Needles and pins, needles and pins,When a man marries his trouble begins!
Needles and pins, needles and pins,When a man marries his trouble begins!
Needles and pins, needles and pins,When a man marries his trouble begins!
His wife bore him some children, and then wished to resume her career as an actress. Strindberg objected to this, and they quarreled, and after seven years they parted. The poet considered this an irremediable tragedy; for he held a mystical idea, that marriage is an actual union of flesh and spirit, and to tear a couple apart is to maim them both. Strindberg put his agony into a book, “The Confessions of a Fool”; a ghastly record, yet one can hardly keep from smiling over it. The author preaches the doctrine that woman is inferior to man; he pounds upon this theme—and then proceeds to tell you marital incidents which make it clear that the woman was fully a match for him!
Strindberg believes that woman is inferior, not merely physically, intellectually and morally, but biologically;she is a half-way creature between man and child, and it is her duty to submit herself in all things to the biologically superior male. But nature for some reason has failed to inform her that she is inferior, and the perverse creature insists upon trying to act as if she were equal; so everything goes to wreck. Somebody said that Herbert Spencer’s idea of a tragedy was a generalization killed by a fact. Strindberg’s tragedy was the same, but he never recognized it; he clung to his generalization, not merely through this marriage, but through two others, which failed in the same way, and for the same reason.
It is true that some women are predatory; it is true that a great many women abuse the power they get. That may be expected of every enslaved race or class or sex. But the only way to become fit for power is to exercise it, and the only way to get it is to take it. The women who broke Strindberg’s three marriages were like the suffragettes with hammers; they were using the only arguments their opponents would heed. As a result of their efforts, some of us now live in a happier time, having comrade-wives who do not abuse their share of power, but co-operate with their husbands in carrying the burdens of life.
But whatever you think about Strindberg’s biological superiority, you cannot deny the power of the tragedy he wrote upon his thesis. It is called “The Father,” and shows a man undermined and destroyed by a cunning, determined woman, who sets out to break him to her will. Also you have to admit the reality of “Miss Julia,” which portrays the degeneracy of the ruling classes in Sweden. This high-born young lady, who starts an intrigue with a man-servant in her household, might be a page out of a “yellow” Sunday supplement in America.
Strindberg came close to the line of insanity; he spent two or three years in a sanitarium, and wrote a book about these borderland states, “Inferno.” Then he took up with Swedenborg, and evolved into a Christian mystic, and went back into a second childhood of bible-worship. But that did not keep him from carrying on frantic quarrels with his enemies, and pouring out many volumes of personalities. Strangely enough, there is a kind of impersonality in it all, because the man is so tragically earnest. He is trying to find the truth, and puts himself before usas a document; no one but Rousseau has done this so completely. Therefore, we think of Strindberg as one of the great teachers. Let the artist give us truth, and we can always find use for it.
Another great writer of this time was troubled about the problem of the ladies. August Strindberg married three, and experienced three tragedies. Friedrich Nietzsche sought to marry one, but she would not have him; after which he wrote contemptuously of them all. Despite the fact that he was a clergyman’s son, he suffered from hereditary syphilis, and went insane—a tragic waste of the greatest genius of modern times.
Nietzsche was born in 1844, and became a professor of philology at a Swiss university. His health broke down from eye-strain at the age of thirty-five, and he retired upon a small pension. His insanity came at the age of forty-five, and he lived eleven years longer, slowly rotting to pieces, and meantime growling like a wild beast.
Nietzsche’s enemies, of course, made the most of this cruel fate; they said that he was insane all the time. That is an easy way to dispose of his writings—easy for the average person, who has never experienced such emotional states as Nietzsche dealt with, and does not wish to be troubled by them. But a few who have experienced these states are in better position to decide. Nietzsche’s mature work is perfectly sane; it contains many contradictions, but we have to permit an original mind to grow. His masterpiece, “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” contains the greatest imaginative writing of several centuries.
But we must remember that these books were written by a man who was ill and suffering atrociously. He declared that every year meant for him two hundred days of pain. His view of life is the product of a pain-driven mind, like the ecstasy experienced by martyrs undergoing torture. We do not expect ordered and systematic thought from such persons; but we may learn from them strange secrets concerning the possibilities of the human spirit.
One of Nietzsche’s doctrines is the exaltation of thearistocratic over the democratic virtues. He was the son of a Prussian state pastor, and he glorified war, and was taken as the spiritual director of the invasion of Belgium. It would be easy for me to deal with him on that basis, and draw and quarter him amid general acclamation. The only trouble is that Nietzsche is one of the pioneers of the moral life, a conqueror of new universes for our race.
There are two sides to his message, the positive and the negative. On the positive side it is the record of an exalted poet, proclaiming brotherhood, service, and consecration. On its negative side it represents the fears and repugnances of an invalid, shrinking from life which was too much for him, and seeking refuge in his own visions, where he could be master without interference from a hostile world. Where Nietzsche loved something, you will generally find it something great and noble; where he hated something, you will often find it a thing he failed to understand. There were two subjects upon which he was entirely ignorant; the first woman, and the second economics. This double ignorance distorted all his thought, and has brought it about that his influence counts on the side of the forces he hated.
Nietzsche agreed with the proposition of the present book, that all the arts are propaganda. He showed how those who were able to face life and to conquer made themselves a philosophy and art of self-assertion and development; those who were afraid of life made a philosophy and art of self-sacrifice and renunciation. Nietzsche explained Christianity as a slave religion, evolved by the victims of Roman imperialism; he proclaimed himself Antichrist, and advocated a “master morality.”
Nietzsche’s supreme contribution is the interpretation of evolution; he became the prophet and seer of this doctrine, developing a concept of the Overman, a higher being into which the human race is destined to evolve. Bernard Shaw has popularized the term Superman; but I venture to stick to Overman, which I used in “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” several years before “Man and Superman” was published. Nietzsche might have chosen the term “Supermensch” if he had wished; but he wrote “Uebermensch.”
This concept Nietzsche set forth in “Zarathustra” withfervor and splendor of imagery, a chant the like of which the German language had never known before. Ten years ago, editing “The Cry for Justice,” made up of the world’s revolutionary literature from thirty languages and five thousand years of history, I gave the last place to a quotation from “Zarathustra”; the reason being that it represents to me the ultimate of modern thought, the greatest words in recent poetry. I quote a portion of this passage:
Man is a cord, tied between Beast and Overman—a, cord above an abyss.A perilous arriving, a perilous traveling, a perilous looking backward, a perilous trembling and standing still.What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and no goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-over and a going-under.I love them that know not how to live, be it even as those going under, for such are those going across.I love them that are great in scorn, because these are they that are great in reverence, and arrows of longing toward the other shore.
Man is a cord, tied between Beast and Overman—a, cord above an abyss.
A perilous arriving, a perilous traveling, a perilous looking backward, a perilous trembling and standing still.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and no goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-over and a going-under.
I love them that know not how to live, be it even as those going under, for such are those going across.
I love them that are great in scorn, because these are they that are great in reverence, and arrows of longing toward the other shore.
You will note that these paragraphs celebrate the fame of the martyrs, those who sacrifice themselves for the race. Are we not here right back in the spirit of Jesus? I do not mean Christianity, the thing that is taught in churches, the creeds of the other-worldly; I am referring to the revolutionary carpenter, who taught brotherhood in its high heroic sense, and proclaimed the kingdom of heaven upon earth.
