[2]Collected Essays and Reviews. William James. New York; Longmans, Green and Co.
BIOGRAPHIES OF POE
The biography of Poe got a wrong start immediately after his death when Griswold slandered him or at least put a false emphasis on certain aspects of his character. Since then, every book about Poe has had an argumentative tone, a defensive spirit, which in a way is as unfair to Poe as was the first misrepresentation. One sometimes feels like crying: "For heaven's sake read his work and let the man alone!" Yet it is not possible to let Poe alone if you have once looked into his life; his story is one of the fascinating chapters of literary history. Professor Smith says that his book, "Edgar Allen Poe, How to Know Him," "is an attempt to substitute for the travesty the real Poe, to suggest at least the diversity of his interests, his future-mindedness, his sanity, and his humanity." On the whole, Professor Smith's attempt is successful and he does help us to realize Poe's personality, "that co-ordination of thought and mood and conduct, of social action and reaction, of daily interest and aim," which Professor Smith justly says, "finds no portrayal in the biographies of Poe."
It is an odd fact that after Griswold two of the more authoritative biographers of Poe did not like him. One was Richard Henry Stoddard; the other, Mr. George E. Woodberry. Neither one, I suspect, chose Poe as a congenial, or even as an interesting subject. The task of writing his biography seems to have fallen to both men as a literary chore; to Stoddard as an official critic who knew Poe, and to Mr. Woodberry as a rising young man of literary talent who thirty years ago was selected by the editor of the "American Men of Letters" to write the life of Poe. Of course, Mr. Woodberry is a competent workman. When, in the year of Poe's centennial, he enlarged his "Life" to two volumes, he put together in a judicial, objective style probably all the facts that we need to know. But his æsthetic judgments are at best unsympathetic. It may be that the lyric "To Helen" has been overpraised, though it is difficult to understand how there can be too much praise for a masterpiece. And when Mr. Woodberry says of our American writers that they were concerned "not with the transitory, but the eternal; and, excepting Poe, they were all artists of the beautiful," we seem to have an example of that sort of moralistic æsthetics which sounds lofty but is only bosh. "If Poe was not an artist of the beautiful," Professor Smith asks, "what was he an artist of?"
That is a good, sensible question and Professor Smith's answer, if not as eloquent as some things that have been written by Poe's European admirers, is sound and appreciative. If it be an American tendency to overrate our national men of genius, we have certainly not displayed that tendency in relation to the American writer who more than any other has captured the imagination of Europeans, for undoubtedly the finest criticism of Poe has come from our brethren overseas. Stoddard had but a grudging sense of Poe's merits and ends his account with a remark which contains a partial truth but which, although it is quoted from Dr. Johnson, is a flat anti-climax: "All that can be told with certainty is that he was poor." There seems to be a good deal more to tell than that, and, indeed, the implications of Poe's poverty, as it affected the artist, are better expressed by Stoddard himself when he says that Poe "wrote with fastidious difficulty, and in a style too much above the popular level to be well paid."
American criticism of Poe is thick with moralisms. Thus Lowell wrote: "As a critic Mr. Poe was æsthetically deficient … he seemed wanting in the faculty of perceiving the profounder ethics of art." But, we may well ask, what is "the profounder ethics of art," and who, except a New England preacher, wants to be bothered with it in lyric poetry? Poe always focused his attention on beauty, on excellence of workmanship, both in the work of other craftsmen and in his own. The Scottish critic, Mr. John M. Robertson, seems to be nearer the truth than Lowell when he says that Poe "has left a body of widely various criticism which, as such, will better stand critical examination to-day than any similar work produced in England or America in his time." I am glad to see that Professor Smith regards Mr. Robertson's essay on Poe as "the ablest brief treatment in any language." The only exception, which Mr. Robertson himself would be the first to make, is the essay by the French critic Emile Hennequin.
But Professor Smith does not quite escape American moralism in his effort to accentuate Poe's virtues. He makes too much of Poe's interest in religion, which was surely nothing but a purely intellectual and critical interest, and his recurrent emphasis on Poe's Americanism is too tiresomely patriotic even for a professor in the United States Naval Academy. Poe was keen for the best interests of American literature, zealous in searching out any note of promise in a new poet and in pointing to the weak spots in men of acknowledged talent. He sometimes exhibits a kind of local Southern patriotism which does not much interest us now. But on the whole, he was detached from the issues of politics, an unlocalized, almost disembodied genius whose apparition in the United States of America is still an endless wonder to European critics.
One possible influence of Poe's environment on his art Professor Smith is, so far as I know, the first to point out; and it is a very valuable suggestion, even if it can not be thoroughly proved. In Virginia, more than in any other American State, the English and Scots ballads survive by oral tradition. It is possible that as a child Poe heard these ballads recited or sung, and from them derived his sense of refrain and repetition. To the influence of the ballad Professor Smith adds the possible influence of plantation melodies as "subsidiary sources of Poe's lyrical technique." He is certainly right in thinking that Poe's originality consists not in the contribution of a new form to poetry but in his individual development of forms already established. His charm resides in the color of his words rather than in the shape of his stanzas. But of course the two things are inseparable and whoever tries to analyse them is hopelessly baffled. Poe's own attempt to explain how the trick is done is far from explaining it, and if he could not expound in prose the secret of poetry, nobody can.
