Chapter 7 of 7 · The Freeman Book by Albert Jay Nock
VI. A Reviewer’s Notebook
A REVIEWER’S NOTEBOOK
THE NOVELS OF UPTON SINCLAIR
IN 1889, when the English nation revealed through its press how unwilling it was to be “pried up to a higher level of manhood” by the “Connecticut Yankee,” and was indeed denouncing the book as a travesty, Mark Twain tried to induce Andrew Lang to come to his defence. “The critic assumes, every time,” he wrote, “that if a book doesn’t meet the cultivated-class standard, it isn’t valuable. The critic has actually impressed upon the world the superstition that a painting by Raphael is more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a chromo; and the august opera than the hurdy-gurdy and the villagers’ singing society; and Homer than the little everybody’s-poet whose rhymes are in all mouths to-day and will be in nobody’s mouth next generation; and the Latin classics than Kipling’s far-reaching bugle-note. . . . If a critic should start a religion it would not have any object but to convert angels; and they wouldn’t need it. It is not that little minority who are already saved that are best worth trying to uplift, I should think, but the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are underneath.” Whereupon our troubled humorist besought Andrew Lang to “adopt a rule recognizing the Belly and the Members, and formulate a standard whereby work done for them shall be judged.”
It is recorded that Andrew Lang failed to respond to this remarkable appeal. He could scarcely indeed have understood it, knowing as he did so little about the American mind. How such a delusion came to possess Mark Twain would be an interesting study in itself; but it was of the nature of our old democracy to believe that the feelings and opinions of the majority had a sort of divine sanction, the popular being regarded as ipso facto good. Under these conditions, a double standard of taste might well have seemed as natural to a man in Mark Twain’s position as that other article of faith of the nineteenth century, the double standard of morals. Yet the “Connecticut Yankee” itself shows us how false the notion was. Mark Twain’s plea was that he was “trying to uplift the mighty mass of the uncultivated.” Actually, in this book, he debased them: he flattered their ignorance of history, he played on their prejudice against the old world, he drew their attention from the abuses of their own social life by focusing their indignation on the long-forgotten abuses of the Middle Ages, he confirmed them in their complacent belief that a shrewd Yankee mechanic possessed all the secrets of life that anyone ought to desire.
It is with a number of such instances in mind that I have read Mr. Upton Sinclair’s three recent novels, “King Coal,” “Jimmie Higgins” and “100%: The Story of a Patriot.” Judged by the “cultivated-class standard” these books are as bad as books can be; they are so weak, so slovenly, so deficient in all the qualities that go to make a work of art that, as one considers Mr. Sinclair’s complaint of the boycott of the press, one asks oneself how far it is not due to the sheer worthlessness of this sort of writing. Novels are novels; from the standpoint of criticism their subject-matter can not save them. It is impossible to interest oneself in “winsome Irish lasses,” in pretty stenographers whose “wicked little dimples lose no curtain calls,” in “patriots” like Peter Gudge, in paragons like Jimmie Higgins; it is impossible because they do not exist in Mr. Sinclair’s own imagination. They have no more existence than the villains and the heroes and the naughty ladies of the movies and the Red Book Magazine. Mr. Sinclair has no more respect for psychology than his mine-owners have for their employees; he has no more respect for the intelligence of his readers than Mr. Hearst. His novels are simply “reels” into which he contrives to pack all the sensations that have occurred in the United States during the last four years. To speak merely as a reader, merely from a literary point of view, one can not, with the best will in the world, follow these narratives from page to page.
I am speaking, as I say, from the “cultivated-class” standpoint. And now the question arises whether Mr. Sinclair is any better advised in his attempt to liberate the proletariat by this means than was Mark Twain in “trying to uplift the mighty mass of the uncultivated.” In his advertisement of “100%” Mr. Sinclair quotes the opinion of one of his readers that he will have even more trouble than he had with “The Brass Check”—“in getting the books printed fast enough.” That was always Mark Twain’s trouble, too; and for a similar reason. It is natural that Mr. Sinclair’s books should be popular among the dispossessed: they who are so seldom flattered find in his pages a land of milk and honey. Here all the workers wear haloes of pure golden sunlight and all the capitalists have horns and tails; socialists with fashionable English wives invariably turn yellow at the appropriate moment, and rich men’s sons are humbled in the dust, Irish lasses are always true, and wives never understand their husbands, and all the good people are martyred and all the patriots are vile. Mr. Sinclair says that the incidents in his books are based on fact and that his characters are studied from life. No doubt they are. But Mr. Sinclair, naturally enough, has seen what he wanted to see and studied what he wanted to study; and his particular simplification of the social scene is one that inevitably makes glad the heart of the victim of our barbarous system. It fills this victim with emotion, the emotion of hatred and the emotion of self-pity. Mr. Sinclair’s novels sell by the hundred thousand: the wonder is they do not sell by the million.
But suppose now that one wishes to see the dispossessed rise in their might and really, in the name of justice, take possession of the world. Suppose one wishes to see the class-system abolished, along with all the other unhappy things that Mr. Sinclair writes about. That is Mr. Sinclair’s own desire; and he honestly believes that in writing as he does he contributes to this happy consummation. I can not agree with him. In so far as Mr. Sinclair’s books show us anything real they show us the utter helplessness, the benightedness, the ignorance, the naïveté of the American proletarian movement. Jimmie Higgins, as I have said, does not exist as a character. He is a symbol, however, and one can read reality into him. He is the American worker incarnate. Well, was there ever a worker so little the master of his fate? That, in point of fact, is just the conclusion Mr. Sinclair wishes us to draw! But why is he so helpless? Because, for all his goodness and his kindness and his courage, he is, from an intellectual and social point of view, unlike the English worker, and the German worker, and the French, and the Italian, and the Russian worker, an infant: he knows nothing about life or about human nature or about economics or about philosophy or even about his enemies. How can he possibly improve his condition, how can he set about advancing his own cause, how can he circumvent the wily patrioteers, how can he become anything but what he is, the mere football of every one who knows more than he? Let us drop the “cultivated-class” standpoint, for a moment, and judge Mr. Sinclair’s novels from the standpoint of the proletariat itself. How do they appear now? They arouse the emotion of self-pity. Does that stimulate the worker or does it merely “console” him? They arouse the emotion of hatred. Does that teach him how to grapple with his oppressors or does it place him all the more at his oppressors’ mercy? The most elementary knowledge of human nature tells us that there is only one answer to these questions.
