part0015

‘Returning to that life (of a burlesque road show) after an interval of a year or two in order to revisit your friends or your old haunts must be among the most peculiar experiences possible to human beings, for it must give your own decaying sensibilities a kind of jealous immortality to see your place filled so rapidly and easily by some one who might well be yourself, re-born into flesh and health. Everything would be altered, while remaining, in all its essentials, exactly the same. The same hotel buildings, only with a freshly darkening coat of paint and perhaps new carpets and sofa covers, and with the band playing another set of tunes that, though new and unfamiliar, were with difficulty to be distinguished from the old. Clerks and people in shops have their positions filled as easily out of the plethora of human beings once they are gone, but it is no part of their lives to pretend that even a simulated gaiety is required from them in the hours of work.

‘Toward these pathetic tones of gaiety any one who had actually worked himself or herself into a permanence on the theater boards could not possibly help feeling both a compassion and a deep degree of interest, like that we feel on discovering some trait typical of Europeans among the natives of the Congo or the Amazon, which emotion has its sort of return boomerang of sentiment in the platitude about our all being brothers and sisters. So must doctors of true medical science regard the witch doctors of the Zulus.

‘A kind of repressed and constipated hysteria in need of a perpetual laxative must be one of the motives that drive people into what are really, in those kinds of cases, but different conditions of the same profession, for you cannot be forced to go upon the stage any more than you can be driven by necessity into an immediately successful livelihood from the streets. There is a nicely-graded road into the fully-fledged conditions of both of these ways of life, and along this people cannot be propelled who have not some innate yearning toward the more dangerous degrees of comfort. I suppose that nearly all these women are the children of mothers who have suffered the same constraints of necessity and predisposition.’

That is bad writing of the same sort as Mr. Theodore Dreiser’s, which can be understood better if it is read quickly than if it is read slowly. The more careful reader is apt to catch his mental coat-tails on such briars as that sentence beginning ‘A kind of repressed and constipated hysteria’ and get no further for a quarter of an hour. This is all very sad, for the passage is an extract from Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell’s All Summer in a Day, which is in many respects a delightful book and one that should shine in the public eye, since neither the importance of the Sitwells as a group nor of Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell as an individual can well be exaggerated.

The three Sitwells, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, are among the few illuminants England possesses which are strong enough to light up post-war England. They are the legatees of perhaps the most glorious group that English life has ever produced, the Whig aristocracy of the eighteenth century. The society that received Voltaire on his visit to England embraced their ancestors and from it they have inherited their graceful intellectual carriage, a boundless curiosity concerning the things of the mind and the quality of taste. That quality requires a synthesis of all the attributes that have raised man from the brute: for to identify the nature of a work of art, to discover of what conflict it is an attempted resolution, is not possible unless one owns the diligence to study history and the memory to record one’s studies. That one may see how far the artist followed the fashion, and how far he wrote of what was in him, and how far the problems that interested him were of time or of eternity, and to determine how far the work is a resolution of that particular conflict and how much or how little the artist has resorted to such weak means of sublimation as sentimental interpretation or suppression of the facts, one must be as sensitive as a bird dog and be able to fight against one’s own conflicts like a successful Laocoon in order to achieve an attitude of detachment. That synthesis is part of the remarkable endowment of the Sitwells. Moreover, each of them is inhabited by a bland demon, as the German metaphysicians used to call that which gets into a man and makes him creative, not so forcibly that it turns them away from criticism, but valid enough to give them the right to speak with the authority of artists. They have indeed by merely moving through society very excitingly, being themselves, done as much for culture in London as anybody since Mr. Ford Madox Ford severed his connection with the English Review. Edith Sitwell writes poetry as gay as a flower garden; its confused joyousness half heard through jazz music, as it is in the performance she and her brothers give called ‘Façade,’ is to me a deal pleasanter than much of the confused passionateness one hears at the opera through the music of Wagner or Strauss, and surely just as legitimate. Osbert Sitwell gives us lovely verse and the amusing grotesqueness of Triple Fugue and Before the Bombardment and scholarly notes on his travels such as very few critics of the last generation would have been equipped to write. And Sacheverell Sitwell has written a great deal of beautiful poetry, complicated by reason of an over-weight of content and not short-weight of execution, and a book called Southern Baroque Art, in which this bland demon rears a structure of argument and sensation that has real and precious idiosyncrasy.

