Ford wrote three series of articles under this title. Those in the Dial and English Review were collected in Thus to Revisit: Some Reminiscences (London, 1921). The following, from a short-lived periodical, were not.

I. The Novel

Time and Eternity. By Gilbert Cannan

Night and Day. By Virginia Woolf

In the beginning, as far as one knows, were the Satyricon and the Golden Ass; then came the contes, fabliaux, nouvelles; then Cervantes, Defoe; then Fielding and Smollett; then Richardson – and so the mainstream of imaginative prose passed again across the Channel to flow from the pens of Diderot, Chateaubriand, and Stendhal, and not to return to these islands until Flaubert and Turgenev had elevated the spinning of loose and formless Romances that you ‘read in’, into the art of constructing novels that you must read.

I trust the reader will allow me to get so far without violently cavilling; for this series of papers is intended rather as a friendly enquiry into how literature has survived Armageddon than as any browbeating disquisition. And it would be a good thing if we could come, now, to some agreement as to the definition applied to varying forms of writing. For before the 4th August 1914, we certainly had not even the rudiments of an agreed critical language. If one had, for instance, to write about the production of novels considered as an Art, one had to use almost exclusively French words – to write of progressions d’effet, mots justes, and so on. I used, I remember, to write high-spiritedly of Novels and Nuvvles, and, thus to cause offence.

NOVELS AND ROMANCES

I propose, now, for the purpose of these Causeries to use the words ‘Romances’ and ‘Novels’. Let us say that amorphous, discursive tales containing digressions, moralizations and lectures are Romances, and that Novels have unity of form, culminations and shapes. In the Romance it matters little of what the tale-teller discourses, so long as he can retain the interest of the reader; in the Novel every word – every word – must be one that carries the story forward to its appointed end. The Romances then would be the Satyricon; Don Quixote; Tom Jones; Vanity Fair; or the Brothers Karamazov, of Dostoevsky; the Novels – well, there are very few Novels. There are the Neveu de Rameau, of Diderot; Le Rouge et le Noir, by Stendhal, Madame Bovary, and Education sentimentale, of Flaubert; practically all the imaginative writings of Turgenev, and of the late Mr James.

The disadvantage of this nomenclature is that, if we adopt it, we must include amongst Romances a great many works eminently unromantic in texture. For you could not say, however loosely constructed they may appear to be, that Humphrey Clinker, the Satyricon, or, on the face of it, the works of Dostoevsky, are inspired by what is usually called the Romantic Spirit. On the other hand the two almost perfect novels by Mr W.H. Hudson – Green Mansions and the Purple Land, are the very embodiment of the Spirit of Romance. As, however, I do not propose to say very much about formless narratives, I am content to leave the matter there. But I should like to add that I do not wish to be taken as thinking – or as trying to induce the reader to believe – that all formless narrative is to be regarded with contempt. I am ready to aver that the Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler, is one of the four great books in the English language, and that Humphrey Clinker is, when one is in the mood, as ‘good reading’ as Fort Comme la Mort – when one isn’t! I hope, indeed, to be allowed to return to Butler next week.

And again; it must not be forgotten that certain writers are sometimes Romancists and sometimes Novelists; that certain books of Novelists have the aspect of Romances – and that many books which appear to be loose in texture are actually almost devilishly intent on carrying their ‘story’ forwards. In Madame Bovary or in Education sentimentale you have pages and pages that appear to be nothing but digressions. You have Homais and you have the cripple – but every word devoted to either of them makes the suicide of Emma more a matter of destiny; and, if you take the greatest – present company always excepted! – writer of today you will find that Mr Conrad goes to almost extraordinary lengths of apparent digression in order to ‘justify’ the existence of a Police Sergeant who shall arrest a cornered criminal. Or again, you have the Mr George Moore – that great writer of Esther Waters and the Drama in Muslin, – or the Maupassant of Une Vie and Bel Ami. These books do not appear to be tight constructed – but he would be a bold man who said, dogmatically that they are without ‘form’. I hope, therefore, that it will appear that nothing strikingly dogmatic is intended in these arguments, for no proper man can today be dogmatic, since all proper men for the last five years have been shaken, earthquaked, and disturbed, to the lowest depths of their beings. It is the queerest thing in the world to return to the grey regions of Covent Garden and to find that still there are ‘firms’ in Henrietta Street, in Bedford Street, or in King Street, and that an ‘Autumn Publishing Season’ is apparently in contemplation. Queer! One walks the grey streets wondering where they all are…

