Chapter VI: Part II: Interpretations (3)

The thing that strikes one most forcibly in reading of Andreyev is the very brief period of his creative activity, fifteen years at the most. After 1902 his writings were merely repetitions or elaborations of former themes and his premise was always the same; a negative attitude toward man, life, human intellect and institutions. He involuted early, and the proof of it in his writing was that he no longer looked in the direction of hope and encouragement. He was like a man who hurries on an unfamiliar road hoping that he will arrive at a safe and comfortable stopping place before the darkness which is fast approaching enshrouds him. He became aware that his thinking faculties that once were brilliant had lost their flexibility: “I feel as though I were in a grave up to my waist.” “I am thinking of suicide, or is suicide thinking of me?” “I am living in a jolly little house with its windows opening on a graveyard”--these are entries in his diary that indicate his increasing melancholy. But this was not his only cross; he lacked money for the basic need of life. He was on the point of coming to this country “to combat the Bolsheviki, to tell the truth about them with all the power within him and to awaken in America a feeling of friendship and sympathy for that portion of the Russian people which is heroically struggling for the rejuvenation of Russia,” when he died of arteriosclerosis, as his friend, admirer and interpreter, Mr. Herman Bernstein, wrote in a letter to the New York _Times_.

A worthy biography of a great writer; it has the fascination of fiction and the satisfaction of fact.

* * * * *

Contrast of Ford Madox Ford’s book on Joseph Conrad with Henry Festing Jones’ book on Samuel Butler will show the difference between inspired and studious writing. One is life, the other is death; one is clay into which the breath of life has been breathed, tenuous, elastic, receptive, emissive; the other is inanimate, inert, rigid, and crumbles when you handle it.

Mr. Ford has megalomania and glories in it. He has systematised delusions of grandeur to which his conduct conforms. He believes he is, and has been in his generation, the finest stylist in the English language and he expresses himself as if convinced that not only did he teach Joseph Conrad to write, but that the renown of the romancer was due in large measure to his collaboration. They are harmless delusions and do not interfere one jot or tittle with my enjoyment of his books. Indeed, as he grows older and fatter he writes better and better. Few contemporary English writers could excel _Some Do Not_ ..., none save possibly Cunninghame Graham could equal _Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance_. I am moved to that statement after reading Mr. Galsworthy’s tribute.

The Joseph Conrad that Mr. Ford presents may not be the Conrad that Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Doubleday, Mrs. Jones, or Mrs. Smith knew, but I am convinced that he would be pleased that I should know him as his alleged friend depicts him.

“A biography should be a novel.” That seems fair, since most novels are biographies. Mr. Ford has written a novel about Joseph Conrad and he has achieved a work of art. It will have the same effect upon readers as Rodin’s sculptures have upon searchers for æsthetic stimulation or appeasement. Some will be moved to smash, others will be thrilled. All will admit merit. It is an informative, not a documented, book, informative of a soul, not a body; it tells not how many days he lived and where he lived, but how he lived and thought; how he dreamed and loved; how he interpreted men’s conduct and how he shaped his own. The work is a remembrance, a logical unfolding of Joseph Conrad as he appeared to Mr. Ford from the first days of their acquaintance to the last. We are told little about Conrad’s political, religious, and social ideas. Mr. Ford was no more curious to know what his friend’s past was than we are to know that an English dramatist made a shapeless play out of one of Mr. Ford’s novels. Yet the latter episode becomes important when we learn that this, and Mr. Ford’s interest in the publication of a review, were the cause of the only “scolding” he ever got from Conrad. Forbearing and forgiving Conrad, diffident and reticent Mr. Ford!

The life of a man is an open book for no one, not even for himself. The characteristics and peculiarities of Conrad intrigued his biographer from the beginning. He binds them with tenuous threads to Conrad’s hereditary traits and the influence of his environment, and finally presents the picture complete, allowing his readers to draw their own conclusions.

Joseph Conrad, according to the portrait, was not the sort of man about whom a conclusion could be readily reached; and when it was, you could not bank on it. He was of cosmopolitan appearance: considerable British insularity, but more Slav and Eastern in his make-up. He gave the impression of a Frenchman, born and brought up in Marseilles! His hatreds seem to have exceeded his loves, but his life was a contradiction of his tastes and he has more friends than enemies. Mr. Ford avows that Conrad hated the sea and disliked to write. “_Un métier de chien_,” he used to call it. When he had made up his mind to write for a living, he had his choice of three languages: he discarded Polish instantly, French with a sigh of regret which he never overcame, and decided on English. And he hated English as a medium of prose, even more than he hated the sea! He thought in French, sometimes in Polish, never in English, unless his thoughts were confined to the most common of everyday commonplaces; when they occupied a higher sphere they were always in French. It was because of the difficulty with which Conrad was constantly confronted that he first thought of collaborating with one who was reputed to be “the finest stylist in the English language.”

Mr. Ford does not marvel at Conrad’s desire to write in English, despite the fact that he knew French so much better. Ford himself writes French better than he does English, not that he knows it better--he does not--but because “in English, he can go gaily on, exulting in his absolute command of the tongue; he can write like Ruskin or like the late Charles Garvice, at will.” In writing, but not in speaking French, he must pause for a word; it is in pausing for a word that the salvation of all writers lies. The proof of prose is in the percentage of right words--not the precious word; not even the startlingly real word. That we might have a whole book on Mr. Ford without a word about any one else!

