I. Mr Compton Mackenzie and Sinister Street

I.

Some years ago I contributed to an extinct – and by me at least sincerely regretted – organ, the Tribune, a series of articles under the above heading. I take them up again partly because I had not, at the time of that paper’s death, finished saying all that I wanted to say; partly because the personnel, or at any rate the aspect of the personnel, of the literary world in this country has undergone a very considerable change. At that date the outlook was full of hope; there were writers like Mr de Morgan who were just beginning careers; others like Messrs Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy who were lions young enough, but already emitting, if I may use the term, formidable roars; there were the established artists in their vigorous primes, like Mr Conrad and Mr Henry James; there were the still living writers who appeared to have almost classical positions, like Mr Meredith, Mr Swinburne, and Mr Hardy, who, since Providence is sometimes kind, is still with us. Today we shift the canvas of the panorama a definite step onwards…

The classical writers of yesterday are dead – Swinburne and Meredith. Mr James, having published his definitive edition, has, as it were, taken classical honours; Mr Conrad is the undisputed Prince of Prose; Messrs Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy have now given us a sufficient bulk of work to sit assured, and classed in what I believe are called the seats of the mighty. And the outlook – The Outlook too, for the matter of that – is full of hope; there is, that is to say, a sufficiency of younger men coming on to make the job of continuing such a series as this worthwhile: there is Mr D.H. Lawrence, on whom I at least pin the most enormous hopes; there is Mr Stephen Reynolds, who continues to analyse the life of what he chooses to call the Poor Man; there is Mr Pound, who, with his humorous appearance is seriously enough undertaking the considerable job of starting a new movement in poetry. (This is not an inclusive survey, but merely a list of the two or three names that jump into my mind. Lord Randolph Churchill forgot Goschen upon a memorable occasion; I may well have forgotten the Henry James of tomorrow. Well – there is Mr Onions!) At any rate, they are there all right, les jeunes!

Men, however, and however young, don’t matter much; even a genius or so does not matter much! The real point for the contemplative critic is whether the collective action of those young men with the vine-leaves in their hair, or of those two or three geniuses, is sufficient to form consciously or no, a movement. For it is only by movements that literature – or anything else – can be carried forward. If the effort of today does not to some extent carry on the effort of yesterday; if the effort of tomorrow does not show some signs of carrying forward the effort of today, thus solidifying the edifice, or, if you like, broadening out the stream – then the contemplation of the Body Corporate of Literature becomes a comparatively unprofitable task – the consideration not of a fine town or stream but that of congregation of unrelated buildings, of unconnected pools. I do not mean to say that even this latter might not be an interesting task, but it is a task not so interesting as the discovery of a systematized effort in a group of beings, though the effort, or even the system, may be unconscious enough. What we desire is to be able to say of our day as was said of a certain Roman: ‘Opera sub Tiberio semi-imperfecta…’ and so on; to be able to say that whereas certain men have set up edifices of sumptuous marble, certain others are still engaged in building in the nobler material further edifices upon vacant lots. This, I think, we can do today.

In the series of articles that I contributed to the Tribune it was possible enough to feel at the time – and it has become a certainty now – that the quality of Hope attached mostly to the three writers Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, and Mr Galsworthy. At that date both Mr Wells and Mr Bennett did two separate types of work – the story-telling type by which they purported to support life, make their names known, and obtain popularity – and the more earnest or, at any rate the more significant type of novel which, in essence, is a work of history. And to this latter class of work in these three writers most of the hope of that dead day attached itself. (Mr James was doing it all the time; Mr Conrad was a separate genius.) What one hoped was that Mr Wells and Mr Bennett would make enough money by writing ‘stories’, and that Mr Galsworthy would take himself seriously enough to set out upon the exclusive writing of the historic novel. For in the end the really historical novels are the chronicle of Brakelond, the works of Defoe, Richardson, Smollett, Mark Rutherford, and George Gissing – the chroniclers of their own day. The Gadzooks style of thing, whether it be Julius Caesar, Salammbô, the Castle of Otranto, the Tower of London, or my own contrivances, is merely a display of ingenuity with no further significance than just the amount of ingenuity displayed…

Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, and Mr Galsworthy, the fates being propitious, did really continue their historical labours almost to the exclusion of the ‘story-telling’ vein, and thus the reproach to the English novel of being a merely negligible collection of desultory anecdotes began to pass. For if the novel, as literature, is to have any serious claim to the position of a saviour of society – and it is no good bothering one’s head about anything if that anything has not got at least a sporting – a ten to one – chance of becoming a potential saviour of society – the novel must be a picture of manners, a chronicle of movements, or of parts of movements.

II.

From this point of view (I am leaving out for the moment the question of Art) you could not well have a better book than Sinister Street, and I am very glad of it, because Mr Compton Mackenzie is a young man whose work I have been, as the phrase is, ‘following’ for some years, and whose personality I find attractive. Mr Mackenzie is of distinguished theatrical origin, which is in itself a significant matter. For whatever may be said for or against theatrical people as a class, they have before them the perpetual necessity of being observers of manners. If they observe well they make good actors; if they don’t they can, at best, but rant. (I think, at least, that I am right in saying this.)

Trained then in what must have been a school of observation and, one presumes, in reasonably easy circumstances, our author attended a presumably slipshod public school of the usual type, and then one of the usual old universities where, as was probably right and proper he paid more attention to the social side of things and to amateur theatricals than to the curriculum. Given in addition a gentlemanly-scholarly contemplation of the Classics –

and so on; given a by no means German attention to the picturesque parts of history, and temporary passions for one game or another, and there you have, I should say, puer felix – or a very unfortunate one, as the cat jumps. Happily felis catus came down on the right side of the wall.

Beginning his publishing with poems, our author presented us successively with a patch-and-powder comedy of great ingenuity, and a theatrical story notable for minute observation of detail. Carnival, however, whatever its merits, and they were considerable, was still a ‘story’, and suffered from being too much written, from being a little too extravagantly picturesque. The danger was that our young friend might find tales more ingenious, and language more florate, and end in the school of the late R.L. Stevenson – the gentleman who put back the clock of English fiction fifty years. (That remark is not mine, though I heartily concur in it; it was actually, in all its truth, made by that great poor genius, Stephen Crane!)

But it was on the right side of the wall that the good cat descended, and with Sinister Street our author joins the goodly band of historians. For Sinister Street is really history – the history of a whole class, in a whole region, during a whole period of life. Mr Mackenzie’s central figure is an apparently ordinary boy, in an apparently ordinary English home in West Kensington, going to the ordinary slipshod preparatory school, to the ordinary slipshod London public school, in preparation for the ordinary good time at one of the older universities. It will thus be observed that Mr Mackenzie knows of what he writes. I have indeed never read a more carefully documented study of real life in boyhood and in early adolescence – or, at any rate, I have never read one that was so documented and yet so interesting; or one in which it is so subtly and so cleverly brought out that the apparently ordinary English boy in the apparently ordinary English home is really the odd creature in an odd establishment that all English people really are. (It was Mr Galsworthy in that most delightful of all his plays, Joy, whose governess made the tremendous discovery that the situation of every soul in these old islands is a ‘special case’, and that, really, is Mr Galsworthy’s chief benefaction to humanity.) Sinister Street itself, then, is a special street; West Kensington is an extraordinarily odd, even a romantic quarter; the boy of the book is a special case – and that is English life of that class. All the while we have been talking of the drab lives of the suburbs…

I don’t mean to say that Sinister Street has not got its artistic faults; though, since these are more apparent whilst one reads the novel, they may well be slighter than struck me at first. Whilst, that is to say, I was reading the book, I was struck by the hardness of the handling. The details about schoolday caps, stamp collections, sweaters, high collars, struck me as being in a sense too provincial – too exclusively appertaining to schoolboy life, and given with too little sense of fusing and of atmosphere. How exactly I should want to alter the handling I could not say; I should want myself to get a little more of haze between the definitenesses; a little less of the continual definition of material objects. And yet I may well be wrong. After all, for eighty years or so the great French writers have preached the lesson that the only way in which to render a psychological state is to render the material objects that evoke it, and that is the truest of all truths. And indeed the memory of Sinister Street – I read it about three weeks ago – is a peculiarly atmospheric one. I seem to see the twilights amongst the not at all high plane-trees, amongst the labyrinthine streets of not very high brick villas, the lights shining out in the paper-shops; the ’buses, just lit up, too – I seem to see, extraordinarily, the landscape of my own boyhood. So that possibly Sinister Street is a work of real genius – one of those books that really exist otherwise than as the decorations of a publishing season – exist along with L’Education sentimentale, Fathers and Children, Heart of Darkness, and The Purple Land. One is too cautious – or, with all the desire to be generous in the world, too ungenerous – to say anything like that, dogmatically, of a quite young writer. But I shouldn’t wonder?

At any rate there is a fine movement stirring in English literature – I mean amongst novels – and novels are the only things worth writing.

Outlook, 32 (13 September 1913), 353–4.

VI. Mr John Galsworthy and The Dark Flower

I.

It is the curse of cynicism, just as it is the curse of handling social grievances in terms of art, that, as if they were acids working on alkalis, the satirical characters of any novel utterly destroy the virtuous protagonists of the author in his constructive moods. The virtuous protagonists, on the other hand, invariably destroy the effect of the book altogether. Becky Sharp, I mean, kills Amelia Osborne so effectively that Thackerayan Virtue was knocked out of the world for good and all by Vanity Fair. No woman, after reading that work, could ever have wanted to be like Amelia, no man like Major Dobbin. Amelia and Dobbin, on the other hand, take their revenge on their creator by making Vanity Fair, whenever they appear on the moving canvas, utterly, oh, desolatingly dull! And they do it even when they are not on the canvas, for when the author is describing his adventuress’s adventures, suddenly a prick of conscience comes into the midst of his gusto. He remembers that he has forgotten the Amelia-cum-Dobbin point of view, and straightway starts in to tell you that his own heart is really in the right place…

As it was with Thackeray of Vanity Fair, so was it with Dickens of Bleak House, with Alphonse Daudet of L’Immortel. For, in that one particular, the French are no whit ahead of their English colleagues, and nothing is more desolatingly dreary than the Virtuous Artist and his wife in the French writer’s masterpiece…

And as it was with his predecessors so it is apt to be with Mr Galsworthy. Mr Galsworthy is the best man in the world – absolutely the best, with a heart of pure gold! He is also the best satirist in England – the only satirist. Now, to be a finished satirist and to have a heart of gold is a very ticklish affair; just as to have the gift of ironical observation and to desire to be a constructive observer is to be in some peril. On the one hand, you are keenly alive to the ridiculous contrasts of a comic world; on the other you desire to construct caryatids, with moulded breasts and hair like corn, groaning under the weight of all the balconies of unreformed Society.

Mr Galsworthy, with his fine, pretty smile – I don’t mean his physical smile, though I don’t see why I shouldn’t, for the matter of that – goes through this ant-heap of ours, through our dining-rooms with the heavy oak furniture, the steel engravings of the Good Shepherd and the Stag at Bay, the tantalus on the sideboard, the cigar-cabinet made to hold two thousand cigars beside the black marble and steel of the fireplace. He lifts the violet velvet window-hangings that let a little dust powder on to the head because the poor parlourmaid is so tired. In the street without he perceives the Watercress-seller, and the fine smile vanishes; the grim jaws clench together (I don’t mean the physical jaws of our author); the notebook comes out; echoes from the Woman Who Did, from William Morris, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, from Henry George, from Ibsen, and St Vincent de Paul whisper through the suddenly shuddering air. And along with the fine smile goes Observation.

Now that is a pity. It is a pity for Literature; it is a pity also for the Watercress-seller and for the Woman Who Has Left Her Husband. For Mr Galsworthy could do so much for these poor people if he relied on his own satiric temperament (which, heaven knows, might be a solvent powerful enough!). He could, if he only would, stand so well upon his own bottom and forget about Jean-Jacques. Even St Vincent he has enough of in himself…

It is especially a pity for the woman who has left her husband, because it is apt to turn her into a bore, so that you forget that hers really is a Hard Case. I was thinking, of course of The Fugitive (Duckworth and Co.), which is being played at the Prince of Wales’. Mr Galsworthy is such a magnificent dramatist. The Silver Box was such a fine play; Joy is such a fine play; The Fugitive is almost always such a fine play. I don’t know any other dramatist who, for me, really counts.

I say this advisedly, though in my moments of irritation with our irritating author I am apt to call him a dreary nuisance. For the feeling of almost mad rage, that comes to one when Mr Galsworthy shouts soliloquies bang in the middle of something really fine and dramatic – just when you want to forget that his crew of doctrinaire humanitarians exist in this distracting town – that feeling of exasperation is apt to persist in the form of sullen resentment ages and ages after one has left the playhouse. It is the most exasperating thing that I know. There was the Pigeon. Nothing could have been finer. It went on and on; it was making every one of its points. Anyone not an ox could have seen what was at the bottom of the piece of life that was being presented. And then – Bang! Some chap on the stage sat down on the corner of a table and began to shout and spout an interminable river of the praise of vagabondage. One did not want it; the play did not need it. It hardened hearts. Yes, it actually hardened hearts…

I was talking during one of the entr’actes to a gentleman who is, let us say, the biggest whisky-distiller the world has ever seen. Said he, rather musingly ‘Charity! Yes, I’ve tried Charity and it did not work. I once sent two guineas to a laundress in the Temple and she tried to blackmail me afterwards. But I think I will try Charity again. I suppose if I founded an orphanage… They couldn’t get up a blackmailing case out of an orphanage – could they now?…’ But as we went out of the theatre he said, ‘Oh, Charity! Damn Charity! I’ve had enough.’ And I’ll be hanged – I’ll really be hanged – if I did not feel like him. Alas! for the poor Watercress-seller. That soliloquy did for him.

I suppose that Mr Galsworthy will say that, being what he is and having done what he has done, he can afford himself the menu plaisir of a soliloquy. But he cannot, because outside his window there stand the figures of the indigent and of the woman who has left her husband. It is his duty either to let their insistent figures alone or to do his real best for them.

The Fugitive is a very excellent illustration. Whenever Mr Galsworthy’s characters are making their hard material points the mind of the audience is apt to be set running – the mind of the reader is apt to be set going – upon what might well be a ‘hard case’ of sufficiently frequent occurrence to be worth considering. When that is to say, the heroine suggested – for she only just suggested – that her husband’s embraces were distasteful to her, the audience could feel for her position varying degrees of real sympathy. She was really in a tight and odious place. It is, in fact, impossible to imagine a more horrible position for a woman. But when the well-developed, not neurasthenic, and quite attractive lady writhed about the stage and groaned because her husband found Big Ben more interesting than a sunset cloud, almost all sympathy went away from her. When her friend, the literary gentleman, urged her to grow her wings, cut the galling knots, and affront the boundless empyrean – then, then! the whole sympathy went round to the afflicted family. It really was, as one of Mr Galsworthy’s characters would say, a bit thick.

Ibsen is so very dead – though even he was once alive; 1882 is so very dead, though it was, truly, once the current year, like this year. And we poor literary gentlemen …. Ah, we poor literary gentlemen – these are no longer our fat years. We cannot afford – not any one of us can afford – to squander our substance of sentimentality in that way. We could in 1882. The guileless public of that decade accepted us and our long hair, our unpaid bills, our spoutings about free love and all the rest of it. But that is all gone. We jolly well have to behave ourselves nowadays, as one of Mr Galsworthy’s characters would say. So that not one – not one solitary one! – Literary Gentleman of today would dare to talk as Mr Galsworthy’s Malise talked to the unfortunate lady whose suicide on the threshold of a brothel (for Mr Galsworthy – in heaven’s name why? – had not the strength of mind to let her get as far as the brothel itself!) he so dismally caused.

No, there is not one Literary Gentleman who would talk like that, though I am advised that one solitary swallow from the tepid eighties still flits across our wintry landscapes and would like to write that sort of stuff. But it can’t be done…

It is amazing to me that Mr Galsworthy, with his fine sense of irony, will not delve so far into the nature of humanity – of the humanity for which he writes – as to see these patent facts. We want nowadays – really the whole world wants nowadays – to sympathize with ladies who are uncongenially married. Even the Churches would welcome some putting of a case that would give them a chance to relax their rules relating to marriage. But talk about clouds and the growth of wings will not do it – only the hard and convincing putting of the material facts of hard cases will do it. And there is nothing that Mr Galsworthy can do better, and there is no one can do it better than Mr Galsworthy. Look at The Silver Box.

Given a lady who wants to leave her husband for valid reasons – physical abhorrence, drink, cruelty to a dog or a kitten, or if you like, merely because she wants to have some fun and will take the risks; given, if you must have a Literary Man, one who will say, ‘My dear child – to leave your husband is a devil of a job; but if you positively must do so I will give you all the legs up that I can’; and given all the rest of The Fugitive just as it is, but without the cup of cold poison at the end, and there you have something. You have considerably something…

For, mind you, The Fugitive is already something; but it is a thing like a picture of which the foreground is painted by a chocolate-box manufacturer, the rest being forceful, vigorous, arousing. You have to cover the foreground with your hand before you get any real enjoyment out of it…

There was once some infernal chap in the Dark Ages who was given a satire to read. He said, ‘This is all very well, but it isn’t constructive. Where is the author’s remedy for the evils that he girds against?’ You hear his shocked and imbecile tones… And ever since that distant day every fool who has had a satire to consider has always asked that imbecile question; and every poor fool who has ever written or contemplated writing a satire has always asked himself, ‘This is all very well, but where is my constructive remedy?’ And straightway he has indulged himself in floridities that are more fatal than drink. But no woodman, cutting down brush, finds it necessary to have a plan for planting the woodlands with geraniums or formulates it in impassioned soliloquies…

No, satire is in itself constructive. For, as certainly as when you cut down underwood in a copse the wood-flowers spring up in your introduced sunlight, so surely does satire clear out the dark forest that is the hearts of men,1 so that the decencies and kindnesses that there are in that soil do find the happy sun. But you must let the bluebells grow in their own way…

Well, perhaps one day Mr Galsworthy will give us again a work of pure and delicate satire, and will enshrine the kindly and generous thoughts that its production causes to arise in him, in a separately published volume of poems or dreams or visions. That would be all that the most exacting of critics would demand, for that would give us two very satisfactory works, differing in kind.

***

Outlook, 32 (18 October 1913), 527–8.

VII. Mr Percival Gibbon and The Second-Class Passenger

I.

The writers of whom I have latterly treated, Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, Mr Galsworthy – and to some extent Mr Mackenzie and Mr W.B. Maxwell1 – have been rather concerned with modern Occidental life as we live it than with romance or art. In a sense they are all of them sociologists, rather grave, rather depressed, not markedly full-blooded, concerned rather to read the solution of some riddle suggested to them by the baffling grey pattern that our life is than with telling good tales in a rattling way.

