No More Learning

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II aime les petites oeuvres polissonnes, les memoires de filles, les confessions d'alcoves, les saletes erotiques, le scandale qui se retrousse dans une image aux devan- tures des libraires, ce qu'il va lire est severe et pur. Qu'il ne s'attende point a la photographie decolletee du plaisir : I'etude qui suit est la clinique de I'Amour.
Le public aime encore les lectures anodines et conso- lantes, les aventures qui finissent bien, les imaginations qui ne derangent ni sa digestion ni sa serenite: ce livre, avec sa triste et violente distraction, est fait pour con- trarier ses habitudes et nuire a son hygiene.
Pourquoi done I'avons-nous ecrit? Est-ce simple- ment pour choquer le public et scandaliser ses goiits ?
Non.
Vivant au dix-neuvieme siecle, dans un temps de suf- frage universel, de democratie, de liberalisme, nous nous sommes demande si ce qu'on appelle "les basses classes" n'avait pas droit au roman ; si ce monde sous im monde, le peuple, devait rester sous le coup de I'interdit litter- aire et des dedains d'auteurs qui ont fait jusqu'ici le silence sur I'ame et le coeur qu'il peut avoir. Nous nous sommes demande s'il y avait encore, pour I'ecrivain et pour le lecteur, en ces annees d'egalite ou nous sommes, des classes indignes, des malheurs trop bas, des drames trop mal embouches, des catastrophe- J'une terreur trop peu noble. II nous est venu la curiosite de savoir si cette forme conventionnelle d'une litterature oubliee et d'une societe disparue, la Tragedie, etait definitivement morte; si, dans un pas sans caste et sans aristocratic legale, les miseres des petits et des pauvres parleraient a I'interet, a I'emotion, a la pitie aussi haut que les miseres des grands et des riches; si, en un mot, les larmes qu'on pleure en bas pourraient faire pleurer comme celles qu'on pleure en haut.
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Ces pensees nous avaient fait oser Thumble roman de 'Soeur Philomene,' en 1861 ; elles nous font publier aujourd'hui 'Germinie Lacerteux. '
Maintenant,quecelivresoitcalomnie: peuluiimporte. Aujourd'hui que le Roman s'elargit et grandit, qu'il commence a etre la grande forme serieuse, passionnee, vivante, de I'etude litteraire et de I'enquete sociale, qu'il devient, par I'analyse et par la recherche psychologique, I'Histoire morale contemporaine, aujourd'hui que le Roman s'est impose les etudes et les devoirs de la science, il peut en revendiquer les libertes et les franchises. Et qu'il cherche I'Art et la Verite; qu'il montre des miseres bonnesanepaslaisseroublierauxheureuxdeParis qu'il
;
fasse voir aux gens du monde ce que les dames de charite ont le courage de voir, ce que les reines d'autre- fois faisaient toucher de I'oeil a leurs enfants dans les hospices: la soufifrance humaine, presente et toute vive, qui apprend la charite; que le Roman ait cette religion que le siecle passe appelait de ce large et vaste nom: HumanitS; il lui suffit de cette conscience: son droit est la.
E. et J. de G. "
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The signal omission from my critical papers is an adequate book on Wyndham Lewis ; my excuses, apart from the limitations of time, must be that Mr. Lewis is alive and quite able to speak for himself, secondly, that one may print half-tone reproductions of sculpture, for however unsatisfactory they be, they pretend to be only half-tones, and could not show more than they do; but the reproduction of drawings and painting invites all sorts of expensive process impracticable during the
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yearsofwar. Whenthepublicorthe"publishers"are ready for a volume of Lewis, suitably illustrated, I am ready to write in the letterpress, though Mr. Lewis would do it better than I could.