Mr. Ford bears heavily on their collaboration, and one unfamiliar with the writings of the two authors might gather that Mr. Ford was the _fons et origo_ of much of Conrad’s work. I have no doubt that Conrad put an appreciative valuation on Mr. Ford’s assistance, but I have the same certainty that he did not evaluate it as did his biographer.

Some will think that Mr. Ford has lately had a bad quarter of an hour reading a recent number of _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ which is devoted wholly to Conrad. There, his colleagues and admirers, French and English, tell of Conrad’s personality and his writings but never a word of his “collaborator.” Water enters a duck’s back a thousand times more penetratingly than failure to accord him what he believes to be his right penetrates the dura mater of Mr. Ford Madox Ford.

Stephen Crane said, “You must not be offended by Hueffer’s manner. He patronises Mr. James, he patronises Mr. Conrad. Of course, he patronises me, and he will patronise Almighty God when they meet, but God will get used to it, for Hueffer is all right.” We are ready to agree with Stephen Crane even after we read as an antithesis that the words in which Henry James always referred to Mr. Ford were “_votre ami, le jeune homme modeste_.”

Conrad’s life revolved around his books, he was constantly occupied with the best manner in which to introduce a character of fiction. It was necessary to get the character in with a strong impression, and then work backward and forward over his past; this theory was the result of thought and experiment on the part of the collaborators. In the same manner, they devised the best opening for each type of writing; their theory was that the opening paragraph of book or story should be of the tempo of the whole performance, so that the ideal novel should begin either with a dramatic scene or with a note that should suggest the entire book. They agreed that style has no other use than to make the work interesting. Hence, they sought to render their thought in the manner which appeared the most sincere and interesting, not to make a display of erudition or of cleverness, or of juggling with words.

Mr. Ford’s book is adorned with flights into the land of constructive writing, and there is much to learn from the theories and principles expressed on the authority of both Joseph Conrad and Mr. Ford. For, there is no denying that the latter’s style is fluent and clear, picturesque enough to be original yet kept constantly within the bounds of pure English. Mr. Ford says that their greatest admiration for a stylist in any language was given to W. H. Hudson, of whom Conrad said that his writing was like the grass that the good God made to grow--when it was there, one could not tell how it came. The consensus of opinion however would seem to be that Conrad got his greatest inspiration from Turgenev.

Conrad’s philosophy was résuméd in one word, “fidelity.” He was faithful in his adhesion to Herrick’s maxim: To live merrily and trust to good letters. He never believed in using novels as a medium of preaching; if his standards of morality suffered from some of his heroes’ breaches, he would create one who would express the opinions Conrad might have been willing to express himself. Thus did Conrad expound his beliefs anonymously, and because he was a gentleman he always created another hero who would refute the preacher’s arguments. His belief was that one of the most important qualities for a novelist to cultivate was humility, to make himself as little conspicuous as possible to the reader.

Mr. Ford has a heart. Unlike his mind, it is assiduously concealed, but it pierces through the coarse envelope of the purely intellectual interest to which he attempts to confine his biography of Joseph Conrad. None of his memoir may be true, but that does not detract from it as a work of art. He shows no trace of real emotion, and his remembrances carry with them no suggestion of the broken heart which some authors would have assumed had they been writing on the same subject with the material Mr. Ford had at his disposal. His book, whether biography or autobiography, is a beautiful tribute to the man he liked and the author he loved. He says that there never was a word of spoken affection between them, never a personal note which would have revealed to either the inner sentiment the other entertained for his collaborator and playmate. But if Mr. Ford will never know what were Conrad’s feelings for him, readers of the biography will know that Mr. Ford’s book found its first inspiration in his heart, and, shaped by his affection, found expression in his intelligence. The duty which prompted him to write it was one of love, and the real sentiment, never expressed in words, is constantly watching over the author’s shoulder.

My disappointment in Mr. Ford’s book is the treatment of Conrad’s art. Conrad had a form of realism that was nearly unique, blended with an impressionism that was at once captivating and awesome. Colours, sounds, voices, visions, atmospheres, are manipulated to make a harmony and an effectiveness that are sometimes overwhelming, always stirring. He accomplished realism through impressionism, and in this he was as nearly original as one can be in literature. Then he had another great merit; he did not draw conclusions about his characters. He submitted the evidence without plea or prejudice, the reader renders the verdict. He saw life as it is, and man as he wishes to be, and he took them both in at a glance, just as Marlow did in _Chance_. He registered them and in his hectic leisure reproduced them, and thus made posterity his debtor. And Fidus Ford has made us his debtors for showing Conrad as he appeared to him. I have no doubt he was quite a different Conrad to Stephen Crane, John Galsworthy, Mr. Doubleday, and Mrs. Conrad, but not more lovable and not more worthy of the admiration the whole literary world gives him to-day.

* * * * *

Mr. Hugh l’Anson Fausset, whose English reads like translation from the French and who handles polysyllabic words as a juggler handles gilded balls, has made a study of the seventeenth century’s poet and divine, that is sure to be widely read by the cultured public and to provoke discussion and dissension. He calls his book _A Study in Discord_ and it purports to depict the conflict that went on in Donne, throughout his whole life, between the physical and the spiritual impulses of his nature. Mr. Fausset’s thesis is that neither as poet nor preacher did Donne succeed in resolving these discords. He enjoyed neither physical nor spiritual harmony but was torn in strife between his intelligence and his impulses. The Christian ideal acted as a poison on the natural man in process of proving a purge. Self-consciousness was the only discipline by which his egoism might learn the wisdom of selfishness. The tale of that battle was Donne’s legacy to literature.