Yet, really the whole concern of art is the telling of a good tale in a rattling sort of way. That was, in essence, the task of Maupassant, of Flaubert, of the Goncourts, of Turgenev. They were not interested in solving for the reader the riddle of the universe; they wanted to ‘grip’. The technical essentials of the French school of fiction – the progression d’effets, the architectonics, and even le mot juste itself – were not so many mysteries of a priesthood. They were just gropings after methods of interesting l’homme moyen sensuel. If English critics and English writers would just make the effort to realize this simple fact they might carry the banner of fiction one step further, which is what decency demands of them. France, exhausted by the great productive struggle of last century, is enjoying a period of rest – is turning its attention to the re-birth of poetry as seriously and as practically as it took up the task of making prose a medium of just expression for reasonable and proper men. Germany never did and never will – until its barbaric language is regenerated – produce anything in prose that non-Germans could want to read. Russians are all too individualistic and obstinate to make any collective, any ‘group’ advances in an art the first of whose necessities is the final sacrifice of self. The Russian has to lecture.

It would remain then for England, where, whatever else may be said about the country, literature is alive, adolescent, and striving in a muddled way. But, just for that very reason, it is remarkable to observe how the virus of French influence has ‘taken’ in this land. It has produced sociologists. Anything that today ‘counts’ in an established sort of fashion, from Mr Bernard Shaw’s productions to, let us say, Mr Maurice Hewlett’s, is sober, earnest, purposeful realism, if it does not happen to be fantastic Utopianism. Now realism was only one side of the French movement, and certainly nothing was further from those writers than earnestness or depression. They might be harrowing, but it stopped at that. Even ‘Coeur Simple’ is cheerful in its treatment beside Clayhanger; it is vivid with episodes, with material objects, with curiosity.

No, the work that is being turned out for us by our novelists who now ‘count’ suggests nothing so much to me as a modern Anglican church with a brass-railed pulpit, and an active vicar directing with energy ‘social endeavour’ amongst the respectable poor. That of course is an excellent thing, but it is an odd one. It is rather like religion with theology left out and with faith turned materialist. For again, whatever the French school had or hadn’t, they had faith – the faith that, if they turned out good art, sociology and the rest would follow. That is what Flaubert meant when he said that if his countrymen had read L’Education sentimentale France would have been spared the horrors of the débâcle. It is a very simple and human claim. The blacksmith is not decried for having as his motto the device: ‘By hammer and hand all art doth stand.’ The baker again will at most be smiled at if he claim that bread is the most important thing in the world, and that, so he but bake well, he may save his soul alive. No one expects the baker to deliver lectures on the land question before he turns to his ovens, or blacksmiths to march about demonstrating in favour of super-Dreadnoughts, though, at the back of the baker in the end is the land, and the apotheosis of smithery is the huge battleship. Those cobblers, in fact, are praised and get to heaven by sticking to their lasts. It is only the literary gentleman who is expected to be – who desires to be – a sort of a blooming hermaphrodite!

These ideas are suggested to me by falling by chance upon a book by Mr Percival Gibbon.

I do not know what Mr Gibbon may desire to ‘do’ with his books – promote Imperialism, found bull-rings? – Heaven knows what. At any rate nothing of the kind sticks out from the context of his work. Frau Grobelaar’s Leading Cases was a set of good stories about Boers and things of that sort. Margaret Harding was a good story about some decent English people in South Africa who were much worried by a nigger. The Second-Class Passenger is a book of good short stories. But, although I have been carefully reading the last two books for the last ten days, I cannot gather from them any philosophy, code of morals that the writer may desire to promote, or any sociologically constructive desire. That is a great relief.

It is a great relief for, if you can read in any writer’s – any English writer’s – books for ten days at all; and if you can then discover none of those abstract attributes, you may then be certain – from the fact of the readability – that that writer is either something of an artist by nativity or that he has some artistic aspirations. And that I really mean.

The author of Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, for instance is for me one of the most readable of novelists.2 Now any English novelist or critic will tell you that that chap wasn’t any sort of artist after the model of the French writers; therefore the French writers must be fools and art is all my eye and Betty Martin… But I think that is the wrong way of looking at it. The right way would be to study Mr Sponge; to study then Boule de Suif, or La Maison Tellier, or Yvette, and to do what you can with the lesson. The probability is that you would produce something really readable.

Mr Gibbon then must be either something of an artist by birth or he must have artistic aspirations. And, since I believe our author has some dislike to being styled the former (though I can’t for the life of me say why it should be objectionable to be told that one has a certain gift!), I will limit myself here to saying that traces of Mr Gibbon’s artistic aspirations are visible on every page of Mr Gibbon’s books. To test quite genuinely that statement, whilst I was writing those words with my right, my left hand was opening, without looking at it, one of Mr Gibbon’s books. I came upon these two sentences:

It was a journey of a day and night, while that little train rolled at leisure through a world of parched sand, beyond the sand-hills to the eye-wearying monotony of the desert. Sometimes it would halt beside a tank and a tent, while a sore-eyed man ran along the train to beg for newspapers…

Now that last sentence is really good selection, observation, projection. Anyone of course could have written the first sentence; ‘parched’ as applied to the sand of a desert is not particularly illuminating; ‘at leisure’ strikes me as wrong when applied to a slow train, because the train had its job of getting somewhere and the very meaning of leisure is to have no preoccupation. Similarly, even in the second sentence Mr Gibbon ought not to have written ‘the train’ because he had already called that conveyance ‘it’; ‘carriages’ or some word that would have visualized the train would have been better. But that having been said, there remain the tank, the tent, and the sore-eyed man who begged for newspapers. That is real observation; that is real art because it conveys to the reader not only information and interest (for it is interesting to be told that a man in the middle of the desert desires newspapers); it also gives a picture, an atmosphere, and, for what it is worth a civilization. It does it moreover in very few words.

Pray pardon my minute examination of such matters. That is my preoccupation in this world. I will try again:

Now that is a very good piece of writing. It is true that ‘likewise’ is a disagreeable word when you mean ‘also’, that ‘sight’, ‘light’, and ‘height’ occurring so close together are disagreeable assonances and, by impeding the ear, impede also the run of the paragraph – and that is always to be avoided because the first thing that you have to do is to get your reader on. But the rest of the paragraph is quiet and formal English, with no Stevensonian epithets sticking out; and the matter of the paragraph, apart from the good picture, is valuable. The picture, that is to say, represents the nigger of the book (Margaret Harding) walking before an extended revolver, with his hands up – and it is all the better ‘technique’ because it is a little mysterious. It fixes itself on the imagination once the answer to the riddle is propounded.

Mr Gibbon is in fact possessed of a very sober and very sufficient technical equipment. He brings about his dramatic incidents very naturally and quietly. And that is all the better in that his subjects are usually subjects of action – subjects set in South Africa, in Algiers, in places where argument as a rule is represented to us as being of the ‘kick him in the belly’ order. But there is not so very much violence in Mr Gibbon’s work. Occasionally he lets himself go, as when Christian Dupreez hits Boy Bailey in the saloon-bar; but Kamis on the other hand sets to work on that unfortunate individual with a proper economy of effort which makes him all the more effective. The Second-Class Passenger lays about him with a bronze image; Miss Gregory uses a hatpin with effect, in the dark; Mr Lucas bangs the Russian lieutenant on the head with a flute.

In addition Mr Gibbon has none of the meretricious omniscience of Mr Kipling – that omniscience that at first delights and afterwards causes so many misgivings; and he has none of the browbeating superiority of the usual Colonial novelist. I suppose him to be an Imperialist, but I do not know; I suppose him to have a sense of sympathy with negroes mishandled in South Africa, with Jews the victims of pogroms in Russia – but it does not stick out worryingly.

***

Outlook, 32 (25 October 1913), 571–2.

XII. Herr Arthur Schnitzler and Bertha Garlan

I.

***

Now, German is a good enough language for verse – a better, really, than English. The female rhymes are frequent and commodious, the vowels are less ugly. (There is not the short u sound of love and butter; the vowels are also more purely pronounced. If the word ‘impossible’ existed in German it would not be spoken ‘impossibull’.) At any rate, it is a good enough medium and, since poets are not expected to be men of reason, they are allowed to use simple sentences. Heine could write ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’, and, as all the world knows, it is quite passable poetry. But if I wished gravely to report the fact to you, I should have to say something like ‘Der Dichter versichert das Maedchen dass sie wie eine in Venedig gekaufte in Luxus-Zuge expedierte und mit “Raedler” abgelieferte Magnolia Blume aussieht’; I should have to add the inserted particulars whether I wanted to or no, in order to give sound, length, dignity to the statement. (The statement means, ‘The poet assures the Maiden that she, like a, in Venice bought, by train-de-luxe despatched, and by express messenger delivered, magnolia blossom looks.’) This is, of course, a rather burlesqued phrase; but here is another from the pages of a quite beautiful book by a quite beautiful writer: ‘Und so sehr sie es mit ihrem Verstande wusste dass der Hugo, der da drin im Nebenzimmer mit jenem neuen schmerzlich gespannten Zug um die Lippen, auf dem Diwan schlief, dasselbe Menschenkind war, das vor wenig Jahren noch im Gartengespielt hatte –’ (‘And however much she might be intellectually convinced that the Hugo who was asleep, within the room, upon the sofa, with that new, strained fold about his lips, was the same child of Adam who, a year or so ago, had still played in the garden –’) And you will observe that this is only the beginning. The full sentence contains forty-one words – ninety syllables – and three inversions, ending with ‘hatte sterben sehen’.

Now, Arthur Schnitzler, from whom I have quoted, is one of the clearest stylists that ever used the German language for the expression of his thoughts, and the book from which I have quoted (Frau Beate und ihr Sohn) is one of the most touching and the most limpid of his excursions in psychological analysis. It is plain, then, that this writer has much to contend with.

Yet his day and his hour have arrived. He is known to two continents as the ‘Austrian Maupassant’. Leaving Maupassant out for the moment (and The Outlook prints this week one of the most typical of Herr Schnitzler’s contes, so that the reader may make the comparison for himself) let us consider the Viennese writer for himself alone.

To Germany Herr Schnitzler stands for a great deal – for a retracing of steps more than anything else. The usually sober enough critic of the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag becomes almost dithyrambic in his praise of Der Weg ins Freie (which is, indeed, a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress of a poet’s soul). It has just been capably translated into English by Mr Horace Samuel under the title The Road to the Open (Howard Latimer). The critic of the Neue Freie Presse calls Frau Bertha Garlan a masterpiece of psychological cabinet-work, and so indeed it is. And Mr Schnitzler has his school of followers that may well, as these things go, prove a lasting influence on literature.

He represents, none the less, a re-casting of steps. I have written often enough in these columns of the international main stream of the novel as an art-product, as opposed to the novels that grow like cabbages. The first effect of this tide in Germany was to force on a large growth of what was called ‘realistisch’ plants. These realistic books were written by authors ranging in importance from Sudermann to Bilse, who wrote the Kleine Garnison. They were influenced more by Zola than by the other Frenchmen, and they were very usually what in England is called ‘nasty’, black, gloomy, and very heavy. Of course, there were books like Freiherr von Ompteda’s Eysen that were serious, sober, and monumental, or, like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, that were really German interior studies, as it were, by Holbein.

II. Bertha Garlan. By Arthur Schnitzler

The product of the – for Germany – inevitable reaction is just exactly Bertha Garlan. For Germany, unlike England, is supremely self-conscious. The German Press and the German public alike began to say, ‘We have had enough of this foreign influence, which is very nasty and un-German.’ They began to ask for a revival of the German qualities of imagination, which is generally sentimentality. That might well have been a disaster; but it wasn’t. For some years the main output of German fiction was distinguished by a sort of imbecility of super-men and femmes incomprises. Every second novelist was giving you the history of strong passionate engineers, wrestling witThe Way into Freedomh dykes against the sea, and forming affinities with super-women not their wives – that sort of thing. Then Mr Schnitzler appeared, and began to take hold of the popular imagination.

Mr Schnitzler is perhaps fifty. (I do not happen to have any German books of reference by me, but I think he was born in Vienna in the sixties.) He began life, at any rate, as a doctor, so that he looks at these careers of ours with some of that scientific and inner knowledge that doctors might possess if they were not, mostly, like other ordinary mortals, trying to hide from the facts of life. And life in Vienna is a very gay, a very sad, a very sober, a very wild affair; a little unreal, a little queer in its sense of values, a little theatrical, and extraordinarily wise. It is French in the sense that all real civilization must in the end tend towards French ideals and French culture. But Vienna differs from Paris in that it has never had a French Revolution. Its civilization is therefore very old, quite blasé, and very minutely evolved.

It is the reflection of this civilization that Schnitzler has given to the world – a civilization as full of paradoxes, of injustices, or immoralities as any play by Mr Bernard Shaw. There is, indeed, a strong undercolouring of Shaw life and Shaw situations in all Mr Schnitzler’s work – the difference being that, whereas every announcement by Mr Shaw of a paradoxical injustice in English life, law, or love has the effect of a bomb, or at least of a cracker, the same thing is bedded in Mr Schnitzler’s works as being part of the fabric of life – as being one of the inevitabilities. Mr Schnitzler is, in effect, so infinitely wiser, so infinitely more grown up, that Mr Shaw has, beside him, the aspect of a happy child playing in the Zoological Gardens.

It is the difference of the civilizations. In this country a man is knocked down by an insuperable disaster, and he is amazed. In Vienna – well, this is how Mr Schnitzler puts it: ‘The utmost foresight and predetermined resolutions do not enable a man to bear disaster more easily, but only to meet it with a braver face.’ Or again:

In the German that is a very beautiful passage with a touching, a melancholy cadence that I have not been able to render – but it gives you, upon the whole, the tone of Schnitzler’s mind. And it strikes me as a very beautiful mind.

Of course, Mr Schnitzler’s ‘message’ is not about municipal milk supplies, which is the grave, bold message of Mr Shaw; nor does he treat love and sex from moral or public points of view as do most English novelists. Viennese civilization is an old affair, and in trying to obtain readers for his books in this country I do not wish to do so by any false pretences. I should advise the English reader to begin with Bertha Garlan and to read afterwards The Way into Freedom, because the first book is less purely Viennese and the latter is very highly civilized. But neither book is one for the much talked-about but probably non-existent young person.

Bertha Garlan is the story of a woman who was satisfactorily but unromantically married to a husband who has been dead several years. She lives unromantically in a small town. One day she goes into Vienna and finds a lover. The lover treats her like a chattel, without much romance or any real love. And she goes back to the small town and the unromantic existence.

That is the whole of the story, and I do not imagine that many English readers will be found for it. It is, however, a very beautifully written, tender, and touching ‘cabinet picture’, as the German critic calls it. It is full of colour, of landscapes, of rivers, of woods, and of air, as are all this author’s books. In all Schnitzler’s writings, moreover, there is the scintillating, topsy-turvy humour, turning at times into grimness, that most people had a chance of tasting when Mr Barker produced the Anatol sketches some years ago; and again, last month – though that was mostly grim – in the Green Cockatoo at the Vaudeville. Of the two translations that have appeared this week, Bertha Garlan is perhaps the better done, but Der Weg ins Freie is a much more ambitious job. It is a difficult and sometimes a dangerous matter to translate a long book from the German; Germanisms seem to saturate your style. Or perhaps the translator of the latter work is a German. In any case both enterprises are wholly praiseworthy.

Outlook, 32 (29 November 1913), 753–4.

XXIII. Fydor Dostoevsky and The Idiot

I.

I must confess to having formed no settled opinion about Dostoevsky. For one thing, he seems to have been a very miserable man; for another, he had to write desperately hard to obtain a precarious living. And, finally, it is not my job to pontify, here or anywhere else. That is a thing that must be left to reviewers. If one utters confidently certain dogmas about the difficult, about the impossible, art of writing it is not because one feels any confidence about one’s dicta. It is for quite another reason.

I will lay you down, very dogmatically, laws about the avoidance of assonances. I will tell you with extreme ferocity that what is to be aimed at in a style is something so unobtrusive and so quiet – and so beautiful if possible – that the reader shall not know that he is reading, and be conscious only that he is living in the life of the book. I don’t want the reader ever to say whilst he is reading ‘How clever this writer is!’ I want him just to be happy, and to be oblivious of himself. (Of course when I write ‘happy’ I include in the adjective the happiness that comes in the contemplation of tragedy.) I will, I say, shout these things at you with an almost uncontrolled fury. But if you got me in a quiet moment you might very well hear me saying, ‘What do we really know about it all? Perhaps an assonance is a quite desirable thing.’ I don’t know. And if I make these allegations confidently and hardly, with clear insulting words, it is only that attention may be drawn to them, and that more professionally critical intellects may set to work upon these matters. I don’t in the least mind being disliked – j’en ai soupé. I don’t in the least mind hurting anybody’s feelings, since what I want to get up is a sort of Kilkenny row about literature. If the doctrines that I uphold prevail, well and good; if another set of doctrines, then at least somebody will be borne to heaven on their wings – quite a number of people I should think, for none of my doctrines seem to be particularly popular in these islands. But I do want anger; I do want fury; I do want either to burn or to be burnt at Smithfield.

Now the other day I chanced to utter some rather careless words about Dostoevsky. I wish I hadn’t. For the poor chap was a miserable man, and I hate hitting even at the ghosts of the unhappy. For heaven’s sake let him have all the glory that the world can offer him, so that his shade may be mightily rejoiced. And the poor chap had to drag his weary pen over miles and miles of paper to find himself an insufficient sustenance. May then, all the peaches and all the caviar of the world be piled up upon his altar, and all the Vouvray of France be poured over them as a libation. But when it comes to a matter of form I must a little stick to my guns, even if I have to go as far as to say that The Brothers Karamazov is not, in the matter of form, so consummate as Fort comme la Mort. What is the good of saying that it is? Dostoevsky was not aiming at Maupassant’s target. He said himself that if he had had more time he would have rewritten; he would have compressed. Moreover, The Brothers Karamazov is not even a finished book. It is a mere preparation for writing the life of a saint. In that sense I was simply careless when I wrote that the monastery scene (and by that I was thinking only of the scene of the dead monk whose body gave out an evil odour) was an excrescence in The Brothers Karamazov as it stands. It is no doubt only an excrescence to that extent. As part of the preparation of Dostoevsky’s hero for a saintly life, to be described in subsequent volumes, it is easy enough to see that what is for the moment an excrescence would have been no doubt a necessity for the finished work and so perfectly in accordance with the form.

The Brothers Karamazov as it stands is in fact merely the pedestal to an immense statue. What I stupidly said is that the pedestal bulges out too much upon one side. What Mr Swinnerton replies is that it doesn’t bulge, and to back himself up he accuses my manner of reading of being ‘digging through a book’. He has really missed his opportunity, for what he should have said was: ‘Yes, the pedestal appears to bulge; but how beautifully that will be accounted for when the great statue stands upon it leaning over to the other side!’ I don’t of course know how Mr Swinnerton would have me read a book. I did not, I suppose, go to the same school. Usually I take a look at the first page and at the last and at two haphazard pages in the middle, and I say: ‘This is rubbish!’ But I very distinctly remember how I read The Brothers Karamazov. I was staying at a hotel for a fortnight and every morning whilst I was dressing, and every evening whilst I was dressing for dinner, and every night, whilst I was going to bed, I read in this book. I read nothing else whatever for the entire fortnight – no newspaper, no nothing. When I had finished the book I gave up two whole days and read it completely through again, intending to examine the workmanship. I didn’t examine the workmanship; I was still too much interested in the story. And that really is all that I have to say about The Brothers Karamazov. It ought to have been all that I had to say about Dostoevsky; I couldn’t have paid a greater tribute and I don’t want to criticise him in the sense of finding fault with him. Let that be the province of other pens. It is not my ‘Fach’, and I withdraw with apologies from the discussion.

