Chapter D: H. Lawrence 325 (5)

The critical study of Whitman by Mr. Basil De Selincourt is sympathetic and discerning as regards what may be called the purely literary side. He understands what Whitman says and takes him for granted as one of the world's supreme poets. He conceives the essential unity of Whitman's thought, a unity that should be obvious but evidently is not to some readers and critics who treat Whitman as a collection of more or less impressive fragments. Mr. De Selincourt's analysis of Whitman's form is instructive, appreciative, though a trifle academic, not wholly emancipated from schoolroom rules of prosody. If you will read Whitman aloud, pronouncing the words as they are pronounced in prose, and emphasizing them according to the sense, the scansion will take care of itself. When a line is bad (and Whitman, like most of the other great poets, wrote bad lines) it won't work by any effort of elocution. The good lines, if you have an ear in your head and a tongue in your mouth, chant themselves, and you can forget all about iambics and hexameters.

Where Mr. De Selincourt fails is in his account of Whitman's notions of liberty, democracy, America, the future. Book-people do not understand these things, especially English book-people, who assume that America produced Whitman because it was a land of liberty. It was not. It was, like the rest of the world, a land of plutocracy, convention, servility. It is complimentary to us but unhappily not true to say that "America stands for the passionate re-assertion of certain beliefs which life, to those who look back upon it, seems always to stultify, but which, to those who can look forward, appears as the very spirit and power of life itself--'the urge, the ardour, the unconquerable will'."

As a matter of fact, America does not stand for any such thing and Whitman does not stand for America. He is a revolutionist in revolt against the American fact and celebrating a possible American future. Official America tried to throttle him. Conventional America ignored him. Literary and revolutionary spirits in England and America welcomed him, for they are free spirits, intellectually free, under any economic conditions and in any part of the world. Whitman himself did not understand why he was acclaimed in England by more men and better men than in America. It was simply because English thinkers, writers, poets, with minds capable of appreciating him, outnumbered their American brothers ten to one.

Two American ladies once called on Tennyson. He asked them whether they knew Walt Whitman. They confessed that they did not. "Then," said he, "you do not know the greatest man in America."

GEORGE E. WOODBERRY

A man's place in the generations of mankind is not wholly determined by the date of his birth. If William James were alive he would be eighty years old; but he belongs to us, to the living present. Mr. George Edward Woodberry is only sixty-seven; yet he already seems like the last figure in a tradition which has come to an end--so far as any period in literature may truly be said to end. James was aware of something like this twenty years ago. He gave Mr. Woodberry the praise that is his due, but expressed at the same time his essential weakness. Of "The Heart of Man" James wrote in a letter:

The essays are grave and noble in the extreme. I hail another
American author. They can't be popular, and for cause. The respect
of him for the Queen's English, the classic leisureliness and
explicitness, which give so rare a dignity to his style, also take
from it that which our generation seems to need, the sudden word,
the unmeditated transition, the flash of perception that makes
reasonings unnecessary. Poor Woodberry, so high, so true, so good,
so original in his total make-up, and yet so unoriginal if you
take him spot-wise--and therefore so ineffective.

Mr. Woodberry is not out of date in a mere journalistic sense or in the hasty judgment of an irreverent generation which affects a trivial contemporaneity and regards even the end of the last century as old fogy. He is out of date because he did not gear with his own times, but remained aloof and backward-looking and so became the last of the Lowells instead of the first of the Woodberrys. It could not have been a conscious or servile emulation on his part, for he has a spirit of his own. But his surroundings and his education were too strong for his fine talent. He was brought up in the twilight of the New England demigods. They handed him the "torch," and he has carried it with pious devotion. To younger men as docile as himself, he became, almost officially, the representative in the flesh of the elders over whose graves he prayed. His publishers announce with pride, with no sense of the depressing implications of what they are saying, that there is a Woodberry Society, "probably the only organization in America dedicated to a living writer." Thus the anachronism is fulfilled. Mr. Woodberry was old when he was young, and he is an institution before he is dead. Some books are epoch making; other books, even great and original books, lie comfortably in their times without being either innovative or conclusive; Mr. Woodberry's six solid volumes[1] are epoch closing, a collection of such words as will not be written again by a man of genuine talent and wisdom.

[1] Collected Essays of George Edward Woodberry. 6 vols. New
York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1921.

The feeling that Mr. Woodberry is a voice from the past that immediately preceded him comes over me most heavily when I read his essays on Lowell's Addresses, on Democracy, and on Wendell Phillips. It may be only the essayist's strict fidelity to Lowell's ideas--no doubt a merit--which leaves the impression that the essayist knows only what Lowell knew and no more, that the pupil has not moved a step beyond the master. It is Lowell over again without the slightest addition from the lessons of time. The London _Nation_ has said of Mr. Woodberry's essays that most of them have "a unity and life that make many of Lowell's seem those of a shrewd but old-fashioned amateur." Yet Lowell was at least a vivid amateur, who expressed something that belonged to the 'fifties, 'sixties and 'seventies; and he had an old gentleman's right to be old in the 'eighties. It is not to be expected that a critic should begin where Lowell leaves off--only a thinker of real genius makes such long strides. But the critic following Lowell in time and not moving half a step ahead of him seems older than Lowell himself.