“His style, whether as poet or preacher, never achieved
either the fresh effusive gaiety, or the assured serenity
of absolute Beauty. He could not create beauty out of
life; he could not even see the beauty in which the limbs
of life were veiled which flamed through and over the
bleak anatomy of fact, consecrating the perishable dust
and redeeming it of squalor and grossness.”

It is the verdict of a judge, not of a jury and Mr. Fausset can not expect that the world of letters will receive it without protest. But he cites with skill and adroitness the evidence on which it is based, holding Donne up in the successive phases of Pagan, Pensioner and Preacher. Were he more advocate than judge he might have added Penitent, for the sake of both alliteration and fuller justice, for the death of the poetic dean was artistic to a high degree and in the last months of his life after he had preached his last sermon, “Unto the Lord belong the issues of Death,” he achieved an absolute harmony of his life in the ebb-tide. The strings of his character then vibrated with small amplitude in unison.

Donne may be a study in discord, but there is nothing of discord in the writing of Fausset. He uses Donne as a peg on which to hang his concrete thought, and his organised ideas of nature, philosophy and religion. While it is a biography it is also a series of essays in which the vagaries, character and personal appearance of his subject are used to point the moral and adorn the tale. It is never left to the reader to form his own opinion of Donne, his life or his acts; for Fausset blares facts about the motive and the soul and his trumpet gives forth no uncertain sound. Even when Donne in a verse letter to a friend states, “and with vain outward things be no more moved,” Fausset immediately states “yet excessive solitude can so affect a character like Donne’s that only a restoration of ‛vain outward things’ can save it from myopia or even madness.”

It required courage to write the life of a man who furnished the material for a masterpiece of English biography. Izaak Walton’s affection for his friend transported him to immoderate commendation of the events of his career, but Mr. Gosse’s _Life and Letters of John Donne_ is just and true. It will immortalise the personality of the poet, just as his somatic features will be perpetuated by the picture in a shroud he so studiously had made.

Fausset can not credit the picture of Donne given by the “gentle Walton” for the reason that Walton wrote on Donne in the spirit of love and admiration. Fausset writes of him neither with love nor hate, but with the scalpel always in hand, dissecting, getting beneath the surface. He is not the tender physician, he is the scientist at work in the laboratory of research with Donne as the cadaver. There is a charm, a beauty, and at times a poetic fervour of expression in the writing which reminds one of the Essay on Shelley by Francis Thompson. One can not help feeling that Donne was doomed from the first if we believe the picture painted of him with unerring hand by Fausset.

But Mr. Fausset is a student and exponent of personality and it is as such that we should estimate his work. Judged by the two studies that he has published: the one under consideration and _Keats; A Study in Development_, he has insight, sound psychology and a logical mind. With years he will grow more kindly and less turbulent. Meanwhile he shall have the benefit of our prayers that the happy day may hasten.

As Mr. Fausset sees him, John Donne was physically a genius; intellectually “possessed”; one who ranged almost every scale of experience, and upon each struck some note: harsh, cunning, arrogant or poignant, which reverberates down the roof of time; a poet who was at times near a monster, full-blooded, cynical and gross; a thinker, curious, ingenious and mathematical; a seer brooding morbidly over the dark flux of things; a saint aspiring to the celestial harmony. He served the flesh with the same ardour with which he sought the ideal. He was a sensualist and a thinker, a poet and a priest, a pagan and a Christian. More than any contemporary he reflected the three aspects of life which met in confused association in seventeenth century England: Mediævalism, the Renaissance and the Reformation. The physical, intellectual and spiritual elements each in turn dominated his personality. The purpose of his life was to bring this trinity of forces into harmony and by so doing discover a new and deeper unity in the Universe itself. It is Mr. Fausset’s belief that he did not succeed in this purpose but the tortured history of such a genius lays bare the potentialities of humanity and of civilisation. His life was one long battle with death: the death of physical grossness and mental conceit, of worldly ambition and spiritual complacence. He had explored the secret of the senses and the subtleties of the mind. And so, psychologist and sensualist as he was, he was competent in the later days of his spirituality to report adequately of the soul. He related poetry to religion, and religion to truth, and he showed us how to relate ourselves to God. His life teaches us that spiritual satisfaction is unworthy of the name, if it be achieved at the sacrifice of intellectual honesty and that religious experience is the prize of perpetual conflict. Such is the man that Mr. Fausset has composited from the creations of Walton, Gosse, Chambers and Grierson.

John Donne was born in London in 1573 and died there in 1631. His life was a stormy one, tempestuous in youth, squally in maturity, blusterous in old age. Calm overtook him but a few weeks before his death. He was a neurotic individual and his neural disequilibrium is testified by his portraits and by his conduct. A portrait of him made at the age of nineteen shows a brow slightly receding and narrowing at the temples, prominent eyes, gigantic nose coarsely flattened at the base, thick lips and pointed chin. His resistance to emotional influences was defective and he reacted strongly to inner as well as to outer influences. From boyhood there was lack of equanimity in the development of the psychic personality although his intellect made him always a conspicuous figure and he “pursued mathematics, law or theology with the same tenacious passion as an ephemeral liaison.” He was combative, satirical, arrogant, Sybaritic, Dionysiac. The sap did not ascend his tree of life gently or harmoniously; it gushed upward, often geyser-like, drenching conventions and submerging morality. He insisted upon licence to do as he pleased and clamoured for freedom and promiscuity, especially in love.