But the essence of my self-appointed task is to record my own time, my own world, as I see it. It is an ambition like another, and I trust it will be pardoned to me. In that sense, and in that sense alone, I can say something about this great writer. I almost wish he had never written; I regard his works with envy, with fear, with admiration. I seem to see him on the horizon as a dark cloud, and the thought of his heavy books is as of so many weights upon my soul; as of so many labours for my poor brain. It is a weariness to me to think that I have got to read The Idiot.

II. The Idiot. By Fydor Dostoevsky
Translated by Constance Garnett

And I suppose that what is at the bottom of my feeling of weariness, of my aversion from Dostoevsky is just the feeling of Bertin, the painter, of Fort comme la Mort. It is the feeling that one is getting on in life, and that one’s successors must be upon the horizon. And in the dark cloud of Dostoevsky and the school that he will make, – in that cloud of locusts one perceives one’s successors. It is the Romantic Movement coming back…

The Romantic Movement coming back! For whatever Dostoevsky may be, he certainly isn’t a Realist. His characters are extraordinarily vivid; but they are too vivid for the Realist School. They are too much always, in one note; they develop little; they are static. His strong scenes are strong to the point of frenzy, but they are too full-dress: everybody has to be in them at once. And they are entirely unprepared – or at any rate the author very frequently doesn’t trouble himself to prepare them. There does not seem to me to be any particular reason why Nastasya should come to the house of Ganya, why she should find so many of the characters there; and there does not seem to me to be any particular reason why Rogozhin should at precisely that moment rush in with another crowd. It is mere coincidence. The French Realistic School simply couldn’t handle such a situation at all, and that is, I suppose, why the French Realistic School – in which I should include Turgenev – does not deal very often with crowds. It could not handle such a situation simply because to satisfy its conscience it would have to provide every member of that crowd with a history, with an ancestry, and with an inevitable reason for turning up in that particular spot at that particular moment.

Dostoevsky simply doesn’t care. He wants to prepare for you one episode of the Christ legend, and he wants to have a lot of spectators. So he just pulls them in, and the Christ-Myshkin is struck on one side of the cheek and, in the proper romantic tradition, he goes one better than Our Lord. He turns away to the wall and weeps for the shame that his persecutor will feel. And the persecutor duly feels the shame. They have to be so full-dress, these Romanticists! And it seems to me that they like to take things so ready-made. Frankly speaking, I am tired of variations of the Christ legend. Or, no, I am not tired of them; I simply never liked them at all. There used to be a German painter of sorts who used to give us pictures of Our Lord in modern peasants’ houses; coming in with a wallet on His back; sitting with them at their homely meals – whatever you like. And Dostoevsky’s Myshkin is too much like Our Lord in a setting of decadent Petersburg society. The book affects me much as the large pictures of Gustave Doré used to do. And, frankly, I don’t like it. But no doubt Doré, too, again will have his day. What spirit he had, what invention, what industry! And Byron will come back, and Pushkin and Lermontov. And the Flower and Fruit pieces will come back; and the whole thing will run its cycle until Preraphaelism once more will have its say with other Rossettis and newer Swinburnes.

Of course I may be entirely wrong in my diagnosis of Dostoevsky. He may not be a reversion; he may be a step forward towards a region of other-worldliness – of the other-worldliness that so desperately today we need. I hope it may be so, and that it is a mere blindness in myself if I fail to perceive it. But I seem to want something fresher, something brighter, something sharper than the Myshkin Christ. For Myshkin is the same thing all over again. But if you ask me what I want… ah, there! that again is not my job. And indeed I don’t know. If I did I should try to do it myself. The only thing that I can imagine as an ideal is a book so quiet in tone, so clearly and so unobtrusively worded, that it should give the effect of a long monologue spoken by a lover at a little distance from his mistress’s ear – a book about the invisible relationships between man and man; about the values of life; about the nature of God – the sort of book that nowadays one could read in as one used to do when one was a child, pressed against a tall window-pane for hours and hours, utterly oblivious of oneself, in the twilight.

I wish I knew, in the meantime, how to pay a tribute to Mrs Garnett for her translations from the Russian. This immense work, so sedulously persevered in, so high in its achievement, is one that could only be rewarded by a gratitude not to be expressed in words. It is dreadful to think of what books in English would be if we had not her translations. And indeed I think that women as a sex should be grateful to her; since she has proved herself capable of such a labour as few men could have carried through, and of a sense of phrase vouchsafed to few of us, whether we be men or women.

Outlook, 33 (14 February 1914), 206–7.

XXV. Monsignor Benson and Initiation

I.

I had an Anglican friend for whose intellect I had a great admiration and for whose character I had a very real respect – and that is rare, for one really respects so few people; perhaps three or four in a lifetime! So that when, one day, this friend said to me in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘My mother was a saint!’ I accepted the statement in a matter-of-fact way. I suppose that she worked little miracles, or did the pretty, kindly, or humorous things that, automatically, one expects of a saint of God.

But, by little and little, I began to see that my friend’s mother, as he saw her – for she was long dead – was none of these things and did none of them. I questioned my friend closely, and more closely; and always as I questioned him, he became more baffling in his attitude. And for the first time, I became conscious that between this friend and myself there was a great gulf fixed. I could not get across it in any way. I remember once being present for a day or so at a congress of historians where two professors struck up a warm friendship, and their conversation impressed me as being exactly like that of my friend and myself about his mother’s sainthood. For the two professors – both very distinguished men – were, the one an officially Lutheran historian, the other an adviser in canon law to the Austrian Government. But when they talked about history, although they were both transparently honest men, it was as if, though they talked about the Rastatter Congress, the Peace of Münster, the same treaties, laws or negotiations of princes – it was as if they were talking in different languages of the affairs of another planet. They did not in the least quarrel; they never, as it were, got near enough to each other for that. They were friendly beings of different species, as it might be a friendly angel and a friendly man – something of that sort.

So with my friend and myself. I got at last a sort of image of his mother’s saintship. I seemed to see, at the end of an immense, serenely dark Jacobean room, an immensely tall square mirror, on a square table, between two very tall wax candles – thin wax candles in silver sticks. The mirror reflects nothing but the black serene emptiness of the room, and behind it is an immensely tall window, with square panes giving on to a perfectly black night…

I don’t mean to imply anything at all by the adjectives ‘black’ or ‘empty’ – it is just physical description. But the point is, I am aware, that my mind is setting for me the background for a High Church lady of the days of Laud – and that my mind simply will not conjure up any figure at all. It simply cannot begin upon the task.

Indeed, I am a little afraid; I recognize a goodness that, to me, is almost a wickedness and almost certainly a cruelty. It is so apparently austere, restrained, non-communicative. It is so nearly exactly what I don’t want religion to be; though it is also so near Papistry. I know that my friend’s poets were Herbert and Crashaw and Vaughan; that his poem – the one that gave him intimate satisfaction – was:

And I think I rather hate those poets and that poem, as indeed I think I hate all sad things.

A friend, like myself, a German Papist, resident for many years in England, has expressed what I am trying to get at much better than I can.

My friend is not a particularly religious man; I dare say he is not orthodox at all; the German Catholics are, I believe, suspected of being latitudinarian in one way or another. But what he says expresses pretty exactly what religion means for me, when I happen to think of it; or more particularly, when I am happening to hope that my children – and all children now growing up upon this earth – may be good Catholics.

And it is extraordinarily different from the Laudian High Church atmosphere – entirely respectable though that atmosphere may be. For, good heavens! if a day is worthy to be the bridal of the earth and sky, it can’t die; and our duty, as I see it, is not so much an austere preparation for a future life as so to live and play with our toys and pictures and reliquaries that, at almost any moment – like my friend over his dressing-case – we may trot away for a little into the more real side of the earth…

I hope I am not saying anything to offend anybody; I am not in the least trying to do so.

II. Initiation. By R.H. Benson

And of course that Laudian spirit is not merely Anglican – there is about it something of the national. It is no doubt English to regard rather the austerities than the friendlinesses of religion – no doubt the spirit of the High Church martyrs and the spirits of Campion and the English martyrs were as nearly as possible beautiful, austere, and flamelike – the spirit of the English College at Rome, that sad, sad place, whose every stone, even on days of rejoicing, seems to whisper to the footfall of exile, of martyrdom, of the oppressions of ages.

Monsignor Benson however has very little of this consciousness of the historic oppressions of the centuries. His is – I am of course writing of him only as a novelist – a much more cheery spirit. One can’t help knowing him to be a priest, so that one doesn’t know how much one’s astonishment may be due to the stupid impression that one never gets away from – the stupid impression that our priests live only in the clouds. But I never do get away from astonishment at the amazing powers of observation that are the Monsignor’s. There is just nothing that he does not notice, and there are few things that he cannot very aptly hit off.

On those lines The Average Man was amazing. One said at page after page, ‘How the dickens does he get to know these things?’ With the wave of his pen he could give you the intricacies of a suburban kitchen; the emotions of a lady choosing a new hat; amazingly he could render for you the emotions of the process of conversion and those of a first lesson in rabbit-shooting. And in tone, in construction, The Average Man was as good as can be desired.

And, if I am disappointed with Initiation, it is still not from any lack of powers of observation or of rendering – it is simply that, in the construction of the book, the author seems to have been a little tired. He has no doubt so many further duties than the writing of novels; whereas, for me, alas! the writing and consideration of novels is the sacred side of my duties.

The opening of the book is excellent; the rendering of the Roman international society, with the marquises having tea with two cardinals, and the Americans and the chatter, and the light thin air of the city of the statue of Victor Emanuel – for the Seven Hills are dwarfed. It is so exactly what one has known; it is so exactly what one knows one will know again. The characterization, the lessons, of the architecture, of the landscape, are in their manner perfect; and the mother and daughter are hit off with real imagination; and the courtship is pretty and touching and real…

But I am tired of the English county-family atmosphere of the later chapters, even though the touch of Papistry is refreshing. I know that the thesis of the book concerns itself with a Prince in Israel, amongst the fleshpots of Egypt, finding Initiation only in death, and that, in order to show you a prince and the fleshpots, long-descended baronets with collies and parks and pavilions and death-chambers and old butlers are handy and convenient. He will have to leave all this and fare into the darkness of God.

But I should have liked something more subtle – something more passionately lovable, for the poor fellow to have to leave. The Monsignor knows so much of the human heart that he could easily enough have given that one more turn to the screw. I remember well enough a short story of his about the spiritual torments of a young priest – an unforgettable thing. And that is what I am wanting him to have screwed himself up to again. I don’t know what I should have preferred – perhaps a prince of the blood royal, passionately interested in his struggles about constitutions and the suppression of dances; or a beggar passionately enamoured of his corner under the hedge and his poached rabbit-pie; or, perhaps better still, a priest passionately loving the tranquillity of his cell… That would have been it…

But perhaps I am wrong and missing the point of the whole book. Perhaps it is I who am tired. I hope it is; for I have such a great wish that Monsignor Benson should write only novels as good as The Average Man.

Outlook, 33 (28 February 1914), 278–9.

XXVI. Miss Amber Reeves and A Lady and her Husband

I.

I am driven by the thought of Mrs Blanco White into the consideration of certain aspects of various social questions. And they are, for me, just questions. I don’t want to dogmatize. What I want to ask is just this: To what extent have new movements – all and sundry new movements, whether for the sterilizing of milk, or for the relaxing of Sabbath restrictions; whether for the gradual relaxation of marriage ties, or for the economic emancipation of women – to what extent have these new movements really affected the fabric of this realm of England?

I simply don’t know. One’s glass, with the best will in the world, is so small, and one is so compelled to drink solely in that glass, that one might come the most frightful howlers if one trusted to one’s own observation. And whom is one to trust? There is Mrs Blanco White’s world – I mean the world portrayed in her books – and if anyone in the world ought to know the extent to which Fabianism has penetrated the solid middle and suburban classes of this country it should be that lady who writes as Miss Amber Reeves. And in that world, there cannot be any doubt about it, Fabianism has come to stay – at any rate with the young women. They have all, all of them, read the latest Fabian tract and the latest pamphlet on the municipalizing of this or that sweated industry. They know all sorts of statistics, and the riddle of the universe has no terrors for their determined intellects. The men (and I believe it is the same in holy Russia) are more indifferent; tarred with the same stick they may be but a good deal of the tar has worn off before the stick has reached them. Still, there is the same coolness; the same contempt for you, me, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And of course there are the well-appointed houses in which these young people live, and the indulgent, muddled, browbeaten parents…

I don’t know this class at all; there are whole classes that one does not know, and that one never will know. I sometimes go wandering at night to take the dog for a walk, or so on, along a great tract of country with squares, crescents, places and the rest of it. There will be hardly a soul in the streets (that is why it is a good region to select for the exercising of one’s dog); there will be no traffic; and in a deathless silence immense white houses of painted stucco tower up into the darkness. There do not seem ever to be any receptions there – at any rate I never see awnings over the footway, or carpets laid down over the pavements. And I wonder frequently, What do all these people do? Where does all the money come from? Why do they all seem to go to bed at half-past ten? Who are they? For, in that immense region, say a mile deep to the north of Hyde Park, and for two miles to the West of Marble Arch, I do not know a single soul – not a single soul in that Imperial city of classical, white, square palaces. For hang it all! in the scale of the world’s history up till today they are palaces.

Is this – do all these people form – the backbone of England? I suppose it is; I suppose they do. And I allow myself to suppose that these are the landscapes of Miss Amber Reeves’ novels. It is from these doors that the fathers issue of mornings with the carefully rolled umbrellas; and there are no receptions, and no carpets in strips across the pavements, because the young people, at nights, are all up in the back bedrooms reading the Fabian tracts and the pamphlets about the municipalization of sweated industries. Then possibly there is nothing wrong – from one point of view at least – with the country. These young people, at the appointed time, will in their turn issue, of mornings, from those porticoes – the males with their umbrellas solicitously rolled by the females, who, key-basket in hand, will just see them through the doorway before going down to interview cook. And it will be a solid, if languid, Unionist constituency. As it was in 1840, as it was in 1880, so it will be in 1920, in 1960, and in saeculum saeculorum…

I suppose nothing ever really changes. The other day I was at a great Unionist banquet – to three hundred ploughmen, hinds, and farmers, far, far down in one of the southern counties. Do you know the difference between Kent and Sussex and the Shires? There still mothers warn their daughters: ‘You see that chap? He comes from Sussex. He’s a’right. He sucked in silliness with his mother’s milk, and he’s been silly ever since. But never you trust a man from the Sheeres.’ They still do it.

II. A Lady and her Husband. By Amber Reeves

Well, there there was certainly an unchanging stratum. It was ludicrously unchanged; the argument that really moved that gnarled audience – the argument against Home Rule – was this: ‘How would you chaps like, without a with your leave or by your leave, to be pitchforked into Hampshire? How would you like to be turned into men from the Sheeres?’ So we growled, and shouted and drank beer seriously out of each other’s mugs – the old blood-brotherhood, quality and ploughmen all drinking and growling together in a serious taciturnity…

And yet, in this confusing world, one is so seriously misled by going out to find what one wants to find, or by one’s fat complacency. For, if Miss Amber Reeves is to be trusted, a change is working in those very stucco palaces that seem to form the backbone of England – a change that is coming about through the entry of women into social consciousness.

I take it for granted that Miss Reeves knows what she is writing about, for, as I have said, this world is no world of mine; I am much more at home drinking out of the same mug with a ploughboy. A Lady and Her Husband shows us however the household of a great employer of labour. The daughters are, roughly speaking, Fabians; but they get married. The son is nothing at all; the father is a constructive genius in the realms of teashops. He gives the public excellent poached eggs, unrivalled cups of tea, pure butter, and wholesome bread. He is honest, buoyant, persevering, unbeatable, and he has done the public great service by providing it with pure food.

His wife, I am allowed to presume, is just a normal woman, leading a sheltered life under the protection of her husband’s comfortable fortune. Suddenly, however, with the marrying of her daughters, her life seems to come to an end. She finds an occupation in the study of her husband’s female employees in the teashops. She discovers that these poor creatures are wretchedly underpaid; that they have to stand for too long hours; that they have to eat their meals in damp cupboards. And these facts appeal to her at first as things that can be easily remedied by her surely benevolent husband. She has always taken her husband to be benevolent.

No sooner however does she approach Mr Heyham than she discovers in him a characteristic that she had never before observed – as it were, the lust of the chase. The great business has to be kept going, because it is a great business; because it is a thing to love, to sacrifice to; because it is at once a mistress and the quarry of the chase. On the other hand, in Mrs Heyham the human side of the poor waitresses – with their miserable salaries that lead them into theft, prostitution – with their long hours of standing, that lead them to have varicose veins, neurasthenia, tuberculosis – all these miseries work in Mrs Heyham to such an extent that she becomes vividly alive to the contrasted interests of the sexes in this civilization of ours. She discovers that, long ago, her husband had been unfaithful to her, and that, in the general buoyancy of his character, he considered the unfaithfulness to have been – as indeed it was – in the nature of a bagatelle. She meets a baby’s nurse, who says that women in this world have a poor time of it, especially when you consider that men will be just as well off as their wives in the next. She meets a secretary, who says: ‘I wonder that any woman ever loved a man. They’re ugly; they’re greedy; they’re coarse-minded… They’ve taken the whole world and made it theirs.’ And this Miss Percival ends up by saying: ‘I’m married, really, you know, only I don’t live with my husband.’ So Mrs Heyham runs down the gamut of feminine miseries…

If however Mrs Blanco White had left it at that, the book would not have been much of a contribution to our knowledge. But with a clever twist she carries the matter one turn of the screw farther. Having been the provider of half Mr Heyham’s capital at his start in life, Mrs Heyham is still a half-proprietor of his immense business. So she puts her foot down and insists that the work-girls shall be better paid. Mr Heyham attempts to counter her by making plans to turn the business into a public company. In that case he will be able eloquently to assert that his duties to his shareholders will not allow him to raise wages; the other shareholders will outvote his wife, and there will be an end of her schemes.

His wife thereupon leaves home, for she is afraid that, in spite of her anger and her determination, her husband, manlike, will force her hand and make her consent to the sale of her interest to the public company. In her seclusion her resolve hardens, and she delivers an ultimatum to her husband – whom she still loves, and who still loves her. In the meantime Mr Heyham, reflecting on his whole position, finds himself able to execute a really fine volte-face. He will, by Jove! become a model employer of labour. He is a very rich man; he can afford it. On the strength of that he will enter Parliament; he has the gift of facile eloquence. He will accept the knighthood that has been offered him. He has had thirty years of hard business career; now he will adopt a career that will suit him just as well. So, in a sense, whilst giving in to his wife he ‘does her in the eye’.

