesson, then, is obviously meant for us. We live in an epoch of exasperated individualism on the one hand, and of crude, confused, and purely industrial striving towards State-socialism on the other. It is this condition of chaos which we call civilization. But if a true civilization is to emerge, it must rest on the idea that every individual, not a few individuals only, is potentially an artist; and it must also rest not on vast agglomerations of capital (as do all our modern States) controlling trade and industry, but on industry and trade being free States in and for themselves. Or, to put it in another way, whatever gods we may worship, they must be gods common to all of us: and they must be worshipped with the liberated worship of the common spirit of united mankind, not with the forced worship of Mammon or of Mammon’s laws. In his study of the spirit of the mediæval artist, Elie Faure has shown us the way to construct a civilization that only weariness and flagging energy can dissipate. It is for us in America to learn the lesson which he would teach us before we destroy our last and best opportunity of assuming the spiritual leadership of the world.
J. G. F. 25. iv. 23.
PHARAOH AKHNATON
SOMETIMES in history there is a brief and sudden flash of light revealing glories of thought and possibilities of human happiness which fill the doubter with awe. It is as if behind the stage of the mortal tragedy another curtain were quickly lifted and quickly let fall again, showing for an instant the drama as it was conceived in the mind of the master. During this breathless interval, the warriors on the stage curb their slaughter, the priests their deceptions, and all the miserable human scene is for a moment transfigured with the soft and steady glowing of eternal lamps.
Such an interval was the short reign of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt,1 whose biography by Mr. Weigall has just appeared. (He is called also Ikhnaton, Khu en Aten, and Amenophis IV, a name he rejected.) He saw that the world about him was faulty, and he rebuilt it; he re-created existence in terms of love for all things; in the gaily-coloured bricks of a new city and the kindly liberalism of a new fabric of State he realized the beauty of his philosopher’s dream, and like a dream it vanished away again as soon as he was dead. I suppose in all history one might search in vain for a lonelier, a more courageous figure than this sickly boy, who, having once surmised the lovely possibilities of earthly life and the goodness of their maker, stood at bay before the onslaught of the ancient world and pushed his vision by main force into concrete form.
Akhnaton was a mystic, in the simplest sense; a poet, a critic, an internationalist and a lover of peace. In all of these rôles he worked so consistently and diligently as to transform his kingdom within the twelve or fourteen years of his reign.
Repelled by the corruption of religious life in Egypt and the shrouding of pure monotheism in a constantly thickening veil of symbolism, he suppressed first the arrogant priesthood of Amon at Thebes, and then extinguished one by one the parasitic sects that fostered the natural superstition of his people. Nor was this enough. Thebes, the royal city of his race, was tainted by long association with Amon, and the priests were almost more powerful there than the Crown. To the direct genius of the King there was but one remedy. He would humble the city, he would ruin it, by the simple process of removing his court. Into the wilderness he fared, chose a spot which seemed to him rich in those natural beauties which he loved above all else, and there wrought out of nothingness a new capital, The City of the Horizon, “the mighty City of the Horizon of Aton, great in loveliness, mistress of pleasant ceremonies, rich in possessions, the offering of the sun being in her midst. At the sight of her beauty there is much rejoicing. She is lovely and beautiful: when one sees her it is like a glimpse of heaven.” It must have been such a town as one sometimes sees in sunset clouds: palaces, courts and gardens, lakes shadowed by cool, dark trees.
Here were no dim shrines droning with perpetual chants to occult forces; for the One God whom Akhnaton set up for the worship of his people was Love, the creative spirit moving through all living things and all nature. The rites of this religion were of the simplest. In the courts of the temple, priests and citizens gathered at dawn and at sunset to sing psalms of delight. Many of these, which Akhnaton himself composed, are as fine as any religious poetry of the world. Unlike most religious poetry, their exaltation is strengthened by a contrasting homeliness in which the little creatures, the chick within the egg, the birds in the marsh, all the earth’s children, are remembered and blessed.
The One God could not be expressed in an image; his symbol, the sun-disk with hands outstretched in benediction, was merely to remind men of that ineffable Being, all goodness, the Sun behind the sun. His truest worship, according to the royal mystic, was love in all its forms, family life, friendliness with one’s neighbours.
The Pharaoh, while encouraging the simple life, did not preach the mortification of the flesh, but only the control of the body. The comforts of life, the brilliancy of decoration, the charms of music, the beauties of painting and sculpture, the pleasure of good company, the tonic of a bowl of wine, were all as acceptable to him, in moderation, as to the Preacher in Ecclesiastes.
