Or:
With one slim finger.... I'll drink it up,
Though it be blood.
We are all quite certain that the lover would not willingly burn in Hell to prove his love, and that if he drank blood he would be sick. The idiom is outworn. That J. Marjoram should employ it is a sign, among others, that he has not yet quite got over the "devout lover" stage in his mood towards women. He makes a pin say: "She dropped me, pity my despair!" which is in the worst tradition of Westminster Gazette "Occ. Verse." He is somewhat too much occupied with this attitudinization before women or the memory of women. It has about as much to do with the reality of sexual companionship as the Lord Mayor's procession has to do with the municipal life of Greater London. Still, J. Marjoram is a genuine poet. In "Fantasy of the Sick Bed," the principal poem in the book, there are some really beautiful passages. I would say to him, and I would say to all young poets, because I feel it deeply: Do not be afraid of your raw material, especially in the relations between men and women. J. Marjoram well and epigrammatically writes:
As little and incomplete
Learns by losing Love
How it was sweet!
True. But, when applied to love with a capital L, and to dropped pins despairing, a little sane realistic disdain will not be amiss, particularly in this isle. I want to see the rise of a new school of love poetry in England. And I believe I shall see it.
TROLLOPE'S METHODS
23 Sep. '09
I am reminded of Anthony Trollope and a recent article on him, in the Times, which was somewhat below the high level of the Times literary criticism. Said the Times: "Anthony Trollope died in the December of 1882, and in the following year a fatal, perhaps an irreparable, blow to his reputation was struck by the publication of his autobiography." The conceit of a blow which in addition to being fatal is perhaps also irreparable is diverting. But that is not my point. What the Times objects to in the Autobiography is the revelation of the clock-work methods by which Trollope wrote his novels. It appears that this horrid secret ought to have been for ever concealed. "Fatal admission!" exclaims the Times. Fatal fiddlesticks! Trollope said much more than the Times quotes. He confessed that he wrote with a watch in front of him, and obliged himself to produce 250 words every quarter of an hour. And what then? How can the confession affect his reputation? His reputation rests on the value of his novels, and not in the least on the manner in which he chose to write them. And his reputation is secure. Moreover, there is no reason why great literature should not be produced to time, with a watch on the desk. Persons who chatter about the necessity of awaiting inspirational hypersthenia don't know what the business of being an artist is. They have only read about it sentimentally. The whole argument is preposterous, and withal extraordinarily Victorian. And even assuming that the truth would deal a fatal blow, etc., is that a reason for hiding it? Another strange sentence is this: "The wonder is, not that Trollope's novels are 'readable,' but that, being readable, they are yet so closely packed with that true realism without which any picture of life is lifeless." (My italics.) I ask myself what quality, in the opinion of the Times writer, chiefly makes for readableness.
CHESTERTON AND LUCAS
7 Oct. '09
Two books of essays on the same day from the same firm, "One Day and Another," by E.V. Lucas, and "Tremendous Trifles," by G.K. Chesterton! Messrs. Methuen put the volumes together and advertised them as being "uniform in size and appearance." I do not know why. They are uniform neither in size nor in appearance; but only in price, costing a crown apiece. "Tremendous Trifles" has given me a wholesome shock. Its contents are all reprinted from the Daily News. In some ways they are sheer and rank journalism; they are often almost Harmsworthian in their unscrupulous simplifying of the facts of a case, in their crude determination to emphasize one fact at the expense of every other fact. Thus: "No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity." So there you are! If you don't accept that you are damned; the Chesterton guillotine has clicked on you. Perhaps I have lived in Paris more years than Mr. Chesterton has lived in it months, but it has not yet happened to me to understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. Hence I am undone; I no longer exist! Again, of Brussels: "It has none of the things which make good Frenchmen love Paris; it has only the things which make unspeakable Englishmen love it." There are a hundred things in Brussels that I love, and I find Brussels a very agreeable city. Hence I am an unspeakable Englishman. Mr. Chesterton's book is blotched with this particular form of curt arrogance as with a skin complaint. Happily it is only a skin complaint. More serious than a skin complaint is Mr. Chesterton's religious orthodoxy, which crops up at intervals and colours the book. I merely voice the opinion of the intelligent minority (or majority) of Mr. Chesterton's readers when I say that his championship of Christian dogma sticks in my throat. In my opinion, at this time of day it is absolutely impossible for a young man with a first-class intellectual apparatus to accept any form of dogma, and I am therefore forced to the conclusion that Mr. Chesterton has not got a first-class intellectual apparatus. (With an older man, whose central ideas were definitely formed at an earlier epoch, the case might be different.) I will go further and say that it is impossible, in one's private thoughts, to think of the accepter of dogma as an intellectual equal. Not all Mr. Chesterton's immense cleverness and charm will ever erase from the minds of his best readers this impression—caused by his mistimed religious dogmatism—that there is something seriously deficient in the very basis of his mind. And what his cleverness and charm cannot do his arrogance and his effrontery assuredly will not do. And yet I said that this book gave me a wholesome shock. Far from deteriorating, Mr. Chesterton is improving. In spite of the awful tediousness of his mannerism of antithetical epigram, he does occasionally write finer epigrams than ever. His imagination is stronger, his fancy more delicate, and his sense of beauty widened. There are things in this book that really are very excellent indeed; things that, if they die, will die hard. For example, the essay: "In Topsy Turvy Land." It is a book which, in the main, strongly makes for righteousness. Its minor defects are scandalous, in a literary sense; its central defect passes the comprehension; the book is journalism, it is anything you like. But I can tell you that it is literature, after all.
If you desire a book entirely free from the exasperating faults of Mr. Chesterton's you will turn to Mr. Lucas's. But Mr. Lucas, too, is a highly mysterious man. On the surface he might be mistaken for a mere cricket enthusiast. Dig down, and you will come, with not too much difficulty, to the simple man of letters. Dig further, and, with somewhat more difficulty, you will come to an agreeably ironic critic of human foibles. Try to dig still further, and you will probably encounter rock. Only here and there in his two novels does Mr. Lucas allow us to glimpse a certain powerful and sardonic harshness in him, indicative of a mind that has seen the world and irrevocably judged it in most of its manifestations. I could believe that Mr. Lucas is an ardent politician, who, however, would not deign to mention his passionately held views save with a pencil on a ballot-paper—if then! It could not have been without intention that he put first in this new book an essay describing the manufacture of a professional criminal. Most of the other essays are exceedingly light in texture. They leave no loophole for criticism, for their accomplishment is always at least as high as their ambition. They are serenely well done. Immanent in the book is the calm assurance of a man perfectly aware that it will be a passing hard task to get change out of him! And even when some one does get change out of him, honour is always saved. In describing a certain over of his own bowling, Mr. Lucas says: "I was conscious of a twinge as I saw his swift glance round the field. He then hit my first ball clean out of it; from my second he made two; from my third another two; the fourth and fifth wanted playing; and the sixth he hit over my head among some distant haymakers." You see, the fourth and fifth wanted playing.
