HANOVER BROWSING
I AM GRATEFUL for the opportunity to express here my tribute to, in my opinion, the greatest of living English critics, Mr. Edward Garnett.
The opportunity arises from the volume Letters from John Galsworthy, 1900-10132, edited with an introduction by Edward Garnett, and published here by Scribner's. My remarks spring partly from .my own indebtedness to the man, and a sincere admiration and affection for him; but more pertinent, is the fact that someone here should recognize the quality of his work even if it does come about twenty years late. He has for many years had recognition from scores of famous writers that he has "launched" and helped with his advice and criticism, but to the masses of readers, especially in the United States, he is practically unknown.
In March, 1914, John Galsworthy, in the Westminster Gazette, paid Garnett his tribute as a critic. Galsworthy wrote: "I say without hesitation that he has done more for English fiction than any living critic, and for less recognition. It is devoutly to be hoped that he, who was born with such distrust of success, with such inveterate feeling for the lost cause, will forgive me for thus expressing my conviction; for I cannot help saying at last what justice should have said long ago During the last twenty years and more Edward Garnett has 'discovered' more talent, helped more aspiration, and fought more battles for the cause of good literature than anyone who can be named; and he has done it nearly all in the dark, and all for the love of the real thing. He has never turned aside, never been swayed a hair's breadth by the tides of popular feeling; he has had his own vision and been true to it To Edward Garnett we owe a great debt, that perhaps cannot be paid. There are some men born to give out sympathy and help to others, and forget themselves. They have reward, but it is seldom coined Truly, it is an odd comment upon the values of life, that when a man is self-forgetful, when his love for what he does surpasses his love for himself, he is generally found to be more or less effaced. Here is one who has never beaten upon a tenpenny drum; how many are there, I wonder, who know his real worth?" These are sentences picked at random from Galsworthy's essay.
Readers of these Letters from John Galsworthy, will learn how helpful Garnett was to him in the books of The Forsyte Saga, and in Galsworthy's books and plays previous to this book, and how unerring was Garnett's judgment and advice, most of which Galsworthy happily followed. (Note particularly the Bosinney episode.) Before giving my own estimate of Garnett as critic I might mention a few men that Garnett has discovered and sympathetically aided. They include Charles M. Doughty, of Arabia Deserta fame, W. H. Hudson, Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy, R. B. Cunninghame Graham (whom he early recognized and appreciated), H. E. Bates, H. A. Manhood, Edward Thomas, Sean 0. Fdolain, Liam O'Flaherty, T. E. Lawrence and many others.
As a critic Mr. Garnett has the foundation of a lifetime of immense reading, of penetrating and unacademic scholarship, and more important still, he has the intuitive good sense that all great critics have had from Longinus to Sainte-Beuve. His instinct for "spiritual truthfulness" in a book is little short of magical. Galsworthy's tribute is not that of a friend, though he was one, but is one of sober judgment. One of the reasons, perhaps, as Galsworthy recognized, for Garnett's sensitiveness for the subtle truths of life and human psychology in literature, is his wide knowledge and understanding of Russian literature as is shown by his prefaces to his wife's admirable translations of Turgenev. (Constance Garnett is generally acknowledged to be the finest translator of Russian books in the English language, and if you buy Turgenev, Tchehov, Gogol, or Dostoievsky, be sure to get Mrs. Garnett's translations, of which she has done about eighty.) Mr. Edward Garnett is heavily endowed with what Pascal called esprit de finesse, which if given a Platonic translation, is close to divine grace. What it is I know not, but it cannot be acquired through learning, though learning may help in its expression and control.
Mr. Garnett, too, is in his own right a fine creative writer, though save for a few discriminating readers and writers, he is even less known than as a critic. Surely his play The Trial of Jeanne D'Arc (Viking Press), is a far more sensitive and finer play than Shaw's Saint Joan, though few have read it. His plays The Feud, and TheBreaking Point, are drama of high order. His satire Papa's War is one of the best and truest things the war years produced. His study of Turgenev reveals a literary understanding of the first rank. I recall that it was his book Friday Nights (Knopf, 1922) that first introduced me to the writings of W. H. Hudson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles M. Doughty, Robert Frost, and Richard Jefferies' Amaryllis at the Fair (a charming story), and who furthered my interest in Tchehov, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Stephen Crane, etc. I know of no finer book of criticism in our time. Whenever I am fortunate enough to get a letter from Mr. Garnett, there are always suggestions that prove most delightful reading. In fact what little I know about modern English authors I owe to Mr. Garntt more than any other single person. His footnotes in his Letters from W. H.Hudson, 1901-1922, and his Letters fromConrad, 1895-1924, have led me into many fruitful channels of reading. In my own library I have twenty of Mr. Garnett's first editions, most of them inscribed, and they are one of the high spots of a modest collection.