MODERN INSTANCES

So that this is an enquiry into that question which has tormented me all my life – as to where we really stand. And here are Mr Cannan, who before the war was one of les jeunes, and Mrs Woolf, of whom I know nothing. Time and Eternity and Night and Day are interesting examples of the two tendencies of which I have written. Speaking as it were in shorthand, you might say that Mr Cannan’s book is a Novel, Mrs Woolf’s a Romance. Mr Cannan carries excision almost to extremes: in reading Mrs Woolf one seems to hear of families [in an] unmistakable voice of one’s childhood. It is surely the voice of George Eliot – but it is the voice of a George Eliot who, remaining almost super-educated, has lost the divine rage to be didactic. Mrs Woolf records passionlessly the mental attitudes, the house furnishings, and the current literature of the intellectual governing class just before the war. You find it difficult to know whether she approves of them or whether – as is probably the case – she isn’t mocking at them tenderly. Her characters are the descendants of great, but rather academic poets, the editors of huge monthly reviews:

How different from us, Miss Beale and Miss Buss! Or rather, how different from the characters and the atmosphere of Mr Cannan’s book. For, whereas Night and Day is a severe love-story, a chassez-croisez of engaged couples in a Parnassian and prewar atmosphere, Mr Cannan’s book is written with lurid heat and deals with murder in an atmosphere of alcoholic and rag-time Bohemia when Armaggedon was at its height.

And here is the murderer in the role of Samson:

Eventually he suffocates Valérie with a pillow – being like Othello, a Militarist.

It is queer to find that, in these modern developments, Mrs Woolf, who is the spiritual descendant of the George Eliots, the Ruskins, the Spencers, the Pollocks, and all the other moral adornments of Victorianism, writes skilfully a moral-less but very entertaining book which is all ado about nothing; and that Mr Cannan, the literary descendant of the Maupassants, the Goncourts, and all the non-moral overseas writers, has become an almost virulent and certainly an incoherent moralist. Incoherent is not, perhaps, the exactly right word. For, just as Mrs Woolf is a mistress of inclusion, so Mr Cannan is to such an extent a master of excision that you cannot quite tell what are the ideals which he violently proclaims.

I shall probably return to both these books when it comes to discussing other technical points. My space is, I imagine, at an end. But I should just like to add that if I did not think that the books of these two writers were not interesting and suggestive I should not write about them.

I do not know what space the Editor of the Piccadilly Review will allow for correspondence on literary matters, but if readers of this periodical, who are seriously interested in technical literary points, care to write to me personally, I will try to answer their communications from time to time, since I take some such arrangement to be of the essence of causeries.

Piccadilly Review, 23 October 1919, 6.

II. The Realistic Novel

An Honest Thief. By Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. Translated by Constance Garnett