The same thing is true of the address on Wendell Phillips, "The Faith of an American." It is fine, even eloquent, but it is abstract and curiously old-fashioned. Phillips in his own utterances is more of to-day and of to-morrow than is his eulogist who was a child in Beverley when Phillips was in mid-career. The reason, of course, is that Phillips was a fighter, hot with real issues, and it is not the critic's business to fight but to examine the ideas of the fighter. These ideas necessarily become somewhat abstract when a critic quotes or rephrases them, especially since Phillips was an orator and flung at his audiences sweeping generalities which in a less inspired man are mere tall talk. But Mr. Woodberry devitalizes Phillips, especially the later Phillips who went on from one issue to the next until he dropped. Mr. Woodberry has not a single clear, plain word about one of Phillips' last fights, that for the Labor party. Mr. Woodberry stops with the actual Phillips before Phillips stopped, and the end of the address fades out in vagueness and platitude. There is something rather touching about Mr. Woodberry's declaration: "I know that what I have said to-night is heavy with risk." One looks in vain to discover the risk. Surely in 1911, when the address was delivered, a man might talk in Mr. Woodberry's mild way every night in the week and invite no more severe punishment than a scolding from Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler.

Mr. Woodberry's ideas and his expressions are all gentle, though not timid nor emasculate. His general faith in "Democracy" is too serenely above the tumult to disturb anybody or provoke a riot call in the quietude of Beverley. I do not know what he means by "Democracy," whether such actual democracy as existed in America in 1899, or some beautiful dream of the future. If democracy is a dream, an unrealized dream, then any beautiful thing a poet says about it is true. But Mr. Woodberry seems to be talking about something actually existing, something already realized in considerable part if not completely, for he says: "Democracy has its great career, for the first time, in our national being, and exhibits here most purely its formative powers, and unfolds destiny on the grand scale." That was not true twenty years ago, and it is certainly not true now. It is the sort of thing that Emerson and Lowell could say with rousing conviction, but twenty years ago it was as obsolete as a beaver hat except in newspaper editorials and political speeches, where it is still going strong--even if not quite so strong as it used to be.

Mr. Woodberry seems to imply that he is somewhat more of a realist than Lowell. But he is in fact less of a realist than Lowell; for Lowell in his time did grapple with the facts of politics. In poetry it is not necessary, it is better not, to be a realist. But in dealing with politics and contemporaneous history the true citizen must be a realist and leave it to the politicians to fly with the eagle. No wisdom is to be derived from such a statement as this: "There is always an ideality of the human spirit in all its [Democracy's] works, if one will search them out." Or this: "Democracy is a mode of dealing with souls." Or this: "Not that other governments have not had regard to the soul, but in democracy, it is spirituality that gives the law and rules the issue." It is, alas, not true that "education, high education even, is more respected and counts for more in a democracy than under the older systems," or that "the law becomes the embodied persuasion of the community," or that "all these blessings [aversion to war, devotion to public duty and many other enumerated virtues] unconfined as the element, belong to all our people."

Mr. Woodberry's democracy simply does not exist and never did exist. Yet there is one existent glory of my country which I believe I appreciate better than he does. He says: "It behooves us, especially, to be modest, for our magnificent America has never yet produced a poet even of the rank of Gray." That was written fourteen years after the death of Whitman. Mr. Woodberry's democracy had not yet come along, but one of its great poets had arrived and departed leaving Mr. Woodberry none the wiser. There is another glory of my country which I appreciate better than Mr. Woodberry does--Poe, whose poetry Mr. Woodberry has never understood, though he has written what is altogether the best biography of the man! To save the six best lyrics of Poe, I would, if such a sacrifice were necessary, cheerfully sink Gray in the deepest sea of oblivion, "Elegy," letters and all. But that is only a slight difference of judgment, and there is no more futile business than to draw up minor poets in grades and ranks. Whitman is another matter; the critic who misses him in this day of the world is simply incompetent. The excuse for Mr. Woodberry is that he does not belong to this day of the world.

There is something pathetic about Mr. Woodberry's patriotism. He sincerely believes that "America's title to glory is her service to human liberty." He has never been delivered from the superstition that "the sense of justice is the bedrock of the Puritan soul"--the Puritan soul, narrow, despotic, cruelly unjust! But when Mr. Woodberry leaves politics and patriotism and religion and returns to art and literature where he is at home, he puts his finger ruefully on the real rock of the Puritan soul, recalling the Puritan's hostility to the theatre and regretting "the American inhibition" "which rejects the nude in sculpture and painting, not only forfeiting thereby the supreme of Greek genius and sanity, but to the prejudice, also, of human dignity." Mr. Woodberry is himself a Puritan, yearning to be free but chained to New England granite, and since he can not get free on this planet he looks up to the heavens where the God of his fathers used to dwell, but where he can find only abstract and vague ideas. Mr. Woodberry's tendency to abstract phrases, which on pressure yield nothing, vitiates his literary essays, the essays in which a professional critic ought to be most concrete, definite, and nourishing. The trouble may be that his views are too high and too broad for the limited vision of a common man; but I think his trouble is that he has not the true philosopher's power to make a long idea, bridging time and space, stand up under its own weight; there is a lack of solid timber and concrete. His best essays are those on individual authors in which he has the selected specific substance of another man's thought to work on. As ought to happen to a sensitive critic, it sometimes happens that Mr. Woodberry's style takes the very tone of his subject. He is whimsical in his charming little essay on Pepys, an adequate trifle; he is grave and quiet when he writes about Gray; and Swinburne so stirs him that his prose awakes and sparkles with metaphor. Even in this essay, however, he can not help demoralizing poetry by moralizing it into pseudo-philosophic prose. "The imagery (of 'Laus Veneris') has more affinity with modes of sacerdotal art, with symbolism and the attributive in imaginative power than it has with the free vitality that is more properly the sphere of poetry." What does that mean? What is the sphere of poetry? The essays on the older poets would make first-rate introductions to school texts, and I think some of them have been so used. They suffer from the fact that in Mr. Woodberry's time--and since--so many standard essays on Milton, Shakespeare, and the rest were written and rewritten, that unless a critic has a fresh point of view, as Mr. Woodberry has not, another essay is simply another essay.