He will rank among the great instigators and great inventors of design; there is mastery in his use of vari- ous media (my own interest in his work centres largely in the "drawing" completed with inks, water-color, chalk, etc. ). His name is constantly bracketed with that of Gaudier, Piccasso, Joyce, but these are fortuitous couplings. Lewis' painting is further from the public than were the carvings of Gaudier; Lewis is an older artist, maturer, fuller of greater variety and invention. His work is almost unknown to the public. His name is wholly familiar, BLAST is familiar, the "Timon" portfolio has been seen.
I had known him for seven years, known him as an artist, but I had no idea of his scope until he began mak- ing his preparations to go into the army ; so careless had hebeenofanypublicorprivateapproval. The"work" lay in piles on the floor of an attic ; and from it we gathered most of the hundred or hundred and twenty drawings which now form the bases of the Quinn col- lection and of the Baker collection, (now in the South Kensington museum).
As very few people have seen all of these pictures very few people are in any position to contradict me. There are three of his works in this room and I can attest their wearing capacity; as I can attest the duration of my regret for the Red drawing now in the Quinn col- lection which hung here for some months waiting ship- ment; as I can attest the energy and vitality that filled this place while forty drawings of the Quinn assortment stood here waiting also; a demonstration of the differ-
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ence between "cubism," nature-morte-ism and the vortex of Lewis: sun, energy, sombre emotion, clean-drawing, disgust, penetrating analysis from the qualities finding literary expression in "Tarr" to the stasis of the Red Duet, from the metallic gleam of the "Timon" portfolio to the velvet-suavity of the later "Timon" of the Baker collection.
The animality and the animal satire, the dynamic and metallic properties, the social satire, on the one hand, the sunlight, the utter cleanness of the Red Duet, are all points in an astounding circumference; which will, until the work is adequately reproduced, have more or less to be taken on trust by the "wider" public.
The novel "Tarr" is in print and no one need bother to read my critiques of it. It contains much that Joyce's work does not contain, but differentiations between the two authors are to the detriment of neither, one tries solely to discriminate qualities : hardness, fullness, abun- dance, weight, finish, all terms used sometimes with derogatory and sometimes with laudative intonation, or at any rate valued by one auditor and depreciated by
another. TheEnglishprosefictionofmydecadeisthe work of this pair of authors.
"TARR," BY WYNDHAM LEWIS *
"Tarr" is the most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time. Lewis is the rarest of phenomena, an Eng- lishman who has achieved the triumph of being also a European. He is the only English writer who can be compared with . Dostoievsky, and he is more rapid than
/Dostoievsky, his mind travels with greater celerity, with more unexpectedness, but he loses none of Dostoievsky's effect of mass and of weight.
* Little Review.
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Tarr is a man of genius surrounded by the heavy stu- pidities of the half-cultured latin quarter; the book de- lineates his explosions in this oleaginous milieu; as well as the debacle of the unintelligent emotion-dominated Kreisler. They are the two titanic characters in con- temporary English fiction. Wells's clerks, Bennett's "cards" and even Conrad's Russian villains do not "bulk up" against them.
Only in James Joyce's "Stephen Dedalus" does one find an equal intensity, and Joyce is, by comparison, cold and meticulous, where Lewis is, if uncouth, at any rate brim- ming with energy, the man with a leaping mind.
Despite its demonstrable faults I do not propose to attack this novel. * It is a serious work, it is definitely an attempt to express, and very largely a success in ex- pressing, something. The "average novel," the average successful commercial proposition at 6s. per 300 to 600 pages is nothing of the sort; it is merely a third-rate mind's imitation of a perfectly well-known type-novel; of let us say Dickens, or Balzac, or Sir A. Conan-Doyle, or Hardy, or Mr. Wells, or Mrs. Ward, or some other and less laudable proto- or necro-type.
A certain commercial interest attaches to the sale of these mimicries and a certain purely technical or trade or clique interest may attach to the closeness or "skill" oftheaping,ortothe"application"ofaformula. The "work," the opus, has a purely narcotic value, it serves to soothe the tired mind of the reader, to take said "mind" off its "business" (whether that business be lofty, "intellectual," humanitarian, sordid, acquisitive, or other). There is only one contemporary English work
* Egoist, Ltd. , 23, Adelphi Terrace House, Robert Street, W. C. 2. 6s. net. Knopf, New York, $1. 50. Reviewed in
The Future.