Bengy. By George Stevenson

Novel-writing is the youngest, as it is the Cinderella, of all the arts. For this reason it is the only art that is supremely worth pursuing. The fields that lie open to it are illimitable, and the possibilities of new forms inexhaustible. For the actual forms that have been exploited hitherto are so few that you could almost number them on the fingers of your hands. The earliest and most rudimentary conceptions of fiction writers were based upon the simplest forms of tale-telling. You took a story, which was generally the story of a man favoured by women and the gods, audaciously endowed and superhumanly fortunate, and you pursued him through various adventures until you thought the reader had had enough of him. Very few writers attempted to convince the reader; it was enough that he should be kept breathless. Occasionally you had an author like Lope da Vega or like Smollett who, whilst investing their central character with heroic qualities, immersed him in atmospheres of actuality that today would be called realistic. Occasionally, too, you had authors like Defoe who produced fiction in the guise almost of forged documents, thus attaining the new pantomimeto some sort of form or to some sort of realism. Richardson, however, was the first creative writer to found a school, and that school may be said still to exist. For the late Mr Henry James was as much a descendant of Richardson as the present Throne is the descendant of the Throne of Henry VIII. Richardson begat Diderot and the encyclopaedists; who begat Chateaubriand; who begat Stendhal, and later Maupassant, Flaubert, Turgenev, the Goncourts, Daudet, and the great French school which dominated the world during the closing years of the Second Empire and of the last century. This school had two descendants – the late Mr James and Mr Joseph Conrad – who are the only two writers whose works since that day have demanded any serious attention from the technical and purely literary point of view.

I am aware that this is a highly provocative statement and I mean it to be so.

FEALISM NOT SUFFICIENT

Let me then particularize a little more. I do not mean to say that during the latter half of last century and the whole of the present one, as far as it has gone, no good books have been written under the guise of fiction except by the Paris school or by Mr James and Mr Conrad. It would be idle – and indeed it would be very wrong – to deny the sombre poetry, the extreme charm, or the tragic gloom, of Mr Thomas Hardy. It would be impossible to deny that The Way of All Flesh is one of the four great books in the English language, but a great book – a book that is great because of the information it conveys or of the characters that it sketches, or of its author’s temperament – is not the same thing as a consummate novel, nor is the power to convey a sense of reality, or what in the nineties of the last century was called realism, a sufficient passport to perfection in art.

For, in the nineties of last century, the immediate effect of the great French school, which was then only just dying, was to produce in the West Central district of London, a passion for what used to be called ‘slices of life’. In those days you had Mr Somerset Maugham and Mr Edwin Pugh, to tell you stories of how heroic coster girls were ‘bashed’ by drunken husbands or lovers; Stephen Crane gave you Maggie, a Child of the Streets; even Mr Kipling tried it in a story called, I think, ‘Badalia Herodsfoot’, which appeared, as far as I can remember, in the Detroit Free Press, and was subsequently suppressed (at any rate, there was some sort of row about it).1 Mr Wells was contributing the adventure of Mr Hoopdriver to the columns of To-day; Mr Zangwill was writing of the Ghetto; Mr Bennett The Man from the North, Mr Gissing and Mr Mark Rutherford were writing tales of lower middle class life. And I fancy Mrs Mary E. Mann had also begun to publish by then. (I am talking of the years around 1895 or so).2 There was thus a very promising ‘slice of life’ school in existence. As a school it has disappeared, though I believe many of the writers who graced it are still amongst us.

‘LIFE’

It concerned itself, however, practically not at all with novel-writing as an art – whether as an art that demanded beauty or exactness of language, or as one necessitating a sense of form. Its preoccupation was with what it called ‘Life’ – and Life meant alcoholism, fog, kerosene lamps, barrel organs and depression. It did, however, one thing – it swept the divinely and feminely supported central figure into the limbo of the commercial novel, and it paid some attention to what is called in French the ‘justification’ of its characters. That was a step in advance.

