HANOVER BROWSING
MY BROWSING this last month has been in more pleasant meads. After having meandered my way through gorsy books on the depression and disquieting volumes on Russia I felt like escaping into the glamorous corners of the book world. Particularly desirable was this during Christmas recess when I was supposed to enjoy a vacation. But as I could not visit the barbaric cities I took the quickest and the cheapest way out of Hanover—which is via books. And I read through the recess and beyond. Some of the works read were on criticism. These were:
1. The Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot. Harcourt, Brace and Co. 1932.
2. Sketches in Criticism: Van Wyck Brooks. E. P. Dutton and Co. 1932.
3. The Literary Mind: Max Eastman. 1932'
4. New Bearings in English Poetry: F. R. Leavis. 1932.
After having my fill of these I hied for refreshment to the country of fiction. But I did not relish novels heavy with despair about life or burdened with a sense of futility for I desired to abstain from such difficult fare. And with few exceptions I managed rather well. These exceptions were the recent novels of Liam O'Flaherty and William Faulkner. Some of the works of Faulkner belong to the underworld of letters. Arnold Bennett said once that Faulkner "wrote like an angel." Well, if he does, he is often a revolting angel. And that kind does not fit in with the Christmas recess of a pedagogue. O'Flaherty's Puritan and Skerrett are also too violent for the same reason. Among the books which passed muster were the following:
1. Flowering Wilderness: John Galsworthy. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1932.
2. Inheritance: Phyllis Bentley. Macmillan and Co. 1932.
3. Pigeon Irish: Francis Stuart. Macmillan and Co. 1932. $2.00.
4. The Coloured Dome: Francis Stuart. Macmillan Cos. 1933. $2.00.
5. Magnolia Street: Louis Golding. Farrar and Rinehart. 1932.
6. Farewell Miss Julie Logan: J. M. Barrie. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1932. $1.00.
7. A Creelful of Fishing Stories: Edited by Henry Van Dyke. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1932. $2.50. A very readable and interesting creelful. Many gems—ancient and modern in this collection.
8. State Fair: Phil Stong. The Literary Guild. 1932. A simple but veracious story of a farmer's family romance in the State Fair of lowa. It has good characterization of human beings and a champion male hog. It is marred by an artificial scheme in the dual romance of the son and daughter.
9. Night Flight: Antoine de Saint Exupery. Translated by S. Gilbert. The Century Co. 1932. A slight novel of the struggles of night-flying air mail pilots in South America. A splendid description of flying in a storm is found in the book. Has a certain nobility despite its sketchiness.
10. The Tenth Moon: Dawn Powell. A story of frustrated characters in a small town in Ohio. An average story of this nature which would appeal more to women than men. Published by Farrar and Rinehart. 1932. $2.00.
The plays and comedies read lacked greatness but were entertaining. These were:
1.. The Moon In the Yellow River and The Old Lady Says No: Two plays by Denis Johnston. Jonathan Cape. 1932.
2. Autumn Crocus: C. L. Anthony (pseudonym). Victor Gollanz. 1931. A simple, fresh, romantic play of an English teacher on a holiday on the continent. She loves and is loved by a fascinating and roguish inn-keeper at his Inn not far from Innsbruck. A select group of English and German tourists enliven the play with their light banter in English and German.
3. Collected Sketches and Lyrics: Noel Coward. Doubleday, Doran and Co. 1932.
4. Of Thee I Sing. George S. Kaufman and M. Ryskind. Lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Alfred A. Knopf. 1932.
This was read because I could not see it acted in New York. It is an amusing musical comedy lampoon on presidential politics. It is Gilbertian in parts and though silly reads better than I expected.