Nietzsche wrote and taught in that same heroic sense; but because of his two great ignorances, concerning women and concerning economics, he could not make distinctions, and save his message from being interpreted in the interest of class greed and materialism. When we see the image of Jesus set up in gold and jewels, and carried forth to bless wholesale murder for the profit of the Russian Tsardom, or of J. P Morgan & Company’s international loans, we are witnessing one of mankind’s historic tragedies. We are witnessing another when the message of Friedrich Nietzsche is taken up by Bernhardi and the Prussian Junkers, and used to sanctify that power which during the war I described as “the Beast with the Brains of an Engineer.”
Nietzsche loathed the Prussian Junkers, and the wholePrussian state machine. He lived the life of an ascetic, and wrote in spiritual terms; when he talked about the “strong,” he meant those that are great in reverence as well as in scorn. But he could not analyze the different kinds of competition in which social beings engage; he could not distinguish between those which encourage intellectual progress and those which strangle it. He saw that in primitive societies war eliminates the degenerate; he did not perceive that in modern capitalist society war has exactly the opposite effect, preserving the weaklings and parasites, and putting commercial hogs in power. Neither did he perceive how a system of hereditary privilege enthrones the sensualists and idlers, the human types he most despised. While young he came under the influence of Richard Wagner; he read that pernicious secret document which Wagner had prepared for his friend King Ludwig, explaining it as the duty of the artist to devise illusions to keep the masses patriotic and religious. Nietzsche absorbed that doctrine and it poisoned his social thought for life.
I have met with ridicule from sapient critics for praising Zarathustra and at the same time proclaiming myself a Socialist. But just as it is possible by a deeper view to reconcile Zarathustra and Jesus, so also it is possible to reconcile Zarathustra and Marx. The free spirits and lofty idealists whom Nietzsche dreamed will never be able to function in the world of international profiteers; they are outcasts in such a world, as Nietzsche was in the Junker world. Only when competition for money has been replaced by co-operative order will mankind take seriously those higher activities which were Nietzsche’s concern.
Exactly the same thing applies to the war of the sexes; it is not in quarreling with women, like Strindberg, or in avoiding them, like Nietzsche, that the happiness of man is found. There is a saying of Zarathustra most frequently quoted by his enemies: “When thou goest to woman forget not the whip.” That is taken to mean that man should dominate woman by brute power; but Georg Brandes tells me that it does not mean that at all. It means that you must not forget that the woman will seek to wield a whip over you if she can; in other words, the Strindberg terror! Brandes declares that he has seen aphotograph of Nietzsche in company with the young lady whom he loved; Nietzsche in this photograph had a child’s harness about his neck and shoulders, and the woman had a whip in her hand. That, of course, was play; but Freud has taught us that play is symbolic, and perhaps it was this picture which Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote his famous sentence.
Anyhow, this much is certain: Nietzsche did not know women. Except for this one unhappy love affair, he took toward them the same attitude as the Christian hermits and monks—and for the same reason, because he wanted to live his inner life without disturbance. So extremes meet, and history repeats itself—the “eternal recurrence” which Nietzsche taught! Through much of his life he had the devoted services of his sister; she nursed him and cared for him during those dreadful years when he wandered about the room growling like a wild beast; and after he was dead, she edited his books and his letters. Man flees from woman—but he begins in a woman’s arms, and he ends there.
Modern civilization is a stepmother to poets; it is crowded, noisy and ugly, and they run away and seek refuge in gardens, or monasteries, or dreams of a happier past. But modern civilization is alive; it is the life of hundreds of millions of human beings, forging a new future. And there comes a new kind of poet, able to penetrate to the inner spirit of that future.
It was fitting that such a poet should be a Belgian; for Belgium is the center of the new industrialism in Europe. Here are great iron and steel plants, and vast cobwebs of railroads, and harbors to which the commerce of the world pours in. The past and the future meet here, for Belgium has an old history and art; it is a battle-ground of Catholicism and Protestantism, of modern science and ancient mysticism, of French revolution and German autocracy. It is wealthy, with all the class contrasts and antagonisms which modern capitalism brings.
Emile Verhaeren was born in 1855, of well-to-do retired parents. He lived in the country, but in Belgium the country is close to the towns, and the boy saw the river with the great ships, the factories and the busy artisans, a teeming life, stimulating to the imagination. He was educated in a Jesuit school, where they hoped to make a priest of him, but did not succeed. He studied law, and led a wild, freakish youth. He had been writing verses since childhood, Latin verses, and then the classical French Alexandrines, under the spell of Victor Hugo. Then came Zola, and young Verhaeren horrified his parents and friends by a volume of poetry portraying the violent and brutal facts of Flemish life. They are a gross and drunken people—we see them in the paintings of Rubens; and it was a time when young poets were in revolt against false idealism, and wanted to deal with reality, the more crude and hideous the better.
From excess of animalism the Belgian people revolt to the other extreme, asceticism; so the country is full of monks, gloomy and sober, living apart and contemplating the past with holy awe. Verhaeren wrote a second book, in which he portrayed strange types of these devotees. But he was content to admire them; he did not join them.
The poet exists by virtue of the fact that he is more sensitive than the average man; life hits him harder blows, and he flies from one extreme to the other. Modern science took from Verhaeren his Catholic faith, and there followed a period of pessimism, a terrible psychic crisis. Like Dostoievski and Strindberg, he came close to the border-line of insanity and suicide. But his restless mind would not give up to any suffering; he was thrilled even by the adventure of pain; he loved life, even though it held for him only the vision of death. All things are themes for art; so he wrote a book of nightmares, a pilgrimage of neurasthenia.
The sick poet had fled from the noisy and brutal world; he found his deliverance by coming back to it. Redemption lay in loving and understanding mankind in its manifold new activities. Those things which the poets generally affect to despise Verhaeren now took up with ecstasy: industrialism, machinery, the roar of cities, the manifold activities of crowds, in all these things he discovered a new power, promising an infinitude of beauty.
Verhaeren wrote in French, and used a new form of rhymed free verse, more obviously rhythmical than Whitman’s, marvelously responsive to every throb of the poet’s imagination. It is a kind of verse to chant aloud, an utterance of sweeping ecstasy. Verhaeren resembles Whitman in many ways; in his identification of himself with the toiling masses, his sense of the multitude as a new being, a thing with a life of its own. Like Whitman he accepts the universe, he sings the chant of humanity becoming God, conquering nature, and remaking existence in its own image.
Walt Whitman sang “these states,” and saw them as one mighty, triumphant land. Verhaeren also had a vision, he was the prophet of the United States of Europe. He had lived in all its great capitals, and knew and interpreted the forces which were bringing them together and making them one. Terrible places they are—“the octopus cities,” he calls them in the title of one of his volumes, and portrays them as gigantic tentacular monsters, sucking all the life-blood from the country. No poet has ever approached Verhaeren in the portrayal of the cruelty and loneliness and horror of these capitalist cities. You will find in “The Cry for Justice” a translation of one of these poems, the most frightful picture of prostitution ever given in verse.