DOSTOEVSKY AS A MODEL

Of this strain in the development of the novel not very much trace remains apparent to one who like myself, is revisiting the glimpses of the moon.3 I do not know if Mr D.H. Lawrence is still writing novels – I hope he is. And Dostoevsky, in a sense, is still with us, since Mrs Garnett, to whom this country is so enormously indebted, is continuing to give us volumes of her translations The Honest Thief will not much increase this indebtedness, since all the stories contained in the volume are excruciatingly bad, with the exception of ‘The Honest Thief’ itself, and that is no great shakes. But it is cheering to see that The Friend of the Family is announced by Mrs Garnett’s publishers as being in preparation. That Dostoevsky who is, in fact, a pure romantic, and only when it suits him to be, a sort of pseudo-realist – that Dostoevsky should have appealed so enormously to the English reader, and still more to the English writer, is only in the nature of things. The English writer is always trying to break back into Romanticism. For any band of artistic effort, of clearness of vision, of sustained thought about human affairs, are troublesome to him as to all men – and they do not seem worth while since our Literary Press, our Preachers, and our Social Hierarchy alike tell him that novel-writing is a contemptible occupation. So, if you have to make a living by it you do it along the lines of least resistance. For this Dostoevsky is the best possible model since a large section of the public nowadays demands realism with its intellect but, in its heart, loves heroes, and Dostoevsky is a realist of the 1895 school inasmuch as he places his heroes in atmospheres of alcoholism, fog, kerosene lamps, gaols, lunatic asylums and mortuaries. But his heroes – I use the word advisedly – always have vast empires in which they are the central figures – those empires being the kingdoms of their own minutely examined psychologies.

***

Piccadilly Review, 30 October 1919, 6.

III. The Serious Books

Seven Men. By Max Beerbohm

Birds in Town and Village. By W.H. Hudson

My friend the late Arthur Marwood1 – who possessed, upon the whole, the widest and the most serene intelligence of any human being that I have yet met – used to say that for any proper man there could only be four books in the English language that could be worth reading. Each proper and serious man, that is to say, could find his own four books, but he could not find more than four. Two of these four he was dogmatic about; he said, I mean, that every man must have, as two out of the four, Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion, and Mayne’s Ancient Law. As for the other two, you might select from, say; Beckford’s Letters from Portugal, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Mr Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, or any one of Mr Hudson’s books – preferably Nature in Downland or Idle Days in Patagonia. But, for any man there could only be four books.

It was a sweeping statement to which my friend thus committed himself, but if the reader will take my word for it that Arthur Marwood was a man of extraordinarily wide reading, of a memory so tenacious that he appeared to be encyclopaedic in his knowledge, and of singular wisdom – if we may give to wisdom the definition that it is the power to apply to any given incident the generalizing habit, and the ability to take various points of view that comes from a very wide knowledge and understanding of other given cases – the reader may well think it worth while to pay some serious attention to this dictum. For myself I love sweeping dicta; they awaken trains of thought: they suggest; and, the more obviously sweeping they are, the less they need to be taken au pied de la lettre and the more they may be refined down until the exact and balanced judgment is arrived at. If you wish to think, you must sketch in a rough design of the region that your thoughts may cover so that you may proceed towards rendering it more exact and more precise.

THE DESPISED NOVEL

It will be observed that all the books selected by my friend were of the variety that is called in the bookselling trade, and by reviewers, the serious book. The novel, that is to say, did not exist for this friend of mine. I don’t mean that he despised novel-writing as an art; he simply did not know that it was there; for, in essence, he was the last of the Tories, and, if Toryism is certainly wisdom, its logical practice calls, on occasion, for a certain wilful colour blindness. He did not, then, condemn novel-writing; he was not of the type, most frequently found amongst deans, who says that the reading of novels promotes offences leading to the Divorce Court; nor yet was he of the type of academic conductors of reviews, magazines, and the more ponderous periodicals, which devote infinite oceans of space to works about the love affairs of Keats and Shelley; the addiction of Elizabeth Barrett to the society of charlatans; the campaigns of Marlborough: the varieties of parasites of the genus pig; the incidence of taxation on the middle classes in Uruguay: the cultivation of beetroots; the production of commercial alcohol; the morganatic wives of the sons of George III; and the prevalence of the mal Anglais at the Court of Peter the Great; whilst imaginative literature is dismissed in two pages, the one headed ‘Recent Poetry.’ and the other ‘Notes About Novels’.