It must be pleasant to meditate on the great men of letters and from time to time write an essay on Virgil or Montaigne or Matthew Arnold. Some leisure is necessary, for the conscientious critic must read much, and much reading takes time. It may be that in our nervous age, in this country, the scholarly critic with a true taste for letters has disappeared, to return perhaps in a day when Democracy or something better shall have dawned. The comfortable old tradition is dead or dying, and since its good works are extant in print, we need no more contributions to it. As Mr. Woodberry says in an essay called "Culture of the Old School": "The _Gentleman's Magazine_--both the name and the thing belong to a bygone time."

ABRAHAM CAHAN

Toward the end of the last century there appeared in the magazines some remarkable stories of the East Side of New York by Abraham Cahan. They were not of the crudely comic type of Potash and Perlmutter, nor were they in the somewhat finer mood of sentimental humor which made Myra Kelly deservedly popular. They were humorous and pathetic in a quiet, compelling way, with a gentle austerity of tone even less familiar to American readers then than it is in the days of the Russian invasion. Mr. Howells praised these stories and he and others in editorial authority encouraged the author to write more. A career in the pleasant art of fiction was open to Mr. Cahan. But he withdrew from it and, so far as I know, he wrote no more stories for at least ten years. He has devoted his energy to building up the great _Jewish Daily Forward_, which is not only the voice of the East Side, but a powerful vehicle of social and political ideals that have not yet penetrated the sanctums of Times Square and of the older newspaper world near City Hall and Civic Virtue.

Then, as he approached sixty, Mr. Cahan gave us "The Rise of David Levinsky", a solid mature novel, into which are compacted the reflections of a lifetime. The publisher's notice called it "a story of success in the turmoil of American life." Probably the writer of those words intended to help the book by the appeal which "success" makes to the American mind, for no reader, not even a publisher's clerk, could miss the immense irony of the story. It is indeed the story of a failure. The vanity of great riches was never set forth with more searching sincerity. The helplessness of the individual, even the strong and prosperous, in the economic whirlpool, the loneliness and disillusionment only partly assuaged by pride in commercial achievement, the sacrifice of the intellectual life to the practical, these are the fundamental themes of the book. Levinsky, with the instincts of a scholar and a desire for the finest things in life, is swept into business by circumstances which he hardly understands himself and against which he is powerless; once in the game he makes the most of his abilities, but he never ceases to regard his visible good fortune as poor compensation for the invisible things he has missed. His wealth forces him to associate with all that is vulgar and acquisitive in Jewry and isolates him from all that is idealistic. He finds that he cannot even speak the language of the woman he most admires. Worse still, he is out of sympathy with the aspirations of millions of poor Jews from whose ranks he has sprung. He has no sympathy with those who would break the game up or make new rules, yet he sees that the game is hardly worth playing, even for the winner. "Success! Success! Success! It was the almighty goddess of the hour. Thousands of new fortunes were advertising her gaudy splendors. Newspapers, magazines, and public speeches were full of her glory, and he who found favor in her eyes found favor in the eyes of man."

The portrait of David Levinsky is a portrait of society, not simply of the Jewish section of it, or of New York, but of American business. And business is business whether done by Jew or Gentile. If Levinsky is a triumphant failure, he is so because American business, which shaped him to its ends, is, viewed from any decent regard for humanity, a miserable monster of success. Not that Levinsky is an abstraction, or that the novelist is forcing a thesis. Far from it. The personality of Levinsky is as sharply individualized as the hero of Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors," though with a different kind of subtlety, the subtlety not of detached analysis, but of naively simple self-revelation, which of course is not so simple as it sounds.

Mr. Cahan knows how to think through his characters, by letting them do the thinking, as if it were their affair and not his. At the same time he does not perform (nor does any other artist) that foolish and meaningless operation, as expressed by a great poet through a young critic, of holding "the mirror up to nature." Nature in a mirror is just nature, not nature thought out, excogitated, turned to human uses, interpreted in human words. And this is the place to say that Mr. Cahan knows how to use words. There are no great phrases in this book. A simple and (intellectually) honest business man writing his autobiography would not use a great phrase; such a phrase might issue from some enviable person in that intellectual life from which Levinsky was excluded. But there is no banal or inept phrase. Such a man as Mr. Cahan intends Levinsky to be, a man trained in the Talmud, which means verbal sense, and hammered by the facts of life, which means a sense of reality, and a wistful failure, which means imaginative retrospection, says things in a direct, firm, accurate style.