OFFICIAL RECOGNITION OF POETRY
14 Oct. '09
I did not go to Paris to witness the fêtes in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Victor Hugo's "La Légende des Siècles," but I happened to be in Paris while they were afoot. I might have seen one of Hugo's dramas at the Théâtre Français, but I avoided this experience, my admiration for Hugo being tempered after the manner of M. André Gide's. M. Gide, asked with a number of other authors to say who was still the greatest modern French poet, replied: "Victor Hugo—alas!" So I chose Brieux instead of Hugo, and saw "La Robe Rouge" at the Français. Brieux is now not only an Academician, but one of the stars of the Français. A bad sign! A bad play, studded with good things, like all Brieux's plays. (The importance attached to Brieux by certain of the elect in England is absurd. Bernard Shaw could simply eat him up—for he belongs to the vegetable kingdom.) A thoroughly bad performance, studded with fine acting! A great popular success! Whenever I go to the Français I tremble at the prospect of a national theatre in England. The Français is hopeless—corrupt, feeble, tedious, reactionary, fraudulent, and the laughing-stock of artists. However, we have not got a national theatre yet.
Immediately after its unveiling I gazed in the garden of the Palais Royal at Rodin's statue of Victor Hugo. I thought it rather fine, shadowed on the north and on the south by two famous serpentine trees. Hugo, in a state of nudity, reclines meditating on a pile of rocks. The likeness is good, but you would not guess from the statue that for many years Hugo travelled daily on the top of the Clichy-Odéon omnibus and was never recognized by the public. Heaven knows what he is meditating about! Perhaps about that gushing biography of himself which apparently he penned with his own hand and published under another name! For he was a weird admixture of qualities—like most of us. I could not help meditating, myself, upon the really extraordinary differences between France and England. Imagine a nude statue of Tennyson in St. James's Park! You cannot! But, assuming that some creative wit had contrived to get a nude statue of Tennyson into St. James's Park, imagine the enormous shindy that would occur, the horror-stricken Press of London, the deep pain and resentment of a mighty race! And can you conceive London officially devoting a week to the recognition of the fact that fifty years had elapsed since the publication of a work of poetic genius! Yet I think we know quite as much about poetry in England as they do in France. Still less conceivable is the participation of an English Government in such an anniversary. In Paris last Thursday a French Minister stood in front of the Hugo statue and thus began: "The Government of the Republic could not allow the fiftieth anniversary of the 'Legend of the Centuries' to be celebrated without associating itself with the events." My fancy views Mr. Herbert John Gladstone—yes, him!—standing discreetly in front of an indiscreet marble Wordsworth and asserting that the British Government had no intention of being left out of the national rejoicings about the immortality of "The Prelude"! A spectacle that surely Americans would pay to see! On Sunday, at the Français, Hugo was being declaimed from one o'clock in the afternoon till midnight, with only an hour's interval. And it rained violently nearly all the time.
ARTISTS AND CRITICS
21 Oct. '09
There is a one-sided feud between artists and critics. When a number of artists are gathered together you will soon in the conversation come upon signs of that feud. I admit that the general attitude of artists to critics is unfair. They expect from critics an imaginative comprehension which in the nature of the case only a creative artist can possess. On the other hand, a creative artist cannot do the work of a critic because he has neither the time nor the inclination to master the necessary critical apparatus. Hence critical work seldom or never satisfies the artist, and the artist's ideal of what critical work ought to be is an impossible dream. I find confirmation of my view in other arts than my own. The critical work of Mr. Bernhard Berenson, for instance, seems to me wonderful and satisfying. But when I mention Mr. Berenson to a painter I invariably discover that that painter's secret attitude towards Mr. Berenson is—well, aristocratic. The finest, and the only first-rate, criticism is produced when, by an exceptional accident, a creative artist of balanced and powerful temperament is moved to deal exhaustively with a subject. Among standard critical works the one that has most impressed me is Lessing's "Laocoon"—at any rate the literary parts of it. Here (I have joyously said to myself) is somebody who knows what he is talking about! Here is some one who has been there.
RUDYARD KIPLING
4 Nov. '09
After a long period of abstention from Rudyard Kipling, I have just read "Actions and Reactions." It has induced gloom in me; yet a modified gloom. Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since "Plain Tales from the Hills" delighted first Anglo-Indian, and then English society. There was nothing of permanent value in that book, and in my extremest youth I never imagined otherwise. But "The Story of the Gadsbys" impressed me. So did "Barrack-room Ballads." So did pieces of "Soldiers Three." So did "Life's Handicap" and "Many Inventions." So did "The Jungle Book," despite its wild natural history. And I remember my eagerness for the publication of "The Seven Seas." I remember going early in the morning to Denny's bookshop to buy it. I remember the crimson piles of it in every bookshop in London. And I remember that I perused it, gulped it down, with deep joy. And I remember the personal anxiety which I felt when Kipling lay very dangerously ill in New York. For a fortnight, then, Kipling's temperature was the most important news of the day. I remember giving a party with a programme of music, in that fortnight, and I began the proceedings by reading aloud the programme, and at the end of the programme instead of "God Save the Queen," I read, "God Save Kipling," and everybody cheered. "Stalky and Co." cooled me, and "Kim" chilled me. At intervals, since, Kipling's astounding political manifestations, chiefly in verse, have shocked and angered me. As time has elapsed it has become more and more clear that his output was sharply divided into two parts by his visit to New York, and that the second half is inferior in quantity, in quality, in everything, to the first. It has been too plain now for years that he is against progress, that he is the shrill champion of things that are rightly doomed, that his vogue among the hordes of the respectable was due to political reasons, and that he retains his authority over the said hordes because he is the bard of their prejudices and of their clayey ideals. A democrat of ten times Kipling's gift and power could never have charmed and held the governing classes as Kipling has done. Nevertheless, I for one cannot, except in anger, go back on a genuine admiration. I cannot forget a benefit. If in quick resentment I have ever written of Kipling with less than the respect which is eternally due to an artist who has once excited in the heart a generous and beautiful emotion, and has remained honest, I regret it. And this is to be said: at his worst Kipling is an honest and painstaking artist. No work of his but has obviously been lingered over with a craftsman's devotion! He has never spoken when he had nothing to say—though probably no artist was ever more seductively tempted by publishers and editors to do so. And he has done more than shun notoriety—Miss Marie Corelli does that—he has succeeded in avoiding it.