“Who ever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he’s one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.”

He, like St. Paul, believed that woman is the glory of the man and was created for him, and he had a contempt for women’s vaunted constancy.

“Foxes, and goats--all beasts--change when they please.
Shall woman, more hot, wily, wild than these,
Be bound to one man...?”

But he was soon to encounter one who was not polyandrous. Anne Moore, in a period of sixteen years, bore him twelve children. He was about thirty years old when he married her. The literary fecundity of his third decade is represented by _Songs and Sonnets_ and _Elegies_. Mr. Fausset is probably correct in his claim that the poetry of Donne’s early maturity was, like Goethe’s, a reflection and refraction of his loves. Donne’s contention was that sex neither can be nor should be transcended and the _Elegies_ are his earnest of it.

But his moral nature was awakening even before he met Anne and he began to question:

“Why should our clay
Over our spirits so much sway
To tie us to that way?”

And he denied that he had formerly protested

“Change is the nursery
Of music, joy, life and eternity.”

The manner in which he broke with the nameless lady whose husband was a deformed man and was stationary all day in a basket-chair, affords Mr. Fausset an opportunity to discharge some verbal pyrotechnics, and to disgorge some righteous wrath. “So, at last, he turned upon the poor woman, whom so short a time before he had bent to his purpose with a militant ardour and a shameless licence. The cold and cruel cynicism, the elemental spite of his last farewell to one who must at least have given as much as she received, has no parallel in our literature. In truth, no one is so ruthlessly vindictive, so callous to every claim of sentiment and generosity as the moralist new risen from the ashes of the brute.” He then quotes “The Apparition” in which Donne taunts her as “feign’d vestal” and threatens one day to square accounts with her. It was not a pretty letter but Mr. Fausset is likely a very chivalric man and “brute” is scarcely justified.

Donne married in haste but never repented, probably because Anne never questioned her husband or tried to improve him.

The first years of their married life were lean. Parental blessing was slow in coming, and slower still was paternal allowance. But they both came and soon after conversion. “Anne Moore served as the bridge which Donne, at least as the lover, climbed from the abyss to the cheerful daylight and even to a homely eminence.” As the fruit of his passion for his mistresses had been disgusted cynicism, that of his devotion to his wife was ecstatic platonism, which now became reflected in his poetry.

Mr. Fausset takes us through the fourth decade of his life, documenting the transformation that took place in his soul from cynicism to platonism, from realist to mystic, from Catholicism to Protestantism, by quotations from his poetry, by pen pictures of his friends, particularly Mrs. Herbert who was “an idyllic retreat of sanity and piety and sympathy in a sultry world” and by descriptions of his reactions to illness, “illness the sword of God.” His religious conversion was the important thing and these are the words that Mr. Fausset uses to describe its onset:

“The young Dionysus, who had broken from the restraints
of Rome, seeking his way back to some primal ecstasy,
which conventions seemed at best to adulterate, was
now attempting to translate his ecstasy into ideas. He
had turned at first to those tortured saints of the
Dark Ages in whom sensuality and science melted into
mysticism, and then to the pure but tenuous conceptions
of Plato. But not for him were those enchanted bridals
of the soul with God, of the mind with Beauty, in
which the body passed away in flame or in smoke. There
was too much of the satyr in his seership, and of the
casuist in his mysticism. His branches might strain up
heavenward but they never forgot their native earth. His
only hope was to subdue his lawlessness to logic, until
the two, blended together in a rational whole, achieved
an equilibrium between mind and body as he had already
discovered for his passions.”

Rome suffocated him and Protestantism seemed a pallid, political compromise, but thanks to frequent prayers, to use his own words, he effected the transition. Donne succeeded in generating the spiritual from the struggle of the rational with the natural, and by so doing Mr. Fausset believes he waged a battle of human consciousness two hundred years in advance of his time.

The turn of the tide in Donne’s worldly affairs dated from 1610 when he wrote a poem, “The Funeral Elegy,” commemorative of the charms and potentialities of a girl whose death had resulted from a box on the ear administered by her adoring father. It was a shot in the dark on the part of Dr. Donne but he “got” his man. Sir Robert Drury provided him a home for three years, then took him abroad. These were years of spiritual growth, emotional equilibrium and physical exhilaration. Soon after his return he took Holy Orders and after much manœuvring, King James, before whom he preached his first sermon, capitulated. His worldly fortunes were assured. It now only remained to make his heavenly ones.