There is no lack of emotion; strong feeling, expressed or implied, runs through the book from beginning to end. But there is a complete absence of eloquence, a deliberate refraining from emphasis, an even manner of setting forth ideas and events impartially for the value inherent in them, an admirable method, the method of a philosophic artist. Here is life, some of it is good, some of it is bad; it is all somewhat pitiable, to be laughed at rather than cried over; nobody is deserving of indignant blame or abuse. It is our business to understand it as well as we can; and though we never can see it in its entirety or with complete clearness, if we make an honest effort to record events and delineate personalities, the events will arrange themselves in a more or less intelligible sequence, and the personalities will be their own commentary upon themselves. An obvious method, but you will read many a book to find one skilful application of it.

It seems to me the method most often employed and carried to the highest degree of perfection by the great Russians. I am driven to the timidity of "seems" because we do much talking about Russian novels without having read many of them or understanding what we have read. But better-informed critics than I have noted that one characteristic of the Russian novel is a benevolent impartiality in its treatment of all kinds of people and a calm contemplation of events horrible, gay, sad, comic. A revolutionist can portray, in fiction, a commissioner of police, whom in real life he would be willing to kill, with a fairness that is more than fair, with a combination of Olympian serenity and human sympathy. He can be a virulent propagandist when he is writing pamphlets, and when he writes fiction he can forget his propaganda or subdue it to art, that is, to a balanced sense of life.

When I say that Mr. Cahan's novel sounds like a good translation of a Russian novel, and that he is a disciple of the Russian novelists, I accuse him of the crime of being an artist and a seer. As a matter of biography, he is a child of Russian literature. And that is why his novel, written in faultless English, is a singular and solitary performance in American fiction. If that strange demand for "the" or "a great American novel," a demand which is at once foolish and the expression of a justifiably proud feeling that a big country ought to have big books, is to be satisfied, perhaps we shall have to ask an East Side Jew to write it for us. That would be an interesting phenomenon for some future Professor Wendell to deal with in a History of American Literature. And by the way, Mr. Cahan is a competent critic. I hope he will give us not only more novels, but a study of Russian literature for the enlightenment of the American mind. I remember with gratitude an article of his which I read when I was even more ignorant than I am now, on the modern successors to the group of Titans, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. He put Maxim Gorky in his place and told us (this was before the Russian invasion) about Andreyev and Chekhov. If Mr. Cahan will write a book on Russian literature, I will do my best to establish him in his merited place in American literature.

THOMAS HARDY

Mr. Bernard Shaw says, apropos Samuel Butler, that the English people do not deserve to have a genius. Butler himself in a note remarks that America, even America, will probably have men of genius, has indeed, already had one, Walt Whitman, but that he cannot imagine any country where a genius would have more unfortunate surroundings than in America. Mr. Arnold Bennett sends a shot from the same gun in "Milestones," when he makes the millionaire shipbuilder puff his chest and say that there is no greater honor to English character than the way we treat our geniuses. Egad! The unworthiness of the British and American nations to have artists born to them was never more shamefully manifested than by the reception accorded thirty years ago to Hardy's "Jude, the Obscure." Harper's Magazine, which seems to have begun printing the story before the editors had seen the complete manuscript, fell into temporary disfavor with some outraged readers. One British journal distinguished itself by reviewing the book under the caption, "Jude, the Obscene."

It is inconceivable that any nation on the continent of Europe could, through its critics or through any considerable number of readers, so dishonor a masterpiece. For "Jude" is a masterpiece; if it is not Hardy's greatest novel, it is one of his three or four greatest, and that means one of a score of supreme works of prose fiction in the language. If profundity of substance and skill in narrative are both considered, Hardy is without rival among British novelists. His is the crowning achievement in the century of fiction that began with Jane Austen and, happily, has not yet terminated with Joseph Conrad. In his hands the English novel assumed a form which, perhaps without good critical reason, one thinks of as French. Despite the racy localism of scene and character, Hardy's work seems alien to the Anglo-Saxon temperament; it has less in common with the spacious days of great Victoria than with a younger time, whose living masters, Mr. Conrad and Mr. Galsworthy, for example, have taken lessons in art across the channel.

In a prefatory note to "Desperate Remedies," dated February, 1896, Hardy lets fall a casual phrase which indicates that he and others had noted his kinship to the French, but that he was not disposed to acknowledge it fully. He seems to say, with that kind of modest pride which distinguishes him, that he found his method for himself, played the game alone. "As it happened," runs the note, "that certain characteristics which provoked most discussion in my latest story ['Jude'?] were present in this my first--published in 1871, when there was no French name for them--it has seemed best to let them stand unaltered." What characteristics does he intend? And was there no French name for them in 1871? Or had not the British critics begun to use the French name? Are these characteristics his candor, his logic, his classic finish of phrase, a certain cool stateliness of manner, an impersonal, distant way of treating most tender and poignant subjects, a lucid, ironic view of life, perfect proportion, large intellectual pity and freedom from cant, from sentimentality? These are some of his virtues and they are the virtues of several modern French novelists and some of the Russian pupils of the French.