Unlike Jehovah, who was not infrequently thought to be a wrathful god, surrounded by clouds and darkness, and speaking through the roar of thunders, the Aton was the “Lord of Peace,” who could not tolerate battle and strife. Akhnaton was so opposed to war that he persistently refused to offer an armed resistance to the subsequent revolts which occurred in his Asiatic dominions. . . . In an age of martial glory . . . Akhnaton set himself in opposition to all heroics, and saw God without melodrama.
This was the characteristic that was to cause his downfall. As time went on, he became more and more immersed in the beauty of his dream; the shady streets of the City of the Horizon were an oasis of calm amid a disintegrating empire. The King stood sorrowful but unpersuaded as frantic appeals for an army poured in from his allies. Finally, he “could no longer stave off the impending crash, and from all sides there gathered the forces which were to overwhelm him. The Government was chaotic. The plotting and scheming of the priests of Amon showed signs of coming to a successful issue. . . . Now through the streets of the city there passed the weary messengers of Asia hurrying to the palace, no longer bearing the appeals of kings and generals for support, but announcing the fall of the last cities of Syria.” The King saw his empire crumble, knew that his faith would not outlive him and that his own end was near. “In the imagination there seems to ring across the years a cry of complete despair, and one can picture the emaciated figure of this ‘beautiful child of the Aton’ fall forward upon the painted palace-floor and lie still amidst the red poppies and dainty butterflies there depicted.”
Within ten years after his death, the City of the Horizon was a deserted and ghastly ruin, the priests of Amon were all powerful, the armies of Egypt were eagerly reconquering the lost empire, and the word “Akhnaton” was forbidden to men’s lips. The priests poured curses upon the excommunicated and nameless criminal. “Through starry space their execrations passed, searching out the wretched ghost of the boy, and banning him, as they supposed, even in the dim uncertainties of the Lands of Death. Over the hills of the west, up the stairs of the moon, and down into the caverns under the world, the poor twittering shadow was hunted and chased. . . . There was no place for his memory upon earth, and in the underworld the priests denied him a stone upon which to lay his head.”
Thus the curtain is again let fall and the light is blotted out. Mr. Weigall’s biography of Akhnaton, from which I have quoted, is at once scholarly and inspired. Not a study in Egyptology but a vivid account of an episode in human idealism, this volume should win many friends for the memory of the young Pharaoh as well as for the author.
R. H.. 11. vii. 23.
MR. ANDERSON’S NEW STORIES
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down!
THUS the quizzical farmer in Mr. Frost’s best-known poem; and thus, if he spoke blank verse, almost any one of Mr. Sherwood Anderson’s nostalgic, solitary personages. The one, I know, is a New Hampshire rebel; the others are farmers and small-town folk of the Middle West; but the difference is not a fundamental one. Mr. Anderson will tell you that his Middle Westerners are but a generation or two removed from New England; that the same frugal blood runs in their contracted veins; that, if they had stone walls to mend, they too would “keep the wall between them as they went.” The recurrence throughout his fiction of this isolation-motive is no accident: Mr. Anderson could not be the authentic artist he is and not reflect, like a poet, the deep human truth of the milieu he has undertaken to interpret. One remembers Wing Biddlebaum in “Winesburg,” who “did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years.” In the tale called “Unused,” in his new volume,1 one recognizes the old predicament: of the girl May Edgely we are told that “if she was walled in, shut off from participation in the life of the Ohio town—hated, feared by the town—she could come out of the town.” For the richness of their data, I repeat, these half-dozen stories are worth a library of sociological history, and no one who would know the heart of the Middle West can neglect them. Did such a task ever before or elsewhere force itself upon an artist like Mr. Anderson: the task of depicting a life so clumsily organized for human intercourse, so sterile in the values of personality, so poverty-stricken in what makes for humane conviviality, so hostile (as a consequence) to the integrity of the individual soul?
This, at any rate, is what I read into that singular spiritual delicacy of Mr. Anderson, into what I can only call his passionate puritanism. Only in regard to a life that in some sinister way threatened the purity of the individuals who capitulated to it, would an artist be so concerned for the inviolability of the ego in its resistance to what philosophers call the “not-me.” If this intense “idiocrasy” is not what puritanism always amounts to, it is characteristic of puritanism on its highest level: on the level on which Whitman defined the twin principle of democracy as “individuality, the pride and centripetal isolation of a human being in himself—identity—personalism.”
The hero of Mr. Anderson’s fable is the man who goes among his fellow-beings holding the cup of his “identity” as a kind of Grail, intangible by the profane. The special tragedy is that there are none but the profane to touch it; that the contacts which should be cleansing are for the most part smirching, and the experiences which should be joyously shared have to be joylessly withheld. The result can be only a kind of spiritual deformity. This, I suppose, is what the old man in the foreword to “Winesburg” means when he says “that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.” This is the perplexity of the young man in “A Chicago Hamlet,” in this volume, bathing himself in cold water at night in the darkness of his room, obsessed with “this business of making oneself the keeper of the clean integrity of oneself.” We are told that he had “a kind of almost holy inner modesty”; and we realize that the pathos of what happens at the end lies in the fugacity of an experience which momentarily offered a relationship not hostile to that modesty.