‘YELLOW-BACKS’

I was examining the other day the files of one such literary organ, and, upon my word, this was the exact proportion allotted respectively to serious books and to literature. My friend Marwood was more sincere. He simply did not consider that novel-writing was a serious pursuit, any more than stamp collecting, or the playing of diabolo, which in those days had become suddenly prevalent. I suppose that his only contact with novels had happened when, one day as a boy in the seventies, he had pulled open an old cupboard in his North Country ancestral manor house. There fell out upon him hundreds and hundreds of yellow-backed novels by Ouida and novelists of her generation. These his father had read contemptuously and chucked – le mot juste – into the otherwise useless cupboard, much as a cigar-smoker might trifle with a cigarette at odd moments to throw the end into a dustbin. That is a reasonable and Tory point of view.

Its logical end, however, is to leave you with only four books in the world, and that is not a very cheering prospect on long winter evenings. For, unfortunately, the writing of serious books has never been taken very seriously in these islands – not the actual writing. The practice of producing matter which will ultimately appear on the two sides of the printed page, the sheets making up the pages being then bound into ponderous volumes, is, of course, sufficiently prevalent. The more ponderous the volume, the more satisfied will the producer be, and the more chance will he have of extended attention in the literary reviews. But you do not write such books with any literary motive. Generals, alas, and Chancellors, produce enormous tomes in order to justify disastrous strategy or political courses that have gone wrong; the widows of generals and the daughters of chancellors produce books from motives of filial piety. Gentlemen with no literary gifts, with no love of literature, and with no literary insight – though this tendency is mostly Teutonic – produce lives of Keats, Shelley, Browning, Crabbe, George Darley, Donne, in the hope of attaining the fame that descends upon the erudite, of the rewards that are reserved for the persistently dull. These are the most pernicious of all writers of serious books – but there are an enormous number of others.

As written today, then, the Serious Book is generally Teutonic in its origin – that is to say, it is produced by gentlemen more distinguished for their industry than for their gifts, insight, or love of their subjects. That a serious book should possess form, imaginative insight, or interest for anyone not a specialist, would, generally speaking, be considered a very unsound proposition. To say that its writing should be distinguished by the quality of style, would be universally condemned.

And yet if a book, no matter what its subject, does not possess qualities of form, imaginative insight, and that catholicity of outlook which is the poet’s gift and that sense of style which conduces to clarity of thought in the reader, that book will have no chance of survival into the future, and, on the day of its birth, will be below contempt.

FACTS THAT SWAMP IDEAS

For the province of literature is to educate, so that the reader may be stirred to the perception of analogies or to the discovery of the sources of pleasure within himself. It is for that that you go to the Arts, and for no other purpose. It is this issue that the Teutonic mode of pursuing learning began so fatally to obscure in the latter years of Queen Victoria’s reign, so that the production of works of ponderously stated and industriously collected fact has swamped the very idea that the province of the printed book is to civilize and to show how sympathy and joy may be arrived at.

To read a sentence of Mr Hudson’s is to receive little or no instruction –

Or to read a page or two of Mr Beerbohm who, as far as I know, is the last survivor of the English school of essayists, is to acquire little or no new factual instruction. Yet to read Mr Hudson is to become a man very much better, since various aspects of the world will become newer, brighter and more vivid, and, to come in contact with this limpid writing which is as simple as the utterance of a child, is to acquire, by degrees, a distaste for pomposities of diction and inexactitude of thought. It is not that the habits of the kingfisher matter any more than the habits of Marlborough or Mme. de Maintenon. On the 27.12.18 and the 4.1.19, being on leave, I twice saw a kingfisher seated on a twig near the miniature lake at the eastern end of the Serpentine in Hyde Park. But unless I state the fact vividly it might just as well go unrecorded.