Verhaeren welcomed science, and proclaimed mass solidarity, the surrender of the individual to the sweep of progress. He became a prophet and preacher of what he called “cosmic enthusiasm.” He was, of course, a Socialist and revolutionist. He wrote a lyrical drama called “The Dawn,” which has been translated into English by Arthur Symonds. Here in a mixture of prose and verse he celebrates a hero who surrenders the citadel of capitalism to the masses, and gives his life in the effort to abolish class conflict and build the happy future. Verhaeren wrote other plays which have not yet been translated or produced; they do not conform to the rules of the drama for profit, for they deal with humanity and not with sex. But the new time is coming—and here is one of its prophets.
I remember the first poet I ever met in my youth; one of the “pure” poets, a dreamy soul, who lived in the ugly city of New York, and wrote about beauty in distant Nineveh and Tyre. He earned his living in a book-store, where he faded slowly, and his hair came to look as if the moths had been feeding on it. Only once I saw fire in his eyes, and that was when the name of Swinburne was mentioned. “Swinburne is agod!” he exclaimed.
Yes, Algernon Charles Swinburne is no mere poet; he is divinity, before whose high altar the art-for-art’s-sakers perform obeisance. He was born in 1837, of an aristocratic county family in the North of England. So he always had plenty of money, and lived his own life in the aristocratic fashion. They sent him to Eton at the age of twelve, and then to Oxford, but respectability failed to “take” with him.
He was the strangest figure in which the soul of a poet was ever housed. As a child he had been beautiful, but something must have gone wrong with his glands, so that his head grew faster than his body. He developed a noble brow, but a weak mouth and receding chin; his enormous head was lighted by two bright green eyes, and covered with a shock of vivid red hair. When he became excited, which he was liable to do at a moment’s notice, his arms and legs began to jerk convulsively, and he would rush about the room, orating vehemently, perhaps hopping upon the sofa, like a bright-colored parrakeet. He was an omnivorous reader, and knew all the poetry there was in the world—most of it by heart, and would pour it out by the hour, in Latin, Greek, French, Italian or English. If he became too much excited, he would suddenly have a fit and fall unconscious, to the terror of the company; but after a while he would come to, just as lively and full of words as ever.
In his childhood and youth, according to the English custom, they filled him up with Greek and Latin verses; he absorbed the bad as well as the good, wine and women as well as song. Then he came under the spell of Victor Hugo, who filled him with a fervor for liberty. It is aninteresting illustration of the influence a great poet can exert. Swinburne worshipped Hugo with frenzied extravagance, and remained a disciple of republicanism all through his seventy-two years; and this without the slightest actual contact with republicanism, without anything in his environment or his actions to explain such revolutionary fever.
Worldly impracticability was carried to its last extreme in this combustible youth; he always had to have somebody to take care of him, and fell under the spell of one personality after another: Rossetti, William Morris, Mazzini, and finally Watts-Dunton, who literally saved his life. Swinburne would come up to London and engage in what he called “racketing”—by which he meant stimulating his frenzies with alcohol. He would keep this up until he was completely prostrated, and then his father or one of his friends would carry him off to the country and mount guard over him, and there he would live a quiet and placid literary life until the world lured him forth again. By the time he was forty he had carried his dissipation to such extremes that he was all but wrecked. One by one his friends had to give him up, and he was living in wretched lodgings at the point of death.
It was then that Watts-Dunton took charge of his affairs once for all, and turned his country house into a sort of literary sanitarium, and kept the poet for thirty years, strictly forbidding any but respectable citizens to call upon him. Here the queer little parrakeet hopped about in the library, and gradually grew old and deaf, and wrote a great deal of prose and verse of little consequence. Some critics fight with the moralists over the question, Is it better for a poet to die drunk and inspired, or to live sober and dull? My friend, George Sterling, writes me on this point: “I still refuse, probably from personal experience, to believe that alcohol helps the artist to function at his best.”
Swinburne’s first great work, published at the age of twenty-eight, was an imitation Greek play, “Atalanta in Calydon.” As poetry it is marvelous; nobody since Shelley had poured out such a torrent of glorious words. All the tricks of the trade are in it—how many you can learn from Professor Saintsbury, who lists them: “equivalence and substitution, alternative and repetition, rhymes andrhymeless suspension of sound, volley and check of verse, stanza construction, line-and pause-moulding, foot-conjunction and contrast.” Such are the weapons in the armory of those who have read all the poetry there is in the world!
What else is there beside verbal splendor and technical tricks? The answer is: The familiar Greek aristocratic personages, struggling in vain against their gods; the old Greek fatalism and pessimism, taken up as a literary exercise and carried to un-Hellenic extremes. It might have puzzled you, perhaps, that a poet of republicanism and revolt should also be a poet of pessimism; but you would have been ill-advised to ask the question of Swinburne, for once, when a friend ventured to criticize his work, he stared for a moment or two of horror, then uttered a shrill scream, and rushed upstairs to his room, and seized his manuscript and spent hours tearing it into shreds and throwing it into the fire—and then spent the rest of the night rewriting it from memory!
Swinburne could not think, he could only feel, and so he was capable of pouring his poetic frenzy into absolutely contradictory ideas. So we have these magnificent choruses of “Atalanta,” in which man’s despair at his own fate is voiced with overwhelming poignancy:
For a day and a night and a morrow,That his strength might endure for a spanWith travail and heavy sorrow,The holy spirit of man....He weaves, and is clothed with derision;Sows, and he shall not reap;His life is a watch or a visionBetween a sleep and a sleep.
For a day and a night and a morrow,That his strength might endure for a spanWith travail and heavy sorrow,The holy spirit of man....He weaves, and is clothed with derision;Sows, and he shall not reap;His life is a watch or a visionBetween a sleep and a sleep.
For a day and a night and a morrow,That his strength might endure for a spanWith travail and heavy sorrow,The holy spirit of man....He weaves, and is clothed with derision;Sows, and he shall not reap;His life is a watch or a visionBetween a sleep and a sleep.
But then, if that be true, what is the use of struggling for liberty and overthrowing tyrants? What indeed is the use of writing beautiful verses and reading proofs and wrangling with publishers and critics? Manifestly, no use whatever. Nevertheless, Swinburne would read a news item about Napoleon the Little, and he would fly into another frenzy, and write a poem in which he called for the blood of tyrants. He collected all these into his “Songs before Sunrise,” which constitute one of the bibles of liberty. When I meet an art-for-art’s-saker, I never fail to ask him if he has read Swinburne’s “Prelude,” inwhich the poet describes his conversion to the cause of human service.
Play then and sing; we too have played,We likewise, in that subtle shade.We too have twisted through our hairSuch tendrils as the wild Loves wear,And heard what mirth the Mænads made.
Play then and sing; we too have played,We likewise, in that subtle shade.We too have twisted through our hairSuch tendrils as the wild Loves wear,And heard what mirth the Mænads made.
Play then and sing; we too have played,We likewise, in that subtle shade.We too have twisted through our hairSuch tendrils as the wild Loves wear,And heard what mirth the Mænads made.
Such has been the poet’s life; but now he has reformed, and taken up the duty of passing on the light of the intelligence to his fellows:
A little time that we may fillOr with such good works or such illAs loose the bonds or make them strongWherein all manhood suffers wrong.
A little time that we may fillOr with such good works or such illAs loose the bonds or make them strongWherein all manhood suffers wrong.