For Poe was first and always a critic, inquisitive of methods, and making his effects with cool calculation. Even if his tales of horror no longer give us the creeps, they will always give to any one who cares about writing, that shiver of pleasure which comes when we watch a dexterous craftsman at work. Professor Smith calls Poe the "father of the short story," but he came too late to be credited with such paternity. After all, Boccaccio and whoever made "The Arabian Nights" lived long before Poe and in Poe's stories are evident traces of old tales of magic and mystery. What Poe did was to rationalize the short story so highly, in some cases, as to sacrifice the illusion of spontaneity which is one of the merits of a tale that seems to tell itself.
With the purpose of suggesting the range of Poe's intellectual interest and of classifying some of his miscellaneous work that does not fall into certain obvious groups, Professor Smith has adopted the term "frontiersman." The image evoked by that word somehow does not fit Poe. He was, in a sense, an explorer of ideas, and he had a genuine gift for philosophy which he did not live to develop. We could spare many of his short stories rather than lose "Eureka." If it is not profound philosophy and if it does not solve the riddle of the universe, it is profound in its beauty, a prose poem. Poe's science is obsolete, no doubt, and even in the science of his day he was little more than an amateur. But the mark of a great intellect is on every page. An amazing mind! He succeeded in all forms of literary art which he tried. If the poet or the critic or the short-story writer should be obliterated, there would still remain a man of genius.
Critics and biographers of Poe, like Poe himself, cannot let his drink alone. They deny or blame or pity without understanding. The question of Poe and alcohol seems to have been finally answered by a California physician, John W. Robertson, in a book which I have not seen but which I know only through reviewers' accounts of it. This physician finds from the evidence that Poe was a dipsomaniac. Dipsomania is not drunkenness nor riotous dissipation; it is a disease. Poe, like other victims of the disease, had to have periodic bouts with the demon, got fearfully sick, and when he recovered stayed cold sober until his next attack. This accounts for Poe's written anathemas against alcohol, which puzzled Remy de Gourmont. De Gourmont says: "Il ne pouvait plus travailler que dans l'hallucination de l'ivresse." Quite the contrary is the case. Poe could not do a stroke of work under the inspiration of whiskey; he was not one of those mad geniuses who conceive masterpieces in a tavern or with a bottle beside the ink-pot. That is proved, or indicated, by his critical clarity, the almost passionless rationality of his tales and poems, and even by the physical perfection of his manuscripts. He worked between his joyless debauches, and he worked hard. His melancholy and love of terror, his preoccupation with defects of will and remorse, whatever "morbidity" there is in his writings, may have some relation to his disease. But as an artist he achieved his dark effects by sheer force of intellect in hours of clear-eyed sobriety. Only in a literary sense is he the author of "MS. Found in a Bottle."
BIOGRAPHIES OF WHITMAN
The one fault that can be found with Traubel's "With Walt Whitman in Camden" is that there is too much of it. But that is a fault easily remedied without blotting a line of the record. Books that contain too little may cheat us of desired knowledge, whereas books that contain too much can do no harm; every reader has the privilege of not reading at all or of dipping into a book here and there. Traubel's method is admirable; it is that of a documentary historian. He set down Whitman's talk and such impressions and facts as the biographer recorded at the moment, and he reproduced the letters in the order in which Whitman gave them to him. He did not presume to select from Whitman's conversation what now seems most interesting or most to Whitman's credit, but he gave you all that he had for you to enjoy or ignore and for other biographers and historians to make use of as they will.
Traubel made no concessions to the fact that readers have to catch trains and read other books, and he ignored, perhaps to his personal disadvantage, certain exigencies of publication, such as the publisher's obvious need to interest as many people as possible with the least possible expenditure. Traubel's method is simple from an artistic point of view, requiring nothing but accuracy, courage and industry. Yet the method is a great strain on all concerned. Traubel could stand it. Evidently the publishers thought they could stand it. The reader can stand it, because, as I have said, he can take as much or as little as suits him. The real question is whether Whitman can stand it. And the amazing mancanstand it. Consider that in the years when Traubel knew him Whitman was an invalid, broken by his services as nurse and brother of soldiers during the war. He was a garrulous old man talking to men who loved him and who, though no servile worshippers of him or anyone else, encouraged him to reminiscence and the utterance of offhand opinion. Now that is a severe test. Not many old men, even men of great achievement in action or art, could last for more than a small volume. Whitman is worth these hundreds and hundreds of pages. For he was a great talker, full of experience and endowed with the gift of speech. Almost every day, according to Traubel's record, he hit off an interesting idea and turned it in a Whitmanese way. He repeats himself. He makes remarks that do not amount to much. But he is never a bore. Line by line he and Traubel, egotists both, but honest, thoughtful, artfully inartistic, have drawn a portrait, the like of which is not to be found. For once a literary man is as big as his literary work. Traubel was a very happy biographer, for he had a sort of monopoly of a great subject, and he had not the slightest temptation to omit or defend.