QUALITIES OF THE ESSAYIST

It is the same with the essay – that form which unites the Novel to the ‘Serious’ Book. Hazlitt’s description of the Great Fight happens – I write this on the authority of our principal boxing expert of today – then to be, out of all the immense welter of words that was poured out about the noble art before its eclipse, the only piece of writing conveying practical information as to the early Prize Ring that has any value for the student of boxing today. But for the general reader it survives because of its vivid and simple writing and because it shows you how to look at the world. To read Mr Beerbohm is to receive practically no instruction. The following passage will show you neither how not to write, nor how to write a play:

But if you read Mr Beerbohm at his best you receive a certain stimulation and, if you follow him, you will be led up to a point of view, which will enable you subsequently to be less subject to being overawed by solemn humbug. Of course, Birds in Town and Village is not Mr Hudson’s best book any more than Seven Men is Mr Beerbohm’s most valuable contribution to comparative sociology. But it is cheering to return to a world that might be full of sad surprises and to find that they are still there.

Piccadilly Review, 6 November 1919, 6.

V. Biography and Criticism

Samuel Butler: A Memoir. By Henry Festing Jones

The Caliph’s Design. By P. Wyndham Lewis

There are few inventions that have not proved a curse to humanity; the gentleman who invented the Biography as applied to the artist or the thinker cursed humanity more than any soul before or since his hateful day. For there is no great man that is not belittled and rendered common by his biographer, since no man may be a hero to his valet. A star danced – and underneath it Shakespeare was born. So he found none to write his biography, and, serene, enigmatic and elusive his face smiles up at us through his pages. Had the bottle washers or parasites who usually attend on the Great, washed the bottles and designed the costumes of the Swan of Avon, we should have read him as little as we read Johnson. So we should have been cursed….

‘CHATTER ABOUT HARRIET’

I never could read Shelley or Keats. I never have been able to, try as I will. And this was because when I was a young child I lived amongst people whose real use for these poets was to discover that when Shelley eloped with Mary Someone or other – Godwin or Wollstonecraft, I fancy – Mary rode upon a donkey, and Harriet drowned herself [in the Round Pond I always used to think]. And Keats was the tuberculous son of a livery stable keeper, who wrote love letters to a lady called Fanny Brawne. You see, in illo die, there were terrible people called Professors Dowden and Buxton Forman,1 my uncle William Rossetti; my aunt Lucy Madox Rossetti. They never told you that Shelley or Keats could make you happy for ever if you read them. They never left one alone to read the poems. But they told me to distraction that Shelley was an atheist or that Keats was killed by the Quarterly.

I find even the editor of the Athenaeum (how jolly for once to be on the side of the Angels!) repeating this plaint:

I have tried by means of notes of exclamation and italics to reveal my profound and agitated disagreement with the amazing statements of the editor of The Athenaeum. (But, indeed, nothing is so disquieting as thus to revisit the glimpses of the moon and to discover that moon and Athenaeum alike have so extraordinarily little changed.)

BUTLER AND HIS BIOGRAPER

‘After all,’ says the editor in the same review, ‘Butler was not a great man.’ Butler was the greatest Englishman the nineteenth century produced, and the Way of All Flesh is one of the four great imaginative works in the English language. And the review of Mr Jones’s book by the editor of the Athenaeum is in fact just a lament – a lament because Mr Jones has destroyed for him his mental image of Butler, so that he will never again read the Way of All Flesh with his old pleasure. That is why I have ventured to say that I agree with the spirit if not the letter of this review!