The American workers’ movement is weak: that we know. The workers’ movements of Europe are, in comparison, strong: that we also know. But why are they strong? Because the masses of individuals that compose them are, relatively speaking, not intellectual and moral infants but instructed, well-developed, self-conscious, self-respecting, resourceful men. They waste little energy in “hating” their masters; they are too busy learning to understand them. They waste still less energy in pitying themselves; they are too busy establishing their rights. How much of this superior morale they owe to their superior education, i. e., to literature, I shall not attempt to repeat; Mr. Max Eastman might contradict me again. But one thing is certain: nothing hinders the worker so much as books like Mr. Sinclair’s. These false simplifications, these appeals to the martyr in human nature, these travesties of the psychology of the powerful ones of the earth are so much dust thrown in the eyes of the proletariat. To the workers themselves, in other words, Mr. Sinclair, with his cake and circuses, is more dangerous than all the Big Business men whom he chastises with whips and scorpions.
To return, then, to the “cultivated-class standard,” I respectfully urge that a book which is not good enough for me is not good enough for Mr. Sinclair’s readers either. I further maintain that the only writers who can possibly aid in the liberation of humanity are those whose sole responsibility is to themselves as artists. Consider the very best novels that have been written with a view to propaganda alone. Consider “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Mrs. Stowe undoubtedly helped to liberate the Negroes from slavery; but there would be few in our generation to deny that she “liberated” them from the frying-pan into the fire. She evoked the emotion of self-pity and the emotion of hatred, but she failed to make her readers think; and because of this, the last state of the Negro is all but worse than the first. On the other hand, consider Turgenev who, in his “Sportman’s Sketches,” wrote to please himself alone. He revealed the serf not as an Uncle Tom, a bleary, teary wax image, but as a man like the rest of us, capable of pride, faith and thought; and the result was that the conscience of Russia has been occupied with nothing since but to rescue that same proud, faithful, thinking man and reinstate him in his rights. The wind bloweth where it listeth: no writer can tell how his work will serve. One can only say that if he does his work, and if he is sincere and has the talent, it can not help serving, and in the most unforeseen ways. Thus, for example, Gorky in his autobiography describes how he got his first revolutionary feeling from Dumas, of all writers in the world. As a boy he used to pore over Dumas’s romances, and it astonished him to hear of a society in which people were polite to one another and considerate of one another. The streets of Paris became his Utopia, and it was then he began to dream of a day when his own Russia, the Russia of the disinherited, might also have its share of social grace and beauty. That was because Dumas, insincere as he was in other respects, conveyed a sincere picture of fine manners. “The persons,” said Shelley (apropos of literature, and expressing the whole truth), “the persons in whom this power takes its abode may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little correspondence with the spirit of good of which it is the minister. But although they may deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve that which is seated on the throne of their own soul. And whatever systems they may have professed by support, they actually advance the interests of Liberty.”
V. W. B. 21. ix. 21
JOHN BUTLER YEATS
MY memory of John Butler Yeats goes back to 1908, to a little gaslit bedroom in the old Grand Union Hotel, whither I had been taken to meet the “father of the poet.” At that time the Irish Literary Revival was at its height, and there were no names more glamorous than Yeats and Synge. The “father of the poet,” with his air of a benevolent sage, looked the part to perfection; looked it and spoke it indeed so perfectly that he shone at first only with innumerable reflected lights. He had come to America for a fortnight; he was to stay for thirteen years. He was to experience between the ages of sixty-nine and eighty-three a second career as affluent as his first had been. How soon it was to be forgotten that he was the father of the poet at all! In that early time—it was natural enough—he pulled for us at all the strings of association. If he had not seen Shelley plain, he had been as an art student a commensal of Samuel Butler and William Morris; he had been one of the first Whitmanians—Whitman sent him his “affectionate remembrance” in a letter of 1872; for forty years he had agreed with York Powell and disagreed with Edward Dowden; he had known the father of Wilde and the mother of Shaw. All these recollections he poured out for us in the most enchanting stream of anecdotes—he was fairly lost for us, I say, in his own good talk.
His earlier career, to be sure, had been wanting in no element of the illuminative, when it was not the paradoxical. It was the career, as rumour told us, of genius in solution, or at least not too forbiddingly crystallized, the career of being human to such a tune that two generations of Irish poets and artists had grown up literally under its wing. The story of Mr. Yeats’s Dublin studio is to be found in Miss Katharine Tynan’s autobiography and I do not know how many other books, just as the record of his influence is to be found in his elder son’s “Reveries over Childhood and Youth.” Never, surely, had a man been more the cause of a more various wit in others, and this without prejudice to his having been—shall I say?—the Reynolds of a stirring age in his nation’s history. He had painted all the distinguished, the interesting, the charming men and women of his time, painted them with such insight and such grace that his gathered work constitutes of itself—remote as it must have been from any suggestion of the public, the official—a sort of National Portrait Gallery. He would not paint the dull, if only, it might seem, because it was they who wished to pay him for his trouble: it was the angel of impecuniosity, I remember his remarking, that had given him his freedom, a sensitive angel, no doubt, whose protection he wished not to jeopardize. His studio was thus never closed save to clients—he would fly to escape from a lucrative commission which meant that there would not be good talk during the sittings, the good talk that implied a current of sympathy. Nor was this merely petulant: he could paint only those whom he saw, and he could see only those whom he admired. He painted, as Swinburne criticized, for the “noble pleasure of praising.” In this, as in so many other respects, his fashion was that of the ancients; and one can not but think that his pride, and all this multiform expression of his pride, must have had its effect in the rebirth of the Irish spirit.