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with which "Tarr" can be compared, namely James Joyce's utterly different "Portrait of the Artist. " The appearance of either of these novels would be a recog- nized literary event had it occurred in any other country in Europe.
Joyce's novel is a triumph of actual writing. The actual arrangement of the words is worth any author's study. Lewis on the contrary, is, in the actual writing, faulty. His expression is as bad as that of Meredith's floppy sickliness. In place of Meredith's mincing we have something active and "disagreeable. " But we have at any rate the percussions of a highly energized mind.
In both Joyce and Lewis we have the insistent utter- ance of men who are once for all through with the par- ticular inanities of Shavian-Bennett, and with the par- ticular oleosities of the Wellsian genre.
The faults of Mr. Lewis' writing can be examined in the first twenty-five pages. Kreisler is the creation of the book. He is roundly and objectively set before us. Tarr is less clearly detached from his creator. The au- thor has evidently suspected this, for he has felt the need of disclaiming Tarr in a preface.
Tarr, like his author, is a man with an energized mind. When Tarr talks at length; when Tarr gets things off his chest, we suspect that the author also is getting them off his own chest. Herein the technique is defective. It is also defective in that it proceeds by general descriptive statements in many cases where the objective presentment of single and definite acts would be more effective, more convincing.
It differs from the general descriptiveness of cheap fiction in that these general statements are often a very profound reach for the expression of verity. In brief, the author is trying to get the truth and not merely play-
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ing baby-battledore among phrases. When Tarr talks little essays and makes aphorisms they are often of in- trinsicinterest,areevenunforgettable. Likewise,when the author comments upon Tarr, he has the gift of phrase, vivid, biting, pregnant, full of suggestion.
The engaging if unpleasant character, Tarr, is placed in an unpleasant milieu, a milieu very vividly "done. " The reader retains no doubts concerning the verity and existence of this milieu (Paris or London is no matter, though the scene is, nominally, in Paris). It is the existence where:
"Art is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger's Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model . . . quarter given up to Art. --Letters and other things are round the corner.
". . . permanent tableaux of the place, disheartening
'
as a Tussaud's of The Flood. "
Tarr's first impact is with "Hobson," whose "dastardly
face attempted to portray delicacies of common sense, and gossamer-like back-slidings into the Inane, that would have puzzled a bile-specialist. He would occa- sionally exploit his blackguardly appearance and black- smith's muscles for a short time . . . his strong pierc- ing laugh threw A. B. C. waitresses into confusion. "
This person wonders if Tarr is a "sound bird. " Tarr is not a sound bird. His conversational attack on Hob- son proceeds by a brandishing of false dilemma, but neither Hobson nor his clan, nor indeed any of the critics of the novel (to date) have observed that this is Tarr's faulty weapon. Tarr's contempt for Hobson is as ade- quate as it is justifiable.
"Hobson, he considered, was a crowd. --You could not say he was an individual. --He was a set. He sat there a cultivated audience. --He had the aplomb and
--I
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absence of self-consciousness of number^, of the herd of those who know they are not alone. . . .
"For distinguishing feature Hobson possessed a dis- tinguished absence of personality. . . . Hobson was an humble investor. "
Tarr addresses him with some frankness on the sub- ject:
"As an oflF-set for your prying, scurvy way of peeping into my affairs you must offer your own guts, such as theyare. . . .
"You have joined yourself to those who hush their voices to hear what other people are saying. . . .
"Your plumes are not meant to fly with, but merely to slouch and skip along the surface of the earth. --^You wear the livery of a ridiculous set, you are a cunning and sleek domestic. No thought can come out of your head before it has slipped on its uniform. All your instincts are drugged with a malicious languor, an arm, a respectability, invented by a set of old women and mean, cadaverous little boys. "
Hobson opened his mouth, had a movement of the body to speak. But he relapsed.