I do not know whether Miss Reeves is more ingenious or more merely ironic. At any rate she is very clever. She has solved that particular riddle of the universe. For it is essential, if there is to be peace in our time, that men should have their vainglorious careers (and we can, none of us, do much harm in Parliament!), whilst women set about the task of clearing up this house of the world. Or is it that poor Mrs Heyham is really done in the eye, after all?

Who knows? In the meantime this is a very clever and a very observant book. And whilst it is a distinct retrogression in technical skill from The Reward of Virtue, it is none the less a distinct advance in assurance of promise. The Reward of Virtue was so technically perfect and so cold that one wondered how Mrs Blanco White was going to improve on it. A Lady and Her Husband is faulty; it is over-burdened with matter. Mrs Blanco White knows almost too much of her subject to have exercised enough of selection. But The Reward of Virtue was the book of an old person; A Lady and Her Husband is a product of youth. It is an advance on which Mrs Blanco White is to be much congratulated, since it means that she is on the road to finding herself. And that is what we all want.

Outlook, 33 (7 March 1914), 310–11.

XXVIII. Mr Morley Roberts and Time and Thomas Waring

I.

I have often wondered what might have been the artist’s education of George Gissing. (It is Mr Morley Roberts’ own fault if one identifies him with the author of Demos and if he does not like it.) I do not know if there are any means of knowing, or if it be mere idleness that lets me be ignorant of a fact so important in the literary history of these islands. For Gissing is an important figure in that history; I don’t like him, but there is no getting away from that fact.

And of George Gissing, in essentials, one knows nothing. One knows that he had a bad time; Mr Morley Roberts has suggested that he was infelix opportunitate domus; but many carters have bad times and many shopwalkers tram-conductors, and private gentlemen make unfortunate marriages. I have an idea also that Gissing loved the classics, loved Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, Apuleius; but so also, very possibly, do Mr Bonar Law, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chief Justice, and Privy Seal. But with what sort of lovers of words Gissing conversed and what sort of words he loved – of that we know as little as of what songs the Sirens sang. I at least know nothing, and even Mr Seccombe has never given us a picture of Gissing knocking down a Mr A. because he loved the word ‘corybantic’ whilst Mr A. laughed at the precious sounds.

Yet it is only such information that is of the slightest value to us; from that we might learn something of the real man and, with the knowledge, might amend our ways! And I have often wondered what could account for the peculiarly unattractive quality of Gissing’s work, for its peculiar hodden ugliness, for its want of inspiration. It was quite odd, to me, always; because, on the one or two occasions when I met Gissing I found him attractive, with a rather beautiful nature, sanguine and by no means unattractive, a rather flame-like individual. (That is rather a stupid simile, but it is the impression that is in my mind.) Nevertheless of the few books of Gissing’s that I have been able to read the only word that I can find to say is that they were ugly – essentially ugly, in soul, in construction, in wording. Or else it was the Ryecroft book which was bad sentimentalism in pretty pretty phraseology.

New Grub Street, for instance, was a work absolutely airless, unrelieved, harrowing, and creaking. It was lying awake for an interminable night listening to the monotone drip from a cistern; it went on and on, undistinguished, sordid; as if one were for ever eating a stale bun in a dirty, gaslit, cheap tea-shop in the Camden High Street. The really great tragedies, whether they be Lear, or Lisa, or Le Rouge et le Noir, are never harrowing, and certainly they are never undistinguished; they never miss being intellectual stimulants. That I suppose is why poor Gissing has gone so completely out – is why, whilst he earned so full a measure of respect in his day, he made so singularly little appeal to one’s imagination. It was impossible to have one’s pulse quickened by the thought of him. Yet undoubtedly he was in every way respectable – sober, industrious, honest, enormously in earnest. I don’t know…

At any rate I have always considered Mr Morley Roberts to have inherited the mantle of poor Gissing; I may be quite wrong, but the impression has always been very strong on me. I do not, anyhow, know Mr Roberts at all well; but I have always had a certain respect for him, combined with a certain aversion, so that when the editor of this paper asked me to write about his latest book I recoiled and protested with the exaggerated impulses that one has. Then however came the idea, ‘After all, one can always slate a blessed book!’ So I started in to read Time and Thomas Waring with every intention of kicking it from Dan to Beersheba. In the result I have wept a handkerchief into a state of complete soppiness over it. And now I am wondering why…

Years ago – perhaps in 1892 – I remember hearing my uncle, Mr William Rossetti, alluding in terms of wonderment to a clerk in his office – the Inland Revenue – who intended to give up that safe job and take to a life of adventure – stevedoring, broncho-busting, jumping the blind baggage, or whatever were the queer ideals of the queer old nineties in the way of physical adventure. And the clerk – to the wonderment of my uncle – went away and attended on cattle on Atlantic boats, and travelled in the United States without paying any fares, and to hoboes he administered the hard K.O. and did the usual things. So, at least, it was reported to me. And when his time was come he returned to London and attended an ‘afternoon’ of my aunt Lucy Rossetti’s; and, as far as I could hear, he did not say a single word, properly filling the bill of the man of action, the bridge-builder, the Kiplingish overman of the poor dear dead decade…

So that was all I ever heard of Mr Morley Roberts until the appearance of the Private Life of Henry Maitland, which was a bitter bad book. Oh, a bitter bad book! I don’t in the least mind that it gave away a number of the confidences of poor dead Gissing; that it may have inconvenienced several other people too I do not much mind. You must not have to do with authors unless you are prepared to have that sort of thing happen to you; that is all there is to it. But there was not about the Private Life a spark of elevation, of insight, of power of projection, of imagination. There was not even any invention. It was like a person sitting down to tell the truth about Mr Jones and telling all the wrong things – telling you only about what he took for his liver and where he bought his socks.

II. Time and Thomas Waring. By Morley Roberts

At the same time, even in the Private Life of Henry Maitland, whilst one was recognizing that it was all hopelessly wrong, it was impossible not to recognize also that here was, if a very plodding, then also a very earnest realist. It was the book, it seemed, of a depressed, rather hopeless individual, who had looked upon life and found it very ugly material, and uninspired, and had rendered it in an ugly, materialistic, and uninspired frame of mind. Still, in an English and what I will call a Mark Rutherford kind of way it was a rendering.

And I think it struck me then – or perhaps I am only being wise after the event – that if the writer of that book could get hold of a subject really suited to his method – which was quite a genuine method! – he might turn out something really valuable. And I am inclined to think that, with Time and Thomas Waring, Mr Morley Roberts really has got hold of his subject. And I am inclined to think that he has turned out a book much more significant than any of Gissing’s or any of Mark Rutherford’s or than any of the English school of realists. I say that I am inclined to think so, because the English school of realism is for me a thing singularly ugly, or at any rate singularly pedestrian, and I have really been very much moved by Mr Roberts’ book. Quite literally I cried so much over it at times that I made myself feel ill, and do feel ill still.

It is unusual to make such a confession, but I make it for what it is worth and because, since I am trying to tell the truth about Mr Roberts, in whom I have no particular interest, he may as well have the benefit of the fact. For of course when I am writing about the quite typically English novel I am apt to get off my feet. I do not know the country – not in the least. There is, for instance, no kind of accomplishment about Mr Roberts. He cannot construct a story nearly as well as any of the novelists of commerce that one never mentions. His composition strikes me as singularly bad. What, for instance, could be worse, from the point of the beautiful and gracious thing that good writing is, than such an ending for a paragraph as the following:

I think I would cut my throat if I found I had written two sentences echoing each other like that. Just fancy repeating ‘she had no…’ and ‘nor any…’ as if it were a trouvaille! It gives the effect of some one playing the intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana fifty times over without stopping. And ‘high, incommunicable thoughts’! My God! And ‘dear, surrendering pity of the soul’! My God! My God!

So that one reads the book as if it were beneath a masking cloud, or as if one were wearing glasses that made everything appear astigmatic; though the conversations when they are not too long are rather effective for an English novelist. But even the conversations are ill-managed and without contrast. Thomas Waring talks, as it were, about the immortality of the soul or real morality with his mistress; then he goes down to his club and finds two journalists, a surgeon, an anaesthetist, and a nondescript and immediately they all begin to talk about the immortality of the soul and real morality in just the same phraseology as the mistresses and the hospital nurses on the next page continue the same conversations in the same phraseology. That is not handling conversation as a master, or even as a capable journeyman would handle it. We know that you must have relief, and that if conversation A be about the immortality of the soul and the higher morality, conversation B must be about the Home Rule Bill, though its more subtle bearings will carry the subject of conversation A a stage farther.

But Mr Morley Roberts just goes on and on – and on. And somehow he gets his effect – to the extent of making me weep. I am aware that in so saying I am doing what is to all intents and purposes to renier mes dieux. But I can’t help that.

And it is by sheer power of his subject that Mr Roberts attains to this achievement. The subject is that of a man who is operated on for a mortal disease, the effects of the operation being merely temporary and he knowing that he must be operated on again and die within a year or eighteen months. There was, attached to this man, a woman he had loved very much, a wife who is always polishing the furniture (Mary, you remember, had chosen the better portion), a mistress who chose the portion of Mary; a daughter who was hopelessly and finally in love with a married man; a son, not a bad fellow, who had an entanglement with a housemaid, and who is not as brilliant as his father could have wished. The man is fifty, fairly prosperous in his profession; fairly eminent – well, you see, it is the sort of coil that any man of fifty may find himself in!

And then suddenly there comes the operation, and he knows that he has only about eighteen months to live. So he sets to work to set everything in order – for his wife; for his daughter; for his mistress; for his son; for what will remain after him of his career. That is the story – that is the ‘affair’ of the book.

You can see that it is rather an epic matter – an epic of our everyday life. Former ages lived in an atmosphere of knowing that death might come at any minute; in the arrow that flieth by night; in the swift pestilence; at the orders of a tyrant or an inquisitor. But we – and that is why Mr Roberts is valuable – hang on the words of a confessor who is a surgeon, and our poor souls are in the hands of nuns who are white-robed hospital nurses. I do not suppose that there is any man of fifty who is not surrounded by friends or mistresses, who may not at any moment be on the operating-table, amidst the white-robed councils of ten; or that there is any man who may not be called on to take his place. The surgeon is our confessor, is our inquisitor, is our high priest, is our pope – if not for us, then for those whom we love more dearly – oh, so much more dearly – than life. May it not, at any moment, strike our daughter who is so straight and fair, our mistress who, whilst our wife polishes the furniture, is the only thing that holds us to life, or our best friend without whom life would be rather a dull affair?

This fine, this epic subject, this real subject of modern life, Mr Morley Roberts has got hold of. And, if he has not treated it with the skill, the gloom, or the fierce indignation of a Dostoevsky, he has at least done so with a sort of honest peasant straightforwardness. If he does not appear to me to have any particular literary skill he has – at least as far as I can discern – no literary tricks. He uses cliché phrases and Anglo-Saxon, and words of Latin derivation and sentimental constructions, much as some Lancashire weaver, some hard, tender, serious and earnest workman might do – a man who had read Ruskin and Huxley and Utopia and the Life of Frederick the Great, and perhaps New Grub Street.

I hope this does not sound patronizing. It is merely the writing of a person of another school – of a foreigner, if you will! At any rate I hope I have brought out my meaning to the extent of making it manifest that I think Mr Roberts has treated almost the most important side of the life we lead, and that he seems to me to be the first person to have rendered it seriously, if at all. Here are the opening words of the book:

That of course is not very striking writing; but it strikes its note right away. And it is the note of the private landscape of almost everybody that one knows and loves. The Elizabethan said: ‘It is but giving over of a game that must be lost.’ Mr Roberts puts it: ‘Above it, in the wall, an electric fan was running.’ But the note is the same.

Outlook, 33 (21 March 1914), 390–1.

XXXI. Lord Dunsany and Five Plays

I.

The Irish are a queer people, not because they are in any way in themselves unusual, but because, being extraordinarily normal, they contrive to produce on the rest of the world such an effect of abnormality. Thus they are cold, utterly without passion, materialist, matter of fact; as a rule, like most other peoples, they are quite without a sense of humour. They are cruel, chaste, ascetic, joyless, Puritan, Nonconformist. They are Anglo-Saxon; they are extraordinarily English. And yet look at them – look at the effect they produce on the bemused world. Is there any living soul, except Mr Bernard Shaw, himself a Nonconformist to the bone-marrow, who does not believe that the Irish are passionate pilgrims journeying through a material world with their eyes on the great stars of heaven, with the verses of the old poets on their lips, and gallant thoughts in the hearts of them? Actually they are thinking whether, if they could fill the old pig up with buckshot, they could not get eleven shillings more for him at Mullingar Fair come Thursday. Only it’s a difficult job to get an old pig to fill itself with buckshot… And, if they could do a little persecuting on their fellow-Nonconformists in Ulster wouldn’t they love to do it – and small blame to them! And would not they roar out great oaths, very astonishing and wild, and so persuade the whole world that it was the Ulstermen that began it by writing ‘Bloody End to the Pope’ under the table in a house at the corner of Square Street? And shouldn’t we – all the rest of the world – go on loving them, as we do? and sentimentalizing over them as we do? and weeping the great tears over them that we do?

All this, you know, is a disquisition on literary technique – for what is literature but the producing of illusions? And for the producing of an illusion there is nothing like an Irishman. A little chap with a face like a monkey’s and a queer hat (though indeed it is really only a hat just like any other Christian’s) will be sitting on a stile somewhere, and he will look at you with the twinkle in his eyes. And he will say: ‘Honesty – God save all here! – is the best policy! A stitch – more power to it! – in time save nine. Early to bed – the saints look down on us! – and early to rise makes a man healthy – heaven save the poor souls going all the way to Loords crost the sea! – wealthy – and it’s a little of that wealth that would slip well through the holes in me waistcoat pockuts! – and wise!’ And he will tell you that a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse, and that many hands make light work, and that least said is soonest mended, and that continence, sobriety, industry, and clean living are virtues. And according as that little chap with the queer hat and a face like a monkey’s desires you to laugh at his humour or weep for the sorrows of his country, so your sides will shake or the tears will pour down over your cheeks. Yet you never either laughed or wept when you first made the acquaintance with the whole inside of his head on top of your copybooks at school… But you will go on pouring out the love that is in you over him just the same! And that, you know, is the real triumph of an art – to make the hand deceive the eye though the eye knows all the while what the hand is doing. And that, again, is perhaps why the Irish have produced so few books and done so little else in the world. They have not needed to; they can make their effect – and what for do we crave for wealth and fame and achievement save that we may make our effect! – with hardly so much as the stirring of a hand – by the quoting of a few copybook maxims, as you might say! And that art is the greatest which most economizes in its means.

I think that Lord Dunsany is one of the best poets that Ireland has yet produced – he and Mr Yeats are enough to justify that distressing humbug of a country of its existence.(Fortunately I have not got to write about Mr Yeats just yet!) But I rather doubt whether Lord Dunsany has much idea of the greatness of his particular conjuring trick – or else he is as great a humbug as the rest of his countrymen. And that I do doubt. I fancy that he has the national gift of prestidigitation without really thinking that he is doing any more than eating potatoes with a fork. For as I understand it, in the considerable Irish group that now exists – in the group that more or less contains himself and Mr Yeats and the Abbey Theatre people and Mr Moore and the gentlemen that Mr Maunsell publishes – in that group Lord Dunsany imagines himself to represent the revolt against realism.

II. Five Plays. By Lord Dunsany

He does nothing of the sort of course, since he is one of the chief realists of them all. He is so much of a realist that he produces an effect of mysticism; just as his countryman who is thinking of filling the old pig with buckshot produces an effect of thinking of the cold ways of the stars. This is not paradox; it is part of the whole scheme of art and of the way art works… For this, more or less, is the way Lord Dunsany sets about it. Says he: ‘I am sick of this world, and the Land Purchase Act, and the defectively sanitated cabins in Connemara. I will build up a world that shall be the unreal world of before the fall of Babylon. I am sick of the sogarths and their way; I will build seven thrones for seven gods of green jade.’ And so he goes and does it – with all the arts of the inspired realist! One is tired of the knocking on the door of Macbeth as an instance, but it is still the best instance in the world of how horror is heightened – of how horror is produced – by the projection of, not the writing about, purely material things. And Lord Dunsany is doing the knocking-on-the-door stunt all the way through four at least of his five plays. (The fifth is quite negligible.)

Now that is beautiful writing and clever imagery; but it is sheer realism all the same. And the lesson of the Gods of the Mountain is not a lesson for the days before the fall of real Babylon; it is a lesson for the grocer round the corner and for me at my desk – and for Lord Dunsany too. So is the lesson of the Golden Doom; so is the lesson of the Unknown Warrior and of the Glittering Gate. And all the effects of these last three plays too are got by the methods of the sheerest realism.

Thus the turning points, the real cruces of the Unknown Warrior are the bones that the slaves gnaw, the bones that are still in the flesh of the king’s dog, the way the prophet’s hair is cut, and the little dints in the very old sword that King Arginones digs up out of the earth. Similarly the effect of the Glittering Gate is produced by the burglar saying that when he gets into heaven his mother will have ready for him a glass of beer and a dish of tripe and onions and a pipe of tobacco. It is these things that make Lord Dunsany’s plays differ from allegory, that most tiresome and most materialist of all things. An allegorist would have left out the bones in the Unknown Warrior, and would have made the dints in the sword not little ones, as dints in swords that have seen service really are. He would have let them be the great dints of stage swords such as might he borne by a Britannia in a Punch cartoon after she had vanquished the Gallic foe. No. Lord Dunsany is not that tiresome thing, an allegorist – though I have a vague idea that he might wish to be considered or to consider himself one. But like all true poets, like all dealers in the unseen, the imponderable,  he is a realist, and a realist, and again a realist, just as all mystics in their queer way are extraordinarily full of knowledge of the world – just in fact as the most saintly of confessors will pop out at you in his confessional a queer bit of knowledge of the foolish way you will behave when you go courting. And we need realists very badly, because this world is so much too much with us. It is too much with us, and it is an extraordinarily unreal mirage. Yes, just a mirage. Three large sharp stones are in my drive; they ought to be pulled up or rolled in. There is a broken and discarded bucket in the long grass of my orchard. The rain is coming, like handfuls of small gravel cast against my window; the baker is coming in at the front gate; I shall have to paint a chest of drawers this afternoon… But all that is really mirage; there is nothing real about the stones or the discarded bucket, or the rain, or the baker coming in at the gate. Myself, my own self, is miles away – thirty miles away, thinking of things how different – how utterly different! And the future is to – the necessity is for – the artist who, by rendering the stones and the bucket and the baker and the Daily Telegraph that is lying on the sofa, will give the world the image of that kingdom of heaven that is behind it all. I rather fancy that the Cubists and the Futurists and the rest of the movement that is trying to get away from representational art are trying to put the kingdom of heaven too directly on to canvas, and that possibly Lord Dunsany would get farther away from the purely economic school if he set his plays in Grosvenor Square of this year.