Mr. Fausset indulges in one of his frequent rhetorical rhapsodies in describing Donne’s first appearance under the stole:

“The figure who mounted the pulpit in these early days of
his ministry was not the spectral divine, the emaciated,
almost sardonic mystic, who was later to hypnotise his
audience by the reverberations of his eloquence, the
intensities of his imagination, and the sepulchral
tones of his voice. He was a man, despite the ravages
of ill-health, still in his prime, his beard indeed
touched with grey, but his face and carriage retaining
that air of buccaneering insolence, almost of dignified
roguery, which we have remarked in the young man. Arrayed
in vestments and uplifted by the sense of an august
occasion, his appearance must have been singularly
striking, suggesting indeed some challenging John the
Baptist or one of Dürer’s swarthy evangelists. At the
same time he did not forget the courtier in the priest.
There was a ‛sacred flattery’ in his address, which if it
‛beguiled men to amend,’ also gratified their vanity. His
learning was beyond dispute, but the crabbed style of his
correspondence, no less than the angular conceits of his
poetry, could scarcely have prepared his friends for the
miracle of eloquence which he was speedily to achieve,
pungent, rhythmical, varied, and, even in its passages of
scholastic argument, strangely sinuous and compelling.”

It is Donne’s spiritual life that his latest biographer finds worthy of unstinted praise, and it is perhaps for that reason that Part Four of his book entitled _The Preacher_ will be found least interesting by the general reader.

Although his friend Izaak Walton wrote: “Donne’s marriage was the remarkable error of his life,” it is difficult to believe him. Anne put out the fire of his concupiscence though it cost her her life, and from its ashes his soul arose. After her death, he withdrew from the world and “in this retiredness,” Walton writes, “which was often from the sight of his dearest friends, he became crucified to the world and all those vanities, those imaginary pleasures that are daily acted on that ruthless stage; and they were as perfectly crucified to him. Now his soul was elemented of nothing but sadness; now grief took so full possession of his heart as to leave no place for joy; if it did, it was a joy to be alone, where, like a pelican in the wilderness, he might bemoan himself without witness or restraint, and pour forth his passions like Job in the days of his affliction.” It was through an agony of remorse that Donne strove for harmony of body and mind. He preached to others to express and reassure himself. Mr. Fausset believes that his exhortation “was not the flower of any abstract love of humanity,” but of intense personal preoccupation.

Preaching did not provide an adequate vent for his emotions so again he turned to poetry which, in keeping with his spiritual integration, he now cast in sonnet form. In these sonnets, Donne was primarily absorbed in asserting his emancipation from worldly values, and lamenting past sin. Mr. Fausset sees him “wooing his God with both the fervour and the self-disgust with which he had before addressed his mistresses”; even the erotic imagery recurs. His religion had become a personal passion and a personal hazard to which theology was no more than a prop. Of the many judgments his interpreter has passed upon him, this is the fairest.

Serious illness thrust itself upon him soon after his promotion to the deanship of St. Paul’s. Even in those days, before “nervous breakdown” was fashionable and a euphemism for episodic mental disorder, it was attributed to overwork and emotional tension, two very rare causes of disease. But he began to be seriously ill, ill of the disease that twelve years later conditioned his death. Before Mr. Gosse published his biography of Donne, he submitted the facts of his illnesses to a London diagnostician who satisfied himself that it was malignant disease of the stomach. But in 1899 when that diagnosis was made, we knew practically nothing about the most insidious, and the most prevalent form of chronic sepsis: that which has its origin in the tonsils and teeth. With the temerity of one whose statement can not be disproven, I boldly assert that, had his tonsils been removed after the alleged attack of typhoid fever and his teeth X-rayed when he felt himself at forty-five lapsing into an infirm and valetudinarian state, he would have lived out the time allotted by the psalmist. Had he been vouchsafed these natural years of piety and preparation, he would have accomplished that synthesis of the physical and spiritual which Mr. Fausset denies him, and the world would not have had _The Devotions_ in which Donne incorporated the features and fears of his illness. England waited three hundred years for some one to parallel his performance of clinical self-observation and then found it in the young man who under the pen name of W. N. P. Barbellion wrote a book as self-revelatory as the _Confessions of Saint Augustine_.

Donne came to many fertile oases in his travel through the desert of sin, to many pools of Bethesda in wading the rivers of disease. The Herbert family was the most refreshing and restoring. In George Herbert, fifteen years his junior, he saw what he would like to have been; and in Herbert’s mother, he saw his ideal of spiritual womanhood. “The Autumnal,” his poem of homage to Magdalen Herbert, embodies his idea of the platonism of the soul as distinct from that of the mind. Through it, there breathes, as Mr. Fausset says, a quiet, tender as the evening sky before it has begun to pale with premonition of night.

Donne devoted the last five years of his life to dying, and he did it with the same intensity and artistry as that with which he devoted the first five years of his maturity to living. He interpreted himself the seventeenth century representative of him that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias and bent himself to the last atom of his strength to make straight the Lord’s paths. It is a stirring and touching narrative and Mr. Fausset has made the most of it; reading it, one is forced to agree that he has established his contention that Donne never achieved a harmonious conscience; for, even in his hours of profoundest religiosity, he was dependent in a measure upon intuition for his faith; the dread of death, and the doubt of God’s mercy were constantly recurring, even though he maintained the priestly attitude with outward calm and enviable courage. In the years of his wisdom he did his best to crucify nature and to implore grace from Him who suffered crucifixion that man might live eternally.