An admirer has called Traubel's work "the most truthful biography in the language." To use the informal mode of Walt Whitman and of his biographer, that ain't exactly so. It ain't the most truthful biography; it's simply a true biography.
"Lincoln," said Whitman, "don't need adorers, worshippers—he needs friends…. The great danger with Lincoln for the next fifty years will be that he will be overdone, over-explained, over-exploited—made a good deal too much of—gather about himself a rather mythical aureole." From such danger Traubel did his best to protect Whitman; the biographer's multitudinous veracity preserves a real man and is a heavy impediment to the critic and literary historian of the future who may try to disobey Whitman's injunction not to "prettify" him. If that impossible and tedious universe, the "whole" truth, is not comprehended in these prolific pages, the errors and omissions are due not to the biographer, but to Whitman himself, who had a silent as well as a loquacious side; he had unexplained depths which probably he did not understand himself. When he spoke he tried to say what he thought, but often he did not speak at all, and at least once he said to Traubel: "I don't care to talk about that."
The writer of fiction may invent substance to fit an artistic scheme. The compiler of facts may, under certain conditions, disregard literary form. The biographer or the historian who will have his work read must play skilfully between the double restriction of substance and form. He must be at once man of science and artist. Because of its very great difficulties, because of the high demands it makes upon the writer, biography is rarely well done. One can name few masterpieces of biography in English. Perhaps the only masterpiece that everybody will name is Boswell's Johnson, that extraordinary performance which heaved literary history out of shape and keeps it in a permanent state of distortion. For Johnson was not a first-rate man of letters; he wrote little that is even tolerable to read; his letter to Chesterfield and the preface to the Dictionary are his most vital productions. Moreover, Boswell was a foreordained nonentity. Yet he was a great artist and Johnson was a great person, and the two of them made a great book; it is a puzzle which makes one fall back, outwitted, to the last ditch of adjectives.
Whitman's opinion of Johnson is interesting, if only in relation to his own biographer's methods. Johnson knew that Boswell was making notes. Traubel, whose word is infallibly good, says that Whitman did not know that his biographer was keeping a record. Whitman did know that Traubel would write about him and he selected the letters and other documents for the "archives." But he was not aware that Traubel was making a diary. Therefore when he talked he was free at least from the constraint imposed on a man who knows that his spoken words are to appear in print.
When Whitman was 69 years old he began to read Boswell; he refers to him a dozen times in the course of the year, thereby showing that Boswell interested him, for when Whitman was not interested in a book he simply forgot it. He thought that Johnson "talked for effect—seemed rather inclined to bark men down, like the biggest dog—indeed, a spice of dishonesty palpably possessed him. Johnson tried rather to impress than to be true." "He was on stilts always—he belongs to the self-conscious literary class, who live in a house of rules and never get into the open air." However, note this significant confession: "I read it through, looked it through, rather—persisted in spite of fifty temptations to throw it down. I don't know who tried me most—Johnson or Boswell. The book lasts—it seems to have elements of life—but I will do nothing to pass it on." There is the comment of the lion on the bear. No, these zoölogical metaphors are quite false. Benevolent and burly male persons are not, even by Whitmanian identifications, to be named with the brutes.
Some day a biographer with the right talent and in possession of all Traubel's material, cognizant of social ideals and facts and sensitive to poetry, will write a good life of Whitman. So far as I know, there is no satisfactory biography of our one magnificent American poet. Traubel was not able to do it. He was properly employed in gathering and publishing the fundamental record. Moreover, his style, perfectly fitted to short hand notes, is, in continuous composition, abominable. I loved him with all my Whitmanian heart and read him, because of every four of his sentences one says something worth while. But ten sentences of his in a row hurt like a corduroy road. I have to get out and walk and rub myself.
Several literary men have tried to write Whitman's life and they have failed. Professor Bliss Perry's book is fatuous. He had no excuse to write about Whitman at all, except in so far forth as a publisher's request to an alleged literary man to do a book for an established series furnishes a practical excuse.
The critical study of Whitman by Mr. Basil De Selincourt is sympathetic and discerning as regards what may be called the purely literary side. He understands what Whitman says and takes him for granted as one of the world's supreme poets. He conceives the essential unity of Whitman's thought, a unity that should be obvious but evidently is not to some readers and critics who treat Whitman as a collection of more or less impressive fragments. Mr. De Selincourt's analysis of Whitman's form is instructive, appreciative, though a trifle academic, not wholly emancipated from schoolroom rules of prosody. If you will read Whitman aloud, pronouncing the words as they are pronounced in prose, and emphasizing them according to the sense, the scansion will take care of itself. When a line is bad (and Whitman, like most of the other great poets, wrote bad lines) it won't work by any effort of elocution. The good lines, if you have an ear in your head and a tongue in your mouth, chant themselves, and you can forget all about iambics and hexameters.
Where Mr. De Selincourt fails is in his account of Whitman's notions of liberty, democracy, America, the future. Book-people do not understand these things, especially English book-people, who assume that America produced Whitman because it was a land of liberty. It was not. It was, like the rest of the world, a land of plutocracy, convention, servility. It is complimentary to us but unhappily not true to say that "America stands for the passionate re-assertion of certain beliefs which life, to those who look back upon it, seems always to stultify, but which, to those who can look forward, appears as the very spirit and power of life itself—'the urge, the ardour, the unconquerable will'."