Yet here is a Sitwell indulging in a page blowsy for lack of that exactitude which makes Mr. Thomas Hardy delight us, when we open the pages of this new collected edition of his poems and read such a poem as ‘The Oxen.’ Since one’s first reading of it that has stood alone in one’s mind, a thing as simple in its favour and its prettiness as a view down a cottage path between the hollyhock rows, a thing that is the map of a mental continent. It is about the legend which tells that at midnight on Christmas Eve all the cattle in their stalls go down on their knees in worship of the Saviour.

Exactitude, certainly, is here: restraint, cunning compression. There is a dramatic poem, ‘One Ralph Blossom Soliloquizes,’ which is a masterpiece of impersonation contrived in twenty-six lines. In it a rake imagines what certain seven women whom he had brought to public shame would say to him when they met in hell, and by the couple of lines he puts into their mouths reveals the complete character of each one of them; and by his own attitude, his combination of an extreme appreciation of their qualities and an essential coldness toward them, such as a jeweller might feel for his stock, he reveals what it is to be a rake. Every line brings up the theme over the horizon of the mind like a rising sun. And there are here all the lyrics that, in a few lines framed with the mosaic metrical skill which comes of familiarity with Latin verse, put the philosophy of one who is too much in love with reality to lie and pretend that that which is harsh is smooth. ‘The Mother Mourns,’‘To Life,’‘The Lacking Sense’ and ‘The Bedridden Peasant’ have the iridescence of tear-bottles, the fine grave form of the funeral urns that they recall.

But, unfortunately, there is more here than exactitude. The collected poems of Thomas Hardy do not, of course, include his finest poetry: for that is in The Dynasts. One may doubt, indeed, whether the gathering of his shorter verse in one volume does him quite such good service as such a collection usually does for a poet. For one thing one would rather read Wessex Poems and Poems of the Past and Present in the form in which they have previously appeared, with Mr. Hardy’s own illustrations. Those drawings are very interesting. Because Mr. Hardy learned his technique as an architectural draughtsman he knows no use for perspective, and the world he draws is as flat as the print on the wall; but every shape he depicts is drawn with such intensity that it is as lively as life. So they are at once remote and actual, perplexing and satisfying. But quite apart from any matter of illustrations, it is a pity to read Mr. Hardy’s shorter poems in one volume, for the reason that when one gets them all together one is apt to be overwhelmed by one of their characteristics. One is apt to be discouraged by the frequency with which Mr. Hardy has persuaded himself that a macabre subject is a poem in itself: that, if there be enough of death and the tomb in one’s theme, it needs no translation into art, the bold statement of it being sufficient.

Really, the thing is prodigious. One of Mr. Hardy’s ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all. ‘The Supplanter’ is typical. It tells how a man who goes to lay a wreath on his bride’s grave arrives just when the cemetery-keeper is giving a small dance for his daughter’s twentieth birthday, and gets involved. It turns out to be quite a party: he spoils his wreath by dancing on it and seduces the daughter; and there is great play a year after over the bride’s grave with the cemetery-keeper’s daughter producing the child of this festivity, and the man showing much irascible repentance. It is the grisliest setting for love betrayed or gratified. One seems, since one is not exalted by any revelation coming out of the treatment, to be listening to the merriment of some lewd morticians. ‘It seems that there were two registered at the Vale of Rest Marble Mausoleum.’ Nearly half the poems in the volume fall into this same category. ‘Satires of Circumstance,’ indeed, get a kind of style from their repetitiveness, from the multiplication of their terse diagrams of misery, from the abundance of their terse shorthand notes of woe, just as the drawings of almost any medieval Dance of Death series have an impressiveness given to them over and above their individual merits by the cumulative effect of their reiterated subjects. But that does not really obscure the fact that they, too, resort to sublimations of the conflict behind the poem which one would call false, were it not that it seems a pity to brand them with the same epithet one applies to such compounding with public favour as sentimentality. But, any way, it is odd, unharmonious, unsatisfying: strangely so for the author of three books that are as satisfying as The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Trumpet Major and Under the Greenwood Tree.