It is perfectly true that we have had too much of the purely economic school, the imbecile Fabian society, the Rationalist Press Association and all that cretinism. We want to get back to the divine right of kings, metaphorically speaking. But I rather doubt if that is most efficiently done by dreaming about the world before the fall of Babylon; it is possible that it would be nearer the mark to present the laying of drainpipes in Connemara or the trees in Soho Square. But the fact remains that, in this odd world, two and two never make four, except in the realms of the imagination; and for the purposes of humanity – or at any rate of the poets who are the only part of humanity that are not just the stuff with which to fill graveyards – the nineteenth century, the age of gas-and-water socialism, was on a hopelessly wrong track. This I know is a sort of an Easter sermon; but I am writing in Holy Week and I cannot help myself. And if the nineteenth century was on a hopelessly wrong track and running down a siding on the one hand, I am not certain that it was not, at any rate in the case of that small band of brothers who evolved the methods of true realism, evolving the true method of rendering the realities that are behind this world of stones, buckets, and furniture that has to be painted. The formula is this: A poet contemplating a sunset has certain emotions stirred within him. Shall he then write down, ‘My emotions are so-and-so’, or shall he so exactly describe the sunset that the reader shall in his turn have emotions stirred within him? Realists prescribe the latter, English writers as a rule prefer the former method. But the queer Irish, with Lord Dunsany at their heads… Ah, they know what they are up to. Because the lesson of the Gods of the Mountain is this: There was a grocer at Putney with sandy whiskers and a lewd mind. But he pretended to be a Puritan with great skill. So the inhabitants of Putney made him a church-warden, and he was then in so prominent a position that he never, never, never once got a chance of going off to Brighton with one of his shopgirls. That is a very good lesson for unser’ Zeit. But Lord Dunsany makes you believe that it is a story of before the fall of Babylon and that his green jade gods have taken the place of the Ancient of Days and the Fabian leaders. It is the clever man that he is!

Outlook, 33 (11 April 1914), 494–5.

XXXIV. Miss May Sinclair and The Judgment of Eve

I.

A gentleman who made a considerable addition to his income – an addition quite enviable – by writing short stories for American magazines, once told me that he dare not adopt that device as a permanent occupation, because all short-story writers die mad. He was rather a mad sort of person…

And I fancy that there is really the root of the matter. What my friend meant was that the ‘machining’ of a good short story is an employment so exacting that, after having been at it for some years, the brain of the writer gave up, not only that struggle, but all other struggles. There I think he was wrong. I fancy that none but a man with the seeds of lunacy in him can write a really good conte. (Very likely none but a man with the seeds of lunacy in him can write at all.) The lunacy of course may take the form merely of an exaggerated cruelty, but cruel at least a short-story writer – the writer of a true conte – must be. If you think of it for a moment you will see how inevitably true the dictum is.

Maupassant was the best of all short-story writers, and he had a cruel mind, and he died mad. Mr Kipling was a short-story writer of great magnificence – but that was in his youth, and youth is nearly always cruel. Mr Jacobs is, technically speaking, one of the best short-story writers there ever was, and his best short stories are always preoccupied with something cruel. They may not be all Monkey’s Paws, but they always represent somebody being cruel to some one else – somebody hitting some one else in the eye, or scoring off somebody else very mortifyingly. And the best of all short-story writers in English – Stephen Crane – had something queer about him, and died young.

Let me hasten to say – for the short story is such a queer thing that one has always to be explanatory about even the very language that one uses – that by the ‘short story’ I mean the conte – the very short story that would occupy from a page to a page and a half of this journal. But what I have said applies to the longish short story quite as truly but with certainly diminished force. Mr Henry James, who has a phrase for almost anything, has given us the phrase that exactly expresses the industry of short-story writing. It is, ‘The turn of the screw’. For a long short story may contain digressions. Nay, it may consist of nothing but digressions, with just the pat of the incident, the stroke from the claw sheathed in velvet, at the beginning, in the middle, at the end – where you will in the narration. But the real short-story writer must be at it with the screw-driver all the time; he must turn, and turn, and turn until the bitter end – until the last revolution of the screw does the trick – until the camel’s back is broken.

For that is what it amounts to. The short story of genius – ‘La Reine Hortense’, ‘The Three White Mice’, ‘The Man Who Would be King’ – demands from its reader – nay, it exacts – an amount of strained, of breathless attention that is nothing short of a cruelty; and the final coup de pistolet – the last word – is the killing of a living thing, the breaking of a back, since it finishes that vital rapport between writer and reader.

The short-story writer is in fact a giver of news. So, for the matter of that, is the novelist, since all art is merely a means of communication between one soul and another. But whereas the novelist is the comparatively tender-hearted person who cannot communicate news without breaking it as gradually as the tenderness of his temperament will permit, the writer of contes is just a brute, like the gentleman of the American story who put the news of Mr Jones’s decease to Mrs Jones by saying, ‘Are you the Widow Jones?’ In a rightly constructed novel every word is a preparation for the final effect; but there are many words, and, since it is the function of art to conceal the artifice, many of the words will possibly be misleading. This is, for instance, true of Madame Bovary, where the incident of the cripple or the harangues of Homais might well be taken for mere digressions were it not that they serve simply as heighteners of curiosity until the final effect of destiny is reached. But the short story has to produce its effect by means more crude – and how infinitely more subtle if they are to be effective. Of course, if the thing is to be merely an anecdote, the task is easy enough…

II. The Judgment of Eve. By May Sinclair

For the anecdote is just a recital of an act of sorts – an act, an expression of opinion, or a contrast, that may be quaint, or may be cruel, or may be startling. But a conte is one or other of these things with, in addition, a certain creation of an atmosphere, of an excitement, of a thrilling or a quivering in the reader. The writer says, as it were, ‘Ah, now I am going to touch you up’, and he does it. He is being cruel to you in fact.

In this gift of cruelty Miss Sinclair has been hitherto somewhat lacking – she has been too much lacking until the publication of her last novel, which very nearly, or perhaps quite, did the trick. She always possessed a power of observation, a tranquil and direct style, but until quite lately she has never seemed to me to catch hold of her subject with the intensity and vigour that are necessary – to catch hold of a theme, as it were, by the neck, and to shake the last exclamation of terror out of it. Her novels, from the Divine Fire onwards, until the Combined Maze, have generally seemed to me to be characterized by a certain listlessness, as if the writer had no real hatreds and no very strong desires. For heaven’s sake do not let me be misunderstood!

I do not mean to say that a writer of novels should hate governments or institutions, or organized cruelties. Such a man is a Social Reformer. But a certain hatred for certain types, a certain cynical dislike for the imbecile, gross and stupid nature of things, for the meannesses of the human heart, for want of imagination, and for the measure of hypocrisy that is necessary to keep us poor human things all going on – that sort of hatred is an almost necessary motive power for the artist.

A sunny optimism, a cheerful outlook – such things are very salutary, but they are an end in themselves and lead nobody anywhere – at any rate in the realms of story-writing. But a settled habit of misliking for one’s kind, for one’s circumstances, or even for certain individuals, of certain races – that is of more avail than all the optimisms of the world, if only because it will make you more observant. Of course if you possess only a sort of kindly scepticism as to the vaunting progressions of civilizations, of politicians, of individuals, or of races, you will write excellent comedy, which is quite as good as tragedy. But a cheerful outlook is an unproductive thing, possessed by men who eat good lunches and slumber after them. It is certainly unproductive of the observant habit of mind, as who should look out upon a sunny moist field and be unaware that the anopheles mosquito might well breed in those watery pastures? No, we need the saeva indignatio…

Miss Sinclair has shown of course traces of this possession often enough. And I take it that her announcement in the Introduction to this volume – the announcement that she is passing ‘to a more intense and more concentrated form’ – really means that she is feeling the necessity for a more intense indignation with want of imaginative sympathy in her fellows and the imbecility of the nature of things. In The Judgment of Eve the two best stories – those that are best ‘machined’ and best inspired – have plenty of this quality. They have indeed as much as could be desired. They are the story called ‘The Judgment of Eve’ itself and ‘The Wrackham Memoirs’. The story, the given thesis, of the ‘The Judgment of Eve’ is indeed cruel enough for the late Catulle Mendès to have handled. It is even crueller, since the implied suggestion that the husband of the story might have saved not only the wife’s life, but her personal appearance, the moral and intellectual character of the home and his own character, by infidelities to his wife, instead of a fidelity that murdered her with too much child-bearing – that suggestion, given the goodness of the character-drawing, is cruel, is exciting enough. I do not mean that it is harrowing; no good art is ever harrowing. It is exciting; it is worrying if you will. But it is stimulating. You are, in a certain sense, strengthened by the reading, since you carry away suggestions; you are not merely exhausted by the appeal to your emotions.

‘The Wrackham Memoirs’ is, without doubt, the better-machined story; it is more alive, more coloured, more really tragic. But I am inclined to think that it would have been better, since it would have been less provincial, if it had been translated out of literary circles. For it is provincial in the sense that, to understand it to the full, you must know something of the figures of the province of letters. And that is wrong; that is quite wrong. You should ask of your reader no knowledge whatever except that of the exact sense of words…

It would have made better art of the story. For if Mr Wrackham had been a politician and Mr Ford Lankester a statesman, or if the one had been a successful quack and the other a really good doctor, Miss Sinclair would have had to complete her story by giving some idea of the nature of their respective work. She would have known that her readers in the bulk know nothing of statesmanship and nothing whatever of doctoring. But, writing as she does a literary story, she has too much taken for granted that Ford Lankester will be recognized for the type of the late George Meredith, and that Mr Wrackham is – well, there is no doubt about him! And if she had had to define the nature of their work it would have given her a yet firmer grip of the story.

Nevertheless ‘The Wrackham Memoirs’ is a jolly good piece of writing and, since most of my readers may be taken to know something of the personalities of this province of letters, they will be safe enough to extract a good deal – a great deal – of rather cruel enjoyment from the story. And, at any rate, if this lady can keep it up – if she can keep up practising this greater intensity and this more concentrated form – I do not think that she need have much fear about her own literary future. She has served a hard apprenticeship in some mysterious and tranquil shades or other; she should now reap a good harvest from any seed she likes to sow.

Outlook, 33 (2 May 1914), 599–600.

XXXV. Les Jeunes and Des Imagistes

I.

Well, here they are, my young friends, with their lovelocks flowing from the seas beyond…

I suppose that, if anything characterizes this day of ours, it is a discontent – a discontent not so much with existing conditions as with existing modes of thought. There is, for instance, not much the matter with this realm of England, but Parliamentary institutions are discredited in the very birthplace of the Mother of Parliaments, and democracy is on its deathbed. This may appear an extreme statement of the case, and, since I am not a political writer, I will not stay to labour the point, which may be treated by pens abler and more serious. It is nevertheless the view of an unprejudiced observer of this odd world. And the point that I really wish to make is that the trend of all these discontents is almost uniformly reactionary. The extreme Left in France – the Syndicalists – are reactionary, are Royalist, friendly to the Church, violently anti-Parliamentary, and so on. And what the extreme Left of France says today the rest of this world finds itself repeating about thirty-nine years after. And in France the arts have a trick – which they certainly have not here – of keeping company with advanced thought, whereas in this country the general body of thought is about a thousand years behind that of the artist. Thus today the general frame of mind in this country is about that of Piers Plowman. In about five hundred years or so we may well have a renewed system that would have pleased Chaucer; and in a quarter of a thousand years again we shall stand with Shakespeare…

And the trend of artistic thought in France – it may well be Slav in its origin – is towards reaction from materialism. Samuel Smiles and our other national heroes would hardly get a hearing in Montmartre; pseudo-Darwinians and other deniers of mystery would hardly now found cults. The eighties, poor dear things, are finally dead. Mind, I am not saying that Marinetti and the Cubists are devout Catholics. They are not. But they represent a frame of mind that, scientifically speaking is religious – that is, at least, other-worldly. If you can once perceive that a cabbage is a wallflower, which, scientifically speaking it is, you will then be able to see that a painter who sets down, in making a portrait, the image of his emotions in seeing his sitter and not a representation of the sitter – this painter is, scientifically, trying to paint his sitter’s soul. He is trying to paint the soul of the world…

Of course you will laugh at this today; but in ten years’ time you will be repeating those very words. Personally I am entirely on the side of Les Jeunes. With two exceptions they are the only persons doing anything worth considering in the world. I know that this is a very undignified attitude for me to adopt; I ought to be sitting on the benches of the British Academy hearing Mr G— tell Mr H— how my ancestors are turning in their graves. But I cannot help it. However much I may try to resemble Socrates, I cannot keep away from the hetairai. The other ladies, like Mr G— and Mr H—, are such crying bores. Yes, one wants to be reckless nowadays…

One wants it desperately; it is a hunger; it is a thirst. One is too safe, in one’s views, in one’s house, in one’s pantaloons. I should respect myself more if I could burgle a Wesleyan chapel and wear a purple-and-green satin dressing gown at Rumpelmayer’s, and, just for once, say what I really think of a few people. But I have not the courage. That is why I admire my young friends – they do that sort of thing. They look odd; they talk violently and perfectly incomprehensibly; they label themselves with names for which they would die. (They label me too, for the matter of that!) And not one of them could write an article that the Times Literary Supplement would print… Think how refreshing that is! Almost anyone else can do it.

Why the particular group whom today we are considering should label themselves – and myself – Imagistes, I do not know. I do not, for the purposes of this article, know what Imagisme is. Let us examine the volume that they have put forth.

II. Des Imagistes: an anthology

Well, one end of this volume is Hellenic, the other extremity Sinetic, if that be the proper term for things which show a Chinese influence. The middle regions contain the very beautiful poems of Mr Flint, which are upon the whole most what I want, since they are about this city. Indeed the most memorable of this very beautiful little collection is Mr Flint’s poem about a swan – and that is also the truest piece of Imagisme, at any rate in this volume. This poem however by Mr Ezra Pound is more valuable as an example of what Imagisme really is (Mr Flint’s I will save for the end).

That seems to me a very perfect poem of a school that I have always desired to see. (I should like to make it plain before going any farther that I am not now attempting to appraise the relative values of the poets here represented. As far as the poems are concerned I prefer – possibly for quite personal reasons – ‘Priapus, Keeper of Orchards’, to anything else in the book.) And these verses seem to me also extremely beautiful. They are by H.D.

And here again is a poem by Mr Richard Aldington that would come almost exactly into the canons of my school, if I had founded a school:

These then are the poems that I most like in this anthology. Stop, though. This also is very beautiful:

It is odd to me to observe how a longish poem of my own that these young men have appropriated for their collection appears amongst this abstract and refined verse like a Gothic gargoyle introduced amongst the Elgin Marbles. I do not mean to say that I would not rather have written Mr Aldington’s verses on the Bayswater Fountains. I would. I also have sat in Kensington Gardens, and there was nothing to prevent my doing it except the absence of the Muse at such moments. But the point is that in this collection the only poem that is rhymed is my own.

My own attempts at verse are longish things, and I suppose that what I am aiming at is to produce the hobbling jolting metres of the Gothic ages. And the reason why I adopt rhyme is that it quickens up the form. I wrote the other day a quite long poem that no paper in this country will print – not even this Journal, which stands, as you see, a good deal. Well, I wrote it carefully in unrhymed irregular metres. And it seemed of a length, intolerable, unbearable, inexpressible. I then went through it carefully, inserting rhymes to every line. The result was a singular shortening in effect. (I do not mean to say that the poem is not still intolerably long, but still the effect of the rhymes is to shorten it by at least one-half. I suppose that to be because the ear, leaping forward to find the rhymes, does its work more quickly. I cannot at any rate imagine any other reason.)

The poems however of these young men are almost invariably short. The effect then of their unrhymedness is to give to swallow-flights an appreciable weight, a certain dignity, a certain length. I do not know quite about the metres. Or rather I know quite well what is my private opinion about them; but it probably differs from any explanation that would be given by the Imagistes themselves. They, would probably tell you – if you could understand what they say, which is more than I mostly can – that rhyme and metre are shackles. And so indeed they are. Reasoning the matter out with myself, I seem to find that the justification for vers libre is this: It allows a freer play for self-expression than even narrative prose; at the same time it calls for an even greater precision in that self-expression.

It is the perpetual torment, it is the ignis fatuus of the artist, in whatever medium, to seek for new forms. I do not know how much of my time has not been spent in discussing the possibility of finding a new form for the novel. One discusses it hopelessly, as if it were floating in the air above the mist in which we live; one discusses it irritatedly, as if it were a word that is for ever on the tip of the tongue and yet will never come forth. But in vers libre as it is practised today I really think that a new form has been found, if not for the novel, then for the narrative of emotion. Mr Pound’s poem that I have quoted is in reality a tiny novel, and as such it is doubly interesting to me who am only a dabbler in verse. But at any rate the immediate interest of vers libre is that whatever its form, it is in its unit an expression of the author’s brain-wave. The unit of formal poetry is the verse of so many lines, or the line itself. The unit of cadenced prose is the paragraph. But the unit of vers libre is really the conversational sentence of the author. As such it is the most intimate of means of expression…

The subject is however so large a one that I hope to be permitted to return to it next week. In case however fate or the editor of this Journal intervenes – which I hope they will not, since the subject is that of the whole future of imaginative thought – let me say that this tiny anthology of the Imagistes contains an infinite amount of pure beauty – of abstract beauty. That is my simple opinion. It is the beauty of music – that is to say, of music without much meaning, but of very great power to stir the emotions. And that is the sole real province of all the arts. Here is Mr Flint’s poem:

Outlook, 33 (9 May 1914), 636, 653.

XXXVI. Les Jeunes and Des Imagistes (Second Notice)

I.

It is interesting – it is like a dim recollection of the early nineties – to consider that in the new movements of which I am writing there are two distinct strains that, it would appear, must become hostile with the bitter hostility characterizing the struggles between Socialists and Anarchists in the year 1893. In 1893, as I recalled elsewhere, I was a full-fledged Anarchist, and I can remember going to William Morris’s meeting at Kelmscott House with the deliberate intention of interrupting those tranquil and lamp-lit affairs. I don’t know that I ever did anything more than shout a question or two, but certainly, there was what is called an ‘ugly feeling’ in the air.

The great mass of humanity at that date regarded Anarchism and Socialism as indistinguishable and as indistinguishably connected with ragged appearances, red ties, and bombs. Well, the years have rolled along, Anarchism has become Syndicalism; Syndicalism in despair has become reactionary, has become even aristocratic, as it was bound to become; and here we all are. And, in the Futurism of today – which is the aesthetic, the intellectual expression of Syndicalism – there can be discerned two main streams. And poor Mr Marinetti is understood to be having already trouble with his followers.

For, on the one hand, whilst all the literary, all the verbal manifestations of Futurism are representational, and representational, and again representational, all the plastic-aesthetic products of the new movement are becoming more and more geometric, mystic, non-material, or what you will. The Futurist painters were doing very much what novelists of the type of Flaubert or short-story writers of the type of Maupassant aimed at. They gave you not so much the reconstitution of a crystallized scene in which all the figures were arrested – not so much that, as fragments of impressions gathered during a period of time, during a period of emotion, or during a period of travel. Thus, in one corner of the picture you would have a large Roman ‘I’, showing that the painter either travelled first-class or would so much like to have travelled first-class that the desire left a permanent impress on his mind. Similarly, in another portion of the canvas there would be a rendering of an old gentleman with a face like a goat, and in other places locomotive funnels – the funnels of steamboats, the Arc de Triomphe, a voiture de remise, and so on. Such a Futurist painting was very much what Flaubert or Maupassant would have tried to render in words forty or fifty years ago. The effect produced indeed is very much that of Turgenev’s account of an execution. And the effect produced by one of Mr Marinetti’s poems is almost exactly similar. It is literally impressionism and nothing more. And the fact that the mots are en liberté affects nothing more than the fact that the word flamme will be standing on its head instead of lying down. The Cubists are however entirely different in spirit and, whatever they are, they aren’t impressionists. They are, if you will, emotionalists. Ltranquilooking at the leaves on a tree, at a man’s head, or at a petticoat makes them want to draw certain patterns, and they go and draw them. That, at any rate, sums the matter up as clearly and in a few words.

