Books and authors

Mr. Norman Douglas has, in Alone, written a book of hatred tempered with archæology and laughter. Luckily, there is very little archæology and enough laughter to make the hatred enjoyable without being infectious. It is not that Mr. Douglas does not like some of his fellow-creatures. He likes heretics and jolly beggars. He liked Ouida. But, if Mr. Douglas likes you, the danger is that he will throw you at somebody else’s head. That is what he does with Ouida, whom he glorifies as “the last, almost the last, of lady authors.” He throws her at the head of the age in general—at “our anæmic and wooly generation,” at “our actual womanscribes” with “their monkey-tricks and cleverness,” at “our vegetarian world-reformers who are as incapable of enthusiasm as they are of contempt, because their blood temperature is invariably two degrees below normal,” and finally at an American novelist described as “this feline and gelatinous New Englander.” That gives a fair enough impression of Mr. Douglas’s attitude to the human race as seen at close quarters.

He has in a measure justified his attitude by making an amusing book of it. Mr. Douglas has a well-stored and alert mind, full of by-ways, that makes for good conversation. As we read him we feel that we are listening to the racy monologues of a traveller with a special gift for pouring out the comedy of his discomforts in abusive form. He tells us how he landed—“with one jump—in Hell,” which is his name for Siena in winter. “I hate Viareggio at all seasons,” he tells us farther on, and he describes the inhabitants as “birds of prey: a shallow and rapacious brood.” At Pisa, when he arrives, “the Arno is the emblem of Despair ... like a torrent of liquid mud—irresolute whether to be earth or water.” He finds a good landlady at Corsanico, but he immediately remembers how he had “lived long at the mercy of London landladies and London charwomen—having suffered the torments of Hell, for more years than I care to remember, at the hands of those pickpockets and hags and harpies and drunken sluts” ... “those London sharks and furies.” At Rome the remembrance of a “sweet old lady friend” sets him thinking also of her husband, “a worm, a good man in the worst sense of the word,” “the prince of moralisers, the man who first taught me how contemptible the human race may become”—“what a face: gorgonising in its assumption of virtue”—“he ought to have throttled himself at his mother’s breast.” The absence of mosquitoes and the fewness of the flies at Rome reminds him again of his sufferings at the hands, so to speak, of flies in other places. “One of the most cherished projects of my life,” he declares, “is to assemble, in a kind of anthology, all the invectives that have been hurled since the beginning of literature against this loathly dirt-born insect, this living carrion, this blot on the Creator’s reputation—and thereto add a few of my own.” The noise of the Roman trams leads him, while lying in bed, to devote the morning hours to “the malediction of all modern progress, wherein I include, with firm impartiality, every single advancement in culture which happens to lie between my present state and that comfortable cavern in whose shelter I can see myself ensconced as of yore, peacefully sucking somebody’s marrow, while my women, round the corner, are collecting a handful of acorns for my dessert,” after which he goes on to denounce the telephone as “that diabolic invention” and the Press for “cretinising” the public mind. At Olevana, it is the nightingale that rouses him to imprecations:

Mr. Douglas, it is only fair to say, explains that Italian nightingales do not sing like English nightingales. But I fancy that Mr. Douglas sat down, when he began these sketches, in the mood for writing comic scarifications, and neither bird nor man, city nor river, was safe from his harsh laughter. He hurls a pen where King Saul in similar mood hurled a spear, and we must concede that he hurls it with force.

Even nightingales, however, do not infuriate him as Victorians and Puritans do. When he writes angrily about nightingales you feel that he is only being amusing. When he writes about Victorians, you realise that he is positively white with anger. “It was not Nero ...” he cries, “but our complacent British reptiles, who filled the prisons with the wailing of young children, and hanged a boy of thirteen for stealing a spoon.” And again: “What a self-sufficient and inhuman brood were the Victorians of that type, hag-ridden by their nightmare of duty; a brood that has never been called by its proper name.” Mr. Douglas, at any rate, has done his best. He even gives us “a nation of canting shop-keepers,” but becomes more original with “hermaphrodite middle-classes.” But his real objection is neither to Victorianism nor to Puritanism; it is to Christianity, as we see when he writes of self-indulgence:

Mr. Douglas is frankly on the side of the pagans—not the real pagans who were rather like ordinary Christians, but the modern pagans who detest Christianity. This paganism is merely egoism in its latest form. It is anti-human, as when Mr. Douglas exclaims:

Such is his creed, and in the result his laughter, though often amusing, is never happy. There is the laughter of sympathy, which is Shakespeare’s, and there is the laughter of antipathy, which is Mr. Douglas’s. That is, perhaps, why his publishers say that his is “a book for the fastidious in particular.” You could not say of Shakespeare that he is “for the fastidious in particular.”

We must grant an author his point of view, however, and the fact remains that, however we may differ from Mr. Douglas’s preaching, we go on reading him with pleasure, protest and curiosity. He puts his life into his sentences, and so he stamps with experience even such a piece of topographical information as:

He is nearly always amusing about wine, whether it is good or bad. But that is only one of his moods. He also talks to you as a naturalist, as an archæologist, as a biologist, or will begin to make some odd book that you are never likely to read live for you; he has discovered an author called Ramage who is perhaps the most real and comical person of whom he writes. There is a vein of cruelty or of selfishness in some of the others who follow one another through his pages. The worst of them is the “phenomenally brutal” sportsman who, along with Mr. Douglas, gave a dead rat to a sow to eat:

That is disgusting, but it is interesting. We may say the same of the sardonic account of the way in which lizards are played with in Italy:

On the whole, one prefers to read Mr. Douglas on the subject of wine, or on the rarity of the use of red things (wine excepted) in Italy, or on the little flames that are supposed to be seen at night over the graves in cemeteries. Mr. Douglas may be gross at times, but he is never a bore. He gives us a meal of many courses, and allows none of the courses to last too long. But it would be a more enjoyable meal if we did not hear in the crabbed laughter of our host the undertones of despair—the despair that comes of “considering your neighbour, what an imbecile he is,” and failing to realise that in order to enjoy his imbecility to the full you must first see him a little lower than the angels. Cervantes did this. Dickens did it. Mr. Chesterton does it. That is why they are not “for the fastidious in particular.”