If the ill reception of "Jude" caused Mr. Hardy to foreswear fiction, then the fools have in a way done us harm by cheating us of two or three great novels. Yet genius takes its revenge on a dull world, especially if it is prosperous genius, too well established to be starved out by the stupidity of an inartistic people. If Hardy had been encouraged to write more novels perhaps we should not have had "The Dynasts." And by and by we shall discover what a loss that would have been. It is the greatest epic that we have been privileged to read since Tolstoy's "War and Peace." And it is the best long poem in English since Morris's "The Earthly Paradise." Though it is cast in scenes and acts it is not a drama except in a vast untechnical sense of the word. But epic it is, creation of an enormous imagination which sweeps the universe and manages a cosmic panorama as commandingly as the same imagination dominates a rural kingdom of farms and desolate heaths. If "The Dynasts" and Hardy's shorter poems lack one thing, that one thing is the magical and haunting line, that concatenation of words which is everlastingly beautiful in the context or detached from it. Morris knew that magic. He was born with it, and no reader of Morris, except a critic, will be deceived by his own denial of his divinity when he said in his honest, off-hand way, sensible as Anthony Trollope, that inspiration is nonsense and verse is easy to write.

"The Dynasts" is an extraordinary poem. It is not French, it is not Greek, it is not like anything else in English. Hardy has discarded Christian mythology. He is not childish enough to revert to the Greek. He has invented a new one. His celestial machinery is as strange an apparition in the heavens as the first aeroplane. His hero, Napoleon, rises above the human stature by which the realistic novelist measures man and becomes not only a tool of destiny but a demigod who seems to understand destiny and share the secrets of that impersonal goddess. Those who are curious about Hardy's philosophy (we like his art; his philosophy may lie down and die on the shelf with the other philosophies) will find the closing chorus of "The Dynasts" significant:

But--a stirring thrills the air
Like to sounds of joyance there
That the rages
Of the ages
Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that were,
Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things fair!

Such is the ultimate word of this artist who so keenly loves beauty, yet, like some neo-Puritan and latter-day ascetic, cannot draw a lovely woman without reminding you that the skull under the cheeks and behind the passionate eyes is not pretty and will probably endure a long time under ground. Is he of like mind with his chorus at last, and does he believe that the Will is going to grow intelligent and make all things fair?

Perhaps Hardy's proneness to dwell on the skeletonic grin of life is due to his exceeding sensitiveness to beauty. Like Poe and other poets, he cannot abide the ugliness that is in the world, and so he insists on The Conqueror Worm, as a man cannot refrain from thrusting his tongue into the sore tooth. Perhaps Hardy is a reaction against the saccharine optimism of his contemporaries and of those just before his time. They falsified life in their fictions by making everything come out nicely, thank you, on the last page. He leans over backward from that kind of untruth and comes dangerously near to being as false. As between falsity in one direction and falsity in the other, there is no choice, except that we have had so much of the sweet kind that Hardy is refreshing. He tends to restore the balance.

Ask any man, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, how life has gone with him, and, if he is honest, he will tell you that life did not go definitely one way or the other. Things sometimes came out well and sometimes not. Hardy is biased in favor of the things that do not come out well. "Life's Little Ironies" is a good title, but it is a title that implies a thesis, an attitude from which humanity is surveyed. The stories are perfection and they sound true. Hardy is a logician and he will back any tale of his with evidence, even the first story in "Wessex Tales," in the preface of which the authority of physicians is invoked. But when you take all his stories together you find nine failures out of ten human careers, and life has a better batting average than that. No one doubts that the "Fellowtownsmen" got into such horrid confusion, that things happened as they shouldn't, that every shot at happiness was a miss. And "The Waiting Supper" is so convincing that you cannot escape. But the two stories together, regarded for the moment not as the excellent works of art which they are, but as a view of human destiny, weaken each other. One convinces you. The two together make you ask questions about the author.

In "The Waiting Supper" there is one line that is as great a pathetic fallacy as the more familiar and cheery kind which represents nature as smiling upon the lovers. Hardy's lovers have to submit to this: "Thus the sad autumn afternoon waned, while the waterfall hissed sarcastically of the inevitableness of the unpleasant." Did you ever hear a waterfall like that? The only waterfalls I have heard quote Darwin and discuss the election returns. I know that the happy poet is a liar when he says that the nightingale is celebrating my love for Mamie, for the nightingale is concerned with other matters. But as between a nightingale who is sympathetic with my emotions and a sarcastic waterfall, I prefer the nightingale. And I do not like either in realistic fiction.

Thomas Hardy, the idol of the younger realists and the liberator of British fiction from the Victorian hoopskirt and the happy ending, is not a realist. He is a great romantic, with a taste for pretty girls, moonlight, heroes and dragoons. He is incurably superstitious. He is pained by many modern things, especially by modern restorations of ancient buildings. He takes Tess to the Druidical stones on Salisbury Plain because he dearly likes that kind of moonlit antiquity. His pronominal substitution of It for He does not achieve a revolution in theology. He manages the destinies of human folk as arbitrarily as any maker of fiction that ever lived. But he never made a story in which he did not convince you that life is overwhelmingly interesting and that nature, girls, and dragoons are beautiful if sad things to contemplate.