To BEGIN with the criticism. The Selected Essays of Eliot include his most representative work in literary criticism. The author is one of the ablest British classical critics of our day. This year he is professor of Poetry at Harvard. The essays selected cover a wide range from Dante to Baudelaire, from Shakespeare and the dramatists of his age down to a recent critic like Whibley. His deservedly popular Tradition and the Individual opens the book followed by The Function ofCriticism. In addition to the more literary subjects he discusses also critics like Arnold and Pater and philosophers like Bradley. Included likewise in the volume are his essays on Humanism as well as his Lancelot Andrews and his provoking Thoughts After Lambeth. Eliot is at his best in the essays on Dante, Dryden, TheElizabethan Dramatists, The MetaphysicalPoets, and the splendid discussion of Baudelaire. He is less convincing in his Thoughts on Humanism and in his treatment of Arnold. With many of his ideas I am in agreement, and I am willing to join him in drinking a glass of sherry to the memory of Dryden despite my inability to accept his preference of Dryden over Milton and Shelley. His evaluation of Hamlet is also unconvincing. There are many gaps in the book pointing to the lie of his interest. These are mainly in the works of the more classical of the English poets and dramatists. He is a severe critic of those romanticists who, as Huxley said, plastered "the fair face of truth with the pestilent cosmetic of rhetoric." As is well known, Eliot is a classicist in his criticism if not in his poetry. He emphasizes standards and an objective scale of values. He likes objectivity, universality, order, distinction, substance, balance, reason, tradition, authority, and historical perspective in life and thought. I confess I like him better as a critic than a poet. To give an idea of his power and subtlety as well as his limitation I can do no better than to quote some of his impressive passages. In his criticism of Middleton Murry's comparison of Outside Authority and the Inner Voice he says: "For to those who obey the inner voice . . . nothing that I can say about criticism will have the slightest value. For they will not be interested in the attempt to find any common principles for the pursuit of criticism. Why have principles, when one has the inner voice?" Or take this passage about Dante and Shakespeare: "But," he says, "you can hardly say that Dante believed, or did not believe, the Thomist philosophy; you can hardly say that Shakespeare believed, or did not believe, the mixed and muddled scepticism of the Renaissance. If Shakespeare had written according to a better philosophy, he would have written worse poetry (sic). It was his business to express the greatest emotional intensity of his time, based on whatever his time happened to think." And in his incisive insight into the disharmonious character of Baudelaire he remarks of him that "In all his humiliating traffic with other beings, he walked secure in this high vocation; that he was capable of a damnation denied to the politicians and the newspaper editors of Paris," or, another paradoxical statement: "It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned."
His philosophical acumen and weakness are revealed in his essay on Bradley. "Philosophy without wisdom," he states, "is vain; and in the greater philosophers we are usually aware of that wisdom which . . . could be called even worldly wisdom. Common sense does not mean, either the opinion of the majority or the opinion of the moment; it is not a thing to be got at without maturity and study and thought. The lack of it produces those unbalanced philosophies, such as Behaviorism. ... A purely "scientific" philosophy ends by denying what we know to be true; and, on the other hand, the great weakness of Pragmatism is that it ends by being of no use to anybody."
His honest and unapologetic attitude towards religion gives vigor to his essays on Humanism. "Humanism," he says, "is either an alternative to religion, or is ancillary to it. To my mind, it always flourishes most when religion has been strong; and if you find examples of humanism which are anti-religious . . . such humanism is purely destructive, for it has never found anything to replace what it has destroyed." A bolder expression of his faith is in his Thoughts After Lambeth wherein he declares confidently that "The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time, so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide."
His esthetic views come out in statements like the following: "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. "Or this illuminating paragraph: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." That throws light on his own poetry.
TURNING FROM Eliot to Van Wyck Brooks we encounter another challenging critic of American thought and letters. His volume also is a collection of critical essays and reviews. In certain circles the author is regarded as one of our most fruitful thinkers, but personally I cannot rate him quite so highly. My main criticism of him is his limited range of ideas and his inadequate philosophical equipment for the work he aims to do. Within limits I enjoyed his earlier critical efforts in America's Coming of Age and Lettersand Leadership. I derived pleasure also from his recent biography of Emersonmore so than from his Ordeal of MarkTwain. In the present book I preferred the Essays on The Critical Movement inAmerica; Mr. Mencken and the Prophets;The Traditio?i of Rootlessness; the Influence of William James; and his admirable chapter on Max Eastman, Science and Revolution, and Upton Sinclair and his Novels. These bring out many of his most characteristic ideas. He is at his best a hard-hitting critic of puritanism in American life and literature, of our pecuniary and individualistic industrialism and the qualities associated with it; of the standardization, mechanization and externalization which he sees everywhere in contemporary society, and the resultant absence of an integrated and rich social life. He accuses American writers of failing to give "the public any coherent, stirring, enlivening vision of life," and that they have no sense of values.
His criticism of American philosophy strikes a similar note. In the essay on William James he points out the limitations of James in this connection. "He was unable," is the indictment, "to create values because he had never transcended his environment, and his failure to do so is perhaps typical of the failures of all those other men who might have deepened and strengthened the character of our society."
Interspersed throughout these sketches one discovers many incisive bits of criticism, such as "to begin with the form, to seek the form, is to confess that one lacks the thing. It is a frank acknowledgment of literary insolvency"; or, in a passage reminiscent of Eliot he bursts out saying "To express not his own feeble or defective emotions but his conceptions, his apprehensions of that reality, felt through his emotions—that is the object of his search," or, in discussing Renan and Literary Style, he remarks that Renan "had, in short, the intuition of the artist, so vigorously denied by our own American customs, that the way to save one's personality is to get rid of it as quickly as possible."