"You reply, 'What is all this fuss about ? I have done the best for myself. '---I am not suited for any heroic station, like yours. I live sensibly, cultivating my vege- table ideas, and also my roses and Victorian lilies. -- do no harm to anybody. "
"That is not quite the case. That is a little inexact. Your proceedings possess a herdesque astuteness ; in the scale against the individual weighing less than the Yellow Press, yet being a closer and meaner attack. Also you are essentially spies, in a scurvy, safe and well-paid service, as I told you before. You are disguised to look like the thing it is your function to betray--What is your
:
individual.
and later
. "
. .
"YouarelibelingtheArtist,byyouridleness. " Also, "Your pseudo-neediness is a sentimental indulgence. "
All this swish and clatter of insult reminds one a little of Papa Karamazoff. Its outrageousness is more Rus- sian than Anglo-Victorian, but Lewis is not a mere echo ofDostoievsky. Hehustleshisreader,joltshim,snarls at him, in contra-distinction to Dostoievsky, who merely
!
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position? --You have bought for eight hundred pounds at an aristocratic educational establishment a complete mental outfit, a program of manners. For four years you trained with other recruits. You are now a per- fectly disciplined social unit, with a profound esprit de corps. The Cambridge set that you represent is an average specimen, a cross between a Quaker, a Pederast, and a Chelsea artist. --Your Oxford brothers, dating fromtheWildedecade,areastrongerbody. TheChel- sea artists are much less flimsy. The Quakers are powerful rascals. You represent, my Hobson, the dregs of Anglo-Saxon civilization! There is nothing softer on earth. --Your flabby potion is a mixture of the lees of Liberalism, the poor froth blown off the decadent nine- ties, the wardrobe-leavings of a vulgar Bohemianism with its headqviarters in Chelsea
"You are concentrated, systematic slop. --There is nothing in the universe to be said for you. . . .
"A breed of mild pervasive cabbages, has set up a wide and creeping rot in the West of Europe. --They make it indirectly a peril and a tribulation for live things to remain in the neighborhood. You are a systematiz- ing and vulgarizing of the individual. --You are not an
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surrounds him with an enveloping dreariness, and im- pairts his characters by long-drawn osmosis.
Hobson is a minor character in the book, he and
Lowndes are little more than a prologue, a dusty avenue
of approach to the real business of the book: Bertha,
"high standard Aryan female, in good condition, superbly
made; of the succulent, obedient, clear peasant
. "
type.
Kreisler, the main character in the book, a "powerful"
study in sheer obsessed emotionality, the chief foil to Tarr who has, over and above his sombre emotional spawn-bed, a smouldering sort of intelligence, combusti- ble into brilliant talk, and brilliant invective.
Anastasya, a sort of super-Bertha, designated by the author as "swagger sex. "
These four figures move, lit by the flare of restau- rants and cafes, against the frowsy background of "BourgeoisBohemia,"moreorlessBloomsbury. There are probably such Bloomsburys in Paris and in every large city.
This sort of catalogue is not well designed to interest the general reader. What matters is the handling, the vigor, even the violence, of the handling.
The book's interest is riot due to the "style" in so far as "style" is generally taken to mean "smoothness of finish," orderly arrangement of sentences, coherence to the Flaubertian method.
It is due to the fact that we have here a highly-ener- gized mind performing a huge act of scavenging; clean- ing up a great lot of rubbish, cultural, Bohemian, romantico-Tennysonish, arty, societish, gutterish.
It is not an attack on the Spicier. It is an attack on a sort of super-^icier desiccation. It is by no means a tract. If Hobson is so drawn as to disgust one with the
. .
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"stuffed-shirt," Kreisler is equally a sign-post pointing to the advisability of some sort of intellectual or at least commonsense management of the emotions.
Tarr, and even Kreisler, is very nearly justified by the depiction of the Bourgeois Bohemian fustiness: Frau- lein Lippmann, Fraulein Fogs, etc.
