HANOVER BROWSING
MY BROWSING this month was in the following fields: A. General Books.
1. The Challenge of Humanism. L. J. A. Mercier. Oxford University Press. 1933.
2. The Name and Nature of Poetry. A. A. Housman. Macmillan and Co. 1933.
3. The Use of Poetry and the Use ofCriticism. T. S. Eliot. Faber and Faber, London. 1933.
4. Characters and Commentaries. Lytton Strachey. Harcourt Brace & Cos. 1933.
A collection of his briefer biographical and critical studies written in his usual sharp and satirical style. Those reading (2) and (3) should also read Strachey's lecture on "Pope" included in this volume.
5. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Harcourt Brace. 1933.
6. Operas and Plays. Gertrude Stein. Plain Edition. Paris. 1933.
Any person in need of a lesson in intellectual humility should try to understand this book. I failed.
7. America in Search of Culture. W. A. Orton. Little, Brown and Cos. 1933.
8. Enquiries into Religion and Culture. Christopher Dawson. Sheed and Ward, London and New York. 1933.
A series of interesting critical articles on a variety of topics. Those who do now know Prof. Dawson's books will find him worth reading, particularly on religious questions. I have enjoyed the three books by him which I have read. His best are Progressand Religion, and a splendid historical book on The Making of Europe.
9. That Immortal Sea. Clifford Bax. Lovat Dickson, London. 1933.
This book deals with the contemporary revolt against religious and sexual standards of behavior. He predicts a reaction in the future.
10. The New Morality. G. E. Newsom Ivor Nicholson and Watson. 1932.
One of the best and sanest criticisms from the Christian and conservative point of view of the sex aspects of the new mora-Lity. He attacks writers like Bertrand Russell with keenness and vigor. Worth reading.
B. Novels and Short Stories.
1. A Nest of Simple Folk. Sean O'Faolain. Jonathan Cape. 1933.
A year ago I pointed out the promise of this young Irish writer in recommending his "Midsummer's Night Madness." This promise is almost realised in this his first full length novel. It is a chronicle novel of an Irish family from 1856 to the rebellion of 1916. It has beauty, imagination, poetic emotion, vigor, effective characterization, touches of courageous realism, and that rare indefinable but unmistakable quality we call "soul." Do not miss it.
2. Rabble in Arms. Kenneth Roberts. Doubleday, Doran and Cos. 1933.
A long historical novel and romance written wTith knowledge of the revolutionary years with which it deals—l77s to 1777. It is crowded with characters and events and action. I found it a little long, but it is worth reading. Dartmouth men will find an added interest in the novel because an early Dartmouth man plays a part in the story. It contains a number of references to Hanover, Dartmouth, Eleazer Wheelock and some of his Indian students. Its picture of Benedict Arnold is interesting.
3. The Tragedy of Man. Imre Madach. Translated from the Hungarian by C. H. Meltzer and P. Vajda. Published by Dr. George Vajna, Budapest, 1933.
Those who do not know this nineteenth century classic Hungarian mystery play or epic will enjoy this translation of it. It has something in common with Faust.
4. Gentlemen, I Address You Privately. Kay Boyle. Harrison Smith and Robert Haas. 1933.
A novel of a mixed genre. It has something of Lawrence and a minor social theme woven around Rochereau—an interesting character. The imagery is unusual.
5- We Are the Living. Erskine Caldwell. Viking Press. 1933.
A collection of his short stories. I like his simple, effective style and broad humor, although it is a little too broad and exaggerated at times. But I do not like many of his themes. Too many of them (and this would apply to his other books also) are concerned with morbid, degenerate, or slightly abnormal types of human beings or situations. He tends to select the raw facts of life to the exclusion of facts of a different order. I cannot help thinking that both Caldwell and Faulkner tend to stand in their own way.
6. A Story Anthology, Edited by Whit Burnett and Martha Foley. Vanguard Press. 1933.
On the whole an undistinguished group of short stories. About half a dozen are good, and two or three are excellent. The best to my liking are Missis Flinders and Ike and Us Moons.