A little time that we may fillOr with such good works or such illAs loose the bonds or make them strongWherein all manhood suffers wrong.
And that leads us by a natural transition to the “Marching Song,” a battle-cry of the revolution:
Rise, ere the dawn be risen;Come, and be all souls fed;From field and street and prisonCome, for the feast is spread;Live, for the truth is living; wake, for night is dead.
Rise, ere the dawn be risen;Come, and be all souls fed;From field and street and prisonCome, for the feast is spread;Live, for the truth is living; wake, for night is dead.
Rise, ere the dawn be risen;Come, and be all souls fed;From field and street and prisonCome, for the feast is spread;Live, for the truth is living; wake, for night is dead.
“My other books are books,” Swinburne declared, “but ‘Songs before Sunrise’ is myself.” His respectable biographer, Edmund Gosse, is both puzzled and shocked by this, and points out how completely Swinburne’s hopes of republicanism have failed to be realized in the modern world. Yes; the poet failed to see that the lords of finance, the fat men of the bourgeoisie, would subsidize autocracy and subsidize superstition, as a means of riveting slavery upon the human mind and body for another century. But let Professor Gosse take care of his health for a few years more, and he may see that Daylight which was heralded in the “Songs before Sunrise.”
We have stepped ahead of our story and omitted to mention Swinburne’s earlier volume of miscellaneous work, “Poems and Ballads,” which was published shortly after “Atalanta,” and gave the Victorian age the worst shock of its existence. This was the time of Tennyson at his most mawkish, the time of “Maud” and “Enoch Arden”; literary England had not seen anything really indecent since Byron’s “Don Juan,” nearly half a century ago. But here came this young aristocrat—the son of anadmiral, and therefore beyond prosecution for anything that he might do—throwing out upon the world an inspired glorification of sexual and alcoholic riot.
Swinburne was, of course, just as sincere in his praise of Venus and the vine as he was in his praise of liberty; more sincere, in fact, because he practiced what he preached in the former case, but he omitted to go off and die in the cause of liberty as Byron had done. Some of his licentious poetry is perfect from the technical point of view; but, on the other hand, “Poems and Ballads” contains the worst combination of words ever put into a poem: “the lilies and languors of virtue and the roses and raptures of vice.” It is pleasant to be able to record that Swinburne had the wit to ridicule his own habit of silly alliteration; see the parody called “Nephelidia”: “From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,” and so on.
In “Thus Spake Zarathustra” there is a doctrine of freedom, which is summed up: I ask you, not freefromwhat, but freetowhat? And that is what I should like to point out to young poets who uncritically accept Swinburne as a god. It is possible to be entirely free to do what you please, and yet not please to do many silly and destructive things. Young poets are free to write as eloquent verses as they know how; and they may put into those verses a celebration of all things beautiful and just and noble in the world. On the other hand, they may put in a celebration of debauchery; and they may try it out for themselves, and fall slaves to alcohol and drugs, and end in the mad-house or a suicide’s or drunkard’s grave—like Baudelaire and Verlaine and Musset and Poe and Dowson, and that brilliant, unhappy genius whose story we have next to read.
Eight years ago Frank Harris published his two volumes entitled “Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions.” I wrote him that it was one of the half dozen greatest biographies in the English language, and he replied, characteristically: “Name the other five.” That story neverfails to raise a laugh; but in fairness to Frank Harris I ought to add that when I sat down and thought it over seriously I could not name the other five. Here is the story of a terrific human tragedy, told plainly and completely, with profound insight and deep pity. How can the man who wrote it not know that it is great?
The subject of this sermon in action was born in Dublin in 1854. His father was a wealthy baronet, a physician who was accustomed to seduce his women-patients; his mother was an excessively vain society poetess. The son was burdened with the label Oscar Fingal O’Flahartie Wills Wilde, and received the usual public school and Oxford education. In these so-called “public” schools, which are ruling class boarding-schools, the boys live semi-monastic lives, entirely withdrawn from woman’s influence; they are fed upon Greek literature and art, which glorifies homosexuality, and therefore English upper-class life is rotten with this odious vice. Frank Harris narrates that at the time of Wilde’s trial, when general exposures on this subject were threatened, great numbers of London’s prominent club members suddenly discovered that they had important business on the Continent.
Oscar Wilde had extraordinary gifts; a vivid imagination, a flow of eloquence, and charming wit. He was the perfect fine flower of leisure-class art, a gentleman about town, a literary dandy who learned the lesson that it pays to advertise, and made himself the most talked about man in London by dressing in knee breeches and silk hose, carrying a large sunflower in his hand, and greeting men and women with sweet impertinences. There is a satiric portrait of this elegant “esthete” in Robert Hichens’ novel, “The Green Carnation.”
Oscar wrote comedies dealing with the London world of fashion in which he lived. These plays delighted that world, and still delight audiences of the fashionable. Frank Harris regards them as imperishable classics; and all I can do is to record the fact that they put me to sleep. Nearly twenty years ago I saw “The Importance of Being Earnest” in New York, and cannot recall that I was ever more bored in a theater. The interest of the play is supposed to lie in its “smart” dialogue, and the formula for that smartness is one which anyone can learn in two minutes. Take any statement involving the simple common sense of mankind, the moral heritage of the race for countless ages; and then make an epigram proclaiming the opposite, and you have a “line” for a society play. “Charity creates a multitude of sins.... It is better to be good-looking than to be good.... All charming people are spoiled.... A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.... It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.... The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish.... Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.... There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.... The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.”
A man who is absorbed in useful work, and therefore has few impulses to depravity, can encounter such Wildeness with indifference; but the average man, who is never sure of his own self-control, and who has sons and daughters to train in as much decency as he can, is made frantic by such perversity, the deliberate bedeviling of the wits of our blindly struggling humanity. These “epigrams” of Oscar Wilde are like the snapping of a whip-lash in the face of men’s everyday moral sensibility. So naturally this too-clever young esthete was cordially loathed, and his enemies whetted their knives for him.
Oscar came over to America to exhibit his whimsicalities to the wives and daughters of our steel kings and pork packers. To the custom’s officer he remarked: “I have nothing to declare but my genius”; and so his success was assured. He went back to London and wrote more plays, one of them, “Salome,” assuredly the most cruel, cold, and disgusting piece of lewdness in the English language. Its heroine is the young daughter of King Herod, who attempts to seduce John the Baptist to her sensual desires, and when he repels her, has him executed, and has his head brought in upon a platter, and strips herself as nearly naked as stage-customs allow, and dances before this bloody object and fondles and kisses it. The climax of modern art depravity was reached when Richard Strauss set this drama to elaborate and costly music. When I saw audiences of bedizened and bejewelled fat beasts, male and female, having their sick nerves thrilledby this “grand” opera, I knew that European capitalism was ready for the slaughterman’s ax.
Out of these plays Oscar reaped much money, and spent it in eating too much, drinking too much, and pursuing his cultured vices. Among his favorites was a young heir of the nobility, who has since become Lord Alfred Douglas, assuredly the most disagreeable little wretch that ever displayed himself in the British world of letters. Lord Alfred’s father, the Marquis of Queensbury, made an effort to separate his son from Wilde, and in so doing he wrote letters concerning Wilde which brought about a great literary scandal.