As a matter of fact, America does not stand for any such thing and Whitman does not stand for America. He is a revolutionist in revolt against the American fact and celebrating a possible American future. Official America tried to throttle him. Conventional America ignored him. Literary and revolutionary spirits in England and America welcomed him, for they are free spirits, intellectually free, under any economic conditions and in any part of the world. Whitman himself did not understand why he was acclaimed in England by more men and better men than in America. It was simply because English thinkers, writers, poets, with minds capable of appreciating him, outnumbered their American brothers ten to one.
Two American ladies once called on Tennyson. He asked them whether they knew Walt Whitman. They confessed that they did not. "Then," said he, "you do not know the greatest man in America."
GEORGE E. WOODBERRY
A man's place in the generations of mankind is not wholly determined by the date of his birth. If William James were alive he would be eighty years old; but he belongs to us, to the living present. Mr. George Edward Woodberry is only sixty-seven; yet he already seems like the last figure in a tradition which has come to an end—so far as any period in literature may truly be said to end. James was aware of something like this twenty years ago. He gave Mr. Woodberry the praise that is his due, but expressed at the same time his essential weakness. Of "The Heart of Man" James wrote in a letter:
The essays are grave and noble in the extreme. I hail another American author. They can't be popular, and for cause. The respect of him for the Queen's English, the classic leisureliness and explicitness, which give so rare a dignity to his style, also take from it that which our generation seems to need, the sudden word, the unmeditated transition, the flash of perception that makes reasonings unnecessary. Poor Woodberry, so high, so true, so good, so original in his total make-up, and yet so unoriginal if you take him spot-wise—and therefore so ineffective.
The essays are grave and noble in the extreme. I hail another American author. They can't be popular, and for cause. The respect of him for the Queen's English, the classic leisureliness and explicitness, which give so rare a dignity to his style, also take from it that which our generation seems to need, the sudden word, the unmeditated transition, the flash of perception that makes reasonings unnecessary. Poor Woodberry, so high, so true, so good, so original in his total make-up, and yet so unoriginal if you take him spot-wise—and therefore so ineffective.
Mr. Woodberry is not out of date in a mere journalistic sense or in the hasty judgment of an irreverent generation which affects a trivial contemporaneity and regards even the end of the last century as old fogy. He is out of date because he did not gear with his own times, but remained aloof and backward-looking and so became the last of the Lowells instead of the first of the Woodberrys. It could not have been a conscious or servile emulation on his part, for he has a spirit of his own. But his surroundings and his education were too strong for his fine talent. He was brought up in the twilight of the New England demigods. They handed him the "torch," and he has carried it with pious devotion. To younger men as docile as himself, he became, almost officially, the representative in the flesh of the elders over whose graves he prayed. His publishers announce with pride, with no sense of the depressing implications of what they are saying, that there is a Woodberry Society, "probably the only organization in America dedicated to a living writer." Thus the anachronism is fulfilled. Mr. Woodberry was old when he was young, and he is an institution before he is dead. Some books are epoch making; other books, even great and original books, lie comfortably in their times without being either innovative or conclusive; Mr. Woodberry's six solid volumes[1]are epoch closing, a collection of such words as will not be written again by a man of genuine talent and wisdom.
The feeling that Mr. Woodberry is a voice from the past that immediately preceded him comes over me most heavily when I read his essays on Lowell's Addresses, on Democracy, and on Wendell Phillips. It may be only the essayist's strict fidelity to Lowell's ideas—no doubt a merit—which leaves the impression that the essayist knows only what Lowell knew and no more, that the pupil has not moved a step beyond the master. It is Lowell over again without the slightest addition from the lessons of time. The LondonNationhas said of Mr. Woodberry's essays that most of them have "a unity and life that make many of Lowell's seem those of a shrewd but old-fashioned amateur." Yet Lowell was at least a vivid amateur, who expressed something that belonged to the 'fifties, 'sixties and 'seventies; and he had an old gentleman's right to be old in the 'eighties. It is not to be expected that a critic should begin where Lowell leaves off—only a thinker of real genius makes such long strides. But the critic following Lowell in time and not moving half a step ahead of him seems older than Lowell himself.
The same thing is true of the address on Wendell Phillips, "The Faith of an American." It is fine, even eloquent, but it is abstract and curiously old-fashioned. Phillips in his own utterances is more of to-day and of to-morrow than is his eulogist who was a child in Beverley when Phillips was in mid-career. The reason, of course, is that Phillips was a fighter, hot with real issues, and it is not the critic's business to fight but to examine the ideas of the fighter. These ideas necessarily become somewhat abstract when a critic quotes or rephrases them, especially since Phillips was an orator and flung at his audiences sweeping generalities which in a less inspired man are mere tall talk. But Mr. Woodberry devitalizes Phillips, especially the later Phillips who went on from one issue to the next until he dropped. Mr. Woodberry has not a single clear, plain word about one of Phillips' last fights, that for the Labor party. Mr. Woodberry stops with the actual Phillips before Phillips stopped, and the end of the address fades out in vagueness and platitude. There is something rather touching about Mr. Woodberry's declaration: "I know that what I have said to-night is heavy with risk." One looks in vain to discover the risk. Surely in 1911, when the address was delivered, a man might talk in Mr. Woodberry's mild way every night in the week and invite no more severe punishment than a scolding from Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler.