GEORGE BORROW

Any book about George Borrow is worth reading. The two volumes by Dr. Knapp are forbiddingly dense with documentary minutiae, yet it is a pleasure to loaf through them at least once. Borrow's burly personality makes itself felt in the driest philological note and vitalizes the pages even of a commonplace critic, as, indeed, it vitalizes many flatly ordinary pages in his extraordinary books. Mr. Clement K. Shorter's "George Borrow and His Circle" is interesting because it is about Borrow and not in the least because it is by Mr. Shorter. Mr. Shorter's declared ambition was to write a book that should appeal not to "Borrovians," but to "a wider public which knows not Borrow."

Every book about the fighting scholar, every moderately competent article about him must invite new immigrants into Borrow's kingdom. But Mr. Shorter is not an introductory critic, not one who by his own skill and charm summons strangers to make the acquaintance of a great man. He is an inept critic who thrives by attaching his name to great reputations. Fancy a man of any trifling literary experience, with the least enthusiasm for literature, writing about style in a style like this: "Borrow, in common with many other great English authors whose work will live, was not uniformly a good stylist. He has many lamentable fallings away from the ideals of the stylist. But he will, by virtue of a wonderful individuality, outlive many a good stylist." It is a sin so to "style" in a chapter about Edward FitzGerald, who at the sound of such sentences would have clapped his hands to his ears.

Borrow describes himself in that pugnacious defence of Lavengro which forms the appendix to "The Romany Rye." "Though he may become religious, it is hardly to be expected that he will become a very precise and straitlaced person; it is probable that he will retain, with his scholarship, something of his gypsyism, his predilection for the hammer and tongs, and perhaps some inclination to put on certain gloves, not white kid, with any friend who may be inclined for a little old English diversion, and a readiness to take a glass of ale, with plenty of malt in it, and as little hop as may well be--ale at least two years old--with the aforesaid friend--when the diversion is over."

Is not that an irresistible man? Shouldn't you think that there would have been among his contemporaries two or three hundred thousand good sports, rooters, heelers, literary and non-literary bookmakers who would bet on him and back him in any enterprise in which his adventurous spirit elected to engage? Yet it was not so. He enjoyed only a short period of popularity after the publication of "The Bible in Spain." When he died at a ripe old age in 1881, he was not well known. During his life the only highly distinguished man of letters who knew and appreciated him was FitzGerald, the exquisite poet and critic--FitzGerald, whose literary habits were as distant as possible from Borrow's, whose fine-edged rapier seems utterly alien to Borrow's short arm jab or his overhand wallop. FitzGerald had a curious accuracy in spotting what was worth while in his time and in dodging certain celebrated things that other people thought worth while, and there is nothing inconsistent in his knowing that Borrow wrote good English. But looking over Borrow's shoulder at his contemporaries, and remembering Borrow's ungainly verses, one is amused to find that the only real literary man facing one with a wink in his eye is FitzGerald. The others have their backs turned.

Consider also Borrow's posthumous fame. His first biographer is Dr. Knapp, an American professor of philology. And the modern critics who praise him are not open-air men, but bookish, library men, whose names do not suggest the robustly adventurous, Lionel Johnson, Mr. Watts-Dunton, Mr. Birrell, Mr. Seccombe.

Most literary critics praise him in terms laudatory enough to atone for the sins of their professional predecessors, whom Borrow held up to "show the creatures wriggling, blood and foam streaming from their broken jaws." His four important books are published in Everyman's Library; Mr. Birrell says that "we are all Borrovians now"; within twenty years have appeared three biographical studies, besides Mr. Shorter's. Yet Dr. Knapp's fundamental biography which was published in 1898 is out of print; that mysterious and reprehensible entity known as the public has not demanded a new edition. It is all consistent with the Borrovian inconsistency. Borrow was proud of being a gentleman and a scholar, and he was both in all true senses of the words; but he hated gentility and wrote a hammer-and-tongs chapter against the genteel; no revolutionist despising the "bourgeois" ever punched their smug faces with such violent verbal fisticuffs.

He boasts of his fondness for gypsies and prize-fighters and quite simply asks, "If he had not associated with prize-fighters, how could he have used his fists?" However, he is an aristocrat and has no sympathy with radical weavers. Despite his hatred of cant, some sentences in "The Bible in Spain" have a missionary twang. He drifts naturally away from the Church of England, yet when he attacks other ecclesiastical institutions he holds up the Church of England as the exemplar of religious truth. He scorns all deviation from fact, yet his biographers have not wholly succeeded in separating what he did from what he invented.