Such questions, to be sure, could have had no interest for Mr. Yeats himself. “Your artist and poet, unless he becomes a rhetorician,” he wrote in one of his last essays, “is a solitary and self-immersed in his own thoughts and has no desire to impress other people.” It was thus that we were to see him, a true solitary himself, and never more so than when he most suggested (to those who did not know him) the autocrat of the dinner-table. But as time went on I think his interest in painting in a measure dropped away. When he first came to New York it was still strong; in the early days at Petitpas’ he always had a sketch-book in his pocket and would draw as he talked; to the end his letters, his briefest notes, were usually adorned with a little pen-and-ink impression—of himself, as a rule, and not too hasty to fix some humorous or ironic “state of the soul.” I imagine, however, that few of the portraits he did here were as good as those he had done at home, perhaps because his sitters were not initiated into the secret, which must have been legendary in Dublin, that unless his pictures were carried off, tactfully but forcibly, at the right moment, he was sure to overpaint and spoil them. His son speaks of his having painted a pond somewhere in Ireland: “He began it in spring and painted all through the year, the picture changing with the seasons, and gave it up unfinished when he had painted the snow upon the heath-covered banks.” Every one discovered this trait sooner or later, but in New York it was usually later: it was not the open secret it might have been if his American suitors had been in a position to compare notes. And besides, who could escape from his presence?—like Socrates, he was a flute-player more wonderful than Marsyas, who charmed us with the voice only. His art suffered in consequence, for he required the cooperation of a practical and resolute sitter. Alas, he should have painted only men without ears.
It was at Petitpas’ that his star rose for us. He had found his way to that friendly house within a year of his arrival, and was not to leave it again; and there he had his “Indian summer of the mind,” a Jovian old age without any visible counterpart in a country where age as well as youth obeys the counsel of Mr. Rockefeller—not to talk but to saw wood. For his play of conversation he required no such preliminaries as Sarah Battle—there was no rigour in Mr. Yeats’s game; yet one condition he would not forego, a clear, abundant light. He disliked the duplicity of the candle-lit American interior; he wished to follow the expressions of his interlocutors and would recall the luminous mahogany-tables of old that reflected the dazzling chandelier and brightened the faces from below as they were brightened from above. The lights were high in Twenty-ninth Street—witness John Sloan’s portrait-group, “Yeats at Petitpas’,” or even George Bellows’s murky lithograph of the same subject. It was really characteristic, this desire, for it signified that our philosopher could not have loved art so much had he not loved human nature more.
His conversation was all of human nature. It flowed with every sort of engaging contradiction, with a wisdom by turns cheerful and tragic and a folly that was always somehow wise. Again, it was always concrete, at least in the earlier time. Mr. W. B. Yeats tells us that when he was a boy his father would choose to read to him the “less abstract” poets; he preferred Keats to Shelley and the first half of “Prometheus Unbound” to the second. During the last few years the metaphysical habit grew upon him and, as he had a terminology all his own, it was sometimes difficult to follow him. Yet even then, as he would distinguish between “feeling” and “emotion,” for instance, or “brains” and “intellect,” one discerned his point without, so to say, perceiving it—nothing annoyed him so much as to be pressed for a definition. Besides, his point never failed to bury itself in one’s mind: one would find oneself puzzling it out years afterward. He had lost some of his mischievousness, so that he would no longer maintain, for instance, that the English are even inferior tailors, and that they are such good poets because they are tyrants in their own houses, but he still clothed his discourse in the gayest web of images. He would say of the difference between a photograph and a portrait that the photograph is like the description of a ball given by a jaded, bored, literal-minded old chaperon, the painting like a description of the same ball given by a pretty girl who has thoroughly enjoyed herself. He would picture the Puritan minister “sitting in company with the father of the family in a sort of horrid conspiracy to poison life at its sources.” He would tell of some Irish peasant who, describing a well-dressed man, added that he “fell away in the breeches.” Or he would call up some picture from the past, as, for instance, of John Richard Green, in the days when he was known as a brilliant man who had done nothing and was not expected to do anything—of Green, in some drawing-room, surrounded by admirers, and remarking in a high chant: “All women seek to combine two mutually incompatible positions—the position of perfect strength and the position of perfect weakness.”
He had forgotten nothing that revealed human nature at its most singular, its most touching, its most absurd, above all its most characteristic. He could forgive anything but rhetoric, legality, emotionality and gregariousness—these were his four abominations. He had had reason in his own country to deplore the folly of the oratorical mind; and regarding legality his opinion was much the same as St. Paul’s, that it was the “strength of sin”—perhaps he was the more certain of this because he had begun life as a lawyer himself. As for his dislike of the emotional and the gregarious, it may have been a result of certain American experiences: I know that his opinion of Whitman changed entirely after he had lived here for a while. Having admired him for years he turned against the “emotional bard,” remarking in one of his later letters, “The Sacred Nine have not heard his name even to this day.” Nor was he free from reservations in regard to the Celtic Revival; I remember his horror, for instance, when a rather gushing lady accused him of having had some commerce with fairies. The truth is that he was at bottom an old-fashioned Anglo-Irish country gentleman, redolent of the classics, a sceptic of the eighteenth-century tradition, or of the tradition of Erasmus and Montaigne, who had also drunk in his youth at the spring of “political economy” and John Stuart Mill; and upon this foundation had been superadded, to the confusion of the simple, the doctrines of Rossetti in painting, of Morris in economics and of Irish Nationalism in the political sphere. It was a combination that made for an infinite, if a somewhat bewildering, wit—a wit that drew the line just the other side of the banshee.
“Idleness and conversation” was his only formula for the good life. Like the “Be hard!” or the “Carefully cultivate your faults” of other sages, it was a stumbling-block to the foolish, among whom Mr. Yeats counted the population of Belfast and those who have “leather” faces and pursue the dollar. In his own case it signified an activity of the mind and the feelings that knew no check; for if his painting had lapsed, he wrote his first play at seventy-eight and was experimenting in poetry to the last week of his life. His “high-bred amicability,” to quote Goethe’s phrase about Molière, was a veritable school of manners, of the natural in manners; and he was always quick to draw out the least articulate of his companions. How many must have blessed him who had never known, till they talked with him, that they too had something to say! But what seems most fortunate now is that his exile turned him more and more to writing—the three books that will give him a distinguished place in literature were all written in America. For years he had been urged to write his reminiscences—York Powell, as we discover in the latter’s published correspondence, suggested it a generation ago; and his “Recollections of Samuel Butler” shows us what the book would have been, or perhaps will be, for he left a mass of manuscripts that must include many a pendant to that diverting and picturesque impression. What does it matter? He drew his own portrait in every line he wrote. Had the “Pensees” of Pascal taken their final shape we should have had only the same Pascal, plus the mortar of “rhetoric”: and it is all the more characteristic that in Mr. Yeats’s record we should miss the connecting links he so cheerfully ignored in life.