Like a certain sort of puritan, Mr. Anderson is more interested in the inner life than in anything else; indeed, “this vain show of things” seems to him but an aspect of the inner life, and he is not too curious about the line that divides material from spiritual. This is what gives his fiction its curiously poetic quality, and, in details, accounts for the seemingly unpremeditated beauty of many of his figures. (“My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms, into the arms of others, over the top of the wall.”) If the word had not too many dusty connotations, one would say that Mr. Anderson was a symbolist; he is at any rate a symbolist without the doctrine, a sort of congenital symbolist: to him the myth is not a theory but an irresistible mode of expression. It will not do to quarrel with him for not being a “realist.” Mr. Edmund Wilson objects that none of the personages in “Many Marriages” has a persuasive reality; that they are consistently incredible as washing-machine manufacturers and housekeepers. But surely it should not need to be pointed out that reality exists on several planes; that the reality of “Babbitt,” valid as it is, is but one kind of reality; that John Webster is not a washing-machine manufacturer, in any special literal sense, but the man who has walked part way down the road of death and has come back to walk the way of life. The employment of this mythopoetic reality is Mr. Anderson’s special forte, and it can be vindicated on the solidest artistic grounds; it gives form and color to fables of subtle subjective experience which would otherwise be too unsubstantial for artistic treatment. The fiction of the inner life would hardly be possible on any other terms.
It is even doubtful whether we can with accuracy speak of Mr. Anderson as a novelist; at least if that name is to be reserved for writers in the tradition, for the followers of Flaubert (like Mr. Sinclair Lewis) or the followers of Henry James (like Mrs. Wharton). In any sense in which these people are novelists, Mr. Anderson must be denied the title; for their scrupulous account of the extrinsic truth, even for their manipulation of psychological drama, he has but mediocre capacities; he has little command over the cool irony which makes Mr. Lewis something of a satirist, and little skill in the handling of complex personal relationships such as Mrs. Wharton reports. He has almost nothing in common with those “erudite and elegant” writers whom Whitman inveighed against. This is indeed his artistic strength; the methods of the novelists I have mentioned would not begin to serve his special and difficult purpose; they are the fictional analogues of a highly organized, highly civilized, completely articulate social order, and the interpretation of such an order is not Mr. Anderson’s task. Hitherto the novelist’s rôle has not been much like that of the bard: he has attempted not so much to give utterance to confused communal emotions as to chronicle, either epically or dramatically, and with a certain detachment, the circumstances of the life about him. That he did not come, in the first place, until comparatively late, is a fact of some significance. Mr. Anderson is attempting—more or less unconsciously, no doubt—to fill the rôle of a kind of bardic poet: to put into simple and beautiful forms the vague and troubling pains of a bewildered people, to personalize a rather mechanical life, to give new values to a world that has discarded its old ones as invalid. And that, as the teller of “The Man’s Story” says, “is I suppose what poetry is all about.”
N. A. 5. xii. 23.
1 “Figures of Earth,” James Branch Cabell. New York: Robert M. McBride Co.
1 “The Life of Admiral Mahan.” Charles Carlisle Taylor. New York: George H. Doran Company.
1 “America and the Young Intellectual.” Harold Stearns. New York: George H. Doran Co.
1 Collection des universités de France, publiée sous le patronage del’Association Guillaume Budé:
Eschyle, Tome I, texte établi et traduit par Paul Mazon; Platon, Tome I, Maurice Croiset; Platon, Tome II, Alfred Croiset; Théophraste, Caractères, Octave Navarre; Cicéron, Tome I, H. de la Ville de Mirmont; Juvénal, Satires, de Labriolle et Villeneuve; Lucrèce, Tomes I et II, Alfred Ernout; Perse, Satires, A. Cartault.
1 “Ulysses.” James Joyce. Paris: The Shakespeare Press.
1 “The Outline of Science: A Plain Story Simply Told.” Edited by J. Arthur Thomson. In four volumes. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Vols. I and II.
2 “The Haunts of Life.” J. Arthur Thomson. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
1 “William De Morgan and His Wife.” A. M. W. Stirling. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
1 “History of Art.” Elie Faure. Translated by Walter Pach. Vol. I. Ancient Art. Vol. II. MediæVal Art. New York: Harper & Brothers.
1 “Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt.” Arthur Weigall. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
1 “Horses and Men.” Sherwood Anderson. New York: B. W. Huebsch, Inc.
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