He was undoubtedly a polyglot, he made metrical translations from thirty languages, wrote a version of the Gospel of St. Luke in Spanish Gypsy (the first book ever attempted in any Gypsy dialect), supervised the printing of the Bible in Manchu-Tartar, made translations from the English into Manchu-Tartar, Russian and Turkish in good style, as any of us who has read them can testify. In the person of Lavengro he lost the stalwart Isopel Berners because he insisted on giving her lessons in Armenian! For all that, he made mistakes and so gave the scholars evidence that he was no scholar. He was not. He had an instinct for language, especially for that language which he knew, as we know it, probably better than he knew Manchu-Tartar. In his English narratives we can follow him and praise him or censure him without violating the severe rule which he laid down: "Critics, when they review books, ought to have a competent knowledge of the subjects which those books discuss."

The four books of Borrow which belong to English literature are "The Bible in Spain," "Lavengro," "The Romany Rye" and "Wild Wales." "The Bible in Spain" is one of those books that grow out of circumstances; it was to a large extent thought out and phrased on the scene, amid the adventures which it narrates; later it was cast into book form. It grew out of experience, but an artist shaped its growth. Borrow was sent by the Bible Society to distribute Spanish versions of the Bible. He encountered the opposition of allied church and government, was arrested, put in prison for three weeks, and liberated through the influence of British officials.

It is not, however, the Bible or his mission that stimulates Borrow's imagination. Cities and people, meetings on the road, scraps of talk, sometimes rather long conversations, monologues by Borrow, the mischances, dangers and excitements of a country at once wild and anciently civilized, Borrow's opinions about languages, characters, landscapes and anything else under the Spanish skies--such is the substance of the book; and the substance is transmitted through a style that gives little heed to elegance, that walks along like a healthy man on a tramp. The most eccentric of men, full of strange languages and odd ideas, Borrow writes English as naturally as he drinks English ale. There is not a touch of eloquence, not a great phrase; his descriptions are rather literal records of what was in front of him and how he liked it than "word-paintings." The dominant writers of his time were super-eloquent. Borrow does not speak their language. Perhaps that is why he did not rival them in popular favor, and also why he seems to us so refreshingly downright.

Borrow, like his master Defoe, has the art of setting all things forth as if they were matters of fact. Even when his characters talk of unusual matters, nay, especially when they harangue and gossip about queer things, their conversation sounds like a transcription from life and not like invention.

"Lavengro" and its sequel, "The Romany Rye," are properly classified in Everyman's Library under fiction, and "The Bible in Spain" is classified as "Travel and Topography." In what proportion autobiography and fiction are admixed is a question which does not effect the merits of the books. They all follow about the same method, and so, too, does "Wild Wales." The episodes are inconsequential, and the looseness of organization not only permits Borrow unlimited latitude of subject, but strengthens the Defoe-like illusion of truth; he never loses the tone of the veracious chronicler who puts things down in the order of nature and not according to the design of art. Between adventures and more or less pertinently to them, Borrow becomes itinerant schoolmaster and gives us instruction in language, philology, comparative literature, ethics and religion. He is not a pedant, but a humanist: "It has been said, I believe, that the more languages a man speaks, the more a man he is; which is very true, provided he acquires languages as a medium for becoming acquainted with the thoughts and feelings of the various sections into which the human race is divided; but in that case he should rather be termed a philosopher than a philologist."

Borrow need not be read continuously; if he enters upon a discourse that promises not to interest you, you can turn the pages rapidly until the eye strikes something more attractive. In his wide variety is something for everybody. The conversations with the old apple woman who had read the story of "Blessed Mary Flanders"; the chapters on pugilism; the talks with tinkers and publicans; the old man who knew Chinese but could not tell time by the clock; the outrageous attack upon Walter Scott; the theological arguments with the man in black--these are some of the choice fragments of what Borrow was pleased to call a "dream." The general atmosphere is less that of dreamland than of the broad highway in full sunlight. Since Borrow died the cult of the open air has increased, and to that as much as to anything is due the revival of interest in him. He is a great person, a colossal egotist who in his journeyings takes up the whole road. It is healthy for a man to be an egotist--especially if he is a colossal one.

SHELLEY

In his "Defence of Poetry" Shelley says that the imagination is the moral instrument. To be greatly good a man must imagine intensely and comprehensively. Poetry serves morality not by what it explicitly teaches, but by its power to awaken and enlarge the mind, to render it "the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought." Since poetry strengthens the imagination, which is the organ of the moral nature of man, "a poet would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his time and place, in his poetical creations which participate in neither." A remarkable book could be made of the best things said in prose by English poets about poetry. Perhaps one book would not hold so much. A narrower yet great and imaginative book could be made of what Shelley said about poetry and what English poets have said about him. Such a book would explain and exhibit the theory of poetry and the art of criticism. The very good edition of Shelley in the Regent Library, (edited by Roger Ingpen) contains some brief "Testimonia" which invite one to the essays from which they are taken, by Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson.

It is significant that Mr. Ingpen has not quoted from Arnold. If it is the function of poetry to expand the imagination and make the mind aware of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought, how did it happen that Arnold, a genuine poet, missed Shelley utterly? Arnold was not satisfied with his essay and intended to return to the subject. That he could do a better thing is proved by his essay on Keats, which, after he has done with his droning, schoolmasterly defence of Keats's morals, is eloquent, serene and restrainedly emotional. Shelley phrased many of the revolutionary ideas that were current in his time. Arnold's timid school-bred culture was impervious to any sort of revolutionary idea. Shelley's ideas did not impress him; he thought Shelley a wonderful singer, but a singer without a solid body of thought. Now, Shelley was the most full-minded poet of his time. He knew more about what ought to be done with the world than any of his contemporaries. That he failed to free Ireland and that the French revolution was a disaster are a reflection on other people's intelligence, not on his. It is not at all derogatory to a man's ideas that for centuries and centuries after him the world fails to come up to his teachings. If an angel is ineffectual that is not the angel's fault. Indeed a too readily effectual angel would be rather a journalist than a seer.