My COMMENTS THIS month will be limited to some of the general books included in my list. The Challenge ofHumanism by Mercier is the best treatment of Humanism on the expository side I have read. I wish I could say as much for it on the critical and philosophical sides. Neither is it at all adequate as a study of the literary phases of Humanism. It is not my intention here to discuss at any length the philosophical positions of Humanism. That it has a definite philosophy of nature and of values is clear from the writings of humanists like Babbitt and Paul Elmer More and their followers. Professor Mercier gives us an excellent account of the main elements in the ethical and religious philosophies of Babbitt and More and Seilleure. He succeeds in singling out for detailed treatment their opposition to naturalism with its interpretation of man in terms of his membership of the order of nature, and its reduction of the higher values and emergent qualities of the universe to the primitively postulated world of physics or of space-time.
Professor Babbitt thought that the basic fallacy of naturalism was its confusion of the "law for thing" with the "law for man." The result was the failure of naturalistic thinkers to understand the uniqueness of man in the cosmic scheme. To view man as a member of the animal kingdom, or from the point of view of a naturalistic biology, was to miss seeing that which really distinguishes man. Man is a member of these kingdoms but he is also a member of what the anthropologists call "the superorganic world." Humanists identify this world with the world of values, and some of them, like Paul Elmer More and T. S. Eliot, go beyond that and view him also as a potential citizen of a supernatural world—or the kingdom of divine grace. The world of values is revealed to man by a God who is the ground and guarantor of the values experienced by man in and through his commerce with this creative God, in whose will is man's peace and in whose love is man's salvation.
What do I think were and are some of the weaknesses of the humanists? The first is the uncomfortable dualism lurking in their thought. It may be that the growth of unity in our knowledge is bound to affect it in a number of ways. The advance in scientific understanding is having the effect of reducing the observable chaos in nature and society and even in the universe of values and unvalues. The area of order in the universe is being added to continuously. In field after field something like this has happened. And we have no logical reason to question that this sort of thing will not go on happening in the future. It is not necessary to claim too much for science to accept this as a possibility if not a certainty. One result of this growing extension in our knowledge of the order of the universe is to remove some of the dualisms which past philosophers struggled so hard to overcome. And something of this nature may very well happen to the dualisms in the thinking of the humanists.
Another weakness of some of them is their confused attitude towards science, of science I cannot quite comprehend. The world has nothing to fear from genuine science. It has much more to fear from ignorance or stupidity. And if some push the claims of science beyond its assured achievements the only remedy is more science. Knowledge is man's best friend. This, weakness of the humanists is seen even in their discussions of the limits of the natural sciences. It also explains their Why so many modern thinkers are afraid inability to draw upon the social sciences —even in support of their claims for the uniqueness of man. Instead of doing so some of them do not pass beyond the immature stage of calling the social sciences "pseudo-sciences." As a matter of fact if Professor Babbitt had drawn more of his ideas from the best thought of contemporary social science he would have strengthened materially his case for distinguishing "the law for things" from "the law for man." He would then have realised that "the higher will" to which he was compelled to resort to continuously was only a part of "the law for man." The whole civilization of man is a witness of his uniqueness when compared with other members of the organic world. I have other criticisms of philosophies of the humanists but space is lacking to explain them.
IT is ENOUGH for me to say that their adequacy in this field depends on the flexibility of the standards which they apply to the task of literary evaluation. A rigid application of classical standards may fail to do justice to creative work of the newer and more experimental order. Artists in search of new forms or of more vital values can hardly ever be handled helpfully in this manner. Furthermore there is always the danger of applying alien critical considerations to art and literature. It is some form or other of this danger that gives point to much of what is expressed in A. E. Housman's The Name and Natureof Poetry. This is one of the best small books of this kind I have read. And although it does not tell the whole story about poetry or the different kinds of poets and poetry, yet its point of view is very salutary when modern poets and critics seem to be engaged in making poetry as obscure and strange as possible. Housman emphasizes poetry as poetry and not as something else. He writes delightfully of the non-intellectual elements in poetry and in the poet, the deeper emotional and physical levels from which poetry bubbles up to the consciousness of the poet as from a hidden well. He thinks poetry is more physical than intellectual, and at the end of the book he tells us how much of his own poetry came to be written. I can recommend the lecture highly and also (to those who do not know them) his two slight volumes of poetry-The Shropshire Lad and Last Poems.