Now it is obvious that a very pretty fight might arrange itself between the Cubists, who are anti-materialists, and the Futurists, who are really realists. And I dare say that, humanity being what it is, that fight may yet arrive. And yet I do not feel at all certain that there is any necessity for this Armageddon, since the real crux of both methods is a matter of arousing emotion. I will try to illustrate what I mean. Some time ago I was passing through a period of extreme mental distress – a period that lasted for a long time – of a distress for which there was no remedy. But one day, going downstairs and looking out of the window, I saw a shape of an extremely vivid – but an incredibly vivid! – green. It was one of those greens that transcend any thinkable colour – that transcend any green flame, any possible painted surface, and it was extremely clear and sharp in outline. It was in fact the underside of a parrot climbing up a vertical wire trellis. And at that sight an extraordinary calmness descended upon my depression; it was like the end of the Church service when the clergyman says ‘The peace of God which passes all understanding’.

II. Des Imagistes: an anthology

Now the point is that, if I had been a Futurist, I should have rendered a bit of the staircase, my shoes which I had just put on, certain details of the circumstance or of the person who was depressing me. I might have put in the representation of a postage-stamp because I was expecting a letter, or the representation of a telephone-receiver because I hoped against hope that some one would ring me up; and somewhere about I should have put in a very sharply defined shape of a very vivid green. I should then expect the spectator to have the emotions that I had then felt. If, on the other hand, I had been a Cubist I should have rendered no material object. I might have given you a streak of clear grey, possibly subconsciously suggested by the sky, a streak of scarlet for the colour I should like postage-stamps to have, a black octagon because the telephone is mechanical in suggestion, and so on. But equally with the Futurist, I should be trying to convey my emotions to the spectator, since the whole province of both these schools of art is the conveying of emotions.

My Imagiste friends fall, it seems to me, into the category of realists. They render, that is to say, concrete objects, and expect the reader to have aroused in him certain emotions. And indeed, if you will consider Mr Flint’s poem about the swan you will see that it is an exact setting forth of my own anecdote about the parrot, and almost the same effect will be produced by Mr Epstein’s sculpture of birds, or by any other of the Imagiste poems that I quoted last week.

The fact is that any very clear and defined rendering of any material object has power to convey to the beholder or to the reader a sort of quivering of very definite emotions. In its very clearness and in its very hardness it seems to point the moral of the impermanence of matter, of human life, or if you will, of the flight of birds. You can get indeed more emotion out of the exact rendering of the light reflected in the bonnet of an automobile than out of the lamentation of fifty thousand preachers. The point is, I suppose, that just as very vivid and perfectly disproportionate emotions are aroused in you by meeting certain persons, so equally vivid emotions will be aroused if you come in contact with their manifestations, with their records, with their art. And the justification of any method of art, the measure of its success, will be just the measure of its suitability for rendering the personality of the artist.

I am thinking of course of the vers libre of my Imagiste friends as a vehicle for the expression of personality. Last week, if you will remember, I said that the unit of verse of the poems in this particular volume appeared to be the conversational sentences of the poet. You must, I think, be aware that whenever you frame a conversational sentence with any care you try to get into it a certain cadence. If you are merely asserting to your fishmonger your reasons for considering the prices he charges for red mullet to be exorbitant, if you are asserting it carefully, you must be aware that, whilst you are listening to his reply to your last sentence, you will be preparing in your mind, you are balancing, you are stressing the sentence with which you will reply to him. You may open your conversation with a long sentence to which he may reply as best suits his temperament. You will then utter a sentence which he may interrupt; you will probably take up your sentence and finish it, partly because you wish to convey certain facts to that fishmonger, but almost certainly very much more because your ear does not wish to be cheated of its cadence, of its stresses, of its balance. And those sentences will be extraordinarily characteristic of you. They will be more characteristic than your hands, than your eyes, than the set of your shoulders, or than the way you lift your feet when you walk. And, if any really observant friend wished to render you to an admiring or to a perturbed world he would render you more exactly by catching the cadence of your sort of typical sentence than by almost any other means. (I do not mean to say that this is the only form characterization takes, but I certainly think it is the most subtle and the most intimate.)

And the more formal your conversation may be the more characteristic will your cadences become – the more characteristic, that is to say, of your mood at the time. If you are at a stiff and frigid tea-party you will arrange them so as to conceal emotion, but they will be none the less you. Or if you have ever had occasion to plead for a long time for something that you very much wanted, with a rather silent person, you will, if you take the trouble to remember – not the context of what you said, but the sound, the rhythm of your utterances – you will remember an effect like that of a sea with certain wave-lengths going on and on and on. They may be long rollers, or they may be a short and choppy sea with every seventh sentence a large wave.

And that seems to me to be the importance of the vers libre of this volume. It seems to me to be important not so much because of the context of the poetry as because it is a definite progress towards the intimate rendering of the writers’ personalities. The vers libre that we have had up to this date has been, as far as its cadence is concerned, more or less derivative. Whitman, for instance, is nearly always blank verse, arbitrarily distributed, and as much might be said of Henley. They wrote, that is to say, rather to satisfy an existent metre, a metre evolved by ages of convention, than to satisfy the personal needs of their ears. And that is true of all other verse forms, whether the line be octosyllabic, or deca- or endecasyllabic, or spondaic, or what you will. I am not of course decrying all other forms of metre and I am not throwing rhyme to the dogs. All that I am trying to say is that verse which is cut to a pattern must sacrifice a certain amount – not necessarily very much, but still a certain amount – of the personality of the writer. And inasmuch as the personality of the writer is still the chief thing in a work of art, any form that will lead to the more perfect expression of personality is a form of the utmost value. I suppose that what I have been aiming at all my life is a literary form that will produce the effect of a quiet voice going on talking and talking, without much ejaculation, without the employment of any verbal strangeness – just quietly saying things. Of course I do not lay that down as a canon for the whole world. The universe is very large and in it there is room for an infinite number of gods. There is room even for Mr Marinetti’s declamations of his battle-pieces. But one is very tired; writing is a hopeless sort of job, words are very hard to find, and one frequently wishes that one were dead, and so on. It is at such times that one welcomes the quiet voice that will just go on talking to one about nothing in particular, just to keep one from thinking. It is at such times that one welcomes such a poem as

Outlook, 33 (16 May 1914), 682–3.

XXXVIII. Mr W.H. Mallock and Social Reform

I.

If the Tory Party had any sense it would buy 6,000, or 60,000, or 600,000, or 6,000,000 copies of Mr Mallock’s book and distribute them throughout the constituencies. But the Tory Party has always been the stupid party and now it is purely imbecile, so I suppose it will do nothing of the sort. From the days of the New Republic Mr Mallock has been the most distinguished, the most active, and the most typical of what it is customary to call reactionary thinkers in this country. I should be tempted to call him the only actively reactionary propagandist that we have; but if I did so some one would write and say that Mr Jones, of Putney, has been writing reactionary pamphlets for the last seventy-two years; and that would be a nuisance. Still, it is my private opinion that Mr Mallock is the most important of our reactionary writers (by ‘reactionary’ I mean really sceptical; for there is in England a school of thought, though it would seem preposterous to say so and though nothing ever really appears to make the Englishman think. Still, here and there in colleges, in vicarages, in surgeries, and in odd houses there are two or three men with cool, unhurried sceptical, cynical minds of the type that is peculiarly English, and that I must confess to finding quite attractive).

What I really do desperately want is to see a good Tory history in use in the schools in this country, to take once and for all the place of stuff of the Whig type like that of the late Mr John Richard Green. It is really time that the idea of precedent broadening down to precedent1 should be got out of the heads of this afflicted people.

For, looking at the state of the nation from the standpoint of the independent observer, it is perfectly obvious to me that we are approaching the stage when we shall have for Government a permanent Left – such a state of things as they have today in France. I am convinced that, once the Irish question is out of the way, our side will never have a chance. Never, never, never. And why in the world should they have a chance? They don’t deserve it. For years and years, for decades and decades, they have been letting their children be filled up with the Whig cant of the greatest good of the greatest number and things that I have not the patience to write about. I do not suppose that there is a single child in this country who is not being taught to say that Oliver Cromwell was a democrat or that the Great Rebellion was a constitutional movement to resist a new and unjust tax and to free a groaning people. As a matter of fact, shipmoney was the oldest tax of England – a tax that was levied before the days of the Heptarchy – and the Cromwellians were a lot of people who objected to paying their taxes just as you and I object to paying them, only more efficiently. They were indeed so efficient about it that, at the death of Oliver Cromwell, the national exchequer was bankrupt.

I do not make these statements as being of any importance, but simply as instances of what should be taught in schools if children are to have any just view of history and if the Tory Party is to survive. The Tory Party has a very proper contempt for men of letters. We are, poor dears, a weak people; but our home nevertheless is in the eternal hills. Last Sunday a lady said to me that she had never met a man of letters who was not a Liberal. I instanced several distinguished employers of the English language, and she retorted that they were none of them Englishmen, though they were certainly strong Tories. I left the matter at that.

But there you have it really in a nutshell. The Tories have always quite properly, but none the less stupidly, despised men of letters. It is like despising your cook; it is just as stupid as kicking your cook in the face. For it is the man of letters who has evolved the monstrous nonsense that is taught in the schools of today. It is the man of letters who is filling up the minds of your children with daily messes just as the cook fills their tender stomachs. And no man, having secured for himself a good cook, would go and kick him or her in the face. I don’t mean to say that the man of letters has any valid moral excuse for being treated better than your butler, your governess, or your curate. But if you don’t treat him better he will go and be a Liberal and get asked to the ‘at-homes’ of the leaders of the party and get a knighthood or so thrown to him. So he will go on writing about precedent broadening down to precedent, and he will go on being a democrat in seculum seculorum.

Hang it all! Why cannot the Tory Party treat men of letters as my co-religionists treat their priests? Quâ man, it is possible for a priest to be the nastiest little bounder imaginable, but, inasmuch as he has to do the dirty work of scraping our ignoble souls into heaven, he has about him something of the divine and is accorded great pomp and precedence in the proper places. The Tory Party, like our ignoble souls, has always had to have somebody to do its dirty work. And, if it could put on a sufficient semblance of deference to make Toryism worth while before the foreign Jew like Disraeli, it could surely pretend to bend its proud neck before followers of my own calling – for the sake of the little children. If you come to think of it, there are no fewer than three men of letters – Lord Morley, Mr Birrell, and Mr Masterman – in the present Cabinet.

II. Social Reform: its relations to realities and delusions.
By W.H. Mallock

I have already avowed the greatest admiration for Mr Mallock’s book. Mr Mallock has set himself the task of destroying one of the great historic fallacies – a fallacy which, having been in the first place the assumption of Karl Marx, has become as great a menace to society of today as has been for a long time the ideas of Rousseau. Rousseau is of course much the more formidable sentimentalist, and as such he is much the more difficult to combat. Rousseau fastened upon the neck of this world that collar which is the idea of the rights of man. Of course it is purely nonsensical to talk of any man having rights when all that a man really has are duties and privileges. But these are very indefinite matters. Rousseau may make his statement and you your counter-statement; yet the matter will remain pretty much where it was, and the degree of its acceptance by the world will be nearly the relative degree of the loudness of your shouting or the persuasiveness of your manner. But Marx was not an artist like Rousseau. He dealt with facts and figures, not in sentiments. He and his followers, that is to say, evolved, not the theory, but the direct statement that, under the system of capitalism the rich are daily growing richer and richer and the poor daily more and more poor. This statement is simply a lie.

This statement is simply a lie due to the non-scientific minds of Marx and of his followers. These gentlemen are sentimentalists like you and me and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. They are sentimentalists who, having once seen some ragged children playing in the gutter whilst an opulent lady in silks and satins – this is rather the phraseology of social reformers than my own – at any rate, having seen the opulent lady in silks and satin roll by in an elegant barouche, drawn by two pampered horses and having upon the box-seat two pampered menials – these social reformers then have their sentiments stirred. They say, here are the rich battening upon the poor. Some time afterwards they go into Hyde Park upon a Sunday morning, and they perceive a perfect galaxy of opulent women drawn by pampered steeds, or at any rate conducted by pampered menials. Having perceived only one lady before and perceiving now a great many, they start and say, ‘surely the rich are growing richer’. At the back of their minds remains the thought of the poorer quarters of an immense London which they seldom visit – because social reformers as a rule do themselves rather well – they quite conscientiously believe that the poor remain as poor as they were. They might then say with truth, as far as they have perceived it, that the rich are growing richer and that the poor remain as they were. Even that would be an untruth, since in actual fact, although a few rich people are growing richer, the whole body of the population, including the poor, are growing immeasurably more wealthy. To put the matter picturesquely, and of course exaggeratedly, there are practically no poor in the England of today.

There are no poor in the sense that there were poor in the year 1801. In the year 1801 the number of earned and unearned incomes was 4,100,000. And the number of incomes below £60 a year was 3,752,100. That is to say, that upwards of three-quarters of the wage-earners of this country were living at what today would be considered very near starvation level. Today the number of incomes below twenty-two shillings a week has decreased to 2,000,000, although the population of wage-earners has increased from four to eleven millions. The number of incomes between thirty shillings and sixty-two shillings was in 1801 90,000. Today it is 6,000,000. These are all official figures quoted by Mr Mallock from census and income-tax returns. It must therefore be obvious to anyone with any eye at all for figures that, far from the poor having grown poorer, or even having remained as poor as they were, not only the relative but the actual number of the very poor has enormously decreased in these islands during the last hundred and fourteen years; and that the relatively comfortable amongst the wage-earning classes have enormously increased in number. Without however inquiring into these facts, and carried away by emotions conveyed to them through their eyes, the Marxian reformers add to their axiom that the rich are growing richer every day, not merely the corollary that the poor are growing poorer – no, for the sake of emotional appeal, for the sake of the balance of phrase, of rhetoric, of epigram, they must add the corollary that the poor are growing poorer.

It is to these arguments, to these particular sentimentalities of the Marxian reformers, that Mr Mallock devotes his keen attention in this remarkable volume. Remarkable the book is, because hitherto the only data that there have been were the vague speculations of party politicians, whereas Mr Mallock has, first of all statisticians, availed himself of ‘specific official information, the existence of which appears to have been overlooked relating to the amount and distribution of incomes at the beginning of the nineteenth century’. And if you come to think of it, if you come to think merely of the drawings of Rowlandson and Cruikshank, or of the depictions of the life of the poor in the pages of novelists from the days of Fielding to those of Dickens; if you come to think of that picture of rags, filth, squalor, darkness, disease, and what is called crime, you will have a picture of horror and brutality compared with which the life of a working-man of today is little short of heaven. This however is mere sentimentalism of my own.

Mr Mallock presents you with the definite and hard statistics reviewed from every thinkable standpoint. He puts the statistics statistically; he puts them in terms of buildings, in terms of eating, in terms of drinking, in terms of furniture – there is no limit to his inexhaustible vitality. I must confess to having found it rather tough reading for the exhausted and inattentive brain that one carries about with one nowadays. But that is not Mr Mallock’s fault; his statements are clear enough when he desires to be clear, and picturesque enough when picturesqueness is his aim. And, as I said at the beginning of this article, the Tory Party, if it had any sense, would trumpet, would telegraph, would telephone, would communicate by every thinkable and unthinkable means Mr Mallock’s discoveries throughout these islands. But of course the Unionists will not.

Outlook, 33 (30 May 1914), 751–2.

XXXIX. Mr W.B. Yeats and his New Poems

I.

Mr Yeats’s figure has always singularly intrigued me. Humanity is not a nice animal, and I must confess to having for seven-eighths of my life, with the best will in the world, regarded Mr Yeats as almost a grotesque. I never took much stock in poets. Shelley to me was always a nuisance, Keats a negligible consumptive, Tennyson a smooth prig, and William Morris a bore. I had some respect for Browning, I suppose because he was fond of talking of the duchesses of his acquaintance, and it appears to me to be respectable to want to know duchesses. I should like to know lots and lots of them, and, if I did, I should certainly talk about them all day long.

What this all amounts to is that I want poets to be natural creatures; and they very seldom are natural creatures. And I suppose why I regarded Mr Yeats with so little respect for many years was simply that he seemed to me exceedingly affected. I don’t mean to say that he seemed to me to be personally affected, since I never, until quite lately, came into personal contact with Mr Yeats. But, from the nineties onward, Mr Yeats really did seem to dispense across this city of London a sort of aura that I found exceedingly irritating. That may have been mere jealousy, of course; but I hardly think it was jealousy, since Mr Yeats was always so immeasurably more distinguished than myself that I might just as well have been jealous of Sappho.

But certainly the thought that Mr Yeats was somewhere about, probably leaning on a mantelpiece with his face to the ceiling, irritated me exceedingly. I didn’t like his confounded point of view. I hated and do still hate, people who poke about among legends and insist on the charms of remote islands. And all that I had read of Mr Yeats’s work was The Countess Kathleen, which seemed to have to do with legend, and a poem which began, ‘I will arise and go now’. This always seemed to me to be particularly irritating. How, I used to ask myself, could that gentleman get to Innisfree, supposing he were then lying down, without rising? And why then should he state that he was going to arise? You will observe that this was a prose-impressionist irritation. The prose-impressionist, if he has to deal with a gentleman going out of a door in an ordinary way, does not say that the gentleman walked to the door, starting with his right foot, put his hand upon the handle, turned the handle, drew the door towards him, and stepped across the mat. No, the prose-impressionist treats the matter somewhat as follows: ‘Mr Humphrey said he must be going. When the door closed upon him Inez threw herself into a chair and wept convulsively.’ So, Innisfree being the centre of Mr Yeats’s poem, and I being, presumably even at that early age, a prose-impressionist, should have preferred Mr Yeats’s poem to have run:

There might have been in addition some details about the landscape and whether the fishing was good. That was what I wanted in a poem of those days; that is what I still want in a poem. And the Mr Yeats of the nineties seemed to be always – when he wasn’t leaning against a mantelpiece – reclining by the side of some lake or other, and then arising and going to some other lake. He seemed, in short, to be self-conscious about his attitude.

I don’t think that as the years roll on I have grown more tolerant. Indeed, I am perfectly sure that I have grown much more ragingly onesided. But I have certainly acquired a great respect for Mr Yeats. Outside my young friends he seems to me to be the one poet that matters in a world where only poets matter. Did you ever happen to know by repute a notorious villain and then gradually get to know that villain? And have you then gradually discovered that that villain was a serious and a strivingconvulsively.’ personality, and gradually, further, that he was a hero, a prophet, the apostle of a cause? It is not an uncommon experience amongst generous people.