His whole life was a series of _beaux gestes_ and the last the most picturesque. Standing upon an urn, with closed eyes and folded hands, shrouded as for the grave, he had his portrait painted. And of that portrait his latest biographer says:

“It was a face at once grotesque and sublime, sinister
and sanctified, fiendish and devout; seared and purified,
cynically ecstatic. The craftiness and arrogance of his
youth were sobered into a hungry, a cadaver simper, while
his mysticism seemed to glimmer through the shadowy
hollows with a phosphorescent life.”

For Mr. Fausset, Donne reflects and condenses the long labour of the man to outgrow the beast and approach the divine. In his unrest we see our own reflected.

This _Study in Discord_ puts Mr. Fausset in the class of biographers at whose head stands Mr. Lytton Strachey. The reader may be annoyed by his obvious inimicality to the realistic strain in Donne’s character; he may be wearied by the turbulence of his exposition, but he can not fail to realise that in reading this book he is companioning a man of education, imagination, sentiment and vision, though his heart sometimes dominates his head.

Throughout the biography we capture as interesting a revelation of the mind of Fausset as we do of Donne, and his desire in writing the biography is summed up in one sentence in the epilogue, “And this soul is worthy of all honour; for though defeated it never accepted a fraudulent peace.”

The reader who knows of Donne from Campbell’s British Poets will, after reading Mr. Fausset’s book, be likely to agree that “the life of Donne is more interesting than his poetry.” It is indeed, and it becomes more interesting after each biographer has had his turn at it. The last word has not yet been said but the best that has been said is the last.

* * * * *

Thomas Burke, a young Britisher who has familiarised readers of English with the East End of London and its motley inhabitants, who writes about unclean things in a clean way and of vicious people wholesomely, and who has rare talent for creating literary atmosphere, calls his biography _The Wind and the Rain_. Next to Mr. Anderson’s story it is the most captivating narrative that I have read in a long time. Scarcely are these words written before pages of the _Memoirs of an Editor_ by Edward P. Mitchell are reflected in the mirror of memory.

Thomas Burke says nothing of his parents; I fancy he did not know them. His first recollections are of his uncle, a gardener with a sense of humour, and of a Chinese with an appearance of mystery who was later deported because he trafficked in opium and morals. He got from the latter what Dostoievsky got from epileptic attacks: a sense of time arrested, crystallised; a sense of eternity; a fancy that always, behind the curtain of time, the joy of the moment had been. The secret that Pater attributed to Mona Lisa he learned from Quong Lee. Though Tommy was but ten years old, he knew all the beauty and all the evil of the heart of Asia: its cruelty, its grace, its wisdom. And the contact generated a writer, for from his sixteenth year he has been animated by a single motive: to express in writing one moment in a London side street. He has not yet succeeded to his own satisfaction. As Marcel Proust seeks to revive the memories and reveries associated with incidents and experiences of childhood and youth, Mr. Burke struggles to make come again “the pins-and-needles sensation in the back of my neck” and to have the soul feeling that accompanied it when Quong Lee beckoned him to his shop and gave him a piece of ginger.

Mr. Burke’s life seems to have been without remarkable event. He stalked poverty, and he fell in love with a snob who had an understanding friend of her own sex who shared a flat with her; he made a half-hearted attempt to get on in the City and a whole-hearted one to be a bohemian; and he saw the seams of the seamy side of life burst wide open now and then. But he also met men with hearts, like Mr. Creegan who gave him his first leg-up. This benefactor rescued him from _une maison de joie et de jeux_ where he cleaned boots and ran errands after he left the orphanage; fed him, clothed him, lodged him, got him a job, and started him on the road that led to hobnobbing with Caruso and reminiscing in Monaco. And he met Gracie Scott. If he treated Gracie as he says in his book he did, it will be one of the sweetest memories of his life when that of Cicely shall have gone forever and that of Cosgrove shall have faded.

One of the many precious lies that grown-ups like to tell themselves is that the days of their youth were happy days. Mr. Burke is not addicted to that sort of story-telling. “I had little happiness then, partly because I was young, and partly because I had no friends, no money, bad food, and no hope. There was just one thing I had then which belongs to all youth, however miserable. Though utterly joyless, I had a tremendous _capacity_ for joy.” One may share that tremendous capacity--for he still has it--by reading _The Wind and the Rain_.

* * * * *

“It is better to be beggared out of hand by a scape-grace
nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.”
R. L. S.

Mr. John A. Steuart has written two large volumes to explain our legacy from Robert Louis Stevenson, which was “a delightful contribution to the romantic literature of the world and an example of courage that will continue to inspire men to remote generations.”

A generation has come and gone since Stevenson died. Of the one now on the threshold even those gifted with imagination and those who understand the impulsiveness of their countrymen, will find it difficult to understand the esteem in which he was held in America in the beginning of the present century. To form any conception of the appreciation, praise and adulation that were bestowed on his writings, they will have to turn to contemporary criticism.