From these essays and these letters,1 the thought drifts up, as Mr. Ezra Pound says, “as easily as a cloud in the heavens, and as clear-cut as clouds on bright days.” In the essays his conversation lives again; in the letters we find it recollected, as it were, in tranquillity, soberer than his wont was, if only because more studied. Yet everywhere the effect is of a pure spontaneity. He will mention “the most deliriously uninteresting young girl I ever met, her perfect aplomb in selfishness was a perpetual surprise and pleasure.” He will say that a “perfectly disinterested, an absolutely unselfish love of making mischief, mischief for its own dear sake, is an Irish characteristic.” He will speak in this fashion of the “dungeon of self-hatred which is Puritanism”:
The supremacy of the will power infers the malediction of human nature that has cursed English life and English letters. I referred to Bunyan as foremost in the malediction movement. He would have called Hamlet “Mr. Facing Both-Ways,” and Juliet “Miss Bold Face” or “Carnality,” and Romeo ‘‘Mr. Lovelorn,” and Macbeth “Mr. Henpecked,” etc., finding where he could epithets and names to belittle and degrade the temple of human nature and all its altars.
He will press to the depths and return with this:
“Except for one or two I have never had a happy day,” said the magnificently fortunate Goethe. The never dying aches of the probe of pain are in every bosom; only while others resort to some kind of laudanum the poets let these work, finding in them the root of happiness, the only sort which, though it be twin with sorrow, is without a fleck on its purity.
He will recur to those leading ideas—that “desire and not emotion is the substance of art,” that “character is the self-evolved enemy of personality,” that “in obeying rules, the highest even, we shall never forget that in so doing we are not alive”—which underlay all his other thoughts and expressed his own “certitude of belief.” His mind was of such a perfect candour that the printed page reproduces it like a sensitive plate; we hear him talking as we read, we see him stoop and smile.
No doubt the novelty of his American experience, the sharp contrast with everything he had previously known, led him thus to define his point of view. His essays on “The Modern Woman” and “Back to the Home” are markedly the fruit of such a reaction: in the presence of our chaos the disparate elements in his own mind, in his life, in his memory, flew together and he rose above them in harmonious flight. So we may say that America had its share in the making of him. It was his energy, he said, a month before he died, that kept him in his adventurous exile; but he also stayed because he liked us. That was a great compliment, and one we shall not forget.
V. W. B. I. iii. 22.
DON MARQUIS
READING and re-reading Mr. Don Marquis’s last book (for who can helping reading it again and again?) makes me wish mightily once more that there were in this country a permanent medium for work of just this literary character, both in prose and verse. It brings back, in short, my visions of a competent American comic paper; and those visions bring impatience in their train, because I am so well convinced that the only thing needful for the production of such a paper is the combination of a publisher and an editor who really know their business—a publisher who can see beyond the end of his nose, who has a little stability, courage and resourcefulness, and an editor whose literary sensibilities are hung on a hair-trigger, who really knows what he wants and why he wants it, and who has an adamantine resolution against everything that he does not want, even if he has to go to press with blank pages. I can hear my readers saying, There! he is off on his old hobby again; but I shall disappoint them. I am quite through with anatomizing and describing the ideal comic paper, the ideal publisher and editor; and I now mean only to say a word or two about the literary resources of the country as exemplified by Mr. Marquis, and what might be done with them.
Mr. Marquis’s “Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady” and especially his “Famous Love-Affairs” are, one would say, the recreations of a literary man. They have that quality; the quality which one finds in Field, Lowell, Harte, Holmes, Gilbert, Thackeray, Lord Neaves, and so on all the way back to the Greek Anthology. There is no external resemblance between Mr. Marquis and any of these; the resemblance is purely internal, and it is unmistakable. It places Mr. Marquis’s work as far remote from the ruck of commonplace, clever, comic verse of what is known as the commercial type, as Dr. Holmes’s “Poem Made to Order” or his lines “On a Portrait of a Gentleman.” It has ease, leisureliness, abundant natural humour—and under the dismaying prevalence of artificial humour, of pert galvanic smartness, how thankful one may be for that! It has playfulness and elegance; Mr. Marquis’s literary taste guides him safely over bogs of slang and colloquialism that would swamp an unsound taste at the second step. For example, let the reader mark the extraordinary poetic beauty of the first three lines of this stanza from Mr. Marquis’s version of the story of Tristram and Iseult, and observe that a less sensitive taste than Mr. Marquis’s could not possibly have managed the transition from them to what follows, without a sad jolt; but he so manages it that one goes along with perfect ease, with no sense of incongruity.
Tristram rode by her palace on a day
When some young angel leaned from Paradise
And loved the earth, and laughed, and made it May;
And Issy saw his lovely purple eyes—
Not the young angel’s; Tristram’s: otherwise
She might have flagged the angel for her beau
Instead of Tristram. Ah! what tears and sighs
Were saved if women never looked below
The angels!—yet, no doubt, at times they’d find it slow.
To accomplish successfully such a transition as this is a truly respectable achievement. Like the circle of Giotto, it is no doubt a tour de force, but it is nevertheless something that can not be extemporized, still less done in a mechanical or purely imitative way. It is an infallible proof of a good literary man’s experienced hand and cultivated taste; and any editor worth his salt would at once discern it as such. Again, Mr. Marquis ends his sequence to the Red-Haired Lady, after thirty-two sonnets which may be fairly sampled thus:
Against what background should I paint your head—
Relieved upon such paler gold as falls
Through groined and mullioned windows on the walls
Of storied minsters, crumbling like their dead?
I will not paint it, Kid; your sort of red,
As full of pep as red-hot cannon-balls,
Titians must splash across the frescoed halls.
Mine ain’t the art for it, when all is said.
—after thirty-two sonnets-worth of this, I say, he ends his sequence with four sonnets of excellent seriousness, grace and force, and again the transition is made naturally and easily. They are as much in place as the dedicatory verse of “Alice in Wonderland.” Then, as the last of the Famous Love-Affairs, Mr. Marquis takes the old story of Harlequin and Columbine, and gives it a wholly fresh and charming turn in serious verse; and such is the fineness of taste displayed among all his preceding colloquialisms, that once more he manages the transition perfectly. Even when Mr. Marquis ventures farthest into slang and colloquialism, as in his sketch of Iseult and her husband, Mark of Cornwall—
Mark was a Pill. His little Dame had class,
(One of those Unions that neglect to une),
She was a Saint; he was a Hound. Alas,
That such a Peach should marry such a Prune!