Max Eastman's The Literary Mind I can recommend only with some misgivings. I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with so much of what he says about the decline of literature and the corresponding adequacy of science. He aims in a way to debunk literature as to its truth-value and at the same time salvage it for its enjoyment value.
Leavis' elucidation of modern poetry is written from too narrow a point of view. He deals chiefly with Yeats, Hardy, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and G. M. Hopkins. His treatment of Eliot is good but his Yeats is not too satisfying and his Pound is just average.
To LEAVE criticism for the novels I have on my list I can recommend nearly all of them. Galsworthy's Flowering Wilderness is not quite as distinctive as some of his other novels. Yet it has the delicacy of feeling and dignity of diction and convincingness of characterization which we usually find in his works. Dinny Cherwell is a splendid character. Sensible and generous, proud and sensitive, fair-minded and independent, humorous and even witty at times, charming and a good sport, she has a little emotional and intellectual flash which is so captivating in a feminine personality. The portrayal of the characters of the aristocratic and conservative friends and relatives of Dinny is also well done. But the leading male character of the novel—Wilfrid Cherwell—is too hyper-sensitive and difficult to appeal to me. Yet when one tries to put oneself imaginatively into his tortured mind—with his "too much war and nomadic instincts" —his behaviour is consistent enough. The story is a simple one. Wilfred Desert,—a sceptical, disharmonic, disillusioned poet, —had renounced Christianity and accepted the Moslem faith under the point of the pistol of a fanatic in the desert of Arabia. He returns to London and falls in love with Dinny—the daughter of an English General. His love is reciprocated in full measure. But the story of Wilfrid's recantation leaks out, and the publication of his poem on this same theme gives his act a publicity which finally shatters his romance. He is denounced by those who know him in London as a traitor to his class and country. Dinny works hard to save her lover's reputation and peace of mind. But all is of no avail. Finally the whole thing becomes emotionally unbearable to Wilfrid, and he leaves Dinny to return once more to the mysterious East. Dinny, scarred by the experience and also mellowed, returns to her family to keep on living as bravely as she could.
The internal struggle of Wilfrid is made harder by his own unconscious acceptance of the judgment passed upon him by members of his own class.
The Inheritance of Phyllis Bentley has had a wide sale in both England and America, and in the main it deserves the acclaim it has received from both the critics and the public. It is an interesting, serious, and straightforward story—competently told—with excellent depiction of character and incident. It has a certain measure of distinction of atmosphere and fidelity to historical fact. It is a social novel covering the years from 1812 to the present depression in the lives of six generations of a Yorkshire woolen manufacturing family,—the Oldroyd family. It has a large canvass and the author has filled in the picture in an appealing manner. It is in its way an enlightening social document. It describes sympathetically the struggles between labor and capital from the Luddite rebellion against the displacement of workers by machinery in the second decade of the nineteenth century down through the years of the early struggles for factory legislation in the thirties. Then follows the turbulent and restless years of the Chartist movement and still later the rise and activity of the Trade unions and their use of the strike. This again is followed by the bad times subsequent upon the passing of the McKinley tariff in the nineties down through the artificially prosperous years of the Great War, and ending up in the difficult post-war years for the old heavy industries of England in general and the Oldroyd woolen industry in particular. Finally the fierce competition and heavy taxation of the last few years forces the Oldroyds to leave their native North Country—all except the youngest of the males of the line who goes back to carry on again in the old Ire Valley environment. Many of the characters in the novel stand out with great clearness. There is something heroic about them. Many of the moving episodes also fix themselves in the memory of the reader. An historical novel but a good one.
It is interesting to compare the importance of and reactions to conventions in Galsworthy's novel with that of Inheritance. Family traditions are strong in both. In the latter part of Inheritance the latest of the Oldroyds—David—tells his father why his schoolmaster has charged him with "adolescent rebellion." "Oh," said Francis, nonplussed. "I think," continues David in a fine full confident tone, "I think it's silly to do things just because everybody does them and they're supposed to be the Right Thing, and all that sort of rot. Just as I think it's silly not to do things because they aren't done. Don't you, father?"
"Well," said Francis, quite staggered by this attack on his dearest code. "Well." He pulled himself together and delivered a short homily on the old school, esprit decorps, good form and so on.
There was another pause. "Well—, I think all that sort of thing's vieux jeu," said the voice from the bed with calm decision. . . ."It's all out of date—a stale blend of Kipling and the kailyard."
Compare this healthy attitude of young David to the root loyalties and surface shibboleths of old England with the tortuous inner writhings of Wilfrid in Flowering Wilderness.