The British “discovered” Stevenson after we revealed him, but when it came to approbation they surpassed us. Then there was an earthquake in the literary world. Henley, the intimate of his early maturity and the doughty champion of his genius, who more than any one else made a public for him, published an article in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ which seemed to give the _coup de grâce_ to Stevenson as a great writer. The blow glanced off Stevenson and stunned Henley; the spectators howled and called the latter traitor, and ghoul. When the excitement subsided dispassionate witnesses reflected upon the matter. Some of them were moved to re-read Stevenson. Others to read him for the first time. The result was that devotees of Stevenson grew less numerous. However, when in 1914 a temperate and generous critic, a novelist of established reputation, Frank Swinnerton, published a critical study of Stevenson which was adverse to his candidacy to immortality, it precipitated a shower of abuse, less inundating than that which submerged Henley, but still disagreeable. However, since that time, indiscriminate adulation of Stevenson has given place to critical estimation. The result to-day is that most judges agree with Swinnerton that it is no longer possible for a serious critic to place him among the great writers because in no department of letters--save the boy’s book and the short-story--has he written work of first-class importance. His latest biographer would seem to agree, though it is difficult to say just what Mr. Steuart believes, for his writing is so overladen with verbiage, so surcharged with platitudes, so interpolated with irrelevancies and so replete with alleged inside information that one can not see the wood for the trees. But he does not agree that Stevenson was not a “great” man for when “he is summed up, when his qualities, mental and moral, have been analysed and tabulated, it will be found that a superb courage crowns all and from that master-quality flows other virtues in which he was conspicuous--chivalry, generosity, love of justice, an eager humanity, a passion for the happiness of the race. It is valour more than aught else that enchants, inspires, and endears him to the people of two hemispheres.” Probably no one will contest Mr. Steuart’s statement, but surely it is an extraordinary reason for a critical biography. No one would think of writing a life of Meredith or of Heine because they displayed courage that excites our envy and elicits our admiration. Was the courage of Heine or of Meredith inferior to that of Stevenson and what was the quality of Stevenson’s that made it so distinguished? Heine had a disease which, at the time, was never known to end in recovery, Stevenson had only a disease (so far as his latest biographer seems to know) that frequently is cured and nearly always tends to quiescence when given half a chance. Why has John Addington Symonds’ courage not been estimated properly as an asset of greatness?

In truth Mr. Steuart takes himself too seriously. He has not advanced Stevenson’s reputation an atom. Mr. Graham Balfour’s biography of Stevenson may be a barley-sugar effigy of him, and it may make him out a seraph in chocolate as Henley claimed, and the portrait may have been touched up to please the family as Mr. Steuart maintains, but taken in connection with Mr. Swinnerton’s book, Miss Masson’s _Life_, and the publications of the Bibliophile Society of Boston, it is a competent account of his life and accomplishments.

There is a feature of Stevenson’s personality that has never been touched upon, but which, now that Mr. Steuart has woven a crown of oak leaves for him, must be discussed, and that is his infantilism. It was his curse as it was in a large measure his shame. It showed itself in many ways: in his relationship to his mother, to Alison Cunningham, “Cunny, my second mother,” to Lady Colvin and to his wife; in his speech, dress, manner and imitativeness; in his gestures; in his emotional reactions and determinations; and more than anything else in his inability to display common sense and ordinary prudence. He was always under the dominion of women older than himself and he enjoyed it; they all mothered him. He had no more capacity to get along without mothering than a ten-year-old child has. He was as interested in his appearance as Narcissus. “He could not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidence any time he passed it; he was never so much in earnest, never so well-pleased, never so irresistible as when he wrote about himself,” Henley wrote and all his biographers agree. That this is a childish trait, no one needs to be told. His speech, manner and dress never failed to attract attention and he took great pains that they should not. Yearning for notice and efforts to secure it are equally well-known infantile traits. Many children invent fictitious parents and forebears. Stevenson was one of them. Mr. Steuart has discovered that one Margaret Lizars of French descent was his great-grandmother, and he naïvely remarks that this explains Stevenson’s oddities. His imitativeness is testified to by the way he taught himself to write and this incident is discussed in the book under consideration in a chapter entitled _The Sedulous Ape_. It would be difficult to say which was the most childish of all Stevenson’s _beaux gestes_, but I shall say, harmonious with heredity, the one he did not make; this incident suggests another illustrious victim of adult infantilism, Shelley. All admirers of that genius know that he went single-handed and inexperienced to Ireland to redress her wrongs. Stevenson, on hearing that a Kerry farmer had been murdered by “moonlighters” and his wife and children boycotted, proposed to rent the Curtis farm and to proceed there with his family!

His dealings with his father, his meeting and courtship of Mrs. Fanny de Grift Osbourne, his break with Henley, all conform to the teachings of child psychology and are harmonious with child-behaviour, and they are even more suggestive of infantilism than are the playing with tin-soldiers, and the setting up and operating a toy press, which was his diversion at Davos when, in his thirty-first year, he sought health there a second time.

But nothing shows his infirmity so conspicuously as his inability to look after his impaired health. It is one of the most pathetic chapters in all biography, Stevenson’s imbecilic neglect of his health. No sooner was he benefited by a stay at Bournemouth, Hyères, Davos, Adirondacks, South Sea Islands, than he, with what looks like deliberation, went somewhere or did something which any one but a child would know was suicidal. The climate of Hyères suited him; in later years he declared that it was the only time in his life that he was really happy. He was lazy, yet at the same time productive, and he felt well. But he must go home, and the reason for going was that “he was yearning to get back to her who had so often and so effectively comforted him.”

Time after time he did the same thing. In fact he was on his way home from Samoa and he had reached Sydney when symptoms developed that made further flight impossible. His reason for selecting Samoa instead of Tahiti or Honolulu was supremely childish, “it was awful fun.” It must be borne in mind that adult infantilism displays itself far oftener in the emotional side of the individual’s make-up than in the intellectual. Geniuses, particularly in the realm of the fine arts, are often emotionally infantile. It accounts in a measure for the quarrels, tantrums and vagaries of artists, and entirely for their reputation of being neither practical nor provident.