Mr. Woodberry's ideas and his expressions are all gentle, though not timid nor emasculate. His general faith in "Democracy" is too serenely above the tumult to disturb anybody or provoke a riot call in the quietude of Beverley. I do not know what he means by "Democracy," whether such actual democracy as existed in America in 1899, or some beautiful dream of the future. If democracy is a dream, an unrealized dream, then any beautiful thing a poet says about it is true. But Mr. Woodberry seems to be talking about something actually existing, something already realized in considerable part if not completely, for he says: "Democracy has its great career, for the first time, in our national being, and exhibits here most purely its formative powers, and unfolds destiny on the grand scale." That was not true twenty years ago, and it is certainly not true now. It is the sort of thing that Emerson and Lowell could say with rousing conviction, but twenty years ago it was as obsolete as a beaver hat except in newspaper editorials and political speeches, where it is still going strong—even if not quite so strong as it used to be.
Mr. Woodberry seems to imply that he is somewhat more of a realist than Lowell. But he is in fact less of a realist than Lowell; for Lowell in his time did grapple with the facts of politics. In poetry it is not necessary, it is better not, to be a realist. But in dealing with politics and contemporaneous history the true citizen must be a realist and leave it to the politicians to fly with the eagle. No wisdom is to be derived from such a statement as this: "There is always an ideality of the human spirit in all its [Democracy's] works, if one will search them out." Or this: "Democracy is a mode of dealing with souls." Or this: "Not that other governments have not had regard to the soul, but in democracy, it is spirituality that gives the law and rules the issue." It is, alas, not true that "education, high education even, is more respected and counts for more in a democracy than under the older systems," or that "the law becomes the embodied persuasion of the community," or that "all these blessings [aversion to war, devotion to public duty and many other enumerated virtues] unconfined as the element, belong to all our people."
Mr. Woodberry's democracy simply does not exist and never did exist. Yet there is one existent glory of my country which I believe I appreciate better than he does. He says: "It behooves us, especially, to be modest, for our magnificent America has never yet produced a poet even of the rank of Gray." That was written fourteen years after the death of Whitman. Mr. Woodberry's democracy had not yet come along, but one of its great poets had arrived and departed leaving Mr. Woodberry none the wiser. There is another glory of my country which I appreciate better than Mr. Woodberry does—Poe, whose poetry Mr. Woodberry has never understood, though he has written what is altogether the best biography of the man! To save the six best lyrics of Poe, I would, if such a sacrifice were necessary, cheerfully sink Gray in the deepest sea of oblivion, "Elegy," letters and all. But that is only a slight difference of judgment, and there is no more futile business than to draw up minor poets in grades and ranks. Whitman is another matter; the critic who misses him in this day of the world is simply incompetent. The excuse for Mr. Woodberry is that he does not belong to this day of the world.
There is something pathetic about Mr. Woodberry's patriotism. He sincerely believes that "America's title to glory is her service to human liberty." He has never been delivered from the superstition that "the sense of justice is the bedrock of the Puritan soul"—the Puritan soul, narrow, despotic, cruelly unjust! But when Mr. Woodberry leaves politics and patriotism and religion and returns to art and literature where he is at home, he puts his finger ruefully on the real rock of the Puritan soul, recalling the Puritan's hostility to the theatre and regretting "the American inhibition" "which rejects the nude in sculpture and painting, not only forfeiting thereby the supreme of Greek genius and sanity, but to the prejudice, also, of human dignity." Mr. Woodberry is himself a Puritan, yearning to be free but chained to New England granite, and since he can not get free on this planet he looks up to the heavens where the God of his fathers used to dwell, but where he can find only abstract and vague ideas. Mr. Woodberry's tendency to abstract phrases, which on pressure yield nothing, vitiates his literary essays, the essays in which a professional critic ought to be most concrete, definite, and nourishing. The trouble may be that his views are too high and too broad for the limited vision of a common man; but I think his trouble is that he has not the true philosopher's power to make a long idea, bridging time and space, stand up under its own weight; there is a lack of solid timber and concrete. His best essays are those on individual authors in which he has the selected specific substance of another man's thought to work on. As ought to happen to a sensitive critic, it sometimes happens that Mr. Woodberry's style takes the very tone of his subject. He is whimsical in his charming little essay on Pepys, an adequate trifle; he is grave and quiet when he writes about Gray; and Swinburne so stirs him that his prose awakes and sparkles with metaphor. Even in this essay, however, he can not help demoralizing poetry by moralizing it into pseudo-philosophic prose. "The imagery (of 'Laus Veneris') has more affinity with modes of sacerdotal art, with symbolism and the attributive in imaginative power than it has with the free vitality that is more properly the sphere of poetry." What does that mean? What is the sphere of poetry? The essays on the older poets would make first-rate introductions to school texts, and I think some of them have been so used. They suffer from the fact that in Mr. Woodberry's time—and since—so many standard essays on Milton, Shakespeare, and the rest were written and rewritten, that unless a critic has a fresh point of view, as Mr. Woodberry has not, another essay is simply another essay.