It is the privilege of elegant British gentlemen to pursue their vices without interference; but they must display discretion, and not step upon the toes of marquises. Oscar Wilde brought suit for slander against Queensbury; and his lordship rallied his aristocratic friends, defended himself successfully, and then had the audacious playwright arrested and prosecuted for sodomy.
The ordinary British citizen had, of course, no knowledge of the inside circumstances of this case; all he saw was that a writer of nasty plays tripped jauntily into the limelight and brought a libel suit against a father for trying to save his son. Of the fact that the father was a bad one, and the son worse, and that the courts were being used to maintain a corrupt ruling class—those things the average Englishman did not know. He will never know them until there is a Socialist daily press in England, with the right to tell the truth about the ruling class, something which at present the libel laws prevent.
Here is material for a drama, far greater than any that Wilde wrote; and Frank Harris gives us the whole story. In the early part of it he sees Oscar clearly as the pitiful victim of his own will-less nature; but when the tragedy of this nature reaches its climax, Harris lets himself be tempted into offering Wilde to us in a new rôle, that of a persecuted hero and martyred genius. Much as Harris may abhor Oscar’s sin, he abhors the leading British virtues still more; so he is in the position of Milton dealing with Satan—he cannot keep from sympathizing with his character, in spite of logic. To be sure, he gives us the facts, so that we can judge for ourselves, if we have the brains; and we must try to be worthy of that trust!
It seems evident enough that Oscar was sent to prison, not because of his genius, nor yet because of his vices, but simply because he attacked in a conspicuous and aggravating way a member of the hallowed ruling caste of Britain. You may call that turning the tragedy into a Socialist tract; but a man cannot interpret any case of social persecution unless he sees its economic implications—unless, in other words, he understands the class struggle. If Frank Harris had been a conscious social revolutionist, his book would have been more powerful and convincing, because he would have been less tempted to blame individuals for evils which are social in their origin. He would have given us an economic interpretation of Oscar, the spoiled darling of a putrescent leisure class, thrown overboard, like Jonah, as a sacrifice in a middle-class hurricane of virtue.
Oscar Wilde was convicted and sent to prison; and of course Frank Harris does not like prisons—he, too, has been sent there by the British ruling caste. It is only natural that he should overlook in his book the significance of the fact which he himself records, that this imprisonment was the best thing that ever happened to Oscar. Harris interceded for him, and was able to get him good food and the right to have his books; he tells us that he noticed during his visits a “spiritual deepening” in Oscar, due to the rigid disciplining of his selfish nature. He was never so well or so much in possession of his mental faculties as when he came out; but immediately he went back to his vomit, and ate and drank and loafed himself to death, according to the customs prevailing in that putrescent leisure class.
It seems to me that the true conclusion to be drawn from Frank Harris’ book is that decadent poets should be sent to prison and kept there permanently. Anything to save them from smart society! While Oscar was at large, the pet of the cultured rich, he idled and wrote futile plays; but when he was locked up, he took life seriously, and wrote great literature: “De Profundis,” a study of his spiritual reactions to his disgrace; and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a supremely eloquent and noble poem, the poet’s excuse for having lived.
Reading these two works we say, by all means let us have prisons for will-less men; places where such unhappybeings may have as much self-government as they can use, together with plain wholesome food, moderate work outdoors, and enforced abstinence from alcohol and tobacco and drugs. Having set up such prisons, let us keep in them, not merely all thieves and highwaymen and esthetes, but men of fashion, princes, lords and dukes, bishops, stock-brokers and fat persons.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “You said you were going to label all your jokes.”
Her husband, after meditating, remarks: “What Oscar needed was the right sort of a wife.”
She answers: “Almost any wife would have told him that a guilty man cannot bring a slander suit.”
“What troubles me,” says Mrs. Ogi, “is that you call this a book of all the arts, and continue to deal with literature.”
“In modern times each of the arts has developed a complicated technique; and in order to analyze them all and show what they mean, one would have to know much more than I know. But every now and then it happens that a musician or painter or sculptor is not satisfied with his own art, but uses mine; and then I have him!”
“Oh, that mine enemy would write a book,” says Mrs. Ogi.
James McNeill Whistler wrote a book; he gave it a title: “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies as Pleasingly Exemplified in Many Instances, Wherein the Serious Ones of this Earth, Carefully Exasperated, Have Been Prettily Spurred on to Unseemliness and Indiscretion, While Overcome by an Undue Sense of Right.” The pages of this book are covered with butterflies which the painter adopted as the signature for his work. These butterflies are defiant, care-free, insolent; manifestly, some one has taken great pains with them, and with the volume through which they flutter. Studying it, we learn what kind of man it takes to succeed as a leisure-class portrait-painter.
Whistler was born in Boston, his father being a majorin the United States Army. We have seen him “let out” from West Point; he was “deficient in chemistry.” He went to Paris and lived the Bohemian student life for some years, and imbibed those ideas concerning the non-moral nature of art, which are a symptom of the disintegration of our ruling classes.
Whistler settled in London. He was unknown and an American; he had new ideas about painting, and the Royal Academy would have nothing to do with him, so he had to fight his way. A fiery little man, with wavy black locks and one very singular white lock over his forehead, he trained his eyebrows to stand out fiercely, and wore a little imperial and a monocle, and carried a very long cane, and a white chrysanthemum always in his buttonhole. He cultivated truculence, and his life was a succession of conspicuous libel suits and public quarrels, kept alive by letters to the newspapers.
To a little group of his intimates Whistler could be a charming companion and host; but when he went out into the world, he put on armor like a hard-shelled crab, and was ready to bite the head off the first person who got in his way. He would hit a man in the eye for differing with him indiscreetly; once in a theater he beat a critic over the head with his cane. In deadly seriousness he challenged George Moore to a duel, and appointed seconds, and published Moore’s failure to reply. Because he was dissatisfied with the price paid him for the portrait of a certain lady, he painted out the lady’s face. He undertook to decorate a dining-room for a wealthy shipowner, and became fascinated with the idea of covering walls and ceiling with an endless number of peacocks in gold and blue. He worked over this in a frenzy for months. The shipowner wanted his house, but could not have it; Whistler turned it into an art gallery, and brought the critics as to a public show. The man had agreed to pay five hundred guineas for the decorating; in consideration of the unforeseen amount of work, he raised the price to a thousand. But Whistler insisted upon two thousand, and flew into a furious rage with the man, and carried the row into the newspapers, and painted most odious caricatures of the man and exhibited them publicly.
Whistler was not content to be a great painter; he was also a lecturer, man of letters, and historian. Hisidea was that when he overcame one of his enemies by a witty retort he made history, and when he collected these retorts and the stories of his quarrels into a book, he wrote history. The collecting was suggested to him by a journalist, who proposed the title, and was authorized to gather the various items from newspaper files. After the work was done and the book prepared and printed, Whistler decided to take the credit for himself, so he sent the journalist a check for ten pounds and dismissed him. Naturally the poor fellow insisted that he had rights in the matter, and tried to bring out the book in Belgium and in Paris. Whistler pursued him and had him arrested and heavily fined; he took over the man’s idea and title, and so we have the beautiful volume with the fancy butterflies. Whistler’s conduct throughout the affair was brutal, and his book I am inclined to call the most hateful thing in print. Its content is the egotism of a highly intelligent and persistent hornet.