What we are blessedly free from is the red-plush '^ Wellsianillusionism,andtheclickofMr.
Bennett'scash- register finish. The book does not skim over the sur- face. If it does not satisfy the mannequin demand for "beauty" it at least refuses to accept margarine substi- tutes. It will not be praised by Katherine Tynan, nor byMr. ChestertonandMrs. Meynell. Itwillnotreceive / the sanction of Dr. Sir Robertson Nicoll, nor of his
despicable paper "The Bookman. "
(There will be perhaps some hope for the British
reading public, when said paper is no longer to be found in the Public Libraries of the Island, and when Clement Shorter shall cease from animadverting. ) "Tarr" does not appeal to these people nor to the audience which they have swaddled. Neither, of course, did Samuel
, Butler to their equivalents in past decades.
"Bertha and Tarr took a flat in the Boulevard Port Royal, not far from the Jardin des Plantes. They gave a party to which Fraulein Lippmann and a good many other people came. He maintained the rule of four to seven, roughly, for Bertha, with the uttennost punctili-
ousness. AnastasyaandBerthadidnotmeet. "Bertha's child came, and absorbed her energies for upwards of a year. It bore some resemblance to Tarr. Tarr's afternoon visits became less frequent. He lived
now publicly with his illicit and splendid bride.
"Two years after the birth of the child, Bertha divorced Tarr. She then married an eye-doctor, and
? IN THE VORTEX 22?
lived with a brooding seveifity in his company, and that of her only child.
"Tarr and Anastasya did not marry. They had no c&ildren. Tarr, however, had three children by a Lady of the name of Rose Fawdett, who consoled him even- tuallyforthesplendorsofhis'perfectwoman. ' Butyet beyond the dim though sordid figure of Rose Fawcett, another rises. This one represents the swing-back of the pendulum once more to the swagger side. The cheerless and stodgy absurdity of Rose Fawcett re- quired the painted, fine and inquiring face of Prism Dirkes. "
Neither this well-writen conclusion, nor the opening tirade I have quoted, give the full impression of the book's vital quality, but they may perhaps draw the explorative reader.
"Tarr" finds sex a monstrosity, he finds it "a German study": "Sex, Hobson, is a German study. A German study. "
At that we may leave it. "Tarr" "had no social ma- chinery, but the cumbrous one of the intellect. . . . When he tried to be amiably he usually only succeeded in being ominous. "
"Tarr" really gets at something in his last long dis- cussion with Anastasya, when he says that art "has no inside. " This is a condition of art, "to have no inside> nothing you cannot see. It is not something impelled like a machine by a little egoistic inside. "
"Deadness, in the limited sense in which we use that word, is the first condition of. art. The second is absence of soul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of a statue are its soul. "
Joyce says something of the sort very differently, he is full of technical scholastic terms : "stasis, kinesis," etc.
1/
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Any careful statement of this sort is bound to be baffoui, and fumbled over, but this ability to come to a hard definition of anything is one of Lewis' qualities lying at the base of his ability to irritate the mediocre intelli- gence. The book was written before 1914, but the de- piction of the German was not a piece of war propa- ganda.
AN HISTORICAL ESSAYIST
LYTTON STRACHEY ON LEFT-OVER CELEBRITY
Mr. Strachey, acting as funeral director for a group of bloated reputations, is a welcome addition to the small group of men who continue what Samuel Butler began. ThehowlsgoingupintheTimesLit. Sup. from the descendants of the ossements are but one curl more of incense to the new author.
His book is a series of epitomes, even the illustrations, from the peculiar expression of Mr. Gladstone's rascally face to the differently, but equally, peculiar expression of Newman's and the petrified settled fanatic will-to- power in Cardinal Manning's, are epitomes.