The first story, and the best, in "Actions and Reactions" is entitled "An Habitation Enforced," and it displays the amused but genuine awe of a couple of decent rich Americans confronted by the sæcular wonders of the English land system. It depends for its sharp point on a terrific coincidence, as do many of Kipling's tales, for instance, "The Man Who Was"—the mere chance that these Americans should tumble upon the very ground and estate that had belonged to the English ancestors of one of them. It is written in a curiously tortured idiom, largely borrowed from the Bible, and all the characters are continually given to verbal smartness or peculiarity of one kind or another. The characters are not individualized. Each is a type, smoothed out by sentimental handling into something meant to be sympathetic. Moreover, the real difficulties of the narrative are consistently, though I believe unconsciously, shirked. The result, if speciously pretty, is not a bit convincing. But the gravest, and the entirely fatal fault, is the painting of the English land system. To read this story one could never guess that the English land system is not absolutely ideal, that tenants and hereditary owners do not live always in a delightful patriarchal relation, content. There are no shadows whatever. The English land system is perfect, and no accusation could possibly be breathed against it. And the worst is that for Kipling the English land system probably is perfect. He is incapable of perceiving that it can be otherwise. He would not desire it to be otherwise. His sentimentalization of it is gross—there is no other word—and at bottom the story is as wildly untrue to life as the most arrant Sunday-school prize ever published by the Religious Tract Society. Let it be admitted that the romantic, fine side of the English land system is rendered with distinction and effectiveness; and that the puzzled, unwilling admiration of the Americans is well done, though less well than in a somewhat similar earlier story, "An Error in the Fourth Dimension."
An example of another familiar aspect of Kipling is "With the Night Mail." This is a story of 2000 A.D., and describes the crossing of the Atlantic by the aerial mail. It is a glittering essay in the sham-technical; and real imagination, together with a tremendous play of fancy, is shown in the invention of illustrative detail. But the whole effort is centred on the mechanics of the affair. Human evolution has stood stock-still save in the department of engineering. The men are exactly the same semi-divine civil service men that sit equal with British military and naval officers on the highest throne in the kingdom of Kipling's esteem. Nothing interests him but the mechanics and the bureaucratic organization and the esprit de corps. Nor does he conceive that the current psychology of ruling and managing the earth will ever be modified. His simplicity, his naïveté, his enthusiasms, his prejudices, his blindness, and his vanities are those of Stalky. And, after all, even the effect he aims at is not got. It is nearly got, but never quite. There is a tireless effort, but the effort is too plain and fatigues the reader, forcing him to share it. A thin powder of dullness lies everywhere.
When I had read these stories, I took out "Life's Handicap," and tasted again the flavour of "On Greenhow Hill," which I have always considered to be among the very best of Kipling's stories. It would be too much to say that I liked it as well as ever. I did not. Time has staled it. The author's constitutional sentimentality has corroded it in parts. But it is still a very impressive and a fundamentally true thing. It was done in the rich flush of power, long before its creator had even suspected his hidden weaknesses, long before his implacable limitations had begun to compel him to imitate himself. It was done in the days when he could throw off exquisite jewels like this, to deck the tale:
Her band within his rosy fingers lay,
A chilling weight. She would, not turn or hear;
But with averted, face went on her way.
But when pale Death, all featureless and grim,
Lifted his bony hand, and beckoning
Held out his cypress-wreath, she followed him,
And Love was left forlorn and wondering,
That she who for his bidding would not stay,
At Death's first whisper rose and went away.
CENSORSHIP BY THE LIBRARIES
23 Dec '09
The immediate origin of the new attempt by the libraries to exercise a censorship over books, and particularly over novels, is quite accidental and silly. A woman socially prominent in the governing classes of this realm has a daughter. The daughter obtained and read a certain book from the circulating library. (Naturally the family is one of those that are too rich to buy books; it can only hire.) The mother chanced to see the book, and considered it to be highly improper. (I have not read the book, but I should say that it is probably not improper at all; merely a trivial, foolish book.) The woman went direct to an extremely exalted member of the Cabinet, being a friend of his; and she kicked up a tremendous storm and dust. The result was that "certain machinery" was set in motion, and "certain representations" were made to the libraries; indeed, the libraries were given to understand that unless they did something themselves "certain steps" would be taken. It was all very vague and impressive, and it brought recent agitations to a head. Hence the manifesto of the libraries, in which they announce that all books must be submitted in advance to a committee of hiring experts, and that the submitted books will be divided into three classes. The first class will be absolutely banned; the circulation of the second will be prevented so far as it can be prevented without the ban absolute; and the circulation of the third will be permitted without restrictions.
Of course, that even the suggestion of a censorship should spring from such a personal and trifling cause is very scandalous. But I am fairly sure that it might happen under any Government and under any form of Government. All Governments must consist of individual members, and all individual members have friends. Most of them are acquainted with women, and with absurd women, who will utilize the acquaintanceship with all their might for their own personal ends. And exceedingly few members of any Government whatsoever would have the courage to tell a well-dressed and arrogant woman to go to the devil, even when that answer happened to be the sole correct answer to an impertinence. Wellington merely damned the portly darlings, but then Wellington, though preposterous as a politician, was a great man.
The menacing letter from the Libraries was received by the Publishers on the very day of their Council meeting. This may or may not have been accidental, but at any rate it put the Publishers at a disadvantage. The Council meetings of the Publishers' Association, being dominated by knights and other mandarins, are apt to be formal and majestic in character. You can't blurt out whatever comes into your head at a Council meeting of the Publishers' Association. And nearly everybody is afraid of everybody else. No one had had time to think the matter over, much less to decide whether surrender or defiance would pay best or look best. Consequently the reply sent to the Libraries was a masterpiece of futility. The mildly surprising thing is that, in the Council itself, there was a strong pro-Library party. Among this party were Messrs. Hutchinson and Mr. Heinemann. Messrs. Hutchinson, it is well known, have consistently for many years tried to publish only novels for "family reading." It is an ambition, like another. And one may admit that Messrs. Hutchinson have fairly well succeeded in it. Mr. Heinemann issues as much really high-class literature as any publisher in London, but if his policy has had a "family and young lady" tendency, that tendency has escaped me. He has published books (some of them admirable works, and some not) which a committee of hiring experts would have rejected with unanimous enthusiasm. It is needless to particularize. Why Mr. Heinemann should have supported the Libraries in the private deliberations of the Publishers I cannot imagine. But that is the fault of my imagination. I have an immense confidence in Mr. Heinemann's business acumen and instinct for self-preservation.