—even under this stress his taste is delightfully sure; it carries him unerringly, and his reader with him, leaving mere smartness and vulgarity miles aside.
But I must not become so taken up with Mr. Marquis’s literary quality as to forget the point that I set out to make. I am sure, though one swallow does not make a summer, that there are others, perhaps many others, whose quality is at least comparable with that of Mr. Marquis, and who might show themselves as much at home amidst the higher order of literary serio-frivolities, if they had some definite and continuous encouragement; and my point is that nothing is so well calculated to provide this encouragement as a really competent comic paper. As things now are, there is but one place, and that a most disadvantageous one, for work like Mr. Marquis’s to appear, namely: the “column.” But a newspaper is an ephemeral, unconsidered thing, its contents sheer trash, and I am sure that Mr. Marquis will assent to my saying that the average of the column rises little above the average of the paper. Small wonder that it is so; the Hyrcanian tiger seems a biddable and domestic creature, when one thinks of the devouring exactions of a daily column that shall not be sheer trash.
Well, then, work of any literary value, even the most moderate, is here practically scattered in a rubbish-heap. It is solitary, lost, easily overlooked, and put at a disadvantage by its environment, since one does not expect to find anything of value in such a place and hence is not looking for it. I remember, for example, an excellent metrical parody by Mr. Marquis that I saw years ago in the Sun, remarking upon the eclipse of all the host of Kipling’s imitators who were once so plentiful, and wondering what had become of them. It was done in really brilliant first-class Kiplingese. I neglected to clip it and shall probably never get hold of it again; and the memory of it has persecuted me ever since, for I can recall only the last line of the first verse:
O ye sons of Kip, have ye lost your grip, are ye feared to throw the bull?
Could anything be better, either as parody or criticism?—and the poem in its entirety was quite as good as that line. The other day, too, I noticed that in the Chicago News, by way of comment on some remarks of mine about our English contemporary Punch, Mr. Keith Preston wrote an admirable verse in Punch’s best characteristic style. It was so good that I could not help regretting that there was here no medium for it like Punch itself, a periodical which would afford a gifted and scholarly person like Mr. Keith Preston an organized public, looking to it regularly for just the kind of thing that he can furnish, expecting it, and appreciating it when it came.
I have never been quite as despondent as some of my friends appear to be, concerning the potential literary resources of this country; believing rather that no very serious critical effort has yet been made to tap and develop those resources. The Freeman, in its short life and within the scope of its mode or method—no periodical, probably, can undertake to work in every genre—has certainly brought out from American writers, chiefly, too, from non-professional writers, a large amount of extremely good writing, plenty good enough for anybody. It has also served as a focus for a considerable public which looks for, expects and appreciates literary work of a certain well-established quality. A periodical specializing not so much in another field as in another mode, would, I believe, have the same good fortune. It would perhaps even more attract the non-professional than the professional writer. We all remember excellent parodies in prose and verse, keen burlesques, trenchant criticism of society and public affairs, that passed from hand to hand in our college days or later, written for the most part by gifted amateurs and never published, though the Editor’s Drawer of the old Harper’s Magazine used to make some sort of place for these, and occasionally got them. We all remember Mr. Child’s extravaganza called “Il Pesceballo,” and the trifles that Mr. Peck used to do when he held the chair of Latin at Columbia, and before he became a professional writer. I can not be sure that Dr. Holmes’s son, for example, does not sometimes amuse himself and his friends with some brisk literary satire or frivolity. Above all, I am not sure that our whole reading public is hopelessly unable and unwilling to accept and appreciate this sort of literary work, if only it knew where it could get it with fair regularity and under some sort of guarantee of its quality.
The thing, then, which I should say that Mr. Marquis’s book indicates as advisable, is a loose progressive organization of writers and readers, such as would be affected by a new type of periodical; say, by a new, wholly different and greatly improved Life or Judge. The whole history of American periodical-publishing in recent years has been a history of this process of organization, usually for purposes that are inferior and non-literary. Multitudes of writers have had their public as truly manufactured for them by the machinery of the publishing-business as though it had been run out of a hopper like so much grist. Before sitting down with folded hands in melancholy contemplation of our fallen literary estate, let us at least employ this process to make sure that it has actually fallen as low as we think it has, or as a superficial view may indicate that it has. Why not see what a new Life or Judge or a resurrected Puck might do; a paper that would make a home for work like that of Mr. Marquis or Mr. Keith Preston—the work, that is, that they themselves are really interested in doing, not the work that they do with their left hand, perforce, and against time, to fill a column; a paper, moreover, that would be so jealous of its contributors’ pride and self-respect that it would not tumble them in, hugger-mugger, to pig together with all manner of low and contemptible company? Thus I come back to my old topic once more, my old hobby, and if I once set foot in the stirrup, I shall be riding bravely off again, in spite of my promise to my readers. My excuse, however, for dwelling on this topic so explicitly and recurring to it so often, is that of all types of writing, this one which is so admirably represented by Mr. Marquis has the least and poorest chance among us, whereas it ought to have the best; for it is the very salt and spice of literature, and a proper respect for it is the mark of cultural maturity.
A. J. N. 12. vii. 22.
LETTERS OF AMBROSE BIERCE
THE Book Club of California has done a service to all lovers of good writing and fine printing in issuing a collection of the letters of Ambrose Bierce,1 and I wish it were possible for more readers to possess themselves of the book. No better craftsman in words than Bierce has lived in this country for many a day, and his letters might well have introduced him to the larger public that, even now, scarcely knows his name. A public of four hundred, however, if it happens to be a picked public, is a possession not to be despised, for the cause of an author’s reputation is safer in the hands of a few Greeks than in those of a multitude of Persians. “It is not the least pleasing of my reflections,” Bierce himself remarks, “that my friends have always liked my work—or me—well enough to want to publish my books at their own expense.” His wonderful volume of tales, “In the Midst of Life,” was rejected, strange as it seems, by virtually every publisher in the country; the list of the sponsors of his other books is a catalogue of unknown names, and the collected edition of his writings might almost have been regarded as a secret among friends. “Among what I may term ‘underground reputations,’” Mr. Arnold Bennett once observed, “that of Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most striking example.” The taste, the skill and the devotion with which his letters have been edited indicate, however, that, limited as this reputation is, it is destined for a long and healthy life.