Whatever else we may be sure of, we may be sure that no age with any intellectual under-pinnings would have made so much fuss over these "figures. " For most of us, the odor of defunct Victoriania is so unpleasant and the personal benefits to be derived from a study of the period so small that we are content to leave the past where we find it, or to groan at its leavings as they are, week by week, tossed up in the Conservative papers. The Victorian era is like a stuffy alley-way which we can, for the most part, avoid. We do not agitate for its
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destruction, because it does not greatly concern us; at least, we have no feeling of responsibility, we are glad to have moved on toward the open, or at least toward the patescent, or to have found solace in the classics or in eighteenth century liberations.
Mr. Strachey, with perhaps the onus of feeling that the "Spectator" was somewhere in his immediate family, has been driven into patient exposition. The heavy gas of the past decades cannot be dispersed by mere "BLASTS" and explosions. Mr. Strachey has under- taken a chemical dispersal of residues.
At the age of nine Manning devoured the Apocalypse. He read Paley at Harrow, and he never got over it. Impeded in a political career, he was told that the King- domofHeavenwasopentohim. "Heavenlyambitions" were suggested. The "Oxford Movement" was, in a minor way, almost as bad as the Italian Counter- Reformation. Zeal was prized more than experience. Manning was the child of his age, the enfant prodigue of it, who could take advantage of all its blessings. A fury of "religion" appears to have blazed through the period. This fury must be carefully distinguished from theology, which latter is an elaborate intellectual exer- cise, and can in its finest developnients be used for sharpening the wits, developing the rational faculties {vide Aquinas). Theology, straying from the en- closures of religion, enters the purlieus of philosophy, and in some cases exacts stiff definitions.
Froude, Newman and Keble were part of an unfor- tunate retrogression, or, as Mr. Strachey has written, "Christianity had become entangled in a series of un- fortunate circumstances from which it was the plain duty of Newman and his friends to rescue it. " Keble de- sired an England "more superstitious, more bigoted.
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more gloomy, more fierce in its religion. " Tracts for tlie Times were published. Pusey imagined that people practised fasting. It was a curious period. One should take it at length from Mr. Strachey.
The contemporary mind may well fail to note a dif- ference between these retrogradists and the earlier nuisance John Calvin, who conceived the floors of hell paved with unbaptized infants half a span long. Mr. Strachey's patient exposition will put them right in the matter.
We have forgotten how bad it was, the ideas of the Oxford movement have faded out of our class, or at least the free moving men of letters meet no one still em- bedded in these left-overs. Intent on some system of thought interesting to themselves and their friends, they "lose touch with the public. " And the "public," as soon as it is of any size, is full of these left-overs, full of the taste of F. T. Palgrave, of Keble's and Pusey's religion.
To ascertain the under-side of popular opinion, or I had better say popular assumption, one may do worse than read books of a period just old enough to appear intolerable.
(For example, if you wish to understand tlie taste displayed in the official literature of the last administra- tion you must read anthologies printed between 1785 and 1837. )
Mr. Strachey's study of Manning is particularly valu- able in a time when people still persist in not under- standing the Papal church as a political organization ex- ploitingareligion; itsforce,doubtless,hascome,through the centuries, from men like Manning, balked in political careers, suffering from a "complex" of power-lust.
Among Strachey's "Eminent" we find one common characteristic, a sort of mulish persistence in any course,
? IN THE VORTEX 227
however stupid. One might , develop the proposition that Nietzsche in his will-to-power "philosophy" was no more than the sentimental, inefficient German of the "old type" expressing an idolization of the British Vic- torian character.
Still it is hard to see how any people save those chr liaiino perduto il hen del intelletto
could have swallowed such shell-game propositions as those of Manning's, quoted on p. 08. concerning response to prayer.
The next essay is a very different matter. Mr. . Strachey, without abandoning the acridity of his style, exposes Florence Nightingale as a great constructor of civilization. Her achievement remains, early victim of Christian voodooism, surrounded mainly by cads and imbeciles, it is a wonder her temper was not a great deal worse. She may well be pardoned a few hysterias, a few metaphysical bees in her cap. Even in meta- physics, if she was unable to improve on Confucius and Epicurus, she seems to have been quite as intelligent as many of her celebrated contemporaries who had no more solid basis for reputation than their "philosophic" writing. Our author has so branded Lord Stratford de Redcliffe and the physican Hall that no amount of apologiawillreinstatethem. Panmureisleftasagoose, and Hawes as a goose with a touch of malevolence.