After reading Housman I could not forego the pleasure of reading T. S. Eliot's The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. His own poetry is often of the intellectual sort. Eliot refers to Housman's lecture and, as expected, was bound to disagree with the judgments on Dryden. Yet he seemed to agree with him to a greater measure than I had anticipated. It is interesting to see Eliot saying also that some of his poetry had a similar origin to that of the poetry of Housman. In discussing obscurity in poetry he makes the amazing statement that he "should like an audience which could neither read nor write." My first reaction to this was one of incredulity. I thought of Eliot's Waste Land and Ash Wednesday, and I could not see that a poet writing poetry of this nature would "like an audience which could neither read nor write." However, on further thought, I can see some sense in that, for it is likely that the poetic rhythms and emotions of his poetry would find a response in untutored minds if read to them. The highly obscure allusions and intellectual references of his poems would be to them of little importance. But with the literate reader this part of his poetry comes in between the reader and sympathetic response to its rhythms and emotions. His appreciative processes are broken asunder by the necessity of trying to discover the intelligible meanings of these intellectualised passages. It was Carlyle in The Hero asPoet who said that poetry is "musical thought." It is this element and its emotional accompaniment which Housman and Eliot have in mind. Somebody defined architecture as "frozen music," and on the basis of these books I am tempted to call poetry "vaporized music."
But my difficulties with obscure poetry like that of Eliot's or even of E. E. Cummings' are minor compared with those I experienced in reading the Operas andPlays of Gertrude Stein. I tried to read this as carefully and sympathetically as I possibly could. But I was defeated. The result is I am still unable to see much of anything in these unintelligible operas and plays. At first I was discouraged, for I assumed that they must have some meaning. I felt depressed, and I said to myself: "I must be dumb: Here is a book that you are too stupid to understand." But a college teacher cannot live comfortably with the thought of his own stupidity. So after a day or two I concluded that it must be Gertrude Stein who is the stupid one.
But I was not satisfied, and when the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas written by Gertrude Stein came to my hand I read it avidly. It is a surprisingly intelligible and interesting volume. Yet it did not help me to understand the unintelligible books of the author. She can write very intelligibly in the accepted logical sense. But her obscure volumes are a problem. I noticed an article on her in the January AtlanticMonthly. The author tried to prove that her unintelligible writings are the product of automatic processes. He makes out a plausible case for this but I do not think it is sound. Many things in The Autobiography contradict it. Passages here and there may be explainable in this way. A careful analysis, however, seems to reveal in her unintelligible works the presence of deliberate, precise, exact elements pointing to a clear and well-developed experimental theory. In the first place she is trying to do in prose what her friends Picasso and Juan Gris and Braque tried to do in painting. Secondly she tries to liberate us from the mechanical usage of words and sentences which have lost their fresh expressiveness. In the third place she aims at a severely exact and abstract style, almost mathematical in its exactitude. Then I detect signs of deliberate symbolism in her works, demanding of the reader an ability to distinguish between manifest content and the inner content of her sentences. The unintelligible books may be pregnant with meanings to the reader who has the clue to unravel them.
It appears to me as if a part of her difficult writing has its origin not in automatic but rather in highly abstract intellectual processes having subconscious undertones of one kind or another. Certain passages in the Autobiography corroborate this in some measure. Note the following: Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by an intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of inner and outer reality. She has produced a simplification (to whom, I wonder) by this concentration, and as a result the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose." Bearing this in mind let me quote you one of the most intelligible sections in her Operas and Plays.
Therese: I am going away. Question: To stay. Therese: No not to stay away. Therese: I am not going to stay away. Therese: I am not going away. Therese: I am not going away. Therese: I am going away not today. Therese: But she went. Therese: Went away the day that is two days for four days anyway. And there is a survival.
I am glad there is a survival! There is usually. Therese after all is quite a girl, and I hope she is not making "a mountain out of a molehill" as she seems to be doing in a number of other places.