It must be said at once that all the letters in the volume were written after the author’s fiftieth year. They thus throw no light upon his early career, upon his development, or even upon the most active period of his creative life, for in 1893 he had already ceased to write stories. Moreover, virtually all these letters are addressed to his “pupils,” as he called them, young men and women who were interested in writing, and to whom he liked nothing better than to give advice. We never see him among his equals, his intimates or his contemporaries; he appears invariably as the benevolent uncle of the gifted beginner, and we receive a perhaps quite erroneous impression that this, in his later life, was Bierce’s habitual rôle. Had he no companions of his own age, no correspondents, no ties, no society? A lonelier man, if we are to accept the testimony of this book, never existed. He speaks of having met Mark Twain, and he refers to two or three Californian writers of the older generation; he lived for many years in Washington, chiefly, as one gathers, in the company of other old army men, few of whom had ever heard that he had written a line; he mentions Percival Pollard; otherwise he seems to have had no acquaintances in the East, while with the West, with San Francisco at least, he seems to have been on the worst of terms. San Francisco, his home for a quarter of a century, he describes as “the paradise of ignorance, anarchy and general yellowness. . . . It needs,” he remarks elsewhere, “another quake, another whiff of fire, and—more than all else—a steady trade wind of grapeshot.” It was this latter—grapeshot is just the right word—that Bierce himself poured into that “moral penal colony,” the worst, as he avers, “of all the Sodoms and Gomorrahs in our modern world”; and his collection of satirical epigrams shows us how much he detested it. To him San Francisco was all that London was to Pope, the Pope of “The Dunciad”; but it was a London without any delectable Twickenham villas or learned Dr. Arbuthnots or gay visiting Voltaires. Bierce’s mind had nothing upon which to feed but the few books, old and well tried, that had nourished his youth. One can only guess how much more effective his life would have been if it had been passed in a congenial atmosphere of living ideas.
To the barrenness of his environment is to be attributed, no doubt, the trivial and ephemeral character of so much of his work; for while his interests were parochial, his outlook, as these letters reveal it, was broadly human. With his air of a somewhat dandified Strindberg—I am glancing at the frontispiece of the book—he combined what might be described as a temperament of the eighteenth century. It was natural to him to write in the manner of Pope, whom he admired prodigiously; lucidity, precision, “correctness” in style were the qualities that he most admired; he was full of the pride of individuality, absolutely fearless and utterly indifferent to public opinion; and the same man who spent so much of his energy “exploring the ways of hate,” was, in his personal life, the serenest of stoics. The son of a “poor farmer” in Ohio, he had had no formal education. How did he acquire such firmness and clarity of mind? He was a natural aristocrat, and he developed a rudimentary philosophy of aristocracy which, under happier circumstances, might have made him a great figure in the world of American thought. Had he come into contact with the best current ideas in his own line, had he lived in the centre, there is no telling how far he might have gone. But America is too large, and the America of his day was too chaotic. It has remained for Mr. Mencken to develop and popularize, with more learning but with less refinement, the views that Bierce expressed in “The Shadow on the Dial.”
Some of these views appear in his letters, enough to show us how complete was his antipathy to the dominant spirit of his age. He disliked humanitarianism as much as he liked humanism, or would have liked it if he had had the opportunity. He invented the word peasant in Mr. Mencken’s sense, as applied, that is, to such worthies as James Whitcomb Riley. “The world does not wish to be helped,” he says. “The poor wish only to be rich, which is impossible, not to be better. They would like to be rich in order to be worse, generally speaking.” His contempt for socialism was unbounded. Of literary men holding Tolstoy’s views he remarks that they are not artists at all: “They are ‘missionaries’ who, in their zeal to lay about them, do not scruple to seize any weapon that they can lay their hands on; they would grab a crucifix to beat a dog. The dog is well beaten, no doubt (which makes him a worse dog than he was before), but note the condition of the crucifix!” All this in defence of literature and what he regards as its proper function. Of Shaw and, curiously, Ibsen, he observes that they are “very small men, pets of the drawing-room and gods of the hour”; he abhors Whitman, on the score equally of sentiment and form; and of Mr. Upton Sinclair’s early hero he writes as follows:
I suppose there are Arthur Sterlings among the little fellows, but if genius is not serenity, fortitude and reasonableness I don’t know what it is. One can not even imagine Shakespeare or Goethe bleeding over his work and howling when “in the fell clutch of circumstance.” The great ones are figured in my mind as ever smiling—a little sadly at times, perhaps, but always with conscious inaccessibility to the pinpricking little Titans that would storm their Olympus armed with ineffectual disasters and popgun misfortunes. Fancy a fellow wanting, like Arthur Sterling, to be supported by his fellows in order that he may write what they don’t want to read!
Bierce was consistent: his comments on his own failure to achieve recognition are all in the spirit of this last contemptuous remark. “I have pretty nearly ceased to be ‘discovered,’” he writes to one of his friends, “but my notoriety as an obscurian may be said to be world-wide and apparently everlasting.” Elsewhere, however, he says: “It has never seemed to me that the ‘unappreciated genius’ had a good case to go into court with, and I think he should be promptly non-suited. . . . Nobody compels us to make things that the world does not want. We merely choose to because the pay, plus the satisfaction, exceeds the pay alone that we get from work that the world does want. Then where is our grievance? We get what we prefer when we do good work; for the lesser wage we do easier work.” Sombre and at times both angry and cynical as Bierce’s writing may seem, no man was ever freer from personal bitterness. If he was out of sympathy with the life of his time and with most of its literature, he adored literature itself, according to his lights. It is this dry and at the same time whole-souled enthusiasm that makes his letters so charming. Fortunate was the circle of young writers that possessed so genial and so severe a master.