It must be pleasant to meditate on the great men of letters and from time to time write an essay on Virgil or Montaigne or Matthew Arnold. Some leisure is necessary, for the conscientious critic must read much, and much reading takes time. It may be that in our nervous age, in this country, the scholarly critic with a true taste for letters has disappeared, to return perhaps in a day when Democracy or something better shall have dawned. The comfortable old tradition is dead or dying, and since its good works are extant in print, we need no more contributions to it. As Mr. Woodberry says in an essay called "Culture of the Old School": "TheGentleman's Magazine—both the name and the thing belong to a bygone time."
[1]Collected Essays of George Edward Woodberry. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1921.
ABRAHAM CAHAN
Toward the end of the last century there appeared in the magazines some remarkable stories of the East Side of New York by Abraham Cahan. They were not of the crudely comic type of Potash and Perlmutter, nor were they in the somewhat finer mood of sentimental humor which made Myra Kelly deservedly popular. They were humorous and pathetic in a quiet, compelling way, with a gentle austerity of tone even less familiar to American readers then than it is in the days of the Russian invasion. Mr. Howells praised these stories and he and others in editorial authority encouraged the author to write more. A career in the pleasant art of fiction was open to Mr. Cahan. But he withdrew from it and, so far as I know, he wrote no more stories for at least ten years. He has devoted his energy to building up the greatJewish Daily Forward, which is not only the voice of the East Side, but a powerful vehicle of social and political ideals that have not yet penetrated the sanctums of Times Square and of the older newspaper world near City Hall and Civic Virtue.
Then, as he approached sixty, Mr. Cahan gave us "The Rise of David Levinsky", a solid mature novel, into which are compacted the reflections of a lifetime. The publisher's notice called it "a story of success in the turmoil of American life." Probably the writer of those words intended to help the book by the appeal which "success" makes to the American mind, for no reader, not even a publisher's clerk, could miss the immense irony of the story. It is indeed the story of a failure. The vanity of great riches was never set forth with more searching sincerity. The helplessness of the individual, even the strong and prosperous, in the economic whirlpool, the loneliness and disillusionment only partly assuaged by pride in commercial achievement, the sacrifice of the intellectual life to the practical, these are the fundamental themes of the book. Levinsky, with the instincts of a scholar and a desire for the finest things in life, is swept into business by circumstances which he hardly understands himself and against which he is powerless; once in the game he makes the most of his abilities, but he never ceases to regard his visible good fortune as poor compensation for the invisible things he has missed. His wealth forces him to associate with all that is vulgar and acquisitive in Jewry and isolates him from all that is idealistic. He finds that he cannot even speak the language of the woman he most admires. Worse still, he is out of sympathy with the aspirations of millions of poor Jews from whose ranks he has sprung. He has no sympathy with those who would break the game up or make new rules, yet he sees that the game is hardly worth playing, even for the winner. "Success! Success! Success! It was the almighty goddess of the hour. Thousands of new fortunes were advertising her gaudy splendors. Newspapers, magazines, and public speeches were full of her glory, and he who found favor in her eyes found favor in the eyes of man."
The portrait of David Levinsky is a portrait of society, not simply of the Jewish section of it, or of New York, but of American business. And business is business whether done by Jew or Gentile. If Levinsky is a triumphant failure, he is so because American business, which shaped him to its ends, is, viewed from any decent regard for humanity, a miserable monster of success. Not that Levinsky is an abstraction, or that the novelist is forcing a thesis. Far from it. The personality of Levinsky is as sharply individualized as the hero of Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors," though with a different kind of subtlety, the subtlety not of detached analysis, but of naïvely simple self-revelation, which of course is not so simple as it sounds.
Mr. Cahan knows how to think through his characters, by letting them do the thinking, as if it were their affair and not his. At the same time he does not perform (nor does any other artist) that foolish and meaningless operation, as expressed by a great poet through a young critic, of holding "the mirror up to nature." Nature in a mirror is just nature, not nature thought out, excogitated, turned to human uses, interpreted in human words. And this is the place to say that Mr. Cahan knows how to use words. There are no great phrases in this book. A simple and (intellectually) honest business man writing his autobiography would not use a great phrase; such a phrase might issue from some enviable person in that intellectual life from which Levinsky was excluded. But there is no banal or inept phrase. Such a man as Mr. Cahan intends Levinsky to be, a man trained in the Talmud, which means verbal sense, and hammered by the facts of life, which means a sense of reality, and a wistful failure, which means imaginative retrospection, says things in a direct, firm, accurate style.