The Publishers, if they chose, could kill the censorship movement at once by politely declining to submit their books to the censorship. If only the three big fiction firms concerted to do this, the Libraries would be compelled to withdraw their project. But the Publishers will not do this; not even three of them will do it. The only argument against a censorship is that it is extremely harmful to original literature of permanent value; and such an argument does not make any very powerful appeal to publishers. What most publishers want is to earn as much money as possible with as little fuss as possible. Again, the Authors' Society might kill the censorship conspiracy by declining to allow its members to sign any agreement with publishers which did not contain a clause forbidding the publisher to submit the book to the committee of hiring experts. A dozen leading novelists could command the situation. But the Authors' Society will do nothing effective. The official reply of the Authors' Society was as feeble as that of the Publishers. I repeat that the only argument against a censorship is that it is extremely harmful to original literature of permanent value; such an argument does not make any very powerful appeal to authors. What most authors want is to earn as much money as possible with as little fuss as possible. Besides, the great money-makers among authors—the authors of weight with publishers and libraries—have nothing to fear from any censorship. They censor themselves. They take the most particular care not to write anything original, courageous, or true, because these qualities alienate more subscribers than they please. I am not a pessimist nor a cynic, but I enjoy contemplating the real facts of a case.
All the forces would seem to be in favour of the establishment of a censorship. (And by a censorship I mean such a censorship as would judge books by a code which, if it was applied to them, would excommunicate the Bible, Shakespeare, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Swift, Shelley, Rossetti, Meredith, Hardy, and George Moore. "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel" would never, as a new work, pass a library censorship. Nor would "Jude the Obscure," nor half a dozen of Hardy's other books; nor would most of George Moore.) Nevertheless I am not very much perturbed. There are three tremendous forces against the establishment of a genuine censorship, and I think that they will triumph. The first is that mysterious nullifying force by which such movements usually do fizzle out. The second force against it lies in the fact that the movement is not genuinely based on public opinion. And the third is that there is a great deal of money to be made out of merely silly mawkish books which a genuine censorship would ban with serious, original work. For such books a strong demand exists among people otherwise strictly respectable, far stronger than the feeling against such books. The demand will have its way. A few serious and obstinate authors will perhaps suffer for a while. But then we often do suffer. We don't seem to mind. No one could guess, for instance, from the sweet Christian kindliness of my general tone towards Mr. Jesse Boot's library that Mr. Jesse Boot had been guilty of banning some of my work which I love most. But it is so. I suppose we don't mind, because in the end, dead or alive, we come out on top.
30 Dec. '09
I imagined that I had said the last word on this subject, and hence I intended to say no more. But it appears that I was mistaken. It appears, from a somewhat truculent letter which I have received from a correspondent, that I have not yet even touched the fringe of the subject. Parts of this correspondent's letter are fairly printable. He says: "You look at the matter from quite the wrong point of view. There is only one point of view, and that is the subscribers'. The Libraries don't exist for authors, but for us (he is a subscriber to Mudie's). We pay, and the Libraries are for our convenience. They are not for the furtherance of English literature, or whatever you call it. What I say is, if I order a book from a Library I ought to be able to get it, unless it has been confiscated by the police. I didn't pay my subscription in order to have my choice of books limited to such books as some frock-coated personage in Oxford Street thought good for me. I've spent about forty years in learning to know what I like in literature, and I don't want anybody to teach me. I'm not a young girl, I'm a middle-aged man; but I don't see why I should be handicapped by that. And if I am to be handicapped I'm going to chuck Mudie's. I've already written them a very rude letter about Mr. de Morgan's "It Never Can Happen Again." I wanted that book. They told me they didn't supply it. And when I made a row they wrote me a soothing letter nearly as long as the Epistle to the Ephesians explaining why they didn't supply it. Something about two volumes and half a sovereign.... I don't know, and I don't care. I don't care whether a book's in one volume or in a hundred volumes. If I want it, and if I've paid for the right to have it, I've got to have it, or I've got to have my money back. They mumbled something in their letter about having received many complaints from other subscribers about novels being in two volumes. But what do I care about other subscribers?"
And he continues, after a deviation into forceful abuse: "I don't want to force novels in two volumes down the throats of other subscribers. I don't want to force anything down their throats. They aren't obliged to take what they don't want. There are lots of books circulated by Mudie's that I strongly object to—books that make me furious—as regards both moral and physical heaviness and tediousness and general tommy-rot. But do I write and complain, and ask Mudie's to withdraw such books altogether? If Mudie came along with a pistol and two volumes by Hall Caine, and said to me, 'Look here, I'll make you have these,' then perhaps I might begin to murmur gently. But he doesn't. I'll say this for Mudie; he doesn't force you to take particular books. You can always leave what you don't want. All these people who are (alleged to be) crying out for a censorship—they're merely idle! If they really want a censorship they ought to exercise it themselves. Robinson has a daughter, and he is shocked at the idea of her picking up a silly sham-erotic novel by a member of the aristocracy, or a first-rate beautiful thing by George Moore.... Am I then to be deprived of the chance of studying the inane psychology of the ruling classes or of enjoying the work of a great artist? Be d——d to Robinson's daughter! I don't care a bilberry for either her or her innocence. I'm not going to be responsible for Robinson's daughter. Let Robinson, if he is such a fool as to suppose that daughters can be spoiled by bad books or good books—let him look after her himself! Let him establish his confounded censorship at his front door, or at his drawing-room door. Let him do his own work. Nothing but idleness—that's what's the matter with him! The whole project that Robinson suggests is simply monstrous. He might just as well say that because his daughter has a weak digestion and an unruly appetite for rich cakes, therefore all the cake shops in London must be shut up. Let him keep her out of cake shops. All I want is freedom. I don't mean to defend my tastes or to apologize for them. If I wish to hire a certain book, that's enough. I must have it—until the police step in. There can only be one censorship, and that is by the police. A Library is a commercial concern, and I won't look at it from any other point of view. I have no interest at the present moment in your notions about the future of literature, and the livelihood of serious artists, and so on. All that's absolutely beside the point. The sole point is that I am ready to let other people have what they want, and I claim that I've the right to have what I want. The whole thing is simple rot, and there's no other word for it."
1910
CENSORSHIP BY THE LIBRARIES
13 Jan. '10
A number of people have been good enough to explain to me that the project of the Circulating Libraries Censorship (now partially "in being") did not originally concern itself with novels, and that, in the first place, it was directed against books of more or less scandalous memoirs. Of this I was well aware. But in writing about the matter I expressly tried to centre its interest on the novel, because the novel is the only important part of the affair. For a year past I have been inveighing against the increasing taste for feeble naughtiness concerning king's mistresses and all that sort of tedious person. And I have remarked on the growing frequency of such words as "fair," "frail," "lover," "enchantress," etc., in the supposed-to-be-alluring titles of books of historical immorality. (I presume that these volumes are called for by the respectable, as the cocotte calls for a crème de menthe at a fashionable seaside hotel on a winter Sunday afternoon.) Apparently the circulating libraries also have noticed the growing frequency of such words in their lists. But what they have noticed with more genuine alarm is the growing prices which clever publishers have been putting on such books. It has not escaped the observation of clever publishers that the demand by library subscribers for such books is a very real demand, and clever publishers therefore thought that they might make a little bit extra in this connexion by charging high for volumes brief but scandalous. The libraries thought otherwise. Hence, in truth, the attempted censorship. The now famous moral crusade of the libraries would certainly not have occurred had not the libraries perceived, in the moral pressure which was exercised upon them from lofty regions, the chance of effecting economies. And there is not a circulating library that does not feel an authentic need of economies.