As for Mr Jones, one wishes one knew quite how, justly, to sum him up. His admiration for Butler is admirable. It has been admirable for years. But for years he was a dependent – as it were a musical valet – to his hero. If you are anybody’s batman a curious thing happens to you, in that you lose all sense of proportion one way or another. If you are a bad servant you will libel your master beyond recognition; if you are a good batman you will think your master was a hero – but your chief talk will be about his feet of clay. I remember asking about his master of an exceedingly devoted – a heroically and touchingly devoted – servant. My friend – a fine fellow and one of a beautiful nature, as I knew him – had been killed three weeks before. His servant would say: ‘Mr —, a fine officer! A keen gentleman! Keen!’ and then he would relate an anecdote showing that my friend had been mean in money matters, mean in his relations with women, deceitful to his senior officers, not very considerate of his men, and, in most things, what used to be called ‘slim’. I dare say my friend had a touch of ‘slimness’ in his composition – yet I will aver that he had a beautiful, self-sacrificing, courageous and far-seeing nature – with a devotion to his and my battalion, to his senior officers and to the men such as is given, alas! to few of us. His batman, absolutely devoted, had admired mostly his occasional feats of slimness and, being at the moment his master’s biographer, mentioned nothing else.

A MONSTROUS FIGURE

It is like that with Mr Jones. He wishes Butler to shine in controversy, to appear shrewd, right, agnostic, ergoteur,2 prudent, sceptical, disillusioned, just as the batman wished to represent his master as always getting the best of it whether by fair means or foul. Mr Jones shows us a Butler who was sound, mean, mercenary, hypochondriac, selfish, lying and, in the end, monstrous – a Butler who was all these things in order that he might ‘score’ every one ‘off’ – from Charles Darwin to the custodians of Italian churches. His Butler bleats and whimpers about ‘truth’ as only a confidence-trickster can do about honesty – and, in the end, it amounts merely to giving ‘old Darwin the best warming that I can manage to give him – and I think I shall manage a pretty hot one’. For ‘Darwin’ you might substitute the world – and the Victorian world’s view of this personal Butler is pretty well summed up in Darwin’s own words: ‘… A clever and unscrupulous man like Mr Butler would be sure to twist whatever I may say against me, and the longer the controversy lasts the more degrading it is to me.’ That is the epitome of the great case Butler versus Mundum-Victoriae.

The world of today is infinitely his debtor, just as Butler is infinitely greater than the shivering and fearful wretch that Mr Jones presents us with. For fear – ceaseless, degraded, and all-pervading fear – is the note of this character; it dreaded friendship, love, wine, the three per cents, Persian cats, emotions, matrimony, life itself. But what do these things matter unless they spoil for us the great projection of life that he left behind him? They matter nothing. And Mr Jones was devoted to Butler. So we may leave it.

A GREAT POET

The fact is that Butler was a great poet – and just as only great writers can translate the writings of great writers in other tongues – so only great poets can write the lives of great poets. And they have other things to do. It is the work of art alone that matters in the case of Butler as in the case of all other poets. Unfortunately parasites obscure all these things to the world.

I am, however, not attaching that disagreeable word to Mr Jones. Long friendship gives a man certain human rights in the direction of descanting on the characteristics of a dead friend. A man in such a case writes from a certain fullness of the heart – and Mr Jones had every right to publish his biography. That it has taken the form it has is a tragedy – since he has belittled for us a man who, had he been left to stand by his work alone, was at once the epitome and the corrective of his race. Your true parasite is the professor who gives us lives of men he has never seen and whose works he has never loved. He calls the result criticism, and hates alike all real criticism which concerns itself with Art, and all real Art of which he himself is incapable.