There is no lack of emotion; strong feeling, expressed or implied, runs through the book from beginning to end. But there is a complete absence of eloquence, a deliberate refraining from emphasis, an even manner of setting forth ideas and events impartially for the value inherent in them, an admirable method, the method of a philosophic artist. Here is life, some of it is good, some of it is bad; it is all somewhat pitiable, to be laughed at rather than cried over; nobody is deserving of indignant blame or abuse. It is our business to understand it as well as we can; and though we never can see it in its entirety or with complete clearness, if we make an honest effort to record events and delineate personalities, the events will arrange themselves in a more or less intelligible sequence, and the personalities will be their own commentary upon themselves. An obvious method, but you will read many a book to find one skilful application of it.
It seems to me the method most often employed and carried to the highest degree of perfection by the great Russians. I am driven to the timidity of "seems" because we do much talking about Russian novels without having read many of them or understanding what we have read. But better-informed critics than I have noted that one characteristic of the Russian novel is a benevolent impartiality in its treatment of all kinds of people and a calm contemplation of events horrible, gay, sad, comic. A revolutionist can portray, in fiction, a commissioner of police, whom in real life he would be willing to kill, with a fairness that is more than fair, with a combination of Olympian serenity and human sympathy. He can be a virulent propagandist when he is writing pamphlets, and when he writes fiction he can forget his propaganda or subdue it to art, that is, to a balanced sense of life.
When I say that Mr. Cahan's novel sounds like a good translation of a Russian novel, and that he is a disciple of the Russian novelists, I accuse him of the crime of being an artist and a seer. As a matter of biography, he is a child of Russian literature. And that is why his novel, written in faultless English, is a singular and solitary performance in American fiction. If that strange demand for "the" or "a great American novel," a demand which is at once foolish and the expression of a justifiably proud feeling that a big country ought to have big books, is to be satisfied, perhaps we shall have to ask an East Side Jew to write it for us. That would be an interesting phenomenon for some future Professor Wendell to deal with in a History of American Literature. And by the way, Mr. Cahan is a competent critic. I hope he will give us not only more novels, but a study of Russian literature for the enlightenment of the American mind. I remember with gratitude an article of his which I read when I was even more ignorant than I am now, on the modern successors to the group of Titans, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. He put Maxim Gorky in his place and told us (this was before the Russian invasion) about Andreyev and Chekhov. If Mr. Cahan will write a book on Russian literature, I will do my best to establish him in his merited place in American literature.
THOMAS HARDY
Mr. Bernard Shaw says, apropos Samuel Butler, that the English people do not deserve to have a genius. Butler himself in a note remarks that America, even America, will probably have men of genius, has indeed, already had one, Walt Whitman, but that he cannot imagine any country where a genius would have more unfortunate surroundings than in America. Mr. Arnold Bennett sends a shot from the same gun in "Milestones," when he makes the millionaire shipbuilder puff his chest and say that there is no greater honor to English character than the way we treat our geniuses. Egad! The unworthiness of the British and American nations to have artists born to them was never more shamefully manifested than by the reception accorded thirty years ago to Hardy's "Jude, the Obscure." Harper's Magazine, which seems to have begun printing the story before the editors had seen the complete manuscript, fell into temporary disfavor with some outraged readers. One British journal distinguished itself by reviewing the book under the caption, "Jude, the Obscene."
It is inconceivable that any nation on the continent of Europe could, through its critics or through any considerable number of readers, so dishonor a masterpiece. For "Jude" is a masterpiece; if it is not Hardy's greatest novel, it is one of his three or four greatest, and that means one of a score of supreme works of prose fiction in the language. If profundity of substance and skill in narrative are both considered, Hardy is without rival among British novelists. His is the crowning achievement in the century of fiction that began with Jane Austen and, happily, has not yet terminated with Joseph Conrad. In his hands the English novel assumed a form which, perhaps without good critical reason, one thinks of as French. Despite the racy localism of scene and character, Hardy's work seems alien to the Anglo-Saxon temperament; it has less in common with the spacious days of great Victoria than with a younger time, whose living masters, Mr. Conrad and Mr. Galsworthy, for example, have taken lessons in art across the channel.
In a prefatory note to "Desperate Remedies," dated February, 1896, Hardy lets fall a casual phrase which indicates that he and others had noted his kinship to the French, but that he was not disposed to acknowledge it fully. He seems to say, with that kind of modest pride which distinguishes him, that he found his method for himself, played the game alone. "As it happened," runs the note, "that certain characteristics which provoked most discussion in my latest story ['Jude'?] were present in this my first—published in 1871, when there was no French name for them—it has seemed best to let them stand unaltered." What characteristics does he intend? And was there no French name for them in 1871? Or had not the British critics begun to use the French name? Are these characteristics his candor, his logic, his classic finish of phrase, a certain cool stateliness of manner, an impersonal, distant way of treating most tender and poignant subjects, a lucid, ironic view of life, perfect proportion, large intellectual pity and freedom from cant, from sentimentality? These are some of his virtues and they are the virtues of several modern French novelists and some of the Russian pupils of the French.