I should have objected to a censorship even of scandalized history, for no censorship ever cured a population of bad taste. But naturally the libraries could not stop at memoirs. They had, in order to be consistent and to talk big about morality, to include novels in their scheme of scavenging. At this point the libraries pass from futile foolishness to active viciousness, and so encounter the opposition of persons like myself, whose business it is to keep an eye on things.
I can tell a true tale about one of the three great circulating libraries. A certain man of taste was directing the education in literature of a certain woman. The time came when the woman had to study Balzac. The man gave her a list of titles of novels by Balzac which she was to read. She went to her library, but could not find, in the list of Balzac's complete "Comédie Humaine" furnished by the library, one of the works which she had been instructed to peruse. Hearing of this, the man, whose curiosity was aroused, called at the library to conduct an inquiry. He had an interview with one of the managers, and the manager at once admitted that their complete list was not complete. "We cannot supply a work with such a title," the manager explained. The book was one of the most famous and one of the finest of nineteenth-century novels, "Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes," issued by Messrs. Dent and Co. (surely a respectable firm), with a preface by Professor George Saintsbury (surely a respectable mandarin), under the title, "The Harlot's Progress." The man of taste asked, "Have you read the book?" "No," said the manager. "Have you read any of Balzac's novels?" "No," said the manager. "Do you prohibit Galsworthy's 'Man of Property'?" "No," said the manager. "Have you read it?" "No," said the manager. "Do you prohibit Jacob Tonson's last novel?" "No," said the manager. "Have you read it?" "No," said the manager. "Well," said the man of taste, "you'd better read one or two of these later writers, and then think over the Balzac question." The manager discreetly replied that he would consult the principal proprietor. The next morning "The Harlot's Progress," in two volumes, was sent round from the library.
But imagine it! Imagine one of the largest circulating libraries in the world, in the year 1909, refusing to supply an established, world-admired, classical work of genius because its title contains the word "harlot"! In no other European capital, nor in any American capital, could such a monstrously idiotic and disgusting thing happen. It is so preposterous that one cannot realize it all at once. I am a tremendous admirer of England. I have lived too long in foreign parts not to see the fineness of England. But in matters of hypocrisy there is really something very wrong with this island, and the atmosphere of this island is thick enough to choke all artists dead. You can walk up and down the Strand and see photographs of celebrated living harlots all over the place. You can buy them on picture post cards for your daughter. You can see their names even on the posters of high-class weekly papers. You can entertain them at the most select fashionable restaurants. Indeed, the shareholders of fashionable restaurants would look very blue without the said harlots. (Only they aren't called harlots.) But if you desire to read a masterpiece of social fiction, some mirror of crass stupidity in a circulating library will try to save you from yourself.
24 Feb. '10
Up Yorkshire way the opponents of freedom have been dealing some effective blows at the Libraries Censorship. They doubtless imagine that they have been supporting the Libraries Censorship; but they are mistaken. Hull has distinguished itself. It is a strange, interesting place. I only set foot in it once; the day was Sunday, and I arrived by sea. I was informed that a man could not get a shave in Hull on Sunday. But I got one. At the last meeting of the Hull Libraries Committee, when "Ann Veronica" was under discussion, Canon Lambert procured for the name of Lambert a free advertisement throughout the length and breadth of the country by saying: "I would just as soon send a daughter of mine to a house infected with diphtheria or typhoid fever as put that book into her hands." I doubt it. I can conceive that, if it came to the point, Canon Lambert's fear of infection and regard for his own canonical skin might move him to offer his daughter "Ann Veronica" in preference to diphtheria and typhoid fever. Canons who give expression to this kind of babblement must expect what they get in the way of responses. Let the Canon now turn the other cheek, in a Christian spirit, and I will see what I can do for him.
Needless to say, "Ann Veronica" was banned from the Free Public Libraries of free Hull. But I cull the following from the Hull Daily Mail: "A local bookseller had thirteen orders for 'Ann Veronica' on Monday, thirty on Tuesday, and scores since. Previously he had no demand." A Canon Lambert in every town would demolish the censorship in less time than it took the Hebrew deity to create the world and the fig-tree.
Canon Lambert, doubtless unconsciously, went wide of the point. The point was not a code for the parental treatment of canons' daughters. England was not waiting for information as to what Canon Lambert would do to a Miss Lambert in a given dilemma. H.G. Wells did not turn up in Hull with a Gatling gun and, turning it on the Canon's abode, threaten to blow the ecclesiastical wigwam to pieces if the canon did not immediately buy a copy of "Ann Veronica" for his daughter to read. Nobody wants to interfere between the Canon and a Miss Lambert. All that quiet people want is to be left alone to treat their daughters according to their lights. Does Canon Lambert hold that the Hull libraries are to contain no volumes which he would not care for his daughter to read?
The Hull Daily Mail has, I regret to say, taken the side of the Canon. This is a pity. The Hull paper should be a little more careful about the letters it prints. In a recent issue it allowed a correspondent to call "Ann Veronica" "pornographic," which is most distinctly libellous. But possibly the correspondent and the newspaper felt themselves secure in Mr. Wells's disdain. "Ann Veronica" is not pornographic. It is not even indecent. It is utterly decent from end to end. It is also utterly honest. It is not one of Mr. Wells's major productions. But if a work of an honourable and honoured artist is to be damned because it happens to be inferior to other works of the same artist, Hull ought to consider the awful case of "Measure for Measure." By the way, would Canon Lambert as soon send a Miss Lambert to a house infected with mumps as put "Measure for Measure" into her hands? The Hull Daily Mail, taken to task, sheltered itself behind Mr. Clement Shorter and the Sphere. I will not discuss Mr. Shorter's singular pronouncement upon "Ann Veronica," because I am in a very good humour with him just now for his excellently acid remarks upon the "success" literature of Mr. Peter Keary. But I may remark that Mr. Shorter did not advocate the censoring of the book, nor did he come within seven Irish miles of describing it as pornographic.
Canonical people have tried to make capital out of the fact that "Ann Veronica" is not to be found in the public libraries of sundry large towns. But the reason may not be connected with the iconoclasm of "Ann Veronica." In an interview, Mr. T.W. Hand, the librarian at Leeds, said: "I haven't read the book through (Why not?), though I have seen it, and we haven't got it in any of our libraries in Leeds. The reason for this is not the character of the book, but the fact that we never purchase our novels until they have become cheaper." Charming confession! A subscription ought to be opened for poverty-stricken Leeds, which must wait to buy an English book that is or will be translated into every European language, until it has become cheaper! A few weeks ago the country was laughing at little Beverley because its Fathers publicly decided to purchase no fiction less than a year old. But are the great towns any better off?