Louis Golding's Magnolia Street is a street and not a family novel. That is a part of its interest. It is a very crowded novel—full of a multitude of characters and incidents. This is due to its nature and form. Magnolia Street after all has character. It is supposed to be a street in a Lancashire town—Manchester I believe. The uniqueness of the street is determined by the intriguing gallery of varied types of people living in it. On one side we have all Jews, and on the other all Gentiles. And with what gusto Golding describes the prejudices, bickerings, jealousies, customs, illicit courtships and even marriages, ambitions, amusements, loyalities and achievements, sorrows and tragic happenings of his very individual street—from 1910 to 1930. A lot can happen in two decades and a lot did happen.
Golding has done a better job in this novel than in any of his other books which I have read. Its strength is in its abundance of living characters-Jewish and Gentile. However, it is a book to read leisurely and tarry by the way. It has at least the material for a dozen interesting short stories. The portraits of Rabbi Shulman and his family, of Reb Berel, the beadle, and his beard, of old Billig—the matrimonial broker, of idealistic Emmanuel and his dreams, of Rose and her gentile, sailor friend, of Bella Winberg—fat and lazy and lucky—all these are excellent.
And on the Gentile side of the street we have an equally interesting group of flesh and blood characters. The novel has a few defects of form and manner. It also lacks selectiveness. And it is occasionally a little artificial and smart. But it is worth unhurried reading.
The Irish novels of Francis Stuart on my list are really worth reading. He is altogether different from O'Flaherty. Stuart is the poet and the mystic and the romanticist. His two novels are splendid in many ways. The reader who wants a strange magic and mystery and witching mysticism will not be disappointed. Pigeon Irish was published a few months ago whereas TheColoured Dome has just been issued in this country. In both there is a good deal of light fancy and mystic fantasy, coupled with beauty of imagery and veracity of characterization. In both also there is a war in the near or far offing, and indeed is a vital part of the atmosphere of the books. In Pigeon Irish—a story projected into the near future—the war seems to be a general European war conducted by the belligerent technocrats of the day to come. The Irish are in it as defenders of what is best in European culture from the rotted super-civilization. The rest of the story is not so easy to describe, for again I repeat there is magic symbolism in the book. The leading female character—Catherine Arigho—is a symbolic but human type. Her way of fighting this war of science is to use carrier pigeons as messengers. And in the chapters describing their flights there is poetry and reality and fine writing. With the development of the tenuous story one gets interested more and more in Catherine and her pigeons and her dreams of a new art and colonies. The other characters also gain in substance and reality. Joe Arigho- the Cammandant; Frank Allen—the uncertain but loyal follower of Catherine; Brigid—his wife—who lived for physical love and was satisfied. Catherine, on the other hand, could never be satisfied by this sort of love—her love had a mystical, sacrificial core to it.
Catherine symbolizes the romantic, fanatical and impracticable side of Ireland. Sometimes she speaks as if she had been reading Huxley's Brave New World. She fights it in any case. She hungers for the old, simple culture of Ireland, for, she says, "we want something different to the sort of civilization that's going. Look at this war. . . . Science is defeating itself already. Eleswhere she becomes quite Huxleyian: "Look, she says, "what was coming in on the radio before it was finally made impossible. Everything was killed. Everything was reduced to chemicism. Love, religion, everything. They're working out the logical conclusion. . . . Science controlling life. Hygienic love. A psychotherapic religion."
In the end, of course, Catherine is defeated, and so is Ireland. But internally? Who knows? In the end she and her loyal follower walk out through the gate of the air-camp of Rathdonnel. And together they start down the dusty road.
In the Coloured Dome, Stuart again gives us a feminine character somewhat reminiscent of Catherine—a Saint Joan type—with a curious capacity to influence men to follow her from afar on the road of sacrifice. The war is nearer home in this book. The Irish are fighting for their own republic. The symbol of the sacred love of Catholic mystics is Tulloolagh— the widow of a soldier who had died in a previous fight for an Irish republic. One of her followers is Garry Delea. Her compelling fanatical spirit draws him after her, but this new rebellion again is defeated and sacrifice is demanded. Two generals offer themselves as two out of the four hostages required by England. Tulloolagh offers herself and induces Garry to be the fourth. They are to be killed but the two generals are to be released. With death facing him on the morrow Garry is compelled to reconcile himself to it; this he does. That night he and Tulloolagh are thrown together in the same cell; out of pity and desire for him she gives herself to Garry. While together in the cell they hear two shots outside. The English had shot the other two and so they were saved. The burden of death is lifted from their spirits, but the experience had induced a subtle change in their characters. Garry now becomes the seeker after sacrifice and immolation. The woman desires Garry for herself, and in a scene of tragic pathos he turns from her—a strange and innerly changed man.