Edward Garnett's father, Richard Garnett, wrote that not-well-enough-known book The Twilight of the Gods-, Mrs. Constance Garnett I have mentioned; and their son David Garnett, has with Lady into Fox,A Man in the Zoo, The Sailor's Return, and Pocahontas, carried on the distinguished tradition in letters of the Garnett family.
If you want to read one of the rarest spirits in modern letters I refer you to the writings of Mr. Edward Garnett.
Vale, by W. R. Inge. Longmans, Green & Co. 1934.
In this little book a great, liberal, and Christian churchman takes his farewell to all who will read. He is now seventy-five years old, and from this point in life, reviews his intellectual and spiritual development. Philosophically he owes most to Plato and Plotinus. Dean Inge is a mystic who is well aware of all arguments, psychological and naturalistic, against mysticism, and yet he remains serene in his faith. He writes like a wise man, and for those who have never read his more serious studies, The Philosophy of Plotinus, and ThePlatonic Tradition in English ReligiousThought, or his more popular OutspokenEssays, will find here the distillation of his thought, the philosophy of a life well lived. Dean Inge is not far in spirit from the modern humanists, and he is a good antidote for the more ignorant aspects of modernism.
He believes that "there must be a courageous adaptation of fundamental Christian principles to new conditions, and a readiness to accept new discoveries as a divine revelation, the message of the Spirit to our time." As regards democracy he writes: "We cannot any longer worship the fetish of democracy; we have seen it at too close quarters. It did its work, mainly destructive, in clearing away the relics of feudalism, privilege, and snobbishness; it educated the nation, up to a point, but we have had to learn that power, in the hands of the many as of the few, is never used well." He rightly, it seems to me, repudiates any government of dictatorship, communistic or fascist, as being too high a price to pay for whatever benefits may accrue from such state-capitalism as these governments represent. He is modern in his view of birth control. He is, in fact, a distinguished Christian gentleman, and his wisdom is much needed today. My own hope is that he lives many years more, for he is the kind of a Christian that we can ill afford to lose in these days of confused thinking along religious lines.
A Soldier in Science, by Bailey K. Ashford. William Morrow & Co. 1934.
This is the autobiography of a great medical man of the United States Army. I use the word great advisedly. After having read a good deal about the campaigns in the war of attrition on the Western Front, written by now dead or retired generals, who with or without plan, hurled millions to their death in the First World War, it is exhilarating to read about the medical corps, whose representative Col. Ashford has done so much toward alleviating tropical diseases in Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Central America. One notes also what an immense amount of good the Rockefeller Foundation has done for South America, in the way of establishing clinics among the poor.
On the 24th of November, 1899, Ashford sent from Puerto Rico this telegram: "Have this day proven the cause of many pernicious, progressive anemias of this island to be due to anclyostomum duodenale." De laanemia—la muerte natural, which had killed countless thousands for centuries in Puerto Rico, had at last been discovered by Ashford to be the result not of climate, nor food, nor malaria, nor hygiene, but by an intestinal worm. His discovery has saved thousands yearly. Hookworm has been conquered.
Dr. Ashford's life has been singularly full of excitement and painstaking service to his fellow men. After the cyclone of 1908 he went to the Mississippi to head the relief work. Still later, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, he went to Brazil, to fight against the deadly sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis). In 1917 and 1918 he was on the Western Front inspecting the French and British hospitals, and later organized a school which planned to acquaint almost a thousand Medical officers with every phase of war. His account of the hospitals, of the British and French methods of treating such new horrors as gas-gangrene, the terrible wounds made by high explosives. and other tortures endured by the fighting men in the War-to-end-War, makes fascinating reading. If the mothers of America should read these 127 pages they would be less anxious to "offer their sons on the altar of freedom" than they were in the last skirmish. Col. Ashford points no moral. He is a soldier, and relates with justified pride how certain hospitals made cures so that thousands of men were returned to the front "for active service" after having been badly wounded there. Later on Dr. Ashford directed The School of Tropical Medicine, at San Juan, and wrote and published eight articles on sprue, its treatment, and its causes. His description of these tropical diseases makes it clear that the men who worked to combat them were men of the highest courage, and men who had unselfishly devoted their lives to a science which preserves and saves, instead of maims and kills. It is difficult to imagine a more honorable title than "soldier of science." Col. Ashford was one of these, and his story should be read by everybody, not only for the interesting knowledge therein for the reader, but also for the vitalizing effect his story has on whatever latent altruism we may possess.
This book deserves a place beside Dr. Cushing's Life of Osier.
I regret to announce that Dr. Ashford died on November 1, 1934, in San Juan, where he was buried with full military honors. He lived just long enough to finish his book and see it through the press.