3 Mar. '10
Literary censorship in the intellectual centre of the world: I need hardly say that I mean Boston, Mass. Boston is the city of Harvard University. It is also the city of the Atlantic Monthly. It is also the city of Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, and Holmes. Boston has a Public Library. It is supposed to be one of the finest public libraries in this world or any other. Great artists, such as Puvis de Chavannes and John Sargent, have helped to decorate the Boston Library. In brief, Boston and its Library are not to be sneezed at. A certain woman asked for George Moore's "Esther Waters," recognized, I believe, as one of the most serious and superb of modern novels. The work was included in the catalogue of the Library. In reply to her request she was informed that she could not have "Esther Waters" unless she obtained from the Chief Mandarin or Librarian special permission to read it, on the ground that she was a "student of literature." I doubt whether the imagination of nincompoops and boards of management has ever devised anything more beautiful than this.
But the lady had a husband, and the husband, being a prominent journalist, had the editorial use of a newspaper in Boston. He began to make inquiries, and he discovered that many of the catalog cards were marked with red stars, and that a star signified that the work described on the card was not morally fit for general circulation. He further discovered that works rankly and frankly pornographic and works of distinguished art were starred with the same star. Lastly, he discovered that the Chief Mandarin or Librarian, all out of his own head and off his own bat, had appointed a reading committee for the dividing of modern fiction into sheep and goats, and that the said committee consisted exclusively of Boston dames mature in years. He exposed the entire affair in his newspapers and made a very pleasing sensation. The first result was that his wife was afterwards received at the Library with imperial honours and given to understand by kotowing sub-mandarins that she might have the whole red-star library sent home to her house if she so desired. There was no other result. The rest of reading Boston remained under the motherly but autocratic care of ces dames. Those skilled in the artistic records of Boston may remember that the management of the same Library once refused the offered gift of a statue of a woman holding a baby, on the sole ground that the woman was not attired.
26 May '10
More interesting information has accrued to me concerning literary censorship in the British provinces. Glasgow has about a dozen lending libraries, chiefly, I believe, of the Carnegie species. In none of these are the works of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett allowed a place. Further, "Anna Karenina," "Resurrection," "Tess," "Jude the Obscure," and "Tono-Bungay" are banned. Further, and still more droll, in the words of a correspondent who has been good enough to send me all sorts of particulars: "A few days ago I applied at the Mitchell Library (a reference library in the centre of the town) for Whitman's poems. The attendant procured the volume, but, before handing it to me, consulted one of the senior librarians. This official scrutinized me from a distance of about eight yards and finally nodded his head in acquiescence. The book was then given to me. On the back of it a little red label was affixed. I made inquiry and discovered that books with these labels are only given out to persons of (what shall I say?) good moral appearance."
Nevertheless, we ought to be thankful that we live in Britain. The case of the United States is in some respects far worse than ours. The egregious Sir Robert Anderson has just explained in Blackwood how he established a sort of unofficial censorship of morals at the English Post Office. In the United States an official censorship of mailed matter exists, and the United States Post Office can and does regularly examine the literature entrusted to it, and can and does reject what it deems inimical to the morals of the native land of Jay Gould, James Gordon Bennett, J.D. Rockefeller, and the regretted Harriman. Among other matter which the United States Post Office censorship has recently excluded are the following items:
An extract from an article in the Fortnightly Review.
An extract from "Man and Superman."
An article in favour of freedom of the Press reprinted from the Boston's Woman's Journal.
An article by Lady Florence Dixie reprinted from a Scottish county paper.
On one occasion the editor of Lucifer had occasion to mention that adultery and fornication had not been criminal offences in England since 1660. The authorities were so aghast at the idea of this information being allowed to creep out that they insisted on the passage being deleted. It was.
Further. The Editor of an American paper, on it being suggested to him that he should reprint portions of a criticism of "Measure for Measure," by Mr. A.B. Walkley in the Times, refused to do so for fear of prosecution. Perhaps the most truly American instance of all is the misfortune that befell the Reverend Mabel McCoy Irwin. The excellent lady began to publish a paper advocating strict chastity for both sexes. It was excluded from the mails on the ground that no allusion to sex could be tolerated. I reckon this anecdote to be the most exquisitely perfect of all anecdotes that I have ever come across in the diverting history of moral censorships. There is a subtle flavour about that name, Mabel McCoy Irwin, which is indescribably apposite ... McCoy. It is a wonderful world! I am much indebted to an American correspondent for these delights.
BRIEUX
17 Feb. '10
I foresee a craze in this country for Brieux. I first perceived its coming one day during an intellectual meal in a green-painted little restaurant in Soho. Whenever I go into Soho I pass through experiences which send me out again a wiser man. On this occasion I happened to speak lightly of Brieux to a friend of mine, a prominent and influential member of the Stage Society—one of those men in London who think to-day what London will think to-morrow, and what Paris thought yesterday. He was visibly shocked by my tone. His invincible politeness withstood the strain, but the strain was terrible. From this incident alone I was almost ready to prophesy a Brieux craze in London. And now a selection of Brieux's plays is to be published in English in one volume, with a preface by Bernard Shaw. Within a fortnight of the appearance of the book the Brieux craze will exist in full magnificence. Leading articles will contain learned off-hand allusions to Brieux, Brieux and Shaw will be compared and differentiated, and Brieux will be the most serious dramatist in France. I doubt not that Mr. Shaw's preface will be a witty and illuminating affair, and that it will show me agreeable aspects of Brieux's talent which have hitherto escaped me; but if it persuades me that Brieux is an artistically serious dramatist worth twopence, then I will retire from public life and seek a post as third sub-editor on the British Weekly.
Brieux is a man with moral ideas. I will admit even that he is dominated by moral ideas, which, if they are sometimes crude, are certainly righteous. He is a reformer and a passionate reformer. But a man can be a passionate reformer, with a marked turn for eloquence, and yet not be a serious dramatist. Dr. Clifford is a reformer; Mr. Henniker Heaton is a passionate reformer; and both are capable of literature when they are excited. But they are not dramatists. We still await Mr. Henniker Heaton's tragic fourth act about the failure of the negotiations for a penny post with France. Brieux is too violent a reformer ever to be a serious dramatist. Violent reformers are unprincipled, and the reformer in Brieux forces the dramatist in him to prostitution. The dramatist in him is not strong enough to resist the odious demands of the reformer: which fact alone shows how far he is from being a first-rate dramatist. As a dramatist Brieux is no stronger, no more sincere, no less unscrupulous, no less viciously sentimental, than the fashionable authors of the boulevard, such as Capus, Donnay, and the ineffable Bernstein, so adored in London. And it is as a dramatist that he must be judged. Of course, if you wish to judge him as a reformer, you must get some expert opinion about his subjects of reform. I fancy that you will end by discovering that as a reformer he must be considered just a little crude.