One forms the most engaging picture of the old man “wearing out the paper and the patience” of his friends, reading to them Mr. Ezra Pound’s “Ballade of the Goodly Fere.” Where poetry is in question, nothing is too small to escape his attention, no day long enough for the counsel and the appreciation he has to give. “I don’t worry about what my contemporaries think of me,” he writes to his favourite pupil. “I made ’em think of you—that’s glory enough for one.” Every page of his book bears witness to the sincerity of this remark. Whether he is advising his “little group of gifted obscurians” to read Landor, Pope, Lucian or Burke, or elucidating some point of style, or lecturing them on the rudiments of grammar, or warning them against the misuse of literature as an instrument of “reform,” or conjuring them not to “edit” their thought for somebody whom it may pain, he exemplifies his own dicta, that, on the one hand, “literature and art are about all that the world really cares for in the end,” and on the other that, in considering the work of his friends, a critic should “keep his heart out of his head.” Let me quote two or three other observations that are equally good:
One can not be trusted to feel until one has learned to think.
Must one be judged by his average, or may he be judged, on occasion, by his highest? He is strongest who can lift the greatest weight, not he who habitually lifts lesser ones.
A writer should, for example, forget that he is an American and remember that he is a man. He should be neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Buddhist, nor Mohammedan, nor Snake Worshipper. To local standards of right and wrong he should be civilly indifferent. In the virtues, so-called, he should discern only the rough notes of a general expediency; in fixed moral principles only time-saving predecisions of cases not yet before the court of conscience. Happiness should disclose itself to his enlarging intelligence as the end and purpose of life; art and love as the only means to happiness. He should free himself of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, politics, simplifying his life and mind, attaining clarity with breadth and unity with height. To him a continent should not seem wide nor a century long, etc. etc.
This is evidently a “set piece”; but behind its rhetoric one discerns the feeling of a genuine humanist.
In certain ways, to be sure, this is a rather sad book. At seventy-one Bierce set out for Mexico “with a pretty definite purpose,” as he wrote, “which, however, is not at present disclosable.” From this journey he never returned, nor since 1913 has any word ever been received from him. What was that definite purpose? What prompted him to undertake so mysterious an expedition? Was it the hope of exchanging death by “old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs” for the “euthanasia” of death in action? He had come to loathe the civilization in which he lived, and his career had been a long tale of defeat. Of journalism he said that it is “a thing so low that it can not be mentioned in the same breath with literature”; nevertheless, to journalism he had given nine-tenths of his energy. It is impossible to read his letters without feeling that he was a starved man; but certainly it can be said that, if his generation gave him very little, he succeeded in retaining in his own life the poise of an Olympian.
V. W. B. 17. i. 23.
MOBY-DICK
So much has been written lately about “Moby-Dick” that I hesitate to bring the subject up again; but the beautifully clear and spacious pages of the new collected edition of Melville have beguiled me into reading the book a third time, and I am wondering if all its felicities have dawned even yet on people’s minds. It seems to me now less chaotic, better shaped, than it seemed at first: nothing has surprised me more than to discover how conscious Melville was of what he was doing. I had taken too seriously the statement with which he opens Chapter LXXXII: “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method”—or rather, I had not placed enough weight on this word “careful.” It seemed to me intolerable that he had not removed the chapters on whales in general, on whaling, whales’ heads, pitchpoling, ambergris, the try-works, ete., and published them separately: they were glorious, but I could not believe that they had been deliberately introduced to retard the action. It struck me that the action should have been retarded as it were within the story. I do not feel this now. The book is an epic, and an epic requires ballast. Think of the catalogue of ships in Homer, the mass of purely historical information in the “Æneid,” the long descriptions in “Paradise Lost”: how immensely these elements add to the density and the volume of the total impression, and how they serve to throw into relief the gestures and activities of the characters! This freight of inanimate or partially inanimate material gives “Moby-Dick” its bottom, its body, in the vintner’s phrase; and I am convinced that Melville knew exactly what he was about.
It is only when we have grasped the nature of the book that we begin to perceive how cunning is its craftsmanship throughout. Of the larger lines I shall speak presently; but glance for a moment at the single episode of Father Mapple’s sermon in the Whaleman’s Chapel. Why is it that, once read, this episode seems to have built itself permanently into the tissues of our imagination? It is because of the skill with which Melville has excluded from our minds every irrelevant detail. He wishes, first, to establish the nautical character of the preacher, so he has him stoop down, after he has climbed into the pulpit, and drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole is deposited within. This may have been taken from reality, for Father Mapple is known to have been drawn from Father Taylor, Emerson’s friend, the apostle to the sailors in Boston. But Melville’s skill here consists in not remarking that Father Mapple might have been boarding a ship: the image already conveys this connotation—Melville uses it to heighten our sense of the preacher’s momentary “withdrawal from all outward worldly ties and connexions.” This nautical character, moreover, is preserved by every detail of the sketch. When Father Mapple kneels and prays, his prayer is so deeply devout that he seems to be “kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.” When he rises, he begins to speak “in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog.” This impression, once established, is maintained by the imagery of the sermon; but, to pass to another point, why do we remember the sermon so vividly? Partly because of the storm that is beating outside the chapel. We are never allowed to forget this storm. It shrieks and drives about us as we enter the chapel, it pelts the door from without, it howls between the hymn and the sermon, it appears to “add new power to the preacher, who, when describing Jonah’s sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself.” The effect of all this is to redouble the solemn intimacy of the scene. The chapel is cut off from the world like the cabin of a ship; our minds are focused with an almost painful intensity upon the visible and audible facts that immediately surround us.
I have dwelt on this episode because it shows with what deliberate art Melville has ensnared his readers. To turn now to the work as a whole: how carefully, with what prevision, he has built up the general scheme: the pitch of the book, the “mystery” of the White Whale, the character of Captain Ahab. First of all, the pitch: with what a mighty rhythm the “Pequod” starts on its voyage:
Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.
There we have the note of the saga; and this is consistently sustained by a dozen different means. Take the portraits of the three mates, Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, “momentous men” all; and the three fantastic harpooneers, the cannibal Queequeg, Tashtego, the Gay Head Indian, and Daggoo, the gigantic Negro. By a process of simplification that heightens their effect without removing it from reality, Melville invests these characters with a semblance as of Homer’s minor heroes:
Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress.
[Tashtego.] To look at the tawny brown of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air.