Mobilizing for Chaos, by O. W. Riegel. Yale University Press. 1934.
Mr. Riegel has written a persuasive, and carefully documented book, concerning the control of news, via the press, cable, or radio, by foreign offices, nationalistic governments, and the less important commercial advertisers. In the United States where the radio and telegraph is not publicly owned more freedom is had than in Europe where most of the countries control and operate such news transmitting agencies. Nevertheless even here our broadcasts and our news aim very often at molding public opinion one way or another.
Germany, of course, offers the perfect example of a state which uses the press and the radio strictly for propoganda purposes. Dr. Goebbels is the national loud speaker. On November 10, 1933, the Nazi chiefs reached between 40 and 50 million Germans through the radio, and two days later million cast their votes for Hitler. The control over a state by a dictator is strengthened immeasurably if he controls the means of spreading news. The trade in propoganda is as vicious as the trade in guns. Mr. Riegel, with considerable force, though without any shrieking, has mustered his facts, and this is a book that should merit serious consideration. Nothing can be done about it unless we resist actively governmental control of the press, and the all-important radio. Propoganda can be insidious and poisonous as those who can remember the last war will testify. At that time governments officially broadcast falsehood so that the very air was poisoned with it. This should not happen again, but I fear that it will.
Thank you, Oscar, for a very readable and instructive book.
Saints Run Mad, by Marjorie Harrison, John Lane, London, 1934.
Going Abroad, by Rose Macaulay. Harper and Brothers. N. Y. 1934.
These two books deal with Buchmanism, or the so-called "Oxford Group." The first is a critique of Buchmanism by a "lifechanger" herself, and the second is a satirical novel by the shrewd Miss Macaulay. Both will amuse you unless you are one of those who take new cults seriously. The late William James would have been fascinated by Dr. Frank Buchman's new revivalism, as he was most interested in emotional cults.
Br. Buchman strikes me as being a Billy Sunday in English tweeds. He is an American with sound ideas on high-pressure salesmanship, and seeks for converts among the "educated" and "leisured" classes. Some of his experience in evangelism he gained in working with Billy Sunday. Dr. Buchman is a Lutheran minister, born in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, and is about 56 years old. He graduated from Muhlenberg College. In the Lake Country of England, at Keswick to be exact, he underwent, the story has it, some supernatural or visionary experience, and found among his many talents a great capacity for influencing young men. Prior to the war he was a Y. M. C. A. secretary at Penn State College, and in 1916, he travelled in India, Korea, and Japan. This latest experiment in revivalism was tried out in the United States, launched in China, introduced into England at Cambridge, and for no good reason is called "The Oxford Group." Oxford repudiates the Buchmanites and at the last statistic taking had about 200 members.
Miss Harrison had a fundamentalist upbringing but had early doubts through scientific studies. After the war, she reports that she like many others was at a spiritual loose end. T. S. Eliot went one way; Miss Harrison another. Buchman said in effect, she writes: "You want the best seats; I have them. Walk right up and join in the joy and the thrill and the fun. All troubles solved. No thought needed. Personal attention guaranteed." Buchman insists on a definite conversion that can be pinned down to some specified time, place, and emotional condition. In 1921 the First English House Party was held at Cambridge These house parties are often held at fashionable hotels (the doctor's hotel in London is the Metropole) and they cost the converts from 11 to 15 shillings a day. This movement is for those who can afford the luxury of a good, social, emotional outburst. Two of Buchman's precepts are: (1) avoid argument, and (2) aim to conduct the interview yourself. Conversion being associated with the Salvation Army, Billy Sunday, and Mrs. McPherson, Buchman uses the word "life changing," and likewise, the convert becomes "life changer." Slogans are bandied about as for instance:
P Powerful J just R becomes Radiograms and E becomes Exactly A Always S Suits y Yours U Us s Sinners
The Buchmanites get direct guidance from God in the form of supernatural radiograms. Dr. Buchman acknowledges that he asks God for guidance for expenditure on postage, or for the amount that he should tip the servants. Miss Harrison admits that many are repulsed by the emotional appeal and that the number of converts is perpetually fluctuating due to those who drop out after the emotional de- bauch has worn off.
With this material at hand Miss Mac- aulay wrote her novel about the Oxford Groupers of Buchman, working their will in Fuenterrabia on the Spanish-Basque coast across from Hendaye. It is a gentle but a telling satire.
I might say that the orthodox churches look with extreme disgust and distrust on the movement. It seems to me that their reasons for so doing are obvious. The movement is just another phenomena, like palmistry, theosophy, magic writing, spiritualism, etc., which verifies the saying that there is nothing that intelligent people will not believe. Truly we are a credulous race.