Whistler has, to be sure, some ideas to advocate. He reprints a lecture called “Ten O’clock,” named from the after-dinner hour at which it was given in London. To his well-fed audience he explained that art is for artists, who alone can understand it; art has nothing to do with the people, who only degrade it when they touch it. Moreover, art has no concern with morality, whether individual or national; “in no way do our virtues minister to its worth, in no way do our vices impede its triumph.”
As for painting, Whistler declared it to be a matter of the arrangement of line, form and color; it has nothing to do with any other idea, not even with the subject being painted. To quote the painter’s own words: “The subject matter has nothing to do with the harmony of color.” In order to emphasize this point of view Whistler took to calling his portraits by such names as “Harmony in Green and Rose,” “Caprice in Blue and Silver,” “Symphony in White,” “Variations in Violet and Green,” “Arrangement in Black and Gray.” One of his most famous paintings showed fireworks at night, and was called “Nocturne in Black and Gold.” John Ruskin wrote of it: “I never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” So there was a picturesque and sensational libel suit, and the jury awarded Whistler damages of one farthing, that is, halfa cent. That was not enough to pay his lawyer’s fees, and so the painter went into bankruptcy and spent a few years in Europe.
What is the meaning of this art doctrine so defiantly enunciated? The answer is, it is an extension of the artist’s egotism; the snobbery of his profession and his caste, in every way and from every point of view an anti-social and predatory thing. Here we are in London, the heart and brain of the British Empire, at that time the greatest agency of exploitation in the world. Here is wealth and fashion, representing the wrung-out sweat and blood, not merely of enslaved British workers, but of enslaved hundreds of millions of black and brown and yellow races. Here dwell the masters, and they wish to flaunt their splendor; heedless of the groans and the agony, the clamor of all the misery of mankind, they command a dining-room painted over with gold and blue peacocks, or hung with portraits of their splendid predatory selves and their lovely parasitic females.
And here come the swarms of painters competing for their attention, seeking to flatter their vanity and awe their ignorance. One hornet a little more venomous than the rest is able to impress his hornetry upon them, to stir their greed by the possibility that his paintings may some day be sold for thousands of pounds. So they decide to have themselves “done” by this strange genius. They come to his studio and spend months of torment standing or sitting for him, while he fusses and frets, and paints and wipes out and paints again, taking infinite pains to see that the ladies’ dresses are made of exactly the right quality of muslin, cut and stitched in exactly the right way—because there is one certain precise kind of muslin dress which is art, and any other kind is something else.
All this is called “beauty”; all this has laws, so Whistler tells us, as definite and determinable as the laws of physics or chemistry. Beauty is a thing permanent and immortal, and independent of all other qualities—morality, justice, health, truth, honesty. The answer is: all this is poisonous nonsense, handed out to the rich by those who exploit their vanity. Art without morality is simply art produced for patrons who have no morality by artists who have no morality. As to the permanence of such art, the answer is that its standards are at everymoment subject to the attack of more clever devisers of new forms of folly and pretense. The proper way to cut a muslin dress today is an absurd way to cut it tomorrow; and the same applies to harmonies of color and outlines of form. The Turks cherish fatness in women, because they like to be comfortable in their harems; the early Christians thought that emaciation was beautiful, because it prepared them for heaven; Whistler, wishing to flatter the aristocratic conceit of his patrons, paints them abnormally tall and lean, because that is the snobbish notion in fashion at the moment.
Whistler was a great artist in the technical sense; that is, he learned to put paint on canvas in such a way as to convey an impression of reality, not merely physical but emotional and spiritual. He was a terrific worker, as any man must be to succeed in the fierce competition of modern life. He took his art with seriousness; and it happened that twice in his lifetime something lifted him above the empty theories in which he gloried. The first time was when he painted his mother. Here was a gentle, sensitive, sweet-faced, devout Presbyterian old lady, with whom all his childhood memories were bound up; he painted her sitting with her hands in her lap, and her gray hair brushed down and covered with an old-fashioned lace cap. He called it “Arrangement in Black and Gray”; and that is all right, because black and gray are old lady’s colors. But he would have described the painting even better if he had given it a moral title: “Arrangement in Reverence and Affection.”
And then came Carlyle; poor, bewildered, dyspeptic, struggling old prophet from Scotland, he looked at Whistler’s portrait of his mother and loved it, and consented to let the painter do the same thing for him. So here is another study, posed in the same way, and called “Arrangement in Black and Gray,” instead of “Arrangement in Pity and Pathos.” These two pictures have human feeling and moral meaning; therefore they are the two which have been reproduced, and which everybody knows and loves. That is the answer to Whistler’s art theories; but of course it is an answer which he himself would have scorned—he would have made a witticism on it, and got out a new edition of “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.”
“This victory is not yours,” says Mrs. Ogi. “It is Death’s.”
Some years ago a story was told me concerning a certain eminent man in England. This man came from the common people; he possesses one of the finest minds in England, and he is the champion of all things generous and free in letters and life. The lady who told me the story, herself a well-known novelist, was writing about the particular section of society from which this man sprung, and in which he had lived his boyhood; she needed an item of local color, and asked him how such people pronounce a certain word. The man flushed, and demanded: “How should I know?” I thought this story one of the most awful I had ever heard; and the lady novelist was shocked when she saw how I took it, for she had not meant to tell anything so serious about her friend. She tried to explain to me, it wasn’t really so bad as it seemed; the pressure of caste feeling is so strong in England that a man is irresistibly driven to cover up his humiliating past.
I tell the incident as preliminary to a discussion of George Meredith. Here was a devoted servant of the muses, a master of his craft, who won a quite unique position among his contemporaries. The public knew him not; to the end of his life his books had little sale, and he was compelled to support himself by odd jobs of journalism and publisher’s reading. But to the inner circle of letters his name became a kind of secret password; he was the choice and precious one, the poet’s poet and the novelist’s novelist, and the little country nook where he dwelt was a shrine to which the distinguished pilgrims traveled from England and America and the Continent.
But over this great writer’s life there hung a dark shadow; a tragic secret, hidden from the world, dimly guessed only by a few of the inner circle. What had been the master’s early life? He never spoke of it. Where had he spent his childhood? No one knew. Where hadhe been born? The government was collecting some kind of census, and put the question to its great novelist, and he lied; he invented an imaginary birthplace. So he lived safe from scandal, and only after his death was the dreadful truth revealed. His grandfather had been a tailor to naval officers! His father likewise had been a tailor, and failing in business, had gone to South Africa and become a tailor there. His son had nothing to do with him and never spoke of him.
What there is so especially dreadful about a tailor you will have to ask some Englishman to explain to you. I personally have known tailors who were exceedingly kind and generous men; I have known tailors who were students and thinkers and devoted workers in the Socialist movement. All that a tailor may be; I suppose he may even be a saint. There is only one thing which he can never by any possibility be, and that is an English gentleman.
And George Meredith aspired to be an English gentleman; he wrote about English gentlemen in all the infinite subtleties of their relationship to other English gentlemen, and more especially to English ladies. He wished to be, not an interloper and observer, tolerated because of his cleverness with the pen; he wished to be an authentic member of the caste, so secure that he might exercise that most cherished of all the privileges of the caste—to ridicule other members who fall away from the perfect caste ideal.