This method of characterization, indeed, prevails throughout the book. Take the captain of the “Jeroboam,” for instance:
A long-skirted, cabalistically cut coat of a faded walnut tinge enveloped him; the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.
We are living from beginning to end in a world by one degree larger than life. The constant mythological allusions, the sweep of the style, the bold splendour of the similes support this impression, till at last the battles with the whales begin and we feel beneath the book the very pulse of the ocean itself. “Give me a condor’s wing!” Melville exclaims in the excitement of his inspiration. “Give me Vesuvius’s crater for an inkstand!” And then he adds, proudly conscious of his achievement: “Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”
No less extraordinary is the development of the legend of “Moby-Dick,” of the sense of impending fatality. Towards the end it may be thought that Melville strains a point or two in order to produce this latter effect. I am thinking especially of the chapter in which the sea-hawk darts away with Ahab’s hat; but the chapters on the “candles” and the needle are open to the same objection. There is an electrical storm and the corposants appear on the yardarms; and soon afterwards it is found that the compasses have been turned. All these phenomena are natural, but they are certainly exceptional; and, occurring so close together, they seem to me to overshoot their mark, which is, of course, to inform the reader that the calamitous whale is approaching. Machinery of this kind is much more in place in works like “The Ancient Mariner” that frankly embody supernatural elements. But consider, at the outset of the book, the apparition of Elijah. Consider that astonishing chapter on the whiteness of the whale. Consider the reports of Moby-Dick that come to us, one after another, from the sailors, from wandering sea-captains encountered during the voyage, from the mad Gabriel of the “Jeroboam,” from the captain of the “Samuel Enderby” whose arm the monster has torn away as he tore away Ahab’s leg. The fabulous whale torments our imagination till we, like Gabriel, think of him as “no less a being than the Shaker God incarnated”; and all this, be it noted, without a word of direct description on Melville’s part. Until he reveals himself just before the chase, we see Moby-Dick solely through the consequences of his actions and the eyes of superstitious men.
I should like to linger over another aspect of the fabulous element of the book—fabulous but entirely consonant with reality. I mean the theme of the “five dusky phantoms” who appear midway in the story, suddenly surrounding Ahab and as if “fresh formed out of air.” We get our first hint of their existence in the dark words of Elijah, when Ishmael and Queequeg encounter him near the wharf in the grey dawn:
But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my shoulder, said, “Did ye see anything looking like men going toward that ship a while ago?”
Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, “Yes, I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure.”
“Very dim, very dim,” said Elijah. “Morning to ye.”
Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and touching my shoulder again, said, “See if you can find ’em now, will ye?”
“Find who?”
“Morning to ye! Morning to ye!” he rejoined, again moving off.
Later, on the voyage, Stubb remarks that Captain Ahab is always disappearing at night: “Who’s made appointments with him in the hold? Ain’t that queer, now?” These vaguely defined Orientals are satisfactorily accounted for as the story moves on; but they remain dim, and their presence and their dimness and the pale, opalescent light that emanates from them spread I can hardly say what magic through the book. It is to be observed, moreover, that all this fantasy in “Moby-Dick” has behind it everywhere a substantial fabric of fact: that is why we never feel that we are reading a romantic novel, why, even at the most extravagant moments, we accept every detail as veracious. There were actually to be seen, in the Nantucket of the ’forties, such figures as Queequeg and Fedallah, just as there were old “fighting Quakers, Quakers with a vengeance,” lords of whales like Bildad and Peleg, with their “thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical pagan Roman.” We can trace the whole story, trunk, branches and twigs, back to the scene out of which it springs, and which we feel between the lines, just as we can trace the Arabian genie back to Aladdin’s lamp; and this, by enabling us to compare the fact with the treatment, inevitably and immensely heightens the effect of the latter.
Of Captain Ahab I should never stop talking if I once began. But here again, to recur to the aspect of the book upon which I have been dwelling, how admirable is Melville’s power of construction. “Ahab’s soul’s a centipede that moves upon a hundred legs.” So he himself asseverates, in the midst of the chase; and this character of a “mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies” is developed and sustained with uncanny adroitness. First we are presented with the other captains who give us the scale of the Nantucket whale-masters in general. Then we see him through a cloud of strange rumours, and not till the ship is well at sea does he appear at all. Suddenly he emerges; he stands on the quarter-deck, and Melville describes him minutely in a magnificent passage. Then he vanishes again, to remain omnipresent but only intermittently visible, the soul, the brain, the will of the ship, and in the end the embodiment of a bedevilled humanity. We are never permitted to become familiar with him: he is never mentioned, he never appears, indeed, save to the accompaniment of some superb phrase, some new majestic image. He is a “grand, ungodly, godlike man,” a “good man—not a pious good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man”; he is a “khan of the plank, a king of the sea, and a great lord of leviathans”; he “lives in the world as the last of the grizzly bears lived in settled Missouri.” It can fairly be said that by the time the chase begins, Ahab is as mighty and terrible a figure in our minds as Moby-Dick himself. The two fabulous characters have grown, by similar means, side by side.
Much more might be said of the form of the book—of the shredded Shakespearean drama, for example, the scraps and fragments of which, among other diverse elements, have been pressed into the moving mass of the narrative. But I can not attempt to develop these points. “The great task of an artist,” said Taine, “is to find subjects which suit his talent.” Melville had this good fortune once and once only; but his masterpiece is worth more than libraries of lesser books. “Moby-Dick” is our sole American epic, no less an epic for being written in prose; and has it been observed that it revives in a sense the theme of the most ancient epic of the English-speaking peoples? Grendel in “Beowulf” might almost be described as the prototype of the White Whale. Was not Grendel also the symbol of “all that most maddens and torments, all that stirs up the lees of things, all truth with malice in it, all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain, all the subtle demonisms of life and thought, all evil—visibly personified”?
V. W. B. 16. v. 23.
1 “Essays: Irish and American.” John Butler Yeats. With an appreciation by “Æ.” New York: The Macmillan Company.
“Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats.” First and Second Series. Selected by Ezra Pound. The Cuala Press, Churchtown, Dun-drum Co., Dublin, Ireland.
1 “The Letters of Ambrose Bierce.” Edited by Bertha Clark Pope, with an Introduction by George Sterling. San Francisco: The Book Club of California. Privately printed.
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