I have seen most of Brieux's plays, and I have seen them produced under his own direction, so that I can judge fairly well what he is after on the stage. And I am bound to say that, with the exception of "Les Trois Filles de Monsieur Dupont" (which pleased me pretty well so far as I comprehended its dramatic intention), I have not seen one which I could refrain from despising. Brieux's plays always begin so brilliantly, and they always end so feebly, in such a wishwash of sentimentalism. Take his last play—no, his last play was "La Foi," produced by Mr. Tree, and I have not yet met even an ardent disciple of the craze who has had sufficient effrontery to argue that it is a good play. Take his last play but one, "Suzette"—or "Suzanne," or whatever its girl's name was—produced at the Paris Vaudeville last autumn. The first act is very taking indeed. You can see the situation of the ostracized wife coming along beautifully. The preparation is charming, in the best boulevard manner. But when the situation arrives and has to be dealt with—what a mess, what falseness, what wrenching, what sickly smoothing, what ranting, and what terrific tediousness! It is so easy to begin. It is so easy to think of a fine idea. The next man you meet in an hotel bar will tell you a fine idea after two whiskys—I mean a really fine idea. Only in art an idea doesn't exist till it is worked out. Brieux never (with the possible exception above mentioned) works an idea out. Because he can't. He doesn't know enough of his business. He can only do the easy parts of his business. Last autumn also, the Comédie Française revived "La Robe Rouge." The casting, owing to an effort to make it too good, was very bad; and the production was very bad, though Brieux himself superintended it. But, all allowances made for the inevitable turpitudes of this ridiculous national theatre, the was senile; it was done for! Certainly it exposes the abuses of the French magistrature, but at what cost of fundamental truth! The melodramatic close might have been written in the Isle of Man.
Take the most notorious of all his plays, "Les Avariés." It contains an admirable sermon, a really effective sermon, animated by ideas which I suppose have been in the minds of exceptionally intelligent men for a hundred years or so, and which Brieux restated in terms of dramatic eloquence. But the sentimentality of the end is simply base. The sentimentality of another famous play, "Maternité," is even more deplorable.
It is said that Brieux's plays make you think. Well, it depends who you are. No, I will admit that they have several times made me think. I will admit that, since I saw "Les Avariés," I have never thought quite the same about syphilis as I did before. But what I say is that this has nothing to do with Brieux's position as a dramatist. Brieux could have written a pamphlet on the subject of "Les Avariés" which would have impressed me just as much as his play (I happened to read the play before I witnessed it). Indeed, if he had confined himself to a pamphlet I should have respected him more than I do. Brieux has never sharpened my sense of beauty; he has never made me see beauty where I had failed to see it. And this is what he ought to have done, as a serious dramatist. He is deficient in a feeling for beauty; he is deficient in emotion. But that is not the worst of him. Mr. Shaw is deficient in these supreme qualities. But Mr. Shaw is an honest playwright. And Brieux (speaking, of course, in a sense strictly artistic) is not. That he is dishonest in the cause of moral progress does not mitigate his crime. Zealots may deny this as loudly as they please. Nothing can keep Brieux's plays alive; they are bound to go precisely where the plays of Dumas fils have gone, because they are false to life. I do not expect to kill the oncoming craze, but I will give it no quarter.
C.E. MONTAGUE
10 Mar. '10
I have read Mr. C.E. Montague's "A Hind Let Loose" (Methuen, 6s.), and I am not going to advise any one to follow my example. I do not desire to prejudice his circulation, but I have my conscience to consider. This is not a book for the intelligent masses; it would be folly to recommend it to them. It is for the secretly arrogant few, those who really do "know that they are august" within, whatever garment of diffident and mild modesty they may offer to the world. Only those few can understand it. All admiration other than theirs will be either ignorant or dog-like—or both. Everybody on the Press will say that "A Hind Let Loose" is a novel about journalism. It is not. Journalism is merely the cloak hanging windily about it, as her cloak hung about Mrs. Colum Fay. It is a novel about the pride of the Ego. It is the fearful and yet haughty cry of originality against the vast tendency of the age, which tendency is that people should live in the age as in an intellectual barracks. Hedlum, the conversational clubman and successful barrister, is the real villain of the story, though he appears but for a moment "Hedlum would take up all that was current, trim it and pare its nails, and give it his blessing and send it out into the world to get on, and it did famously. You felt that if it was not true then the fault was truth's; there must be some upper order of truth, not universally known, to which he had conformed and to which the facts, in the vulgar sense, could not have been loyal. All of him helped the effect. He was of the settled age—fifty or so—handsome, with the controlled benignity, the mellowed precision, the happy, distinguished melancholy sometimes united in a good-looking judge.... You watched the weighing of each word at its exit from the shaved, working lips, and the closure of their inexorable adamant behind its heels. As the last commonplace of club gossip, smoke-room heroics, and music-hall sentiment issued from these portals, transfigured by the moderate discount that made it twice itself, you not only saw it was final truth, or virility's quintessential emotion; you felt he had done something decisive, even gallant, and that you were in it—a fine fellow, too, in your way; and you quickened; you lived back and forward, back to the blithe days at school when they first taught you never to think your own thoughts or take what came in a way of your own, but to pool your brains with the rest and 'throw yourself into the life of the school,' and on to your early manhood's deeper training in resemblance to others, and so to the good day, always coming and always here, always to be had by him who wills it with his might, when the imitative shall inherit the earth."
I quote this, the very essence of the work, in order to choke off the feeble, the kind, and the altruistic. I would not hawk this book. If I had foreknown what it was I would never have mentioned it. I would have mentioned it to none, sure that, by the strange force of gravity which inevitably draws together a book and its fit reader, the novel would in the end reach the only audience worthy of it. I say no more about it.
PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS
10 Mar. '10
Authentic documents are always precious to the student, and here is one which strikes me as precious beyond the ordinary. It is a letter received from a well-known publisher by a correspondent of mine who is a journalist:
"I am awfully sorry that we cannot take your novel, which is immensely clever, and which interested my partner more than anything he has read in a good while. He agrees with me, however, that it has not got the qualities that make for a sale, and you know that this is the great desideratum with the publisher. Now don't get peevish, and send us nothing else. I know you have a lot of talent, and your difficulty is in applying this talent to really practical problems rather than to the more attractive products of the imagination. Get down to facts, my son, and study your market. Find out what the people like to read and then write a story along those lines. This will bring you success, for you have a talent for success. Above all things, don't follow the lead of our headstrong friend who insists upon doing exactly what you have done in this novel, namely, neglecting the practical market and working out the fanciful dictates of imagination. Remember that novel-writing is as much of a business as making calico. If you write the novels that people want, you are going to sell them in bales. When you have made your name and your market, then you can afford to let your imagination run riot, and then people will look at you admiringly, and say, 'I don't understand this genius at all, but isn't he great?' Do you see the point? You must do this AFTER you have won your market, not before, and you can only win your market in the first place by writing what folks want to buy.—Sincerely yours—"
The writer is American. But the attitude of the average pushing English publisher could not have been more accurately expressed than in this letter sent by one New Yorker to another. The only thing that puzzles me is why the man originally chose books instead of calico. He would have sold more bales and made more money in calico. He would have understood calico better. In my opinion many publishers would have understood calico better than books. There are two things which a publisher ought to know about novel-producers—things which do not, curiously enough, apply to calico-producers, and which few publishers have ever grasped. I have known publishers go into the bankruptcy court and come out again safely and yet never grasp the significance of those two things. The first is that it is intensely stupid to ask a novelist to study the market with a view to obtaining large circulations. If he does not write to please himself—if his own taste does not naturally coincide with the taste of the million—he will never reach the million by taking thought. The Hall Caines, the Miss Corellis, and the Mrs. Humphry Wards are born, not made. It may seem odd, even to a publisher, that they write as they do write—by sheer glad instinct. But it is so. The second thing is that when a novelist has made "his name and his market" by doing one kind of thing he can't successfully go off at a tangent and do another kind of thing. To make the largest possible amount of money out of an artist the only way is to leave him alone. When will publishers grasp this? To make the largest possible amount of money out of an imitative hack, the only way is to leave him alone. When will publishers grasp that an imitative hack knows by the grace of God forty times more about the public taste than a publisher knows?
TOURGENIEV AND DOSTOIEVSKY
31 Mar. '10
I have read with very great interest Mr. Maurice Baring's new volume about Russia, "Landmarks in Russian Literature" (Methuen, 6s. net). It deals with Gogol, Tourgeniev, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, and Tchehkoff. It is unpretentious. It is not "literary." I wish it had been more literary. Mr. Baring seems to have a greater love for literature than an understanding knowledge of it. He writes like a whole-hearted amateur, guided by common sense and enthusiasm, but not by the delicate perceptions of an artist. He often says things, or says things in a manner, which will assuredly annoy the artist. Thus his curt, conventional remarks about Zola might have been composed for a leading article in the Morning Post, instead of for a volume of literary criticism. Nevertheless, I cannot be cross with him. In some ways his book is illuminating. I mean that it has illuminated my darkness. His chapters on Russian characteristics and on realism in Russian literature are genuinely valuable. In particular he makes me see that even French realism is an artificial and feeble growth compared with the spontaneous, unconscious realism of the Russians. If you talked to Russians about realism they probably would not know quite what you meant. And when you had at length made them understand they would certainly exclaim: "Well, of course! But why all this fuss about a simple matter?" Only a man who knows Russia very well, and who has a genuine affection for the Russian character, could have written these chapters. And I am ready to admit that they are more useful than many miles of appreciation in the delicate balancing manner of, say, an Arthur Symons.
Mr. Baring raises again the vexed question of Tourgeniev's position. It is notorious that Tourgeniev is much more highly appreciated outside Russia than in it. One is, of course, tempted to say that Russians cannot judge their own authors, for there is a powerful and morally overwhelming cult for Tourgeniev in France, Germany, and England. I have myself said, sworn, and believed that "On the Eve" is the most perfect example of the novel yet produced in any country. And I am not sure that I am yet prepared to go back on myself. However, it is absurd to argue that Russians cannot judge their own authors. The best judges of Russian authors must be Russians. Think of the ridiculous misconceptions about English literature by first-class foreign critics!... But I am convinced that Mr. Baring goes too far in his statement of the Russian estimate of Tourgeniev. He says that educated Russian opinion would no more think of comparing Tourgeniev with Dostoievsky than educated English opinion would think of comparing Charlotte Yonge with Charlotte Brontë. This is absurd. Whatever may be Tourgeniev's general inferiority (and I do not admit it), he was a great artist and a complete artist. And he was a realist. There is all earth and heaven between the two Charlottes. One was an artist, the other was an excellent Christian body who produced stories that have far less relation to life than Frith's "Derby Day" has to the actual fact and poetry of Epsom. If Mr. Baring had bracketed Tourgeniev with Charlotte Brontë and Dostoievsky with the lonely Emily, I should have credited him with a subtle originality.
About half of the book is given to a straightforward, detailed, homely account of Dostoievsky, his character, genius, and works. It was very much wanted in English. I thought I had read all the chief works of the five great Russian novelists, but last year I came across one of Dostoievsky's, "The Brothers Karamazov," of which I had not heard. It was a French translation, in two thick volumes. I thought it contained some of the greatest scenes that I had ever encountered in fiction, and I at once classed it with Stendhal's "Chartreuse de Parme" and Dostoievsky's "Crime and Punishment" as one of the supreme marvels of the world. Nevertheless, certain aspects of it puzzled me. When I mentioned it to friends I was told that I had gone daft about it, and that it was not a major work. Happening to meet Mrs. Garnett, the never-to-be-sufficiently-thanked translator of Tourgeniev and of Tolstoy, I made inquiries from her about it, and she said: "It is his masterpiece." We were then separated by a ruthless host, with my difficulties unsolved. I now learn from Mr. Baring that the French translation is bad and incomplete, and that the original work, vast as it is, is only a preliminary fragment of a truly enormous novel which death prevented Dostoievsky from finishing. Death, this is yet another proof of your astonishing clumsiness! The scene with the old monk at the beginning of "The Brothers Karamazov" is in the very grandest heroical manner. There is nothing in either English or French prose literature to hold a candle to it. And really I do not exaggerate! There is probably nothing in Russian literature to match it, outside Dostoievsky. It ranks, in my mind, with the scene towards the beginning of "Crime and Punishment," when in the inn the drunken father relates his daughter's "shame." These pages are unique. They reach the highest and most terrible pathos that the novelist's art has ever reached. And if an author's reputation among people of taste depended solely on his success with single scenes Dostoievsky would outrank all other novelists, if not all poets. But it does not. Dostoievsky's works—all of them—have grave faults. They have especially the grave fault of imperfection, that fault which Tourgeniev and Flaubert avoided. They are tremendously unlevel, badly constructed both in large outline and in detail. The fact is that the difficulties under which he worked were too much for the artist in him. Mr. Baring admits these faults, but he does not sufficiently dwell on them. He glances at them and leaves them, with the result that the final impression given by his essay is apt to be a false one. Nobody, perhaps, ever understood and sympathized with human nature as Dostoievsky did. Indubitably nobody ever with the help of God and good luck ever swooped so high into tragic grandeur. But the man had fearful falls. He could not trust his wings. He is an adorable, a magnificent, and a profoundly sad figure in letters. He is anything you like. But he could not compass the calm and exquisite soft beauty of "On the Eve" or "A House of Gentlefolk."...