Do you think that I am making too much of this frailty of George Meredith? I answer that it is the key to the understanding of everything he wrote. Stop and think what it means that a man who possessed one of the great intellects of his time, who had all the wisdom of all the ages at his command, should be so bowed down with awe before the spirit of caste that he was willing to lie about himself. I do not mean merely that such a man’s whole life would become a pose; that he would pretend to be abnormally spiritual and ascetic, when as a matter of fact he was strongly attracted to lark-pies; that he would study his features, and observing that he had a refined and sensitive profile, would place himself at the window in such a position that his adorers would gaze upon this profile during the course of their visit. What I mean isthat this man would have a caste-ridden mind; the subtleties of caste distinction, the minute details of appearance and conduct and thought by which caste superiority is manifested and maintained—this is the stuff out of which the man’s novels would be made, and the theme upon which his superfine intellect would be concentrated.
And so it is in the Meredithian universe. The dark, grim, vaguely shadowed Nemesis of the Greeks is gone; Jehovah with his thunders has been laid away with the other rubbish in the garret; what is left, to dominate the lives of men and women, to blast their hopes and lure them to ruin and despair, is social convention. And all such convention may be boiled down into one formula: thou shalt not break into a caste higher than that to which you were born. You may have money, and try it; you may pretend to have money, and try it; but in both cases alike you will fail. Meredith gives us masterpieces in the way of impostors trying to break in; he is even willing, under the veil of art, to use his own tragic life-story, and in “Evan Harrington” he tells about a tailor’s son who tries to break in. He turned such blasts of ridicule upon the poor tailor family and the poor tailor state of being, that Meredith’s tailor father down in South Africa was shriveled up with shame, and could not thereafter endure to hear his son’s novels discussed.
Likewise, women fail to break into the sacred caste. They have beauty, they have wit, but nothing avails. The creator of “Diana of the Crossways” lays himself out to convince us that this heroine is the most brilliant conversationalist that ever graced a London dinner-table. But she had to have money, and so she sells a government secret to a great newspaper, and being discovered, is thrown out. And if Diana failed, with all her worldly gifts, what hope for poor Lucy Feverel, who had nothing but country graces, natural loveliness of body, and sweetness and kindness and unselfishness of spirit? The “ordeal” of Richard Feverel lies in the fact that being a son of a rigid English gentleman, rigidly trained according to an ideal system, he falls in love with a country flower, and instead of seducing her according to the custom of the caste, he marries her. So, of course, the pair of them are trampled.
The defenders of Meredith will say that he does notdesire such a state of affairs; he merely portrays it, because it exists. My answer to that is the familiar one, that art is propaganda. If George Meredith had believed in overthrowing the caste system in England he could surely have found ways to convey that fact to us. He might have begun with his own life; he might have taken his stand on a pedestal and said: “I, who know myself to be a highly intellectual novelist, am the son and grandson of tailors, and be pleased to make what you can of that.” If Meredith had realized vitally and vividly the anti-social nature of the caste system, and especially how that system is the very negation and death of art—surely he would have found space in his many novels for at least one character who has a little success in the effort to hold his head up against the power of snobbery. Remember, this was a time in which Alfred Harmsworth, gutter-journalist, became an earl, and Keir Hardie, pit-boy, became a labor hero. But Meredith’s caste-bound characters fail, and fail without any hint that they might have succeeded.
I do not wish to be unjust to this brilliant novelist, who was a modern man in many ways. He was entirely free from that religiosity which blighted Tennyson’s mind. He was clear-sighted about love, seeing that it is a thing of flesh and spirit, and must be both, or neither. Also he stood valiantly for the rights of ladies to be educated, and to have their talents recognized, and to dispose of their own personalities. In his old age he advanced the proposition that all marriages should be for a term of years, and that at the end of the term the parties should be free to remarry or not, as they wished. That this most sensible idea did not raise more of a storm was because most persons in Britain took it for granted that the novelist must be joking.
But as a rule what we get from Meredith is not social criticism in its broad sense, but merely caste criticism, the self-discipline of the privileged orders. Meredith’s greatest novel is “The Egoist,” a quite amazing study of one of these superior males, a creature who has been brought up from infancy to regard his sublime self as the purpose for which his own family exists, and one of a small group of select persons for whom the British Empire, and therefore the world exist. Meredith lays him bare for usin every turn and movement of his being, and we loathe him heartily, and sympathize with the series of females with whom he dallies in courtship.
Meredith is one of those super-sophisticated novelists who are unwilling to allow us to be interested in a course of events. The intellect in him has eaten up and sterilized the emotions. In reading him we are tormented by a feeling that his story and his characters would be delightful if only he would give them a chance; but he has such a brilliant style, he has so many ideas to convey to us, and so much shining wit and corruscating metaphor to display. It is like an exhibit of fireworks, which can be most ravishing for a few minutes; you catch your breath, and think you have never seen anything more lovely. But after an hour or so you decide that fireworks lack variety.
This infinitely subtle and delicate, witty and charming personality invites us to sit with him as gods upon Olympus, to look down upon the tragic fate of mortals, and find pleasure in the irony of their failures. As in the case of Corneille, we are concerned with the strife and clash of aristocratic egotisms; we take part in deadly intrigues, and in duels without mercy. But times have changed, and now no blood is shed, no corpses cover the ground; it is a duel of wit, with a death-blow in a phrase or the lifting of an eye-brow. Watching the conflict, we find ourselves asking, precisely as we asked with Corneille: What have we to do with these puppets? How do they concern us? What reality is there, what permanence to the conventions which dominate their puppet minds? What real wisdom is there behind their volleys of cleverness? So we realize that we are still in the Victorian age; and Victoria and boredom are two words for one thing.
We are getting down to modern times, and have come to the first great artist of whom I can say that with my own eyes I saw him. Shortly before the war, coming out of the dining-room of the New Reform Club in London,my host, H. G. Wells, stopped me and whispered: “There sits the Great Cham.” He may have said “Great Buddha” or “Great Jupiter”; anyhow, I looked, and seated at a table in solitary state was a large elderly gentleman, with large bald head shining whitely, and jaws moving meditatively. I knew him from his pictures; and besides, there was at that time only one Great Cham, or Great Buddha, or Great Jupiter of international letters.
I did not ask to meet him, because, having read him, I understood the aesthetic proprieties, and did not wish to surprise a Great Master with his mouth full of lunch. Also, the days of my discipleship had long since passed, and I was not sure if I would be able to think of just the proper delicate subtlety with which to convey my attitude to one whom I had once revered, and now regarded with affection because of reverence remembered. That sentence is a little longer and more subtle than I usually write—such being the effect upon one’s style of merely thinking about Henry James.
In my youth I wanted to know the great world, and who could tell me with such compelling authority? I read everything he had written up to that time—no small task, some forty volumes, many of them fat. I stuck to it day and night for a couple of months, and then wrote an essay, “The Leisure-Class Historian,” which, alas, no editor could be found to publish, and which was consumed, with all the rest of my belongings except one night-shirt, in the Helicon Hall fire.