That the bulk of mankind is ages behind the best of its poets and seers might possibly be explained by the fact that the bulk of mankind simply has not met their thoughts. But how shall one explain the fact that artistic children of culture, who have had opportunity to read, who respond to the beauty of seers and poets, remain at the tail of the intellectual procession, are not abreast of long dead poets like Shelley, and let the leaders of their own day sweep past them unapprehended, unguessed? The thing that makes one impatient of the privilege of culture is that many of those who have enjoyed it do not lead; they drag mankind back. In "Winds of Doctrine," by Mr. George Santayana, the mind of the present age is likened to "a philosopher at sea who, to make himself useful, should blow into the sail." When you make a generality about the mind of today, you are perfectly safe, for nobody can dispute you. Nobody knows what the mind of today is doing. It is doing so many things that no one of us can keep track of it. But when a man writes himself down in a book, you can tell what his mind is doing--in that book. I should liken Mr. Santayana to a philosopher who, really wanting to sail, had forgot to cast off and was still lashed to the dock with a spanking wind blowing out to sea.

It is no wonder that Whitman, revolutionary in substance and form, perplexes the genteel and the cloistered. But it is a wonder that Shelley, whose form is classic and whom a century has transformed from demon to angel, does not reach them. A striking example of critical and philosophic blindness is Mr. Santayana's essay on Shelley. Mr. Santayana is a poet, and in this essay he says beautiful poetic things. He is not stupid as Arnold was, for once in his life. But he misses Shelley. He understands what Shelley was related to before Shelley, for example, Plato, but he does not know the relation of Shelley to his time or to the world since Shelley. What Mr. Santayana says is lucid in phrase but quite hopelessly confused in thought. He says that Shelley was "a finished child of nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature, history and society." That is not true of Shelley or any other human being in recorded history. It is worse biography than Dowden's, and it seems that so old a critic as Taine might have saved a man from writing such nonsense in the year 1912. Mr. Santayana says that "Shelley was not left standing aghast, like a Philistine, before the destruction of the traditional order." That is naive. Of course Shelley was not left standing aghast; he was trying his best to destroy the traditional order; he was butting his beautiful head against it. He did not budge the traditional order. One reason is that most people have impoverished imaginations, that the world can't do what Tolstoy thought would save it, stop and think for five minutes. Another little reason is that there are too many conservatives like Mr. Santayana teaching the young men of the world. Yet Mr. Santayana says that Shelley was "unteachable"!

Shelley believed that a man would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong in his poetry. Yet every man, poet or not, who writes at all and is not a hypocrite, embodies his conceptions of right and wrong in all his utterances. Shelley was intensely personal in his poetry. His sky-larking, star-sweeping way of expressing himself takes us out of range of his individual opinions. He spoke heart-near things in splendid distances and tried to pull the far skies down into sodden British hearts. The revolt, the defeated revolt of his own times, near to him as the news of the daily papers, he allegorized as the rebellion of a mythological Islam, and he flung the stars reeling through Spenserian stanzas. No essayist has risen fully to Shelley's poetic stature and comprehended him except another great poet, Francis Thompson. Speaking his own convictions, as every man, poet, critic, or even an academic voice of reason must and should speak his convictions, Thompson begins his essay by pleading for a reunion between his church and the art of poetry. So much of his essay seems to me interesting but not closely relevant to Shelley. After this introduction Thompson soars into the greatest essay that has ever been written on an English poet by an English poet.

Most poets, with their wonderful ears, of course write good prose. Francis Thompson has a fine essay on the prose of poets. Even Browning, who wrote little prose except the extraordinary parenthetical letters, was so clarified by Shelley that in his essay he discovered a fairly fluent and readable style.

Shelley is primarily neither philosopher nor revolutionist, but lyric poet. Yet to treat him only as a lyric poet is to forget his great drama, "The Cenci," which can hold up its head undiminished beside the Elizabethans. That idiotic British officialdom does not, or did not at last accounts, allow its performance on the regular stage, is perhaps only one more proof of how little impression Shelley's austere anarchism made on practical British morality. "The Cenci" is austere; for Shelley, it is athletically economical. The last speech of Beatrice is an unexcelled emotional climax. Yet even in this play we find that "intensely personal" note of Shelley; it speaks all his heart against all injustice. The play learned many lessons from the Elizabethans. It is not far wrong to call these lines Shakespearean:

My wife and children sleep;
They are now living in unmeaning dreams;
But I must wake, still doubting if that deed
Be just which was most necessary. O,
Thou replenished lamp! whose narrow fire
Is shaken by the wind and on whose edge
Devouring darkness hovers!

H. G. WELLS AND UTOPIA