This aspect of Thomas Hardy’s work is, of course, not peculiar to his poetry. It is characteristic of any of his volumes of short stories, of Life’s Little Ironies, for example, or A Grout of Noble Dames, which are too often mere recitals of odd ways of getting into the churchyard. In other words, it is peculiar to his shorter work. And that, perhaps, gives us a clue to the course of this taint of eccentric morbidity. Thomas Hardy is a man of culture. He is, as a matter of fact, a much more cultured man than Henry James was, for he had a more systematic education and attained to something of scholarship in Greek and Latin, and had the further discipline of his training as an architect; and he had the advantage for which Henry James so yearned, of having been born into a social order so long established that a code of manners had been worked out which enjoined on all persons the sort of behaviour which had been found to be most conducive to general harmony. But, oddly enough, he was always very artless. Though he was instinctively an artist, he could not formulate to himself what art was or understand how other artists got to work. It was similar to the way in which Samuel Butler was more interested in science than in anything else, but never came to any conscious comprehension of the scientific spirit, so that he was always attributing the strangest motives to Huxley and Darwin. Once Thomas Hardy became engaged on a long and important book his lack of comprehension of what art was about mattered nothing; for in meditating on the adventures throughout any prolonged train of events he fell, as artists do, into the equivalent of a trance state, during which his subconscious pushed up into the conscious such events and phrases as are appropriate symbols for the matter that had to be expressed. But in briefer composition the mechanism did not set to work as quickly; and there obtruded on him his habitual perplexity as to what art could possibly be about, which he would try to allay by conforming to the two reasons for which country-folk tell each other stories. That they do first for the sake of entertainment, and secondly for the sake of wisdom, to add to the map of life’s contours. He, therefore, sat back and tried to remember true stories that belonged to the type of truth.

Now, it happens that if one tries to remember like that, if one stays still in the present and lets the events rush to one out of the past, it is the fractures of one’s normal life that appear first. One remembers what was not customary. The customary condition of Thomas Hardy’s mind was an abundant appreciation of life. There comes into such a scene as that when Sergeant Troy shows his sword drill to Bathsheba Everdene, the most complicate system of joys circling within joys, like the stars dancing among themselves in the heavens: a joy in the earth itself, in bodies, in beauty, in strength, in sex, in the play of the body that pulls the mind and itself near to sex and then away again; in the play of the mind that, in not quite the same rhythm, pulls the body and itself near to sex and then away again; joy in the peacock strut of the male, joy in that aspect of the woman which may be symbolized by a moist, pouting, dark rose lower lip. That was what his subconscious pleasurably saw in life; but because it was so habitual, it does not leap to the recalling memory. He does not remember the warmth which his sound blood, which has kept him going for most of a hundred years, sends through his veins. Rather he remembers the time when the blood seemed shocked out of his body by the chill air that rises from an open grave. Hence these many records of mere calamity, of charnel accidents, which are merely the defects of a great quality, shadows such as must be cast by a strong light, nothing to be counted against him.

But Mr. Sitwell’s book lies beside us to remind us that there has recently come into literature a force which will in future prevent any such novelists as come under its influence from any such misinterpretations of their own pasts. It is a force that is only novel so far as it is applied to prose, for it is the inspiration of nearly all lyric poetry, and a great deal of the rest. It is the force of memory practised as an art. Those who seek remembrance this way do not stay still in the present and let the accidents of the past fight to them by shock tactics. They project themselves into the past as before they have projected themselves into an invented world, and recreate the experiences they already have had by passing through them imaginatively, just as in a plain matter of fiction they pass imagination through the experiences they never have had. This gives their account of them an extreme psychic importance. These experiences already have brought certain things to the subconscious mind and changed it; the conscious goes back and revisits the mind in its first state and compares it to the mind in its second state, and by reason of that comparison and the processes involved in it changes it again to a third state; the internal conflict which is the root of the artist’s desire to create is intensified and concentrated, since many of the small dog-fights that take place round the central battle are seen for what they are and suppressed; and the general sense of harmony with which the artist hopes to reconcile his conflict must be immensely increased by the pleasure he must get in moulding this material, so specially malleable with familiarity, into beauty. It is for this reason, perhaps, that poetry has hitherto always had a greater prestige than fiction, which has heretofore been so much less personal, so much less a matter of direct memory.