Any one who would convince himself that many emotional and a few physical characteristics of infancy clung to Stevenson in his maturity should read the Essay _Child’s Play_ in the volume _Virginibus Puerisque_.

Mr. Steuart harbours the delusion that he has brought to light something new about Robert Louis Stevenson. One person familiar with everything that Stevenson wrote and practically everything that has been written about him fails to find it. To be sure he found out the name of the bonny lass with whom Stevenson fell in love while she was an earning guest of Mrs. Warren in Edinburgh, but he should be ashamed for having published it. He found out also that Stevenson did not live a strictly continent life, either before or after marriage. That is no business of Steuart, and it does not concern readers of Stevenson.

One feels on reading the chapter in which “Claire” is introduced that writing it, Mr. Steuart experienced a kind of salacious exaltation and his apology in behalf of Stevenson makes one creep. Why Wordsworth is dragged in, no one save the author knows. He must be aware that it was not pruriency or pathological inquisitiveness that gave rise to the Wordsworth-Vallon story. Critics and interpreters had sought for explanation of obscurities in the philosopher-poet’s work. The story explained them.

Mr. Steuart is satisfied that he did a Sherlock Holmes turn about the Henley-Stevenson break. Let us admit it. How do the details that he gives make Stevenson’s personality clearer to us? Mrs. Stevenson did not like Henley, just as Mr. Steuart does not like Mrs. Stevenson. Henley wrote Stevenson a letter and requested that it should not be shown to anybody, a thing which would indicate that, though he was captain of his fate and master of his soul, he did not know the a. b. c. of the matrimonial game. Stevenson showed it to his wife and “der Tag” dawned for her. The battle was fought and Stevenson won, but at the expense of his peace of mind and happiness. The reparations have not been made. No one can yet tell who will finally be called the moral victor, but unless all signs and portents are to be distrusted it is R. L. S.

Mr. Steuart’s book is interspersed with homilies on education and on British valour; bromidic reflections: “As all the world knows, the Casino at Monte Carlo is the centre of life and excitement to that gay community”; platitudinous moralisations: “In such matters fathers are apt to forget they were once young themselves”; and “adversity, it has been said, is the true test of manhood”; meticulous explanations such as the varieties of solicitor in Scotland; and studied padding, as an example of which may be cited seven-eighths of what he says about George Meredith. Some people may be glad to hear what he thinks of Meredith as a novelist and as a person, but there will be fewer probably after his book on Stevenson has been read.

“It is certain,” writes the author, “that Vailima, with its ever increasing strain, did much to kill Stevenson.” Not nearly so much as these two volumes, which were intended as a monument to him, have done! Had Mr. Steuart talked with every old woman in Scotland who had ever seen Stevenson, had he searched the register of every lupinaria of Stevenson’s day in Edinburgh, and had he spent twice as much time as he has in reverence before a bust of Henley, he could not understand Stevenson the man or Stevenson the romancer.

Finally there is something patronising and condescending in his attitude toward Stevenson, something contemptuous toward Mrs. Stevenson and something studiously neglectful of Lady Colvin that is very irritating. The reader who can rise from Mr. Steuart’s volume without feeling that the author takes himself with sibylline seriousness is fortunate, and the reader who can peruse the closing line without a smile should take a cholagogue. His salute of Stevenson makes one think of a wood-pecker taking leave of an eagle.

V
POETS

TROBADOUR, by _Alfred Kreymborg_.
WILLIAM BLAKE IN THIS WORLD, by _Harold Bruce_.
JOHN KEATS, by _Amy Lowell_.
POE--MAN, POET AND CREATIVE THINKER, by _Sherwin Cody_.
EDGAR A. POE, A PSYCHOPATIC STUDY, by _Dr. John W.
Robertson_.
RIMBAUD, by _Egdell Rickword_.

Despite the number and varieties of biographies published every year, we rarely come upon one that is so interesting that it can not be put down until the last page is read, one that grips us like a novel such as _The Constant Nymph_ or _Tono Bungay_. Alfred Kreymborg, a maker of verses without rhyme or capitals, some of which have great emotional range, has succeeded in writing a story of his life that rivets our attention. And he has pitched it in a key that persistently revives pleasant memories. Reading it, one feels that it is the faithful portrait of a soul in its adventures through life. Mr. Kreymborg is an uncommon individual: a modest artist. He is content that his artistry shall dawn upon us gradually, that we shall discover it as it were. He does not proclaim it in the first chapter and reiterate it in all the succeeding ones.

Neither our country nor its metropolis has been considered favourable breeding ground for artists, nor is our atmosphere congenial to the artistic temperament. It is difficult to conceive of more sterile soil or environment for the growth and display of the emotional and intellectual endowment that constitute artistry than those in which Mr. Kreymborg found himself at his birth and during his formative years. Indeed, he can not even be said to have been fortunate in his parents, though his father, a German cigar packer, had a sense of humour, liked Jews, and detested Tammany Hall; and his mother played the Butterbrod Walzer and was optimistic. But that his talent was nevertheless “in the family” on his mother’s side is testified by his Aunt Isabelle, who went to the library every day, and was devoted to things called ideals.