Something of the sort must have taken place in myself as far as Mr Yeats was concerned. It was probably Mr Yeats as theatre director that first impressed me. Nothing could be more unlike a theatre director than Mr Yeats in his apparent distraction; but somehow things seemed to get themselves done by the players of the Abbey Theatre in a way infinitely better than that of any gentleman whose pince-nez did not fall off every two minutes. And the Abbey Theatre was a very fine and a very memorable achievement. So, having acquired considerable personal respect for Mr Yeats, it began to occur to me that his Celticism might be genuine, or might be a pose, but that in any case it did not matter very much beside the importance of the personality. It was as if the saviour of a country should choose to wear a shocking bad hat. And then someone kindly induced Mr Yeats to send me some poems for publication in The English  Review, and I began to have larger hopes of this poet. One of them began:

This seemed to me to be more encouraging, since a poet who is dissatisfied with government will probably have something in him. Or it might be better to put it that an Irishman who was not out of heart with the government of his country would be so little of a man that he could not possibly be a poet.

II. New Poems. By Mr W.B. Yeats

And in his new poems Mr Yeats shows more and more signs of coming out of Celticism. I do not mean to say that he is any less an Irishman, but he seems to occupy himself less with going up into the mists and reading about the old ancient kings of all when he gets there. Mind, I am not so violently Futurist as to object to a man having any truck at all with old legends. But dwelling upon them is just a sort of building of castles in the air, and building castles in the air is an occupation over which every man should spend a portion of his time if he is to keep his mind sweet. But I think it should not be too much indulged in, any more than drinking, to which pursuit it is closely allied. It is a too easy type of stimulant.

A considerable portion of Mr Yeats’s new book is made up of legendary matter, and beautiful enough it is. But a considerable proportion too is given up to actualities, to pictures, even to pasquinades. And that is a very good thing. You have poems with titles like ‘To a Wealthy Man who promised to send a second subscription if it were proved that people wanted pictures’, or ‘September 1913’, or ‘To a Friend whose work has come to nothing’. And it is a very good thing that Mr Yeats has come out into the world. It is a good thing for the public generally. To have your poets perpetually chanting that your own day is vulgar or mean, and that beauty can be found only in other centuries or in other climates, is a thing very enervating. If you are perpetually to be told that heroism, beauty, fineness, or chivalry are only to be found in the records of the year 1415 or the Malay Free States, you will gradually cease your efforts to be beautiful, fine, heroic, or chivalrous. And that man who, having the power, ceases to depict for you the possibility of chivalry is accursed beyond all other men, since in the end chivalry in yourself and in those around you and loyalty to your ideals are the only things that make life worth living.

And Mr Yeats’s emergence into this curious and beautiful world of ours is of benefit to the world of letters because it is very interesting. I have, for instance the vague conviction that Mr Yeats is nowadays as subconsciously abandoning beauty as in the nineties he sought it. He seems to strive after harsh effects, harsh words, harsh consonants. I haven’t much right to dogmatise about these matters, but I rather fancy that in these last two particulars he is mistaken. A harsh effect is always a good thing, because it is arresting to the attention – a harsh effect in matter I mean. But harsh verbiage I rather fancy is always a mistake, simply because it stops the run of the eye and gives a sort of dramatic effect where dramatic effect is a nuisance. And dramatic effect is a nuisance not only when it forces the note, but because it lessens the effect of such passages as are designedly dramatic. The effect of a gentleman’s weeping or swearing will at any given moment be very much less if he is in the habit of being in tears or frequently utters expletives; thus Mr Yeats’s harsh and crabbed use of English, although I can quite well imagine it to be design, takes away to some extent from one’s pleasure in reading his verse. ‘Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy struck’ is an ugly line not only because the matter is ugly – which is perfectly legitimate – but because the gs and ks and the comma and the unusual construction arrest the ear almost as badly as if a train had run off the line. And I cannot see that any purpose is served by letting this train run off its rails five times in the course of five verses – since this line is five times repeated.

But Mr Yeats may reply – as it is open to every artist to reply – that he could not get his particular effect if he did not use this particular means. And, no doubt in saying so he would be perfectly justified in his own view. But I think I should be right in rejoining that in that case Mr Yeats must be still aiming at what, for lack of a better word, I would call the rhetorical. He is no longer aiming so much at the adventitious beauty, the rhetoric, of legends and of the indefinitely remote, but he is trying to get a sort of swagger into his gait, a sort of harshness into his voice.

God forbid that I should be taken to deny the right of existence of any d’Artagnan1 amongst the poets, but, for myself, I do seem to need something quieter and something more subtle: I suppose that the person of whom I am always thinking is in the end Heinrich Heine in his more satirical moods.

But in the end I suppose that it does not matter. There was Mr Yeats, with his harsh words or with his words that are not harsh, evolving a new method and adumbrating a new point of view, and I must confess to unfeigned satisfaction at the new point of view. I have said somewhere else that Mr Yeats’s earlier work suggested to me a landscape, or perhaps rather a territory all of mist, through whose swathes there gleamed here and there a jewel, a green cap or a white owl’s feather. But the landscapes of Mr Yeats’s new poems suggest to me rather high skies, with toppling clouds and the shore of the sea and harsh rocks and people leading the life that we lead. I cannot think of any other way to express it; and if I have meticulously, and possibly with the air of a pedant, examined the mere verbiage of these poems it is only because that is my poor old job. I wish it weren’t my poor old job and that I had the faculty of expressing more ungrudgingly my admiration for this great personality and fine poet.

Outlook, 33 (6 June 1914), 783–4.

XLII. Mr Robert Frost and North of Boston

I.

***

I have heard depressed Americans – and nearly all Americans are very depressed when you praise their country to them, though they will knock you down with a fire-shovel if you hint at a word of blame – I have heard depressed Americans assert that the end of New England has come, because all the sons of the old-standers – the men whose families went over with the Mayflower – marry the French ladies’ maids of the summer boarders, and so the old stock is dying out. But I think that that must be an exaggeration. The agricultural New Englanders are horribly poor because their country is unfertile, their climate inclement, and they have to suffer – just as English farmers have to suffer – from the competition of the West. But there still remains a large population supporting itself by agriculture – hard, rigid, determined men, instinct with the New England conscience, with cold virtues of early Nonconformity rendered colder by the harshnesses amongst which they dwell. They are extraordinarily provincial, formal, old-fashioned, and unbending; some of them strike one as a little mad, because of course their values are not one’s own values. But there they are, and it is to me at least incredible that summer boarders enough can be found to populate the country from Connecticut to the State of Maine with French ladies’ maids.

II. North of Boston. By Robert Frost

It is because of the revelatory light that it casts upon the nature of this queer population that Mr Frost’s book may well be of value to the general reader. Because it is as interesting as a book of travel. The story of the dangerous man with the hundred collars for which he has no use because they are size sixteen, whereas his neck now requires sixteen-and-a-half; the picture of the two neighbours walking down opposite sides of a loose stone wall, replacing boulders that cattle, time, or the weather have thrown down; the real pictures of haymaking and of the man who tried to smother his employer beneath trusses of hay because that employer had nagged him to a state of frenzy; the pictures of the berry-pickers; of the mountains, of the springs – all these things are better done by Mr Frost than by any writer that I know. There are these natural objects and scenes – and always there is present the feeling of madness, of mysterious judgements, of weather-hardened odd people – people very uncouth and unlovely, but very real.

I have the privilege of knowing Mr Frost quite well, but if I did not know him I should imagine him to be a queer harsh sort of fellow, in a hacked-out black frock-coat, with a round soft black hat, a goatee going grey, driving a dilapidated buggy over sandy roads filled with boulders the size of an armchair. A sort of deacon from the State of Maine he would be – one of those silent dour Americans who appear sane enough until suddenly, as if you touched in them something that clicked, they become frighteningly vocal, impassioned, hurlant – there is no other word for it – about the Second Advent or something of the sort. Maybe it will only be about a patent-medicine.

I have omitted to state that Mr Frost’s stories and pictures are in verse, so that I may have been attracting attention to his book by false pretences. But Mr Frost’s verse is so queer, so harsh, so unmusical, that the most prosaic of readers need not on that account be frightened away. This is the sort of verse that it is:

He had been left by the woman he lived with, who had gone off and married some one else, and that is the girl’s mother speaking. She had lived with them, as I make it out; but she also was going off… That is the queer sort of story, and those are the queer people the stories are about, and that is the queer sort of verse.

Mr Frost no doubt has theories as to prosody. He seems to make people, or the narrator, talk with the abrupt sort of rhythms that do undoubtedly distinguish his compatriots north of Boston, and then to insist on jamming all the utterances into decasyllabic lines. You can hardly call it blank verse. Occasionally lines with nine syllables or seven hit you in the face and make you feel as if you had fallen out of a window, or, at any rate, set you counting on your fingers. Here are the first lines of the book:

That last line is a truly bewildering achievement.

But I daresay Mr Frost does not care whether his lines are regular or not. And yet, on the other hand why does he bother to put his work into lines at all? I am not insinuating that Mr Frost is not a poet. He is a very fine one. But there is such a thing as vers libre, which is an excellent instrument for rendering the actual rhythm of speech. I am not in the least suggesting that Mr Frost should write vers libre; I am only saying that it seems queer that he does not. There was Whitman… But Mr Frost’s achievement is much finer, much more near the ground and much more national, in the true sense, than anything that Whitman gave to the world. I guess he is afraid of the liberty of vers libre; to shackle himself probably throws him into the right frame of mind. It is another form of the New England conscience.

Anyhow it is no affair of mine. As long as Mr Frost goes on getting his effects I don’t mind how he gets them. He may use rhymed Alexandrines for all I care. As long as he will go all on, croak-croaking about his queer people, I shall be satisfied. Because he does give you a very excellent, a very poetic, a very real sense of his meadows and woods and rocks and berries, and of night and of showers and of wildnesses and dangers – of an America that really matters far more than the land of endless trickery, make-believe, and lying and empty loquacity. That is the face that – Heaven knows why! – America seems to like to present to these parts of the world; but those are its least desirable features. Anyhow Mr Frost has called in on us to redress the balance of that particular New World. And I hope he will get a hearty welcome.

For he is not a remains of English culture grown provincial and negligible as were the writers that abounded near Concord, Mass. He is as different from Holmes and Whittier as he is from Whitman or Bret Harte or Mary E. Wilkins. He is not in fact a sentimentalist. Not to be a sentimentalist is to be already half-way towards being a poet – and Mr Frost goes the other half of the way as well, though to describe what that other half is beats me. Here is the little poem – rhymed for a change – in which as it were he proffers his invitation to read North of Boston:

Why is that beautiful and friendly and touching and all sorts of things? I don’t know. I suppose, just because Mr Frost is a poet.

Outlook, 33 (27 June 1914), 879–80.

France, 1915 (continued)

I.

The distinction between the French mind and the non-French mind – nay, the absolute distinction of the French mind – is almost entirely a matter of language. For it has never been sufficiently recognized in this country how language holds sway over character, over action, and over all the attributes of humanity. When a French peasant-woman observes somebody hanging about her house, the men being absent in the fields, she says: ‘C’est que’que maoufatant!’ – ‘It is some malefactor.’ A Kent or Sussex peasant-woman in the same circumstances would remark: ‘Reckon he bëant after no good!’ And, as you progress further northward through the English shires towards the Border so you will approach the still greater caution of ‘I’m not saying that he’s there for any good.’ And very similar reservations will characterize the common speech of almost all European countries, even when the matter of comment is something absolutely immaterial. In the brightest of sunshine in High Germany the peasant will say: ‘I am not saying that the weather is not good’; and the Russian peasant, in answer to your query, will put it that perhaps it is five versts to Moscow, but that the matter is in God’s hands. The Latin mind – or what it is convenient to call the Latin mind – seeks, in fact, for definite statements and, before making a statement, must of necessity form a mental appraisement as exact as possible. This leads to an extreme concreteness of mentality.

These things are of course matters of aesthetics, and matters of aesthetics, usually despised in this country, are at the present moment very much at a discount. Why they should be at a discount, the prevailing system having broken down and having proved so absolutely unworkable, Heaven alone knows! This country, and this world having drifted into the greatest of catastrophes for want of plain-speaking, one might think that sanity would lead the populations of this country and of the world to see the desirability of cultivating the exact use of speech. We are at war today very largely because of the imbecilely figurative language that prevails in German Ministries and Chancelleries, and of the imbecilely phrased reservations that characterize the diplomatic language of the rest of the world. We are, in short, at war today because German allegories of Mailed Fists, shining armour, and the rest of it seemed ludicrous to the rest of the world, and because the cautious indefiniteness of phraseology of the rest of the world seemed to the German office-holders to be a sign of timidity. The Germans loudly proclaimed to the rest of the world that if anyone sought to cast the shadow of dishonour upon their unspotted eagle-banner they would unsheathe the sword that their fathers had bequeathed to them, and would gird on the shining armour fashioned for them by Thor, the God of War, and, with the words of Luther upon their lips, under the auspices of the God of the Germans, would ‘let loose’ (losschlagen) upon an effete Europe and so conquer a place in the sun. The rest of the world, with Great Britain at its head, replied that in the event of certain unfortunate eventualities certain other unfortunate eventualities might eventuate. At that point, which had been reached by July 27, 1914, the rest of the world believed that Germany was engaged on farcical rodomontades, and Germany believed that the rest of the world meant nothing at all, and did not know what it did mean. Had Germany, on the other hand said: ‘We are a very efficient nation; our military organizing has been carried to a pitch of human perfection; it is absolutely necessary for us and Austria to have at least one open strip of territory through the Balkans to our allies the Turks, and so through to the Persian Gulf. If this strip of territory is not guaranteed to us and our allies we shall march through Belgium to Paris’; and if the rest of the world had then replied: ‘We are not so efficiently organized as you, but we are determined to support France, and if you violate the neutrality of Belgium we shall put into the field all the forces that we can raise to oppose you’ – here would at least have been a clear issue.

I am not presuming to criticize the diplomatic steps that were taken by this country or by any of the Allies. They, like the rest of the world, have to take the world as they find it, with its periphrases, its reservations of language, and its cliché phrases. But I am very much concerned to point out that if similar blunders of diplomacy are to be avoided in the future it is important that clarity of phrase and exactness of thought should be cultivated. And here at once the question of aesthetics comes in.

II.

For to be precise is the most difficult thing in the world, and it is only the French, following in the traditions of classical Rome, who have at all appreciated the value of this precision. Nicenesses of phrase are not merely part of the private pleasure of the artist; they are the necessity of the common man in every function of his life. Relatively, even the present war is of small importance; what is of importance is that the ordinary affairs of life should be conducted as quietly, as efficiently, with as little discussion and as little waste of time as possible. The farmer who can instruct his hind in the fewest and most exact words how deep to plough a field, how low to cut a hedge, at what time to take up a young team from the field, is doing a greater service to humanity than another farmer who fumbles over his instructions, and whose instructions are, in consequence, less fully carried out and yield smaller return. A man who, in courting a woman, or a woman who, being courted by a man, can exactly define his or her emotions or what their subsequent relationships will be, is doing some service to the State, since less time will be lost from their subsequent labours over the adjustments of their personal relationships. A mother is doing most service to the State when the language with which she enjoins moral reflections upon her children is exact, convincing, and thus most likely to bear fruit. It is in all these departments that France has so far outstripped the rest of the Occidental world that we may well say that it is only France that matters. If, in short, Europe, save for France, were depopulated, France could provide Europe with a much saner, much more efficient race of men – of men capable of making something decent, dignified and enjoyable out of life.

There is no minuteness to which this does not apply. If, being a man, you go into an English hat-shop you try on a hat and don’t like it; you try on another and don’t like that. At last you put one on and the hatter remarks that that is how they are being worn now. If you go into a French hat-shop, the hatter, being a practical man, will try you with several hats, and will finally arrive at one of which he will say, ‘Cela vous dégage mieux la physiognomie’ – ’That disengages your physiognomy better’ or, as we should say, ‘brings out your features more’.

To this gem there are several facets. In the first place the French hatter is better educated in the traditions of his trade; it costs him as little effort to discern and decide that a hat ‘disengages your physiognomy’ as it costs his English confrère to say that it is a fine morning when it probably isn’t. And, again, the Frenchman talks like a book. In England this is a term of reproach. But that is probably one of the worst symptoms of English life, for, however near it may come to exactness of expression, or however far it may fall away from that first of human necessities, your book is at least an attempt to express something more exactly than it is usually expressed in everyday parlance. And, if national obloquy attaches itself to the phraseology of literature, then national obloquy attaches itself to exactitude of expression between man and man. Yet it is only by exactitude of expression between man and man that honesty and decency in human contacts can be attained to. In England, in short – still more in Germany, and even more, I believe, in Russia – the cleavage between the spoken language and the written is very wide and grows daily wider. This is a great calamity for the world. On the one hand the spoken language tends to become more and more figurative and less and less exact since it is more and more divorced from written language, which should be at least an attempt at exact expression. On the other hand, literature becomes more stilted, becomes more a matter of preciousness, and delights more in words as decoration rather than as the means of exact expression – literature then becomes of less and less influence on the life of the people, and leaders of thought lose at once their influence and the desire to express their thought. It is because in France these tendencies are less developed than in every other country of the Occidental world that we may most welcome an alliance in which the hegemony of the civilized world falls to this great, sober, and beneficent country. Other things matter very little. The greatest victories of mankind are over and done with by the next autumn, when the stubble is over the graveyards; but we shall only make a decent thing of peace when we can see human issues clearly, and we shall only see human issues clearly when we have learnt to effect their just expression.

Outlook, 35 (8 May 1915), 599–600.

Sologub and Artzibashef1

I.

To Western minds the main characteristic of Russian writers is just the atmosphere that they, all alike, render for us – a physical atmosphere of wooden, cell-like rooms, of leather, of smoke and of immense fields, where – I do not know why – I have the impression that I shall always find summer. I suppose that is because the immense majority of Russian stories that I have read are stories of the country, and the winter shuts up country-life in Russia. But, whether it is the matchless ‘Bielzhin Prairie’, the matchless ‘Rattle of the Wheels’, or the matchless description of the peasants’ singing contest in the House of Gentlefolk or in Torrents of Spring, it is always the summer of a green land of willow-fringed streams that comes up in my mind when I think of them. And as with Turgenev, so with the new great of Russia:

That is the landscape and that the old house of Sologub. And here is the landscape of Sanine – and an open window:

It will be observed that the landscape of Artzibashef is more exotically rendered and more coloured than that of Sologub, just as his comparatively vulgar soul is more hotly expressed than that of the much greater artist that Sologub is.

Sanine one may dismiss with a very few words. It is one of those works, written no doubt honestly enough, whose popular appeal lies in the fact that it supplies justification for men to misbehave with other men’s wives or women with other woman’s husbands. The philosophy of the chief character Sanine – who is a perfectly unreal Superman related to the Monster of Frankenstein – reduces itself to the saying, though it takes a hundred thousand words to say it in: ‘Do what you damn well like.’ That is not a very new philosophy.