If the ill reception of "Jude" caused Mr. Hardy to foreswear fiction, then the fools have in a way done us harm by cheating us of two or three great novels. Yet genius takes its revenge on a dull world, especially if it is prosperous genius, too well established to be starved out by the stupidity of an inartistic people. If Hardy had been encouraged to write more novels perhaps we should not have had "The Dynasts." And by and by we shall discover what a loss that would have been. It is the greatest epic that we have been privileged to read since Tolstoy's "War and Peace." And it is the best long poem in English since Morris's "The Earthly Paradise." Though it is cast in scenes and acts it is not a drama except in a vast untechnical sense of the word. But epic it is, creation of an enormous imagination which sweeps the universe and manages a cosmic panorama as commandingly as the same imagination dominates a rural kingdom of farms and desolate heaths. If "The Dynasts" and Hardy's shorter poems lack one thing, that one thing is the magical and haunting line, that concatenation of words which is everlastingly beautiful in the context or detached from it. Morris knew that magic. He was born with it, and no reader of Morris, except a critic, will be deceived by his own denial of his divinity when he said in his honest, off-hand way, sensible as Anthony Trollope, that inspiration is nonsense and verse is easy to write.
"The Dynasts" is an extraordinary poem. It is not French, it is not Greek, it is not like anything else in English. Hardy has discarded Christian mythology. He is not childish enough to revert to the Greek. He has invented a new one. His celestial machinery is as strange an apparition in the heavens as the first aeroplane. His hero, Napoleon, rises above the human stature by which the realistic novelist measures man and becomes not only a tool of destiny but a demigod who seems to understand destiny and share the secrets of that impersonal goddess. Those who are curious about Hardy's philosophy (we like his art; his philosophy may lie down and die on the shelf with the other philosophies) will find the closing chorus of "The Dynasts" significant:
But—a stirring thrills the airLike to sounds of joyance thereThat the ragesOf the agesShall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that were,Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things fair!
But—a stirring thrills the airLike to sounds of joyance thereThat the ragesOf the agesShall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that were,Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things fair!
But—a stirring thrills the air
Like to sounds of joyance there
That the rages
Of the ages
Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that were,
Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things fair!
Such is the ultimate word of this artist who so keenly loves beauty, yet, like some neo-Puritan and latter-day ascetic, cannot draw a lovely woman without reminding you that the skull under the cheeks and behind the passionate eyes is not pretty and will probably endure a long time under ground. Is he of like mind with his chorus at last, and does he believe that the Will is going to grow intelligent and make all things fair?
Perhaps Hardy's proneness to dwell on the skeletonic grin of life is due to his exceeding sensitiveness to beauty. Like Poe and other poets, he cannot abide the ugliness that is in the world, and so he insists on The Conqueror Worm, as a man cannot refrain from thrusting his tongue into the sore tooth. Perhaps Hardy is a reaction against the saccharine optimism of his contemporaries and of those just before his time. They falsified life in their fictions by making everything come out nicely, thank you, on the last page. He leans over backward from that kind of untruth and comes dangerously near to being as false. As between falsity in one direction and falsity in the other, there is no choice, except that we have had so much of the sweet kind that Hardy is refreshing. He tends to restore the balance.
Ask any man, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, how life has gone with him, and, if he is honest, he will tell you that life did not go definitely one way or the other. Things sometimes came out well and sometimes not. Hardy is biased in favor of the things that do not come out well. "Life's Little Ironies" is a good title, but it is a title that implies a thesis, an attitude from which humanity is surveyed. The stories are perfection and they sound true. Hardy is a logician and he will back any tale of his with evidence, even the first story in "Wessex Tales," in the preface of which the authority of physicians is invoked. But when you take all his stories together you find nine failures out of ten human careers, and life has a better batting average than that. No one doubts that the "Fellowtownsmen" got into such horrid confusion, that things happened as they shouldn't, that every shot at happiness was a miss. And "The Waiting Supper" is so convincing that you cannot escape. But the two stories together, regarded for the moment not as the excellent works of art which they are, but as a view of human destiny, weaken each other. One convinces you. The two together make you ask questions about the author.
In "The Waiting Supper" there is one line that is as great a pathetic fallacy as the more familiar and cheery kind which represents nature as smiling upon the lovers. Hardy's lovers have to submit to this: "Thus the sad autumn afternoon waned, while the waterfall hissed sarcastically of the inevitableness of the unpleasant." Did you ever hear a waterfall like that? The only waterfalls I have heard quote Darwin and discuss the election returns. I know that the happy poet is a liar when he says that the nightingale is celebrating my love for Mamie, for the nightingale is concerned with other matters. But as between a nightingale who is sympathetic with my emotions and a sarcastic waterfall, I prefer the nightingale. And I do not like either in realistic fiction.
Thomas Hardy, the idol of the younger realists and the liberator of British fiction from the Victorian hoopskirt and the happy ending, is not a realist. He is a great romantic, with a taste for pretty girls, moonlight, heroes and dragoons. He is incurably superstitious. He is pained by many modern things, especially by modern restorations of ancient buildings. He takes Tess to the Druidical stones on Salisbury Plain because he dearly likes that kind of moonlit antiquity. His pronominal substitution of It for He does not achieve a revolution in theology. He manages the destinies of human folk as arbitrarily as any maker of fiction that ever lived. But he never made a story in which he did not convince you that life is overwhelmingly interesting and that nature, girls, and dragoons are beautiful if sad things to contemplate.