Queen \'ictoria appears several times in this essay, and effectively:
" 'It will be a very great satisfaction to me,' Her Majesty added, 'to make the acquaintance of one who has set so bright an example to our sex. "
"The brooch, which was designed by the Prince Con-
"
? 228 WSTIGATIONS
sort, bore a St. George's cross in red enamel, and the Royalcyphersurmountedbydiamonds. Thewholewas encircled by the inscription, 'Blessed are the Merciful. '
Dr. Arnold of Rugby, to be as brief as possible with a none too pleasant subject, "substituted character for intellect in the training of British youth. "
The nineteenth century had a "letch" for unifications, it believed that, in general, "all is one"; when this doc- trine failed of a sort of pragmatic sanction in rem, it tried to reduce things to the least possible number. True, in the physical world, it did not attempt to use steam and dynamite interchangeably, but, in affairs of the mind, such was the indubitable tendency.
It is, however, a folly to "substitute" character for intelligence and one would rather have been at the Grammar-School of Ashford, in Kent, in 1759, under Stephen Barrett, A. M. , than at Rugby, in 1830, under Dr. Arnold, or, later, under any of his successors. And I give thanks to Zeusocns tot' ialv, that being an Ameri- can, I have escaped the British public school. Mrs. Ward is at liberty to write to the Times as much as she likes, I do not envy her Dr. Arnold for grandfather.
Arnold stands pre-eminent as an "educator," and from him the term has gradually taken its present meaning: "a man with no intellectual interests. "
Mr. Strachey completes his volume with a study of that extraordinarycrank. GeneralGordon. Ittakeshimtwo lines to blast the reputation of Lord Elgin. He does it quietly, but Elgin's name will stink in the memory of the reader. It is difficult to attribute this wholly to the author, for the facts are in connivance with him. But if his irony at times descends to sarcasm, one must balance that with the general quietude of his style. One canbuthopethatthisbookwillnotbehislast; onewould
? IN THE VORTEX 229
welcome a treatment, by him, of The Members of the British Academic Committee, British Publishers, The Asquith Administration.
The religion of Tien Wang mentioned on p. 221 ap- pears to have been as intelligent as any other form of Christianity, and to have had much the same active ef- fects. However, Gordon was appointed to oppose it. Throughout the rest of his life he seems to have been obsessed by the curious medijeval fallacy that the world is vanity and the body but ashes and dust. He fell vic- tim to the exaggerated monotheism of his era. But he'
had the sense to follow his instinct in a period when instincts were not thought quite respectable; this made him an historic figure; it also must have lent him great charm (with perhaps rather picturesque drawbacks). This valuable quality, charm, must have been singularly lacking in Mr. Gladstone.
It is, indeed, difficult to restrain one's growing con- viction that Mr. Gladstone was not all his party had hoped for. Gordon was "difficult," at the time of his last expedition he was perhaps little better than a lunatic, but Gladstone was decidedly unpleasant.
In all of the eminent was the quality of a singularly uncritical era. It was a time when a prominent man could iorm himself on a single volume handed to him by "tradition"; when illiteracy, in the profounder sense of that term, was no drawback to a vast public career. (An era, of course, happily closed. )
I do not know that there is much use enquiring into the causes of the Victorian era, or any good to be got from speculations. Its disease might seem to have been an aggravated form of provincialism. ^Professor Sir Henry Newbolt has recently pointed out that the English
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public is "interested in politics rather than literature"; this may be a lingering symptom.