It is not a very new philosophy; it may be right or it may be wrong; that is no affair of mine in these columns. But a life lived on those lines is apt to be a very uninteresting life; and literature written on those lines, since it accentuates life, is bound to be drearily, drearily uninteresting. A literature of morality, in short, can only be interesting when it deals with the interplay of scruples. One may, that is to say, find an interest in considering the story of a gentleman who is not certain whether he will pick a pocket, cut a throat, punch a head, or go off with a till or another man’s wife. But most of the interest goes out of a story when it is a foregone conclusion that the hero always will do what he damn well pleases. It is like going to races where it is always Eclipse first and the rest nowhere. And the story becomes excruciatingly monotonous when the hero not only breaks all the commandments with machine-like regularity, but talks about the breaches – and talks and talks – and talks.

From that point of view Sanine is one of the worst books ever written. Nevertheless it is obvious that a work that has had the enormous sale, all the world over, that has been enjoyed by this work of M. Artzibashef cannot be wholly uninteresting. And the fact is that M. Artzibashef, if he is not an artist, and if he very certainly is not a master, is a considerable genius as a teller of artless and coloured stories. He is in short one more product of the Russian return to the Romantic movement. The incidents of Sanine are not quite real; the seductions and suicides are too frequent and suggest that the writer has gone through life looking for seductions and suicides. Of course if you do that for forty years or so you may find quite a number, so that, like the landscapes of this work, the mental atmosphere is too highly coloured to be artistry. The real weakness of this writer is unerringly pointed out by Mr Cannan in the introduction to the English edition. ‘M. Artzibashef,’ says Mr Cannan, ‘is fascinated by the brutality of human life.’ He is in fact a specialist, like any other stamp-collector. And that is wrong. For life may be cruel, but it is always varied and subtle even in its cruelties; or life may be gay, but it is always varied and complicated in its most elemental gaieties. And the amount of time occupied by brutalities in the mental life of the most brutal of life’s brutes is relatively very tiny. Let us say that it is a matter of two minutes a day. To put it very roughly: A man may be all his life an honest, sober, and industrious bank clerk, a good father, a loving husband, a cheerful friend. At the end of his life he may commit a murder in a moment of passion. Well, throughout all time, so long as his name is remembered, that man will be known as So-and-So the murderer. The artist is the person who perceives that that is not a true appellation, and Michale Artzibashef is not one of these. Therefore he does not deserve much consideration either as a novelist or a thinker, though Sanine is well enough worth reading for the matter that it contains, just as one may read an account of the doings at the Court of the King of Dahomey.

II.

Feodor Sologub is an altogether different pair of shoes, and in introducing him to us Mr John Cournos is doing us a real service. For Sologub is Russian in a sense that Artzibashef is not, and that even Turgenev is not, since Turgenev was something more than merely Russian. And we have got to live with Russia for the rest of our lives. It is well then, merely from that point of view, that we have The Old House.

The Old House is a story of the quiet dwelling in the mournful fields where the river winds amongst the willows. It is lived in by four women, a grandmother, a mother, a daughter, and an old nurse, who all await the return of the man-child of the house – and the man-child has been hanged. He has been hanged for a political offence, and they know he has been hanged, and they continue to wait for his return. They wake up, drink their chocolate in their beds, open the rooms, see that his rooms are exactly in order for his return, cross the garden and the river to meet him as he comes, sit all together in the evenings and await his return. They live, you see, their orderly, quiet, grave, and mournful lives in the old house, one-storeyed and with a mezzanine, entirely on that pivot. From time to time one says to the other: ‘This is all nonsense. Borya has been hanged.’ But the other continues to read the newspaper, even while she is speaking – to read the newspaper for tidings of Borya’s whereabouts.

This story is a remarkable masterpiece in the art of telling. It so gets itself in, recapitulates, spots in a point here and there, is so misty and so extraordinarily real that – impatient as one may be in the reading of it – at the end and for days after one has been in Russia. For, indeed, all Russia – or, at any rate, the secret of Russian lives – is here. One has asked oneself again and again how it is that Russians bear the hardships that are theirs – the hardships of poverty in one case, of oppression, of foul weather, of unceasing toil for little material profit or enjoyment. And there it is – the power to endure that comes from the obstinate determination to ignore material circumstance, to live amongst visions and unrealities – to live in short, obstinately in the kingdom of God that each of us has within him. This is the main ‘note’ – it is the note of the Letters of a Sportsman, of the stories of Chekhov, of the immense epics of Dostoevsky, as it is of the comparatively ostentatious careers of Tolstoy or of Maxim Gorky. And this at least should rid us of the fear of Russia as a militarist or an aggressive Power of the future. The Russians simply have not enough practicality to wage any calculated war of aggression, though for defence their visionary nature makes them incomparable.

I am inclined to find a little fault with Mr Cournos for his selection of the other tales of Sologub that he here gives us. There is, that is to say, too much of the arbitrary-supernatural and not enough of the beautifully real. I call visions of beasts, monsters, dispossessed souls and the like, the arbitrary-supernatural because they have no communal basis or interest. I see myself visions, every day of my life – this morning I had a vision of a huge crab burrowing into a sandbank; yesterday of a buxom, dark lady in blue satin with a large blue hat, with a dog beside her, carrying a huge bunch of wild flowers and walking down my drive. I put them down to ocular fatigue and leave the matter at that, for I do not regard them as matters of legitimate art, though I suppose it is not illegitimate, now and then, to depict a character haunted by visions and to weave some sort of story into a series of apparitions.

The point that I wish to make is that the interest of such tours de force lies so entirely in the handling that one specimen would have been enough in the present volume. Here, out of eleven stories four deal with bogies, horribly enough, two with lunacy, and only five with real life. That is a pity, for the stories of real life are masterpieces. Read, for instance, ‘The Search’, which is about how a little boy feels when he is wrongfully accused at school of having pilfered from his comrades’ overcoat pockets. It is a wonderful revelation of the human heart – of that heart of another which is a dark forest, as the Russians say.

It will be a great disgrace to the British public if it neglects this volume, on the accustomed plea that life is too sad already for one to read sad books. We have consumed edition after edition of Sanine, which is a riot of animalism and chockful of suicides – let us, for goodness’ sake, do something for a book which will show us our Allies are good, gentle visionaries. That would be a real compliment.

I must add that Mr Cournos has done his work very exquisitely, with that touch of poetry in his prose that is the gift only of a translator who is himself a delicate poet and a patient thinker, and spiritually akin to the writer whose works he interprets. I hope Mr Secker will commission Mr Cournos to translate the complete works of Feodor Sologub. It would be a fine achievement – a fine monument with which to celebrate that peace for which we all long.

Outlook, 35 (26 June 1915), 830–1.

A Jubilee (review of Some Imagist Poets)

I.

It is as nearly as possible twenty-five years since I wrote my first review.

***

Well, twenty-five years is a long time to have been bothering one’s poor head about literature; it is, as it were, a jubilee period.

***

Please God, my next twenty-five years will be spent in other fields; if I get my poor chance life will probably wear a different aspect for me, and from that I shall draw other lessons. If not today, then tomorrow, I hope to be up and away to regions where I shall be precluded from uttering injunctions to find le mot juste, and le mot juste.1 And le mot juste again! That shall be as it chances but let me give at least as much alms to oblivion as this: that if any poor soul is heartily sick of my writing – and I suppose that there are such poor souls in plenty – he cannot be half as heartily sick as I of my writing. Where, then do we stand?

I do not suppose that I have led a movement, though I dare say I have. There isn’t, you know, any knowing in these matters. Supposing that I should say that my young friends the Imagists were children of my teaching, I expect that, with one accord, they would get up and say that they had never heard of me. The world is like that. But still, unceasingly, in season and out, for a quarter of a century I have preached the doctrine that my young friends now inscribe on the banner of their movement. So I may have led their movement – blowing, as it were, into a discordant gourd, in the dust of the wilderness, miles ahead, and no doubt unworthy to unloosen the shoe latchets now that I am overtaken.

What, then, is this doctrine? Simply that the rendering of the material facts of life, without comment and in exact language, is poetry and that poetry is the only important thing in life. This is an absolute truism that any city merchant or any crossing-sweeper or any newspaper manager would subscribe to if he took the trouble to know what it meant; the misfortune is that inferior writers and loose thinkers have so befogged the meaning of the word ‘poetry’ that I shall, to most readers, have the appearance of having written nonsense. Let me put the matter, then, in several differing aspects.

Let us say you are a hero on the fields of Flanders. You have rescued wounded, you have taken trenches, you have kept the machine-gun all on going. But you will do all this unrewarded and unseen by any save God unless some poet – who may be your commanding officer, who may be a private reporting to your commanding officer – unless, then, some poet in exact and convincing phrases conveys to the bestower of decorations or to the heart of a people the presentation of your deeds. Those phrases will be poetry because they have the power to rouse emotion; they will have the power to rouse emotion because they are exact, simple, and sincere. Widdrington of Chevy Chase lives today, and today, if we meet people called Widdrington, we say: ‘That is an honourable name’, not because he fought on when his legs were cut off below the knee, but because some balladist had the wit to write: ‘He fought upon his stumps.’ It is just the semi-grotesqueness of the phrase expressing a feat that the mind afterwards recognizes as one of extreme obstinacy, vitality, and heroism that makes Widdrington live in our memories whilst millions of other heroes have been forgotten since his day. Or, again, the early dispatches of Sir John French were poetry of a very high order – were ‘reading’ of a very high order – just because they were, in phraseology, exact, preoccupied, simple, and unaffected. They were just renderings.

II. Some Imagist Poets: an anthology

I differ therefore from my Imagist friends in one very important particular. They dismiss ‘prose’ with a sniff. That is wrong, since they only exist by descent from the great prose writers – and I will go so far as to hazard the dogma that the prose form is the only satisfactory vehicle for expressing the poetry of life. Says the writer of the preface to Some Imagist Poets:

This is a survival of an ancient superstition descending from barbarous days when primeval savages first found that rhythmical grunts could be used for the accentuating of group emotions. I express this fact as incisively as I can because this pronouncement of the preface writer is a perpetuation of the greatest nuisance in the world. The fact is that cadenced prose is poetry, and there is no other poetry. Rhythmic prose, regular verse forms, and ‘free-verse’ itself as soon as its cadence is ‘more marked, more definite, and closer knit than that of’ properly constructed prose – all these things are departments of rhetoric which is a device for stirring group passion. In this sense Chateaubriand’s sentence:

though it may have its defects of expression, is yet much truer poetry than:

which is a rhetorical expression of an uneasy egotism and has little of the repose that stamps the caste of Vere de Vere. And in this sense:

Or:

are poetry – and very great poetry – whilst

with its rhymes and detestable assonances and inexactitudes, though they be printed as prose, are sheer artificiality.

Of the six poets printed in this anthology only two – H.D. and Mr F.S. Flint – have the really exquisite sense of words, the really exquisite tranquillity, beauty of diction, and insight that justify a writer in assuming the rather proud title of Imagist – of issuing, that is to say, that challenge, that they will rouse emotions solely by rendering concrete objects, sounds, and aspects. Mr D.H. Lawrence is a fine poet, but he employs similes – or rather the employment of similes is too essential a part of his methods to let his work, for the time being, have much claim to the epithets restrained or exact. (What I mean is that although it may be ingenious writing to say that a wave looks like green jade, Stephen Crane’s statement as to waves seen from a small boat, ‘the waves were barbarous and abrupt’ is the real right thing.) Mr John Gould Fletcher, Mr Aldington, and Miss Lowell are all too preoccupied with themselves and their emotions to be really called Imagists. It is no doubt right to be dissatisfied with the world, or with the circumstances of your life in childhood, or to make your mark in the world by writing as if you were Paganini or Tartini of the ‘Trillo’. But that is really not business – though of course it is business as usual. Still, Miss Lowell is extraordinarily clever. What could be more clever than:

I suppose the real trouble with Miss Lowell is that she has no heart.

Mr Lawrence, on the other hand, has the touch of greatness. No doubt one day he will be great enough – and it is a very good thing for him that he has joined the Imagists. Their movement is about the only literary thing that much matters today. With H.D. and Mr Flint – (it is a scandal and a shame that Mr Flint is not recognized as one of the greatest men and one of the most beautiful spirits of the country – it is a scandal and a shame that Mr Flint is not the head and body of a national commission for making England understand France – it is a scandal and a shame that Mr Flint should be a power in Paris and unchronicled here; though we may put it to the credit of this out-of-joint world that it has produced H.D., who seems to have found what he desires) – with H.D. then and Mr Flint as the hard pebble core, and with the others that I have mentioned, more or less amorphous, but marked enough around them, this little group of poets is rolling its hump along the world. It is a good thing. My eyes – though they are not yet too old to shed tears – will, metaphorically speaking, close upon this twenty-five years of stump-oratorship in favour of direct thinking and low speaking, contentedly enough – in the conviction that England, whatever may happen, will continue to hold a worthyish place still in the serener regions of good letters.

P.S. – At the risk of occupying more space than is allotted to me by the Editor, I will transcribe the manifesto of this little group. I hope readers will pay some attention to it, for it is very well put – indeed I have written most of the generalizations at least ten monotonous times in these columns during the last two years – and it will afford the reader a pretty good standard or touchstone for judging what other work is poetry:

Outlook, 36 (10 July 1915), 46–8.

On a Notice of Blast

II. Blast, War Number. Edited by Wyndham Lewis.1

The first number of Blast, issued so many thousand years ago, was mostly larks. The second number is a much more serious affair. Of its contributors only Mr Pound – who is, of course, a neutral – keeps much of his original jauntiness; and Mr Lewis has discovered a new poet who shows signs of being very much after my own heart in Mr T.S. Eliot – an American. Upon the rest – upon Mr Lewis, upon Gaudier, upon even Miss Dismorr and Miss Sanders, as upon Mr Nevinson, Mr Roberts, and Mr Wadsworth – the pressure of these times leaves its solemn traces. And, indeed, they would be bad enough artists if it did not, since, in the end, all good art is, in however distorting a mirror, a reflection of its own time. And, indeed, that the Vorticist movement should have survived a year such as that we have just passed through argues a grimness and tenacity of purpose such as must needs reflect itself in the works of these contributors. So that it is not a very gay Blast that thus greets the storms of summer.

And, when everything is said and done, Blast offers itself, modestly enough, as pioneer work, as exploration. ‘We are not Hindu magicians,’ says Mr Wyndham Lewis, ‘to make our mango-tree grow in half an hour.’ And that is a very sensible statement. And, whilst I am quoting, I may as well give you Mr Lewis’s statement of the practical position of the Vorticists. They have been called violent – though why a drawing of five superimposed planes should be more violent than, say, a representation of Britannia with a trident, passes me to imagine. So, says Mr Lewis:

I do not know that eclecticism ever found a more modest trumpeter, which makes the vindictiveness of my friend the critic of the evening paper still more inexplicable. It is so very unusual to spit on the grave of a young man who is quite gently trying to find a new road. And obviously a new road is needful for the young. I confess to finding a certain strangeness in the cubes, the revolving astral bodies, the periphrases, the notes of exclamation of Vorticism. But the contemplation does not move me to defile last resting-places. I say to myself: The aspect of the world must be vastly different to those born within the last quarter of a century. My existence began, consciously at least, in the country. Rounded limbs of horses progressed there before rounded hay-wains; cherries hung upon boughs; speech was slow; brooks gurgled very gently. That was the normal basis of human life. But, for those born since the nineties the earth is a matter of hurtling, coloured squareness, of the jar of telephone bells, of every kind of rattle and bang, of every kind of detonation, of every kind of light in shafts, in coronets, in whirls and blaze and flash. The ocular and phonetic break between today and the historic ages is incredible. To all intents and purposes the Kent of my childhood and adolescence differed very little from the Greece where Sappho sang. There were railway trains, but one used them little; there was gunpowder, but one saw its effects seldom enough. Nowadays, ten times a day we are whirled at incredible speeds through glooms, amidst clamours. And the business of the young artist of today is to render those glooms, those clamours, those iron boxes, those explosions, those voices from the metal horns of talking-machines and hooters.

Upon this task the Vorticists have set out, quite tentatively. And I repeat that I find a certain strangeness in their effects. I imagine that I should prefer to be where Christobel low-lieth and to listen to the song the sirens sang.2 But I am in London of the 1910s, and I am content to endure the rattles and the bangs – and I hope to see them rendered. And I certainly do not hope to see them rendered with the palette-effects of the late Lord Leighton or the verbal felicities of the late Lord Tennyson. I am curious – I am even avid – to see the method that shall make grass grow over my own methods and I am content to be superseded. I think that that should be the attitude of the composed and reasonable human being. We – my friend the critic of the evening paper, myself, the executors of the late Lord Leighton – have got to go out sooner or later, and the really exciting thought is: What is going to give the world the good time we had with Flaming June, the Derby Day, Bubbles or the Idylls of the King?3 I think what I should like best in the world would be to know what form human expression will take in ten centuries from now, and I think that what I should like least in the world to have recorded of me is that I should have hindered that oncoming or have ridiculed the mortuary inscription over the tomb of the untimely dead.

As for the methods of the supporters of Blast I will quote for you a few words that poor Gaudier wrote in the trenches. I do not think you can want anything gentler or wiser as an expression of artistic ideals.

I find that a very touching and wise passage of prose. And I will ask the reader to observe that it contains the thoughts of an artist who had a mystical and beautiful mind and who had been long under fire. Is it not interesting and valuable to observe what such a mind selects? If Blast had presented us with nothing else it would have been justified of its existence.

Outlook, 36 (31 July 1915), 143–4.

1 [Ovid, Fasti, 4.427–8; ‘In a shady vale there is a place moist with the abundant spray from a high waterfall’]

1 [Ford frequently echoed this remark from Turgenev’s ‘Lisa’. See Ancient Lights (London, 1911), p. xi; and the title page to The New Humpty-Dumpty (London, 1913).]

1 [William Babbington Maxwell (1866–1938), one of the illegitimate children of M.E. Braddon and her publisher John Maxwell, was a prolific novelist, specializing in social satire and stories of sexual betrayal.]

2 [R.S. Surtees]

1 [A misquotation of George Herbert’s ‘Vertue’.]

1 [Tennyson, ‘You ask me, why, though ill at ease’: ‘A land of settled government, / A land of just and old renown, / Where Freedom slowly broadens down / From precedent to precedent’.]

1 [Hero of Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers.]

1 The Old House. By Feodor Sologub. Translated from the Russian by John Cournos. Sanine. By Michale Artzibashef. Translated by Percy Pinkerton.

1 [Ford got his commission as an officer in the Welch Regiment by the end of the month.]

1 [In the first part of this article, Ford takes issue with a derogatory review of the Vorticist magazine; a review he thought insulting 1 [In the first part of this article, Ford takes issue with a derogatory review of the Vorticist magazine; a review he thought insulting

2 [Apparently a confusion of Coleridge’s ‘Christobel’ with Tennyson’s ‘Claribel, A Melody’, which opens: ‘Where Claribel low-lieth’. Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial, chapter 5. See p. 137 above.]

3 [Paintings by Lord Leighton, William Frith, Sir J.E. Millais, respectively, and Tennyson’s poems (completed in 1885).]