The release of the force of memory in fiction is, with certain few and momentary exceptions, a novelty belonging to this age. It is curious that, although subsequent developments of it have proved that it is supremely suited to unseal the tragic springs of life, its first exponent should have been a great comedian. For one could not deny that title to George Moore, since the ultimate result of his reminiscent work is happy laughter. (How joyously, for example, one remembers Euphorion in Texas, in which a Texan lady visits Mr. Moore in the hope that his attentions might enable her to found a line of artists in that state, when one picks up a little book called The Creative Arts in Texas, which capably tells us that there are now in that State forty-seven poets, five playwrights, eleven novelists, eleven short story writers, twenty-three essayists, eight historians, six collectors, twenty-three composers, nine sculptors, and fifty-one painters. One must congratulate Mr. Moore on unusual greatness of an unusual kind.) The unique personality of Mr. Moore prevented the method from being recognized for what it was, or as anything but a phase of his extraordinary being. The next person who tried it was Dorothy Richardson, and though she created interest by the power inherent in her method, she killed it by the relative insignificance of her internal conflict. And then the perfect transplantation of the poetic mood to prose was effected by Marcel Proust.

The greatness of Proust! One cannot exaggerate it. Like the greatest, he draws one out of the house of one’s life into his house. Shakespeare performed such abductions mercilessly. Making one’s father less real than King Lear, his old lips turning back like a wolf’s from his toothless gums while his dying flesh cursed live mating flesh and he talks of the small gilded fly; and the wench that broke one’s heart less real than Cleopatra, proving curiously that all love is not divine. The memory, the poet’s memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one’s mere personal life, that one has merely lived. Even so, one finds oneself seated in the great salon of Marcel Proust’s mind, witnessing events which are more clarified than those of life, which clarify life. There is that affair of the phrase from the sonata by Vinteuil. Through all Swann’s odious humiliations he could be consoled by those sounds. They had been moulded into a shape that just fitted the hole that had been cut in his heart. Yet he never learned that the sonata had been written by the snuffy old M. Vinteuil. Nor if he had known would it have availed anything. He could not have established any relationship with old M. Vinteuil, divided as they were by several abysses. Human comprehension, the thing one longs for above all else, is not so easily to be achieved. That there are phrases of music which adorn a situation like a garland set on the brow of a statue; that is enough. At any rate, that must be enough, since there is no more. What is real, if this is not real? Did that not actually happen in the world in which one lives? Or rather, does one not actually live in the world where that happened?

Under that spell Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell has fallen; and he has re-created very beautifully an afternoon of childhood, a night of youth. The writer of to-day who can profit by the immense researches into consciousness that have been made since Henry James began to write is now amazingly fortunate in his awareness of himself, in his knowledge of his own nature, which is his own instrument and at least half of his material. Yet at the same time one perceives from certain pages of poor writing that the freedom from any factual constraints in the new form, the absence of any necessity to keep dates with oneself such as was imposed on the writer of the old-fashioned novel, with a plot to work out, or the old-fashioned essay with a point to prove, are something of temptations to inexactitude.

And there we are where we began. The point in which Mr. Sitwell irritates us by his inferiority to Mr. Hardy proves to be the result of his use of that same force, the lack of which makes Mr. Hardy jeopardize his superiority by faults to which Mr. Sitwell would not be subject, his ignorance of his own nature, his tendency to present the abnormal phases of his being as if they were the normal. One perceives that adding to the technique of art is not like throwing out a new wing in the town hall. Rather is it like some great movement under the waters on the face of the earth, that opens a channel here, that afar off lifts up a reef, according to the great terrestrial rhythms.