If one sought, not perhaps to exonerate, but to explain the Victorian era one might find some contributory cause in Napoleon. That is to say, the Napoleonic wars had made Europe unpleasant, England was sensibly glad to be insular. Geography leaked over into mentality. Eighteenth century thought had indeed got rid of the Bourbons, but later events had shown that eighteenth century thought might be dangerous. England cut off herintellectualcommunicationswiththeContinent. An eraofbigotrysupervened. Wehavesothoroughlyfor- gotten, if we ever knew, the mental conditions preced- ing the Victorian era, save perhaps as they appear in the scribblings of, let us say, Lady Blessington, that we cannot tell whether the mentality of the Victorian reign was an advance or an appalling retrogression. In any casewearegladtobeoutofit . . . irregardlessofwhat wemaybeinto; irregardlessofwhetherthecommunica- tions among intelligent people are but the mirage of a minute Thebaid seen from a chaos wholly insuperable. *
A LIST OF BOOKS
When circumstances have permitted me to lift up my prayer to the gods, of whom there are several, and whose multiplicity has only been forgotten during the less felicitous periods, I have requested for contem- porary use, some system of delayed book reviewing, some system whereby the critic of current things is per- mitted to state that a few books read with pleasure five or six years ago can still be with pleasure perused, and
* "Eminent Victorians," by Lytton Strachey.
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that their claims to status as literature have not been obliterated by half or all of a decade.
GEORGE S. STREET
There was in the nineties, the late nineties and dur- ing the early years of this century, and still is, a writer named George S. Street. He has written some of the best things that have been' thought concerning Lord Byron, he has written them not as a romanticist, not as a Presbyterian, but as a man of good sense. They are worthy of commendation. He has written charm- ingly in criticism of eighteenth century writers, and of the ghosts of an earlier Piccadilly. He has written tales of contemporary life with a suavity, wherefrom the present writer at least has learned a good deal, even if he has not yet put it into scriptorial practice. (I haste to state this indebtedness. )
The writers of moeurs contemporaines are so few, or rather there are so few of them who can be treated under the heading "literature," that the discovery or circula- tion of any such writer is no mean critical action. Mr. Street is "quite as amusing as Stockton," with the infinite difference that Mr. Street has made literature. Essays upon him are not infrequent in volumes of English essays dealing with contemporary authors. My impres- sion is that he is not widely read in America (his pub- lishers will doubtless put me right if this impression is erroneous) ; I can only conclude that the possession of a style, the use of a suave and pellucid English has erected some sort of barrier.
"The Trials of the Bantocks," "The Wise and the Wayward," "The Ghosts of Piccadilly," "Books of Essays," "The Autobiography of a Boy," "Quales Ego,"
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"Miniatures and Moods," are among his works, and in them the rare but intelligent reader may take refuge from the imbecilities of the multitude.
FREDERIC MANNING
In 1910 Mr. Manning published, with the almost de- funct and wholly uncommendable firm of John Murray, "Scenes and Portraits," the opening paragraph of which I can still, I believe, quote from memory.
"When Merodach, King of Uruk, sat down to his meals, he made his enemies his footstool, for be- neath his table he kept an hundred kings with their thumbs and great toes cut off, as signs of his power andclemency. WhenMerodachhadfinishedeating he shook the crumbs from his napkin, and the kings fed themselves with two fingers, and when Merodach observed how painful and difficult this operation was, he praised God for having given thumbs to man.
" 'It is by the absence of things,' he said, 'that we learn their use. Thus if we deprive a man of his eyes we deprive him of sight, and in this man- ner we learn that sight is the function of the eyes. '
"Thus spake Merodach, for he had a scientific mind and was curious of God's handiwork. And when he had finished speaking, his courtiers ap- plauded him. "
Adam is afterwards discovered trespassing in Mero- dach's garden or paradise. The characters of Bagoas, Merodach's high priest, Adam, Eve and the Princess Candace are all admirably presented. The book is divided in six parts: the incident of the Kingdom of
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Uruk, a conversation at the house of Euripides, "A Friend of Paul," a conversation between St. Francis and the Pope, another between Thomas Cromwell and Macchiavelli, and a final encounter between Leo XIII and Renan in Paradise.