MR LEWIS’ S SELF -CONTRADICTION

In a queer, muffled, incoherent way this is what Mr Wyndham Lewis does in his latest pamphlet – and he does it the more effectually in that he contradicts himself on each successive page. In that he descends alike from Samuel Butler and from Samuel Johnson before him. Just as was the case with Butler – and no doubt with Johnson – Mr Lewis seems to feel the necessity for a theory, so that, having formulated it, he may sleep soundly. On the morrow he will develop his theory until it is altogether different. Then he will formulate that and, so again, sleep soundly; and, at the bottom of all his theorizing there is good, sound, solid, common horse sense. So it was with Butler, so also with Johnson – and as with these two, so in the case of Mr Lewis the good sound sense is united, as a rule, with the desire to ‘score off someone’, for reasons personal, obvious or obscure. This personal motive may or may not be usually wrong; aesthetically it is impeccable. A work of art, a piece of criticism, is an attempt to spread, to strengthen or to render prominent, your own type – an attempt to render the world a more fitting place for the survival of men sympathetic to you. If then, ‘X.’ attempts to damage you, either by injuring your public reputation, by carrying off your young woman, or distraining on you for rent, ‘X.’ becomes an enemy of humanity. So you try to destroy him, quite legitimately; you typify him as a being belonging to another School of Thought, and, either by name or veiledly, you destroy him. Your solicitor – or your Professor of Etiquette – might try to dissuade you; but they function in another dimension, a dimension not yours.

THE ONLY ART CRTIC

So, smashing at those who have inconvenienced, discouraged, publicly condemned him, Mr Lewis voyages down the Ages. He is, as far as I know, the only writer about the Plastic Arts of today who matters twopence – just as, in his day, Whistler, for all his defects, was worth a wilderness of Ruskins and Tom Taylors. At any rate he is the only writer about the Plastic Arts whom anyone could want to read and to digest. He has no doubt thought; he has for certain, felt a great deal, and he smashes the Pompous and the Worthy.

That is as much as I feel called upon to say about his fulminations on the Plastic Arts. Personally, I agree with him when he says that X=X; and I applaud him when he says that X=really ω. But I do not profess to dogmatize about the Plastic Arts – I am more concerned with the dominable and cantankerous way in which Mr Lewis puts things.

For myself I wish – and I always have wished – that Mr Lewis would leave paintings alone, and devote his enormous and spasmodic energies to writing. I don’t at all know where he stands as a painter – but how admirably is this put:

FRENCH REALISM

I have been trying to say – and indeed, saying, at great length – all that since before Mr Lewis was born – and without any particular effect – or any effect at all. But put so shortly, in a form so portable to the mind, Mr Lewis’s statement is bound to have its effect – even on our own Academics. Our own Academics – who are more poisonous than those of any other nation, since they act on readers more sluggish and more ‘dreamy’ – must, that is to say, either adopt enough of Mr Lewis’s statement to keep them alive, or they will find their ground cut away under their feet in the minds of the sluggish and dreamy public. (I notice, indeed, that several of our Art critics have already altered their views as to the relative values of Cézanne, Gaugin, Picasso or Matisse, in order to get in line with some of Mr Lewis’s classifications.) For the life of the Academic is always an anxious one. If he slay the body to which he is parasitic he must die. So, every now and then, he must admit some new life, and thus, even in this country, the Arts carry on. And Mr Lewis is one of those rare creatures who, sending out as it were lightning flashes, reveals to this parasitic class the awful precipice that is just at their feet. I notice indeed that even The Times puts the Caliph’s Design amongst books recommendable to its readers. So that once again – twice in one week! – I find myself on the side of the – what?

Piccadilly Review, 20 November 1919, 6.

1 [Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling (London, 1999), pp. 226–7, recounts a row with Harper and Brothers who planned to publish a volume of stories without Kipling’s permission. Eventually the publishers included the story ‘The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot’ instead of another, on the grounds that they already had the serial rights for it.]

2 [Mr Hoopdriver is the protagonist of Wells’s The Wheels of Chance (1896). Mary Mann (1848–1929) wrote over forty volumes of fiction, many set in Norfolk.]

3 [What may this mean, / That thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel, / Revisitst thus the glimpses of the moon…’ – Hamlet I. iv. 32–4]

1 [Ford drew upon Marwood in constructing many of his fictional characters; in particular, Christopher Tietjens in Parade’s End.]

1 [The great Shakespearean scholar Edward Dowden also wrote a Life of Shelley. Henry Buxton Forman, editor of Shelley and Keats, worked for the Post Office.]

2 [Quibbler or caviller]