Coming back to the task at this interval, I realize that I gave Henry James too broad a title; he is “the cultured-class historian.” He knows of the existence of the uncultivated mob of idle rich, the “high-feeding, champagne-quaffing, orchid-arranging,” as he describes them; but his theme is that small section of the rich who possess aesthetic sensibilities, and withdraw in haughty aloofness from high-feeding, champagne-quaffing, and orchid-arranging, and live fastidious lives devoted to the cultivation of beauty. The word “beauty” Henry James understands in the broadest sense; it covers not merely the things you look at, but the things you do and the things you think. You recognize it by its being elegant, dignified and restrained.
To an outsider it might appear cold, but the Masteradmits you to the inside, and you discover that it is passionate, quivering with feeling. But it sternly checks its impulses, and seldom permits itself to do anything except to think about the problems confronting it, to analyze these problems in minute detail, to pile up subtlety and complication concerning them—literally whole mountains of complication; or perhaps (since, when you are reading or writing or discussing Henry James, you anticipate many variations of metaphor, and endless subtle shadings of metaphor, and parenthetical disquisitions interpreting and qualifying, and still further, as it were, intensifying metaphor—each separate complication, you will note, set apart from other complications by a comma) it would convey a more accurate impression of the authentic Jamesian manner, if I were to say that he builds towering structures of subtle sophistication, which structures you, with joy and excitement of the mind, see rising, unexpectedly splendid, before you, revealing new possibilities of penetration into the refinements of sensibility, as well as new possibilities of sentence structure, which convey, by infinite variation of shadings, a sense, or, as it were, almost a sensation, of the actuality of exceptional mental experience.
Such are the great rambling sentences, through which you stagger and gasp your way. You keep on, because you find that the old boy is really saying something. He is not delighting in intricacy and smartness for their own sake, as you so often feel to your annoyance with Meredith; he is not deliberately confusing you with useless obscure detail like Browning; he is really making a heroic effort to convey some complicated intricacy in the mental processes of people who not merely think, but who think about thinking, and think about thinking about thinking.
Henry James was born in New York in 1843, his father being a theological writer. His elder brother, William, became a popular professor of psychology at Harvard, thus giving rise to the jest that “William is a psychologist who writes like a novelist, and Henry is a novelist who writes like a psychologist.” Henry was taken abroad and educated in England, France and Switzerland, which had the effect of cutting his roots from under him. At the age of twenty-six he moved permanently to England, and from that time made his home there, with occasional trips to the Continent.
He was a sensitive youth, quiet and shy; he suffered from spinal trouble, and liked to sit quietly in drawing-rooms and listen to other people talk. Then he would go apart for long periods, and reflect upon what he had heard, and weave it into stories. He was grateful to his friends if they would tell him their troubles, because that provided him with copy; but he never told anyone his own troubles, and his friends lost sight of the possibility that anything might ever have happened to him personally. Edmund Gosse, who became his intimate, tells how in his old age James, walking up and down in a garden one evening, was suddenly moved to open his heart. Looking up at a light in the house, he was reminded of a scene long, long ago, when he had stood in a street one rainy night, looking up thus to a lighted window, expecting to see a face, but the face had not come. That was all of the story; but Mr. Gosse was thrilled, even appalled. Actually, once upon a time, something had happened to the Master!
It would perhaps not be indelicate of us to feel warranted in assuming that this something had to do with the relation of the sexes. We note that this relation is, like everything else in the Henry James world, fastidious, reserved, and governed by the aesthetic sensibilities. These people do not love, they talk about loving; and as years pass, and the later manner grows, their talk comes more and more to deal with the condition of having been loved.
In “Daisy Miller,” an early story which made the young author famous, we see an innocent American girl in Rome, who to her horror receives an improper advance from a young Italian. In “Madame de Mauves” we see an American lady, unhappily married to a Frenchman in Paris, tempted by passion for a true young American. But when we come to the great long novels with the great long sentences of the “third manner,” we find ourselves dealing with the fact that once upon a time, long, long ago, a man and a woman committed an impropriety, and now somebody else is slowly finding out about it, to the general horror and dismay. Thus “The Golden Bowl,” seven hundred and eighty-nine closely printed pages,dealing with the mental and emotional reactions of a woman who has an intimate woman friend, and discovers that her husband has at some past period been the lover of this friend. Or “What Maisie Knew,” in which we discover an ancient intrigue through the eyes of the little daughter of the intriguing woman. Perhaps you think you know what obscenity is, but you get a new revelation of its possibilities when you proceed through the mind of a child to pick up hints and allusions of the elders, and piece them into a pattern of fornication.
Henry James, the son of an American theological writer, acquired, like Hawthorne, an inside knowledge of Puritanism, and in his early novels he took the New England point of view toward intrigues and improprieties. Thus Daisy Miller is innocent and free, and the dark, wicked Italian misunderstands her freedom, and thinks she is what a girl with such manners would be in Europe. Madame de Mauves, a loyal wife, is married to a Frenchman of no morals, and when she loves a true and good American, she scorns to sin, for the reason that she would be imitating the Frenchman, she would be doing what the Frenchman expects her to do. “The American” is a novel about a “man from home,” who has made money, and seeks a cultured wife among the French nobility, and gradually finds that he is in a nest of murders. All regulation hundred percent patriotic stuff!
But Europe grew upon Henry James, and America faded, and the aesthetic sensibilities became less Puritanical and more cosmopolitan. So we have “The Ambassadors,” the world’s great international novel. Something over twenty years ago I went with a friend on a canoeing trip in the far Northern wilds, and for six weeks we saw only one white man, the keeper of a Hudson Bay trading post. Baggage had to be limited on such a trip, and I took only one book. Evening after evening I would read it, a few pages at a time, lying in a tent by candle light. So I had plenty of time to note every subtlety, and before I got through I was talking Henry James in my sleep. Now the twenty years are as a day, and the characters and their story are as vivid as ever in my mind.
A young New Englander, son of a wealthy family, has come to Paris and settled there, refusing to go home. His family send an elderly friend as ambassador to bringback the prodigal. This ambassador, whose name is Strether, discovers that a crude young barbarian has been changed by his Parisian life into a cultured and self-possessed man of the world. Strether is duly impressed by the change, and attributes it to the influence of a middle-aged French lady, who has been the young man’s good angel.
He writes about the situation, but the family is not satisfied, and another ambassador comes, this time the young man’s elder sister, the incarnation of the acidulous propriety of New England. This sister is not in the least impressed by the French lady, but on the contrary suspects the very worst between the lady and her brother. Strether is shocked by her crude ideas; but then comes the climax of the drama—a scene wherein it is accidentally revealed to Strether that the acidulous sister is right; a part of the process whereby the charming French lady has civilized the young barbarian has been to take him as her lover. So two civilizations meet, and in the clash between them we see the hearts of both revealed.
You note that in all these stories we are dealing with well-to-do people. No other kind of people exist in the world of Henry James. Such highly complicated and subtle aesthetic sensibilities are only possible in connection with large sums of money, freely furnished to the characters without effort on their part. It is impossible to imagine any person in the “third manner” being so vulgar as to make, or even to take money. What they do is to spend money elegantly, and when they meet persons who spend it inelegantly, they turn away in dignified disdain. There are only a few passages in which the novelist condescends to be aware of the existence of the lower orders, who by their toil produce the wealth which makes the aesthetic sensibilities possible. We get one such glimpse in “The Princess Casamassima”; the hero glances at the women and girls of the working classes, and then: