THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 ON CONTEMPORARY 
 LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 STUART P. SHERMAN 
 
 ' Man must begin, know this, where nature ends," 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD.
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1917, 
 
 BT 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 First printing, November, 1917 
 Second printing, May, 1918 
 Third printing, Jane, 1922 
 Fourth printing, January, 1923 
 
 TNI QUIRK * tODM OO. Pitt* 
 
 IUHWAT, N. J.
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 PR 
 
 TO 
 PAUL ELMER MORE
 
 FOR permission to reprint the essays in this volume, 
 I am indebted to the Editor of The Nation. Since 
 their original appearance they have been revised and in 
 several instances greatly enlarged. 
 
 I have been accused of being a besotted " Victorian " 
 a kind of creature which ought to be extinct, very 
 obnoxious to the younger critics, yet still so numerous 
 as to constitute a not negligible element in the proces- 
 sion of our days. To give a certain color to the charge 
 I have included an essay on Alfred Austin, whom I 
 regard as the most amusing of the Victorian poets. 
 
 Mr. Henry Holt asks me to allay, if possible, the 
 resentment of those who may inquire why Shakespeare 
 has been smuggled, like a Joseph's cup, into the corn 
 of a volume on contemporary literature. Shakespeare 
 is here because I find him the most interesting and sug- 
 gestive of living writers. His presence helps one to 
 distinguish the values of his competitors. His humanism 
 serves as a measure of the degrees of their naturalism. 
 Reflective readers will perceive, I hope, that the object, 
 if not the ostensible subject, of the essay on Shakespeare 
 is also the object of the essays on Mr. Wells, for 
 example, and Mr. Dreiser and Mr. George Moore.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 I THE DEMOCRACY OP MARK TWAIN .... 18 
 
 II THE UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF H. G. WELLS . . 50 
 
 III THE BARBARIC NATURALISM OF THEODORE DREISER . 85 
 
 IV THE REALISM op ARNOLD BENNETT .... 102 
 V THE AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF GEORGE MOORE . . 120 
 
 VI THE SKEPTICISM OF ANATOLE FRANCE .... 169 
 
 VII THE EXOTICISM OF JOHN STNGE 190 
 
 VIII THE COMPLACENT TORYISM OF ALFRED AUSTIN . . 211 
 
 IX THE AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF HENRY JAMES . . . 226 
 
 X THE HUMANISM OF GEORGE MEREDITH .... 256 
 
 XI SHAKESPEARE, OUR CONTEMPORARY 285 
 
 INDEX 307
 
 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 THERE was perhaps a time when the literary critic 
 was expected to tell the public the truth about books 
 and authors. Current philosophy bids us relinquish 
 that vain expectation. The critic may indicate the 
 position of an author, and he may, if he chooses, com- 
 pare that position with his own. But as for truth, it is 
 a personal and private matter not to be measured by 
 any common standard. Candid novelists like Mr. H. G. 
 Wells admit that they make their " truth " as they need 
 it. Courageous philosophers like Professor Dewey 
 boldly proclaim that they abandon their " goodness " 
 when it stands in the way of those who manipulate 
 events. The modern sage in danger of martyrdom swiftly 
 cuts loose from the forlorn hope and reattaches his 
 conscience to a " going concern." " For what is truth, 
 after all," asks the relativist, " but some definite per- 
 son's impression at some definite point of view? Name 
 the person and indicate the point of view, and I shall 
 know how to value his truth." " And what is goodness," 
 asks the cheerful pragmatist, " but the thing that 
 goes ? " in an autocracy, presumably, the will of the 
 autocrat, in a democracy the vote of the majority. The 
 notion that one person is better qualified than another 
 to fix values in literature has recently been designated 
 by one of literature's professors as the favorite and most 
 
 3
 
 4 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 persistent fallacy of criticism. " Holding the critic's 
 opinions to be obligatory upon other readers," says one 
 of Professor Dewey's followers in an interestingly anar- 
 chical treatise on " The Social Criticism of Literature," 
 " is very like c fiat money ' easy to issue but sometimes 
 harder to realize upon. No power on earth can make a 
 book really valuable to me if it is not so." 
 
 I admit the force of the relativist argument with a 
 certain reservation. Though contemporary history 
 may appear to be overwhelmingly against me, I cannot 
 bring myself absolutely to abandon the ancient notion 
 of human progress. Sages whom I revere assure me that 
 we do not advance, that we merely pass through recur- 
 rent cycles of change. I cling fondly to the hope that 
 they are mistaken. Iconoclasts declare that the critic's 
 " childish estimate of The Swiss Family Robinson prob- 
 ably differs widely from his grown-up verdict upon it. 
 But his second judgment is not necessarily a truer judg- 
 ment than the first, nor the first than the second." If 
 we must relinquish the general presumption that the 
 judgment of maturity is better that is to say, truer 
 than the judgment of childhood, we should hasten, in 
 the interest of democratic fair play, to extend the politi- 
 cal, as we have already extended the educational, 
 franchise to the kindergarten. We may come to that 
 point ; but common sense is not yet ready for the abdi- 
 cation involved in our reaching it. Common sense still 
 clings to the antique notions of growth toward power, 
 ripening toward wisdom, progress toward truth. The 
 moment that one admits the reality of progress, one has 
 immediately to admit the reality of the object toward
 
 INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 which progress is made; and the way is open for the 
 establishment of standards and measures for marking 
 the advances in our course and also those aberrations 
 arid retrogressions which occasionally justify the " mar- 
 tyrs " in standing fast against the main movement of 
 their time. 
 
 A critic who deals with his contemporaries should not, 
 however, show himself utterly out of sympathy with the 
 spirit of his age. In the essays here assembled, I hope 
 it will be found that I have exhibited a certain respect 
 for the " relativity of knowledge." Yet what is sauce 
 for the critic is sauce for the criticized. If the critic 
 can give us no absolute truth, neither can the creative 
 artist. I feel this so strongly that in examining the 
 work of poet or novelist it appears to me above all 
 interesting and important to go behind the work and to 
 discover the workman and his point of view. He gives 
 me a " criticism of life " seductively and imposingly 
 disguised as a representation of life, designed to capti- 
 vate my emotions and intelligence, and in some degree 
 to alter my conception of truth. It is thoroughly perti- 
 nent to the business of criticism to inquire searchingly 
 what manner of man is offering his eyes for mine. When 
 an author hands me a book entitled " The Way of All 
 Flesh " or " The Way of the World " my sympathies 
 with the relativist are roused at once ; the first leap of 
 my curiosity is to know how much of the world, what 
 aspects of the flesh, can be seen on the level and at the 
 point of observation where the author habitually takes 
 his stand. 
 
 .The reader of many books discovers that at a certain
 
 6 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 level and at a certain point of view all the observers are 
 impressed with the infamous nature of man ; on another 
 level and at another point of view all the observers sing 
 the praises of our aspiring humanity; at still another 
 level and at a third point of view all the observers are 
 smitten with the glory of God. Naming these levels and 
 these points of view is an elementary step toward more 
 difficult sub-classifications. Now and then one meets a 
 man who violently objects to being placed and classified. 
 He takes pride in saying " I am not an * ist ' nor an 
 * ite ' and I subscribe to no * ism.' ' In all probability 
 he is not an author; for the beginning of effective 
 authorship is usually the adoption or the acceptance of 
 a definite point of view. It may be that he is an author 
 with shifting and inconsistent points of view Gold- 
 smith, for example, of whom Johnson exclaimed : " Sir, 
 he knows nothing ; he has made up his mind about noth- 
 ing." It may be that he is, like Montaigne, a man who 
 has made up his mind not to make up his mind : in which 
 case he has subscribed to the most catholic of all 
 " isms " skepticism. In general we may predict that 
 the man who imagines himself sui generis will discover 
 some day, after the fashion of M. Jourdain, that he has 
 been an " ist " all his life without knowing it. May the 
 classifications in this book help him toward that useful 
 bit of self-knowledge. Knowing one's class is knowing 
 one's " place in the world," and knowing one's place in 
 the world is knowing one's relative value. To assist 
 authors and readers in the process of self-recognition 
 and self-appreciation is one of the pleasures of criticism. 
 Some years ago an English writer, impressed by the
 
 INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 relativity of our knowledge and by the vast power of 
 imposition lodged in the hands of the literary critic, pro- 
 posed a means to prevent the guileless public from think- 
 ing more reverently of critical " authority " than it 
 ought to think. He urged all honest practitioners to 
 preface each of their articles with a brief confession of 
 faith in some such fashion as this : " I am a member of 
 the Church of England (or an Atheist, Dissenter, 
 or what not) ; a Conservative (or a Liberal, Radical, or 
 what not) ; a Classicist (or a Romanticist, Realist, or 
 what not) ; belong to the Spectator set (or the Saturday 
 Review, or the Daily Mail, or what not). This sensi- 
 tively honorable proposal, it will be remembered, was 
 anticipated in its essential feature by the device of 
 Bottom " Tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, 
 but Bottom the weaver : this will put them out of fear." 
 Superfluous Bottom's device may have been; it was 
 inspired by a tender humanity worthy of all emulation. 
 It is in his spirit that I write this " prologue " to indi- 
 cate the point of view from which I have been studying 
 the tendencies in contemporary literature. 
 
 I write this " prologue " under the impression no 
 doubt temporary, yet for the moment almost overwhelm- 
 ing that we are living to-day in the worst of all pos- 
 sible worlds. It is, at any rate, a world of which every 
 intelligent man must feel ashamed. It is an absurd 
 world. By the more or less immutable nature of things 
 it is so constituted that the path of life for the ordinary 
 man in the ordinary course of events is beset from the 
 cradle to the grave with pitfalls of mental and physical 
 pain. On this precarious pathway men with but a trifle
 
 8 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 less than the average sureness of footing and indulgence 
 of fortune are so constantly in misery that pain appears 
 to them the one steadfast reality. Revising the Greek 
 poet quoted by Saint Paul, they are ready to say : " In 
 pain I live and move and have my being." Philosophers 
 even in the halcyon days of peace have opined that forti- 
 tude is the supreme virtue and freedom from pain the 
 supreme felicity of our decaying nature. For in this 
 world of birth pangs and death pangs, insensate and 
 involuntary forces of nature are in unintermitting con- 
 spiracy against the happiness of man. Yet he, at the 
 present moment, with the utmost deliberateness, with 
 all the energy of his will, with all the resources of his 
 intellect is seeking, in all quarters of the globe, to mul- 
 tiply pain beyond all recorded precedent pain to the 
 body and pain to the heart disease, dismemberment, 
 and death, to body, mind, and spirit. For the moment 
 I speak not of the ulterior purposes of the men who, in 
 Professor Dewey's admirable phrase, " manipulate 
 events." The ulterior purposes of those who triumph 
 will undoubtedly have to be pronounced benign and beau- 
 tiful. But I speak now of man's immediate acts and 
 facts, his means and not his ends ; and those are of an 
 absurdity beyond tragedy colossal, stupefying. So 
 that the present stage of human " progress " calls to 
 remembrance the regions which Dante visited, places 
 " mute of all light," where souls blaspheming the Divine 
 Power are whirled in an infernal hurricane, or writhe in 
 fire, or sunk to the lips in ice devour one another. 
 
 No man, Socrates assures us, knowingly chooses what 
 is not for his own good. Then what " sweet thoughts,
 
 INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 what longing " have led men to this doloroso passo? 
 Carlyle described the French Revolution as " truth 
 dancing in hell-fire." To my vision, at least, the truth 
 that dances in the hell-fire of the war of the German 
 Invasions in which we live, move, and have our being 
 is the old truth declared by the grim seer of Florence: 
 
 Intesi che a cosi fatto tormento 
 enno dannati i peccator' carnali, 
 che la ragion sommettono al talento. 
 
 " I learnt that to such torment are doomed the carnal 
 sinners who subject reason to lust. . . . ' The first 
 of these concerning whom thou seekest to know,' he then 
 replied, * was Empress of many tongues. With the vice 
 of luxury she was so broken, that she made lust and law 
 alike in her decree, to take away the blame she had 
 incurred.' " 
 
 This last phrase, " that she made lust and law alike 
 in her decree, to take away the blame she had incurred," 
 sums up for me a deep, many-branched ruinous tendency 
 of contemporary thought. This is the logical conclusion 
 of the naturalistic philosophy which has been for many 
 years subtly extending its influence in all countries and 
 in every field of human activity. It is the logical con- 
 clusion of repudiating all standards, teaching one's 
 conscience to trot in the rut of events, and making one's 
 truth as one needs it. The primitive savage is taught to 
 believe that his happiness depends upon the observance 
 of tabus. The modern savage is taught by a thousand 
 sophists to believe that tabus are the only obstacles 
 between him and his happiness. He " blasphemes the
 
 10 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 divine power " by identifying its dictates with his appe- 
 tites, so that no check of religious superstition or of 
 reasoned reverence remains in his consciousness to 
 oppose the indefinite expansion of his " self-love." The 
 devil, as Goethe represents him, is the spirit that 
 denies. Mr. Paul Elmer More, certainly one of the 
 most penetrating moralists of our times, says that 
 this is clean kam. The spirit that denies, he de- 
 clares, is God. I do not recall any single utterance 
 from living lips that has impressed me as more pro- 
 foundly illuminating. I should not like to think that 
 denial is the only aspect of God, but I am sure that it 
 is the aspect of God most ignored by those who flatter 
 themselves that because they have forgotten him he has 
 forgotten them. And I am as certain as I can be of 
 anything that God is a spirit who denies the validity 
 of adopting the laws of the physical universe for the 
 moral regiment of man. 
 
 The great revolutionary task of nineteenth-century 
 thinkers, to speak it briefly, was to put man into nature. 
 The great task of twentieth-century thinkers is to get 
 him out again somehow to break the spell of those 
 magically seductive cries, " Follow Nature," " Trust 
 your instincts," " Back to Nature." We have trusted 
 our instincts long enough to sound the depths of their 
 treacherousness. We have followed nature to the last 
 ditch and ditch water. In these days when the educator, 
 returning from observation of the dog kennel with a 
 treatise on animal behavior, thinks he has a real clue to 
 the education of children; when the criminologist with 
 a handful of cranial measurements imagines that he has
 
 INTRODUCTION 11 
 
 solved the problem of evil ; when the clergyman discovers 
 the ethics of the spirit by meditating on the phagocytes 
 in the blood; when the novelist returning from the 
 zoological gardens wishes to revise the relations of the 
 sexes sd as to satisfy the average man's natural craving 
 for three wives ; when the statesman after due reflection 
 on " the survival of the fittest " feels justified in devour- 
 ing his neighbors in the presence of all these appeals 
 to nature, we may wisely welcome any indication of a 
 counter-revolution. 
 
 Literary criticism has been an accomplice in the usur- 
 pations of the naturalistic philosophy. Disillusioned, 
 it should be an ally in the revolt against it. There are 
 signs of insurrection in many quarters. For the valor 
 and high spirits of his revolt one welcomes the critical 
 writings of Mr. G. K. Chesterton. Fighting with intel- 
 lectual mountebanks, he has stolen some of their 
 weapons ; he has taken his stand in what his adversaries 
 will assail as a " mediaeval " citadel ; yet in his Ortho- 
 doxy, despite its archaic elements, he has produced the 
 most brilliantly sensible book that has come in recent 
 years from the embattled journalists of London. In 
 France assailants of naturalism ordinarily wear the 
 antique armor of the Catholic faith, and appeal to tra- 
 ditions which are of comparatively little potency in 
 English-speaking lands. Professor Guerard, a French- 
 man, writing in this country on French thought in the 
 nineteenth century, attacks the same foe without a 
 return to Rome, and on grounds open to the young 
 people who modestly call themselves the " intelligentsia." 
 I have found much anti-naturalistic virtue in a little
 
 12 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 book by Sigurd Ibsen, the son of the dramatist, which 
 was translated into English in 1913 with the title, 
 Human Quintessence persuasive by reason of its large 
 concessions to the enemy and the author's unwillingness 
 to take refuge in a metaphysical or theological thicket. 
 Professor Shorey has just made a spirited sally against 
 the naturalistic educators in The Assault on Humanism. 
 Mr. W. C. Brownell, whose criticism is invariably distin- 
 guished by its high and fine civility, has in his recently 
 published Standards discharged among the Barbarians 
 a quiverful of arrowy and exquisitely pointed satire. 
 But Mr. Paul Elmer More and Professor Babbitt, in 
 more or less obvious cooperation, are, I think, the critics 
 in America who have most consistently striven to make 
 the movement against naturalism conscious of itself and 
 aggressive and formidable. They have defined its ob- 
 jects, illustrated its principles, contrived its strategy, 
 and richly provided it with munitions of war Professor 
 Babbitt in The New Laocoon and elsewhere, Mr. More 
 in the impressive series of his Shelburne Essays. 
 
 There are at least three ways of discrediting the 
 current naturalism or " scientific monism." The most 
 difficult, perhaps, is to attack it upon purely metaphysi- 
 cal grounds. The most unanswerable is to oppose it 
 with religious intuitions. The simplest and possibly not 
 the least effective is to meet it with Johnsonian com- 
 mon sense, appealing to the general reason and experi- 
 ence of mankind against the conclusions of the ratiocina- 
 tive faculty of the individual. In America the critical 
 movement which opposes naturalism is not, if I under- 
 stand it, distinctively religious but distinctively human-
 
 INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 istic. It seeks not primarily to reclaim man for God 
 but to reclaim him for civil society; not so much to fit 
 him with wings as to persuade him to shed the horns and 
 hoofs which he has been wearing in his long apres-midi 
 d'un faune. The humanist therefore requires no com- 
 plex philosophical apparatus. He may keep the peace 
 with scientific monism as a theory of great logical co- 
 gency, and yet assert that the really consistent monist 
 is " a phenomenon we have never seen and never shall 
 see." In effect he dismisses the theory as irrelevant to 
 human needs and, indeed, contradictory to human ex- 
 perience. Though he shun the metaphysical abyss and 
 profess his inability to climb the steeps of mystical 
 insight, he is at one with the saints in his clear perception 
 of the eternal conflict between " the law for things " 
 and " the law for man." This is the rock upon which 
 the humanist builds his house. 
 
 In the natural world he discerns no genuine law of 
 progress, no conservation of values, no unity of purpose, 
 but brutal cross purposes, blind chance, and everlasting 
 change. The notion that the Darwinian " survival of 
 the fittest " indicates an aristocratic tendency in 
 nature, he deems a vulgar error based upon a confusion 
 of adaptation to environment with conformity to ideal 
 ends. In human society, on the other hand, Mr. Ibsen, 
 for example, detects an " impetus," unique in character, 
 which " urges us to bring our existences and the condi- 
 tions about us into agreement with an ideal picture we 
 bear in our hearts." In the human consciousness Mr. 
 More detects an " inner check " which, in the interest of 
 character, opposes the push of instinct, the expansive
 
 14 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 impulse of the elan vital. " All the experience of the 
 past," says Professor Babbitt, " cries, as though with a 
 thousand tongues, through the manifold creeds and sys- 
 tems in which it has been very imperfectly formulated, 
 that the highest human law is the law of concentration." 
 To call this unique " impetus," this " inner check," this 
 " law of concentration " human or to call it divine is 
 not this in the present state of our ideas a tolerably 
 insignificant matter of nomenclature? Certainly the 
 matter of quintessential importance is to recognize this 
 impulse and to exalt it. For it cleaves the universe in 
 twain as decisively as the fiat that divided the waters 
 which were under the firmament from the waters which 
 were above the firmament. 
 
 The line of progress for human society must therefore 
 be in the direction of this human impetus. It cannot 
 possibly lead " back to nature," but must steadily show 
 a wider divergence from the path of natural evolution. 
 Society is in great part an organized opposition to 
 nature, and it justifies itself only when it maintains its 
 ground. It is irrelevant to approve or condemn this or 
 that possible line of conduct on the basis that it is or is 
 not in conformity with nature. It is pertinent only to 
 inquire whether it is in harmony with the constitution 
 and aim of the human organization. It is not accord- 
 ing to the tendency of clay to become a pot or of wood 
 to become a table, but it is of the very essence of the 
 artisan and the artist to overcome the tendency of wood 
 and clay. It is according to the nature of an animal to 
 preserve its own life and to reproduce its species, but it 
 is of the essence of a man to lay down his life out of
 
 INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 reverence for his great-grandfather and to check the 
 impulse to indiscriminate reproduction out of considera- 
 tion for his great-grandson. The impulse to refrain 
 thus indicated we can find nowhere in nature. It is part 
 of the pattern or design of human society that lies in 
 the heart of man. 
 
 The application, then, of biological terminology to 
 human institutions now common among German and 
 other political philosophers is fraught with confusion 
 and illegitimate inferences. Society is not, after all, an 
 organism but an " organization." It is not determined 
 wholly, like organisms, by environment and previously 
 existing forms of society, but partly by a vision of forms 
 that have never existed and by a passion for approxi- 
 mating them. It is not unfolded naturally and spon- 
 taneously, but artificially and by contrivance. Its laws 
 are not statements of observed relationships among 
 forces; they are the forces themselves the shaping, 
 creative energy of the special human impetus, stemming 
 the tide of natural impulse, and saying, " Here and there 
 thou shalt go, and no farther." Yet we speak of the 
 evolution of society and the evolution of animals as if 
 polar bears and political constitutions ran on all fours, 
 had begun to trouble the womb of chaos at much the same 
 epoch, and had been delivered to a passively expectant 
 world by a similar spasm of vital energy. Hypnotized 
 by the passes of a facile monism, the consciousness of 
 man sees itself playing but a cognitive and spectatorial 
 part in history, accepts the universe as it would accept 
 an avalanche, and lies down in a deep paralysis of the 
 will to await what the morrow may bring forth.
 
 16 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 To the humanist not the least interesting consequence 
 of the present war will be its effect upon the philosophy 
 of naturalism and its expression in literature; for the 
 conflict presents itself to his eyes as essentially a 
 struggle between the masters of the " law for things " 
 and the servants of the " law for man." When in the 
 summer of 1914 the German army went roaring and 
 singing and destroying over the borders of Belgium into 
 France, sweeping all the painfully constructed works of 
 man before it, it struck the imagination, in spite of its 
 mechanical organization, like a river in flood, seeking 
 the sea, like a ruthless natural force, following nature's 
 laws; and so its own apologists have described it. 
 When Belgium checked it, when France and England 
 dammed it, when one ally after another hemmed it in, 
 the counterstroke was quite uniformly described in terms 
 equivalent to far-off Asiatic Siam's declaration of war 
 (which comes as I write) as an effort to " uphold the 
 sanctity of international rights against nations showing 
 a contempt for the principles of humanity." Here for 
 German and other naturalistic thinkers is the grand dis- 
 illusion. Here for the humanist is the hope amid the 
 horror. Humanity does after all recognize certain 
 rights and principles as fixed and established; in hours 
 of ease speaks of them like a wanton; but when need 
 arises, dies for them as for the possession that is dearer 
 than life. The victory of the Allies should logically be 
 reflected in a literature exalting the vindicated " law for 
 man." Haunted by memories of the fiery ruin wrought 
 by those who made lust and law alike in their decree, it 
 ^should not seek in nature for the order, stability, justice,
 
 INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 gentleness, and wisdom that only man has ever desired 
 or sought to create. It should mirror a society more 
 regardful of its ascertained values, more reverent of its 
 fine traditions, more reluctant to take up with the 
 notions of windy innovators. It should, in short, sug- 
 gest in its own subtle way the desirability of continuing 
 to work out in the world that ideal pattern which lies 
 in the instructed and disciplined heart.
 
 I 
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 
 
 ANY one who has thought of Mark Twain merely as 
 the author of many books may well be recommended to 
 make his acquaintance as a puissant American person- 
 ality through the three thick volumes of Mr. Paine's 
 biography. As an inducement to that considerable 
 undertaking I record here the experience of a reader 
 who approached the enterprise with a distinct apprehen- 
 sion that he would be overtaken by fatigue before he 
 emerged from the two-hundred-and-ninety-sixth chapter 
 and plunged into the twenty-four appendices. He was 
 thinking of Mark Twain as a humorous writer ; and his 
 mind was still irritated by memories of the extravagant 
 admirers who in recent years have saluted the veteran 
 of a thousand ovations as a superlative artist, a pro- 
 found moralist, and a grave philosopher. He reflected 
 on the fact that the biographer was something of an 
 idolater and that his biography was the fruit of six 
 years' labor, during four of which the subject had 
 offered himself for study, and had dictated volumes of 
 recollections. He suspected that these 1,719 pages 
 would constitute a last disproportionate monument 
 under which the old humorist would be buried. Then 
 he opened the book and began to read. 
 
 When he left off reading, two or three days later, he 
 
 18
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 19 
 
 found it difficult to escape from the interesting illusion 
 that he himself was Mark Twain. He felt as if he had 
 just returned from a prolonged exploration of the 
 world, and were rounding out in tranquillity a restless 
 life that had extended over three-quarters of a century. 
 He looked back over a stream of experience of historical 
 breadth and national significance. He had been carried 
 back to the days of Andrew Jackson, and, with the hope 
 and hunger of the westward migration, had drifted as 
 the slave-holding John Clemens out of Kentucky into 
 Tennessee and on to Missouri, and there had died, 
 dreaming in poverty of his 75,000 acres of Tennessee 
 land unsalable at twenty-five cents an acre. In 1835 he 
 had been born again in the son, Samuel Langhorne 
 Clemens. Half-educated, mischievous, and clever he 
 had set type for a struggling little journal in Hannibal, 
 Missouri, ten years before the Civil War, and had made 
 his first " sensation " by printing in his brother's paper 
 a poem very faintly reminiscent of Robert Burns, in- 
 scribed "To Mary in H 1" (Hannibal). He had 
 taken one end of a Testament, his mother holding the 
 other, and had promised not to " throw a card or drink 
 a drop of liquor," and had set out to see the world, still 
 as a printer, in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, 
 Keokuk, and Cincinnati. But then he heard the call of 
 the Father of Waters, and for four years was pilot, 
 and studied the intricate mysteries of the Mississippi, 
 and laughed and jested with rivermen from St. Louis 
 to New Orleans, till a shell from the Union batteries 
 exploded in front of his pilot-house and ended that 
 chapter. Then for a few days as second lieutenant of
 
 20 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 an extemporized militia company, he rode a small yellow 
 mule to the aid of the Confederacy. Next the golden 
 flare in the far West caught his eye, and couched among 
 the mail-bags behind six galloping horses, he swapped 
 yarns across seventeen hundred miles of plains till he 
 reached Carson City, and became a miner, and suffered 
 the quotidian fever of the prospector, and filled his 
 trunk with " wild-cat " stock, and knew the fierce 
 life of frontier saloons and gambling hells. From the 
 unremunerative pick and shovel he turned to the bois- 
 terous, bowie-knife journalism of the Enterprise, and 
 thence to vitriolic humor on the Morning Call in San 
 Francisco, and he sent his name to the Atlantic coast 
 with The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and 
 lined his pockets with gold by a great news " scoop " in 
 the Sandwich Islands. 
 
 It was 1866, he was thirty-one years old, and his 
 " career " had just begun. He now entered a forty- 
 year engagement as a public lecturer, and competed 
 successfully with Fanny Kemble and P. T. Barnum, 
 and made himself known to hundreds of thousands whom 
 he convulsed with laughter. At the same time he became 
 a great traveler, perlustrated the cities of his native 
 land, plundered the vineyards of Greece, presented an 
 address to the Czar, visited Jerusalem with the Inno- 
 cents, sojourned in England and gossiped with the 
 Prince of Wales, in Germany and dined with the 
 Emperor, in India and was entertained by a native 
 prince in Bombay, interceded with President Kruger 
 for the prisoners of the Jameson Raid, captured the 
 cities of Australia and New Zealand, and exacted trib-
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 1 
 
 ute from the whole world. Three or four years after 
 the Civil War he had begun to throw off books as a 
 comet throws off meteors. Then he took up the burdens 
 of a publisher, bargained with General Grant for his 
 memoirs, and sold a quarter of a million copies where 
 the other bidder had planned for a sale of five or ten 
 thousand. His imagination took fire at a dream of 
 magnificent wealth, and he became a great speculator, 
 and in one year invested $100,000 in projects, and 
 sank a fortune in an unperfected type-setting machine, 
 and went into bankruptcy. Then, at the age of sixty 
 he girded himself anew and made another fortune in 
 three years and repaid his creditors to the last dollar, 
 and in a few years more had accumulated a third for- 
 tune for himself, and drew annual royalties equal to the 
 salary of the President of the United States, and built 
 himself splendid mansions, and rested from his labors 
 on an Italian mahogany bed, clad in a dressing-gown of 
 Persian silk. Then the University of Oxford summoned 
 the printer, pilot, miner, reporter, traveler, lecturer, 
 author, publisher, capitalist across the sea, and robed 
 him in scarlet, and made him a Doctor of Letters, and 
 he retired into unofficial public life till, in 1910, the call 
 came to set his course toward the sinking sun. 
 
 This is not the biography of an author ; it is a part of 
 the prose Odyssey of the American people; and it will 
 continue to be read when many of Mark Twain's writ- 
 ings are forgotten. It will continue to be read because 
 it conveys in relatively brief compass the total effect 
 which he spent his lifetime in producing with American 
 recklessness and prodigality, with floods of garrulous
 
 22 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 improvisation. Mr. Paine loiters a little, it is true, 
 through the years of Mark Twain's final prosperity, 
 but that was the period of his personal relations with 
 his hero, and we must forgive him if, like an artist 
 infatuated with his subject, he paints us several por- 
 traits differing only slightly in attitude and shading. 
 His first two volumes are really marvels of compression ; 
 he disposes, for example, of the trip to Palestine in 
 twenty-odd pages, and of the voyage around the world 
 in less ; yet very likely he tells about as much of those 
 famous expeditions as after the lapse of a hundred years 
 a more sophisticated posterity will stay to hear. From 
 first to last he rejects tempting opportunities to digress 
 into history and overflow into description; he supplies 
 only so much setting as serves to bring the actor into 
 higher relief. He is under an illusion, I believe, as to 
 the value of Mark Twain's theology and philosophy and 
 literature ; but his sense of what we may call biographi- 
 cal value is admirable. His book is full of animated and 
 characteristic phrase, gesture, and attitude. He has 
 extenuated nothing of his hero's weakness or his 
 strength, and has set forth with all possible veracity 
 the processes through which the man of the frontier 
 became, without losing his essence and his tang, quite 
 literally the man of the world. 
 
 No one recognized more frankly than Mark Twain 
 himself that in a sense he was a raider from the Border. 
 He never pretended to be the thing that he was not, and, 
 on the other hand, he was never ashamed of the thing 
 that he was. He planted himself, according to the 
 Emersonian injunction, squarely upon his instincts,
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 23 
 
 accepted " the society of his contemporaries, the connec- 
 tion of events," and, with a happy faculty for turning 
 everything to account, capitalized his very limitations. 
 It was one of the secrets of his immense personal effect 
 that he never felt nor looked like a scholar or a thought- 
 worn literary person, but rather like a man of affairs 
 erect, handsome, healthy, debonair in his earlier years 
 like a prosperous ranchman, later like a financier, a 
 retired field-marshal, an ambassador, or, as his friends 
 would have it, like a king. It was an iron constitution, 
 tempered in the Mississippi and tested in the mining 
 camps of the West, that enabled him to endure the stu- 
 pendous fatigues of his great lecturing tours, to throw 
 off 100,000 words of a novel in six weeks, to toil with- 
 out exercise and smoking heavily all day and half the 
 night, and, when he was past seventy, to talk copyright 
 for hours with a hundred and fifty different Congress- 
 men and radiate superfluous energy at a dinner in the 
 evening, or to play billiards with his biographer till 
 four o'clock in the morning. 
 
 If a kind of unconscious frontier impudence per- 
 suaded him of his competency as a Biblical critic, and 
 carried him into the realm of abstract ethics, and led 
 him late in life to add the weight of his authority to the 
 followers of Delia Bacon, it was a kindred and valuable 
 mental innocence that made the first fifty years of his 
 life a perpetual voyage of discovery, sharpened his 
 observation and his appetite for experience, and pre- 
 served the vernacular vigor of his speech. Had he 
 undergone in his formative period the discipline of an 
 older and firmly stratified society, he would have been
 
 24 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 saved from some lapses in taste, but he would have 
 lacked that splendid self-confidence which is born of 
 living among a relatively homogeneous folk, and which 
 in the long run explained his unrivaled power, on the 
 platform and in print, of getting in touch with his 
 public. As pilot, miner, and Nevada journalist he 
 found his most profitable associates among men rather 
 than among women, and formed the habit of address- 
 ing himself to a robust masculine audience a habit 
 which gives him an almost unique distinction in Amer- 
 ican literature, and marks him clearly as belonging 
 to the heroic age. He was " a man's man." It is a sig- 
 nificant fact that he was introduced to his future wife 
 by her brother, who had become a great friend of his on 
 the voyage of the Innocents. It is an equally significant 
 fact that the friendship terminated and the brother 
 departed on a journey when he learned that the humorist 
 intended to marry his sister. If Mark Twain ever be- 
 came a lion among the ladies, it was because they liked 
 lions, not because he made any special concessions to 
 the ladies. He detested vFane Austen, her works, and 
 her world; and unabashed he accounted for his antip- 
 athy : " When I take up one of Jane Austen's books, 
 such as Pride and Prejudice, I feel like a barkeeper 
 entering the kingdom of heaven." What he thought of 
 the " kingdom of heaven " he has set forth in another 
 place. 
 
 No American writer has ever enjoyed a more purely 
 democratic reputation than Mark Twain. From village 
 celebrity to international renown, he has been advanced 
 stage after stage by popular suffrage. The plain, un-
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 25 
 
 bookish citizen holding both his sides at a public lecture 
 has helped roar him into eminence. The freckled, brown- 
 legged pirate who finds Tom Sawyer nearer to his busi- 
 ness and his bosom than Robinson Crusoe has played no 
 negligible part in the campaign. The vote of the retired 
 merchant reading A Tramp Abroad in preparation for 
 a European holiday told decisively in his favor before 
 the tardy voice of the professional critic assented. Only 
 when an overwhelming majority of his fellow country- 
 men had established his position, did the universities 
 formally recognize the fact. And one suspects that for 
 him as he strolled into the Sheldonian Theatre clad in 
 scarlet to receive his degree from Oxford the pleasantest 
 note of the occasion was the " very satisfactory hurrah " 
 from the audience. 
 
 In the last few years of his life he received a higher 
 honor than a degree from any university however vener- 
 able; he received the highest honor within the gift of 
 the Republic. Let us distinguish here, not his three 
 " manners " but the three aspects of his reputation. 
 Like a political orator making his maiden speech or 
 invading hostile territory, Mark Twain had broken the 
 reserve of his first audience with a string of irresistible 
 " funny stories " and a comic recital of his travels. 
 Handicapped by uproarious laughter, he produced a 
 number of books which demanded serious consideration, 
 but his leonine head had grown gray before he lived 
 down his reputation as a " platform humorist." At 
 about the time of his seventieth birthday, however, he 
 obtained a reconsideration of his case, and the gravest 
 tribunals decided that he indubitably belonged in the
 
 26 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 history of literature, if, indeed, he was not the " fore- 
 most American man of letters." After that, national 
 feeling about him crystallized rapidly into its final 
 state. He appeared in white flannels in midwinter, 
 declaring that white was the only wear for a man with 
 seventy clean years behind him; we were significantly 
 pleased. When our newspapers had made one of their 
 occasional " little breaks " in reporting the result of his 
 serious illness, he cabled from the Bermudas that the 
 reports of his death were " greatly exaggerated." It 
 was a phrase that we all envied, from our Presidential 
 phrase-maker down ; we recognized that he was no longer 
 a mere literary man he was a national character. 
 When he died we abandoned the last reservation. We 
 said with one voice: He was an American. 
 
 To the foreign critic this ultimate tribute may seem 
 perplexingly cheap and anticlimactic. That is, of 
 course, due to the mistaken notion that we number some 
 five score millions of Americans. As a matter of fact, 
 we number our Americans on our ten fingers; the rest 
 of us are merely citizens of the United States. Any 
 one who will take the trouble to be born may become 
 a citizen. To become an American requires other 
 talents. We are more than doubtful about the status 
 of Washington: he was the Father of his Country, 
 but he lacked a certain indispensable tang. Lowell 
 forgetting Franklin, who had the tang said that Lin- 
 coln was the first American. From certain indications 
 it looks as if Mr. Roosevelt might turn out to be an 
 American. Only the other day * he sent us a message to 
 1 Written in 1910.
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 27 
 
 this effect : " I know that the American people will agree 
 that I could have acted in no other way than I did act." 
 The American is a man of destiny. His word and deed 
 flow inevitably out of the American character. On the 
 one hand, he does a thing because it is right; on the other 
 hand, the thing is right because he does it. Revising 
 the thought of Henry V we 7 may say, Nice customs 
 curtsy to great Americans. 
 
 This point is strikingly illustrated by a story which 
 Mark Twain tells on himself in one of the chapters of 
 his autobiography. It was in 1877, before a company 
 including all the leading " geniuses " of New England, 
 banqueting in honor of Whittier's birthday. When 
 Mark Twain's turn came, he rose and entered upon a 
 fictitious " reminiscence." Out in southern California 
 he had knocked at a miner's cabin, and announced him- 
 self as a literary man. The miner replied with marked 
 ill-humor that he had just got rid of three of them, 
 " Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes consound the lot. . . . Mr. Emerson was a 
 seedy little bit of a chap, red headed ; Mr. Holmes was 
 as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hun- 
 dred, and had double chins all the way down to his 
 stomach. Mr. Longfellow was built like a prizefighter. 
 . . . They had been drinking, I could see that." And 
 so on. 
 
 At the words " consound the lot," Twain had expected 
 a peal of laughter, but to his amazement " the expres- 
 sion of interest in the faces turned to a sort of black 
 frost." The whole story was a dismal failure; it was 
 years before the author recovered from the shame of it.
 
 28 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 Speaking for the moment as a pious reader of O. W. 
 Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and The Atlantic 
 Monthly, I am not in the least surprised at the New 
 England frost. And I know very well that Jane Austen 
 or Thackeray or George Meredith would have agreed 
 with the New England geniuses that Mark Twain's 
 reminiscence was a piece of crude, heavy, intellectual 
 horse-play an impudent affront offered to Puritan 
 aristocracy by a rough-handed plebeian jester from 
 Missouri. But hear Mark Twain thirty years after the 
 event: 
 
 I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot, it hasn't a 
 single defect in it from the first word to the last. It is just 
 as good as can be. It is smart; it is saturated with humor. 
 There isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it any- 
 where. What could have been the matter with that house? 
 . . . If I had those beloved and revered old literary im- 
 mortals back here ... I would melt them till they'd run 
 all over that stage! 
 
 In his mellow Indian summer Mark Twain himself 
 grew conscious that he had become an American. He 
 knew, therefore, that the speech was right, because he 
 had made it. I confess to a doubt whether those " old 
 literary immortals " would, if they were among us, 
 laugh at it even now ; for the man who laughs with Mark 
 Twain must be capable of feeling himself, for the 
 moment, neither better nor worse than " the overwhelm- 
 ing majority " of his fellow citizens; and the New Eng- 
 land " immortals " were incapable of feeling themselves 
 in that mean position, even for a moment. 
 
 Mr. Paine, like some other recent critics, dwells with
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 29 
 
 a kind of retaliatory gusto upon the Brahminical reser- 
 vations in the welcome accorded Mark Twain by mem- 
 bers of the older New England inner circle; he is sure 
 that the world is now having its laugh at the Brahmins. 
 He reminds us also that, while Twain was still on a kind 
 of nervous probation in America, he had been received 
 with unrestrained delight in England. But the right 
 explanation of the hesitation on this side of the water 
 does not seem to have occurred to him. The fact is that 
 Twain was hailed with jubilation by Englishmen because 
 he answered perfectly to their preconceptions of the 
 American character and to their long-standing demand 
 for something " indigenous." They could enjoy him, 
 furthermore, with the same detached curiosity and glee 
 that their ancestors at the Court of James I felt in the 
 presence of Pocahontas another typical American who, 
 as we read, received marked attention from the Queen, 
 and accompanied her to the Twelfth Night revels. We 
 imagine that some gentlemen in Virginia were a little 
 anxious lest it should be thought in England that all 
 their wives were Indians without deeming it at all nec- 
 essary to apologize for Pocahontas ; she was a lovely 
 barbarian, to be sure, but she was truly representative 
 only of the dusky background of their civilization. The 
 Brahmins, correctly enough, looked upon Mark Twain, 
 and will continue to look upon him, as a robust frontiers- 
 man, produced in the remote Jacksonian era, carrying 
 into the courts of kings the broad laughter of the plains, 
 and representing an America that, for them, is already 
 historical and almost fabulous. But they should no 
 more condescend to this Herculean humorist than to any
 
 30 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 other epic hero ; they should accept him heartily as they 
 accept Robin Hood and Charlemagne, the wily Odysseus 
 and Dick Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London. 
 In the America that lies outside the chilly state of 
 mind called New England, Mark Twain has rather won 
 than lost friends by the savory earthiness, the naive 
 impudence, the lucky undisciplined strength of the folk 
 hero. By his fearless revelation of the reaction of a 
 frontiersman in contact with the riper aspects of civi- 
 lization, he has appealed profoundly to the elements of 
 the pioneer that have lurked in the hearts of most of 
 his countrymen from the days of Captain John Smith to 
 the days of Colonel Roosevelt. " Whenever I enjoy 
 anything in art," he wrote to a friend, " it means that 
 it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact 
 has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in 
 front of many a chromo." To ears outside of New 
 England the sound of that is endearingly American. In 
 his famous but somewhat heavy-handed attack upon a 
 French critic's accounts of " these States," he declared 
 that there is nothing " characteristically American " 
 except drinking ice water. But on the occasion of a 
 railway accident he remarked, " It is characteristically 
 American always trying to get along short-handed and 
 save wages." If the eulogists of his humor held them- 
 selves to a strict inquisition, they would find themselves 
 praising sometimes his legitimate triumphs and some- 
 times with an admiration for success that is character- 
 istically American his infractions of the laws of taste. 
 His humor not infrequently depends upon a disregard 
 of proprieties, and occasionally it consists of little but
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 31 
 
 a disregard of properties. An illustration may be found 
 in the one-hundred-and-twenty-third chapter of the 
 biography. The humor on this occasion consisted in 
 reminding General Grant and his veterans of the Army 
 of the Tennessee and the six hundred guests at a great 
 and solemn banquet that once upon a time their grim 
 commander-in-chief was wholly occupied in trying to 
 get his great toe into his mouth " and if the child is 
 but the father of the man, there are mighty few who will 
 doubt that he succeeded." The house, we are informed, 
 came down with a crash, and General Sherman ex- 
 claimed, " I don't know how you do it ! " That was 
 humor befitting the Welsh giants of the Mabinogion or 
 rather the bronzed revelers in Carson City. Only a very 
 eminent American, speaking not in Boston but in Chi- 
 cago could in the characteristic American phrase 
 have " gotten away with it." It was a crime against 
 taste, colossal, barbaric or it would have been in any 
 society which stood upon its dignity, recognized sacred 
 superiorities, and exacted deferences. 
 
 Now the black frost which followed Mark Twain's 
 after-dinner speech in Boston, and the thunder of ap- 
 plause which followed his similar after-dinner speech in 
 Chicago indicate clearly enough, first, that he was out of 
 place in Holmes's New England, and, secondly, that he 
 was quite at home in Walt Whitman's leveled America. 
 " I paint myriads of heads," cried Whitman, " but I 
 paint no head without its nimbus of gold-colored light." 
 At a banqueting table where every head is nimbused, 
 what is elsewhere reprehended as indecorum passes for 
 easy democratic familiarity. Among the descendants
 
 32 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 of the high priests of the Puritans Mark Twain discov- 
 ered to his surprise that he was regarded as an unsancti- 
 fied Philistine. On neither of these occasions was his 
 " effrontery " a mere effusion of individual " impu- 
 dence." It was rather an ingenuous assertion of the new 
 democratic camaraderie a rough western interpreta- 
 tion of the " brotherhood of man," which in the good- 
 natured Mississippi Valley encourages the " hobo " in 
 quest of a cup of coffee to ring the front door-bell and 
 accost the lady of the house as " sister," or permits the 
 colored porter to drop into a seat for a chat with the 
 Pullman passenger, or prompts the Reverend " Billy " 
 Sunday, the Henry Ward Beecher of that " section," 
 to clap the Almighty on the back and to box the ears 
 of the Prince of Darkness. In Boston Mark Twain 
 spoke to an audience which freely entertained the ab- 
 stract idea of equality but which was by no means ready 
 to accept all these practical consequences of the fra- 
 ternal ideal. In Chicago he spoke to an audience of 
 veterans who in the Civil War had felt the kin-making 
 physical touches of nature, and had lost some of their 
 reverence for the starchy decencies and linen distinctions 
 of formal society. In more or less conscious rebellion 
 against the idea of the "grand style," which demands 
 the representation of a military hero as mounted on a 
 splendid charger with forefeet pawing the air, he 
 brought down the house by a humorous stroke of the 
 new " realism," which insists upon reminding the public 
 that even a military hero is on a common footing with 
 the average man in the possession and strategic manipu- 
 lation of his great toe. The success of this effort may
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 33 
 
 perhaps not improperly be regarded as an omen of the 
 declining power of the New England tradition in 
 American literature the partial eclipse of Holmes by 
 Mark Twain, of Longfellow by Whitman, of Hawthorne 
 by the Hoosier novelists, of Whittier by Edgar Lee 
 Masters. " Who are you, indeed," exclaims Whitman, 
 " who would talk or sing in America? " The antiphonal 
 voice replies: 
 
 I swear I will have each quality of my race in myself. 
 Talk as you like, he only suits These States whose manners 
 favor the audacity and sublime turbulence of The States. 
 
 Humor, it is agreed, consists in contrasts and incon- 
 gruities, and the essence of Mark Twain's most charac- 
 teristic humor consists in contrasting this typical nim- 
 bused American, compacted of golden mediocrities, 
 against the world consists in showing the incongruity 
 of the rest of the world with this nimbused American. 
 In so far as that is true, it necessarily follows that the 
 heights and depths of humor are beyond the reaches of 
 Mark Twain's soul. His laughter is burly, not fine; 
 broad, not profound ; and, in his earlier works, national, 
 not universal. When he that sitteth in the heavens 
 laughs, as we are assured that he does, he is not con- 
 trasting the year 1776 with the year 1300, nor the 
 President of the United States with Louis XVI, nor the 
 uncrowned sovereigns of Missouri with the serfs of 
 Europe. The comparison is intolerable ; let us mark a 
 lowlier difference. When Puck in the Midsummer 
 Night's Dream, looks upon the bewildered Athenian 
 lovers and exclaims, " Lord what fools these mortals
 
 34 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 be " ; when Titania waking from magical sleep, murmurs 
 with drowsy amusement, " Methought I was enamoured 
 of an ass " the mirth of these subtle creatures is 
 kindled by the contrast between the humanity of Bottom 
 and the Athenians, and the exquisite manners and pas- 
 sions of elfland. If Mark Twain had revised the play, 
 he would have had some Yankee boy in overalls making 
 sport of Puck and Titania; such, at any rate, is the 
 humor of A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court 
 and of Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. It is said 
 that the last book he read was Carlyle's French Revolu- 
 tion. He must have found its picturesque and savage 
 denunciation of ancient shams very much to his taste; 
 but his own work shows little trace of its peculiar heart- 
 searching humor the humor begotten by a reflective 
 comparison of the upstart, red-blooded pageant of 
 time's latest hour with the dim, grim phantasms of 
 history : 
 
 Charlemagne sleeps at Salzburg, with truncheon grounded, 
 only fable expecting that he will waken. Charles the 
 Hammer, Pepin Bow-legged, where now is their eye of 
 menace, their voice of command? Hollo and his shaggy 
 Northmen cover not the Seine with ships, but have sailed 
 off on a longer voyage. The hair of Tow-head (Tete 
 d'etoupes) now needs no combing; Iron-cutter (Taillefer) 
 cannot cut a cobweb; shrill Fredegonda, shrill Brunhilda, 
 have had out their hot life-scold, and lie silent, their hot 
 life- frenzy cooled. . . . They are all gone; sunk down, 
 down with the tumult they made; and the rolling and 
 trampling of ever new generations passes over them; and 
 they hear it not any more forever. 
 
 Carlyle's humor has what we call historical depth;
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 35 
 
 he laughs at his contemporaries with a bygone eternity. 
 When Whitman asks that sardonic question, " Whom 
 have you slaughtered lately, European headsman?" 
 millions of strange shadows tend on him. He, too, is a 
 humorist and a grave one; he laughs prophetically 
 with an eternity to come. Mark Twain, looking neither 
 before nor after, laughs, when he is in his popular vein, 
 with the present hour; and he cannot stand the com- 
 parison. Not by his subtlety nor his depth nor his 
 elevation but by his understanding and his unflinching 
 assertion of the ordinary self of the ordinary American 
 " the divine average " did Mark Twain become, as 
 some critics are now calling him, " our foremost man 
 of letters." 
 
 He was geographically an American; he knew his 
 land and its idioms at first hand Missouri, the Missis- 
 sippi River and its banks, Nevada, California, New 
 England, New York, the great cities. It was insuffi- 
 ciently recognized before his time that to love one's 
 country intelligently one must know its body, as well 
 as its mind. He had the good fortune to be born in the 
 West; so that, of course, he had to go east otherwise 
 he might, instead of becoming an American, have re- 
 mained a mere Bostonian or New Yorker all his life, and 
 never have learned to love Chicago and San Francisco at 
 all. At various times and places, he was pilot, printer, 
 editor, reporter, miner, lecturer, author, and publisher. 
 But during the first half of his life, he went most freely 
 with " powerful uneducated persons, and with the 
 young, and with the mothers of families." The books 
 in which he draws upon his life in the West Tom
 
 36 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 Sawyer, Roughing It, Huckleberry Finn, and Life on 
 the Mississippi are almost entirely delightful. They 
 are brimful of unreflective boyhood and youth, of rude 
 energy and high spirits, of pluck and rough adventure ; 
 they are richly provincial and spontaneous ; they spring 
 luxuriantly out of their fresh native earth. One accepts 
 them and rejoices in them as one accepts a bluff on the 
 Mississippi or as one rejoices in a pine tree on a red 
 spur of the Rockies. 
 
 It is when a frontiersman carries his virtues abroad 
 that the lines of his character become salient. Mark 
 Twain was a self-made man, of " small Latin and less 
 Greek," deficient in historical sympathy and imagina- 
 tion, insensitive to delicate social differences, content 
 and at home in modern workaday realities. I con- 
 fess with great apprehension that I do not much care 
 for his books of foreign travel. Like the story told 
 on Whittier's birthday, they are " smart and satu- 
 rated with humor " ; but for some almost indefinable 
 reason my emotions fail to enter into the spirit of 
 the occasion. An uneasy doubt about the point of view 
 binds my mirth as with a " black frost." I find myself 
 concerned for my fellow-citizen, the author behind the 
 books ; beneath the surface gaiety the whole affair seems 
 to be of appalling seriousness for us both. Ostensibly 
 light-hearted burlesques of the poetical and sentimental 
 volumes of travel, these books are in reality an amaz- 
 ingly faithful record of the way Europe and the Orient 
 strike the " divine average " the typical American 
 the man for whom the world was created in 1776. Wan- 
 dering through exhumed Pompeii, he peoples its solemn
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 37 
 
 ruins with the American proletariat, and fancies that 
 he sees upon the walls of its theatre the placard, " Posi- 
 tively No Free List, Except Members of the Press." 
 He digresses from an account of the ascent of Vesuvius 
 to compare the prices of gloves, linen shirts, and dress 
 suits in Paris and in Italy. At length arrived at the 
 summit of the mountain, he describes its crater as a 
 " circular ditch " ; some of the party light their cigars in 
 the fissures ; he descends, observing that the volcano is a 
 poor affair when compared with Kilauea, in the Sand- 
 wich Islands. He visits the Parthenon in the night; 
 obviously, the memorable feature of the expedition was 
 robbing the vineyards on the way back to the ship. The 
 most famous picture galleries of Europe are hung with 
 " celebrated rubbish " ; the immemorial Mosque of St. 
 Sophia is the " mustiest barn in heathendom " ; the Sea 
 of Galilee is nothing to Lake Tahoe. The Mississippi 
 pilot, homely, naive, arrogantly candid, refuses to sink 
 his identity in the object contemplated that, as Cor- 
 poral Nym would have said, is the humor of it. He is 
 the kind of traveling companion that makes you wonder 
 why you went abroad. He turns the Old World into a 
 laughing-stock by shearing it of its storied humanity 
 simply because there is nothing in him to respond to the 
 glory that was Greece, to the grandeur that was Rome 
 simply because nothing is holier to him than a joke. 
 He does not merely throw the comic light upon counter- 
 feit enthusiasm ; he laughs at art, history, and antiquity 
 from the point of view of one who is ignorant of them 
 and pretty well satisfied with his ignorance. And, unless 
 I am very much mistaken, the " overwhelming major-
 
 ity " of his fellow-citizens those who made the success 
 of Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad have 
 laughed with him, not at him. So, too, unquestionably, 
 in the nearly parallel case of the bludgeoning burlesque, 
 A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court. 
 
 There is always a great multitude of what Matthew 
 Arnold calls Philistines ready to rise up and hail as a 
 deliverer any bold influential spokesman who will rail 
 against the idea of " the saving remnant," and will 
 assure the world that it is an idle affectation, an anaemic 
 refinement, to pretend to admire the sort of things that 
 Matthew Arnold urged us to admire. In Mark Twain's 
 frequent excursions into literary criticism there is a note 
 which escapes being demagogic only by being extrava- 
 gantly and comically sincere. Let us take for example 
 this little burst of revolt against the English classics in 
 Following the Equator: 
 
 Also, to be fair, there is another word of praise due to 
 this ship's library: it contains no copy of the Vicar of 
 Wakefield, that strange menagerie of complacent hypocrites 
 and idiots, of theatrical cheap-John heroes and heroines, 
 who are always showing off, of bad people who are not 
 interesting, and good people who are fatiguing. A singular 
 book. Not a sincere line in it, and not a character that 
 invites respect; a book which is one long waste-pipe dis- 
 charge of goody-goody puerilities and dreary moralities; a 
 book which is full of pathos which revolts and humor which 
 grieves the heart. . . . 
 
 Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. 
 Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good 
 library out of a library that hadn't a book in it. 
 
 When a reader of cultivated taste comes upon a
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 39 
 
 passage like that, he sighs and says, " Mark Twain 
 was not a literary critic " ; but when the " man in the 
 street " comes upon such a passage, he chuckles and 
 says, " Mark Twain was an honest man." As there are 
 always more men in the street than readers of culti- 
 vated taste, Mark Twain is justified by a large popular 
 majority. It thus appears that what endears a public 
 man to us is what he has in common with us not his 
 occasional supereminences. It does not damage Frank- 
 lin to say that he was not so graceful as Lord Chester- 
 field ; nor Lincoln to say that he was not so handsome 
 as Count D'Orsay; nor Mr. Roosevelt to say that one 
 misses in his literary style I know not what that one 
 finds in the style of Walter Pater. Writing from Khar- 
 tum, our Lion hunter tells us that, in consequence of 
 hard service in camp, his pigskin books were " stained 
 with blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes." We have a 
 mystical feeling that this is very appropriate and beau- 
 tiful that an American's books ought to be stained 
 with gun oil and ashes. " Fear grace fear delicatesse," 
 cries the author of " Chants Democratic." It does not 
 damage Mark Twain with his constituency to say that 
 there was not a drop of the aristocrat in his veins. 
 
 His disrespect for aristocratic institutions and dis- 
 tinctions both in life and in literature is piquantly illus- 
 trated by his criticism of the French Revolution, Sir 
 Walter Scott, and the American South in Life on the 
 
 Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of 
 Bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the 
 Revolution broke the chains of the ancien regime and of the
 
 40 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 Church, and made a nation of abject slaves a nation of free- 
 men; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above 
 birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from 
 royalty that, whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods 
 before, they are only men since, and can never be gods 
 again, but only figure-heads, and answerable for their acts 
 like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate 
 the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution 
 did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and 
 permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress. 
 
 Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and 
 by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even 
 turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phan- 
 toms; with decayed and degraded systems of government; 
 with the silliness and emptiness, sham grandeurs, sham 
 gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless 
 long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real 
 and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that 
 ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived a good 
 part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but 
 in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so 
 forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still force- 
 fully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the 
 nineteenth century (my italics) is curiously confused and 
 commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civi- 
 lization, and so you have practical common-sense, progres- 
 sive ideas, and progressive work, mixed up with the duel, 
 the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd 
 past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. 
 But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the South- 
 erner or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier 
 way of phrasing it would be wholly modern, in place of 
 modern and mediaeval mixed, and the South would be fully 
 a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter 
 that made every gentleman in the South a major or a 
 colonel, or a general or a judge, before the war; and it was
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 41 
 
 he, also, that made these gentlemen value the bogus decora- 
 tions. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, 
 and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and 
 pleasure in them. 
 
 As this passage Indicates, Mark Twain was a radical, 
 resolute, and rather uncritical democrat, committed to 
 the principles of the preamble to the Constitution, pre- 
 serving a tang of Tom Paine's contempt for kings, and 
 not without a suggestion of the republican insolence 
 caricatured by Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit. He did 
 not and could not give a " square deal " to the South 
 or to Scott or to Europe or to the Arthurian realm. 
 He refused all recognition to aristocratic virtues which 
 retard the complete establishment of the brotherhood 
 of man. He was not, like some more exquisite men of 
 letters, a democrat in his study and a snob in his draw- 
 ing-room; he was of the people and for the people at 
 all times. His tender regard for the social contract 
 permeated his humor. It will be remembered that 
 Pudd'nhead Wilson earned his nickname and ruined his 
 chances as a lawyer for twenty years by an incompre- 
 hensible remark about a howling dog. " I wish I owned 
 half of that dog," said Wilson. "Why?" somebody 
 asked. " Because I would kill my half." No one 
 understood him the sensitive, symbolic democracy of 
 the expression was too compact for their intelligence, 
 and they fell into a delicious discussion of how one-half 
 could be killed without injury to the other half. That, 
 to be sure, is also one of the problems of democracy; 
 but Wilson's implications were, I believe, both simpler 
 and deeper than that. In not molesting another man's
 
 dog he showed the American reverence for property. 
 The American desire to be moderately well-to-do (Mr. 
 Roosevelt's " neither rich nor poor ") he indicated by 
 desiring to own only half the dog. In saying that he 
 would kill his half he expressed his sacred and inalien- 
 able right to dispose of his own property as he chose, 
 while at the same time he recognized his neighbor's 
 sacred and inalienable right to let his half of the prop- 
 erty howl. Indeed, I am not sure that he did not recog- 
 nize that the dog had a certain property right in 
 howling. 
 
 With almost every qualification for a successful politi- 
 cal career, Mark Twain could never have aspired to the 
 Presidency, for he was not a regular attendant at 
 church, a shortcoming, by the way, which interfered 
 seriously with Mr. Taft's campaign till his former pas- 
 tor testified in the public prints that the candidate had 
 once at a church social taken the part of a fairy. In 
 religion, Twain appeared to be a mugwump, or, more 
 classically speaking, an agnostic over whom had fallen 
 the shadow of Robert Ingersoll of pious memory. The 
 irreligion of that generation is touched with a raw, 
 philistine rationalism, but is thoroughly honest. Like 
 all Americans, the author of Tom Sawyer received his 
 religious culture in the Sunday-school, but stumbled 
 over the book of Genesis and kindred difficulties, and was 
 " emancipated." The loss of faith which, in certain 
 conditions, is a terrible bereavement, was to him a blessed 
 relief ; when the God of the old-fashioned Sunday-school 
 and the camp meeting ceases to terrify, he ordinarily 
 becomes a deadly bore. Having never known the mag-
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 43 
 
 nificent poetry of faith, he never felt the magnificent 
 melancholy of unbelief. His experience was typical, 
 however, and his very unspirituality was social. In his 
 examination of Christian Science, he admitted that every 
 man is entitled to his own favorite brand of insanity, 
 and insisted that he himself was as insane as anybody. 
 That was enough to assure most of us that he was sound 
 on " all essentials." 
 
 " Be good and you will be lonesome " is, I suppose, 
 one of Mark Twain's most widely quoted utterances in 
 the field of morals. At first thought, one may wonder 
 why this apparently Bohemian apothegm should have 
 taken such hold upon the heart of a nation which above 
 all things else adores virtue. But the difficulty disap- 
 pears the instant one reflects that these seven words 
 express by implication precisely the kind and temper of 
 virtue that the nation adores. Like Wilson's observation 
 on the dog, the saying is cryptic and requires explica- 
 tion. Mark Twain tells us in his autobiography that 
 when he was a boy his mother always allowed about 
 thirty per cent, on what he said for " embroidery " and 
 so " struck his average." The saying means, as I take 
 it, first of all, Don't lose your sense of humor as those 
 do who become infatuated with their own particular 
 hobbies in goodness. Calculate to keep about in the 
 middle of the road, but make allowance for all reasonable 
 shades of difference in taste and opinion. Don't be too 
 good or you will find yourself in a barren and uninfluen- 
 tial minority of one. In America, whatever is not social 
 is not virtue. Mark Twain seems to have felt that the 
 New England Puritans were "too good to be true";
 
 44 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 that the American people could never get together on 
 the high levels of New England spirituality. In his 
 interesting series of dialogues, What Is Man?, he re- 
 duces all the motives of human conduct to self-interest ; 
 but, like Benjamin Franklin, who set out from a similar 
 position, he reaches the conclusion that an enlightened 
 self-interest is not at war with the interests of others. 
 " Diligently train your ideals upward," he says, " and 
 still upward toward a summit where you will find your 
 chiefest pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, 
 will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and 
 the community." When he put his shoulder under the 
 debts of his bankrupt publishing house, he took a clear 
 stand on one of the essentials of a national " code." 
 In his chivalric treatment of Joan of Arc and Harriet 
 Shelley he showed the spirit animating another funda- 
 mental American tradition, which, it is to be hoped, our 
 iconoclasts will not be able to destroy. Fond of strong 
 language, careless of peccadilloes, tolerant of human 
 frailities though he was, his feet were "mortised and 
 tenoned " in domestic rectitude and common morality. 
 Mark Twain does not give us much help toward real- 
 izing our best selves ; but he is a rock of refuge when the 
 ordinary self " the divine average " is in danger. As 
 some one has said, " We cannot live always on the cold 
 heights of the sublime the thin air stifles." We can- 
 not flush always with the high ardor of the signers of 
 the Declaration, nor remain at the level of the address 
 at Gettysburg, nor cry continually, " O Beautiful ! My 
 country ! " Yet, in the long dull interspaces between 
 these sacred moments we need some one to remind us
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 45 
 
 that we are a nation. For in the dead vast and middle 
 of the years insidious foes are stirring anaemic refine- 
 ments, cosmopolitan decadencies, Teutonic heresies, 
 imperial lusts, fraud and corruption, the cold sickening 
 of the heart at reiterated expressions of unfaith in the 
 outcome of the democratic experiment. When our coun- 
 trymen migrate because we have no kings or castles, we 
 are thankful to any one who will tell us what we can 
 count on. When they complain that our soil lacks the 
 humanity essential to great literature, we are grateful 
 even for the firing of a national joke heard round the 
 world. And when Mark Twain, robust, big-hearted, 
 gifted with the divine power to use words, makes us all 
 laugh together, builds true romances with prairie fire 
 and Western clay, and shows us that we are at one on 
 all the main points, we feel that he has been appointed 
 by Providence to see to it that the precious ordinary 
 self of the Republic shall suffer no harm. 
 
 Postscript 
 
 Good manuscripts are not often interred with the 
 bones of great writers, nor published after their death ; 
 but Mark Twain, as his biographer explained to us, 
 lived under a somewhat stringent domestic censorship, 
 that of Mrs. Clemens, which renders his case exceptional. 
 The Mysterious Stranger, first published in 1916, one 
 surmises was suppressed and pigeonholed not because 
 it was below the author's literary standard, but because 
 it was regarded by some censor or other as indiscreet. 
 Literary discretion consists in continuing to write in
 
 46 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 one's popular vein consists in expressing the common- 
 sense of one's constituency. When Mark Twain wrote 
 in his popular vein he expressed a fairly cheerful and 
 quite unabashed familiarity with the " buzzing, bloom- 
 ing confusion " the habitual temper of his country- 
 men. But The Mysterious Stranger he apparently 
 wrote to please himself; he expressed in it his personal 
 and intimate sense of an unsatisfactory world ; he gave 
 vent to feelings too irregular, too bitter, and too subtle 
 to please all the lovers of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. 
 He revealed, in short, the undercurrent of his humor. 
 Upon one who is acquainted with his other works the 
 effect of this revelation is to deepen the note of his 
 gaiety throughout, making it appear the reflex of unex- 
 pectedly somber considerations. Like the revelations 
 with regard to Charles Lamb's domestic affairs, like 
 certain cynical and pessimistic passages in the letters 
 of another characteristically American humorist, John 
 Hay, it lets one in to a temperament and character of 
 more gravity, complexity, and interest than the surfaces 
 indicated. 
 
 The artfulness of the book, in which illustrator and 
 publisher have had a part, sends one for comparison 
 to the Travels of Lemuel Gulliver. The point is, as I 
 have proved by experiment, that a boy of nine can read 
 this brightly pictured magical romance of the sixteenth 
 century with delight and without undesirable stimula- 
 tion. He will take pleasure with the three lads of Esel- 
 dorf (he probably will not Anglicize the name of this 
 Austrian village) in the ingenious marvels wrought by 
 the mysterious stranger. He will be gently touched in
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 47 
 
 his compassionate instincts by the witch-hunting scenes 
 and by the strange pathos of sudden death supernatur- 
 ally foreseen. But he will not raise embarrassing re- 
 ligious or metaphysical questions, for the air of enchant- 
 ment and romance intervenes between this fiction and 
 the world of his serious concern. He will ingenuously 
 accept Eseldorf as an unusually animated province of 
 wonderland. He will be quite unconscious that he has 
 read a book written at his elders, a book steeped in 
 irony, a dangerous " atheistical " book, presenting a 
 wholly unorthodox view of the devil and a biting 
 arraignment of the folly and brutality of mankind. 
 
 Mark Twain was one of many men of his generation 
 who early received an untenable conception of God, 
 tried the conception by human standards, and dismissed 
 it as untenable. There are two priests and an astrologer 
 in Eseldorf; but there is no God. His functions are 
 pretty completely taken over by the mysterious stranger 
 who candidly announces himself as Satan, nephew to the 
 well-known gentleman of that name. He is a well-fa- 
 vored and winsome youth with a " winy " invigorating 
 atmosphere. Essentially he is the incarnation of vital 
 force, the creative power in the universe. Knowing 
 all things, having power over all things, he despises 
 man and is mildly amused by him, looks down upon him 
 as an elephant looks down upon a red spider, sends him 
 to death or torment without malice and without a pang. 
 His conduct shines in comparison with that of man ; for 
 though he is without good-will, he is without ill-will 
 also, and he has intelligence and power. In comparison 
 with the conduct of man, moreover, the conduct of dumb
 
 48 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 animals shines ; for though they lack some useful facul- 
 ties, they are blest in freedom from the " Moral Sense " 
 that terrible human faculty which organizes and legal- 
 izes and perpetuates cruelty and folly. 
 
 It is not " tonic " to look at men through the eyes 
 of the mysterious stranger ; to him " their foolish little 
 life is but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction ; and they have 
 no sense. Only the Moral Sense." He alters a link in 
 the life of one of the lads of Eseldorf, to whom he has 
 taken a fancy, so that he shall drown; this alteration, 
 he explains to the boy's playmates, is a real kindness, 
 for " he had a billion possible careers, but not one of 
 them was worth living." He shows to the boys a vision 
 of human history; they see Caesar invade Britain 
 " not that those barbarians had done him any harm, but 
 because he wanted their land, and desired to confer the 
 blessings of civilization upon their widows and orphans." 
 " You see," says Satan, " that you have made continual 
 progress. Cain did his murder with a club ; the Hebrews 
 did their murders with javelins and swords; the Greeks 
 and Romans added protective armor and the fine arts 
 of military organization and generalship ; the Christian 
 has added guns and gunpowder; a few centuries from 
 now he will so greatly have improved the deadly effec- 
 tiveness of his weapons of slaughter that all men will 
 confess that without Christian civilization war must 
 have remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of 
 time." 
 
 Relief from this irony and cynicism is, of course, not 
 afforded by the presence of Satan or Nature in the 
 romance. The relieving contrast to the folly and
 
 THE DEMOCRACY OF MARK TWAIN 49 
 
 cruelty depicted is in the felt presence of the chivalrous 
 heart and mind of Mark Twain himself, in his definite 
 conception of certain evils to be removed, in his hopeful- 
 ness about the possibility of removing them. The wicked 
 world visited by the mysterious stranger is, after all, 
 sixteenth-century Austria not these States. What 
 Mark Twain hated was the brutal power resident in 
 monarchies, aristocracies, tribal religions, and minori- 
 ties bent on mischief, and making a bludgeon of the 
 malleable many. His passion of hatred for oppression 
 and unreason was never more cuttingly phrased than in 
 this posthumous volume. The intensity of his vision 
 of evil has subdued and darkened his laughter has 
 given it a note almost like despair ; it is the laughter of 
 an often-outraged believer in liberty, democracy, and 
 loving-kindness.
 
 II 
 
 THE UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF H. G. WELLS 
 (BEFOKE THE WAR) 
 
 IT is a singularly incurious person who has never 
 looked into the books of H. G. Wells; for through his 
 innumerable pages swarm the figures, flash the colors, 
 hum the voices of strictly contemporary life. Though 
 he is on the brink of fifty, he remains the copious and 
 incessant spokesman for the Younger Generation which 
 he has stung into consciousness of itself. He helps us 
 also to understand the stupidity of our fathers and the 
 absurdity of our mothers. When Ann Veronica, in the 
 novel bearing her name, announces her intention of at- 
 tending an unchaperoned dance in London and spend- 
 ing the remnant of the night in a hotel, her aunt packs 
 an entire " system of ideas " into the little apprehensive 
 phrase, " But, my dear ! " If you feel that the exclama- 
 tion is delightfully ridiculous, you may consider yourself 
 of the Younger Generation. If you elevate pained eye- 
 brows with the aunt, you must set yourself down as 
 Victorian. 
 
 When the Queen's great reign closed with her death 
 in 1901, Mr. Wells did not go so far as to insist that 
 the bones of her statesmen should be hung in chains and 
 the ashes of her men of letters scattered to the winds. 
 
 50
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 51 
 
 But he recognized, as did the court poets at the Restora- 
 tion, that the readiest way to brighten a new epoch is to 
 blacken its predecessor ; violating the Victorians was an 
 expedient justified, to adapt a military expression, by 
 literary necessity. Accordingly he has put into circu- 
 lation the popular epithets for the politics, religion, art, 
 and morals which prevailed in the " dingy, furtive, cant- 
 ing, humbugging, English world " of our fathers, with 
 its " muddled system," its " emasculated orthodoxy," 
 its " shabby subservience," its " unreasonable prohibi- 
 tions," its " meek surrender of mind and body to the 
 dictation of pedants and old women and fools." At the 
 same time he has been giving currency to the catchwords 
 of the new era : " scientific method," " research," " effi- 
 ciency," " cooperation," " publicity," " constructive 
 statesmanship," " socialism," " eugenics," " feminism," 
 " aviation." When we open his works of fiction, we find 
 the Victorian muddler, the prig, the standpatter, and 
 the prude making way for the clear-eyed theorist with 
 the "white passion of statecraft," the titled lady with 
 a penchant for breaking plate glass, the iconoclastic 
 journalist in greenish-gray tweeds and art-brown tie, 
 the independent young schoolgirl who dares to say 
 " damn." And we are feelingly persuaded that we are 
 moving, or that the world has rolled on and left us 
 behind. 
 
 A writer so full of tendency as Mr. Wells, constantly 
 setting father against son and son against father, is 
 obviously something more or less than a novelist, quite 
 irrespective of his sociological treatises. In the state 
 of literary manners existing under George V, it is a bit
 
 52 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 difficult, however, to determine whether a man of letters 
 who comes forward with a new order of ideas is a hum- 
 bug or a philosopher. While I was pondering this 
 delicate essential question in the case of Mr. Wells, 
 there came into my hands a study l of the man and his 
 works by a critic of the younger generation, Mr. Van 
 Wyck Brooks, which helped me out of an embarrassing 
 situation. " Grotesque and violent as it may at first 
 appear," says Mr. Brooks, " I believe that in the future 
 Wells will be thought of as having played toward his 
 own epoch a part very similar to that played by Mat- 
 thew Arnold." 
 
 I was glad to be assured that Mr. Wells's air of pas- 
 sionate earnestness and transparent candor was not 
 merely an aspect of his literary technique. And I 
 seized eagerly upon the suggested parallelism ; for, as I 
 said to myself, if Wells is the Arnold of our time, by 
 instituting a series of comparisons between the two men 
 we may measure the " march of mind " in the post- 
 Victorian period, and demonstrate the superiority of the 
 ideas open to our young people over those set before 
 their elders. But as I glanced down the page, I per- 
 ceived that the likeness of Arnold and Wells was not 
 limited to their general function in bringing home to 
 the English mind " a range of ideas not traditional in 
 it." That likeness extends, it seems, to " their specific 
 attitudes toward most of the branches of thought and 
 action they have concerned themselves with. Wells on 
 Education, on Criticism, on Politics, and the nostrums 
 of Liberalism; Wells, even on Religion, continues the 
 1 The World of H. G. Wells By Van Wyck Brooks. New York.
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 53 
 
 propaganda of Arnold. Everywhere in these so super- 
 ficially dissimilar writings is exhibited the same fine dis- 
 satisfaction, the same faith in ideas and standards, the 
 same dislike of heated bungling, plunging, wilfulness, 
 and confusion ; even the same predominant contempt for 
 most things that are, the same careful vagueness of 
 ideal." 
 
 Though I share the critic's desire to relate Mr. Wells 
 in some way to his predecessors, I was reluctant to 
 acquiesce in the implications of this series of compari- 
 sons. For one point I supposed was entirely certain 
 that Wells repudiated the Victorians ; and here was Mr. 
 Brooks making him out the spiritual son and heir of 
 one of their leading representatives. With a little effort, 
 I believed, a spiritual ancestor with a more appealing 
 likeness to his descendant could have been discovered 
 outside the age of compromise and muddle. Arnold, as 
 I thought, was disqualified for the relationship by char- 
 acteristics which he shared with most of the reforming 
 novelists of his sluggish period. I refer to their habit 
 of dealing, " confusedly," no doubt, with realities, and 
 to the modesty of their enterprises. Dickens, Kingsley, 
 Reade, Mrs. Stowe, and the rest they did not seek to 
 make the world over, but only to accomplish a few simple 
 things like abolishing slavery, sweat-shops, Corn Laws, 
 the schools of Squeers, imprisonment for debt, the red 
 tape of legal procedure, the belief in pestilence and 
 typhoid as visitations of God and all that sort of pid- 
 dling amelioration. 
 
 What Wells required in the way of an ancestor was a 
 man with a large free gesture, like Godwin or Rousseau,
 
 54 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 sweeping away the Daedalian labyrinth of existing 
 society, and with a few bold strokes chalking out a new 
 social order. Shelley might serve ; he was like Wells in 
 striving " to bring home to the English mind a range of 
 ideas not traditional in it " ; and he showed other points 
 of similarity. In both Shelley and Wells we find the 
 same fierce railing at conventional and customary 
 things, the same eager projecting and reforming temper, 
 the same childlike faith in the possibility of refashioning 
 human nature, the same absorbed interest in sex, and 
 the same abandonment of an eagerly pursued science 
 for the sake of writing romances. 
 
 Though in these general respects Shelley was like 
 Wells, Shelley was not in the least like Arnold, who, as 
 will be remembered, dismissed him as a beautiful but 
 ineffectual angel. I was thus driven to conclude that 
 the really decisive likeness which Mr. Brooks saw be- 
 tween Wells and Arnold was not in their general func- 
 tion and temper, but in " their specific attitudes toward 
 most of the branches of thought and action they have 
 concerned themselves with." Yet having by this time 
 conceived a partiality for my own literary parallel, I 
 subconsciously ran it out alongside that of Mr. Brooks, 
 while I was examining his contention that the prophet 
 of the Younger Generation has continued the propa- 
 ganda of the " elegant Jeremiah " of the Victorians. 
 
 Wells, we are told, continues the propaganda of 
 Arnold with regard to education. The error involved 
 here could have been made only in an age more con- 
 cerned about its educational machinery than about its 
 educational product. It is perfectly true that both
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 55 
 
 Wells and Arnold wish the state to organize and stand- 
 ardize instruction. The vital question, however, is 
 whether they agree upon what the state schools are to 
 teach, and upon what is the " objective " of teaching. 
 
 It will hardly be disputed that if educators have any- 
 thing in common it is the desire of each to reproduce 
 his own educational species. Wells was trained at the 
 Royal College of Science in physics, chemistry, astron- 
 omy, geology, and botany; Arnold was trained at the 
 University of Oxford in the traditional classical disci- 
 plines. Wells belongs indubitably to the scientific 
 species of educator, distinguished by its devotion to 
 original research and by its steadfast belief that the 
 crown of human endeavor is an extension of the bound- 
 aries of knowledge. Arnold belongs indubitably to the 
 humanistic species of educator, distinguished by the 
 importance it attaches to the assimilation of classical 
 experience in the attainment of its highest end, the per- 
 fection of the individual character. 
 
 When Wells outlines a model course for the schools 
 of the future, he discards Greek and Latin, and pre- 
 scribes as the " backbone " of a sound curriculum as 
 much mathematics as possible, English, and the natural 
 sciences. When Arnold, after thirty years' experience 
 as inspector of schools, delivers in America the essence 
 of his educational ideas, he tells us that for most men a 
 little mathematics suffices ; that Greek will be " increas- 
 ingly studied as men increasingly feel the need in them 
 for beauty and how powerfully Greek art and literature 
 can serve this need " ; and that if there is to be a separa- 
 tion and option between humane letters and natural
 
 56 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 sciences, the majority of men would do well " to choose 
 to be educated in humane letters rather than in the 
 natural sciences." For, argues Arnold, humane letters 
 help a man's soul to get soberness, righteousness, and 
 wisdom ; while in the sphere of conduct, which is three- 
 fourths of life, the natural sciences are comparatively 
 impotent, leaving the moral nature undisciplined and 
 inclined to caprice and eccentricity. Arnold maliciously 
 cites the case of Faraday, that eminent man of science, 
 who was a Sandemanian ; one thinks also of Shelley, who 
 emerged from his passionate study of chemistry at 
 Oxford, declaring that the happiness of the human race 
 depends upon the adoption of a vegetable diet ; and one 
 remembers the many heroes and heroines of Wells who 
 have been bred on the natural sciences, and how they 
 apply their zoological observations to the conduct of 
 life. If, finally, we recall together the fact that Wells 
 is a pupil and disciple of Huxley, and the fact that 
 Arnold's Science and Literature is rather explicitly an 
 attack upon the new educational programs inspired by 
 Huxley, it should be clear that Wells came into the 
 world to condemn the educational ideas of Arnold. 
 
 It is true that both Wells and Arnold insist upon the 
 importance of fearless criticism the free play of ideas 
 upon all the subjects which concern us. But here again, 
 before we agree that one continued the work of the 
 other, it is essential to know the standpoint adopted, 
 the method pursued, and the object contemplated by 
 each. 
 
 At the risk of verbal absurdity one is obliged to say 
 that Wells as critic takes his stand with the future
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 57 
 
 behind him ; that he retreats into the future for light on 
 the problems of the present; and that the object of his 
 criticism is to enable us to see things as in themselves 
 they really are not. And, to continue the Hibernian 
 contrast, Arnold takes his stand with the past behind 
 him ; he turns to history for light on the questions of the 
 day; and his object, as he never tires in repeating, is to 
 enable us to see things as in themselves they really are. 
 
 This wide difference in critical object, method, and 
 standpoint arises from the fundamental opposition be- 
 tween, let us say, the pseudo-scientific and the human- 
 istic outlook upon life. Wells, whose philosophy took 
 shape in the biological laboratory as under the micro- 
 scope the bounds which seemed to hold individuals in 
 fixed species disappeared and everything merged in 
 everything else by an infinite scale of infinitesimal differ- 
 ences Wells is profoundly impressed by the uniqueness 
 of every atom in the universe, and hence by the impossi- 
 bility of formulating any law valid for any two atoms. 
 Arnold, whose philosophy took shape as he studied the 
 moral rather than the physical history of man, is pro- 
 foundly impressed by the identity of human passions 
 and human needs in Palestine, Greece, and England; 
 and hence by the possibility of discovering law valid for 
 civilized men everywhere and at all times. 
 
 We have here an explanation of the curious fact that 
 the critic of scientific training abandons the " scientific 
 method " and proceeds from the unknown to the known, 
 while the critic trained in humane letters adopts the 
 " scientific method " and proceeds from the known to 
 the unknown. I mean that Wells, in his skepticism of
 
 58 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 the categories established by the intellect, throws reason 
 overboard, and commits the steerage of his course to 
 a self-willed, egoistic, anarchical imagination. " I make 
 my beliefs," he says, " as I want them. I do not attempt 
 to go to fact for them. I make them thus and not thus 
 exactly as an artist makes a picture so and not so." 
 For Arnold, who retains his faith in the intellect, truth 
 is not something to be created, but something to be 
 ascertained. Between the two critics yawns this gulf: 
 Wells seeks to make whim and the will of Wells prevail, 
 while Arnold seeks to make " right reason and the will 
 of God " prevail. 
 
 This distinction holds between the political fantasies 
 of Wells as set forth in his various Utopian essays, and 
 the political and social criticisms of Arnold as set forth 
 in his essays on Democracy, Equality, British Liberal- 
 ism, and Culture and Anarchy. In the one case, a 
 lyrical voice cries, like the Persian poet, " Come, let us 
 drink wine, and crown our heads with roses, and break 
 up the tedious roof of heaven into new forms." In the 
 other case, a sober, persistent Englishman says, " Let 
 us try to look at this nineteenth century of ours steadily 
 and determine what can be done; let us straighten a 
 little here, and level a little there, and elevate a little 
 everywhere." 
 
 A specious likeness is perhaps observable in the fact 
 that both Wells and Arnold advocate extending the 
 powers of the state. The likeness itself becomes a 
 difference the moment one reflects that Arnold recom- 
 mended an increase of governmental action in a time 
 of laissez-faire Liberalism and radical Individualism,
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 59 
 
 and that Wells advocates an increase of governmental 
 action in a time when an English statesman is telling 
 us that " we are all Socialists nowadays." It is not 
 the function of a political critic, as Arnold reminds us, 
 to carry coals to Newcastle. 
 
 The difference widens as soon as one considers the 
 uses to which Wells and Arnold propose to put the 
 enlarged powers of the state. Wells, having the cour- 
 age of his sanguine imagination, desires to make the 
 state a magnificent reservoir of science and energy and 
 capital, " which will descend like water that the sun has 
 sucked out of the sea," which will do away with the 
 necessity of poverty and labor and pain, and which will 
 abolish " the last base reason for any one's servitude or 
 inferiority." Arnold, who prefers to retain some con- 
 tact with the realities of life, phlegmatically lays down 
 a very simple principle defining the limits of state 
 action : " To use the state is simply to use cooperation 
 of a superior kind. All you have to ask yourselves is 
 whether the object for which it is proposed to use this 
 cooperation is a rational and useful one, and one likely 
 to be best reached in this manner. Professor Fawcett 
 says that Socialism's first lesson is that the working- 
 man can acquire capital without saving, through hav- 
 ing capital supplied to him by the state, which is to serve 
 as a fountain of wealth perennially flowing without 
 human effort. Well, to desire to use the state for that 
 object is irrational, vain, and mischievous. Why? Be- 
 cause the object is irrational and impossible." 
 
 What more need be said of the New Republic and 
 other ships of state which Wells, like Shelley launching
 
 60 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 his paper boats on the pond in Kensington Gardens, 
 lets drift down the stream of time? What more need 
 be said but that Wells himself, like Shelley in his later 
 years, has begun to despair of transforming the world 
 by state intervention, and is transferring his faith to 
 the redemptive power of the " beautiful moral ideal- 
 isms " embodied in his own novels ! 
 
 Nowhere, however, does the irreconcilable opposition 
 of Wells and Arnold appear more distinctly than in 
 their respective attitudes toward morality, and in par- 
 ticular toward " sexual morality." In the latter field, 
 the Bosnia of the moral world, Wells has been an 
 incessant dropper of bombs. Arnold, in general, main- 
 tained the despised Victorian " reticence." One recalls, 
 nevertheless, significant passages in his letters express- 
 ing apprehensions for the future of France on the score 
 of the " social evil." And one recalls his equally signifi- 
 cant declaration that Dowden's Shelley makes one feel 
 " sickened for ever of the subject of irregular relations." 
 
 To this humanistic moralist of the Victorians moral- 
 ity seems a settled and simple matter. He holds that 
 in the course of some thousands of years of civilized 
 society the elementary principles of conduct have been 
 adequately tested, and are now to be unequivocally ac- 
 cepted. They constitute a standard of " right reason " 
 outside ourselves, to which we should vigorously sub- 
 ject our treacherous individual sensibilities. By adopt- 
 ing these principles the individual acquires a character, 
 becomes a member of civil society, and performs the first 
 duty of man, which is to perpetuate in and through 
 himself the moral life of the race.
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 61 
 
 The zoological moralist of the Younger Generation 
 holds that morality is a new, complex, experimental 
 science with its work all before it and only a vague 
 generalization fresh from Mr. Wells' laboratory to guide 
 it. In order to get society upon a sound moral basis, 
 says Mr. Wells, it is essential " to reject and set aside 
 all abstract, refined, and intellectualized ideas as start- 
 ing propositions, such ideas as right, liberty, happi- 
 ness, duty, or beauty, and to hold fast to the funda- 
 mental assertion of life as a tissue and succession of 
 births" How Sairey Gamp would have enjoyed that 
 " tissue and succession of births " ! Upon this strik- 
 ing obstetrical truth Mr. Wells proposes to hang Moses 
 and all the prophets. Then he will erect upon it the 
 new morality. 
 
 Since life is fundamentally a tissue and succession of 
 births, it appears to follow that the first duty of man 
 is to perpetuate not the moral but the physical life of 
 the race. Since " we don't know what to breed for," 
 orthodox eugenics is all astray. Since scientific man- 
 breeding, or zoological ethics, is still in its infancy, it 
 behooves us to encourage all sorts of experimentation 
 in procreation, cohabitation, the rehabilitation of nat- 
 ural children, the state subsidization of mothers, and 
 perhaps also of lovers. In the new society, instead of 
 the Victorian convention which precluded the married 
 man from investigation in this field, we shall have free- 
 dom for various sex-associations, and, consequently, for 
 enriching emotional discoveries in what are now the dull 
 years of domestic fidelity and emotional hebetude. Mr. 
 Wells is rather fond of turning the tables upon the
 
 62 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 naughty dramatists of the Restoration, who, as every 
 one knows, exalted the bachelor at the expense of the 
 married man. In Ann Veronica, for example, and The 
 New Machiavelli, it is the bachelor who is the cad and 
 the cornuto; it is the married man who knows how to 
 strike the emotional diapason. 
 
 It may be objected that it is idle to promise a future 
 in which a man may love any woman he pleases, since 
 all history teaches that a man has his life-work cut out 
 for him if he pleases any woman he loves. Mr. Wells 
 does not care what history teaches. It may be pointed 
 out that experimentation in irregular relations is not a 
 novelty; that it is now, and always has been, widely 
 practiced ; and that the experience of mankind has gen- 
 erally proved it disastrous. Mr. Wells does not care 
 what the experience of mankind has proved. If you 
 assure him that it is not a question of social " systems," 
 but of human nature, if you insist that irregular rela- 
 tions under any system quite regularly beget that " vehe- 
 ment flame " of jealousy which the wise man of Israel 
 says is " cruel as the grave," you do not abate his en- 
 thusiasm one jot. He is a man of imagination. He 
 makes his beliefs as he wants them. If they clash with 
 immutable things in this world, he creates another 
 world. He has heard of jealousy; but he intends to 
 abolish it. He intends to create a new society in which 
 one can make love to another man's wife without excit- 
 ing the jealousy of her husband. This is the inspirit- 
 ing message of Passionate Friends, which closes with 
 these words : " I will not be content with that compro- 
 mise of jealousies which is the established life of human-
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 63 
 
 ity today. I give myself to the destruction of jealousy 
 and of the forms and shelters and instruments of 
 jealousy, both in my own self and in the thought and 
 laws and usage of the world." 
 
 Precisely Shelley's idea when he magnanimously in- 
 vited his wife to join him and Mary Godwin in Switzer- 
 land. And she, poor wretch, dumbly criticized his idea 
 from the bottom of the Serpentine. 
 
 The defect in Wells's religion which distinguishes it 
 from the religion of Arnold is exactly the defect in his 
 morality, namely, the lack of any principle of control. 
 Here again, he cries, we are in a field for free experi- 
 mentation ; nothing has been determined ; " religion and 
 philosophy have been impudent and quacldsh quack- 
 ish ! " And so, while for Arnold religion is something 
 which binds and limits, religion for Wells is something 
 which looses and liberates. Arnold rejects dogmatic 
 theology, but he writes three books to justify the 
 Hebraic faith in an Eternal, not ourselves, which makes 
 for righteousness, and to extol the " method " and the 
 " sweet reasonableness " of Jesus. Wells rejects dog- 
 matic theology and all our inheritance from the Hebrews 
 except their turn for business organization; his sub- 
 stitute for " morality touched with emotion " is a hot 
 fit of enthusiasm for social progress excited by fixed 
 meditation upon the Utopian projections of his own 
 fancy. 
 
 For Arnold, the men of true religious insight are 
 Jesus, Marcus Aurelius, St. Francis, the author of the 
 Imitations, Spinoza, who all consent together that " the 
 Kingdom of God is within you." Wells designates this
 
 64, ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 conception in the case of Marcus Aurelius as " a desire 
 for a perfected inconsequent egoism." There is some- 
 thing to be said for a religion which produces a per- 
 fected egoism like that of Aurelius. But Wells, in the 
 temper of Shelley and other social revolutionists, insists 
 that " salvation's a collective thing," to be accomplished 
 somewhere in the social environment, beyond the borders 
 of the individual soul. The logical product of the senti- 
 mental altruism of Wells may be seen in the hero of 
 almost any of his later novels in the hero, for example, 
 of Tono-Bungay, whom his creator quite accurately 
 characterizes as a " spiritual guttersnipe in love with 
 unimaginable goddesses." 
 
 With all its fervor for perfecting mankind in the 
 mass, the religion of Wells somehow fails to meet the 
 needs of the individual man. It helps every one but its 
 possessor. He has struggled with this problem, but he 
 has not brought to his task the resources of the religious 
 sages; he has approached it with only the resources of 
 the scientific perfectibilians. He has felt, as we all have 
 felt, the dumb and nameless pain which throbs at the 
 heart of our being as we march or mince or creep or 
 crowd through the welter of cross-purposes, wars, pov- 
 erty, dreadful accidents, disease, and death, which we 
 call our life. If you ask him how to assuage that pain, 
 he answers that we must apply scientific methods to 
 make mankind pacific, intelligent, well, and wealthy. If 
 you ask him why his hero, Trafford in Marriage, who is 
 already wealthy, well, intelligent, and pacific, still feels 
 the throbbing pain, he replies, " That is because Traf- 
 ford has a developed social consciousness, and cannot
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 65 
 
 enter into felicity until there is a like felicity for all 
 men to enter." 
 
 Now, did Mr. Wells possess not the insight of the 
 religious sages, but just the sober human experience of 
 a pagan like Horace, he would know that though all 
 men entered his earthly paradise of lacquered ceilings, 
 white-tiled bathrooms, Turkey rugs, scientific kitchens, 
 motor-boats, limousines, and Victrolas, still in their poor 
 worm-infested breasts would dwell " black care," still 
 would they remain spiritual guttersnipes in their scien- 
 tific Elysium. And if Mr. Wells consulted Arnold or 
 the spiritual physicians who have effectually prescribed 
 for the essential malady of living, he would be told that 
 inner serenity springs from self-collection, self-control, 
 and, above all, from the Hebraic sense of personal 
 righteousness, which is the beginning of religious 
 wisdom. 
 
 Here and there through the works of Wells there is a 
 glint of skepticism, a flash of self-mockery, which makes 
 one wonder to what extent he himself feels the confidence 
 of the young people who look to him as their saviour. 
 But I have deliberately renounced inquiry into the 
 essential sincerity of his radicalism. I have presented 
 him in the role that captivates his admirers, not as an 
 empty resonator for a bewildered and discontented 
 multitude, but as a glowing, eloquent, sanguine leader 
 of the generation which is pressing for a place in the 
 sun. I have exhibited him rising in adorable, unworldly 
 innocence to arraign a social system under which two 
 and two make only four, and water refuses to run up 
 hill, and a child cannot eat his cake and keep it, and fire
 
 66 
 
 will not refrain from burning, nor the lion and the lamb 
 lie quietly together, nor sober people take seriously his 
 fairy tales of science, sex, and sociology. If my analysis 
 is correct, I have detached him from Arnold, and estab- 
 lished his connection with Shelley. This service should 
 be grateful to him and to his followers ; for I have denied 
 him the rank of a Victorian critic only that I might 
 elevate him to the rank of a Georgian angel. 
 
 (SINCE THE WAB) 
 
 What transformation has the war wrought in the 
 protean shape of Mr. Wells? 
 
 If there is anything fixed in his convictions it is his 
 belief that at about the period of his literary advent the 
 world began to spin down the ringing grooves of change 
 into an orderly and luminous future. As the advance 
 agent of progress and the bosom friend of posterity he 
 was more or less under obligation to interpret the Euro- 
 pean upheaval as a stage in a happy evolutionary proc- 
 ess. Accustomed to thinking on a large scale, he at once 
 spread out before him the map of the world and indulged 
 himself in his favorite recreation of prophesying. In 
 his volume of prognostications, What Is Coming? 
 (1916) he attempted a serious and realistic forecast 
 based upon an analysis of existing forces and tendencies. 
 The war had somewhat shocked and embittered him, but 
 on the whole its first effect was to strengthen his cheer- 
 ful self-confidence. It promised, he (thought, to further 
 in its own way the political and social changes which he 
 had always regarded as necessary preliminaries to the
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 67 
 
 millennium. The responsibility for the debacle and 
 thus for the forward lunge of civilization he placed to 
 the credit of the militaristic misrulers and the " culti- 
 vated rancid nationalism " of Germany. He saw the 
 possibility of a permanent settlement of Europe in the 
 overthrow of the Hohenzollern Empire. Since in the 
 present style of warfare a decisive and shattering vic- 
 tory was not to be expected, he declared that the reduc- 
 tion of the Central Powers must be continued, after arms 
 were laid down, by an economic alliance. This program 
 would necessitate the retention and the extension of the 
 present strong governmental control of industries, com- 
 merce, and transportation. The Central Powers would 
 be obliged to adopt similar measures, and a third great 
 alliance of the Americas was fairly predictable. Among 
 these three great groups of nations tremendous conflicts 
 would ensue. Yet in these grand divisions questions of 
 race, nationality, and sovereignty would inevitably lose 
 their exacerbating acuteness. The way would be gradu- 
 ally cleared for the federation and socialization of the 
 nations and the scientific world-state, which has always 
 floated like a beautiful mirage on the far horizon of Mr. 
 Wells's soul. The hopes of humanity thus depended, as 
 Mr. Wells felt in the earlier stages of the war, upon 
 vast political and social alterations, dictated by military 
 necessity, imposed by military force, and equivalent in 
 their total effect to what a neutral observer might have 
 called the " Germanization " of the world. 
 
 Desperate Liberals on every hand have said : " We 
 must fight fire with fire. We abhor the spirit of modern 
 Germany; but in order to defeat Germany we must
 
 68 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 temporarily imitate Germany." Mr. Wells, however, 
 desired the defeat of the Germans and at the same time 
 the permanent and universal triumph of German organ- 
 ization. It had been his constant day-dream to get 
 Humanity into the Promised Land en masse, and not 
 ten thousand years hence, but swiftly, soon, in the next 
 fifty years, in the next decade, soon enough to permit 
 his writing a novel entitled " Beyond Jordan." Human- 
 ity apathetically dillydallied in the wilderness. Human- 
 ity refused to march sweetly and smoothly and moved 
 as by one common thought and that Mr. Wells's. The 
 war revealed to him the methods of " reformers " who 
 get results. Snatching at military necessity as an 
 obviously effective goad to indolent and divers-minded 
 men, he grasped at last the missing essential in a scien- 
 tific socialist Utopia a coercive force. 
 
 He and other honest men maintain that military coer- 
 cion is a temporary expedient and that Germany is a 
 needlessly imperfect model. He reassuringly declares 
 that the Kaiser and the Prussian oligarchy and the 
 German army are curious archaisms, unnecessary and 
 removable excrescences upon the " modern scientific 
 State." But this, I think, is one of the great contem- 
 porary illusions. Army, oligarchy, and Kaiser, or their 
 equivalents, are the causes and conditions of such a 
 state are the indispensable clubs of cooperation and 
 efficiency and impassioned concerted mass action. It is 
 idle to point to the accomplishment of " democratic " 
 England so long as England is at war, for England has 
 to all intents and purposes temporarily abandoned de- 
 mocracy. Government in war-time is, if effective, gov-
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 69 
 
 ernment while the people hold their breath, government 
 under artificial conditions maintained by a quite abnor- 
 mal and, in the long run, unendurable surrender of indi- 
 vidual liberty, will, property, and life. When the ob- 
 jects of existence are simplified by the extraordinary 
 stress of a great war to the production of munitions, 
 provisions, and transportation, the obvious demand is 
 for expert governmental control; the cry goes up for a 
 " dictator." The moment peace is made and the nor- 
 mal diversity and multiplicity of individual human inter- 
 ests are again free to assert themselves, democrats will 
 recall to secure what rights governments are instituted 
 among men. John Smith will inquire again in his old 
 skeptical democratic fashion where is the government 
 official who is more expert than John Smith in managing 
 his own life and liberty and in directing his own pursuit 
 of happiness. The temporary unity and solidarity of 
 the volonte generale will disappear. The will of the 
 governors will lose its identity with the will of the gov- 
 erned. Only an iron fist will be able to buffet them 
 out of the " rotten " individualism which distinguishes a 
 true democracy from a military autocracy. 
 
 " We are beginning to agree," says Mr. Wells, " that 
 reasonably any man may be asked to die for his country ; 
 what we have to recognize is that any man's proprietor- 
 ship, interests, claims, or rights may just as properly 
 be called upon to die." Our prophet counts heavily 
 upon the immense burden of the war debt and the 
 trained sacrificial spirit of the soldiers returning to civil 
 life to strengthen and continue in the years of peace this 
 readiness to surrender all to the State. Under dire
 
 70 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 necessity the mood may persist in some degree through 
 the period of reconstruction ; and we shall hear eloquent 
 and heroic-sounding voices urging us to despise the 
 individual and to glorify the national life. Yet we may 
 certainly reckon on a powerful reaction after the war 
 against the abstract idealism and the concrete brutality 
 of " politically-minded men." Times like these in which 
 we are living may hear with little show of horror the 
 Napoleonic question, " What are a million lives to a 
 man like me ? " or to modernize the query " What 
 are the lives of all your sons in comparison with the per- 
 petuity of the State ? " But human nature will return 
 to its deep-seated belief in certain inalienable individual 
 human rights ; and millions of young men in Europe 
 who are doomed to go maimed and stumping through 
 their prime will soon be looking a little wistfully about 
 to discover whether there is any land left in the world 
 where a man may live and let live. In the moment that 
 the all-sanctifying military necessity relaxes, some at 
 least of the " moral " qualities which, in the stress of 
 war, governments stamp with the highest values will be 
 popularly rated like Confederate " shinplasters " ; and 
 plain people, chafing under orders to march in directions 
 which they have not determined, will be praying again 
 to the shiftless and inefficient gods of the Victorians to 
 preserve them from too much government. 
 
 Mr. Britling Sees It Through owes its success in this 
 country largely to the fact that Mr. Wells reacts in it 
 against his own prophecies of the salvation of the world 
 by military force, economic necessity, and the alteration 
 of the map. The prophetic book was a typical product
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 71 
 
 of his speculative reason, influenced by the current exal- 
 tation of mechanical efficiency, and reiterating in great 
 part his earlier prophecies. The novel was the result 
 of his actual experiences in a war waged by a mechani- 
 cally efficient nation against its more or less inefficient 
 neighbors. In the first shock of the conflict Mr. Britling 
 of course cries out : " Oh why, my fellow-Britons, did 
 you not render yourselves mechanically efficient as 
 Rudyard Kipling, and Mr. H. G. Wells, and other 
 foresighted gentlemen long ago urged you to do." But 
 as the war goes on Mr. Britling enters upon grave 
 reconsiderations. The central interest of the book is 
 in its exhibition of something like spiritual commotion, 
 in the midst of which there appear profound doubts of 
 naturalistic morality and mechanical efficiency, our mod- 
 ern instrument of salvation. 
 
 The masterpiece is of course Mr. Britling, who is 
 transparently Mr. Wells himself, portrayed with un- 
 precedented frankness. Most of his important portrait - 
 painting is done from the same model, but his practiced 
 hand has never before produced so engaging a likeness 
 of himself. I am not speaking of his private life, of 
 which I know nothing, but of his ideas, his sympathies, 
 his character as a man of letters. What one enjoys in 
 Mr. Wells is his curiosity, his vivacity, his hopefulness, 
 his bright eagerness to clasp the wide universe in one 
 heart-satisfying embrace. What one deplores in him is 
 his hodgepodge of sex and politics, his passion for 
 chimeras, his habit of supping on the east wind, his 
 unwillingness to grow up at last and cheerfully adjust 
 himself to the generally recognized fact that there is
 
 72 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Aspiring, 
 visionary, and diffuse, he makes himself adored by radi- 
 cals of one-and-twenty and by middle-aged women with 
 imaginations unappeased by experience. But he dis- 
 appoints those who expect an intellectual leader to find 
 his own center, make up his mind, and come to conclu- 
 sions. TO those who look for fruit in the fall of the 
 year he offers a new crop of blossoms. He has made a 
 god of " becoming." His intellectual fluency and ver- 
 satility have been his undoing, giving him ever the 
 appearance of an unstable, an unformed power, a nebu- 
 lous nucleus of dissolving impulses. Mr. Chesterton 
 once remarked that one can hear Mr. Wells growing 
 overnight. The war has been a long and a formative 
 night, and Mr. Wells has come out of it with one book 
 which can stand the light of common day. The fact is, 
 apparently, that he has at last, to borrow his own 
 figure, " felt in his skin " what he has only been dream- 
 ing about for the last quarter of a century. He has felt 
 in his skin what is wrong with the world. 
 
 The effect of futility in a great many of his novels 
 is directly traceable to his endeavor to persuade us that 
 something which is in fact of very little importance is 
 of very great importance. I refer to the philanderings 
 of his fervent heroes and heroines. In order that some 
 fervent hero or heroine might philander for six months 
 or a year, and philander in tranquillity, he has repeat- 
 edly tried to persuade us that human nature should be 
 altered and the world reconstructed. Now, the world 
 needs reconstitution, and human nature needs altera- 
 tion ; but not for that purpose. It was difficult, indeed,
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 73 
 
 to believe that a man with Mr. Wells's wholesome comic 
 sense could seriously weigh or consider that purpose; 
 or fail to see the absurdity of clamoring for order, 
 measure, and control in the external world while reserv- 
 ing a silly, sentimental, yet tremendously destructive 
 anarchy in the heart. It was almost necessary to believe 
 that in employing the bait used by the lower order of 
 socialists he was inspired less by a desire to reform the 
 world than by a desire to make his trap irresistibly 
 captivating to unappeased middle-aged women and radi- 
 cals of one-and-twenty. 
 
 Well, in this respect the great war, with its multi- 
 tudinous public and private calamities pressing daily 
 nearer to the heart of the household at Matchings Easy, 
 provokes in Mr. Britling a revulsion of feeling. Through 
 the first selfish panic of the civil population hoarding 
 their gold and buying up bread and tinned sardines; 
 through the days when one watched with growing aston- 
 ishment, yet with an aloof spectatorial air, the thunder- 
 ous trampling and rush of the Germans toward Paris ; 
 through the period of agitated unpreparedness and the 
 apathetic recruiting and the drilling without uniforms 
 or rifles ; through the Churchill-excursions to Constanti- 
 nople; through the tedious wintry sieges; through the 
 months when the villages of England filled with Belgian 
 exiles and with wounded sons and with English widows 
 and orphans, sleeping and shuddering under the peril 
 of infested skies through all this commotion the dis- 
 tinguished speculative author, Mr. Britling, settles 
 slowly earthwards till his feet are planted upon the 
 " realities of life." Incidentally his eighth affair of the
 
 74. ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 heart, which in the piping times of peace would have 
 required to be elaborated into one of his soulful ro- 
 mances, sinks into exactly the place of contemptible 
 insignificance which it deserves. 
 
 With a new sense of values Mr. Wells turns upon 
 himself, in the person of Mr. Britling, and humorously 
 analyzes that fascinating romantic temperament to 
 which in his previous novels he has been so indulgent: 
 
 The mysterious processes of nature that had produced 
 Mr. Britling had implanted in him an obstinate persuasion 
 that somewhere in the world, from some human being, it 
 was still possible to find the utmost satisfaction for every 
 need and craving. He could imagine, as waiting for him, 
 he knew not where, a completeness of understanding, a per- 
 fection of response, that would reach all the gamut of his 
 feelings and sensations from the most poetical to the most 
 entirely physical, a beauty of relationship so transfiguring 
 that not only would she it went without saying that this 
 completion was a woman be perfectly beautiful in its 
 light, but what was manifestly incredible, that he too would 
 be perfectly beautiful and quite at ease. 
 
 There is what I have called the unrealistic and 
 Shelleyan emotional tendency in the prophet of the 
 Younger Generation. Now hear Mr. Wells's realistic 
 and disillusioning comment upon that tendency: 
 
 This persuasion is as foolish as though a camel hoped 
 that some day it would drink from such a spring that it 
 would never thirst again. For the most part Mr. Britling 
 ignored its presence in his mind, and resisted the impulses 
 it started. But at odd times, and more particularly in the 
 afternoon and while traveling and in between books [fairly
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 75 
 
 often by this account] Mr. Britling so far succumbed to 
 this strange expectation of a wonder round the corner that 
 he slipped the anchor of his humor and self-contempt and 
 joined the great cruising brotherhood of the Pilgrims of 
 Love. . . . 
 
 For some years the suspicion had been growing in Mr. 
 Britling's mind that in planting this persuasion in his being, 
 the mysterious processes of Nature had been, perhaps for 
 some purely biological purpose, pulling, as people say, his 
 leg; that there were not these perfect responses, that loving 
 a woman is a thing one does thoroughly once for all or 
 so and afterwards recalls regretfully in a series of vain 
 repetitions, and that the career of a Pilgrim of Love, so 
 soon as you strip off its undulous glamor, is either the most 
 pitiful or the most vulgar and vile of perversions from the 
 proper conduct of life. 
 
 What does all this mean but that Mr. Wells is relax- 
 ing his hold upon his grand elementary moral concep- 
 tion of life as a " tissue of births." As a Utopian 
 naturalist he had advocated the harmonization of con- 
 science with what he now almost contemptuously desig- 
 nates as Nature's " purely biological purpose." He 
 now implicitly recognizes human purposes which prop- 
 erly run counter to the biological purpose, and human 
 ideals which properly oppose the mysterious instincts 
 conspiring to pull, as people say, one's leg. Mr. Wells 
 has been guilty here of another betrayal of the Younger 
 Generation. He threatens to lead the young people back 
 into the abandoned region of " abstract, refined, and 
 intellectualized ideas " such ideas as right, liberty, 
 happiness, duty, and beauty, in behalf of which, indeed, 
 they are now shedding their blood.
 
 76 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 It may be objected that the quasi-official philosophy 
 of modern Germany fortifies its warriors without resort 
 to the old moral abstractions. It gets the fighting vir- 
 tues by sternly inculcating the subordination of personal 
 instincts to the imperious needs of the species. It has 
 heard Nature murmuring to herself in the still watches 
 of the night " Deutschland uber alles" and it has reso- 
 lutely harmonized conscience with the Great Mother's 
 biological purpose, her mysterious passion for the segre- 
 gation, triumph, and perpetuity of the German race. 
 At some time in the course of the war, one conjectures, it 
 must have rushed upon Mr. Wells with a shock that the 
 German " morality " is Wellsian theory adapted to cir- 
 cumstances by practical men, that German efficiency is 
 the realization of his life-long dreams, that modern 
 Germany is, in short the naturalistic Wellsian Utopia 
 militant. It must have occurred to him with horrible 
 searchings of the heart that there at last at his door, 
 effectively operating, was the machinery for " railroad- 
 ing " mankind into the scientific millennium. Why should 
 he seek to destroy it? Because it was not English? 
 That doubtless was the cause of his first instinctive 
 gesture of wrath and indignation. He had accustomed 
 himself to thinking of the road into the Promised Land 
 as built and operated by Englishmen. Accordingly he 
 joined in the popular clamor, which may be summarized 
 as follows : " The German machine is the best ever 
 devised. Therefore we must utterly destroy it. And 
 we must build one of our own exactly like it. The Ger- 
 mans are scoundrels. We are honest men." Into this 
 logic of jealousy Mr. Wells was plunged bjr the fact
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 77 
 
 that he and the Germans worshiped the same gods, and 
 founded their " morality " upon the same naturalistic 
 principles. Had he not in The Discovery of the Future 
 scoffed at the legal type of mind which reveres the past, 
 stands upon promises, abides by treaties, and quibbles 
 about who began the fighting? Had he not glorified the 
 " creative mind " with visions of empire, with the " will 
 to live," jesuitically making morality a means to its 
 end, boldly trampling over prohibitions to its goal, 
 cheerily letting the dead past bury its dead ? How could 
 he distinguish his attitude of mind from that of the alien 
 enemy ? Only by abandoning his " atheistical " follow- 
 ers, renouncing his worship of machinery, and shifting 
 his moral center. 
 
 On the publication of Mr. Britling it was widely 
 heralded through the press that Mr. Wells had " discov- 
 ered God." It would have been more accurate to say 
 that Mr. Wells was fumbling for God. He was reach- 
 ing out, with manifest symptoms of spiritual dis- 
 tress, for a power apart from the brutal rush and con- 
 flict of natural forces. He brought in an incoher- 
 ent report of a vague spiritual reality mistily en- 
 compassing the field " where ignorant armies clash by 
 night." 
 
 The " inwardness " of Mr. Wells's reaction to the war 
 after his " discovery of God " may perhaps be suggested 
 by the words which come into Mr. Britling's mind as he 
 stands on the scene of a Zeppelin raid : 
 
 Some train of subconscious suggestion brought a long for- 
 gotten speech back into Mr. Britling's mind, a speech that 
 w full of that light which still seeks so mysteriously and
 
 78 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 indefatigably to break through the darkness and thickness 
 of the human mind. 
 
 He whispered the words. No unfamiliar words could 
 have the same effect of comfort and conviction. 
 
 He whispered it of those men whom he still imagined 
 flying far away there eastward, through the clear freezing 
 air beneath the stars, those muffled sailors and engineers 
 who had caused so much pain and agony in this little town. 
 
 " Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." 
 
 Is this hypocrisy and an insufferable literary pose on 
 the part of Mr. Britling? Or is it just as sincere as his 
 son's " Damn the Kaiser and all fools "? One accepts 
 its sincerity. For Mr. Britling has been taking medi- 
 cine, bitter and purgative, to his soul's great good. He 
 has brought " the Zeppelin raids, with their slow cres- 
 cendo of blood-stained futility," into connection with 
 " the same kind of experience that our ships have in- 
 flicted scores of times in the past upon innocent people 
 in the villages of Africa and Polynesia." These terrible 
 incursions were a part of that mechanical " efficiency " 
 which the Germans had and the English had not, but 
 which Mr. Wells and other imperially-minded men had 
 long been urging upon the English as the way of salva- 
 tion. It was not the way! That was the truth glim- 
 mering in Mr. Britling's mind. It was the way to some- 
 thing perhaps to more efficiency, but not to salvation. 
 That lay at the end of a route which the footsteps of 
 the imperial dream have never trod. It lay perhaps 
 somewhere in the valley of self-humiliation beyond the 
 range of those who put their trust in the legs of man or 
 in chariots and horses. Mr. Britling took his first step
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 79 
 
 toward it by honestly " no longer thinking of the Ger- 
 mans as diabolical. They were human ; they had a case. 
 It was a stupid case, but our case, too, was a stupid 
 case. How stupid were all our cases ! What was it we 
 missed? Something, he felt, very close to us, and very 
 elusive. Something that would resolve a hundred 
 tangled oppositions." 
 
 Mr. Wells and Mr. Britling have written in the course 
 of the war a good many pamphlets on what should be 
 done after it. Mr. Britling criticizes his contributions 
 thus: 
 
 " Dissertations/' said Mr. Britling. 
 
 Never had it been so plain to Mr. Britling that he was a 
 weak, silly, ill-informed, and hasty-minded writer, and 
 never had he felt so invincible a conviction that the Spirit 
 of God was in him, and that it fell to him to take some part 
 in the establishment of a new order upon the earth ; it might 
 be the most trivial part by the scale of the task, but for him 
 it was to be now his supreme concern. 
 
 The criticism in this paragraph was severe but not 
 wholly undeserved, and the promise of amendment which 
 it offered was illusory, as Mr. Wells promptly demon- 
 strated by the publication of God The Invisible King, a 
 book as hasty and ill-informed as anything that he has 
 written. Apparently he was elated by the impression 
 made upon his readers by Mr. Britling's religious ex- 
 periences but mistaken about the nature of the impres- 
 sion. Mr. Britling Sees It Through was an arresting 
 social phenomenon. " Mark," one said to oneself, " this 
 interesting indication of the law of man's spirit. In
 
 80 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 the hour of overwhelming trial and bewildering disas- 
 ters he gropes instinctively for a rock of refuge, for the 
 permanent amid the transitory, for the eternal which 
 we call God. So pervasive is the present sense of need 
 that it takes hold upon the mind even of H. G. Wells, 
 who probably knows less of the nature of God than any 
 author of his eminence now living." Such was our im- 
 pression of his conversion. But Mr. Wells, hearing the 
 wide murmur of interest in the one " naturalist " that 
 had repented, leaped to the conclusion that he, single- 
 handed, had made a great light break upon a world wait- 
 ing in outer darkness for his private illumination. Far 
 from admitting that he has returned to the " fold," he 
 naively lifts up his voice and invites the fold to turn to 
 him. There is not a grain of humility in this new 
 apostle. Standing in the midst of Mars' Hill he radi- 
 antly offers us a copy of his new book, saying in effect : 
 " Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare 
 I unto you." 
 
 There is unquestionably an abundance of magnani- 
 mous impulse in God The In-visible King, and its pres- 
 ence tempts the benevolent critic to exclaim, " Let the 
 devil fly away with its faults." But Mr. Wells himself 
 teaches us no such critical forbearance. Every time 
 that he writes a book he condemns all his predecessors. 
 His occasional tributes to other men go to his contem- 
 poraries. And each new message of his cancels his 
 previous messages. He has no base of supplies; he 
 keeps open no line of communication with the past. He 
 is still the grandiose and romantic dreamer bent upon 
 bringing forward a brand-new scheme for the salvation
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 81 
 
 of the world. A few years ago it was world-socialism; 
 a little later it was world-aristocracy ; today it is world- 
 theocracy. What it will be tomorrow no man knows, 
 but every man can guess that it will be something differ- 
 ent and equally evanescent. Every reflecting man can 
 guess this, because the problem which Mr. Wells sets 
 himself is insoluble to the point of absurdity, namely, 
 the establishment of a government of the world by anar- 
 chists. Like all men of anarchical temper, he constantly 
 oscillates between absolute despotism and absolute lib- 
 erty, and never stops at the point of rest between the 
 extremes. The problem presented in God The Invisible 
 King is precisely : How to bring about " the kingdom 
 of God on earth " by complete and universal anarchy 
 in religion. I have misstated the case. Every anarchist 
 is by nature a despot. Mr. Wells's anarchy is not to 
 be quite complete and universal. " Had I the plantation 
 of this isle," says old Gonzalo in The Tempest, " and 
 were the king on't, I would by contraries execute all 
 things," and a little later he adds that on the island 
 there should be no sovereignty. The end of his speech, 
 as a bystander remarks, forgets its beginning. Mr. 
 Wells's anarchy, like the amiable Gonzalo's, is qualified 
 by the absolute despotism of its would-be creator. In 
 the " kingdom of God on earth " he very firmly rules 
 that there shall be no churches, no priests, no Bibles, 
 no creeds ; and happy is the man cuius oblectatio est in 
 lege H. G. Wells, et qui de lege Ulius meditatur interdiu 
 ac noctu. 
 
 Compared with Mr. Wells, the Reverend Billy Sunday 
 walks humbly and reverently before God and the history
 
 82 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 of human experience. Billy Sunday, knowing that re- 
 ligion is what binds us to righteousness, seeks to fill the 
 emotions with love and fear of God and hatred and fear 
 of the devil in order to bind his hearers to the ten major 
 laws delivered by Moses. His religion is founded upon 
 a rock, which he does not imagine is of his discovery or 
 invention. Mr. Wells has invented his God, but he has 
 not yet invented his righteousness; and that singular 
 omission leaves his deity out of all characteristic employ- 
 ment. He does not even pretend to know what right- 
 eousness is. Furthermore he profoundly objects to 
 being bound by anything. Accordingly he makes a clean 
 sweep of all religious authorities and all scriptures 
 which, as " revealed " truth or as potent poetical symbol, 
 have proved through generation after generation their 
 regulative efficiency in human affairs. In their stead he 
 offers his sketch of the Invisible Kin^ made in his own 
 image early in 1917 a Utopian enthusiast whose func- 
 tion is not to bind and regulate but to fling the reins 
 on the neck of enthusiasm. The Invisible King is no 
 meddler, like the God of the Hebrews, in a man's private 
 affairs : " We have to follow our reason as our sole 
 guide in our individual treatment of all such things as 
 food, and health, and sex." Mr. Wells modifies this 
 principle in another place by telling us that when in 
 doubt about some nice point of conduct we may consult 
 our family physician; and this permission or advice 
 seems justified by the fact that " our spiritual nature 
 follows our bodily as a glove follows the hand." Souls 
 craving more light are recommended to consult the 
 author's First and Last Things. If by chance any
 
 UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF WELLS 83 
 
 apostle of the new faith insists upon having a back- 
 ground for his religion, let him turn to the Koran rather 
 than to the Bible. The Koran is a better source; for 
 " Islam was never saddled with a creed." 
 
 As Mr. Wells warms to his task of composition, the 
 spirit of prophesy descends upon him, and he begins 
 to declare what things this churchless, creedless, lawless 
 faith is going to accomplish in the world. The tangle 
 of contradictions into which he falls is amusing. " We 
 of the new faith " reject Christ because he was only " a 
 saint of non-resistance." And yet, continues our angelic 
 doctor gravely, " there is a curious modernity about 
 very many of Christ's recorded sayings." " Our faith," 
 however, as distinguished from Christianity is militant. 
 Apparently " we " have conceived the quite novel idea of 
 redeeming the world from sin by the effusion of blood ! 
 Ours is a militant faith ; yet it is absolutely unorganized : 
 " it is for each man to follow his own impulse, and to 
 speak to his like in his own fashion." The intelligent 
 reader will at once perceive what an advantage that 
 gives " us " over, let us say, Catholic Christendom. Our 
 faith is unorganized ; " and yet " here, I submit, Mr. 
 Wells's trust in religious anarchy touches the cloudy 
 borders of sublimity " and yet in a few score years the 
 faith of the true God will be spreading about the world. 
 The few halting confessions of God that one hears here 
 and there today, like that little twittering of birds which 
 comes before the dawn, will have swollen to a choral 
 harmony." 
 
 The fine and sound things in this book I have not 
 much emphasized. They are exhortations to " repent-
 
 84. ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 ance," " consecration," " self-sacrifice," labor for the 
 " kingdom of God on earth." Mr. Wells's impression 
 that they are new is as " curious " as the " modernity of 
 very many of Christ's recorded sayings." They may 
 of course be heard in any orthodox pulpit in the course 
 of a month's sermons with due credit given for their 
 origination and some attempt made to render their 
 meaning definite and their application practical. As 
 Mr. Wells handles them they tend only to create a vague 
 diffusive emotion. It is better for him to think of them 
 as of his own confection than for him not to think of 
 them at all ; but as a matter of fact the chief contribu- 
 tive element in his testament is his peculiarly sanguine 
 and mellifluous egotism. If he could only bring himself 
 to acknowledge now and then that ideas may be true and 
 useful even though they have always been recognized 
 as such, he might occasionally find the whole force of 
 ancient traditions gathering behind him and supporting 
 his advance into the future. His passion for dynamit- 
 ing his own rear and sallying out on that long march 
 with only his " personal luggage " betokens not an in- 
 tellectual leader but an intellectual madcap. It is a fine 
 feather in the bonnet of a writer of naturalistic fiction 
 to create and bring out between novels a perfectly new 
 divinity, and one so amiable as the Invisible King. But 
 I, for one, find that his prophecy of the kingdom of this 
 pleasant Utopian has only given me a particular relish 
 for rereading the ninetieth and the ninety-first Psalms.
 
 ni 
 
 THE BARBARIC NATURALISM OF 
 THEODORE DREISER 
 
 THE layman who listens reverently to the reviewers 
 discussing the new novels and to the novelists discussing 
 themselves can hardly escape persuasion that a great 
 change has rather recently taken place in the spirit of 
 the age, in the literature which reflects it, and in the 
 criticism which judges it. The nature of the supposed 
 revolution may be briefly summarized. 
 
 The elder generation was in love with illusions, and 
 looked at truth through a glass darkly and timorously. 
 The artist, tongue-tied by authority and trammeled by 
 aesthetic and moral conventions, selected, suppressed, 
 and rearranged the data of experience and observation. 
 The critic, " morally subsidized," regularly professed 
 his disdain for a work of art in which no light glim- 
 mered above " the good and the beautiful." 
 
 The present age is fearless and is freeing itself from 
 illusions. Now, for the first time in history, men are 
 facing unabashed the facts of life. " Death or life," we 
 cry, " give us only reality ! " Now, for the first time 
 in the history of English literature, fiction is become a 
 flawless mirror held up to the living world. Rejecting 
 nothing, altering nothing, it presents to us let us take 
 our terms from the bright lexicon of the reviewer a 
 
 85
 
 86 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 " transcript," a " cross-section," a " slice," a " photo- 
 graphic " or "cinematographic " reproduction of life. 
 The critic who keeps pace with the movement no 
 longer asks whether the artist has created beauty or 
 glorified goodness, but merely whether he has told the 
 truth. 
 
 Mr. Dreiser, in his latest novel, The Genius, describes 
 a canvas by a painter of this austere modern school: 
 " Raw reds, raw greens, dirty gray paving stones such 
 faces! Why, this thing fairly shouted its facts. It 
 seemed to say : * I'm dirty, I am commonplace, I am 
 grim, I am shabby, but I am life.' And there was no 
 apologizing for anything in it, no glossing anything 
 over. Bang ! Smash ! Crack ! came the facts one after 
 another, with a bitter, brutal insistence on their so- 
 ness." If you do not like what is in the picture, you 
 are to be crushed by the retort that perhaps you do not 
 like what is in life. Perhaps you have not courage to 
 confront reality. Perhaps you had better read the 
 chromatic fairy-tales with the children. Men of sterner 
 stuff exclaim, " Thank God for a realist ! " 
 
 Mr. Dreiser is a novelist of the new school, for whom 
 we have been invited off and on these fourteen years to 
 " thank God " a form of speech, by the way, which 
 crept into the language before the dawn of " modern " 
 realism. He has performed with words what his hero 
 performed with paint. He has presented the facts of 
 life " one after another with a bitter, brutal insistence 
 on their so-ness," which marks him as a " man of the 
 hour," a " portent " the successor of Mr. Howells and 
 Mr. James? In the case of a realist, biographical de-
 
 BARBARIC NATURALISM OF DREISER 87 
 
 tails are always relevant. Mr. Dreiser was born of 
 German-American parents in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 
 1871. He was educated in the Indiana public schools 
 and at the State University. He was engaged in news- 
 paper work in Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and else- 
 where, from 1892 to 1910. He has published two books , 
 of travel: A Traveller At Forty, 1913, and A Hoosier 
 Holiday, 1916, which, without the support of his fiction, 
 would entitle him to dispute with Mr. Viereck for the 
 title of vulgarest voice yet heard in American literature ; 
 also a collection of one-act dramas, Plays of the Natural 
 and Supernatural, 1916. But he has laid reality bare 
 for us most generously in his five novels, published as 
 follows: Sister Carrie, 1901; Jennie Gerhardt, 1911; 
 The Financier, 1912 ; The Titan, 1914 ; and The Genius, 
 1915. These five works constitute a singularly homo- 
 geneous mass of fiction. I do not find any moral value 
 in them, nor any memorable beauty of their truth I 
 shall speak later ; but I am greatly impressed by them as 
 serious representatives of a new note in American litera- 
 ture, coming from that " ethnic " element of our mixed 
 population which, we are assured by competent authori- 
 ties, is to redeem us from Puritanism and insure our 
 artistic salvation. They abundantly illustrate, further- 
 more, the methods and intentions of our recent courage- 
 ous veracious realism. Before we thank God for it let 
 us consider a little more closely what is offered us. 
 
 The first step toward the definition of Mr. Dreiser's 
 special contribution is to blow away the dust with which 
 the exponents of the new realism seek to becloud the 
 perceptions of our " reverent layman." In their main
 
 88 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 pretensions there are large elements of conscious and 
 unconscious sham. 
 
 It should clear the air to say that courage in facing 
 and veracity in reporting the facts of life are no more 
 characteristic of Theodore Dreiser than of John 
 Bunyan. These moral traits are not the peculiar marks 
 of the new school ; they are the marks common to every 
 great movement of literature within the memory of man. 
 Each literary generation detaching itself from its prede- 
 cessor whether it has called its own movement Classical 
 or Romantic or what not has revolted in the interest 
 of what it took to be a more adequate representation of 
 reality. No one who is not drunken with the egotism of 
 the hour, no one who has penetrated with sober senses 
 into the spirit of any historical period anterior to his 
 own, will fall into the indecency of declaring his own 
 age preeminent in the desire to see and to tell the truth. 
 The real distinction between one generation and another 
 is in the thing which each takes for its master truth is 
 in the thing which each recognizes as the essential reality 
 for it. The difference between Bunyan and Dreiser is 
 in the order of facts which each reports. 
 
 It seems necessary also to declare at periodic intervals 
 that there is no such thing as a " cross-section " or 
 " slice " or " photograph " of life in art least of all 
 in the realistic novel. The use of these catchwords is 
 but a clever hypnotizing pass of the artist, employed to 
 win the assent of the reader to the reality of the show, 
 and, in some cases, to evade moral responsibility for 
 any questionable features of the exhibition. A realistic 
 novel no more than any other kind of a novel can escape
 
 BARBARIC NATURALISM OF DREISER 89 
 
 being a composition, involving preconception, imagina- 
 tion, and divination. Yet, hearing one of our new real- 
 ists expound his doctrine, one might suppose that writ- 
 ing a novel was a process analogous to photographing 
 wild animals in their habitat by trap and flashlight. 
 He, if you will believe him, does not invite his subjects, 
 nor group them, nor compose their features, nor furnish 
 their setting. He but exposes the sensitized plate of his 
 mind. The pomp of life goes by, and springs the trap. 
 The picture, of course, does not teach nor preach nor 
 moralize. It simply re-presents. The only serious ob- 
 jection to this figurative explanation of the artistic 
 process is the utter dissimilarity between the blank im- 
 partial photographic plate, commemorating everything 
 that confronts it, and the crowded, inveterately selective 
 mind, which, like a magnet, snatches the facts of life that 
 are subject to its influence out of their casual order and 
 redisposes them in a pattern of its own. 
 
 In the case of any specified novelist, the facts chosen 
 and the pattern assumed by them are determined by his 
 central theory or " philosophy of life " ; and this is pre- 
 cisely criticism's justification for inquiring into the ade- 
 quacy of any novelist's general ideas. In vain, the new 
 realist throws up his hands with protestations of inno- 
 cence, and cries : " Search me. I carry no concealed 
 weapons. I run life into no preconceived mold. I have 
 no philosophy. My business is only to observe, like a man 
 of science, and to record what I have seen." He cannot 
 observe without a theory, nor compose and record his 
 observations without betraying his theory to any criti- 
 cal eye.
 
 90 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 As it happens, the man of science who most pro- 
 foundly influenced the development of the new realistic 
 novel, Charles Darwin, more candid than the writers of 
 " scientific " fiction, frankly declared that he could not 
 observe without a theory. When he had tentatively 
 formulated a general law, and had begun definitely to 
 look for evidence of its operation, then first the sub- 
 stantiating facts leaped abundantly into his vision. His 
 Origin of Species has the unity of a work of art, because 
 the recorded observations support a thesis. The French 
 novelists who in the last century developed the novel of 
 contemporary life learned as much, perhaps, from Dar- 
 win's art as from his science. The technique of fiction 
 imitated the procedure of scientific research. Balzac 
 had emphasized the relation between man and his social 
 milieu; the Goncourts emphasized the importance of 
 extensive " human documents " ; Zola emphasized the 
 value of scientific hypotheses. He deliberately adopted 
 the materialistic philosophy of the period as his guide 
 in observation and as his unifying principle in composi- 
 tion. His theory of the causes of social phenomena, 
 which was derived largely from medical and physiologi- 
 cal treatises, operated like a powerful magnet among the 
 chaotic facts of life, rejecting some, selecting others, and 
 redisposing them in the pattern of the roman naturaliste. 
 Judicious French critics said : " My dear man," or 
 words to that effect, " your representations of life are 
 inadequate. This which you are offering us with so 
 earnest an air is not reality. It is your own private 
 nightmare." When they had exposed his theory, they 
 had condemned his art.
 
 BARBARIC NATURALISM OF DREISER 91 
 
 Let us, then, dismiss Mr. Dreiser's pretensions to 
 superior courage and veracity, the photographic trans- 
 script, and unbiassed service of truth; and let us seek 
 for his definition in his general theory of life, in the 
 order of facts which he records, and in the pattern of 
 his representations. 
 
 The impressive unity of effect produced by Mr. 
 Dreiser's five novels is due to the fact that they are all 
 illustrations of a crude and naively simple naturalistic 
 philosophy, such as we find in the mouths of exponents 
 of the new Real-Politik. Each book, with its bewilder- 
 ing mass of detail, is a ferocious argument in behalf of 
 a few brutal generalizations. To the eye cleared of illu- 
 sions it appears that the ordered life which we call civi- 
 lization does not exist except on paper. In reality our 
 so-called society is a jungle in which the struggle for 
 existence continues, and must continue, on terms sub- 
 stantially unaltered by legal, moral, or social conven- 
 tions. The central truth about man is that he is an 
 animal amenable to no law but the law of his own 
 temperament, doing as he desires, subject only to the 
 limitations of his power. The male of the species is 
 characterized by cupidity, pugnacity, and a simian in- 
 clination for the other sex. The female is a soft, vain, 
 pleasure-seeking creature, devoted to personal adorn- 
 ment, and quite helplessly susceptible to the flattery of 
 the male. In the struggles which arise in the jungle 
 through the conflicting appetites of its denizens, the 
 victory goes to the animal most physically fit and men- 
 tally ruthless, unless the weaklings, resisting absorption,
 
 92 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 combine against him and crush him by sheer force of 
 numbers. 
 
 The idea that civilization is a sham, Mr. Dreiser some- 
 times sets forth explicitly, and sometimes he conveys it 
 by the process known among journalists as " coloring 
 the news." When Sister Carrie yields to the seductive 
 drummer, Drouet, Mr. Dreiser judicially weighs the 
 advantages and disadvantages attendant on the condi- 
 tion of being a well-kept mistress. When the institu- 
 tion of marriage is brushed aside by the heroine of The 
 Financier, he comments " editorially " as follows : " Be- 
 fore Christianity was man, and after it will also be. A 
 metaphysical idealism will always tell him that it is 
 better to preserve a cleanly balance, and the storms of 
 circumstance will teach him a noble stoicism. Beyond 
 this there is nothing which can reasonably be imposed 
 upon the conscience of man." A little later in the same 
 book he says : " Is there no law outside of the subtle 
 will and power to achieve ? If not, it is surely high time 
 that we knew it one and all. We might then agree to 
 do as we do; but there would be no silly illusion as to 
 divine regulation." His own answer to the question, 
 his own valuation of regulation, both divine and human, 
 may be found in the innumerable contemptuous epithets 
 which fall from his pen whenever he has occasion to 
 mention any power set up against the urge of instinct 
 and the indefinite expansion of desire. Righteousness is 
 always " legal " ; conventions are always " current " ; 
 routine is always " dull " ; respectability is always " unc- 
 tuous " ; an institution for transforming schoolgirls 
 into young ladies is presided over by " owl-like conven-
 
 BARBARIC NATURALISM OF DREISER 93 
 
 tionalists " ; families in which the parents are faithful 
 to each other lead an " apple-pie order of existence " ; a 
 man who yields to his impulses yet condemns himself for 
 yielding is a " rag-bag moralistic ass." Jennie Ger- 
 hardt, by a facile surrender of her chastity, shows that 
 " she could not be readily corrupted by the world's selfish 
 lessons on how to preserve oneself from the evil to come." 
 Surely this is " coloring the news." 
 
 By similar devices Mr. Dreiser drives home the great 
 truth that man is essentially an animal, impelled by 
 temperament, instinct, physics, chemistry anything 
 you please that is irrational and uncontrollable. Some- 
 times he writes an " editorial " paragraph in which the 
 Jaws of human life are explained by reference to the 
 behavior of certain protozoa or by reference to a squid 
 and a lobster fighting in an aquarium. His heroes and 
 heroines have " cat-like eyes," " feline grace," " sinuous 
 strides," eyes and jaws which vary " from those of the 
 tiger, lynx, and bear to those of the fox, the tolerant 
 mastiff, and the surly bulldog." One hero and his mis- 
 tress are said to " have run together temperamentally 
 like two leopards." The lady in question, admiring 
 the large rapacity of her mate, exclaims playfully: 
 " Oh, you big tiger ! you great, big lion ! Boo ! " Court- 
 ship as presented in these novels is after the manner of 
 beasts in the jungle. Mr. Dreiser's leonine men but 
 circle once or twice about their prey, and spring, and 
 pounce; and the struggle is over. A pure-minded 
 serving-maid, who is suddenly held up in the hall by a 
 " hairy, axiomatic " guest and " masterfully " kissed 
 upon the lips, may for an instant be " horrified, stunned,
 
 94 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 like a bird in the grasp of a cat." But we are always 
 assured that " through it all something tremendously 
 vital and insistent " will be speaking to her, and in the 
 end she will not resist the urge of the elan vital. I 
 recall no one of the dozens of obliging women in these 
 books who makes any effective resistance when summoned 
 to capitulate. " The psychology of the human animal, 
 when confronted by these tangles, these ripping tides of 
 the heart," says the author of The Titan, " has little to 
 do with so-called reason or logic." No; as he informs 
 us elsewhere in endless iteration, it is a question of 
 chemistry. It is the "chemistry of her being" (that 
 of the female in question) which rouses to blazing the 
 ordinarily dormant forces of Eugene Witla's sympathies 
 in The Genius. If Stephanie Platow is disloyal to her 
 married lover in The Titan, " let no one quarrel " with 
 her. Reason : " She was an unstable chemical com- 
 pound." 
 
 Such is the Dreiserian philosophy. 
 
 By thus eliminating distinctively human motives and 
 making animal instincts the supreme factors in human 
 life, Mr. Dreiser reduces the problem of the novelist to 
 the lowest possible terms. I find myself unable to go 
 with those who admire the powerful reality of his art 
 while deploring the puerility of his philosophy. His 
 philosophy quite excludes him from the field in which 
 the great realist must work. He has deliberately re- 
 jected the novelist's supreme task understanding and 
 presenting the development of character ; he has chosen 
 only to illustrate the unrestricted flow of temperament. 
 He has evaded the enterprise of representing human con-
 
 BARBARIC NATURALISM OF DREISER 95 
 
 duct ; he has confined himself to a representation of ani- 
 mal behavior. He demands for the demonstration of his 
 theory a moral vacuum from which the obligations of 
 parenthood, marriage, chivalry, and citizenship have 
 been quite withdrawn or locked in a twilight sleep. At 
 each critical moment in his narrative, where a realist 
 like George Eliot or Thackeray or Trollope or Meredith 
 would be asking how a given individual would feel, think, 
 and act under the manifold combined stresses of organ- 
 ized society, Mr. Dreiser sinks supinely back upon the 
 law of the jungle or mutters his mystical gibberish about 
 an alteration of the chemical formula. 
 
 The possibility of making the unvarying victorious- 
 ness of jungle-motive plausible depends directly upon 
 the suppression of the evidence of other motives. In this 
 work of suppression Mr. Dreiser simplifies American life 
 almost beyond recognition. Whether it is because he 
 comes from Indiana, or whether it is because he steadily 
 envisages the human animal, I cannot say; I can only 
 note that he never speaks of his men and women as " edu- 
 cated " or " brought up." Whatever their social status, 
 they are invariably " raised." Raising human stock in 
 America evidently includes feeding and clothing it, but 
 does not include the inculcation of even the most ele- 
 mentary moral ideas. Hence Mr. Dreiser's field seems 
 curiously outside American society. Yet he repeatedly 
 informs us that his persons are typical of the American 
 middle class, and three of the leading figures, to judge 
 from their names Carrie Meeber, Jennie Gerhardt, and 
 Eugene Witla are of our most highly " cultured " race. 
 Frank Cowperwood, the hero of two novels, is a hawk of
 
 96 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 finance and a rake almost from the cradle; but of the 
 powers which presided over his cradle we know nothing 
 save that his father was a competent officer in a Phila- 
 delphia bank. What, if anything, Carrie Meeber's typi- 
 cal American parents taught her about the conduct of 
 life is suppressed; for we meet the girl in a train to 
 Chicago, on which she falls to the first drummer who 
 accosts her. From the bosom of a typical middle-class 
 American family, Eugene Witla emerges in his teens 
 with a knowledge of the game called post-office, takes 
 the train for Chicago, and without hesitation enters 
 upon his long career of seduction. Jennie Gerhardt, of 
 course, succumbs to the first man who puts his arm 
 around her; but, in certain respects, her case is 
 exceptional. 
 
 In Jennie Gerhardt Mr. Dreiser ventures a disastrous 
 experiment at making the jungle-motive plausible with- 
 out suppressing the evidence of other motives. He pro- 
 vides the girl with pious Lutheran parents, of fallen 
 fortune, but alleged to be of sterling character, who 
 " raise " her with utmost strictness. He even admits 
 that the family were church-goers, and he outlines the 
 doctrine preached by Pastor Wundt: right conduct 
 in marriage and absolute innocence before that state as 
 essentials of Christian living ; no salvation for a daugh- 
 ter who failed to keep her chastity unstained, or for the 
 parents who permitted her to fall ; Hell yawning for all 
 such ; God angry with sinners every day. " Gerhardt 
 and his wife, and also Jennie," says Mr. Dreiser, " ac- 
 cepted the doctrines of their church without reserve." 
 Twenty pages later Jennie is represented as yielding her
 
 BARBARIC NATURALISM OF DREISER 97 
 
 virtue in pure gratitude to a man of fifty, Senator 
 Brander, who has let her do ( his laundry and in other 
 ways has been kind to her and her family. The Senator 
 suddenly dies; Jennie expects to become a mother; 
 Father Gerhardt is broken-hearted; and the family 
 moves from Columbus to Cleveland. The first episode is 
 perhaps not altogether incredibly presented as a mo- 
 mentary triumph of emotional impulse over training as 
 an " accident." The incredible appears when Mr. 
 Dreiser insists that an accident of this sort to a girl 
 brought up in the conditions stated is not necessarily 
 followed by any sense of sin or shame or regret. Upon 
 this simple pious Lutheran he imposes his own natural- 
 istic philosophy, and, in analyzing her psychology be- 
 fore the birth of her illegitimate child, pretends that she 
 looks forward to the event " without a murmur," with 
 " serene, unfaltering courage," " the marvel of life hold- 
 ing her in a trance," " with joy and satisfaction," see- 
 ing in her state " the immense possibilities of racial ful- 
 filment." This juggling is probably expected to pre- 
 pare us for her instantaneous assent, perhaps a year 
 later, when a healthy magnetic manufacturer, who has 
 seen her perhaps a dozen times, claps his paw upon her 
 and says, " You belong to me," and in a perfectly cold- 
 blooded interview, proposes the terms on which he will 
 set her up in New York as his mistress. Jennie, who is 
 a fond mother and a dutiful daughter, goes to her pious 
 Lutheran mother and talks the whole matter over with 
 her quite candidly. The mother hesitates not on 
 Jennie's account, gentle reader, but because she will be 
 obliged to deceive old Gerhardt ; " the difficulty of tell-
 
 ing this lie was very great for Mrs. Gerhardt " ! But 
 she acquiesces at last. " I'll help you out with it," she 
 concludes " with a little sigh." The unreality of the 
 Avhole transaction shrieks. 
 
 Mr. Dreiser's stubborn insistence upon the jungle- 
 motive results in a dreary monotony in the form and sub- 
 stance of his novels. Interested only in the description 
 of animal behavior, he constructs his plot in such a way 
 as to exhibit the persistence of two or three elementary 
 instincts through every kind of situation. He finds, for 
 example, a subject in the career of an American captain 
 of industry, thinly disguised under the name of Frank 
 Cowperwood. He has just two things to tell us about 
 Cowperwood: that he has a rapacious appetite for 
 money ; and that he has a rapacious appetite for women. 
 In The Financier he " documents " these truths about 
 Cowperwood in seventy-four chapters, in each of which 
 he shows us how his hero made money or how he capti- 
 vated women in Philadelphia. Not satisfied with the 
 demonstration, he returns to the same thesis in The 
 Titan, and shows us in sixty-two chapters how the same 
 hero made money and captivated women in Chicago and 
 in New York. He promises us a third volume, in which 
 we shall no doubt learn in a work of sixty or seventy 
 chapters a sort of huge club-sandwich composed of 
 slices of business alternating with erotic episodes how 
 Frank Cowperwood made money and captivated women 
 in London. Meanwhile Mr. Dreiser has turned aside 
 from his great " trilogy of desire " to give us The 
 Genius, in which the hero, Witla, alleged to be a great 
 realistic painter, exhibits in 100 chapters similarly sand-
 
 BARBARIC NATURALISM OF DREISER 99 
 
 wiched together, an appetite for women and money in- 
 distinguishable from that of Cowperwood. Read one of 
 these novels and you have read them all. What the 
 hero is in the first chapter, he remains in the one hundred 
 and first and the one hundred and thirty-sixth. He 
 acquires naught from his experiences but sensations. 
 In the sum of his experience there is nothing of the im- 
 pressive mass and coherence of activities bound together 
 by principles and integrated in character, for all his 
 days have been but as isolated beads loosely strung on 
 the thread of his desire. And so after the production 
 of the hundredth document in the case of Frank Cowper- 
 wood, one is ready to cry with fatigue : " Hold ! Enough ! 
 We believe you. Yes, it is very clear that Frank Cow- 
 perwood had a rapacious appetite for women and for 
 money." 
 
 If at this point you stop and inquire why Mr. Dreiser 
 goes to such great lengths to establish so little, you find 
 yourself once more confronting the jungle-motive. Mr. 
 Dreiser, with a problem similar to De Foe's in The Ap- 
 parition of Mrs. Veal, has availed himself of De Foe's 
 method for creating the illusion of reality. The essence 
 of the problem for both these authors is the certification 
 of the unreal by the irrelevant. If you wish to make 
 acceptable to your reader the incredible notion that 
 Mrs. Veal's ghost appeared to Mrs. Bargrave divert his 
 incredulity from the precise point at issue by telling him 
 all sorts of detailed credible things about the poverty 
 of Mrs. Veal's early life, the sobriety of her brother, 
 her father's neglect, and the bad temper of Mrs. Bar- 
 grave's husband. If you wish to make acceptable to
 
 100 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 your reader the incredible notion that Aileen Butler's 
 first breach of the seventh article in the decalogue was 
 " a happy event," taking place " much as a marriage 
 might have," divert his incredulity by describing with 
 the technical accuracy of a fashion magazine not merely 
 the gown she wore on the night of Cowperwood's recep- 
 tion, but also with equal detail the half-dozen other 
 gowns that she thought she might wear, but did not. If 
 you have been for three years editor-in-chief of the 
 Butterick publications you can probably persuade your 
 readers that you are a master of the subject, and having 
 acquired credit for expert knowledge in matters of dress 
 and millinery, you can now and then emit unchallenged 
 a bit of philosophy such as " Life cannot be put in any 
 one mold, and the attempt may as well be abandoned at 
 once. . . . Besides, whether we will or not, theory or 
 no theory, the large basic facts of chemistry and physics 
 remain." None the less, if you expect to gain credence 
 for the notion that your hero can have any woman in 
 Chicago or New York that he puts his paw upon, you 
 had probably better lead up to it by a detailed account 
 of the street-railway system in those cities. It will 
 necessitate the- loading of your pages with a tremendous 
 baggage of irrelevant detail. It will not sound much 
 like the fine art of fiction. It will sound more like one 
 of Lincoln Steffens's special articles. But it will pro- 
 duce an overwhelming impression of reality, which the 
 reader will carry with him into the next chapter where 
 you are laying bare the " chemistry " of the human 
 animal. 
 
 It would make for clearness in our discussions of con-
 
 BARBARIC NATURALISM OF DREISER 101 
 
 temporary fiction if we withheld the title of " realist " 
 from a writer like Mr. Dreiser, and called him, as Zola 
 called himself, a " naturalist." While asserting that 
 all great art in every period intends a representation 
 of reality, I have tried to indicate the basis for a work- 
 ing distinction between the realistic novel and the natur- 
 alistic novel of the present day. Both are representa- 
 tions of the life of man in contemporary or nearly 
 contemporary society, and both are presumably com- 
 posed of materials within the experience and observation 
 of the author. But the realistic novel is a representa- 
 tion based upon a theory of human conduct. If the 
 theory of human conduct is adequate, the representa- 
 tion constitutes an addition to literature and to social 
 history. A naturalistic novel is a representation based 
 upon a theory of animal behavior. Since a theory of 
 animal behavior can never be an adequate basis for a 
 representation of the life of man in contemporary 
 society, such a representation is an artistic blunder. 
 When half the world attempts to assert such a theory, 
 the other half rises in battle. And so one turns with 
 relief from Mr. Dreiser's novels to the morning papers.
 
 IV 
 THE REALISM OF ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 IN discussing the work of Mr. Dreiser, I have offered 
 a protest against the confusion which results from call- 
 ing all novelists who deal with contemporary life real- 
 ists ; and I have proposed, as a means of making useful 
 and important distinctions among them, a scrutiny of 
 the bundle of general ideas which constitute for each his 
 " working philosophy," and which, as I maintained, 
 necessarily underlie the artistic representation of each 
 and in considerable measure determine its form. When 
 I had traced the lack of verisimilitude in the Dreiserian 
 novel to Mr. Dreiser's perverse and libellous " theory of 
 animal behavior " and, on that basis, had proposed to 
 designate him as a naturalist,! felt the need of supple- 
 menting my argument by exhibiting the relationship, in 
 some popular exemplar, between genuine realism and a 
 " respectable theory of human conduct." 
 
 Arnold Bennett at once appeared in at least one 
 respect to be a promising candidate for the position. 
 His works, to be sure, are of very unequal value; for, 
 frankly writing to live, he has diversified the production 
 of masterpieces by the quite unscrupulous production of 
 pot-boilers. Yet all sorts of good judges unite in 
 declaring that his best novels The Old Wives' Tale and 
 the Clayhanger trilogy, including Clayhanger, Hilda, 
 
 103
 
 REALISM OF ARNOLD BENNETT 103 
 
 Lessways, and These Twain produce upon them an 
 unprecedented impression of reality. These books, we 
 are told, challenge and endure comparison not with 
 other books but with life itself. Their " transcript " of 
 Five Towns society is so full, detailed, and accurate that 
 it may be used by the student of human nature almost 
 as confidently as first-hand observation. I was glad to 
 find general agreement on this point, for it relieved me 
 of the task of justifying my own conviction that Mr. 
 Bennett is v in effect, a realist. 
 
 The only objection that I saw to the choice of Mr. 
 Bennett as a contemporary realist was that the very 
 critics who praise the reality of his representations insist 
 sternly that he has no " philosophy in life," that he rep- 
 resents no ideal, that he does not " interpret " his facts, 
 that his value resides wholly in the energetic integrity 
 of his transcript. Mr. Darton, himself a novelist, says 
 in his recent study of his fellow craftsman : " In the 
 Five Towns novels there is no ideal. There is no criti- 
 cism. There is no tradition or philosophy of society. 
 There is nothing but life as the people described live it 
 and see it and feel it." This is highly interesting, if 
 it is true. If it is true, it disposes of my contention that 
 an artist cannot observe without a theory. If it is true, 
 it should suggest to the younger generation of novelists 
 who are looking to Mr. Bennett as their master the 
 wisdom of making all haste to get rid of their ideas. 
 
 Mr. Barton's assertion that Arnold Bennett's work 
 has no value save that of mere representation was antici- 
 pated by Henry James in his discussion of the " new 
 novel " in 1914, and was by him extended to an entire
 
 104. ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 group of the younger writers, of which he specified Mr. 
 Bennett and Mr. Wells as the leaders. The distin- 
 guishing characteristic of the group, according to Mr. 
 James, is " saturation." By this he means, as I take it, 
 that all these novelists, and to a high degree their lead- 
 ers, are masters of the materials of their art. They 
 know with extraordinary completeness and detail what 
 they are talking about, but when they have made us see 
 what they have seen, they yield us no further satisfac- 
 tion. They squeeze the sponge or, as Mr. James puts 
 it, the " orange " ; this gives us an " expression of life." 
 Expectant but disappointed criticism cries : " Yes, 
 yes, but is this all? These are the circumstances of the 
 interest we see, we see ; but where is the interest itself, 
 where and what is its center, and how are we to measure 
 it in relation to that ? " 
 
 I cannot follow a critic who finds Wells and Bennett 
 alike in their dominant value, and, what is far more in- 
 teresting, neither can Mr. Wells! Stung to the quick 
 of his celestial mind by the polite implication that he is 
 only a thoroughly immersed sponge, he has retorted 
 in his semi-pseudonymous Boon, 1915, with a scath- 
 ing criticism and a " take-off " on Mr. James, whom he 
 links with Mr. George Moore by virtue of their sterile 
 aestheticizing. That is their dominant " value " their 
 central " interest." His own central interest, as he 
 reasserts with more than customary vehemence and 
 formlessness, is the expression of his yearning for a life 
 of divine efficiency and divine ecstasy. He has a theory 
 of conduct which has developed out of that romantic 
 yearning; and his representations of life in fiction are
 
 REALISM OF ARNOLD BENNETT 105 
 
 experimental illustrations of that theory. It is quite 
 absurd to charge an author with " mere representation," 
 who almost invariably bursts the outlines of his hero, 
 disrupts his narrative in mid-career, shatters the illu- 
 sion of reality, and buries all the characters under the 
 avalanche of his own personal dreams and desires. Mr. 
 Wells, in brief, cherishes a " philosophy of life " which 
 makes it impossible for him to write a realistic novel. 
 He is dedicated to romance. His high calling is to write 
 pseudo-scientific fantasies and fairy tales of contempo- 
 rary society. 
 
 Mr. Wells in Boon incidentally repudiates yoke- 
 fellowship with the novelist of the Five Towns in a pas- 
 sage which gives us the key to Mr. Bennett's " philo- 
 sophical " position. Mr. Bennett is there recorded as a 
 " derelict," an " imperfectly developed," an " aborted " 
 great man surviving from the old times : " Would have 
 made a Great Victorian and had a crowd of satellite 
 helpers. No one will ever treasure his old hats and 
 pipes." This is both amusing and instructive. Mr. 
 Wells does not call a man a Victorian without malice 
 aforethought. If I may be pardoned a violent expres- 
 sion, Mr. Wells would like to slay all the Victorians; 
 better still, he would like to believe that they are all 
 dead. What he objects to in that generation is not the 
 " mere representation " of the novelist ; it is the accursed 
 philosophy of life which underlies their representations. 
 Mr. Bennett rises up to prove, alas, that this philos- 
 ophy is not dead yet. His solid realistic novels protest 
 against Mr. Wells's fairy tales. His vision of life pro- 
 tests against Mr. Wells's vision of life. The Old Wives 9
 
 106 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 Tale makes The Research Magnificent look like child's 
 play. Put These Twain beside Marriage, and instantly 
 the art of the latter seems flimsy and incondite, and its 
 informing ideas fantastic. And one may perhaps just 
 note in passing that beside any one of Mr. Bennett's 
 novels, Mr. Dreiser's Genius instantly appears to be a 
 barbaric yawp. An author whose work thus judges, so 
 to speak, another work with which it is brought into 
 contact, has a potent critical value meriting exami- 
 nation. 
 
 The popular impression that Mr. Bennett has no gen- 
 eral ideas is easily explained by the fact that he does not 
 attempt, as Mr. Wells does, to break down the boun- 
 daries between the literary genres, and to make the 
 novel serve at the same time as a narrative of events 
 and as a philosophical dissertation. Respecting the per- 
 sonalities of his dramatis personae, wishing to preserve 
 the sharpness of their outlines in their own atmosphere, 
 he does not obviously impute to them his ideas nor set 
 them to discussing them. With a restraint unusual 
 among English novelists, he refrains from elaborate 
 " editorial " comment upon his " news." When he wishes 
 to set forth his ideas explicitly, he writes a book of 
 popular philosophy: Mental Efficiency, The Feast of 
 St. Friend, The Plain Man and His Wife. If these 
 books were as well known to the American public as the 
 novels are, we should hear no more in this country about 
 Mr. Bennett's lack of ideas. On the contrary, all our 
 women's clubs would be debating, in their eager simple- 
 hearted fashion, " The Philosophy of Arnold Bennett." 
 
 Mr. Darton, more sophisticated than our fellow coun-
 
 REALISM OF ARNOLD BENNETT 107 
 
 trymen, says in effect that the philosophy in these 
 books is not worth discussing; and it does not seem to 
 occur to him that it can have any bearing upon Mr. 
 Bennett's fiction. The works named above have been 
 advertised in England, he tells us, as containing " big, 
 strong, vital thinking." But, he continues, " big, 
 strong, vital thinking is just what these remarkable 
 little books do not contain. They contain the com- 
 pletest common-sense, expressed with astonishing sim- 
 plicity and directness, and based upon unimpeachable 
 honesty of outlook. They are a guide to efficiency, to 
 self-help, to practical idealism, to alertness of intelli- 
 gence, to sinewy culture, to every high quality which 
 every crass Briton has always thought the crass Briton 
 does not show. The United Kingdom is almost over- 
 stocked with agencies for the purpose, from the physical 
 energies of Mr. Sandow to the benevolent writing of the 
 late Lord Avebury. . . . They are quite perfect lay ser- 
 mons. But " and these are the damning words " they 
 are not original." I perfectly agree that Mr. Bennett's 
 general ideas are not " original," and on the whole com- 
 mend his judgment in not tying up his art to anything 
 so transitory as a " new " philosophy. I object to the 
 implication, in which Mr. Wells will rejoice, that because 
 they are old they are dead or deficient in strength and 
 vitality. I will not stand upon the word " big," a term 
 which should be reserved for the use of advertizing man- 
 agers and radical reformers. But I cannot reconcile 
 Mr. Darton's description of these books as guides to 
 every high quality needed by the crass Briton with his 
 assertion that there is no criticism in the Five Towns
 
 108 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 novels, except on what seems to me the untenable as- 
 sumption that Mr. Bennett, the popular novelist, and 
 Mr. Bennett, the popular philosopher, are distinct and 
 non-communicating beings. I shall attempt to show 
 that the novelist's treatises on conduct are related to his 
 artistic representation of it. 
 
 The beginning of wisdom, according to this philos- 
 ophy, which runs counter to our current naturalism, is 
 the recognition of a fundamental duality in human ex- 
 perience. Mr. Bennett presumes not God to scan. He 
 is as completely emancipated from religious metaphysics 
 as any of his contemporaries. Like a true child of his 
 scientific age, he takes nothing on authority; he brings 
 everything to the test of his experience. But looking 
 into himself as a microcosm, he sees and reports that the 
 universe consists of a controlling power, which is the 
 quintessence of man; and of a power to be controlled, 
 which is nature. The zest, the object, the compensation 
 of existence lie in the possibility of extending the domin- 
 ion of the human over the natural power, the voluntary 
 over the involuntary impulses, the conscious over the un- 
 conscious agents. " For me," he says, " spiritual content 
 (I will not use the word ' happiness,' which implies too 
 much) springs from no mental or physical facts. It 
 springs from the spiritual fact that there is something 
 higher in man than the mind, and that something can 
 control the mind. Call that something the soul, or what 
 you will. My sense of security amid the collisions of 
 existence lies in the firm consciousness that just as my 
 body is the servant of my mind, so is my mind the serv- 
 ant of me. An unruly servant, but a servant and pos-
 
 REALISM OF ARNOLD BENNETT 109 
 
 sibly less unruly every day! Often have I said to that 
 restive brain : ' Now, O mind, sole means of communica- 
 tion between the me and all external phenomena, you 
 are not a free agent ; you are subordinate ; you are noth- 
 ing but a piece of machinery ; and obey me you shall." 
 
 The responsibility for extending the dominion of man 
 over his own nature and, indirectly, over his remoter 
 circumstances, Mr. Bennett, in opposition to our popu- 
 lar sociological doctors, places primarily upon the indi- 
 vidual. While Mr. Wells, for example, urges us to cast 
 our burdens and our sins upon society, and goes about 
 beating up enthusiasm for schemes to improve the " mind 
 of the race " by leagues of Samurai and legislative enact- 
 ments, Mr. Bennett fixes his eye upon plain John Smith, 
 and says : " I am convinced that we have already too 
 many societies for the furtherance of our ends. To my 
 mind, most societies with a moral aim are merely clumsy 
 machines for doing simple jobs with a maximum of fric- 
 tion, expense, and inefficiency. I should define the 
 majority of these societies as a group of persons each 
 of whom expects the other to do something very wonder- 
 ful. Why create a society in order to help you perform 
 some act which nobody can perform but yourself? " 
 Arnold Bennett says disappointingly little about that 
 " big " idea, " the mind of the race." And whenever he 
 contemplates that impressive and admired abstraction 
 " the backbone of the nation," it resolves itself under 
 his realistic gaze into the by-him-no-less-admired but 
 certainly less generally impressive spinal columns of 
 John Smith and other homely vertebrates. 
 
 In dealing with the relations of John Smith to Mrs.
 
 110 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 Smith, the Victorian Bennett feels obliged to say, in 
 opposition to those who hold out for these plain people 
 the prospect of a life of freedom and sustained ecstasy 
 to be attained by upsetting the established order, that 
 most of our ideas of freedom and ecstasy are romantic 
 will-o'-the wisps. In the recent " evolution " of society 
 he perceives rapid changes for the better in living condi- 
 tions and a gradual amelioration of manners and tastes, 
 but no significant alteration in the elements of human 
 nature. " Passionate love," he insists, " does not mean 
 happiness ; it means excitement, apprehension, and con- 
 tinually renewed desires." " Luxury," he adds, " ac- 
 cording to the universal experience of those who have had 
 it, has no connection whatever with happiness." " Hap- 
 piness as it is dreamed of cannot possibly exist save for 
 short periods of self-deception which are followed by ter- 
 rible periods of reaction. Real practicable happiness 
 is due primarily not to any kind of environment, but to 
 an inward state of mind. Real happiness consists first 
 in an acceptance of the facts that discontent is a condi- 
 tion of life, and, second, in an honest endeavor to adjust 
 conduct to an ideal." 
 
 It must infuriate an advocate of moral revolution like 
 Mr. Wells, to hear Mr. Bennett, bracketed with him as 
 a leader of the new school, asserting that " the great 
 principles, spiritual and moral, remain intact." It 
 must perplex an apologist for moral anarchy and stri- 
 dent self-assertion like Mr. Dreiser to find a fellow real- 
 ist declaring that " after all the shattering discoveries 
 of science and conclusions of philosophy, mankind has 
 still to live with dignity amid hostile nature," and that
 
 REALISM OF ARNOLD BENNETT 111 
 
 mankind can succeed in this tremendous feat only " by 
 the exercise of faith and of that mutual good will which 
 is based on sincerity and charity." But what must dis- 
 tress them beyond measure is this able craftsman's expo- 
 sition of the relation of moral conventions to artistic 
 form. " What form is in art, conventions are in life. 
 . . . No art that is not planned in form is worth con- 
 sideration, and no life that is not planned in conventions 
 can ever be satisfactory. . . . The full beauty of 
 an activity is never brought out until it is subjected to 
 discipline and strict ordering and nice balancing. A 
 life without petty artificiality would be the life of a 
 tiger in the forest. . . . Laws and rules, forms and 
 ceremonies are good in themselves, from a merely 
 aesthetic point of view, apart from their social value and 
 necessity." 
 
 These are the ideas of a man who has taken his stand 
 against Mr. Wells's Utopia on the one hand and against 
 Mr. Dreiser's jungle on the other. As old as civilized 
 society, they have the conservative complexion of all 
 traditional and enduring things. They are not worth 
 discussing if they are not challenged. Like fire and 
 water, they do not appear vital till they are denied. 
 Ordinarily a novelist has not needed consciously to 
 concern himself with them unless he has intended to 
 trample them under foot. But in the face of the present 
 naturalistic invasion, when humanistic ideas are in the 
 trenches, under fire, fighting for existence, a novelist 
 who paints men in preference to tigers, supermen, or 
 scientific angels, has interestingly taken sides. His 
 preference is an entirely discussable " criticism of life."
 
 112 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 The general theme of Mr. Bennett's masterpieces, 
 determined by the central interest of his philosophy, is 
 the development of character in relation to a society 
 which is also developing. He has no foolishly simple 
 mechanical formula for the process. He has rather a 
 sense that this relationship involves an interplay of 
 forces of fascinating and inexplicable complexity. 
 
 His sense of the marvelous intricacy of his theme ex- 
 plains his elaborate presentation of the community life 
 in which his principal figures have their being. He is 
 bent upon bringing before the eye of the reader every 
 scrap of evidence that may be conceived of as rele- 
 vant to the " case." The reader who believes that 
 character is determined mainly by inherited physiologi- 
 cal traits finds in the Five Towns novels a physiological 
 account of three successive generations. The reader 
 who holds that education is the significant factor is 
 abundantly supplied with the educational history of 
 father and children and grandchildren. The reader who 
 lays stress upon a changing environment and the pres- 
 sure of the hour sees how from decade to decade and 
 from year to year the hero or heroine is housed and 
 clothed and fed and occupied and amused ; and wrought 
 upon by parents and children and relatives and friends 
 and servants and strangers; and subjected to the influ- 
 ences of social customs and business and politics and 
 religion and art and books and newspapers transmitting 
 to the thick local atmosphere the pressure of the world 
 outside. The reader who looks for the main currents of 
 the nineteenth century in the Five Towns discovers the 
 Clayhanger family and their neighbors developing in
 
 REALISM OF ARNOLD BENNETT 113 
 
 relation to the democratic movement, the industrial rev- 
 olution, the decay of dogmatic theology, the extension 
 of scientific thought and invention, the organization of 
 labor, and the diffusion of aesthetic consciousness. 
 One's first impression before this spectacle is of admira- 
 tion at the unrelenting artistic energy which keeps this 
 presented community life whole and steady and yet per- 
 ceptibly in motion through a long span of time. 
 
 One's second impression is of admiration at the force 
 of composition which keeps the principal figures from 
 being " swamped " in the life of the community. They 
 are immersed in it and dyed in it and warped and bat- 
 tered and grooved by it; yet they are never made to 
 appear as its impotent creatures ; somehow they are 
 made to emerge above their " environment " as its cre- 
 ators and preservers its plain, grim, but enduring 
 heroes. The secret of this " somehow " is that Mr. 
 Bennett implicitly recognizes as an artist what he ex- 
 plicitly declares as a popular philosopher, namely, the 
 existence in the individual of something deeper than the 
 body, deeper than the mind an ultimately responsible, 
 independent, spiritual, self with the power to control, 
 in some measure, its circumstances. 
 
 In his preface to The Old Wives' Tale he tells us that 
 the originating impulse of that work was a conviction 
 that a " heartrending novel " might be written to ex- 
 press " the extreme pathos in the fact that every stout 
 aging woman was once a young girl with the unique 
 charm of youth in her form and movements and in her 
 mind." The theme as he states it is only the threadbare 
 platitude of cavalier poetry the deciduousness of phy-
 
 114 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 sical beaut j ; and its pathos is only skin deep. But the 
 theme as he develops it is the spiritual truth sung by 
 George Herbert " only a sweet and virtuous soul, like 
 seasoned timber never gives " ; and its pathos is indeed 
 heartrending. Constance and Sophia, the two heroines 
 of The Old Wives' Tale, appeal to tragic compassion not 
 because they were young and have grown old and gro- 
 tesque but because they hungered for life and love, yet 
 quietly and proudly starved in their respectability rather 
 than touch a morsel of forbidden food. After a consid- 
 erable course of reading in the " temperamental " novels 
 of the naturalistic school, one begins to feel that the re- 
 sisting power of formed character has vanished from the 
 earth. I shall not forget the sigh of relief that I uttered 
 when I came upon a certain passage in the story of 
 Sophia's resistance to the various invitations of Paris 
 sensuality. The poor girl in her loneliness craving for 
 sympathy and affection finds her physical and mental self 
 responding involuntarily to the ardent wooing of the 
 kindly Chirac. " ' My dear friend,' he urges with un- 
 daunted confidence, ' you must know that I love you.' 
 She shook her head impatiently, all the time wondering 
 what it was that prevented her from slipping into his 
 arms." She does not slip into his arms ; and one rejoices 
 not because one's moral sense is gratified, but simply 
 because one is pleased to find occasionally a novelist who 
 recognizes the inhibited impulse, in the sexual connection, 
 as among the interesting facts of life. Mr. Bennett por- 
 trays persons with various powers of inhibition ; but he 
 does not give the place of hero or heroine to a slave of 
 instinct. He paints an abundance of unlovely men and
 
 REALISM OF ARNOLD BENNETT 115 
 
 women hard, shrewd, smart, selfish, bigoted; but the 
 interest of his story centers in the deliberate acts of 
 rational beings, who are conscious, like Hilda Lessways, 
 of their miraculous power " to create all their future 
 by a single gesture," and who have or achieve some of 
 the substance and fixity of character. By the very 
 design of his novels Mr. Bennett reveals his admiration 
 for the prudent, foresighted, purposeful people. The 
 man who has himself in hand he makes, by his com- 
 positional emphasis, a measure of the subordinated 
 figures. 
 
 The Clayhanger trilogy, triumphantly completed by 
 the publication of These Twain, expresses with the mov- 
 ing force of dramatic representation the ideas more 
 simply exposed in The Plain Man and His Wife. The 
 first volume has for its theme the development of the 
 character of Edwin Clayhanger from the formlessness 
 of his boyhood to the steadiness, honesty, application, 
 efficiency, solidity, tolerance, justice, and self-control of 
 his manhood. The theme of the second volume is the 
 development of the characters of Hilda Lessways from 
 the innocent, ignorant rebelliousness and rapturousness 
 of girlhood through a brief ill-advised matrimonial ad- 
 venture to the vibrant, hopeful, open-eyed egoism and 
 rather grim determination of early womanhood. The 
 theme of the third volume is the further development of 
 this " dynamic " and that " static " character through 
 the difficult and at times almost baffling process of adapt- 
 ing themselves to living together as man and wife. 
 Taken together the three novels constitute an impressive 
 dramatic criticism of Mr. Wells's theory of the life of
 
 116 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 sustained ecstasy and, if you please, of Mr. Dreiser's 
 theory of the life of ruthless animality. 
 
 It is clear that Mr. Bennett has attempted to present 
 in the completed trilogy an adequate account of the 
 fiery conflict, with typical antagonists, of the Eternal- 
 Feminine and the Eternal-Masculine. If you are a man, 
 you will writhe, or you ought to writhe, at the exposure 
 in Edwin of your own obstinate conviction that you 
 think straight and that your wife does not, and at the 
 exposure of your hot fits of indignation at her shifty 
 evasions of your flawless argument. If you are a woman, 
 you will blush, or ought to blush, at the exposure in 
 Hilda of your own illogicality and your willingness to 
 gain ends commendable no doubt by perfectly un- 
 scrupulous means. Hilda respects and loves her hus- 
 band deeply, but she is irritated by his colds, by his 
 little set habits, by the deliberateness of his temper, and 
 by the inarticulateness of his appreciation of her. 
 Edwin loves his wife and feels the charm and force of 
 her personality; but he distrusts her intellect and can- 
 not entirely approve her morality. He is exasperated 
 by her interference in his business. He keenly resents 
 the injustice in which she involves him through acts 
 inspired by her ambition for him and by her passionate 
 and jealous devotion to the advancement of their own 
 family interests. She develops social aspirations in 
 which he does not share, and a desire for a style of liv- 
 ing which promises him increased burdens with no added 
 satisfaction. Their common effort seems to multiply 
 luxuries and superficial refinements without in the least 
 sweetening or deepening or strengthening their spir-
 
 REALISM OF ARNOLD BENNETT 117 
 
 itual intercourse. He tells himself in a moment of 
 intense self-commiseration that the great complex edifice 
 of his business " with its dirt, noise, crudity, strain, and 
 eternal effort " exists solely that Hilda may exist " in 
 her elegance, her disturbing femininity, her restricted 
 and deep affections, her irrational capriciousness, and 
 her strange, brusque commonsense." He asks himself in 
 poignant self-pity : " Where do I come in ? " After 
 repeated scenes of domestic tension he walks out of his 
 house and home with hot brain and twitching nerves. 
 He mutters to himself : " She won't alter her ways and 
 I shan't stand them." In what he takes for ultimate 
 despair, he says to himself, " as millions of men and 
 women have said to themselves, with awestruck calm: 
 ' My marriage was a mistake.' ' 
 
 But as this plain, average man wanders aimlessly 
 through the streets of the Five Towns with tumult in 
 his breast, confronting the ruin of his private universe, 
 he has an experience comparable in character and in 
 significance to him with that of Thomas Carlyle when in 
 sultry Leith Walk he authentically took the Devil by 
 the nose. When his brain cools and his nerves stop 
 twitching and his formed character returns to its equi- 
 librium, he has first a flashing intuition into a method 
 by which he can reconcile himself to his " universe." 
 " It was banal; it was commonplace; it was what every 
 one knew. Yet it was the great discovery of all his 
 career. If Hilda had not been unjust in the assertion of 
 her own individuality, there could be no merit in yielding 
 to her. ... He was objecting to injustice as a child 
 objects to rain on a holiday. Injustice was a tre-
 
 118 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 mendous actuality! It had to be faced and accepted. 
 (He himself was unjust. At any rate he intellectually 
 conceived that he must be, though honestly he could 
 remember no instance of injustice on his part.) To 
 reconcile oneself to injustice was the master achieve- 
 ment. . . . He yielded on the canal-bridge. And in 
 yielding, it seemed to him that he was victorious." For, 
 and this is the second part of Edwin's spiritual experi- 
 ence, in the instant when he gains the wisdom he feels in 
 his innermost self the power to put it into effect. His 
 joyous sense that he is not going to be " downed " by 
 his circumstances, he expresses with a certain crudity 
 perhaps with a certain vulgarity; but something may 
 be forgiven a man who has just solved the " problem of 
 marriage " " I'm not going to be beaten by Hilda ! 
 And I'm not going to be beaten by marriage. Dashed 
 if I am ! A nice thing if I had to admit that I wasn't 
 clever enough to be a husband ! " Clayhanger does not 
 return to his home with a notion that his discovery will 
 " transform marriage into an everlasting Eden." He 
 anticipates further trouble and further sacrifices. But 
 he has found content by accepting discontent as a condi- 
 tion of life, and by honestly endeavoring to adapt his 
 conduct to an ideal. In his recognition of the need of 
 a more flexible intelligence and a stiffer backbone he 
 embodies at once the principle of progress and the prin- 
 ciple of conservation. He is a hero of his generation, 
 not victorious but conquering. He cannot stand like 
 Benham in The Research Magnificent, and say, " I am a 
 Man. The Thought of the world." But he might 
 stand, if he had the habit of attitudinizing, and say,
 
 REALISM OF ARNOLD BENNETT 119 
 
 " I am a man. A vertebral unit in the backbone of the 
 nation." 
 
 One cannot plan a life in conventions without cutting 
 out of it many wayward desires and " beautiful im- 
 pulses." The young lions and lionesses of radicalism are 
 forcing the question upon us whether one can plan a life 
 in beautiful impulses and wayward desires without cut- 
 ting out the plan. Mr. Bennett answers in the negative, 
 and votes for preserving the plan. I do not undertake to 
 speak critically of his philosophy. I only observe that 
 it seems to support an altogether decent theory of 
 human conduct. And this in turn underlies an artistic 
 representation of life remarkable for its fullness, its 
 energy, its gusto, its pathos, its play of tragic and comic 
 lights, its dramatic clashes, its catastrophes, and its 
 reconciliations in short, for its adequacy. I fear that 
 my reasoning will not make much impression upon the 
 young, for the young, as Mr. Randolph Bourne tells us, 
 the young are in love with life; and to accept conven- 
 tions is to refuse life. The young will still turn to Mr. 
 Wells, " for he," says Miss Rebecca West " for he has 
 inspired the young to demand clear thinking and intel- 
 lectual passion from the governing classes, instead of the 
 sexual regularity which was their one virtue and which 
 he has hinted is merely part of a general slothfulness and 
 disinclination for adventure." As I sadly take my place 
 in the rear of the " cretinous butlers " who " do not like 
 Mr. Wells," I summon my Christian charity to declare 
 that much shall be forgiven a champion of Mr. Wells, 
 whose critical arrows go singing, like this sentence of 
 Rebecca West's, straight to the heart of laughter.
 
 THE AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF 
 GEORGE MOORE 
 
 IT is now about forty years since George Moore, not 
 content with the priestly auditor provided by his Church, 
 abandoned the private confessional and began to pour 
 along the town the secret flood of his ideas and emotions. 
 How could he have done otherwise? Ireland taught his 
 tongue not to cleave to the roof of his mouth; Roman 
 Catholicism taught him to confess his sins; Jean 
 Jacques, his Delphian Apollo, taught him to dulcify 
 and ventilate them. He has been as beguilingly various 
 in the moods and forms of his personal effusions as in 
 the matter and manner of his ostensibly objective prose 
 fiction. Like most born men of letters, he delivered his 
 first message to the world in verse Flowers of Passion, 
 1877. In Confessions of a Young Man, 1888, he adopts 
 a glittering, paradoxical, impudent ruthless air befit- 
 ting a young man who has lived in Paris and passed 
 through all the illusions. With Memoirs Of My Dead 
 Life, 1906, he lowers his pitch, softens his accents, in- 
 troduces a note of pleased satiety and gloating languor 
 proper to the sensuous reminiscences of later middle-age. 
 In .the three volumes of Hail and Farewell, 1911-14, he 
 holds our attention still by subtler modulations of his 
 malicious revery, by a studied alteration of nakedness 
 
 120
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 121 
 
 and filmy sophistication in his garb, by the dreamy 
 femininity of his gesture, by the lax almost unaccented 
 movement of his voice. In his alluring latest manner, 
 always dulcet, always fluent, he has laid bare a person- 
 ality compact of nearly everything that is detestable 
 to the mind of a plain citizen going about his business in 
 the marketplace. He has confessed consuming egotism, 
 quivering sensibility, fastidiousness, vanity, timidity, 
 calculating shamelessness, sensuality, a streak of feline 
 cruelty, and absolute spiritual incontinence. Manet's 
 portrait of him, the weird, wide-eyed face veiled in wispy 
 hair, corresponds to his own unflattering self-por- 
 traiture : an elderly Irish satyr fluting among the reeds 
 to a decadent Irish naiad, and, in the pauses of the 
 fluting, mingling reminiscences of his adventures, artis- 
 tic and amatory, with the notes of the impressions made 
 by the fading sunlight upon his soul. 
 
 Though this personality possesses a certain acrid 
 bouquet of its own, it challenges our attention less by 
 its uniqueness than by its representativeness. Clearly 
 enough he was cast if anything so essentially fluid 
 can be said to have been cast in that temperamental 
 mold which Rousseau idly intimated was broken up 
 after his own creation. That temperament at work 
 in contemporary art and morals, persisting unaltered 
 under many manifestations, he represents with remark- 
 able consistency and completeness. Purely intellectual 
 initiative he has none: but he has been swiftly respon- 
 sive to every new influence in art and literature. All 
 his life he has lurked in the purlieus of schools and 
 insinuated himself into movements, solicitating, like the
 
 122 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 barren Calpurnia, the fructifying touch of some fleet 
 clear-eyed runner. His literary liaisons have been as 
 facile and as frequent as the infatuations of George 
 Sand. He has succumbed in turn, not to enter into par- 
 ticulars, to three movements, very different on the sur- 
 face but impelled by the same general undercurrent : he 
 has been wooed, won, and lost by " aesthetism," natural- 
 ism, and the symbolism of the Irish Renaissance. Let 
 us trace here the course of this interesting " evolution." 
 
 The first step in the aesthetic novitiate is the prepa- 
 ration of the self for its own independent activity by 
 detaching it from the complex organic network of do- 
 mestic, social, racial, national, and religious relation- 
 ships in which it has been placed by the irrelevant acci- 
 dent of birth. In the Confessions of a Young Man Mr. 
 Moore dismissed in a page or two the Ireland of his 
 childhood. The reason was obvious : it had nothing to 
 do with the first phase of his literary career. From the 
 day when he read the Sensitive Plant of Shelley " by the 
 shores of a pale green Irish lake," he was destined to 
 shake from his feet the dust of Ireland, he was devoted 
 to art and letters, and dedicated to the continuation of 
 Shelley's terrible mission the " emancipation " of the 
 human spirit. 
 
 An impressionable Irishman who had severed all nat- 
 ural ties could easily enough in the early 'seventies of 
 the last century, have become a perfect aesthete in Eng- 
 land. The spring had come slowly up that way, but 
 at last it had definitely announced itself. Rossetti, 
 having struck the note of intensity in painting and 
 poetry, had gone on to the collection of blue china and
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 123 
 
 Japanese bric-a-brac. In 1870 William Morris com- 
 pleted The Earthly Paradise. Ruskin in the same year 
 began to lecture on art at Oxford, teaching to be sure, 
 from his own high ethical standpoint the pregnant 
 doctrine that taste is morality. In 1873 Pater put 
 forth his seductive studies in the art and poetry of the 
 Renaissance, setting up the aesthetic ideal in Mona 
 Lisa, committing to posterity the aesthetic testament 
 in the famous Conclusion. Before the end of the decade 
 Moore's fellow-countryman Wilde was delighting his 
 circle, shocking the burgesses, and achieving notoriety 
 by brilliant paradoxes and the hard gem-like beauties 
 of strange verse. In ten years the aesthetic movement 
 had run its swift course through beauty to intensity 
 and thence to perverseness ; and it had produced an 
 effective school for the transformation of English 
 youths into sun-flowered Corinthian dandies. 
 
 Of this Oxford aestheticism Mr. Moore felt the influ- 
 ence in due season, but he somewhat anticipated its 
 effects by crossing the Channel to France, and at once 
 immersing his divested soul in the Lethe of an alien art. 
 There he was gradually born again in the Ptolemaic 
 world of the Latin Quarter, in the free society of the 
 temporarily and permanently untied, in an atmosphere 
 of smoke bounded by an horizon of canvas. There the 
 deracinated Irishman assumed the language and the 
 pleasures of the Parisian without assuming his responsi- 
 bilities, lived in bachelor apartments surrounded with 
 rare books, old furniture, and fantastic curios ; rose at 
 noon and retired at daybreak, and maintained a model 
 and a python the latter daily propitiated with guinea-
 
 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 pigs. Mistresses and pythons, cameos and sphinxes 
 these were the themes of his favorite poets and ro- 
 mancers, representatives of an older than the English 
 aestheticism and potent contributors to it Gautier and 
 Baudelaire, Banville and Verlaine. In the unreal world 
 of the studios which he haunted, Bohemian dreamers 
 were painting dancing girls borrowed from the unreal 
 world of the stage, Aphrodites rising from the sea, 
 Harlequins and Columbines. In this little eccentric 
 planet where the problems of good and evil resolved 
 themselves into questions of green and gold, light and 
 shadow, line and mass, pleasure and pain, Mr. Moore 
 seems to have learned all the morality that he has ever 
 practiced or advocated. 
 
 After a sojourn in Paris so long that he almost forgot 
 the idiomatic use of English, he returned to England, 
 an appetent and ambitious ego, in time to catch the 
 aesthetic movement of the late 'seventies. In 1877, 
 synchronizing with Oscar Wilde's arrival as a poet, he 
 published his first book, of which the title, Flowers of 
 Passion, sufficiently indicates the character and the 
 literary inspiration. He followed this up in 1881 with 
 Pagan Poems, and for several years to come diverted 
 himself as a journalist, critic of art, realistic novelist, 
 and fop. The experiences and the spirit of the aes- 
 thetic period are adequately represented in Confessions 
 of a Young Man. As there was nothing novel in the 
 processes by which Mr. Moore was turned out an 
 aesthete, so there was nothing novel in the product. 
 The compact gospel of aesthetic egotism unfolded by 
 his Young Man in 1888, France had received from
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 125 
 
 Gautier and Baudelaire twenty to fifty years earlier. 
 Mr. Moore's originality consisted merely in carrying 
 Parisian " aestheticism " the corrupt leavings of the 
 Romantic Movement across the Channel, and offering 
 it to the Anglo-Saxon world. Let us have a few jewels 
 from the monument which he raised to eternalize his 
 youth : 
 
 My father's death freed me, and I sprang like a loosened 
 bough up to the light. His death gave me power to create 
 myself, that is to say, to create a complete and absolute self 
 out of the partial self which was all the restraint of home 
 had permitted; this future self, this ideal George Moore, 
 beckoned me, lured me like a ghost; and as I followed the 
 funeral the question, Would I sacrifice this ghostly self, if 
 by so doing I should bring my father back ? presented itself 
 without intermission, and I shrank horrified at the answer 
 which I could not crush out of mind. 
 
 Art was not for us then as it is now, a mere emotion, 
 right or wrong only in proportion to its intensity. 
 
 I am feminine, morbid, perverse. But above all perverse, 
 almost everything perverse interests me, fascinates me. 
 
 I could not understand how anybody could bring himself 
 to acknowledge the vulgar details of our vulgar age. The 
 fiery glory of Jose de Heredia, on the contrary, filled me 
 with enthusiasm ruins and sand, shadow and silhouette of 
 palms and pillars, negroes, crimson, swords, silence, and 
 arabesques. 
 
 Two dominant notes in my character an original hatred 
 of my native country, and a brutal loathing of the religion I 
 was brought up in. 
 
 A little bourgeois comfort, a little bourgeois sense of 
 right, cry the moderns. Hither the world has been drifting 
 since the coming of the pale socialist of Galilee: and this is 
 why I hate Him, and deny His divinity. ... I, who hold
 
 126 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 nought else pitiful, pity Thee, Thy bleeding face and hands 
 and feet, Thy hanging body; Thou at least art pictur- 
 esque. . . . 
 
 The healthy school is played out in England: all that 
 could be said has been said. 
 
 What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites 
 died under Pharaoh's lash or Egypt's sun? It was well 
 that they died that I might have the pyramids to look on, 
 or to fill a musing hour with wonderment. 
 
 I am ashamed of nothing I have done, especially my sins, 
 and I boldly confess that I have desired notoriety. 
 
 Humanity is a pigsty, where liars, hypocrites, and the 
 obscene in spirit congregate: and it has been so since the 
 great Jew conceived it, and it will be so till the end. Far 
 better the blithe modern pagan in his white tie and evening 
 clothes, and his facile philosophy. He says: " I don't care 
 how the poor live; my only regret is that they live at all," 
 and he gives the beggar a shilling. 
 
 In this year of grace these glowing Neronics no longer 
 make us shudder; they are happily beginning to make 
 us yawn. The sickly little poetasters in America who 
 have attempted in recent years to dish this decayed 
 pottage up again are even from a merely aesthetic point 
 of view beneath mention and beneath contempt. If any- 
 thing is dead, the aesthetic movement that took shape 
 in the 'seventies is dead. The sphinxes and the green 
 carnations, the flowers of passion and the ballads in blue 
 china, already associate themselves in memory with the 
 stucco and the stuffed birds of an elder decorative 
 scheme. To burn always with a hard, gem-like flame 
 before a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance no 
 longer epitomizes for the younger generation, " success 
 in life." Where are the aesthetes of yesteryear ? Where
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 127 
 
 are our Oscar Wildes and Ernest Dowsons and Aubrey 
 Beardsleys? Where are the authors and illustrators of 
 the Yellow Book and the Savoy? Early death made 
 havoc in their ranks, Socialism distracted the younger 
 generation, fresh pastures invited them. They have left 
 the banks of their Dead Sea desolate. Somewhat in 
 advance of the general exodus, Mr. Moore's prescient 
 nostrils perceived a fetid odor rising from the waters, 
 and he took refuge among the " naturalists," or, as he 
 called them in those days, the " realists." 
 
 It may appear at first thought a far cry from feeding 
 guinea-pigs to pythons, and indulging in Neronic mus- 
 ings on the Egyptian pyramids, to writing a realistic 
 novel of life in the slums of London. As aesthete, Mr. 
 Moore had declared that he did not care how the poor 
 lived. In 1894, as realistic novelist, he brought out 
 Esther Waters, the intimate life history of an illiterate 
 servant-girl who in the course of her squalid existence 
 spent some time in the poor-house. If the author's con- 
 fession did not belie the suggestion, we might infer that 
 a great change had come over him. Knowing him as we 
 do, we are not permitted to conjecture that his contempt 
 for the lower classes has dissolved in compassion for the 
 poor. We must seek for the point of view from which an 
 English scullery maid can be made to yield artistic sat- 
 isfaction equivalent to that formerly yielded by the per- 
 fumed lady of romance. 
 
 We may approach the question by remarking that this 
 point of view had been discovered by several of Mr. 
 Moore's masters in fiction by Balzac, Maupassant, 
 and, notably, Flaubert. That relentless lover of le mot
 
 128 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 unique occupies in French literature a position closely 
 corresponding to that occupied by Mr. Moore in Eng- 
 lish: he is the link between the romanticists and the 
 realists. Frenchman and Irishman were temperament- 
 ally akin; open the Education Sentimentale, and through 
 page after page you will feel as if you were in the pres- 
 ence of an earlier version of Mr. Moore's memoirs. 
 Formed in the intensely aesthetic school of Gautier and 
 Baudelaire, Flaubert, like the Young Man, held that the 
 only virtue is perfection of form. Fundamentally en- 
 grossed in sex, he, too, craved refinement in the seduc- 
 tion of the senses the intoxication of perfumes, the 
 allurement of lace, religious veilings, Oriental coloring, 
 barbaric splendors. Finally, he, too, abhorred and de- 
 spised the Philistine and all his virtues. Salammbo, La 
 Tentation de Saint Antoine, Herodias such are the 
 works one should expect from a man of his romantic 
 origins. Why, then, does this great romantic artist 
 bend all his talents to the portrayal of the bourgeois life 
 of Madame Bovary, depraved wife of a stupid country 
 doctor? Why, then, does this despiser of the vulgar 
 herd cause to be bound up in the same volume with 
 Herodias, the tale of an ignorant, sensual, long-suffering 
 servant-girl (Un Coeur Simple), obviously related to 
 Esther Waters? 
 
 Upon this peculiar transition from romanticism to 
 realism Mr. Moore throws a luminous beam in several 
 passages of his works commenting upon an artistic inno- 
 vation of Degas. To this original painter, a man of 
 penetrating intellect, belongs, according to our author, 
 the credit for discovering that the nude was becoming
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 129 
 
 well-nigh incapable of artistic treatment. To him be- 
 longs also the credit for the discovery of a method for 
 rehabilitating the nude. The formula is novelty through 
 cynicism. Having asked the rhetorical question, " Who 
 in sheer beauty has a new word to say? " Degas sent for 
 a butcher's fat wife, and requested her to pose for him. 
 Following the clue of ugliness, Degas escaped from the 
 tedious palace of romantic art into a new world of vivid 
 sensations. Mr. Moore's delight with the results he 
 has expressed in Confessions of a Young Man, in Im- 
 pressions and Opinions, 1891, and again in the first vol- 
 ume of Hail and Farewell, 1911. The following passage 
 is from Impressions and Opinions: 
 
 Three coarse women, middle-aged and deformed by toil, 
 are perhaps the most wonderful. One sponges herself in a 
 tin bath: another passes a rough nightdress over her lumpy 
 shoulders, and the touching ugliness of this poor human 
 creature goes straight to the heart. A woman who has 
 stepped out of a bath examines her arm. Degas says, La 
 bete humaine qui s'occupe d'elle-meme; une chatte qui se 
 leche. Yes, it is the portrayal of the animal life of the 
 human being, the animal conscious of nothing but itself. 
 
 How superbly these figures stand forth in the hard 
 clear light of contempt ! George Eliot digressed in a 
 familiar passage in Adam Bede to protest against the 
 exclusion from art of Dutch subjects " old women 
 scraping carrots with their work-worn hands . . . 
 rounded backs and stupid, weather-beaten faces that 
 have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the 
 world." But George Eliot did not find it necessary to 
 strip her old women or peep at them through a keyhole ;
 
 it was not their essential animality but their essential 
 humanity that attracted her; and the kindly light which 
 fills her pictures is that light of moral sympathy and 
 love which irradiates the bowed head of Wordsworth's 
 leech-gatherer. A man detached from his species like 
 Mr. Moore defends the ugly in art on entirely different 
 grounds. Aesthetically very piquant indeed ! As " pic- 
 turesque," when your eyes have been opened to it, 
 as the crucifixion of Christ ! That, so far as he is con- 
 cerned, is a sufficient justification of naturalism. 
 
 Mr. Moore has profited by the lessons of Degas. 
 How he probed into the animal life of his laundress when 
 he was writing Esther Waters he has related with gusto. 
 How in that novel he opened the door upon the physical 
 terrors of childbirth the reader may determine for him- 
 self, if he is not already satiated with the innumerable 
 morbid and hysterical representations of later writers. 
 Moore's aesthetic zest in the repulsive he has carried 
 over into the sentimentalities of his memoirs, employing 
 quite habitually a dash of the disgusting as a sauce 
 piquante to intensify the sweetness of his reveries. If it 
 were possible for him to make a perfectly straightfor- 
 ward explanation of his use of the nauseous, he would 
 tell us just this: It is an aesthetic novelty. But when 
 an aesthete introduces an indecency in the Anglo-Saxon 
 world, he still hesitates a little to admit that it is intro- 
 duced merely to furnish a new sensation. He assumes 
 for the moment the air of the veracious and dispassion- 
 ate historian ; he says with a false appearance of candor : 
 It is a fact of civilization. A good illustration of this 
 pseudo-scientific pose of the artist may be seen in this
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 131 
 
 record of his observation of a house-maid in Confessions 
 of a Young Man: 
 
 Emma, I remember you you are not to be forgotten up 
 at five o'clock every morning, scouring, washing, cooking, 
 dressing those infamous children; seventeen hours at least 
 out of the twenty- four at the beck and call of landlady, 
 lodgers, and quarreling children; seventeen hours at least 
 cut of the twenty-four drudging in that horrible kitchen, 
 running upstairs with coals and breakfasts and cans of hot 
 water; down on your knees before a grate, pulling out the 
 cinders with those hands can I call them hands? The 
 lodgers sometimes threw you a kind word, but never one 
 that recognized that you were akin to us, only the pity that 
 might be extended to a dog. And I used to ask you all 
 sorts of cruel questions; I was curious to know the depth 
 of animalism you had sunk to, or rather out of which you 
 had been raised. And generally you answered innocently 
 and naively enough. But sometimes my words were too 
 crude, and they struck through the thick hide into the quick, 
 into the human, and you winced a little ; but this was rarely, 
 for you were nearly, oh, very nearly an animal; your tem- 
 perament and intelligence were just those of a dog that has 
 picked up a master, not a real master, but a makeshift 
 master who may turn it out any moment. Dickens would 
 sentimentalize or laugh over you; I do neither. I merely 
 recognize you as one of the facts of civilization. 
 
 The last sentence, being interpreted, means, " I merely 
 aestheticize over you." The kinship with Degas extends 
 below the surface. Mr. Moore's work is conceived and 
 produced in a cynical contempt for humanity a con- 
 tempt which he had fed and fattened from every avail- 
 able source. From Baudelaire, Degas, and Zola he 
 derived his conception of the aesthetic possibilities of
 
 132 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 the human beast ; and Zola gave him the formula, natur- 
 alisme, la verite, la science. These direct literary and 
 artistic influences were reinforced in the 'eighties by 
 some acquaintance with the pessimistic philosophy of 
 Schopenhauer and of Eduard von Hartmann, which in 
 this same period was shaping the cynical spirit of 
 Samuel Butler. A Teutonic-Oriental nihilism was about 
 the most perverse and blighting spirit then abroad in 
 the land; accordingly Mr. Moore embraced it, and did 
 what he could to propagate it. " That I may die child- 
 less," exclaims his Young Man, " that when my hour 
 comes I may turn my face to the wall saying, I have not 
 increased the great evil of human life then, though I 
 were a murderer, fornicator, thief, and liar, my sins 
 shall melt even as a cloud. But he who dies with chil- 
 dren about him, though his life were in all else an excel- 
 lent deed, shall be held accursed by the truly wise, and 
 the stain upon him shall endure forever." His convic- 
 tion that existence is an evil is modified by a conviction 
 that existence may be made fairly savory by an artist 
 with plenty of money who rids himself of Christianity, 
 his conscience, and his humanitarian sympathies, and 
 with nicely calculating selfishness gratifies his natural 
 impulses. 
 
 Mr. Moore is an accomplished literary artist : that is 
 to say, he is a master of the means necessary to produce 
 the effects which he preconceives. Lewis Seymour in 
 A Modern Lover, Mr. Moore's first novel published in 
 1883, is an eloquently cynical representation of the 
 successful Victorian artist, flowering in the studios, 
 boudoirs, and ball-rooms of the late 'seventies. " Lewis,"
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 133 
 
 says the historian with a grimace, " believed in passion, 
 eternal devotion, and, above all, fidelity; he could not 
 understand the sin of unfaithfulness, in any shape or 
 form; without truth, there could not be love, and how 
 any man could make love to his friend's wife, passed his 
 comprehension." So much for the Victorian ideality. 
 Lewis, like the hero of Maupassant's Bel Ami, lives 
 mentally and physically at the expense of the numerous 
 women whom he captivates ; he flirts with his models ; he 
 goes up the aisle of the church in which he is married 
 past pews full of the ladies with whom he has been inti- 
 mate ; in the days of his honeymoon his bride discovers 
 upon his finger a diamond ring sent to him by a married 
 mistress ; he prospers exceedingly, and is elected to the 
 Academy. So much for the Victorian reality. If you 
 exclaim, " This is mere caricature," Mr. Moore replies 
 in the Confessions that " the whole " of his own " moral 
 nature is reflected in Lewis Seymour." 
 
 As a foil to Lewis as artist, he introduces a group of 
 " realist " painters who are sick of sentiment and the 
 " conventional prettiness of things." They can put up 
 with the sentiment of Swinburne's leper, because the sub- 
 ject is fresh and unhackneyed. Instead of occupying 
 themselves, like Sir Frederick Leighton, for example, with 
 " graceful nymphs languishing on green banks, either 
 nude or in classical draperies," they paint " housemaids 
 in print dresses, leaning out of windows, or bar-girls 
 serving drinks to beery-looking clerks." This they de- 
 clare is the "positivism of art," and they rejoice that 
 they have achieved an art in accord with the philosophy 
 of the age. Mr. Moore's entire picture of society in
 
 A Modern Lover is a contribution to the new " realism." 
 It is an exhibit offered in support of the thesis of the 
 Restoration dramatists, that every man is a sensualist 
 and every woman a rake. The thesis is proved by the 
 simple Restoration device of representing every pro- 
 fessed allegiance to ideal standards as a hollow sham. 
 
 His second novel, A Mummer's Wife, 1884, " reeks " 
 more powerfully of actuality than any other of his works 
 before Esther Waters; but its special interest is still 
 more or less " theoretical." It is an exhibit offered in 
 support of a thesis selected from Duruy's L'lntroduc- 
 tion Generate a VHistoire de France: " Change the sur- 
 roundings in which a man lives, and in two or three gen- 
 erations, you will have changed his physical constitu- 
 tion, his habits of life, and a goodly number of his 
 ideas." The novel is a kind of English " transposition " 
 of Madame Bovary t flavored with a handful of something 
 of Zola's. Kate Ede, the soft, good-natured, respectable 
 wife of a horribly asthmatic shopkeeper whose physical 
 agonies are rendered with disgusting closeness, escapes 
 mentally from the humdrum of her shop and sewing- 
 room by reading sentimental poetry and cheap romantic 
 novels. It never occurs to her to make any attempt to 
 realize her romantic dreams till a traveling theatrical 
 company visits the town, and a gross but amiable actor 
 is lodged in her house. She brings him hot water in the 
 morning and serves him his breakfasts ; they chat at odd 
 moments and surreptitiously visit a crockery factory; 
 after a few meetings and facile embraces in dark hall- 
 ways, she runs away with him and travels with the 
 troupe. Her good-humored fat-legged companion the
 
 fat legs and good humor are about the only notes of 
 his character treats her kindly, and obligingly marries 
 her; but under the new Bohemian influences Kate's 
 respectability disintegrates, she begins to tipple, she 
 becomes morbidly jealous and furiously quarrelsome, 
 and she dies in squalid and nauseating dipsomania. 
 As a study in mental and physical dissolution A Mum- 
 mer's Wife is wonderfully impressive. The analysis 
 and the representation of drunken female rage are 
 beyond praise. The total emotional effect upon the 
 reader resembles that of an intense sea-sickness a some- 
 what novel aesthetic effect. With notable self-restraint, 
 Mr. Moore in this case strives for a hard, clear, dry 
 objectivity. He offers no moral conclusion; so that the 
 orthodox moralist is at liberty to say, Here is a stinging 
 illustration of the consequences of drink and adultery. 
 But if there is any sincerity in Mr. Moore's personal 
 writings, we may be sure that, if called upon, he would 
 moralize the tale in some such fashion as this : Don't go 
 in for the fast life if you haven't the stamina to stand 
 the pace. 
 
 To introduce such a moral as this into the book would 
 spoil Mr. Moore's aesthetic effect. He does not intend 
 here to present his gospel of enlightened egotism. He 
 desires only to convey to the reader his sense of the dull 
 pathos of things his contemptuous pity for humanity ; 
 and he marvellously well understands how to do it. 
 There is page after page as poignant as this description 
 of Kate in her rapid decline : 
 
 She had a box in which she kept her souvenirs. They
 
 136 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 were a curious collection. A withered flower, a broken 
 cigarette-holder, two or three old buttons that had fallen 
 from his clothes, and a lock of hair. But it was underneath 
 these that lay the prize of prizes a string of false pearls. 
 Never did she see this precious relic without trembling, and 
 to put it round her neck for a few minutes after her lonely 
 dinner when she was waiting for him to come home, charmed 
 and softened her as nothing else did. It was a necklace 
 she had to wear in a comedietta they had both played in, 
 The Lover's Knot. Well did she remember the day they 
 had gone to buy it together ; it had been one of the happiest 
 in her life. But it was precisely the reaction caused by 
 these moments of tenderness that was terrible to witness. 
 Gradually from looks of dreamy happiness the face would 
 become clouded, and as bitter thoughts of wrongs done her 
 surged up in her mind, the tiny nostril would dilate and 
 the upper lip contract, until the white canine tooth was 
 visible. For ten minutes more she would remain, her hands 
 grasping nervously at the arms of her chair: by that time 
 the paroxysm would have obtained complete mastery over 
 her, and with her brain deaf and cold as stone she would 
 walk across the room to where the liquor was kept, and 
 moodily sipping gin-and-water, she would form plans as 
 to how she would attack him when he arrived home. 
 
 In A Drama in Muslin, 1886, Mr. Moore sets himself 
 a more complex task than he undertakes in A Mummer's 
 Wife, and his treatment of this theme is intensely per- 
 sonal. He paints here on a fairly wide canvas Irish 
 social life in town and country in the days of the Land 
 League. His central characters are four or five girls 
 belonging to various country families, who have just 
 completed their education in a convent and are now to 
 be provided with husbands and careers. The spirit in 
 which Mr. Moore approaches his subject I have already
 
 indicated by a quotation from his nearly contempo- 
 raneous Confessions : " Two dominant notes in my char- 
 acter an original hatred of my native country, and a 
 brutal loathing of the religion I was brought up in." 
 Let us supplement this with another passage from the 
 same source, indicating his attitude toward the popular 
 discontent in Ireland which threatened to cut off his 
 revenues and forced his return from Paris a passage 
 breathing the spirit of the Nietzschean HerrenmordL 
 and the German invasion of Belgium: 
 
 That some wretched farmers should refuse to starve, 
 that I may not be deprived of my demi-tasse at Tortoni's, 
 that I may not be forced to leave this beautiful retreat, my 
 cat and my python monstrous. And these wretched crea- 
 tures will find moral support in England; they will find 
 pity! Pity, that most vile of all virtues, has never been 
 known to me. The great pagan world I love knew it not. 
 Now the world proposes to interrupt the terrible austere 
 laws of nature which ordain that the weak shall be tram- 
 pled upon, shall be ground into death and dust, that the 
 strong shall be really strong, that the strong shall be 
 glorious, sublime. 
 
 Mr. Moore's problem, then, is to make his picture of 
 Irish society express adequately his contempt for it 
 and, incidentally, for humanity in general. I will enu- 
 merate and illustrate some of the means by which he 
 accomplishes his end. 
 
 In the first place he makes his characters creatures 
 of heredity and environment, according to the naturalis- 
 tic formula; and he insists with brutal emphasis upon 
 physiological structure as the determining element in
 
 138 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 their behavior. How explicit his shallow pseudo-sciene,, 
 becomes may be illustrated by the following paragraph : 
 
 Alice Barton's power to judge between right and wrong, 
 her love of sentiment, her collectedness, yes, I will say her 
 reasoned collectedness were, as has been partially shown, 
 the consequence of the passivity of the life and nature of 
 her grandfather (the historian); her power of will, and her 
 clear, concise intelligence were inherited from her mother, 
 and these qualities being placed in a perfectly healthy sub- 
 ject, a subject in whom every organ functioned admirably, 
 the result was a mind that turned instinctively from mystic- 
 ism and its adjuncts. . . . And Cecilia's dark and illogical 
 mind can also be accounted for, her hatred of all that con- 
 cerned sexual passion was consequent on her father's age 
 and her mother's loathing for him during conception and 
 pregnancy; and then, if it be considered that this trans- 
 mitted hatred was planted and left to germinate in a mis- 
 shapen body, it will be understood how a weird love of the 
 spiritual, of the mystical, was the almost inevitable psychical 
 characteristic that a human being born under such circum- 
 stances would possess. 
 
 The conduct of each of the young girls is deduced 
 from the shape of her limbs, the color of her eyes and 
 hair, her complexion, and other carefully enumerated 
 physical marks. From Alice Barton's " thin arms and 
 straight hips and shoulders " Mr. Moore proves her 
 " natural powerlessness to do aught but live up to the 
 practical rectitudes of life, as she conceived them to 
 exist " ; and accordingly Alice is married to a prosaic 
 doctor, and lives a life of dull British respectability. 
 The " amorous plenitude " of arm and bosom in her 
 sister Olive and her extremities flowing into " chaste
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 139 
 
 slendernesses " mark her out for a vapid and futile pur- 
 suit of a titled husband. May Gould is a round, soft- 
 limbed girl : " the soft, the melting, the almost fluid 
 eyes, the bosom large and just a little falling, the full 
 lips, the absence of any marked point or line, the rolling 
 roundness of every part of the body announced a want 
 of fixed principle, and a somewhat gross and sensual 
 temperament." May gives and takes pleasure as oppor- 
 tunity offers, and fares as prosperously as any of her 
 friends. Cecilia, having a deformed body, necessarily 
 conceives of life as " a libidinous monster crouching in a 
 cave, with red jaws dripping with foul spume." She 
 abhors equally Alice's honest marriage and May's 
 liaisons: " It is the same thing; one seeks a husband, an- 
 other gratifies herself with a lover. It is the same 
 thing. Where's the difference? It is animal passion 
 all the same." 
 
 Mr. Moore himself takes essentially Cecilia's position. 
 For him animal passion is the reality underlying all the 
 mummeries of marriage, society, fashion, and religion. 
 He finds his " fun," as Henry James would say, in strip- 
 ping off the masks. Here, for example, is his not alto- 
 gether sympathetic account of the celebration of the 
 Mass in the presence of an elegantly hypocritical gentry 
 and a brutal and superstitious peasantry : 
 
 The mumbled Latin, the by-play of the wine and water, 
 the mumming of the uplifted hands, were so appallingly 
 trivial, and, worse still, all realisation of the idea seemed 
 impossible to the mind of the congregation. Passing by. 
 without scorn, the belief that the white wafer the priest held 
 above his head, in this lonely Irish chapel, was the Creator
 
 140 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 of the twenty millions of suns in the Milky Way, she (Alice) 
 mused on the faith as exhibited by those who came to wor- 
 ship, and that which would have, which must have, inspired 
 them, were Christianity now, as it once was, a burning, a 
 vital force in the world. Looking round, what did she see? 
 Here, at her elbow, were the gentry. How elegantly they 
 prayed, with what refinement ! Their social position was as 
 manifest in their religion as in their homes, their language, 
 their food. The delicate eyelids were closed from time to 
 time; the long slim fingers held the gilt missals with the 
 same well-bred grace as they would a fan; their thoughts 
 would have passed from one to the other without embarrass- 
 ment. Clearly they considered one the complement of the 
 other. At the Elevation, the delicate necks were bowed, 
 and, had lovers been whispering in their ears, greater mod- 
 esty could not have been shown. 
 
 They had come to be in the absolute presence of God, the 
 Distributor of Eternal rewards and punishments and yet 
 they had taken advantage of this stupendous mystery to 
 meet for the purpose of arranging the details of a ball. 
 
 The peasantry filled the body of the church. They 
 prayed coarsely, ignorantly, with the same brutality as they 
 lived. Just behind Alice a man groaned. He cleared his 
 throat with loud guffaws: she listened to hear the saliva 
 fall: it splashed on the earthen floor. Further away a 
 circle of dried and yellowing faces bespoke centuries of 
 damp cabins, brutalising toil, occasional starvation. They 
 moaned and sighed, a prey to the gross superstition of the 
 moment. One man, bent double, beat a ragged shirt with 
 a clenched fist; the women of forty, with cloaks drawn over 
 their foreheads and trailing on the ground in long black 
 folds, crouched until only the lean hard-worked hands that 
 held the rosary were seen over the bench rail. The young 
 men stared arrogantly, wearied by the length of the service. 
 
 They, too, had come to be in the absolute presence of 
 God the Distributor of Eternal rewards and punishments 
 and yet they had taken advantage of the occasion of this
 
 stupendous mystery for the purpose of arranging a land 
 meeting. 
 
 One can readily enough understand why a " blithe 
 pagan " like Mr. Moore finds little to enlist his sympa- 
 thies in witnessing a celebration of the Mass in a little 
 Irish chapel. It is not so easy to explain why he sustains 
 his air of disgust in describing such eminently 
 " worldly " scenes as the great ball at Dublin Castle. 
 The fact is that he is a pretty poor " pagan," and not 
 very " blithe." He is a nineteenth century " naturalist " 
 who has read Schopenhauer's essay on women and has 
 seen an opportunity for a novel aesthetic effect in a 
 sneeringly anti-romantic representation of the relations 
 between men and women. He describes this brilliant 
 event of the social season very much as a hunter of 
 literary turn might describe the behavior of a herd of 
 elk in mating time a hunter who should take his stand 
 with the females of the herd, and try to interpret 
 their emotions of nervous expectation and their efforts 
 to make themselves attractive to the ranging males. 
 In Mr. Moore's opinion the women novelists George 
 Eliot, George Sand, and the rest have failed to 
 utilize the opportunities of their sex ; they have written 
 like men; they have left unpictured the mating en- 
 counter as seen from the feminine point of view. Mr. 
 Moore with his feminine intuitions has stepped into the 
 breach, has familiarized himself with the mysteries of 
 petticoats and lingerie, and has shown just how the 
 despicable man-hunt looks to intriguing mammas and 
 rosy compliant daughters and to the hysterical feminist
 
 142 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 of 1885. His picture reminds one very faintly of 
 Jane Austen; but she dissipates romance with eight- 
 eenth century common sense, and he with the cynicism 
 of a nineteenth century naturalist. His contempt for 
 the whole social exhibition is curiously emphasized by 
 the interjection of an occasional highly-wrought para- 
 graph in the manner of Huysmans, descriptive of the 
 silks and shoulders and odors, which, for the sniffing 
 aesthetic observer, constitute the high points of the 
 occasion. Has any English novelist written a more ex- 
 quisite appreciation of dress goods than this? 
 
 With words of compliment and solicitation, the black- 
 dressed assistant displayed the armouries of Venus ar- 
 mouries filled with the deep blue of midnight, with the 
 faint tints of dawn, with strange flowers and birds, with 
 moths, and moons, and stars. Lengths of white silk clear 
 as the notes of violins playing in a minor key; white poplin 
 falling into folds statuesque as the bass of a fugue by Bach ; 
 yards of ruby velvet, rich as an air from Verdi played on 
 the piano; tender green velvet, pastoral as hautboys heard 
 beneath trees in a fair Arcadian vale; blue turquoise faille 
 Franaise fanciful as the twinkling of a guitar twanged 
 by a Watteau shepherd; . . . white faille, soft draperies 
 of tulle, garlands of white lilac, sprays of white heather, 
 delicate and resonant as the treble voices of children sing- 
 ing carols in dewy English woods ; berthas, flounces, plumes, 
 stomachers, lappets, veils frivolous as the strains of a 
 German waltz played on Liddell's band. 
 
 Has any one ever exhibited greater connoiseurship 
 in shoulders than appears in the following? 
 
 There heat and fatigue soon put an end to all coquetting
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 143 
 
 between the sexes. The beautiful silks were hidden by the 
 crowd; only the shoulders remained, and, to appease their 
 terrible ennui, the men gazed down the backs of the women's 
 dresses stupidly. Shoulders were there, of all tints and 
 shapes. Indeed, it was like a vast rosary, alive with white, 
 pink, and cream-colored flowers: of Marechal Niels, Souve- 
 nir de Malmaisons, Mademoiselle Eugene Verdiers, Aimee 
 Vibert Scandens. Sweetly turned adolescent shoulders, 
 blush white, smooth and even as the petals of a Marquise 
 Mortemarle; the strong commonly turned shoulders, abun- 
 dant and free as the fresh rosy pink of the Anna Alinuff; 
 the drooping white shoulders full of falling contours as 
 pale as a Madame Lacharme ; the chlorotic shoulders, deadly 
 white, of the almost greenish shade that is found in a 
 Princess Clementine . . . and, just in front of me, under 
 my eyes, the flowery, the voluptuous, the statuesque shoul- 
 ders of a tall blonde woman of thirty whose flesh is full 
 of the exquisite peach-like tones of a Mademoiselle Eugene 
 Verdier, blooming in all its pride of summer loveliness. 
 
 Finally, has any writer in English ever given to the 
 odors of the human herd more lyrical expression than 
 this? 
 
 Momentarily the air grew hotter and more silicious; the 
 brain ached with the dusty odor of poudre de ris, and the 
 many acidities of evaporating perfumes; the sugary sweet- 
 ness of the blondes, the salt flavours of the brunettes, and 
 this allegro movement of odors was interrupted suddenly 
 by the garlicky andante, deep as the pedal notes of an 
 organ, that the perspiring arms of a fat chaperone slowly 
 exhaled. 
 
 What is the artistic intention of these purple para- 
 graphs? They are designed to intensify the curious
 
 dull emotion of revulsion which a healthy human being 
 feels in the presence of a subtly derisive representation 
 of his kind a representation of human weakness and 
 folly and sensuality unrelieved by the admission of any- 
 thing sacred, anything noble, anything morally sound 
 and sweet. A novelist who cares a rap about represent- 
 ing life whole feels bound to establish somewhere in his 
 picture of the human scene " reflectors " of the light of 
 his own ideals or of his common sense, if he has no ideals. 
 This light may be reflected by some of the characters in 
 the action; it may be irradiated over them all by the 
 author's comments upon the characters ; it may even 
 flash out with adequate illumination from the course of 
 the action itself. At the points in Mr. Moore's narra- 
 tive where one looks for light, what does one find? 
 Well, when one turns from the petty and sordid " souls " 
 of his presented characters, one is invited by the author 
 to fix one's mind upon the sounds of their dress goods, 
 the tones of their skins, and the tastes of their 
 odors! 
 
 Does Mr. Moore sympathize with any of the charac- 
 ters in A Drama in Muslin? Yes, at certain points of 
 the story he sympathizes with the intellectual position of 
 Alice Barton. This young woman has at least partly 
 emancipated herself from religious and conventional 
 modes of thought. She has half-formulated for herself 
 George Moore's own naturalistic philosophy. She be- 
 lieves that " the most feasible mode of life is to try to 
 live up to the ordinary simple laws of nature of which 
 we are but a part." " In an obscure and formless way," 
 he says, " she had divined the doctrines of Eduard von
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 145 
 
 Hartmann, the entire and unconditional resignation of 
 personal existence into the arms of the cosmic process." 
 Her solution beautifully makes an end of the moral 
 conflict of the ages the struggle of man to subject his 
 lower to his higher nature, to make his conduct conform 
 to an ideal of conduct : she would make " the ends of 
 nature also the ends of what we call conscience " just 
 as the other animals do. Virtue under this principle 
 consists in frankly yielding to one's instincts. The 
 misery of life comes from resisting them. If you resist 
 them it is because you are a hypocrite, or a coward, or a 
 fool. 
 
 It is not necessary to examine in detail all Mr. 
 Moore's later " realistic " representation of man as 
 animal. Novels like Spring Days, for example, which 
 was published in 1888, and Vain Fortune, published in 
 1890, are comparatively insipid performances, and they 
 add nothing to our previous impression of his methods 
 and purposes. Nor need we tarry long over his realistic 
 masterpiece Esther Waters, 1894. It is the most elab- 
 orate and learned study in literature of the English 
 housemaid and barmaid and her environment. When 
 Mr. Moore was a youth, before Shelley had kindled his 
 imagination, he acquired an intimate knowledge of cer- 
 tain aspects of life in his father's racing stables; and 
 to this fund of special information he has added from 
 time to time by intimate studies of charwomen and 
 chambermaids. Drawing upon these rich resources, he 
 has recreated with amazing verisimilitude all the smells 
 and sights and voices amid which Esther's stubborn 
 " will-to-live " shaped her inconspicuous career: jockeys
 
 146 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 and stable-talk, kitchen wenches and kitchen talk, the 
 lying-in hospital, the nursery where unwelcome children 
 are killed off at 5 " per," the bedroom in the garret, 
 the tavern, the drunkards, the race-track, the betting- 
 man, the street-walkers, and only so much of the life 
 above stairs as an English " slavey " sees. Esther has 
 an illegitimate child by a man in livery at her first place 
 of employment. The man in livery is dismissed because 
 he is courted by a young lady who is a guest upstairs. 
 Later Esther also loses a position through the amorous 
 approaches of a young gentleman in the house to whose 
 advances she has not responded. After her first slip 
 she is kept straight by a dogged, instinctive, passionate 
 fidelity to her child by the necessity of keeping in her 
 employer's graces so that she and her child may live. 
 In the course of eight or ten years she meets again and 
 marries the man who abandoned her ; but presently he 
 loses all he has in the races, and dies of consumption. 
 The widowed Esther returns to her first mistress, now 
 a widow also; and the two lonely women in the lonely 
 decaying house live on together in an almost sisterly 
 relationship. Her son becomes a soldier, and she is very 
 proud and happy when she sees him in his red uniform. 
 The story has a certain dull gray pathos, for which it 
 has been much admired. Esther is only a strong igno- 
 rant drudge, innately stupid she cannot be taught to 
 read; yet she is the most appealing figure in all Mr. 
 Moore's fictitious world. Her patient endurance of the 
 world, her heroic toil for her offspring, and her all- 
 absorbing maternal passion would awaken elementary 
 and profound sympathies, if one were a little less con-
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 147 
 
 scious of her role as demonstrator of the thesis that the 
 blind instincts of reproduction and self-preservation 
 account for everything that is significant in human 
 destiny. 
 
 If you accept this thesis, you will not judge people 
 as of " good " or of " bad " character. You will only 
 mark in them the strength or the weakness of the " vital 
 force " which impels them to act as they do and not 
 otherwise. If the vital force in them is a powerful 
 driving stream of energy, you will envy and admire 
 them. If it is fluctuating and feeble, you will despise 
 them. The desire to sing, to paint, to pray all these 
 you will recognize as but allotropic phases of sexual 
 emotion. When Mr. Moore had thoroughly grasped 
 this thought, his spirit was cheered and comforted. 
 He had long lacked a hero. He had perhaps grown a 
 little weary of sneering at all things. Some inappeas- 
 able instinct in him demanded some object for his alle- 
 giance. He found his hero, his object of allegiance, in 
 the " cosmic processes." When one compares his novels 
 written in the 'nineties with those written in the 
 'eighties, one perceives a certain shifting in emphasis 
 from the external to the internal factors in character a 
 shifting from a " mechanistic " to a " vitalistic " 
 formula. There is, for example, this distinction between 
 A Mummer's Wife and Esther Waters: the first is a 
 study of the victorious force of environment ; the second 
 is a study of the victorious force of the " will-to-live " 
 and to perpetuate one's kind. 
 
 As a champion of the cosmic processes, Mr. Moore 
 feels a growing interest in artistic sterility and religious
 
 148 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 celibacy and their physiological connections. There is 
 something of his new note, the pathos of sterility, in 
 A Drama in Muslin: there is much more of it in Vain 
 Fortune: and it is plangent in Celibates, 1895. Celi- 
 bates, according to his interpretation, are persons in 
 whom the vital force is feeble, or has been checked and 
 thwarted by some perversity of doctrine or by some hos- 
 tility of environment. Mildred Lawson in Celibates is 
 a study of unchaste chastity. The vital force in her is 
 represented as just strong enough to make her lascivious 
 and just feeble enough to keep her " chaste." She has 
 a queasy appetite for artistic expression and a life of 
 passion: she toys with art and abandons it to toy with 
 and torment a series of lovers ; not virtue but timidity 
 and impotence inhibit her desires. One suspects that 
 she, like many of Mr. Moore's women, is in considerable 
 measure an " autobiographical revelation." She is a 
 Vestal vampire one of the most noxious and noisome 
 creatures in English literature. But mark how artfully 
 Mr. Moore avails himself of her low value, or rather, 
 let us say, of her worthlessness, to raise the " price " of 
 a common commodity. The mouthpiece of the " cosmic 
 processes " in this story is an artist's model who has 
 also served in another capacity one of Mildred's lovers, 
 killed by Mildred's unkindness. Between Mildred and 
 the model this clarification of the moral issues takes 
 place : 
 
 ' I did not know of your existence till the other day. I 
 heard that ' 
 
 ' That I was his mistress. Well, so I was. It appears 
 that you were not. But, I should like to know which of us
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 149 
 
 two is the most virtuous, which has done the least harm. 
 I made him happy, you killed him.' 
 
 In " John Norton," a second story in Celibates, Mr. 
 Moore occupies himself with tracing to a kind of faint- 
 ness of sexual impulse his hero's taste for the marmoreal 
 and virginal type of woman, his taste for monastic 
 severity in his material surroundings, and, finally, his 
 taste for the cloister and an ascetic God. The story is 
 written with aesthetic intensity; and the aesthetically 
 exquisite appreciations of the vernal beauty of Kitty, 
 alive and dead, are calculated to make the casual reader 
 unmindful of the anti-religious innuendo, the insidious 
 malice, which lurks in every page. John Norton is pre- 
 sented a little in the manner of Anatole France, as this 
 passage will perhaps suggest to readers of Thais: 
 
 He rose from the table, and looked round the room. The 
 room seemed to him a symbol the voluptuous bed, the cor- 
 pulent arm-chair, the toilet-table shapeless with muslin of 
 the hideous laws of the world and the flesh, ever at variance 
 and at war, and ever defeating the indomitable aspirations 
 of the soul. John ordered his room to be changed; and in 
 the face of much opposition from his mother, who declared 
 that he would never be able to sleep there, and would lose 
 his health, he selected a narrow room at the end of the 
 passage. He would have no carpet. He placed a small 
 iron bed against the wall; two plain chairs, a screen to 
 keep off the draft from the door, a small basin-stand, such 
 as you might find in a ship's cabin, and a prie-dieu were all 
 the furniture he permitted himself. 
 
 ' Oh, what a relief ! ' he murmured. ' Now there is line, 
 there is definite shape. That formless upholstery frets my 
 eye as false notes grate on my ear': and, becoming sud-
 
 150 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 denly conscious of the presence of God, he fell on his knees 
 and prayed. 
 
 In Evelyn Innes, 1898, and its sequel Sister Teresa, 
 1901, Mr. Moore presents a heroine of genuine artistic 
 temperament and artistic power. She yields with per- 
 fect abandon to the vital forces within her which crave 
 expression in sensual passion and sensuous music. 
 When she has realized all her possibilities as lover and as 
 artist she is impelled to realize with similar complete- 
 ness all the possibilities of the religious life. All phases 
 of her career the sexual, the musical, and the re- 
 ligious are represented as consequences and manifesta- 
 tion of a profound elan vital over which she has no more 
 control than a rose has over its thorns or the sap in its 
 stem or the vermeil tints in its petals. The notion of a 
 rational self-determination, of an intelligible object 
 guiding a man like a star to ideal ends this we are to 
 believe is an illusion. We that is the housemaids and 
 artists with whom Mr. Moore is familiar can do noth- 
 ing but what is predetermined by the blind push in the 
 darkness below and behind us of the unconscious energy 
 which animates the flowers and the beasts of the field. 
 To surrender wholly to the current of our natural 
 impulses, to relish the undirected streaming of our sen- 
 sations, to ask not whither we are drifting this is the 
 way to make the most of ourselves. This is Mr. Moore's 
 philosophy of naturalism. 
 
 We must return now to record Mr. Moore's liaison 
 with his native land. In 1894, three years after the 
 date which Lady Gregory regards as the definitive awak-
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 151 
 
 ening of the Irish imagination, he still thought of Ire- 
 land as a wretched realm by him happily abandoned, 
 where no one did anything " except bring turf from the 
 bogs and say prayers." He was still writing realistic 
 English novels, explaining Ingres and Manet to the 
 British public, and enriching his midnights by the ex- 
 change of impressions and sensations with Mr. Arthur 
 Symons in the Temple. He had begun, however, to hear 
 with increasing interest rumors that a mysterious angel 
 was troubling the waters of the pale green Irish lake. 
 In Kiltartan Lady Gregory was collecting folklore and 
 by humble hearthsides learning the quaint old songs of 
 the peasants. In Dublin a pale, thin poet, William 
 Butler Yeats, was dreaming his way backward into the 
 dim legendary days of Cuchullin and Diarmuid. One 
 momentous night his fellow Templar, Edward Martyn, 
 Roman Catholic, celibate, amateur in letters, hinted in 
 his presence a desire for the ability to compose his plays 
 in Irish. Piquant suggestion! As at the touch of an 
 enchanted wand the closed cavern of Mr. Moore's youth 
 opened, and through his consciousness drifted vague 
 Irish memories faintly pungent like the smoke of a peat 
 fire trailing over a low roof of thatch. Along his nerves 
 he felt a premonitory tingling prophetic of a literary 
 movement. He recalled an ancient saw of Turgenieff's, 
 " Russia can do without any of us, but none of us can 
 do without Russia." What if he should go to Ireland 
 and look into the matter. 
 
 Behold him now in Dublin with bosom bared to every 
 wanton breeze, whiffing and sniffing the exciting air, and 
 eagerly wooing to be wooed. A little chilled by the want
 
 of salvos greeting the return of the distinguished prodi- 
 gal and literary elder brother, he duly casts a superior 
 eye over the undertakings of the Celtic enthusiasts, 
 inspects the theatre, revises plays, passes judgment on 
 poems, and even delivers an occasional speech at a meet- 
 ing of the Gaelic League. But something present in 
 them or lacking in him prevented their working in per- 
 fect unity of spirit. Lady Gregory feared that he 
 would break up the mold of Yeats's mind. He feared 
 that Yeats would break up the mold of his. A suspicion 
 on their side that he was not quite one of them and a 
 tinge of jealousy on his side, reinforced by a conviction 
 that they were " subalterns," widened the rift between 
 them. The fact is that in their divers fashions they 
 loved Ireland as their venerable mother. He, an inter- 
 national philanderer, despised Ireland, hoped that she 
 would make love to him, tell him her secrets, " enwomb " 
 his thoughts, and let him go. It were tedious to detail 
 the long-drawn-out aesthetic coquetry which terminated 
 in his final rupture with England and the formation of 
 the Irish liaison. 
 
 Perhaps the most interesting first fruits of this amour 
 were the volume of sketches entitled The Unfilled Field 
 and the symbolistic novel called The Lake; I have fre- 
 quently tried to read two of his plays but quite without 
 success. The first of these books is comparable in many 
 ways with the justly celebrated work which seems to have 
 inspired it, Turgenieff's Memoirs of a Sportsman. The 
 second is Mr. Moore's own very contemporaneous ver- 
 sion of the unbinding of Prometheus a piece of sym- 
 bolism which summarizes whatever there has been of
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 153 
 
 " Messianic " character in the author's career. The 
 protagonist of this strange fiction is Father Oliver, a 
 Roman Catholic priest, who dwells in a little cottage by 
 a pale green Irish lake. He is fettered there by acci- 
 dent, custom, tradition; the vulture that consumes his 
 liver is the ordinary routine of life. Through more 
 than three hundred pages Father Oliver hovers about 
 this lake, as vague, indeterminate, and purposeless as 
 the mist that gathers and dissolves upon its bosom. At 
 last an imperative instinct quickens in his blood like that 
 which directs the mating and seasonal migrations of wild 
 geese; he steals down to the bank, strips to the skin, 
 hesitates for a moment, then plunges into the deep, 
 swims to the other shore, and flees away. Thus the 
 naturalistic philosophy of Esther Waters, Evelyn Innes, 
 and Sister Teresa is " enwombed " in Ireland. Father 
 Oliver is the spirit of man in modern times; he is the 
 spirit of the Irish Renaissance ; he is, in short, the per- 
 fectly emancipated spirit of George Moore. 
 
 The first volume of Hail and Farewell sets forth in 
 full the considerations and reconsiderations which led 
 Mr. Moore in the days of the Boer War to make his 
 reconnoitering expedition into Ireland and to take coun- 
 sel with the literary chiefs in Dublin concerning the 
 future of art. The second volume treats of the trans- 
 ference from London to Dublin of his bag and baggage, 
 his Manets and his Monets, of his long and earnest 
 endeavor to become a concordant note in the Irish 
 Renaissance, and of his final tragic conviction that 
 Roman Catholicism is hostile to art, and that dogma 
 and literature are incompatible. The anti-Roman thesis
 
 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 gives a certain tenuous continuity, but it appears to 
 be only incidental to the main purpose of the work. 
 The third volume is a melange of reminiscences, musings, 
 and informal criticism. 
 
 The main purpose of Hail and Farewell may best be 
 explained by reference to the nearest French equivalent. 
 In the preface to the great Journal des Goncourt, 
 brother Edmond says : " We have tried to make our 
 contemporaries live again among posterity in life-like 
 guise, to make them live again by the spirited stenog- 
 raphy of a conversation, by the physiological surprise 
 of a gesture, by those flashes of passion in which a per- 
 sonality is revealed, by that je ne sais quoi which renders 
 the intensity of life by noting, in short, a little of that 
 fever which is peculiar to the heady life of Paris." On 
 the 28th of May, 1857, the Goncourt firm entered this 
 thought in their j ournal : Un joli litre pour des souve- 
 nirs publics de son vivant: SOUVENIRS DE MA VIE MORTE. 
 In 1906 Mr. Moore carried out the hint with his 
 Memoirs of My Dead Life. Add to this his earlier 
 Confessions of a Young Man and the Irish trilogy, and 
 the scope of his design becomes apparent : he aspires to 
 be the Goncourt of the English decadence the Boswell 
 of a literary generation. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to remark that the matter of 
 his epos is distinctly inferior. In the French work we 
 are confronted with the real leaders of the generation, 
 the peers of France who received their inheritance from 
 Hugo and Balzac: Flaubert with his life poisoned by 
 remorse for once having coupled two genitives, Gautier 
 exploding in reckless paradox, Sainte-Beuve adorned
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 155 
 
 with earrings of cherries and overflowing in fine mali- 
 cious chat, Taine disputatious, Scherer coldly circum- 
 spect, Renan silent but curious like a respectable woman 
 at a supper of courtesans, Zola comparing notes with 
 Edmond on the pain in his intestines and much more 
 of less and greater import. This gossip at the lowest 
 is still, so to speak, gossip from the tents of the heroes 
 encamped before Troy. When we turn to Mr. Moore's 
 journals, we are not turning to the Goncourt of a cor- 
 responding literary generation in England. We are no 
 longer at the center of the engagement. We are rather 
 regaled with gossip from the camp-followers of the 
 French movement. It is Symons, and Yeats, and Moore 
 against Sainte-Beuve, and Flaubert, and Zola. On the 
 whole, it is an English " Epigoniad " against a French 
 " Iliad." 
 
 Yet as the Goncourt of English " side-issues " Mr. 
 Moore has no rival. He deserves the credit for intro- 
 ducing into English a vivid personal narrative of liter- 
 ary contemporaries, which is almost a new literary form : 
 what though all his heresies were long since anticipated 
 by the guests at the Magny dinners. His work, further- 
 more, so far as the manner is concerned, possesses both 
 the merits and defects of his French predecessors. He 
 says apparently everything that he pleases without 
 regard to the pleasure of living sensibilities. He 
 mingles delightful bits of reverie with passages of 
 studied grossness, pages of piquant dialogue, epigrams, 
 criticisms of music, art, poetry, characters of the living 
 and the dead. Most of his Irish fellow-workers he 
 sketches with the detachment of a whimsical contempt.
 
 156 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 Of " dear old " Edward Martyn, one of the lesser drama- 
 tists, he writes, with his usual felicity of suggestion: 
 
 A great psychologist might have predicted his solitary 
 life in two musty rooms above a tobacconist's shop, and his 
 last habits, such as pouring his tea into a saucer, balancing 
 the saucer on three fingers like an old woman in the country. 
 Edward is all right if he gets his mass in the morning and 
 his pipe in the evening. A great bulk of peasantry with a 
 delicious strain of Palestrina running through it. 
 
 He never lets slip an opportunity to add a comic 
 stroke to his delineation of the character of Mr. Yeats : 
 
 When the hooker that was taking Yeats over to Aran, or 
 taking him back to Galway, was caught in a storm, Yeats fell 
 upon his knees and tried to say a prayer; but the nearest 
 thing to one he could think of was, " Of man's first dis- 
 obedience and the fruit," and he spoke as much of " Para- 
 dise Lost " as he could remember. 
 
 As usual, Mr. Moore writes with most particularity 
 and interest of himself. He makes it perfectly clear that 
 Ireland could never be anything to him but an exquisite 
 place to dream in : " Oh, how beautiful is the world of 
 vagrancy lost to us forever, AE. ! " There is nothing 
 finer in all Moore's works than some of these occasional 
 passages of vague and drifting reverie : 
 
 A numbness stole upon my eyelids, and I began to see the 
 strange folk plainer, coming in procession to the altar, 
 headed by the Druids. Ireland was wonderful then, . . . 
 and, opening my eyes, Ireland seemed wonderful in the blue 
 morning that hung above her, unfolding like a flower a 
 great blue convolvulus hanging above the green land, swell-
 
 ing like the sea. My eyes closed again. It seemed to me 
 that I could dream for ever of the gods, and the mysteries 
 of Time, and the changes in the life of Man, of the listless 
 beauty of the sky above, fading imperceptibly as the hours 
 went by. 
 
 After a succession of these fine swan flights, it is 
 amusing to find Mr. Moore comparing himself with 
 Catholic Martyn, and wondering whether it would be 
 wise for him to exchange, " were it possible, a wine- 
 glass of intelligence for a rummer of temperament." 
 More to the point is the passage in which he seems to 
 reveal an awareness that his quarrel is not with Catholic 
 Ireland nor with Protestant England, but with the whole 
 spirit of Western civilization. His final words of self- 
 justification will remind the reader of Dowden's defence 
 of Shelley: 
 
 The right of property holds good in all society; but in 
 the West ethics invade the personal life in a manner un- 
 known to the East, so much so that the Oriental stands 
 agape at our folly, knowing well that every man brings 
 different instincts and ideas into the world with them. The 
 East says to the West, " You prate incessantly about 
 monogamy " A sudden thought darting across my mind 
 left my sentence unfinished, and I asked myself what man- 
 ner of man I was. . . . An extraordinarily clear and in- 
 flexible moral sense rose up and confronted me, and looking 
 down my past life, I was astonished to see how dependent 
 my deeds had always been upon my ideas. / had never been 
 able to do anything that I thought wrong, and my conscience 
 had inspired my books. 
 
 However ill Mr. Moore has prospered in his endeavor 
 to domesticate in England this Franco-Turkish latitude
 
 158 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 of conscience, it must be very satisfactory to him for his 
 own part to look back over a perfectly impeccable past. 
 We Occidentals know little of this inflexible rectitude of 
 conduct. It is at odds with the genius of our morals 
 and of our literature. Even our priests and holy men 
 have not professed it ; they have acknowledged their bad 
 days of backsliding and shameful defeat. For we of 
 English race know ourselves to be men of blood and sin, 
 emerging from the welter and conflict with blotted 
 'scutcheons to partial triumphs ; and, at our final retro- 
 spect, the best of us are of Henry Fifth's mood : 
 
 More will I do; 
 
 Though all that I can do is nothing worth, 
 Since that my penitence comes after all, 
 Imploring pardon. 
 
 To put the whole matter on merely literary grounds, 
 we resist Moore though he is a pretty writer to save 
 Shakespeare, whom, on the whole, year in and year out, 
 we prefer. East is East, and West is West ; and when 
 Mr. Moore has drained that wine-glass of intelligence, 
 he may have another flash of insight, in which he may 
 perceive that it is not dogma and literature that are 
 incompatible, but George Moore and an English tradi- 
 tion of a thousand years. 
 
 If one writes well enough, one may say anything one 
 pleases. A man who takes great pains with his style is 
 likely in the long run to have a devoted following, and 
 to get a hearing, even for his indiscretions and inepti- 
 tudes. If he unites with his talent for dulcet utterance 
 a certain instinct for " sex " and salacity and shocking
 
 middle-class sensibilities, he is pretty sure to become a 
 celebrity, and he has a fair chance of becoming a classic, 
 in his own lifetime. There is at present a strong demand 
 for the sanction given to the discussion of questionable 
 subjects by an unquestionable style. Mr. Moore knows 
 how to meet that demand. Some people read him for 
 his style, and some people read him for his subjects. 
 And so one was not surprised to hear him hailed, not 
 long ago, as the greatest master of English since 
 Thackeray. His latest book, The Brook Keriih, is said 
 by his admirers to exhibit him at his best. The best 
 work of the " greatest master of English since Thack- 
 eray " should be an event of first-rate literary impor- 
 tance. It should, at least, bear " looking into." 
 
 It does. I have looked into it rather carefully and 
 with curiosity sharpened by the fine things that have 
 been said about it. An honest and benevolent critic 
 ought, however, to indicate clearly from what point of 
 view it will bear inspection. It will be a kindness to 
 readers who wish to keep in touch with the really 
 " great " living writers to say frankly what sort of 
 readers will not be able to bear looking into it. The 
 first sort are those who accept the traditional view of 
 the Bible and the life of Jesus: to them The Brook 
 Keriih can be nothing but an impudent and detestable 
 profanation of the sanctuary. The second sort are 
 those who, without accepting all the traditional views 
 of the Bible and the life of Jesus, preserve a profound 
 admiration and reverence for the founders of Chris- 
 tianity and for the poetic truth and beauty of the Scrip- 
 ture: to them The Brook Keriih can hardly fail to
 
 160 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 appear a licentious and ignoble travesty. There remain 
 George Moore's followers, to whom every line of his is 
 precious; and there remain those who can, in the case 
 of a " great " living writer, put aside their own religious 
 and literary predilections, and yield to their quite un- 
 holy curiosity to know what a man like George Moore 
 can have to say about Jesus. 
 
 The book leaves no doubt that Mr. Moore has for 
 many years done a good deal of I will not say, of 
 thinking. Mr. Moore does not think ; he muses. That, 
 for persons of musing temperament, is the charm of his 
 later manner. He has then, I say, done a great deal of 
 musing about his subject. For some reason, Jesus is a 
 phenomenon that has disturbed his equanimity. The 
 Beatitudes, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection have been 
 obstacles to the equable flow of his naturalistic revery. 
 The " cross," the " crown," " renunciation," " self-sac- 
 rifice," " redemption " all these knotty ideas and sym- 
 bols of our need of a spiritual life and of the means of 
 attaining it have puzzled George Moore, have annoyed 
 him, have almost forced him to think. But Mr. Moore 
 does not like to think; it is contrary to the stream of 
 his tendency. And why, he " mutters " to himself, 
 should one do what one does not like? Why, he muses, 
 should one go against the stream of one's tendency? 
 Have not all great artists found themselves by following 
 their tendency? There was Degas, for example. . . . 
 Christian tradition, however dwindled, runs counter to, 
 and thwarts, one's instincts. Clearly, one cannot muse 
 in comfort till one gets this Jesus out of one's system ! 
 
 Novelists and dramatists of this generation have tried
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 161 
 
 various means to get the spiritual Jesus of the gospels 
 out of their systems. Oscar Wilde exorcised the spirit- 
 ual Jesus by repeating to himself that it was an exqui- 
 site Pre-Raphaelitish aesthete who walked in the Garden 
 of Gethsemane. Others have accomplished the same end 
 by repeating to themselves that it was an anarchist, a 
 socialist, a humanitarian enthusiast. George Moore 
 must have mused on these modern literary exorcisms till 
 be became aware that all methods have one common ele- 
 ment ; any one who desires to rid himself of the obsession 
 of the spiritual Jesus has but to put his own natural 
 instinctive self in the place of Jesus. The substitution 
 brings instant relief from the pressure upon the con- 
 sciousness of an exacting alien force. Thus, when Mr. 
 Moore has performed this substitution and has converted 
 Jesus of Nazareth into a sentimental Irish naturalist of 
 our own day, he is no longer troubled by the hallucina- 
 tion of a voice calling : " Follow me." The voice says 
 now : " Follow your inclinations " which, of course, is 
 precisely what he was " getting at." 
 
 Mr. Moore creates the Moore-ish Jesus of this curious 
 fiction untrammelled by the spirit or the letter of the 
 gospel narratives. His Jesus does not die on the cross, 
 but is removed from it alive, and is slowly nursed back 
 to health in the house of Joseph of Arimathasa. It is 
 shortly after the descent from the cross and during the 
 convalescence that the following conversation takes 
 place : 
 
 Joseph asked, not because he was interested in dog breed- 
 ing, but to make talk, if the puppies were mongrels. Mon-
 
 162 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 grels, Jesus repeated overlooking them ; not altogether mon- 
 grels, three-quarter bred; the dog that begot them was a 
 mongrel, half Syrian, half Thracian. I've seen worse dogs 
 highly prized. Send the bitch to a dog of pure Thracian 
 stock and thou'lt get some puppies that will be the sort that 
 I used to seek. 
 
 This is not the most nor the least quotable of the 
 innumerable passages by which our ingenious author 
 gives to his narration a kind of sex-interest in which 
 the gospel story is quite deficient. When the continu- 
 ance of Jesus in Jerusalem becomes dangerous, Joseph 
 sends him into the hills by the brook Kerith. There, 
 among the ascetic Essenes, with whom he had lived be- 
 fore he went out to preach, he dwells as a shepherd for 
 some twenty years, busily occupied in improving the 
 stock by a judicious selection of rams, but finding occa- 
 sion to muse from time to time on the events of the 
 past composing, so to speak, his Memoirs of My Dead 
 Life. In these pastoral musings among the hills, he ex- 
 hibits all George Moore's mental manners or manner- 
 isms picks up a definite theme, toys with it, strays 
 from it, loses the thread, drifts off on the stream of rev- 
 ery, and perhaps eventually drifts back again. It is not 
 to be wondered at that this somewhat languid form of 
 mental activity brings him ultimately around to Mr. 
 Moore's own " intellectual position." Here is a selec- 
 tion of his sayings and musings on pages 365 and 366 : 
 
 Repentance changes nothing, it brings nothing unless 
 grief peradventure. ... I used, he said, to despise the 
 air I breathed, and long for the airs of paradise, but what 
 did these longings bring me? grief. God bade us live on
 
 'AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 163 
 
 earth and we bring unhappiness upon ourselves by desiring 
 heaven. Jesus stopped, and looking through the blue air 
 of evening, he could see the shepherds eating their bread 
 and garlic on the hillside. . . . His thoughts began again, 
 flowing like a wind. ... In the desert he had looked for 
 God in the flowers that the sun called forth and in the 
 clouds that the wind shepherded, and he had learnt to prize 
 the earth and live content among his sheep, all things being 
 the gift of God and his holy will. He had not placed him- 
 self above the flowers and grasses of the earth, nor the 
 sheep that fed upon them, nor above the men that fed upon 
 the sheep. . . . Rites and observances, all that comes under 
 the name of religion, estranges us from God, he repeated. 
 God is not here, nor there, but everywhere: in the flower, 
 and in the star, and in the earth under foot. . . . But 
 shall we gather the universal will into an image and call it 
 God? for by doing this do we not drift back to the start- 
 ing place of all our misery ? We again become the dupes of 
 illusion and desire; God and his heaven are our old enemies 
 in disguise. He who yields himself to God goes forth to 
 persuade others to love God, and very soon his love of God 
 impels him to violent ends and cruel deeds. It cannot be 
 else, for God is but desire; and whosoever yields to de- 
 sire falls into sin. To be without sin we must be without 
 God. . . . Jesus stood before the door of the cenoby, 
 . . . asking himself if any man had dared to ask himself 
 if God were not indeed the last uncleanliness of the mind. 
 (My italics: the "daring" of the question reminds one 
 rather less of Jesus than of the talented poet-editor of the 
 Vaterland.} 
 
 The foregoing passage gives us the positive or " con- 
 structive " message of the book. TEis soft, sentimental, 
 pseudo-pantheism is no doubt really Mr. Moore's? 
 When he expresses it, he speaks with as much sincerity 
 as the chary gods have vouchsafed to him. It is when
 
 164 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 he is steeped to the lips in a vague sweet sense that there 
 is no difference between him and a flower it is in such 
 moments that he writes the " delicious " half-pages that 
 persuade even schone Seelen that he is the greatest 
 master of English since Thackeray. It is when he is in 
 the grip of a vague sense that there is no difference be- 
 tween him and a sheep or, let us say, one of the Essene 
 rams which so much solicit his attention it is in such 
 moments that he writes the sly half-pages which per- 
 suade some of us that he is not far from right: that 
 there is probably no very great difference between his 
 religion and that of the sheep. And so one comes back 
 to a sense that a religion which helps a man make the 
 distinction between himself and a flower has a certain 
 usefulness yet. 
 
 Revenons a nos let us return to Mr. Moore's Jesus. 
 His musing by the brook Kerith has a destructive tend- 
 ency along with its benevolent sentimentality. He muses 
 slowly to the conclusion that his great mission was a 
 mistake ; that a large part of his teaching was fanatical ; 
 that his renunciation of the earthly life was perverse; 
 that his presentation of himself as the Messiah was im- 
 posture. Finally, in the assembly of the Essenes, he 
 confesses his sins. Conducted by a master-confessor, 
 the recital is rather prolix. Here is part of the con- 
 fession : 
 
 I fear to speak of the things I said at that time, but I 
 must speak of them. One man asked me before he left all 
 things to follow me if he might not bury his father first. I 
 answered, leave the dead to bury their dead, and to another 
 who said, my hand is at the plough, may I not drive it to the
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 165 
 
 headland, I answered: leave all things and follow me. My 
 teaching grew more and more violent. It is not peace, I 
 said, that I bring you, but a sword, and I come as a brand 
 wherewith to set the world in flame. ... It seems to me 
 that in telling the story, brethren, I am doing but the work 
 of God: no man strays very far from the work that God 
 has decreed to him. But in the time I am telling I was 
 so exalted by the many miracles which I had per- 
 formed by the power of God or the power of a demon, I 
 know not which, that I encouraged my disciples to speak of 
 me as the son of David, though I knew myself to be the son 
 of Joseph the carpenter; and when I rode into Jerusalem 
 and the people strewed palms before me and called out, the 
 son of David, and Joseph said to me, let them not call thee 
 the son of David, I answered in my pride, if they did not 
 call it forth the stones themselves would. ... A day 
 passed in great exaltation and hope, and one evening I 
 took bread and broke it, saying that I was the bread of life 
 that came down from heaven and that whosoever ate of it 
 had everlasting life given to him. After saying these words 
 a great disquiet fell upon me, and calling my disciples to- 
 gether I asked them to come to the garden of olives with me. 
 And it was while asking God's forgiveness for my blas- 
 phemies that the emissaries and agents of the Priests came 
 and took me prisoner. 
 
 The " great situation " in the book is the confronta- 
 tion of Jesus with the apostle Paul. He staggers into 
 the cenoby of the Essenes one night, full of the " glad 
 tidings of the resurrection " which he has been preaching 
 from Damascus to Jerusalem. He is present through 
 part of .the confession of Jesus, but imagines that he is 
 listening to a madman, and is himself seized with a fit 
 in the midst of the disclosure. Jesus makes several 
 efforts later to persuade Paul that he is indeed the cruci-
 
 166 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 fied Nazarene ; but Paul departs utterly incredulous and 
 unmoved, and goes on his way, proclaiming the risen 
 Lord. Jesus had intended to return to Jerusalem, and 
 to destroy his following by exploding his " legend." 
 But having seen how Paul has set his heart on the resur- 
 rection idea, he hates to do it; he does not do it; he 
 simply disappears, leaving Paul uncontradicted to 
 preach his colossal error throughout the earth " be- 
 cause," as one admiring reviewer has put it, " because 
 in his gentleness he cannot give so much pain " ! 
 
 I can think of but one passage in literature which 
 equals this in its special quality. That is the pas- 
 sage in Tristram Shandy where Uncle Toby picks 
 up the fly which has tormented him cruelly all dinner- 
 time : " I'll not hurt thee, says my Uncle Toby, rising 
 from his chair, and going across the room with the fly 
 in his hand I'll not hurt a hair of thy head : go says 
 he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke 
 to let it escape; go, poor devil, get thee gone, why 
 should I hurt thee? This world surely is wide enough 
 to hold both thee and me." If Jesus were the senti- 
 mentalist that Mr. Moore depicts him, one could imag- 
 ine him tossing his Irish " apologist " out the window 
 with the remark that Uncle Toby addressed to the fly. 
 
 We owe the same debt of attention to Mr. Moore that 
 we should owe to a man who should push his boat into 
 the river above Niagara Falls, ship his oars, and submit 
 to the will of the waters ; he would demonstrate the force 
 and consequences of the current. Mr. Moore has shot 
 the falls of naturalism. We were acquainted with its 
 clear spring in the high mountain home, where Words-
 
 AESTHETIC NATURALISM OF MOORE 167 
 
 worth, drinking, vowed himself " well pleased to recog- 
 nize in nature and the language of the sense, the author 
 of his purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the 
 guardian of his heart, and soul of all his moral being." 
 We had seen Wordsworth's pleasant faith in the con- 
 currence of nature with the moral ends of man elab- 
 orately clothed in the fiction of George Meredith's 
 Richard Feverel, specifically in the chapter entitled 
 " Nature Speaks." We had seen in the work of 
 Thomas Hardy the sweet pantheistic illusion give way 
 to tragic insight into the actual relationship existing 
 between nature and society. He, too, recognized in 
 nature a power that molds the characters and destinies 
 of men. But it was not clear to him that an impulse 
 from a vernal wood would always send a Peter Bell to 
 church or an errant father to his child ; it seemed quite 
 as likely that it would send a Jude to an Arabella or a 
 Tess to an Alec. It appeared, in brief, to his vision 
 that this blind power which moves through all things, 
 though occasionally coinciding with human law, urges 
 men on to the fulfilment of its own tendencies, irrespec- 
 tive of the disasters which may consequently befall them 
 in that social order established and regulated by reason 
 and foresight. Because, however, he is fully aware of 
 the resolute power perpetually conflicting with the in- 
 cessant pressure of instinct, naturalism attains in him 
 to tragedy. His grim symbol of nature and the morality 
 of society is Tess of the D'Urbervilles swinging on the 
 gallows. After Hardy, to speak of the concurrence of 
 nature in the moral ends of man becomes impossible. 
 We have reached the fork in the road ; we must turn to
 
 168 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 the right with reason to guide us into the walled and 
 steepled cities and the civil life of our kind, or turn to 
 the left and trust to instinct. 
 
 Mr. Moore turned to the left. In a few strides 
 he passed beyond good and evil into that wilderness 
 where birds and cantatrices sing, where wild creatures 
 conceive and aesthetes confess, where every creeping 
 thing brings forth its young, and the simple serv- 
 ant girl, having given to the world a natural son, 
 lives happy ever after in the consciousness that she 
 has accomplished that whereunto she was sent. In 
 this Arcadian world there is neither comedy nor trag- 
 edy; for there is neither passion nor joy, conflict 
 nor climax, reconciliation nor catastrophe: there are 
 only the flush and fading of sensual excitement, the 
 vicissitudes of wind and weather, the progress of the 
 seasons, and the cyclic changes of birth and death. Mr. 
 Moore is right in regarding his life as more significant 
 than any of his works. When a man of great talent has 
 made his mind a courtesan to nature, the only tragedy 
 that he can write is his confession. When a man has 
 shaken off the bonds that united him with civil society, 
 the only confession that he can make of significance 
 to civil readers is that such emancipation is exile. What, 
 then, does George Moore mean by telling us that beneath 
 his frivolous mask is concealed a tragic actor?
 
 VI 
 
 THE SKEPTICISM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 
 
 JULES LEMAITRE, one of the most delicately apprecia- 
 tive of French critics, thus defined for himself the charm 
 of Anatole France : " I feel the saturation of his work 
 with all its antecedents; I find in it the latest state of 
 the human consciousness." 
 
 His work thus accomplishes what Mona Lisa, accord- 
 ing to Pater, accomplishes in art " the summing up in 
 itself all modes of thought and life." One escapes in 
 his books from the shallow and savorless modernity of 
 contemporary literature. He is a cosmopolitan not 
 merely of the present year of grace ; he was a citizen of 
 the world before the Christian era. A leisurely aristo- 
 crat, polished, imperturbable, he has strolled with ironic 
 smile among the neglected ruins of antiquity, and has 
 reanimated their fallen splendor. He has walked under 
 the plane trees without the city wall conversing with 
 Socrates and the Sophists on the reality of our ideas. 
 He has discussed Greek philosophy in the Tusculan 
 villa with Cicero, has sauntered over the Aventine chat- 
 ting with Horace, and has listened with bowed head 
 while Virgil read to the grief-stricken household his 
 divine praise of the young Marcellus. He observed the 
 strange star in the East, heard the stories of Lazarus 
 and Magdalen, and dined with Pilate, Procurator of 
 
 169
 
 170 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 Judea. In the Egyptian desert he occupied a cell with 
 the Christian cenobites; in Alexandria he tasted the 
 last luxuries of the pagan world. He caught from the 
 catacombs the fervent murmur of prayer and the mys- 
 terious hymns of the martyrs. He saw with a regret- 
 ful smile nymphs and dryads and fauns at twilight 
 scurrying through country woodlands in terror of the 
 cathedral bell. A lover of masquerade, he has crept 
 into the cassock of mediaeval monks, and gravely an- 
 nounced the performance of miracles, or discoursed 
 upon the lusts of the flesh and the pride of life, or whiled 
 away long hours on a settle in the cloister splitting the- 
 ological hairs with the church fathers. Especially, has 
 he haunted the steps of the Brides of Christ, irresistibly 
 drawn by the allurement of their celestial roses, hoping, 
 perhaps, to catch a drop of the spilled milk of Para- 
 dise. And all this he has told, not as one passing fever- 
 ishly through successive stages of intellectual intoxica- 
 tion, but as one sitting at ease and leaning indolently 
 out from a casement in Elysium. 
 
 More fascinating than all this selected world-experi- 
 ence is the point of view of the narrator. He keeps us 
 wondering where he is. The detachment of M. France 
 is not that of Flaubert or of Maupassant. The realist 
 withdraws a little from his object to gain the proper 
 focus for his microscope. He is nevertheless savagely 
 absorbed in it. He means to bring it home to us, to 
 make us enter into it and feel it tingling in our five 
 senses. M. France, on the other hand, seeks in general 
 to tranquilize the senses. When I say this, I do not 
 forget the vein of cold salacity which runs through his
 
 SKEPTICISM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 171 
 
 works. In presenting the simian proclivities of man he 
 maintains an air of smiling aloofness. He contemplates 
 the troubled face of the world through serene leagues of 
 motionless ether. He will report mundane affairs not 
 to the prurient ears of mortals, but to the gods of Epi- 
 curus who inhabit the quiet above the clouds and winds, 
 and feel from time to time a mild amusement in the 
 human spectacle. Passing beyond the flaming ramparts 
 of the world, he would enter the celestial hall where the 
 blithe Immortals revel, crying : O Shining Ones, let me, 
 a mortal, share your feast. I have withdrawn my heart 
 and hope from the miserable race of men. For they 
 come out of the darkness and struggle like beasts in the 
 brief light and go into the darkness again. All their 
 achievements are but as the excellencies of worms differ- 
 ing among one another. They are rent with a love more 
 cruel than the grave. They are burnt in the fire of their 
 own flesh. They are terrified by the shadows which they 
 cast upon eternity. But I I have learned the secret 
 of your immortal calm. I have found that there is 
 peace for those who are content to perceive and not to 
 possess the world. I have learned to look upon the 
 labors of Hercules without an impulse to lift a finger, 
 upon the temptations of St. Anthony with no stirring 
 of the flesh, upon the crucifixion of the martyrs with 
 scarcely a throb of sympathetic pain. To the ego wisely 
 isolated from the contagious fevers of existence all these 
 things are but as the fierce vexation of a dream. Make 
 me, therefore, a place beside you, and I will tell you 
 tales of men, provoking supernal mirth. 
 
 If one rereads the works of M. France in the English
 
 172 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 translation, one unconsciously associates each succes- 
 sive volume with the bland and laurelled old Epicurean 
 stamped in gold upon the cover. Even with the trans- 
 lator's note reminding us that the volume entitled 
 Jocasta and the Famished Cat was his first venture in 
 fiction, originally published in 1879, it is difficult to 
 think of the author as a young writer, for already he is 
 surveying his contemporaries in their keenest self- 
 absorption with the cool detachment of an old resident 
 in the ivory tower. Jocasta appeared in the heyday of 
 naturalism two years after L'Assommoir, and in its ele- 
 ments it is an ugly piece of bourgeois tragedy with a 
 sentimental heroine hanging herself in a bathhouse with 
 her nephew's necktie, loved by a young surgeon who 
 analyzes his sensations and dissects the nervous system 
 of frogs. In the hands of almost any other writer of his 
 generation this material would have taken shape as a 
 depressing " human document " illustrative of a me- 
 chanical theory of life. But M. France has never grimly 
 adopted the mechanical theory of life; he has only 
 played with it and amused himself with the spectacle of 
 those who were in the grip of it. " A delightfully novel 
 basis for composition," he seems to murmur to himself, 
 " in this notion of scientifically dissecting the nervous 
 system of frogs and heroines. Let us see what can be 
 made of it." The air of artifice, of technical experi- 
 mentation, removes, for my sense, the sting of actuality ; 
 so that the suicide of the modern heroine affects me less 
 than a knife thrust in an old tale of Boccaccio. It 
 affects me rather like a demonstration in geometry or 
 the last move in a game of chess.
 
 SKEPTICISM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 173 
 
 Still, if this somber matter has left a bad taste in the 
 mouth, one has only to turn the page and forget the 
 sordid sorrows of Philistines in a gorgeous chronicle 
 of the picturesque denizens of the Latin Quarter who 
 foregathered at the sign of the Famished Cat. " No 
 one who is sane affords me much amusement," quotes 
 M. France with approval ; and, as he sees it, all Bohemia 
 wears motley. From the windows of the ivory tower 
 he looks down upon the poetical enthusiast in his 
 garret no less than upon the scientific enthusiast in his 
 laboratory. Yet though he preserves here his attitude 
 of aloofness, he portrays his troop of intoxicated origi- 
 nals with an incomparable zest in their idiosyncrasies, 
 and with a mellowness of mirth that suggest an only 
 half-extinguished sympathy. Labanne, the sculptor, 
 who thinks he must read fifteen hundred volumes on 
 the pigmentum of the black races and the geological 
 formation of the Antilles before he can touch clay 
 for his statue of Black Liberty, must occupy a warm 
 place in his creator's learned heart. Indeed, the door 
 of Labanne's studio, with its strange conflict of inscrip- 
 tions carved and chalked by " various people," will seem 
 to some readers almost to epitomize M. France's bewil- 
 dering " criticism of life." These are some of the 
 inscriptions : 
 
 " Womkn is more bitter than death." 
 
 " Academicians are all bourgeois, Cabanel is a hair- 
 dresser's assistant." 
 " Laud we the womanly form, which still, as of old, uplifts 
 
 Chants hieratic, in praise of the greatest of beauty's gifts. 
 
 Paul Dion."
 
 174 
 
 " I have brought back the clean linen. Monday I will 
 call for the dirty at the porter's lodge." 
 
 "Athens, ever venerable city, if thou hadst not existed, 
 the world would not yet know the meaning of beauty." 
 
 " Labanne is a rat. I don't care a damn for him. 
 
 Maria." 
 
 And there were many others on the door. 
 
 The career of Thai's, a fair Alexandrian courtesan 
 of the fourth century, offered unusual attractions to the 
 feasting eye of the philosophic angel. No other writer 
 has realized so completely so deliriously, as a disciple 
 of Renan would say certain artistic possibilities in 
 ecclesiastical history and the legends of saints and mar- 
 tyrs. With few exceptions, romances in English con- 
 cerned with the lives of the early Christians are to any 
 but juvenile readers extremely insipid. It must be ad- 
 mitted that an ulterior religious purpose seldom seems 
 entirely favorable to the art of fiction. Cardinal New- 
 man wrote his pallid and long-forgotten romances in a 
 religious ascetic's revulsion from paganism and with an 
 eye to furthering the cause of Rome. Kingsley, with a 
 more virile art, wrote with a keen detestation of ascetic- 
 ism and with a special pleasure in barking at Newman. 
 Anatole France, perhaps knowing as much about certain 
 aspects of the saints as Newman, and certainly knowing 
 as much about sinners as Kingsley, aspires to write of 
 both like a philosophical angel, hovering a little above 
 the earth, spectator of everything, participator in noth- 
 ing. The belief and the unbelief of Gentile and Jew 
 concern him not at all save as they offer to the aesthetic 
 sense some new note of intensity, some unexploited
 
 SKEPTICISM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 175 
 
 mingling of strangeness with beauty. It is difficult to 
 say whether he enters with more penetrating and illumi- 
 nating curiosity into the life of the Alexandrian beauty 
 and her favorites set in the dazzling luxury of the wicked 
 city, or into the gaunt soul and body of the stylite 
 Paphnutius ringed by the tombs and the desert. The 
 picturesque qualities of both engage him, but from both 
 he preserves a complete spiritual detachment. In the end, 
 however, the mask slips a little from the observant angel, 
 and reveals the smile of the lurking cynic. It is made 
 perfectly clear that Thai's turned toward heaven merely 
 from satiety of the flesh, and that Paphnutius turned 
 toward hell merely from satiety of the spirit a con- 
 clusion sufficiently devoid of edification. There is not 
 one breath of genuine holiness in the book. Yet for 
 piquancy of attack, for malicious insight into the psy- 
 chology of the anchorite, and for sheer brilliancy of rep- 
 resentation there is nothing like this in English. 
 
 M. France is one of the innumerable champions of 
 intellectual emancipation who have compromised the 
 cause of liberty by their libertinism. He will pay his 
 penalty in the inevitable reaction. Inspired by a quite 
 righteous indignation against his subtle voluptuousness 
 and his moral impotence, various French critics 1 have 
 in recent years attempted to damage or to destroy his 
 reputation as a creative artist. His work, they tell us, 
 is deficient in originality; it is but a superlatively bril- 
 
 1 See. for example, Giraud's Maitres de I'Heure, Michaut's 
 Anatole France, and compare Gurard's Five Masters of French 
 Romance. An interesting review of recent critical literature 
 appears in an article by D. S. Blondheim in Modern Philology, 
 July, 1916.
 
 176 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 liant pastiche. A writer whose work is saturated, as 
 M. Lemaitre says, with everything that has preceded 
 it lays himself open to that sort of attack ; and it must 
 be admitted that many of his volumes are very loosely 
 composed. Some of his books, nevertheless, will last as 
 long as men continue to read Lucian, Boccaccio, Rabe- 
 lais, Voltaire. Sylvestre Bonnard has already estab- 
 lished itself as a student's classic. At the Sign of the 
 Reine Pedauque will probably never attain that honor 
 and for " good and sufficient " reasons ; but it is likely 
 to live without that aid. When you have turned the 
 last page, you will recognize that the work belongs on 
 the Index, you may think that it should be supplied with 
 an appendix like Don Juan's classics, you may pitch it 
 into the fire, chuckling like the delighted monastic 
 censors in the painting. But you know very well that 
 you cannot put an end to the abounding life that is in 
 Monsieur PAbbe Jerome Coignard and his reverent 
 pupil Tournebroche. With all their gross imperfec- 
 tions on their heads they are marked, like Tom Jones 
 and Falstaff, for immortality. The English parallels 
 are very inadequate. Tom Jones is only a spirited 
 young animal. Falstaff resembles the abbe in his girth, 
 his geniality, his drunkenness, his larceny, his carnality, 
 and his sentimentality; and yet, after all, Falstaff is 
 but an amiable brutal Englishman without culture or 
 philosophy other than that which we attribute nowa- 
 days to the man in the street. Jerome Coignard par- 
 takes heartily of the common sinful humanity of Sir 
 John, but he includes, besides, within his ample sphere, 
 nearly everything that his creator finds to love, pity,
 
 SKEPTICISM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 177 
 
 and deride in the civilization of the ancients, the Latin 
 Christianity filtered through the Middle Ages, and the 
 rationalism of the early eighteenth century. He is one 
 of the richly endowed rogues of whom one says, " Of 
 course he is an unspeakable rascal, yet you can't resist 
 him." 
 
 Ex-priest, ex-professor of eloquence in the college of 
 Beauvais, ex-librarian to the bishop of Seez, author of 
 a translation of Zozimus the Panopolitan, this wine- 
 drinking, wenching, mellow-hearted debauchee is, like 
 M. France himself, a follower at the same time of Epi- 
 curus and Saint Francis of Assisi. A child of the " en- 
 lightenment " before the Encyclopaedists and a disciple 
 of Descartes, he keeps his religion and his philosophy in 
 water-tight compartments : " Jacques Tournebroche, my 
 son, be mindful never to put faith in absurdities, but to 
 bring everything to the test of reason save in the matter 
 of our holy religion." A student of theology, he is 
 deeply read in the Fathers, and when he is in the vein, 
 can be unctuous, devout, and seriously concerned for the 
 salvation of his soul. He is also a classical scholar 
 versed in the most recondite Grecian and Roman authors, 
 and his rich table-talk is redolent of a charming erudi- 
 tion; but, when he is buried in a library and weary of 
 labor and devotion, he does not hesitate to indulge his 
 powerful sensuality in fare fitter for Trimalchio's feast 
 than for the provender of a man of God. Escaping 
 with stolen diamonds and some bottles of white wine 
 from a drunken brawl in which he has stabbed a man, 
 the good abbe is delayed on the Lyons road by the wreck- 
 ing of his coach, overtaken by his pursuers at nightfall,
 
 and mortally wounded. Yet he lives long enough to 
 make a beautiful repentance, obtaining salvation in the 
 moment of death, and he expires in a pleasant odor of 
 sanctity, not a little consoled by the fact that, as he had 
 been struck down by a Jew, he " perished a victim to a 
 descendant of the executioners of Christ." 
 
 M. France has given us his personal commentary on 
 the abbe in a pleasant study of thirty-five pages pre- 
 fixed to the companion volume, Les Opinions de M. 
 Jerome Coignard, published in the same year, 1893, 
 with the Reine Pedauque. In 1909 he returned to the 
 theme with Les Contes de Jacques Tournebroche. I men- 
 tion these facts because, in the two or three pages of 
 general appreciation with which Mr. W. J. Locke intro- 
 duces the English translation, he does not mention them. 
 After due reflection I cannot guess why Mr. Locke was 
 asked to write this preface, unless it was because he is 
 the author of a popular book called The Beloved Vaga- 
 bond. If my conjecture is correct, he has neglected a 
 very pretty opportunity to acknowledge a debt and to 
 discourse on the differences between the spirit of Eng- 
 lish and French fiction. The relation between At the 
 Sign of the Reine Pedauque and The Beloved Vagabond 
 is interesting. That Mr. Locke has borrowed in some 
 fashion the happy invention of Coignard and Tourne- 
 broche cela saute aux \yeux. He sets out, just as M. 
 France does, with the adoption of a clever boy, engaged 
 in a menial occupation, by a very learned, very dirty, 
 very benevolent vagabond of philosophical habit; and 
 the boy in each case writes the memoirs of the alliance. 
 But the two authors walk only a short way together.
 
 SKEPTICISM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 179 
 
 Mr. Locke's tale is conceived in English sentiment; his 
 philosopher conceals beneath his soiled shirt a deathless 
 romantic passion. M. France's tale is conceived in 
 philosophical irony and Gallic cynicism ; beneath all his 
 classical and Christian culture, M. Jerome Coignard is 
 a sensualist, pure and simple or, more strictly speak- 
 ing, impure and complex. Mr. Locke would persuade 
 us that man is a flower that at heart smells sweet though 
 it blossoms in the dust. M. France, on the contrary, 
 would have us believe that man is an "obscene and evil 
 fly " remarkably imprisoned in the amber of his ideals. 
 
 When M. France, after forty years of philosophical 
 romancing in the garden of Epicurus, published his 
 Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, the professional historians were 
 shocked and the Epicureans were perplexed. It did not 
 seem quite respectful to the Muse of History, for the 
 author of Le Lys Rouge to present her with the life of 
 the virgin of Domremy. On the other hand, it appeared 
 out of character for the author of M. Jerome Coignard 
 to take the scholarly ideal so seriously. To most of his 
 followers his perilous charm had been that he always 
 seemed to say Mr. George Santayana has said it, too, 
 in three lines of a seductive sonnet: 
 
 The crown of olive let another wear ; 
 
 It is my crown to mock the runner's heat 
 
 With gentle wonder and with laughter sweet. 
 
 Nor was it clear what garland a novice of over three- 
 score could hope to win in the trite and well-gleaned 
 field of history where he made his debut. To be sure, 
 some critics tried to show that this work did not really
 
 180 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 represent a new departure in M. France's development; 
 for, they said, even in his romances he had been an his- 
 torian, as even in his history he had been a romancer. 
 Both views are partly right ; the history of Jeanne d'Arc 
 was, in a sense, only the latest in a long series of natur- 
 alistic and iconoclastic saints' lives. But there was a 
 difference. How explain the lengthy preface discussing 
 predecessors, theories of history, original documents? 
 M. France had sent his fine Ariel often enough among 
 ancient libraries, but had never allowed him to appear 
 in the sunlight with dust on his wings. What convic- 
 tion, slowly formulating, had brought this volant, elu- 
 sive spirit, this mocking beguiler of an empty day into 
 step with his sober contemporaries? Let us not attempt 
 to discover, said M. Achille Luchaire, reviewing the first 
 volume of the work, ne cherchons pas a penetrer le 
 mystere de cette evolution. 
 
 M. France has something of Prosper Merimee's re- 
 pugnance to being divined. On the heels of Jeanne 
 d'Arc, as if anxious to complicate the chart of his evolu- 
 tion, he sends a satirical afterpiece, L'lle des Pingouins, 
 which dissipates in peals of derisive laughter any notion 
 that its author has joined the modern historians. This, 
 too, is a history prefaced by a critical account of 
 sources; but, though shorter, it is much more compre- 
 hensive than its forerunner. It is an abridgment of all 
 history that has been or shall be, under the form of a 
 veiled comic history of France. " In spite of the appar- 
 ent diversity of the amusements which seem to attract 
 me," begins the preface in the old ironical vein, " my 
 life has only one object. It is wholly bent toward the
 
 SKEPTICISM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 181 
 
 accomplishment of one great design. I am writing the 
 history of the Penguins." In the search for the buried 
 monuments of this people, continues the author, " I have 
 excavated by the seashore an unviolated tumulus; I 
 found in it, according to custom, stone axes, swords of 
 bronze, Roman coins, and a twenty-sous piece with the 
 head of Louis-Philippe I, King of the French." 
 
 Embarrassed by difficulties attendant on the inter- 
 pretation of conflicting evidence, the historian called in 
 counsel several eminent archaeologists and palaeograph- 
 ers : " They looked at me with a smile of pity which 
 seemed to say : * Do we write history ? Do we attempt 
 to extract from a text, from a document the least scrap 
 of life or truth? We publish texts pure and simple. 
 We stick to the letter. The letter alone is appreciable 
 and definite. The spirit is not; ideas are crotchets. 
 One must be very presumptuous to write history; one 
 must have imagination.* ' A surviving historian of the 
 old school was more encouraging " Why take the 
 trouble to compose a history when you have only to 
 copy the standard works, as every one does. . . . One 
 word more. If you wish your book to be welcomed, neg- 
 lect no opportunity to extol the virtues upon which 
 societies are based : devotion to riches, pious sentiments, 
 and especially the resignation of the poor, which is the 
 foundation of order. Assert, sir, that the origins of 
 property, nobility, and gendarmery will be treated in 
 your history with all the respect which these institutions 
 merit. Have it understood that you admit the super- 
 natural when it appears. On that condition you will 
 succeed in good company." " I have meditated these
 
 182 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 judicious observations," says M. France demurely, " and 
 have paid good heed to them." 
 
 The narrative accordingly begins with the apostolic 
 calling of Saint Mael, and his wonderful conversions, his 
 wide wanderings, and finally his voyage in a miraculous 
 stone trough over the turbulent Northern Sea to an 
 undiscovered island. After a detour of the place, the 
 holy man, somewhat advanced in age and understanding, 
 comes upon a circle of penguins. Mistaking them for 
 a primitive heathen people, Saint Mael explains to them 
 successively Adoption, Rebirth, Regeneration, and Illu- 
 mination, and then in three days and three nights bap- 
 tizes them all. " When the baptism of the penguins was 
 known in Heaven," proceeds the historian with the suave 
 gravity which heightens the effect of his daring, " it 
 caused there neither joy nor sorrow, but extreme sur- 
 prise. The Lord himself was embarrassed. He called 
 an assembly of scholars and theologians and asked them 
 if they considered the baptism valid." As a result of a 
 long, hot debate, participated in by St. Patrick and 
 Saint Catherine, Saint Augustine and Saint Antony, 
 Tertullian, Orosius, and Saint Gregory of Nazianzen, 
 with interposed questions and objections by the Lord, it 
 was decided that the penguins must be changed into men. 
 And it was done. 
 
 Thus does M. France admit the supernatural, when 
 it appears ! Since Lucian set the infernal gods to quar- 
 reling over the ferry hire in Hades, dramatized the loves 
 of the Olympians, and represented Zeus, when Timon 
 began to rail, as inquiring casually of Hermes what 
 dirty fellow was bawling from Attica beside Hymettus,
 
 SKEPTICISM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 183 
 
 no one, perhaps, has dealt so unabashedly with the reign- 
 ing dynasty of the Heavenly Ones. A late unpersecuted 
 Voltaire tolerance has made a long march since the 
 eighteenth century he would gently laugh Jehovah out 
 of Paradise. Rien n*est plus Idche, says Pascal, que ds 
 faire le brave contre Dieu. True, one can fancy Anatole 
 France replying, but see: The walls of chrysoprase, the 
 solemn temples of the twelve-gated city are fast dis- 
 solving like an insubstantial pageant of the air. Is it 
 not better to smile than to weep? 
 
 With similar fidelity to the instructions of his ad- 
 viser against disparaging sacred institutions, M. France 
 describes the origins of " property, nobility, and gend- 
 armery." Shortly after the baptism and transforma- 
 tion of the penguins, they begin to clothe themselves, 
 inclose land, and fight. One brains his neighbor with a 
 club ; another furious fellow fixes his teeth in the nose of 
 his prostrate adversary; a third brays the head of a 
 woman under an enormous stone. Saint Mael is horri- 
 fied, but he is assured by a religious brother of wider 
 experience that the penguins are accomplishing the most 
 august of functions " they are creating law ; they are 
 founding property ; they are establishing the principles 
 of civilization." All this reminds one of the Social Con- 
 tract and the famous Discourses of Rousseau, but it is 
 to be remembered that in the state of nature the pen- 
 guins are feathered bipeds. No golden age glimmers 
 for Anatole France behind the age of blood. Indeed, 
 in Jerome Coignard he has subjected the revolutionary 
 illusions to the most penetrating criticism : " If one is 
 going to take a hand in governing men," he declares,
 
 184 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 " one must not forget that they are bad monkeys." The 
 history of the penguin nation is the history of half-in- 
 telligent beasts the history of Yahoos and Hou- 
 yhnhnms. At this point, I cannot forbear quoting the 
 brief, mordant sketch of " Draco the Great," a hero of 
 the Middle Ages : 
 
 He carried fire indifferently over the territory of the 
 enemy and his own domain. And he was wont to say, to 
 explain his conduct: " War without burning is like tripe 
 without mustard; it is insipid." His justice was rigorous. 
 When the peasants whom he had taken prisoners could not 
 pay their ransom, he had them hanged on a tree, and if any 
 unfortunate woman came to beg mercy on her penniless 
 husband, he dragged her by the hair at the tail of his horse. 
 He lived like a soldier, free from all effeminacy (II vecut en 
 sold at, sans mollesse). It is a pleasure to acknowledge that 
 his morals were pure. 
 
 Something in that reminds one at the same time of 
 Swift and of Tacitus. If the style is indeed the man 
 himself, there is a tincture of iron in the blood of this 
 Epicure. 
 
 There is much piquancy in the contemptuous account 
 of Les Temps Modernes, but one feels the author's 
 point most sharply in the exultant pessimism of his 
 vision of the future. The notion that there is a grim 
 limit set to the evolution of life on our planet has long 
 been dear to the heart of M. France. Long ago he 
 prophetically buried the last desperate relic of our race 
 in the frozen rind of the sunless world. But here he 
 has worked out more fully the stages by which the 
 human tragedy is to decline to the ultimate catastrophe.
 
 SKEPTICISM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 185 
 
 Before the somewhat remote Last Day there are to be 
 a number of false or temporary endings precipitated by 
 forces at work within the social organism. M. France 
 seems now to have turned his back upon the socialistic 
 hope which he courted a few years ago. To the central- 
 izing tendency of wealth no effective check can be im- 
 posed ; in the long run, it is as irresistible as gravitation, 
 the rising of sap in forests, the swing of planets in their 
 orbits. But at certain periods when the remorseless 
 oppression of capitalists brings the lower orders to the 
 verge of extinction, they will gain for themselves a 
 dreary breathing space with dynamite. They will level 
 all populous cities to the dust and incinerate the pain- 
 fully acquired material and intellectual riches of civil- 
 ization. For a little while the exhausted survivors will 
 rest, and gasping in dismal anarchy recover their animal 
 strength. Then the old blind urge of life will begin 
 anew; step by step poor posterity will fight its way up 
 the long ascent again ; once more the many-storied cities 
 will hum, and lean anaemic millionaires, Pharoahs half- 
 mummified, lord it over the Egyptian millions laying the 
 bricks for their mausoleums. And so the old wheel of 
 life will turn round and round in concentric circles, ever 
 shortening its diameter, till, at last it vanishes in a 
 point, and the barren globe freed of its feverish animal- 
 cules journeys on through the void! 
 
 " It is the duty of every thinker who has formed an 
 idea of the world," said M. France in one of his essays 
 on contemporary literature, " to express that idea, 
 whatever it may be." If the last chapters of L'lle des 
 Pingouins were a faithful transcript of his sense of the
 
 186 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 facts of life crowding in upon the sensitive conscious- 
 ness, we should have deeply to commiserate the author. 
 But the pessimism of M. France is partly polemical. 
 " The spiritualist," Emerson tells us, " finds himself 
 driven to express his faith in a series of skepticisms." 
 M. France began life as a devout humanist, forming his 
 taste and his style on the noblest literature of Greece 
 and Rome. In early manhood, however, he felt power- 
 fully the new hope and enthusiasm of the early followers 
 of Darwin. To the young men of his generation, it was 
 a fresh, firmly-founded revolutionary gospel. But as the 
 century wore on, the scientific millennium receded into 
 the infinitely remote future. To believe in it demanded 
 as pure an exercise of faith as to believe in the New 
 Jerusalem. M. France's faith was unequal to the task. 
 What faith remained in him reverted to his early human- 
 ism. Meantime the unreflecting mass of humanity had 
 caught the fanatic fervor of the scientific dream, and 
 had left humanism far in the rear. When M. France 
 returned to the temples of his gods he found them empty 
 of worshipers. And so, like most humanists to-day, he 
 is a disheartened humanist. He would, perhaps, have 
 spoken seriously of his faith if he could have found 
 serious listeners. It is rather dreary to praise Pallas 
 Athene in perfect solitude. It is more diverting to steal 
 into the camp of the victors, and mock their cause and 
 insinuate horrible doubt into every heart. Yet by a 
 happy law of the universe only the potential philanthro- 
 pist can be misanthropic. The Olympian detachment 
 of M. France is illusory. Without a place to stand on, 
 a man can no more despise his fellows than Archimedes
 
 SKEPTICISM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 187 
 
 could lift the world. So long as M. France despises us, 
 we need not despair ; the earth beneath his scornful feet 
 is a part of the common heritage. 
 
 I find a still more serious flaw in the would-be seamless 
 garment of M. France's skepticism. He has often 
 assured us that the skeptic is a good citizen, because, 
 uncertain of all things, he is the least radical of men. 
 But the salt of the right skeptic is the love of truth. 
 Whatever enters his head he reports freely, as one hold- 
 ing a commission to act as the disinterested intelligence 
 of mankind, surveying the past and present and spying 
 out the future. That salt was in the virile fiber of 
 Montaigne sitting in his tower in Perigord, cupboarding 
 the choice viands of the ancients and portraying with 
 unflinching hand the manners and mind of the man he 
 knew best. But Anatole France does he candidly 
 attempt to represent the world as it appears ? Does he 
 love the truth and search for the truth above all else? 
 As it seems to me he loves above all else the luxury of 
 philosophic despair. He is a kind of refined, philosophi- 
 cal sentimentalist. With the assiduity of the Graveyard 
 Poets, he cultivates and cherishes those truths, or seem- 
 ing truths, which make for melancholy. We hear every 
 day: This is the truth; we must face it. The fact is 
 we may usually turn our backs upon it, and it is often the 
 part of wisdom to do so. There may be a more whole- 
 some truth at the opposite point of the compass. It is 
 true that when a good man dies he rots like a rascal. It 
 is also true that he lives a fragrant life in the memory 
 of his friends. To embrace the latter truth strengthens 
 the heart; but a certain kind of sentimentalist always
 
 188 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 embraces the worm that inherits the shroud. It is the 
 truth ; we must face it. But no man can face all truth. 
 We judge a man's wisdom by his power of making inti- 
 mates of those truths which give channel and speed to 
 the languid, diffusive drift of his days. M. France has 
 sought through all the world for the truths inducing in 
 the perceiver a pensive and helpless sadness. M. France 
 is too much concerned about the misery of the last man. 
 If the good die young, as there is some warrant for 
 believing, the last man will deserve hanging. 
 
 The skepticism of M. France is largely a literary 
 pose. It is his justification for making capital of un- 
 speakable things. It is his justification for unlimited 
 intellectual self-indulgence. For a good skeptic he 
 knows altogether too much about the future. When a 
 man's philosophy has carried him to the point where 
 several million years of civilization are as to-morrow, 
 are as nothing, to him, it is a pity that it should not go 
 a step further to the point where space vanishes and 
 time expires and the illusive ages evaporate into the 
 eternity of the everlasting Now. For a good skeptic 
 he is altogether too sure that the world has exhausted 
 its possibilities. He holds, indeed, that we live in a 
 bright-flowing mist of days and nights, of sleeping and 
 waking dreams. But he does not hold this belief with 
 strength enough to be dumb and astonished at thought 
 of the germs of new orders of ideas now forming in 
 society or slumbering as yet unstirred in the unused 
 mind of the world. He does not recognize as frankly 
 as a skeptic should how plastic is the eternal flux under 
 the creative energy of the desire of man, who had only
 
 SKEPTICISM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 189 
 
 to say, " Let the flux be peopled with demons and with 
 seraphim," and it was. Only the new-born babe enjoys, 
 however, that purity of uncertainty to which M. France 
 pretends. And as soon as the babe first sniffs the vital 
 air, it is a judge as well as an observer. It discovers at 
 once that for the present at least some things are good 
 and beautiful, and others terrible and necessary.
 
 VII 
 THE EXOTICISM OF JOHN SYNGE 
 
 JOHN SYNGE was dead before he was celebrated, and 
 even his posthumous fame was curiously impersonal. If 
 you asked any man that you met what he thought of 
 the Playboy of the Western World, the chances were in 
 favor of an interested response on the freshness of the 
 Irish actors, the stupidity of the noisy objectors in the 
 audience, or the hilarious and unexpected beauty of the 
 piece. But if in your encounter with the ordinary play- 
 goer you led out with the question, " What do you think 
 of John Synge ? ", the chances were even that you would 
 be met with the query, " Who is he ? " Even to many 
 who have written about his plays, his personality seems 
 to be as indistinct as that of the author of The Book of 
 the Dun Cow; and the inferences which they have drawn 
 from his words recall Mr. Archer's preconception of the 
 invalid Stevenson as a happy athlete. From a half- 
 dozen reviews, English and American, one gathers the 
 impression that The Playboy is an " intensely national 
 Irish play," that the author is notable for " freshness 
 of outlook and spontaneity of expression," " depth of 
 ardent sympathy " and " tender charity," that he has 
 u experienced the rich joy found only in what is superb 
 and wild in reality," and, finally, that in his presence 
 " somehow criticism becomes meaningless ; it is enough 
 
 190
 
 THE EXOTICISM OF JOHN SYNGE 191 
 
 to share his vision and his joy." All these phrases 
 indicate what some one has called a positive genius for 
 hitting the wrong nail on the head. All this reminds 
 one of what the curate in the Aran Islands said to Synge 
 on finding him one Sunday morning loafing outside his 
 cottage door. " Tell me," inquired the curate, " did 
 you read your Bible this morning? " Synge replied in 
 the negative. " Well, begob, Mr. Synge," said the 
 good man, " if you ever go to heaven, you'll have a good 
 laugh at us." 
 
 This misconception of the man is closely related to 
 the still persistent misconception of the literary move- 
 ment with which he was associated. Apparently the 
 " vulgar error " will not down, which holds that the 
 so-called Irish Renaissance is essentially a folk move- 
 ment that the new literature is a spontaneous burgeon- 
 ing of the ancient and wellnigh extinct Celtic crabtree, 
 stirred at his roots by Mr. Douglas Hyde and a genera- 
 tion of peasant children reading popular poetry in the 
 original Gaelic. The more deeply one looks into the 
 matter the more firmly one is convinced that the his- 
 torical, Catholic, England-hating Ireland, which finds 
 voice in a number of the lesser playwrights of the Dublin 
 group, is producing little of consequence to the outside 
 world. Wherever new blossoms have appeared and fruit 
 has prospered there have been cross-fertilization and the 
 skilful grafting of exotics in the hands of a little band 
 of learned experimenters held together by the fine tact 
 of Lady Gregory and the unflagging enthusiasm of Mr. 
 W. B. Yeats. The informing spirit and quickening 
 power have drifted in on all the winds of heaven from
 
 England, Norway, Germany, Russia, and France, and 
 there have been innumerable insets from the plantations 
 of Blake and Ibsen and Hauptmann and Tolstoy and 
 Maeterlinck. As any disciple of D'Arbois de Jubainville 
 or of Kuno Meyer will tell you with some disdain, the 
 animating spirit of this new poetry that walks the world 
 is not the spirit of the ancient Irish bards. As any 
 intelligent observer should be able to perceive, it is the 
 spirit of an entirely contemporary, an entirely modern 
 romanticism, which happens, to borrow Mr. George 
 Moore's word, to have " enwombed itself " in Ireland, 
 but which might with almost equal facility enwomb itself 
 in China or Persia; just as the eighteenth century mel- 
 ancholy and unrest which enwombed itself in Macpher- 
 son's Ossian later reappeared in the Werther of Goethe 
 and the Rene of Chateaubriand. 
 
 Now though the relation of men like Mr. Yeats and 
 Mr. Moore to general European romanticism and natur- 
 alism is for the most part obvious and unconcealed, 
 Synge seems at first glance to stand apart from them 
 and from every one else. For special reasons those 
 who knew him best have not been unwilling to maintain 
 him in his isolation. He was the man that Mr. Yeats 
 had prophesied in the beginning, the proof of all his 
 theories, the realization of his dreams the indigenous 
 Irish poet inspired by close contact with the ancient 
 peasantry to utter the deep passion of the people in 
 the strong fresh speech of the folk. He was like the 
 author of the Cuchulin story ; he was like Homer. For, 
 as Mr. Yeats said, the idea of the Irish Renaissance is : 
 " the epic interpreted through the peasant, the peasant
 
 THE EXOTICISM OF JOHN SYNGE 193 
 
 interpreted through the epic." He cared nothing for 
 recent books ; he had no relation to the decadent writers 
 of France ; " if he was influenced by the French writers, 
 they were of the pre-Moliere period " : thus Mr. Yeats. 
 And Mr. Moore tells us with his customary malice that 
 when Yeats first heard In the Shadow of the Glen, he 
 cried, " Euripides ! " ; and when he heard the Riders to 
 the Sea, he cried, " Aeschylus ! " Very similar to Mr. 
 Yeats's was the critical feeling of the young Werther 
 when he carried in one pocket the songs of the divine Ho- 
 mer and in the other the songs of the divine Macpher- 
 son equally divine and, in the fall of the year, far more 
 sympathetic. Voltaire malignantly pointed out that 
 these ancient Celtic lays contained certain plagiarisms 
 from Solomon and Milton, and unfortunately those who 
 have insisted on the French antecedents of Synge have 
 not always been free from a malicious desire to damage 
 his reputation as a poet and especially as a representa- 
 tive of Ireland. In consequence of various non-literary 
 forces there has been rather a partisan than a critical 
 division of opinion. On the one hand, we are told that 
 he owes everything to the French decadents; on the 
 other, that his work came straight from the heart of 
 Erin. On the one hand it is argued that he was only a 
 clever craftsman; on the other, that he stands by his 
 absolute achievement only a little lower than Shake- 
 speare. While these parties are reconciling their differ- 
 ences, it may be worth while to inquire in an entirely 
 dispassionate way, with Synge's collected works before 
 us, what manner of man he was. 
 
 There are before me five portraits of Synge, each one
 
 194 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 of which suggests under scrutiny one aspect of his some- 
 what elusive character. One, a grotesque sketch by 
 Mr. J. B. Yeats, shows us a hatted figure with back 
 turned and shoulders hunched. If you look closely, you 
 will see that it is " Synge at rehearsal." But if you 
 trust your first impression, you will say that it is a 
 dilapidated tramp gazing at the stars. A second por- 
 trait in the collective edition has a strikingly elvish or 
 faunish look half timidity a&d half mischief. A third 
 presents the likeness of the literary Bohemian mous- 
 tache, chin-tuft, and general effect call up a favorite 
 pose of R. L. Stevenson. The fourth, a set piece in 
 profile against a curtain, faintly reminds one of a similar 
 study of Walter Pater with eyes fixed in aesthetic con- 
 templation. The impressive features of the physiog- 
 nomy exhibited in Mr. Howe's book are the brooding 
 impenetrable eyes eyes filled with dreams and shad- 
 owed with pain and sadness. Now what we know of 
 Synge's life makes it not wholly fanciful to read in these 
 faces a brief abstract of his personality with his vagrant 
 yearnings, his homeless laughter, his facility in disguises, 
 his love of the picturesque and strange, and his deep- 
 seated melancholy and despair. 
 
 If a tramp be defined as a man with an obscure past, 
 without home or family or visible means of support, 
 drifting unaccountably from place to place, Synge was 
 for a considerable period of his life and that the forma- 
 tive period a tramp. We know that he was born at 
 Rathfarnham, near Dublin, in 1871, and that he passed 
 through Trinity College. Then the door is almost 
 closed upon his occupations till 18989, when he was
 
 THE EXOTICISM OF JOHN SYNGE 195 
 
 called from abroad to take part in the new movement in 
 Ireland. Yet we are permitted to catch one significant 
 glimpse of a poverty-stricken, silent, rather morose 
 young man in ill health, who has left his native land and 
 is apparently seeking to escape from his memories in 
 aimless wanderings among alien people and alien modes 
 of thought. His first wayfaring was in Germany, where 
 Heine was perhaps the will-o'-the-wisp to his feet; but 
 all roads lead the literary vagabond ultimately to Paris, 
 and when he had made his pilgrimages, he brought up 
 in the Latin Quarter. ' Before I met him,' says Mr. 
 Yeats, ' he had wandered over much of Europe, listening 
 to stories in the Black Forest, making friends with 
 servants and with poor people, and this from no aes- 
 thetic interest, for he had gathered no statistics, had 
 no money to give, and cared nothing for the wrongs of 
 the poor, being content to pay for the pleasure of eye 
 and ear with a tune upon the fiddle.' 
 
 Synge's transformation from a tramp into an Irish- 
 man of letters his sponsors represent to us as a kind of 
 modern miracle. But they can preserve this air of 
 mystery only by insisting that the return to Ireland 
 meant an abrupt break and a fresh beginning rather 
 than the natural evolution of his career only, in short, 
 by maintaining that what is clearly illuminating is wholly 
 irrelevant. Now about 1895 Synge installed himself 
 in solitary lodgings in Paris and undertook to prepare 
 himself to be a * critic of French literature from the 
 French point of view.' At this point our authorities 
 diverge, and Mr. Yeats executes a bit of skilful and 
 characteristic legerdemain. He lifts the curtain in
 
 196 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 the garret of the Latin Quarter some four years later 
 and discovers the author of two or three poor poems 
 studying the works of Racine. George Moore, on the 
 other hand, says explicitly that Synge was writing 
 indifferent impressionistic criticisms of Lemaitre and 
 Anatole France. There is no necessary conflict between 
 these two reports, but there is a noticeable difference of 
 emphasis. Between Synge and Racine I should never 
 attempt to establish any affinity. But between Anatole 
 France and Synge ? that is quite another matter. For 
 the discreet discoverer of the new poet admits that he 
 found Synge ' full of that kind of morbidity that has 
 its root in too much brooding over methods of expres- 
 sion, and ways of looking upon life which come, not out 
 of life but out of literature.' Was that Mr. Yeats's 
 covert way of confessing that Synge was steeped in 
 Anatole France? This, at any rate, can be established: 
 Synge's point of view in comedy is almost identical 
 with that of Anatole France. Despite the Frenchman's 
 vastly greater range of culture, the two men are abso- 
 lutely at one in their aloof, pyrrhonic irony and their 
 homeless laughter the laughter of men who have wan- 
 dered all the highways of the world and have found no 
 abiding city. 
 
 Mr. Yeats, who is crammed with convictions and con- 
 stitutionally incapable of understanding this desperate 
 and smiling skepticism no one, I think, asserts that 
 Synge acquired his humor from the Dublin singers Mr. 
 Yeats gives a puzzled account of Synge's ideas which 
 unintentionally confirms our conjecture. Synge had, he 
 tells us, * no obvious ideal ' ; he seemed ' unfitted to think
 
 THE EXOTICISM OF JOHN SYNGE 197 
 
 a political thought ' ; he looked on Catholic and Prot- 
 estant alike with amused indifference; all that comes 
 down to us from education, and all the earnest conten- 
 tions of the day excited his irony ; * so far as casual eye 
 could see,' he had * little personal will.' This descrip- 
 tion of moral and volitional prostration could be applied 
 with hardly an alteration to Anatole France. And it 
 should help put to rest the legend of the joyous Synge, 
 bounding over the hills with the glad, wild life of the 
 unspoiled barbarian. The creators of the legend of the 
 joyous Synge have made much of one or two pages in his 
 island notebook which reveal high nervous excitement 
 induced by wild storms. I am impressed by the equally 
 frequent and important symptoms of weariness and low 
 vitality. His attitude toward death is too friendly. He 
 cannot make a dangerous passage over rough seas with- 
 out hinting at his readiness to sink out of sight beneath 
 the gray waters. He undergoes a surgical operation and 
 describes his sensations in a gruesome little narrative 
 called Under Ether. While his nurses suppose him to 
 be making ready for the ordeal, he slips quietly down 
 into the operating room and examines the instruments. 
 The consternation of the attendants when they come 
 upon him there alone is as if they had discovered a con- 
 demned man on the morning of his execution secretly 
 fingering the ax. In the grim humor of this recital there 
 is something more than manly resolution in the face of 
 death. 
 
 Synge's verse is what we should expect of a rather 
 despondent young Bohemian, unsure of himself, and 
 seeking among other poets food and forms for his mel-
 
 198 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 ancholy. I wish to tarry for a moment upon his small 
 collection of poems and translations, partly because, 
 though little known, it is intrinsically interesting, and 
 partly because it reveals so clearly on a small scale the 
 nature of his literary talent. The poems are due to the 
 influence of various masters to Burns, Wordsworth, 
 Swinburne, and notably, to that fascinating outlaw, 
 Maistre Fra^ois Villon. In about one-third of them he 
 sings of death, and in nearly all of them there is a dis- 
 tinguishable echo of some earlier singer. 
 
 In " Queene," for example, one hears an echo of 
 Villon's " Ballade of Dead Ladies ": 
 
 Seven dog-days we let pass 
 Naming queens in Glenmacnass, 
 All the rare and royal names 
 Wormy sheepskin yet retains: 
 Etain, Helen, Maeve, and Fand, 
 Golden Deirdre's tender hand. 
 
 These are rotten, so you're the Queen 
 Of all are living, or have been 
 
 In the poem, " To the Oaks of Glencree," again, we 
 notice how Maistre Villon helps him shape and round 
 out the first pure impulse of lyric exultation : 
 
 My arms are round you, and I lean 
 
 Against you, while the lark 
 Sings over us, and golden lights and green 
 
 Shadows are on your bark. 
 There'll come a season when you'll stretch 
 
 Black boards to cover me; 
 Then in Mount Jerome I will lie, poor wretch, 
 
 With worms eternally.
 
 THE EXOTICISM OF JOHN SYNGE 199 
 
 The startling and paradoxical fact about this collec- 
 tion is that the original poems constantly remind us of 
 some one else; the translations alone seem unmistak- 
 ably Synge's. The original poems have the merits of 
 skilful literary imitation. They might have been writ- 
 ten, however, by Stevenson or Lang or by Mr. Edmund 
 Gosse, or by half a dozen other cultivators of old French 
 verse. But neither Mr. Gosse nor Lang nor Stevenson 
 could have written a line of the poem that follows : 
 
 Are you bearing in mind that time when there was a fine 
 look out of your eyes, and yourself, pleased and thoughtful, 
 were going up the boundaries that are set to childhood? 
 That time the quiet rooms, and the lanes about the house, 
 would be noisy with your songs that were never tired out; 
 the time you'd be sitting down with some work that is right 
 for women, and well pleased with the hazy coming times 
 you were looking out at in your own mind. 
 
 May was sweet that year, and it was pleasantly you'd 
 pass the day. 
 
 Then I'd leave my pleasant studies, and the paper I had 
 smudged with ink where I would be spending the better 
 part of the day, and cock my ears from the sill of my father's 
 house, till I'd hear the sound of your voice, or of your loom 
 when your hands moved quickly. It's then I would set store 
 of the quiet sky and the lanes and little places, and the sea 
 was far away in one place and the high hills in another. 
 
 There is no tongue will tell till the judgment what I feel 
 in myself those times. 
 
 Here are all the peculiar marks of Synge himself 
 the irresistibly quaint idiom, the drifting rhythm, the 
 loose sentence structure, thought thrown out after 
 thought, as it were, without premeditation, and bios-
 
 200 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 soming from phrase to phrase, the window opened upon 
 a mist of vague and limitless emotion, the poignant and 
 adorable Celtic wistfulness ; while, as a matter of fact, 
 these lines are a tolerably close translation of Leopardi's 
 " Silva." We are here in the presence of a pure miracle 
 of that style which is Synge's special creation, and 
 which distinguishes him not merely from Leopardi, but 
 also from all his Anglo-Irish contemporaries. With all 
 its apparent spontaneity, his style is as patiently and 
 cunningly wrought out as the style of Walter Pater 
 wrought of a scrupulously select vocabulary, idiom, and 
 images, with an exacting ear controlling the cadence 
 and shepherding the roving and dreamy phrases. With 
 the aid of this perfected instrument he is able to appro- 
 priate and seal as his own poems from authors as diverse 
 as Petrarch and Walter von der Vogelweide, Leopardi 
 and Villon. This fact, taken together with his depend- 
 ence in the original poems, tends to justify a search 
 beneath the surface of his other work for alien forces 
 secretly shaping his emotions and determining his 
 forms. 
 
 The orthodox method of " explaining " Synge is to 
 ignore the poems and translations and point to the 
 volume on the Aran Islands. This is the record, we are 
 told, of Synge's literary salvation; here lies the key to 
 the dramas. In other words, we are asked to believe 
 that Mr. Yeats's theory of poetry has been demon- 
 strated. A stranded Irishman living gloomily in Paris 
 without ideal and almost without ideas is sent to a little 
 group of lonely islands to the southwest of Galway, 
 inhabited by stolid fisher-folk in a very backward state
 
 THE EXOTICISM OF JOHN SYNGE 201 
 
 of culture. He spends part of every year there we 
 pass over the fact that the other part is spent in Paris 
 wearing the rawhide shoes of the natives, warming his 
 blood with their fires and their poteen, living in their 
 kitchens, hearing their legends, and sharing in their 
 noble primitive customs till the folk passion streams 
 through him and makes him a genius. If any one is 
 skeptical, we point to the fact that something like the 
 " germ " of two or three of Synge's plays is actually 
 present here in the form of jottings on folk story and 
 belief. Now, this is a delightfully simple recipe for 
 making a genius. If this were the whole truth, one 
 might agree without reservation with one of the review- 
 ers who declares that the Aran Islands is of " vast 
 importance as throwing light on this curious develop- 
 ment," and who adds that it " is like no other book we 
 have ever read." 
 
 When I first read the A ran Islands, I thought of that 
 much-experienced vagabond and subtle exploiter of 
 exotic and primitive cultures, Pierre Loti ; and I have 
 learned recently with some satisfaction from a foot- 
 note in Mr. Howe's book, that Synge thought Pierre 
 Loti " the best living writer of prose." And when I 
 found Synge comparing conditions in the Aran Islands 
 to a disadvantage with what he had seen in his rambles 
 in Brittany, I thought of Anatole le Braz and all his 
 charming studies of the songs and superstitions and cus- 
 toms and characters of that other Celtic people. And 
 then there drifted into my remembrance the pensive face 
 of another wanderer and exile, half-Irish and half-Greek, 
 known in the Orient as Koizumi Yakumo, and in the
 
 202 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 western world as Lafcadio Hearn. As I turned once 
 more the pages of his book on Japan and ran through 
 the Life and Letters, glancing at his Eastern costume 
 and at the almond eyes of his sons, I reflected that he, 
 at any rate, had possessed the courage to realize the 
 dreams of his favorite author, Theophile Gautier, and 
 the Oriental reveries of Victor Hugo. Finally I opened 
 the book of Chateaubriand, great father of them all, and 
 read : * When he arrived among the Natchez, Rene had 
 been obliged, in order to conform to the customs of the 
 Indians, to take a wife, but he did not live with her. A 
 melancholy disposition drew him to the depths of the 
 forest ; there he passed whole days alone, and seemed 
 a savage among the savages.' 
 
 The attitude, the point of view that is the question 
 about this Irishman and his book on the Aran Islands. 
 Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galere? Now, it is 
 an essential error to imagine that when Synge passed 
 from the Latin Quarter to the Aran Islands he was 
 returning to his own people. He never desired to return 
 to his own people. He went to this group of islands, 
 and then to the most remote and backward of them, 
 because he wished to escape into a perfectly strange and 
 virgin environment. 
 
 The peculiar charm of the Aran Islands and other 
 books of its class consists not in the identification of 
 the narrator with the life of the people whom he de- 
 scribes, but rather in accentuating the contrast between 
 the sophisticated son of the cities and the simple bar- 
 barian. It is the aesthetic charm of looking upon illu- 
 sions through the eyes of the disillusioned. In the
 
 THE EXOTICISM OF JOHN SYNGE 203 
 
 earlier examples of this genre the sense of the sundering 
 gulf is emphasized by bringing the weary heir of all the 
 ages into sentimental relations with a ' noble ' female 
 savage an unspoiled daughter of the wilderness. But 
 the sentiment now smacks of the romanticism of the 
 old school. In the various books in which Pierre Loti 
 pictures his exotic amours, you may trace the declension 
 of the lovely and beloved barbarian into a mere tran- 
 sitory symbol of the * soul ' of the land in which she is 
 found. In the Manage de Loti, for example, there is 
 still a breath of strange passion for the poor Poly- 
 nesian girl, yet the lover comments as follows : * In truth 
 we were children of two natures, widely sundered and 
 diverse, and the union of our souls could only be tran- 
 sitory, incomplete, and troubled.' But in that most 
 heartlessly beautiful book in contemporary literature, 
 Madame Chrysantheme, the breath of passion has given 
 way to sheer nervous disgust. With the little yellow 
 poupee, Loti has nothing in common, not even an emo- 
 tion. As he takes pains to point out in the dedication 
 to the Duchesse de Richelieu, though Madame Chrysan- 
 theme seems to have the longest role, it is certain that 
 the three principal personages are: Moi, le Japon et 
 VEffet que ce pays m'a produit, f Myself, Japan and 
 the Effect which that country produces in me ' the 
 bitter perfume which a crushed chrysanthemum of 
 Nagasaki exhales for the nostrils of a disillusioned 
 Academician. 
 
 Essentially Synge was seeking the same thing the 
 perfume which the Aran Islands could yield to the dis- 
 illusioned Irish-Parisian. He, too, has transferred the
 
 204 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 sentiment, which was formerly attached to the fair 
 savage, to the land itself. Despite his apparent solici- 
 tude for realistic detail, it is the subjective soul of 
 the islands that he is striving to capture. His book, 
 like Loti's, is pieced together of short impressionistic 
 sketches which are related to one another only through 
 the mood of the author. ' It is only in the intonation 
 of a few sentences,' he writes, * or some fragment of 
 melody that I catch the real spirit of the island, for in 
 general the men sit together and talk of the tides and 
 the fish, and the price of kelp in Connemara.' The tra- 
 ditional lovely savage has here suffered a further declen- 
 sion into a peasant girl in her teens toward whom only 
 a friendly attachment exists. Yet this girl, like her 
 famous predecessors, becomes the symbol of what he has 
 come to seek : ' At one moment she is a simple peasant, 
 at another she seems to be looking out at the world 
 with a sense of prehistoric disillusion and to sum up 
 in the expression of her gray-blue eyes the whole ex- 
 ternal despondency of the clouds and sea.' And after 
 he has talked to her of the ' men who live alone in Paris,' 
 he notes that ' below the sympathy we feel there is still 
 a chasm between us.' I do not wish to push this paral- 
 lelism farther than it goes. In the Aran Islands the 
 Mot, as well as the maiden, is subdued almost beyond 
 comparison. But both men, like all the children of 
 Chateaubriand, avail themselves of picturesque exotic 
 scenes to enlarge and reverberate the lyric cry of their 
 own weariness in civilized life and their loneliness out 
 of it. 
 
 Synge's dramas are all sad, tragedies and comedies
 
 THE EXOTICISM OF JOHN SYNGE 205 
 
 alike, because they are all based upon a radical and 
 hopeless disillusion. In them the native lyrical impulse, 
 which in the poems we found checked by the cynicism 
 of Villon, and which in the Aran Islands expanded under 
 the influence of Loti, is again checked and controlled by 
 the irony of Anatole France. This is no doubt a bald 
 and over-emphatic way of putting the case, but it may 
 serve to indicate the general modes in which foreign 
 forces determined his talent. Synge has been praised 
 by many critics on the ground that he has reconciled 
 poetry with life. In the sense that he has broken 
 through the old ' poetic diction ' and invented a new 
 poetic dialect with a fresh savor of earth in it, this is 
 doubtless true. But in a profounder sense it is nearer 
 the truth to say that he has widened the rift that was 
 between them. For the drift of all his work is to empha- 
 size the eternal hostility between a harsh and repug- 
 nant world of facts controlled by law, and the inviting 
 realm of lawless imagination. In one of the longest 
 of his plays, The Well of the Saints, this idea becomes 
 perfectly explicit. Two blind beggars who have long 
 pleased themselves with thinking of each other's beauty 
 are, through a miracle, restored to sight. But the vision 
 of * things as they are ' is so hideous that they fall into 
 a violent hatred of each other. And they are both so 
 thankful when they go blind again that they reject 
 with scorn the holy man's offer to repeat the miracle. 
 This is perhaps the most elaborate expression of an idea 
 in all Synge's works, and one is not surprised to learn 
 that four years before The Well of the Saints there 
 was performed and printed in Paris a * Chinese ' play
 
 206 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 by M. George Clemenceau, called the Voile du Bonheur, 
 which contains identically the same idea, and which, as 
 Mr. Howe concedes, it is ' perfectly probable ' that 
 Synge knew. 
 
 For us The Well of the Saints is significant only as 
 illustrating with especial clearness that profound sense 
 of disillusion which underlies all Synge's eccentric come- 
 dies, and constitutes, as I have said, his point of contact 
 with Anatole France. The most France-like comedy 
 that he ever conceived was never written, but the 
 scenario is reported to us by Mr. Yeats. * Two women, 
 a Protestant and a Catholic, take refuge in a cave, and 
 there quarrel about religion, abusing the Pope or Henry 
 VIII, but in low voices, for the one fears to be ravished 
 by the soldiers, the other by the rebels. At last one 
 woman goes out because she would sooner meet any 
 fate than such wicked company.' Now it is just this 
 homeless elfishness of his mirth that distinguishes Synge 
 from Jonson and Moliere and Congreve, with whose 
 names his has been so fearlessly coupled. In all the 
 classical comedy of the world one is made aware of the 
 seat whence the laughing spirit sallies forth to scourge 
 the vices or sport with the follies and affectations of 
 men. When the play is over, something has been accom- 
 plished toward the clarification of one's feelings and 
 ideas ; after the comic catharsis, illusions dissolve and 
 give way to a fresh vision of what is true and perma- 
 nent and reasonable. Synge's comedies end in a kind of 
 ironical bewilderment. His, indeed, is outlaw comedy 
 with gypsy laughter coming from somewhere in the 
 shrubbery by the roadside, pealing out against church
 
 THE EXOTICISM OF JOHN SYNGE 207 
 
 and state, and man and wife, and all the ordinances of 
 civil life. 
 
 It is not that many of the dramatis persona: are 
 vagrants, but that the dramatist himself is in secret 
 heart a vagrant, and his inmost vision of felicity is 
 purposeless vagabondage. What are the passages in 
 these plays that all the critics delight to quote, and that 
 the playgoer carries home from the theatre fragments 
 of them singing in his memory ? They are the passages 
 in which some queen or beggar, touched with the lyric 
 ecstasy, expresses a longing to go roaming down the 
 open road or into the wilderness. You will find this 
 gypsy call in every one of Synge's dramas except The 
 Riders to the Sea. In the Shadow in the Glen it is a 
 peasant housewife who loathes her little cottage and her 
 dry and oldish husband, and follows a shabby tramp 
 out into the hills where " you'll be hearing the herons 
 crying out over the black lakes, and you'll be hearing 
 the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks and 
 the big thrushes when the days are warm." In the 
 Well of the Saints it is the blind beggars fleeing from the 
 light and reality and preferring to sit in darkness and 
 illusion by the highway, " hearing a soft wind turning 
 round the little leaves of the spring, and feeling the 
 sun, and we not tormenting our souls with the sight 
 of the gray days, and the holy men, and the dirty feet 
 is trampling the world." In the Tinker's Wedding it is 
 a trio of itinerant peddlers who after a brief skirmish 
 with the Holy Church, gag the priest and scurry off 
 with the gold originally intended as a wedding fee, " to 
 have a good time drinking that bit with the trampers
 
 208 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 on the green of Clash." In the Playboy it is Christy 
 Mahon dreaming of the time when he and Pegeen will 
 be " pacing Neifin in the dews of night, the time sweet 
 smells do be rising, and you'd see a little shiny new 
 moon, maybe, sinking on the hills." Even to that piece 
 built of the heroic stuff of the bards, Deirdre of the 
 Sorrows, he gives the same turn : here it is a wondrously 
 fair woman scorning a share in sovereignty and the high 
 king of Ulster to go salmon-spearing and vagabonding 
 with the sons of Naisi. To this man in whose vision of 
 joy we are invited to participate, life presents itself in 
 its comic aspects as a juxtaposition and irreconcilable 
 opposition of hideous realities and hopeless dreams, 
 dreams like the glens of Neifin in the dews of night, 
 realities like Old Mahon in the potato field ' He was a. 
 dirty man, God forgive him.' 
 
 What, then, shall we say of his tragedy? Those who 
 are sealed of the tribe of Synge speak high praise of 
 The Riders to the Sea, that picture of the drear old 
 woman who has lost all her sons. As Mr. Edward 
 O'Brien declares in the preface printed in the collective 
 edition, this drama is set in the atmosphere of universal 
 action ; it holds the " ' timeless peace ' that passeth all 
 understanding." This is rare vision, indeed. It is a 
 noble phrase, this ' timeless peace.' It connotes in my 
 imagination the serene enduring forever of victorious 
 heroes and saints who have passed out of tribulation. 
 It is not, at any rate, an empty euphemism for annihila- 
 tion, but a state in which even those of the living dwell 
 who, like the Stoic emperor, have caught a vision of a 
 central beauty and abiding harmony in all the works
 
 209 
 
 of God. It is the mood in which all high tragedy leaves 
 us; the still elation into which we rise when blind 
 CEdipus answers the call of the god ; the * calm of mind, 
 all passion spent ' with which we are dismissed by that 
 superb last chorus in Samson Agonistes, beginning: 
 
 All is best, though oft we doubt 
 What the unsearchable dispose 
 Of Highest Wisdom brings about. 
 
 Such, they tell us, is the atmosphere of Riders to the 
 Sea. It is like Lear, it is like Greek tragedy; it is not, 
 as they hasten to say it is not like Maeterlinck's Home 
 or The Intruder. Synge certainly does differ from 
 Maeterlinck in two striking respects. While the Belgian 
 ' mystic ' deprives his persons of personality and local- 
 ity and confers a kind of demonic personality upon 
 death, the naturalistic Irishman steeps his lines in per- 
 sonality and the reek of the gray sky and the smell of 
 the sea, and he represents death, in spite of the premo- 
 nitions of Maurya, as only the old dark way of nature. 
 But so far as what the Germans call the ' inner form ' 
 is concerned, Synge gives us simply an Irish transpo- 
 sition of Maeterlinck. Strictly speaking, Riders to the 
 Sea is not a tragedy at all, because it is not a drama. 
 It might with more propriety be called a tragic idyl a 
 somber picture, impressive enough in its kind, with the 
 fearful whispering of the young girls, whose necks have 
 not yet bowed beneath the ancient burden, and the gray 
 broken old mother, who looks before and after and has 
 passed through all illusions, sitting there patiently, 
 passively, receiving the tidings of disaster. Protagonist
 
 210 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 in the proper sense of the word there is none; no act 
 of the will turning against destiny as a token of human 
 participation in that divine energy into which death 
 resumes us all. It is this turning of the will that makes 
 just the difference between what is drama and what is 
 not ; and between the mood with which Samson in Gaza 
 affects us when he says, * And I shall shortly be with 
 them that rest,' and the mood with which Maurya 
 affects us when she says, ' No man at all can be living 
 forever, and we must be satisfied.' It is the difference 
 between Milton looking into the timeless peace and 
 Synge looking into the noisome grave. We heard him 
 before crying aloud under the golden lights of the oaks 
 of Glencree that in the end black boards would cover 
 him and he should lie with worms eternally. Just that 
 is the tragic vision and significance of The Riders to the 
 Sea.
 
 VIII 
 
 THE COMPLACENT TORYISM OF 
 ALFRED AUSTIN 
 
 IN a day when ancient manuscripts are opened and 
 made to yield up misprized and forgotten genuises, it 
 is singular that no one seems to have discovered Mr. 
 Alfred Austin. Fortune, who deals inscrutably with 
 the reputation of poets, has apportioned him a unique 
 destiny. To some she has given merit without fame ; to 
 others, fame without merit ; to him alone, fame without 
 being read. Both before and after he entered upon the 
 laureateship, his works were considered inessential to 
 salvation. But upon his assumption of the singing 
 robes of Lord Tennyson, he stepped at one conspicuous 
 stride into the hot sunlight of journalistic derision. 
 His own long participation in conservative journalism 
 as leader writer for the Standard contributed to the 
 acrimonious hilarity of his reception. Liberal knives 
 hitherto exercised against his politics were now for the 
 first time fleshed in his poetry. Little Englanders, be- 
 come for the nonce literary critics, collected all the hasty 
 and unfiled lines in the lays of the " hysterical Helot of 
 Imperialism." The merciless cartoonist elevated him to 
 the ancient throne of Dulness and twined the Parnassian 
 laurels about his girdle. The wits of the press under- 
 took to commit him with his peers, sagely debating 
 
 211
 
 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 whether to lodge him by copious Southey or elegant 
 James Pye, or whether to bid Shadwell lie a shade 
 nearer Flecknoe and make room for the newcomer 
 by Colley Gibber. His name has thus become a house- 
 hold allusion; his works who has read them? Here 
 was surely a porridge to have killed a stouter poet than 
 the Quarterly's martyr,, 
 
 Mr. Austin is different; at seventy-six, still appar- 
 ently as hale, happy, and industrious as ever, he pub- 
 lished his memoirs * in two volumes comprising some 
 six hundred pages written with unflagging zest and 
 genuine power in self-revelation. Those familiar with 
 him only through floating rumor may surmise that he 
 erected this memorial to anticipate a neglectful and 
 prejudiced posterity lest, if he set not hand to the 
 task, there should be a lacuna in the Lives of the British 
 Poets. All the evidence, however, indicates that Mr. 
 Austin became his own biographer, as he became his own 
 poet, on the principle that if one would have a thing 
 done well one should do it one's self; and he has left 
 little to the hands of subsequent biographers or critics. 
 Certainly in this happy work there is not the slightest 
 trace of a head beneath the critical bludgeonings 
 " bloody but unbowed." There is no trace of blood or 
 echo of bludgeon. Throughout the book, which is not 
 approached in interest by any of the author's previous 
 writings, there is only smiling self-complacency and the 
 mild afterglow of a long and successful experience in 
 to quote his own summary " Literature, in verse and 
 prose ; Politics, internal and international ; Journalism, 
 
 1 The Autobiography of Alfred Austin, 1835-1910; New York.
 
 TORYISM OF AUSTIN 13 
 
 War, Law, Religion, Art, Travel, Society, Town and 
 Country Life." 
 
 This self-complacency appears in the record of his 
 influence with political leaders ; in the glimpse that he 
 offers us of Parliamentary honors proffered him but 
 thrust aside for higher rewards ; in his words to young 
 writers on the secrets of style; in his hints for future 
 pilgrims to Italian shrines consecrated by his verse; 
 and, above all, in the account since Wordsworth's 
 Prelude, unequalled in minuteness and self-reverence of 
 his own poetical development. His early satirical poem 
 entitled The Season contains, he tells us, in spite of the 
 faults of irresponsible youth, " the germ of what Mat- 
 thew Arnold called * the criticism of life ' to be gathered 
 from one's works in their entirety." (A peculiar sub- 
 stitution of " one " for " / " is a " note " of Mr. Austin's 
 style.) From this germ, he traces with retrospective, 
 brooding, and affectionate finger the movement ofttimes 
 unconscious of his poetical powers toward that far-off, 
 divine event, his masterpiece, The Human Tragedy. 
 Pointing out that Italy cradled, though England bore, 
 his poetry, he declares that his Italian sojournings 
 " stripped him " of that insularity of familiar knowl- 
 edge that marks so much of English literature. Recall- 
 ing early days in Rome, he speaks with wonder of his 
 unawareness of the divine things then a-brewing : " I 
 little knew that The Human Tragedy, not to come fully 
 and finally to the birth till more than ten years later, 
 was already germinating, and was waiting only for the 
 simultaneous occurrence of the mighty European events 
 between the years 1866 and 1871 and the much-needed
 
 expansion of my own mind." This sense of cosmic ges- 
 tation, then carried so blithely, but almost oppressive 
 in the retrospect, reminds us of Eckermann and Goethe 
 marveling together over the genesis of Faust. And sure 
 enough, a few lines later Mr. Austin adds in the benevo- 
 lent tone which he adopts toward his period of poetic 
 adolescence : " But, as Goethe said, * No youth can be 
 a master,' and one was young." As he dwells on what he 
 now sees were the high points of his experience, the 
 phrase comes in like a refrain : " I did not then know 
 or suspect " ; " without any consciousness that one's 
 poetic education was being promoted by it " ; "I now 
 can retrospectively see that one's education and the 
 storing of one's mental, moral and emotional capacity 
 were going forward. Had I known it at the time, what 
 pain it would have spared me ( ? one) ! " This Little- 
 did-I-wot runs like a silver thread throughout the auto- 
 biography: Mr. Austin is the most spontaneous of 
 poets. His appreciation of his own poetry nowhere 
 deficient in delicacy reaches its tenderest expression in 
 his comment on certain villages in northern Italy once 
 visited by him : " Suppressing their less attractive fea- 
 tures, imaginative memory transfigured them later in 
 the grave, sad journey of Godfrid and Olympia to Milan 
 from the little chapel in Spiaggiscura, that closes with 
 the melancholy line, 
 
 Ah! life is sad, and scarcely worth the pain." 
 
 This is indeed a melancholy line, but though it illus- 
 trates Mr. Austin's sympathetic imagination and his
 
 TORYISM OF AUSTIN 215 
 
 power over the sententious poetic phrase, it by no means 
 represents his criticism of life. As I have already 
 intimated, a divine satisfaction with his own position, a 
 bland unconsciousness of contemporary feeling and 
 opinion these are precisely the startling and notable 
 traits of the Laureate's character. They are startling 
 because at first view one cannot see what supports them. 
 They are notable because, as one considers the pages of 
 this autobiography, one sees exactly what supports 
 them. One perceives that these traits are not mere per- 
 sonal idiosyncrasies but the traditional and distinguish- 
 ing marks of a diminishing but dogged literary, social, 
 and political group. Mr. Austin, though he wots it not, 
 is the last minstrel of Toryism. As he writes, he feels 
 himself soothed, sustained, and magnified by the sup- 
 port of the landed gentlemen of England. He is not, he 
 fancies, dipping his pen into the shallow well of egotism 
 but into the inexhaustible springs of English sentiment. 
 The genial and versatile figure that he portrays full 
 length before us he conceives as no mere longanimous 
 minor poet but as a typical, if somewhat superior, gen- 
 tleman of Albion to whom some celestial beneficence has 
 accorded, besides the common excellencies of his class, 
 the sacred gift of song. He has consecrated the sacred 
 gift of song to the celebration of the common excel- 
 lencies of his class. We can make no sound valuation of 
 his poetry without some consideration of the origin and 
 nature of his ideas. 
 
 Like Sir Walter Scott of Abbotsford, who first made 
 him conscious that he was a poet, and like Lord Byron 
 of Newstead Abbey, whose verse and romantic pilgrim-
 
 216 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 age he has imitated in The Human Tragedy though 
 without passion, rebellion, wit, or diablerie Mr. Austin 
 is a great respecter of family. On the basis of his trivial 
 mention of literary contemporaries and his ample en- 
 largement upon his intimacy with baronets and lords, 
 we can easily credit his declaration that " no one admires 
 honourable descent and the easy gradations of English 
 society, from class to class, more than I do." This 
 feeling, eminently becoming in an official singer to the 
 royal household, is apparent in his treatment of his 
 own lineage. Born of Roman Catholic parents in this 
 best possible of worlds six years after the Catholic 
 Emancipation Act, Mr. Austin is derived from what 
 every American would regard as comfortable < aristo- 
 cratic stock, his family for three generations before him 
 having dealt in wool. And yet with a peculiarly Vic- 
 torian instinct for adorning whatever he touches, he 
 contrives to cast an additional glamour over his family- 
 tree. Though he does not attempt to follow his physi- 
 cal ancestry beyond his great-grandfather, he shows at 
 any rate with the aid of Chambers's Encyclopaedia 
 that the " honourable trade of wool-stapling " flourished 
 as early as the time of Edward III ; and he has himself 
 seen houses of " striking architectural beauty " which 
 belonged to wool-staplers " in the days of the Planta- 
 genets." 
 
 Since he traces his forebears only to satisfy legiti- 
 mate curiosity as to the antecedents of his literary 
 talent, it is no less essential than interesting to exhibit 
 the close relationship existing between the manufacture 
 of wool and verse ; so that we may not think it anomal-
 
 TORYISM OF AUSTIN 217 
 
 ous but entirely natural to find the same stock which 
 through three generations put forth wool-staplers in 
 the next putting forth a poet. History is on Mr. 
 Austin's side. As he playfully reminds us, Shake- 
 speare's father was a wool-stapler; Dante belonged to 
 the Guild of the Woolcombers. " Such mental ances- 
 try," says the autobiographer with perhaps a touch of 
 modesty, " may inoffensively be recalled, since none can 
 hope " Mr. Austin has an old-world grace and facility 
 in classical allusion " to approach the supreme great- 
 ness of these poetic Dioscuri." So much for his main 
 inheritance in the paternal line. The blood of the 
 Austins, conspiring with Shakespeare, Dante, and the 
 Guild of the Woolcombers, determined that he should 
 be a poet. 
 
 The special field of his poetry, however, appears to 
 have been strongly influenced by the Hutton strain 
 which came to him through his grandmother. Close 
 attention will be required here, for heredity is a slippery 
 matter at the best, and the argument runs at this point 
 through a narrow defile : Mr. Austin " seems to remem- 
 ber that there existed a floating tradition that the 
 Huttons had at one time been among the landed gentry." 
 Skeptical biologists may cry out that land is an acquired 
 non-transmissible characteristic. Socialists of which 
 sect there were none in the England of the elder Hut- 
 tons, merry England, the real England, the England 
 of Mr. Austin socialists are said to hold similar 
 views. 
 
 The incontestable fact remains that Mr. Austin re- 
 ceived from the Huttons, or from somewhere, an impulse
 
 218 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 inclining him affectionately tbward land, and land in 
 large parcels. From childhood, he tells us, he has ex- 
 perienced " a passionate clinging to the country, a keen 
 admiration of territorial homes, with their deer-parks 
 and wide-stretching woodlands, and an unconquerable 
 antipathy, of a most prejudiced character, to towns, 
 mills, and manufactures." At first thought the unwary 
 reader may suspect a conflict between the hereditary 
 Austin instinct for commerce and the Hutton impulse 
 toward the serene life of the landed gentry. But wool- 
 stapling as well as the business of owning land, we are 
 assured, was in the time of the poet's childhood " a 
 singularly light occupation " with ample margins for a 
 nine o'clock breakfast and a half hour's lingering before 
 business among " the flowers, the poultry, and the 
 pigeons." 
 
 In such a mold heredity cast him. " Qualis ab in- 
 cepto " says Mr. Austin ; as he was in the beginning, 
 so essentially he has remained, except that he has relin- 
 quished the Roman faith which was not quite English. 
 He came into the world with a few strong innate ideas, 
 and has neither discarded nor added many since. 
 Pigeons, poultry, and flowers surrounding a territorial 
 home with background and foreground of deer-park 
 and wide-spreading woodland these constitute his cen- 
 tral conception of nature. These things the Laureate 
 has sung with sweetness and sincerity both in prose and 
 in verse in Veronica's Garden, Haunts of Ancient 
 Peace, and in many a lyric, vernal, aestival, autumnal, 
 and hibernal. None but a resolutely incredulous critic 
 would question his knowledge of English seasons; and,
 
 TORYISM OF AUSTIN 219 
 
 in spite of his deprecatory " such gardening knowl- 
 edge as I may later have acquired," there is no rea- 
 son for doubting his intimate acquaintance with Eng- 
 lish flowers. If poetry avails at all in these evil days, 
 his songs must have done something toward keeping 
 alive a love of territorial homes in the hearts of their 
 owners. Nor has Mr. Austin confined himself to groves 
 and gardens. He has sung also of man and especially 
 of woman the occupants of territorial homes, and of 
 all the prejudices and sentiments that uphold and beau- 
 tify them. 
 
 Though not a poet of wide-ranging passion, he has 
 given their due to English love, courtship, and marriage. 
 Summing up at the close of his first chapter the forces 
 that most moved his childhood, he mentions " a dim 
 sense of the magnetic difference of the sexes." This 
 sense became with advancing years steadily keener with- 
 out losing any of its pristine quality. In witness 
 whereof read the naive but attractive incident of the 
 beautiful chambermaid of Megara, who fleetingly 
 beheld in the evening the poet hoped might wait upon 
 him at breakfast. " That excusable love of what is 
 beautiful," says the Laureate, silently distinguishing 
 himself from an earlier Grecian pilgrim, " was disap- 
 pointed." But tarry! As Mr. Austin and his party, 
 after the morning meal, were setting forth on their 
 journey, the fair one appeared for a moment in the 
 doorway. They doffed their hats. She inclined her 
 head. They drove away to Eleusis, never to see her 
 more. Mr. Austin exclaims in another prose work of 
 his containing certain strictures on Shelley : " What a
 
 220 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 fortunate circumstance it has been for the English 
 people, that they can respect as well as admire their 
 greatest writers. . . . Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, 
 Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, all good reputable citi- 
 zens, all pillars of the Commonwealth, strengthening 
 England by their conduct as much as by their genius." 
 The maturer phase of this sense of the " magnetic 
 difference " and its important place in Mr. Austin's work 
 are symbolically adumbrated in the poem called In the 
 Heart of the Forest. The poet, accosting the shrilling 
 missel-thrush, inquires the meaning of his music : 
 
 Then louder, still louder he shrilled: I sing 
 For the pleasure and pride of shrilling, 
 
 For the sheen and the sap and the showers of spring 
 That fill me to overfilling. 
 
 Yet a something deeper than Springtime, though 
 It is Spring-like, my throat keeps flooding: 
 
 Peep soft at my mate, she is there below, 
 Where the bramble trails are budding. 
 
 She sits on the nest and she never stirs; 
 
 She is true to the trust I gave her ; 
 And what were my love if I cheered not hers 
 
 As long as my throat can quaver. 
 
 In this shy lyric, Mr. Austin hints darkly at the true 
 solution of the vexed woman question. Fortunately I 
 am able to illuminate this matter by a gloss extracted 
 from the series of articles which he contributed to the 
 Spectator in 1894, reporting his researches through 
 England for " haunts of ancient peace." One of these
 
 TORYISM OF AUSTIN 221 
 
 haunts was the household of the fourth Countess of 
 Leicester. " Iii the church at Penshurst, where we abode 
 that night," says our author, " there is a monument to 
 the fourth Countess of Leicester, and on it is recorded, 
 presumably in obedience to her own wish (my italics), 
 that * Her sole desire was to make a good wife and good 
 mother.' Could there be a nobler ambition? And shall 
 I be forgiven if I add that when the little * emancipat- 
 ing ' hubbub of our day has subsided, the ineradicable 
 instinct of women will re-echo that devout and humble 
 vow?" 
 
 In the seventeen years since these lines were written 
 the " little * emancipating ' hubbub " does not seem to 
 have subsided much. While Mr. Austin was penning 
 the pages of his autobiography, young women wearing 
 a bandeau inscribed with the motto " Votes for Women " 
 were parading in Piccadilly. The tumult, however, has 
 not reached the Laureate among the primroses and lady- 
 smocks of Swinford Old Manor. While we who do not 
 live in territorial homes have been asking, Ou sont les 
 neiges d" 'ant an? " where are the wives who sit on the 
 nest and never stir ? ", he has sung on imperturbably , 
 celebrating the Lucille, the Dora, the Maud of the mid- 
 Victorian dream the fair and lissome English maiden 
 blushing and trembling toward her lover and her lord 
 with the reverence implanted in her unsunned bosom by 
 God and Nature. 
 
 The remote charm that invests Mr. Austin's concep- 
 tion of the eternal-feminine pervades also his picture of 
 man in family relations a picture which helps us, since 
 the family is a little image of the State, to understand
 
 222 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 his political ideals. For men of the modern democratic 
 way of thinking, marriage exists in order to give repre- 
 sentation to the Opposition. When a man marries, as 
 we view the matter, he grants voice and vote to his 
 sharpest and most remorseless critic. And this conces- 
 sion, most of us are agreed, whatever difficulties may 
 attend it, is good for the government. To Mr. Austin, 
 on the other hand, ideal marriage means a man's quiet 
 and unchallenged assumption of the domestic throne of 
 his fathers and his mild paternal reign over devoted and 
 adoring subjects. But why blunder toward this lofty 
 idea in prose when the Laureate has already embodied 
 it in poetry of inimitable clearness and simplicity? In 
 quoting from his lines on " Wordsworth at Dove Cot- 
 tage " I shall be following his own practice in dealing 
 with matters ineffable in the baser medium. Recurring 
 to the figure of the missel-thrush, he declares that 
 Fame's sweetest minister is " she who broods upon one's 
 name, but calls it not aloud " ; then addressing Words- 
 worth : 
 
 And this at least, in full, you had, 
 
 From sister, and from wife: 
 They made your gravest moments glad, 
 
 They havened you from strife; 
 Hallowed your verse, revered your tread, 
 Maintained a nimbus round your head 
 
 And deified your life. 
 
 Now the nimbus as a domestic ornament is no more 
 hopelessly out of date than the whole social and political 
 order which Mr. Austin has celebrated. In 1790 Burke 
 saw it already in the last ditch ; because it was no more,
 
 TORYISM OF AUSTIN 
 
 Carlyle declared that the nations were hurtling pell-mell 
 into the Pit ; Buskin loved it still with a passionate re- 
 gret as an exile in a strange land. It remained for Mr. 
 Austin to declare that it has not been and never shall 
 be shaken. His present attitude toward internal affairs 
 may be suggested by the postscript to a letter of his in 
 The Times, which he has deemed worthy a place near the 
 close of his autobiography. The sentiment, indorsed by 
 Mr. Austin, was originally uttered by the Comte 
 d'Haussonville, nephew of the Due de Broglie, and friend 
 of the Due d'Aumale, " and whose reception by the 
 Academie Fran9aise I had the good fortune to attend, 
 taken there by the late Lord Lytton when English 
 Ambassador in Paris " etc. Here is the sentiment: 
 " The speeches of members of the House of Lords dur- 
 ing the Election, so superior, even as platform oratory, 
 to those delivered by the members of the House of Com- 
 mons with one or two exceptions, would alone suffice to 
 save from successful attack any assault upon its 
 existence." 
 
 With democracy long since triumphant, with socialism 
 on foot, while dynamite is laid in broad daylight under 
 the House of Lords, Mr. Austin still confronts the times 
 with comfortable mien and inquires whether we shall 
 exchange for a modern democracy without a throne, 
 with no towers, with " mean plots without a tree " 
 (small holdings cultivated by the owners?), a " herd of 
 hinds too equal to be free," dwelling together in " greed, 
 jealousy, envy, hate, and all uncharity " shall the 
 gentlemen of England barter for this, he asks, " our 
 ancient, unaltered Motherland," " where sweet Order
 
 224: ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 now breathes cadenced tone," with its " hamlets meek," 
 its lambs going " safe to the ewes " and its " calves to 
 the udder," its yearlings fattening, its heifers browsing, 
 its " whistling yokels " guiding the " gleaming share " 
 hard by the home where " gentle lordship dwells," in 
 country-seats with their " woodland amenity," where 
 " comely domain marches with comely domain," and the 
 plumped pheasant peeps through the boskage over " pas- 
 toral downs, as little changed since the time of Egbert 
 as the sea itself"? "Shall this exchange be made?", 
 cries the Laureate in feigned and rhetorical consterna- 
 tion. " Banish the fear ! ", he replies in his poem called 
 " Why England is Conservative," " Look Seaward, Sen- 
 tinel," and in many another patriotic lay of unique and 
 incomparable insolence. While the " wild-beast mob " 
 of the nations whine with envy at her peace and pros- 
 perity, or roaring and sweating under their armor, 
 menace her across the " bastions of the brine," she 
 towers and shall forever tower supreme, " victor without 
 a blow," " smilingly leaning " on her " undrawn 
 
 sword " 
 
 I have made this review of Mr. Austin's leading ideas 
 because it has been falsely rumored that he has none. It 
 should now be apparent that, far from being content 
 with the fame of an idle pastoralist, he challenges recog- 
 nition as a poetical representative of the conservative 
 spirit. It should also be clear that the value of his rep- 
 resentation is impaired by his complete identification of 
 conservatism with Toryism a confusion due to his 
 obliviousness to the flight of time. I suppose it is more 
 or less of the essence of genuine Toryism to confound
 
 TORYISM OF AUSTIN 225 
 
 the amenity and stability of one's own fireside with the 
 Welfare of the country; in so far as that is true Mr. 
 Austin seems to be a good Tory. In his system of ideas, 
 furthermore, I can detect little that would have been 
 repugnant to the sense of a country gentleman in the 
 reign of Farmer George. But the possible historical 
 value of his expression of Toryism is destroyed by a 
 serious anachronism: the foundation on which his 
 Georgian ideas rest, the sentiment which suffuses them, 
 and the artistic coloring which invests them are mid- 
 Victorian. Mr. Austin upholds the House of Lords, the 
 territorial homes, and the whistling yokel not like a true 
 blue Tory because they were ordained by God; nor 
 like the later philosophical Tory because they were 
 ordained by nature ; but like the unphilosophical, athe- 
 istical, pseudo-Catholic Pre-Raphaelites because they 
 are aesthetically gratifying. That explains his " un- 
 conquerable antipathy " to towns, mills, and manufac- 
 tures, and at the same time his fondness for depicting 
 Britannia leaning smilingly on her undrawn sword. 
 That is why he hates and fears liberalism, and at the 
 same time makes conservatism ridiculous by representing 
 it as invincible. That is why his poems, if read, and his 
 picture of happy England might loosen all the bricks 
 in the pavements of Manchester and Liverpool. For the 
 sentimental romantic Toryism of Mr. Austin is not so 
 much dull as false ; false and at the same time obsolete ; 
 obsolete but not yet old enough to have acquired an 
 antiquarian interest.
 
 IX 
 
 THE AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 " No one has the faintest conception of what I am 
 trying for," says the celebrated novelist in The Death 
 of the Lion, " and not many have read three pages that 
 I've written; but I must dine with them first they'll 
 find out when they've time." These words are tinged 
 with Henry James's own disdain of the fashionable 
 world which wears, and wears out, a man of genius like 
 a spangle on its robe. They are tinged too with the 
 mixed regret and satisfaction of an author who knew 
 what it was to grow too fine for one's public. Born in 
 1843, James established in the seventies and eighties of 
 the last century the kind of reputation that calls for 
 French and German translations. He lived to hear the 
 wits of the late nineties and the following decade calling 
 for the translation of his maturest works into English. 
 Perhaps twenty years ago every one had read, or had 
 attempted to read, a recent novel of his ; but there has 
 come up a generation of young people who have been 
 permitted, with the connivance of critics, to concede the 
 excellence of his earlier productions and the " impossi- 
 bility " of his later ones without looking into either. 
 Shortly before his death in 1916 he emerged for the 
 general public from his obscure memoir-writing, and
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 227 
 
 stood for a moment conspicuous on the sky-line a dark 
 august figure bowed in devout allegiance beneath the 
 English flag ; then with a thunder of ordnance not made 
 for his passing he slipped below the horizon. In the 
 hour of trial he had given to England a beautiful ges- 
 ture, which derived much of its interest from his life- 
 long refusal to commit himself to any cause but art. 
 Though the adoption of English citizenship by an Amer- 
 ican would have excited in ordinary circumstances the 
 profane wit of our paragraph-writers, the gravity of 
 this occasion chastened them; and when, a few months 
 later, his death called for comment, many of them 
 clutched at this transferral of allegiance as the last, if 
 not the only, intelligible performance of his that was 
 known to them. Some of them, to be sure, remembered, 
 or said they remembered, Daisy Miller as a " perfect 
 little thing of its kind," or professed a not unpleasant 
 acquaintance with the Portrait of a Lady, or even ex- 
 hibited a vague consciousness that the novelist had 
 treated extensively the " international situation," but 
 in general they betrayed their " unpreparedness " for 
 defining his talent and valuing his accomplishment. 
 
 Criticism should have declared by this time, and 
 should have declared with emphasis and authority, what 
 Henry James was " trying for." It should also have 
 declared whether, when he slipped below the horizon, he 
 sank into the deepening shadows of literary history, or 
 whether he passed on into a widening world of light 
 the Great Good Place of a grateful and enlightened pos- 
 terity which will not dine with him but which will read 
 him. May we securely let him pass while we go on to
 
 228 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 something better ; or shall we find, if we go on, that he 
 is the something better to which we come at last ? There 
 are wide differences of opinion in the critical jury. Mr. 
 Brownell, who has said a multitude of penetrating things 
 about his mind and his art, and who is, one should sup- 
 pose, the critic in America best qualified to enjoy and 
 to value him, does not conceal his quiet hope and expec- 
 tation that among the novelists of the future we shall 
 not meet his like again. Professor Pattee, who is " out " 
 for American local colors and big native American ideas, 
 declares in so many words that Henry James's novels 
 " really accomplish nothing." Recent English criticism 
 strikes up in another key. Mr. Ford Maddox Hueffer 
 promises him immortality, if there is any immortality 
 for extraordinarily fine work a point about which he 
 is doubtful; but he struggles to this handsome conclu- 
 sion through such fantastic arguments, with such explo- 
 sions of temper and erratic judgment, through such a 
 stream of " Godforbids " and " Thankgods " and " God- 
 knowses," with such a display of the new literary bad 
 manners, that one wonders how he ever came to occupy 
 himself with an author so dedicated to refinement. The 
 little book of Miss Rebecca West, an acutely positive 
 and intensely glowing young " intellectual," has delight- 
 ful merits: its adverse criticism is cuttingly phrased if 
 not always precisely keen, its appreciative passages are 
 full of fresh ardor and luminous if not always illuminat- 
 ing imagery ; it holds up a candle and swings a censer 
 in the principal niches and chapels of the wide-arching 
 cathedral upon which the builder toiled for half a cen- 
 tury ; but it rather evades the task of presenting a final
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 229 
 
 comprehensive view of explaining, in short, in the 
 honor of what deity the whole edifice was constructed. 
 
 Let us cut an avenue to the inner shrine by removing 
 from consideration some of the objects for which most 
 of his American and English compatriots profess a 
 pious veneration. Henry James has insulted all the 
 popular gods of democratic society for example, the 
 three persons of the French revolutionary trinity and 
 $he " sovereign people " collectively. Captain Sholto, 
 almost unique among his characters in uttering a politi- 
 cal thought, must express pretty nearly his creator's 
 position when he says, " I believe those that are on top, 
 the heap are better than those that are under it, that 
 they mean to stay there, and that if they are not a pack 
 of poltroons they will." It would be difficult to name 
 an American author more perfectly devoid of emotional 
 interest in the general mass of humanity. His attitude 
 toward the " submerged tenth " is chiefly established by 
 his silence with regard to it. In The Princess Casamas- 
 sima, one of the rare places in which he permits a view 
 of the dark Netherward of society to fall upon the eye 
 of a sensitive observer, this is the reported reaction: 
 j< Some of the women and girls, in particular, were 
 ippalling saturated with alcohol and vice, brutal, be- 
 draggled, obscene. ' What remedy but another deluge, 
 alchemy but annihilation? ' he asked himself as he 
 his way ; and he wondered what fate there could be, 
 in the great scheme of things, for a planet overgrown 
 with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled 
 against a ball of consuming fire." The passage is a little 
 deficient, is it not? in warm fraternal feeling. Let us
 
 230 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 round out this impression with the reported reaction of 
 a sensitive observer in The Madonna of the Future to 
 a little glimpse of free life in Rome : " Cats and 
 monkeys, monkeys and cats ; all human life is there ! " 
 These sensitive observers doubtless had cause for a 
 shudder of revulsion, and dramatic reason as well. 
 Their behavior becomes interesting when one compares 
 it with James's personal account in London Notes of his 
 own attitude toward a very different scene the prepa- 
 rations for the Victoria Jubilee. " The foremost, the 
 immense impression is of course the constant, the perma- 
 nent, the ever-supreme the impression of that greatest 
 glory of our race, its passionate feeling for trade. . . . 
 London has found in this particular chapter of the 
 career of its aged sovereign only an enormous adver- 
 tisement." Later he reports that he has been taking 
 refuge from the Jubilee in novel-reading. The great 
 thing to be said for the novelists, he adds, is " that at 
 any given moment they offer us another world, another 
 consciousness, an experience that, as effective as the 
 dentist's ether, muffles the ache of the actual and, by 
 helping us to an interval, tides us over and makes us 
 face, in the return to the inevitable, a combination that 
 may at least have changed." Was it a pose to speak of 
 fiction as an ethereal pause in the midst of the perpetual 
 toothache of the actual and of a great patriotic demon- 
 stration as a peculiarly sharp toothache? Or was it 
 " American humor "? The pose, if pose it was, is curi- 
 ously of a piece with his saying to John Hay, who had 
 been received with an " ovation " on his arrival in South- 
 ampton, " What impression does it make in your mind
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 231 
 
 to have these insects creeping about you and saying 
 things to you? " 
 
 A partial explanation of this disgust and this detach- 
 ment from the major interests of the majority of men 
 may be found in a half-dozen familiar facts of his 
 biographical record: the peculiar genius of his Sweden- 
 borgian father, his early induction in old New York, 
 his birthplace, into " the religion of foreign things," his 
 foreign language teachers, his early perusal of the 
 London Punch and his devotion, a little later, to the 
 Revue des Deux Mondes, his glimpses in childhood of 
 London and the Continent, his artistic apprenticeship 
 under John la Farge, his trifling contact with the 
 Harvard Law School, his serious contact as reviewer 
 with the New York Nation and with the Atlantic 
 Monthly, his discovery of a fine vein of fiction, and the 
 permanent settlement of his residence abroad. The 
 leading idea in the elder James's plan for his son's life 
 seems to have been to rescue him from the typical demo- 
 cratic process in order to open to him some finer destiny : 
 to provide him with comfortable means and ample leis- 
 ure, to save him from every exacting pressure, to pre- 
 serve him from the stamp of any definite educational 
 system, by perpetual migrations to snap the root of 
 local attachments, to postpone for him as long as pos- 
 sible the choice of a career, so that at last the young 
 man should be whatever he was and do whatever he did 
 by the free impulse of his own spirit. The perfect 
 working of this plan was probably marred by a physical 
 accident at the time of the Civil War, which as Henry 
 James circuitously explains, assigned him to the role
 
 232 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 of an engrossed spectator. Whatever the significance 
 of this incident, the result of the plan of tasting life in 
 New York, Boston, Geneva, London, Paris, Rome, Flor- 
 ence, and Venice was to set up an endless process of 
 observation, comparison, discrimination, selection, and 
 appreciation a process which for this highly civilized, 
 highly sensitized young spirit, became all-absorbing, 
 and made of him a fastidious connoisseur of experience, 
 an artistic celibate to whose finer sense promiscuous 
 mixing in the gross welter of the world was wearisome 
 and unprofitable. 
 
 There is no getting round the fact that he was as pro- 
 digiously " superior " inside as he was outside the field 
 of art. In his recent much quoted essay on the New 
 Novel he has the air of a conscious old master conde- 
 scending for the nonce to notice " the rough and tumble 
 * output ' " of the young vulgar democratic herd. A 
 false note in Miss West's treatment of his character is 
 her remark that he lacked " that necessary attribute of 
 the good critic, the power to bid bad authors to go to 
 the devil." Mr. Brownell, on the other hand, puts some 
 of his work at the head of American criticism. His 
 Hawthorne, his Partial Portraits, his Essays in London 
 and Elsewhere, his Notes on Novelists, his various " por- 
 traits " of cities and " scenes," including The American 
 Scene, and his introductions to his own novels constitute 
 certainly an impressive body of literary and social criti- 
 cism of unique quality and high interest. As for the 
 " necessary attribute," he sent authors to their appro- 
 priate places so civilly and suavely that they probably 
 failed frequently to notice where they were sent ; but no
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 233 
 
 critic ever more remorselessly sent to the devil bad 
 authors, mediocre authors, and even very distinguished 
 authors. In his later years, he very blandly, very 
 courteously, sent the whole general public to the devil. 
 He was mortally weary of the general public's obtuse- 
 ness ; he despaired of the general public, and despised it. 
 At the same time he reiterated in his stories, his critical 
 articles, and in the prefaces to the New York edition of 
 his work challenges and entreaties to the critical few 
 to come and find him. 
 
 In that fascinating work The Figure in the Carpet he 
 depicts, for criticism, what he would have called his 
 own " case." He presents there, amid various intensi- 
 fications of interest, Hugh Vereker, a master-novelist, 
 head and shoulders above his contemporaries; so that 
 even his devoutest admirers and his most studious critics 
 miss the thing that he has written his books " most for." 
 " Isn't there," he says to one of them, " for every 
 writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that 
 most makes him apply himself, the thing without the 
 effort to achieve which he wouldn't write at all, the very 
 passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, 
 for him, the flame of art burns most intensely? . . 
 There's an idea in my work without which I wouldn't 
 have given a straw for the whole job. ... It stretches, 
 this little trick of mine, from book to book, and every- 
 thing else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. 
 The order, the form, the texture of my books will per- 
 haps constitute for the initiated a complete represen- 
 tation of it. So it is naturally the thing for the 
 critic to look for. It strikes me," Vereker adds smil-
 
 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 ing but inscrutable, " even as the thing for the critic 
 to find." 
 
 The thing which James hoped chiefly that his critics 
 would some day recognize is not that he is a great stylist, 
 or a learned historian of manners, or the chief of the 
 realists, or a master of psychological analysis. All 
 these things have been noted and asserted by various 
 more or less irreligious strollers through that cathedral- 
 like edifice to which we have likened his works. The 
 thing which he as the high priest solemnly ministering 
 before the high altar implored some one to observe and 
 to declare and to explain is that he adored beauty and 
 absolutely nothing else in the world. To the discovery 
 of beauty he dedicates his observation, his analysis, his 
 marvelous and all-too-little recognized imaginative en- 
 ergy. That is why he sends the rest of the world to the 
 devil, that is his romance, that is his passion, that is 
 why when he discusses his own creations he talks verit- 
 ably like a soul in bliss. The intimate relation of his 
 fiction to modern realities beguiles the uncritical reader 
 into an erroneous notion that he is a " transcriber," a 
 literal copyist, of life. What in his prefaces he begs 
 us again and again to believe is that his stories origi- 
 nated in mere granules and grms of reality blown by 
 chance breezes to the rich soil of the garden of his 
 imagination, where they took root, and sprang up, and 
 flowered; then they were transplanted with infinite art 
 to the garden of literature. What he offers us, as he 
 repeatedly suggests, is a thousandfold better than life; 
 it is an escape from life. It is an escape from the unde- 
 signed into the designed, from chaos into order, from
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 235 
 
 the undiscriminated into the finely assorted, from the 
 languor of the irrelevant to the intensity of the perti- 
 nent. It is not reality ; he goes so far as to say quite 
 expressly that it is poetry. If that is true, his novels 
 should, in spite of Professor Pattee, " accomplish " 
 something ; they should give us on the one hand an ideal 
 and on the other hand a criticism ; and they do give us 
 both. Henry James's importance for Anglo-Saxons in 
 general and for Americans in particular is that he is 
 the first novelist writing in English to offer us on a 
 grand scale a purely aesthetic criticism of modern 
 society and modern fiction. 
 
 His special distinction among writers of prose fiction 
 is in the exclusiveness of his consecration to beauty a 
 point which in this connection probably requires eluci- 
 dation. To the religious consciousness all things are 
 ultimately holy or unholy; to the moral consciousness 
 all things are ultimately good or evil; to the scientific 
 consciousness all things are ultimately true or not true ; 
 to Henry James all things are ultimately beautiful or 
 ugly. In few men but fanatics and geniuses does any 
 one type of consciousness hold undivided sway, and even 
 among the geniuses and fanatics of the English race the 
 pure aesthetic type was till Ruskin's time excessively 
 rare. The normal English consciousness is, for pur- 
 poses of judgment, a courthouse of several floors and 
 courts, to each of which are distributed the cases proper 
 to that jurisdiction. In the criticism of Matthew 
 Arnold, for example, there are distinct courts for the 
 adjudication of spiritual, ecclesiastical, moral, aesthetic, 
 political, social, and scientific questions; but Ruskin
 
 236 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 handles all matters in the aesthetic chamber. In Shake- 
 speare's criticism of life, to take the case of a creative 
 artist, the discrimination of experience proceeds on 
 clearly distinguishable levels of consciousness; the ex- 
 quisite judgment of Sylvia " holy, fair, and wise is 
 she " is a certificate of character from three distinct 
 courts. But Henry James, on the contrary, receives 
 and attempts to judge all the kinds of his experience on 
 the single crowded, swarming, humming level of the 
 aesthetic consciousness ; the apartments above and bekm 
 are vacant. 
 
 It is a much simpler task to indicate his position in 
 literature with reference to the nature of his conscious- 
 ness than with reference to the forms of his art. Critics 
 attempting to " place " him have said the most bewil- 
 dering things about his relationship to Richardson, 
 Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, George Meredith, 
 Stevenson, Tourgenieff, Balzac, the Goncourts, Flau- 
 bert, Maupassant, Zola, and Daudet. To say that he is 
 the disciple of this galaxy is to say everything and 
 nothing. He knew intimately modern literature and 
 many of its producers in England, France, Italy, and 
 Russia, and he is related to them all as we are all related 
 to Adam and to the sun and the moon and the weather. 
 He doubtless learned something of art from each of 
 them, for he took instruction wherever he could find 
 it even from " Gyp," as he blushingly confesses in the 
 preface to The Awkward Age. But what different gods 
 were worshiped in this galaxy ! Even Meredith, who 
 resembles him in his psychological inquisitiveness, does 
 not in nine-tenths of his novels remotely resemble him
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 237 
 
 in form ; moreover, Meredith is a moralist, a sage, a 
 mystic, and a lyrical worshiper of Life, Nature, and 
 other such loose divinities. James called Balzac " the 
 master of us all," he called Tourgenieff " the beautiful 
 genius," he sympathized intensely with Flaubert's dedi- 
 cation to perfection ; but his total representation of life 
 is not much more like that of any of his " masters " 
 than George Eliot's is like Zola's. 
 
 It is a curious fact that while American criticism 
 tends to refer him to Europe, English criticism tends to 
 refer him to America. A pretty argument, indeed, could 
 be constructed to prove that he might have been very 
 much what he was, if he had not gone body and soul to 
 Europe, but had simply roved up and down the Atlantic 
 coast comparing the grave conscience of Boston and the 
 open and skyey mind of Concord with the luxurious 
 body and vesture of New York and the antique " gentil- 
 ity " of Richmond comparing the harvested impres- 
 sions of these scenes, and weaving into new patterns the 
 finer threads which American tradition had put into 
 his hands: Hawthorne's brooding moral introspection, 
 his penetration of the shadowed quietudes of the heart, 
 his love of still people and quiet places, his golden 
 thread of imagery beaded with brave symbolism, the 
 elaborated euphony of his style ; Irving's bland pleasure 
 in the rich surface of things, his delight in manorial 
 dwellings, his sense of the glamour of history, his tem- 
 peramental and stylistic mellowness and clarity, his 
 worldly well-bred air of being " at ease in Zion " ; Poe's 
 artistic exclusiveness, his artistic intelligence, his inten- 
 sity, his conscious craftsmanship, his zest for discussing
 
 the creative process and the technique of literature. As 
 a matter of fact, Henry James does "join on " to the 
 eastern American traditions; he gathers up all these 
 enumerated threads; he assimilates all these forms of 
 consciousness. Hawthorne plays into his hands for 
 depth and inwardness, Irving for outwardness and en- 
 richment, and Poe for vividness and intensity. 
 
 The result of this fusion of types is a spacious and 
 richly sophisticated type of the aesthetic consciousness 
 of which the closest English analogue is that of Walter 
 Pater. James is like Pater in his aversion from the 
 world, his dedication to art, his celibacy, his personal 
 decorum and dignity, his high aesthetic seriousness, his 
 Epicurean relish in receiving and reporting the multi- 
 plicity and intensity of his impressions, and in the ex- 
 acting closeness of his style. There are distinctions in 
 plenty to be made by any one curious enough to under- 
 take the comparison ; but on the whole there is no better 
 side light on James's " philosophy " than Pater's Con- 
 clusion to the Studies in the Renaissance and his Plato 
 and Platonism; no better statement of his general lit- 
 erary ideals than Pater's essay on Style ; no more inter- 
 esting " parallel " to his later novels than Marius the 
 Epicurean and Imaginary Portraits. To make the mat- 
 ter a little more specific let the curious inquirer compare 
 the exposure of Pater's consciousness which is ordi- 
 narily known as his description of Mona Lisa with the 
 exposure of James's consciousness which is ordinarily 
 known as the description of a telegraph operator (In 
 the Cage). 
 
 The reduction of all experience to the aesthetic level
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 239 
 
 James himself recognized as a hazardous adventure. 
 At the conclusion of his searching criticism of a fellow 
 adventurer, Gabriele D'Annunzio, he raises the question 
 whether it can ever hope to be successful. D'Anmmzio's 
 adventure he pronounces a dismal failure that is, of 
 course, an aesthetic failure; for in the quest of the 
 beauty of passion the Italian, he declares, has produced 
 the effect of a box of monkeys, or as he periphrastically 
 puts it, " The association rising before us more nearly 
 than any other is that of the manners observable in the 
 most mimetic department of any great menagerie." 
 But, he continues, the question is whether D'Annunzio's 
 case is " the only case of the kind conceivable. May we 
 not suppose another with the elements differently mixed? 
 May we not in imagination alter the proportions within 
 or the influences without, and look with cheerfulness for 
 a different issue. Need the aesthetic adventure, in a 
 word, organised for real discovery, give us no more 
 comforting news of success? . . . To which probably 
 the sole answer is that no man can say." 
 
 The last sentence is modest but can not have been 
 wholly sincere; for James must have known that his 
 own works answer all these questions in the affirmative. 
 His own case is an altogether different variety of the 
 species ; his " news " is infinitely more comforting than 
 D'Annunzio's. The particular ugliness, the morbid 
 erotic obsession, on which D'Annunzio foundered, James, 
 like Pater, sailed serenely by. His aesthetic vision had 
 a far wider range and a far higher level of observation 
 than that of almost any of the Latin votaries of " art 
 for art " Gautier or Flaubert, for example. And yet,
 
 240 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 let us admit it frankly once for all, his representation 
 of life offends the whole-souled critical sense intensely 
 in some particulars and on what is fundamentally the 
 same ground as that on which these others offend it. 
 His representation of life is an aesthetic flat; it sins 
 against the diversity, the thick rotundity, the integrity 
 of life. Its exquisitely arranged scenes and situations 
 and atmospheres are not infrequently " ugly," as he 
 would say, with the absence of moral energy and action. 
 In The Awkward Age, for example, in that society 
 which lives for " the finer things," which perceives, and 
 compares, and consults, and so perfectly masters its 
 instincts, the situation fairly shouts for the presence of 
 at least one young man conceivably capable of bursting 
 like Lochinvar through the circle of intriguing petti- 
 coats to carry off the heroine. The atmosphere of The 
 Golden Bowl is ineffable " There had been," says the 
 author, " beauty day after day, and there had been for 
 the spiritual lips something of the pervasive taste of it." 
 The atmosphere is ineffably rich, still, golden, and, in 
 the long run, stifling ; the perceptive Mr. Verver, who is 
 in it, gives a superb image of its effect : " That's all I 
 mean at any rate that it's 'sort of soothing: as if 
 we were sitting about on divans, with pigtails, smoking 
 opium and seeing visions. ' Let us then be up and 
 doing ' what is it Longfellow says ? That seems some- 
 times to ring out ; like the police breaking in into our 
 opium den to give us a shake." 
 
 One may properly stress the point of his sin against 
 the integrity of life because it is of the essence of the 
 aesthetic case. It explains the vague but profound
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 241 
 
 resentment which some readers who do not balk at 
 James's difficulty, feel when they have got " inside." 
 Mr. Brownell, Mr. Hueffer, and Miss West all point 
 toward but do not, I think, quite touch the heart of the 
 matter when they say that James lacks " the historic 
 sense." A part of the historic sense he indubitably has, 
 and far more historical learning is implied in his work 
 than is explicit in it ; he loves the color and form of the 
 past, he feels the " beauties " of history. But history 
 to him, even the history of his own life, is a kind of mag- 
 nificent picture gallery through which he strolls, delight- 
 edly commenting on the styles of different schools and 
 periods, and pausing now and then for special expres- 
 sion of rapture before a masterpiece. Miss West beau- 
 tifully flames with indignation at his " jocular " refer- 
 ences to the Franco-Prussian War and at his unsympa- 
 thetic treatment of the French Revolution till she hits 
 upon the explanation that he was out of Europe while 
 the Franco-Prussian War raged, and that he was not 
 born at the time of the French Revolution, so that he 
 could no more speak well of it " than he could propose 
 for his club a person whom he had never met." The 
 explanation doesn't fit all the facts. He was not out of 
 England when in his introduction to Rupert Brooke's 
 letters, he expressed his satisfaction that the English 
 tradition " should have flowered in a specimen so beau- 
 tifully producible." The appreciation of Brooke is one 
 of the most beautifully passionate tributes ever written ; 
 but the passion is purely aesthetic ; the inveterate air 
 of the connoisseur viewing a new picture in the gallery 
 of masterpieces he can not shake off. He was not speak-
 
 ing of events that took place before he was born when 
 he said of the assassination of Lincoln in his Notes of 
 a Son and Brother: " The collective sense of what had 
 occurred was of a sadness too noble not somehow to 
 inspire, and it was truly in the air that, whatever we 
 had as a nation failed to produce, we could at least 
 gather round this perfection of classic woe. True 
 enough, as we were to see, the immediate harvest of 
 our loss was almost too ugly to be borne for nothing 
 more sharply comes back to me than the tune to which 
 the esthetic sense, if one glanced but from that high 
 window, recoiled in dismay from the sight of Mr. Andrew 
 Johnson perched on the stricken scene." 
 
 Any good American will flame with indignation when 
 he reads that passage; it so fails to present the subject; 
 it is so horribly inadequate; it so affronts what Lord 
 Morley would call " the high moralities " of life. With 
 its stricken " scene," its aesthetic rapture, its aesthetic- 
 dismay, it insults the moral sense as a man would in- 
 sult it who should ask one to note the exquisite slope 
 of a woman's neck at the funeral of her husband. It 
 makes one burn to break the glass in the high aesthetic 
 window. It sins against the integrity of life as, to take 
 some distinguished examples, Kenan's Vie de Jesus and 
 Pater's Plato and Platonism sin against it. To present 
 the Spartan boy as a nineteenth-century aesthete or to 
 present the life of Jesus as essentially " delicious " is 
 to miss in the quest of distinction the most vital and 
 obvious of distinctions. It is a blunder into which 
 simple, gross, whole-souled men like Fielding or Smollett 
 or Dickens could never have fallen. It is a crudity of
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 243 
 
 which only the most exquisite aesthete is capable; and 
 he perching exclusively in his high aesthetic window 
 absolutely can not avoid it. It is of the pure aesthetic 
 consciousness, not the intellect, that Emerson should 
 have written his terse little couplet : 
 
 Gravely it broods apart on joy 
 And truth to tell, amused by pain. 
 
 When all these discriminations against the usurpa- 
 tions and blindnesses of the aesthetic sense have been 
 made it remains to be said that the infinitely seductive, 
 the endlessly stimulating virtue of Henry James is the 
 quintessential refinement, the intriguing complexity, 
 the white-hot ardor of his passion for beauty. One feels 
 the sacred flame most keenly, perhaps, in novels and 
 tales like The Figure in the Carpet, The Next Time, 
 The Death of the Lion, The Lesson of the Master, 
 Roderick Hudson, and The Tragic Muse, in all of which 
 he is interpreting the spirit of the artist or treating 
 the conflict between the world and art. One feels it in 
 the words of the young man in The Tragic Muse who 
 abandons the prospect of a brilliant political career to 
 become a portrait painter : " The cleanness and quiet- 
 ness of it, the independent effort to do something, to 
 leave something which shall give joy to man long after 
 the howling has died away to the last ghost of an echo 
 such a vision solicits me in the watches of the night with 
 an almost irresistible force." One feels it in the words 
 of the young diplomat in the same novel, who is infatu- 
 ated with a fine piece of acting: "He floated in the 
 felicity of it, in the general encouragement of a sense
 
 244 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 of the perfectly done" One feels it in the words of the 
 novelist in The Lesson of the Master, who says he has 
 missed " the great thing " namely, " the sense which 
 is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is 
 his death, of having drawn from his intellectual instru- 
 ment the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of 
 having played it as it should be played." 
 
 For a born man of letters the first effect of this pas- 
 sion for perfection is an immense solicitude for style, 
 that is to say, for an exact verbal and rhythmical cor- 
 respondence between his conception of beauty and his 
 representation of it. Judgment upon style, then, in- 
 volves two distinct points: first, the question whether 
 the conception is beautiful, and, secondly, the question 
 whether the representation is exact. In the case of 
 Henry James there should not be much dispute about 
 the exactness and completeness of the representation; 
 no man ever strove more remorselessly or on the whole 
 more successfully to reproduce the shape and color and 
 movement of his aesthetic experience. The open ques- 
 tion is whether his conceptions were beautiful; and on 
 this point the majority of his critics have agreed that 
 his earlier conceptions were beautiful but that his later 
 conceptions were not. To that, in the last analysis, one 
 must reduce the famous discussion of his two, or three, 
 or half-a-dozen " styles." Any one who reads the 
 works through in chronological order can explode to his 
 own satisfaction the notion that James in any book or 
 year or decade deliberately changed his style. What 
 changed was his conception of beauty, and that changed 
 by an entirely gradual multiplication of distinctions
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 245 
 
 through the enrichment of his consciousness and the 
 intensification of his vision. To his youthful eye beauty 
 appeared in clear light, clear color, sharp outline, solid 
 substance; accordingly the work of his earlier period 
 abounds in figures distinct as in an etching of the eight- 
 eenth century, grouping themselves as on a canvas of 
 Gainsborough's, and conversing and interacting with 
 the brilliant lucidity and directness of persons in a 
 comedy of Congreve's. To his maturer vision beauty 
 has less of body and more of soul; it is not so much in 
 things as in the illimitable effluence and indefinable aura 
 of things ; it reveals itself less to eye and ear and hand 
 though these are its avenues of approach than to 
 some mysterious inner organ which it moves to a divine 
 abstraction from sense, to an ecstacy of pure contem- 
 plation. Accordingly, late works like The Sacred Fount 
 and The Golden Bowl present rather presences than 
 persons, dim Maeterlinckian presences gliding through 
 the shadow and shimmer of Turneresque landscapes and 
 Maeterlinckian country-houses, and rarely saying or 
 doing anything whatever of significance to vulgar ear 
 or eye. The evolution of his artistic interest may be 
 summed up in this way: he begins with an interest in 
 the seen, the said, the enacted ; and he ends by regarding 
 all that as an obstruction in the way of his latest inter- 
 est, namely, the presentation of the unseen, the unsaid, 
 the unacted the vast quantity of mental life in highly 
 civilized beings which makes no outward sign, the in- 
 visible drama upon which most of his predecessors had 
 hardly raised the curtain. The difficulty in the later 
 works is not primarily in the sentence structure but in
 
 246 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 the point of view. The sentences in the most difficult 
 of the novels, The Sacred Fount, are generally as neat, 
 terse, and alert as the sentences in The Europeans, 
 which is within the comprehension of an intelligent 
 child. When his sentences are long and intricate they 
 usually imprison and precisely render some intricate and 
 rewarding beauty of a moment of consciousness luxuri- 
 ously full: for example this moment of Strether's in 
 The Ambassadors: 
 
 How could he wish it to be lucid for others, for any one, 
 that he, for the hour, saw reasons enough in the mere way 
 the bright, clean, ordered water-side life came in at the open 
 window? the mere way Mme. de Vionnet, opposite him 
 over their intensely white table-linen, their omelette aux 
 tomates, their bottle of straw-colored chablis, thanked him 
 for everything almost with the smile of a child, while her 
 gray eyes moved in and out of their talk, back to the quarter 
 of the warm spring air, in which early summer had already 
 begun to throb, and then back to his face and their human 
 questions. 
 
 Only attend till the beauty of that crowded moment 
 reproduces itself in your consciousness, and you will 
 not complain much of the difficult magic of its evocation. 
 
 Beyond almost all the English novelists of his time 
 Henry James has applied his passion for beauty to the 
 total form and composition of his stories. He cares little 
 for the " slice of life," the loose episodic novel, the 
 baggy autobiographical novel, so much in vogue of late, 
 into which the author attempts to pitch the whole of 
 contemporary life and to tell annually all that he knows 
 and feels up to the date of publication without other
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 247 
 
 visible principle of selection. With extremely few excep- 
 tions his subjects present themselves to him either as 
 " pictures " to be kept rigorously within the limits of a 
 frame, or as " dramas " to be kept within the limits of 
 a stage, or as alternations of " drama " with " picture." 
 How he imposes upon himself the laws of painter and 
 playwright, how he chooses his " centre of composition," 
 handles his "perspective," accumulates his " values," 
 turns on the " lights " all this he has told with extraor- 
 dinary gusto in those prefaces which more illuminate the 
 fine art of fiction than anything else one is tempted to 
 say, than everything else on the subject. The point 
 for us here is that he strives to make the chosen form 
 and the intended effect govern with an " exquisite econ- 
 omy " every admitted detail. The ideal is to express 
 everything that belongs in the " picture," everything 
 that is in the relations of the persons of the drama, but 
 nothing else. 
 
 His exacting aesthetic sense determines the field no 
 less than the form of his fiction. A quite definite social 
 ideal conceived in the aesthetic consciousness is implicit 
 in his representation of a really idle class an ideal 
 ultimately traceable to his own upbringing and to his 
 early contact with the Emersonian rather than the 
 Carlylean form of transcendentalism. He has a positive 
 distaste for our contemporary hero " the man who 
 does things " ; the summum bonum for him is not an 
 action but a state of being an untroubled awareness of 
 beauty. Hence his manifested predilection for " highly 
 civilized young Americans, born to an easy fortune and 
 a tranquil destiny " ; for artists who amateurishly
 
 24-8 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 sketch and loiter through lovely Italian springs, though 
 conscious of " social duties " that await them beyond 
 the Alps ; for diplomats devoted to the theatre and mem- 
 bers of Parliament who dabble in paint; for Italian 
 princesses and princes free from the cares of state ; for 
 French counts and countesses who have nothing to keep 
 up but the traditions of their " race " ; for English lords 
 with no occupation but the quest of a lady ; for Amer- 
 ican millionaires who have left " trade " three thousand 
 miles behind them to collect impressions, curios, and 
 sons-in-law in Europe. Objectors may justly complain 
 that he seems unable to conceive of a really fine lady 
 or a really fine gentleman or a really decent marriage 
 without a more or less huge fortune in the background 
 or in the foreground of the picture ; and it may be added 
 that to the sense of a truly " Emersonian " mind the 
 clink and consideration of gold in most of his crucial 
 instances is a harsh and profound note of vulgarity 
 vibrating through his noble society. He is entirely 
 sincere when he says, in speaking of Balzac, that the 
 object of money is to enable one to forget it. Yet fine 
 ladies, fine gentlemen, and fine society as he understands 
 these matters are, to tell the hard truth, impossible 
 except in the conditions created by affluence and leisure. 
 In comparative poverty one may be good; but one can 
 not, in the Jamesian sense, be beautiful ! 
 
 Society can not in the Jamesian sense be beautiful 
 till the pressures of untoward physical circumstances, 
 of physical needs, and of engagements with " active 
 life " are removed, and men and women are free to live 
 " from within outward," subjecting themselves only to
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 249 
 
 the environment and entering only the relationships dic- 
 tated by the aesthetic sense. Let us not undervalue the 
 significance of this ideal, either with reference to life 
 or with reference to literature. It is inadequate ; but it 
 has the high merit of being finely human. It had the 
 precious virtue of utterly delivering Henry James from 
 the riotous and unclean hands of the " naturalists." 
 To it he owes the splendid distinction that when half 
 the novelists of Europe, carried off their feet by the nat- 
 uralistic drift of the age, began to go a-slumming in the 
 muck and mire of civilization, to explore man's simian 
 relationships, to exploit la bete humaine and Vhomme 
 moyen sensuel, to prove the ineluctability of flesh and 
 fate and instinct and environment he, with aristocratic 
 contempt of them and their formulas and their works, 
 withdrew farther and farther from them, drew proudly 
 out of the drift of the age, and set his imagination the 
 task of presenting the fairest specimens of humanity in 
 a choice sifted society tremendously disciplined by its 
 own ideals but generally liberated from all other com- 
 pelling forces. Precisely because he keeps mere car- 
 nality out of his picture, holds passion rigorously 
 under stress, presents the interior of a refined conscious- 
 ness precisely for these reasons he can produce a more 
 intense pleasure in the reader by the representation of a 
 momentary gush of tears or a single swift embrace than 
 most of our contemporaries can produce with chapter 
 after chapter of storms and seductions. 
 
 The controlling principle in Henry James's imaginary 
 world is neither religion nor morality nor physical neces- 
 sity nor physical instinct. The controlling principle is
 
 250 ON CONTEMP ORARY LITERATURE 
 
 a sense of style, under which vice, to adapt Burke's 
 words, loses half its evil by losing all its grossness. In 
 the noble society noblesse, and nothing else, obliges. 
 Even in the early " international " novels we witness 
 the transformation of Puritan morality, of which the 
 sanction was religious, into a kind of chivalry, of which 
 the sanctions are individual taste and class loyalty. 
 Madame de Mauve, the lovely American married to a 
 naughty French husband in that charming little master- 
 piece which bears her name, is not exhibited as preserv- 
 ing her " virtue " when she rejects her lover; she is ex- 
 hibited as preserving her fineness. Her American lover 
 acquiesces in his dismissal not from any sudden pang 
 of conscience but from a sudden recognition that if he 
 persists in his suit he will be doing precisely what the 
 vulgar French world and one vulgar spectator in par- 
 ticular expect him to do. In the earlier novels such as 
 Madame de Mauve, Daisy Miller, and The American, 
 the straightness, the innocence, the firmness of the 
 American conscience are rather played up as beauties 
 against the European background. Yet as early as 
 1878 he had begun, with the delightfully vivacious and 
 witty Europeans, his criticism of the intellectual dulness 
 and emotional poverty of the New England sense of 
 " righteousness " a criticism wonderfully culminating 
 in The Ambassadors, 1903, in which the highly percep- 
 tive Strether, sent to France to reclaim an erring son 
 of New England, is himself converted to the European 
 point of view. 
 
 Noblesse in the later novels inspires beauties of be- 
 havior beyond the reaches of the Puritan imagination.
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 251 
 
 It is astonishing to observe how many heroes and hero- 
 ines of the later period are called upon to attest their 
 fineness by a firm clear-eyed mendacity. The Wings of 
 a Dove, for example, is a vast conspiracy of silence to 
 keep a girl who knows she is dying from knowing that 
 her friends know that she knows. To lie with a wry 
 face is a blemish on one's character. " / lie well, thank 
 God," says Mrs. Lowder, " when, as sometimes will hap- 
 pen, there's nothing else so good." In the same novel 
 poor Densher, who rather hates lying, rises to it : " The 
 single thing that was clear in complications was that, 
 whatever happened, one was to behave as a gentleman 
 to which was added indeed the perhaps slightly less shin- 
 ing truth that complications might sometimes have their 
 tedium beguiled by a study of the question of how a 
 gentleman should behave." When he is tempted to throw 
 up his adventure in noble mendacity he is held to it in 
 this way : as soon as he steps into the Palazzo Leporelli 
 in Venice where the dying lady resides he sees " all the 
 elements of the business compose, as painters called it, 
 differently " he sees himself as a figure in a Veronese 
 picture and he lives up to the grand style of the picture. 
 He actively fosters the " suppressions " which are " in 
 the direct interest of every one's good manners, every 
 one's really quite generous ideal." 
 
 The most elaborate and subtle of all James's trib- 
 utes to the aesthetic ideal in conduct is The Golden 
 Bowl a picture in eight hundred pages of the relations 
 existing between Maggie Verver and her husband the 
 Prince, between Maggie's father Adam Verver and his 
 second wife Charlotte, and between each one of the
 
 252 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 quadrangle and all the rest. Before the pair of mar- 
 riages took place we are made to understand that an 
 undefinedly intimate relation had existed between the 
 Prince and Charlotte, of which Maggie and her father 
 were unaware; and after the marriages we are made to 
 understand that the undefinedly intimate relation was 
 resumed. All four of the parties to this complex rela- 
 tionship are thoroughly civilized ; they are persons fit 
 for the highest society : that is to say, they have wealth, 
 beauty, exquisite taste, and ability to tell a lie with a 
 straight face. What will be the outcome? The out- 
 come is that without overt act, or plain speech, or dis- 
 played temper on any hand, each one by psychic tact 
 divines " everything," and Mr. and Mrs. Verver quietly 
 return to America. Why is the liaison dissolved with 
 such celestial decorum? It is dissolved, because the 
 " principals " in it perceive the aesthetic " impossi- 
 bility " of continuing their relations in that atmosphere 
 of silent but lucid " awareness " ; and it is dissolved 
 with decorum because all the persons concerned are 
 infinitely superior to the vulgarity of rows, ruptures, 
 and public proceedings. The " criticism of life " im- 
 plicit in the entire novel becomes superbly explicit in 
 Maggie's vision of the ugliness and barbarousness of the 
 behavior of ordinary mortals in like circumstances : 
 
 She might fairly, as she watched them, have missed it 
 (hot angry jealousy) as a lost thing; have yearned for it, 
 for the straight vindictive view, the rights of resentment, 
 the rages of jealousy, the protests of passion, as for some- 
 thing she had been cheated of not least: a range of feelings 
 which for many women would have meant so much, but
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 253 
 
 which for her husband's wife, for her father's daughter, 
 figured nothing nearer to experience than a wild eastern 
 caravan, looming into view with crude colours in the sun, 
 fierce pipes in the air, high spears against the sky, all a 
 thrill, a natural joy to mingle with, but turning off short 
 before it reached her and plunging into other defiles. 
 
 Does not that description of Maggie's vision throb 
 with a fine passion of its own throb with the excite- 
 ment of James's imaginative insight into the possible 
 amenity of human intercourse in a society aesthetically 
 disciplined and controlled? 
 
 James's works throb with that fine passion from the 
 beginning to the end just as Pater's do. Criticism's 
 favorite epithets for him hitherto have been " cold," 
 " analytical," " scientific," " passionless," " pitiless " 
 historian of the manners of a futile society. That view 
 of him is doomed to disappear before the closer scrutiny 
 which he demanded and which he deserves. He is not 
 an historian of manners ; he is a trenchant idealistic 
 critic of life from the aesthetic point of view. 
 
 He is not pitiless except in his exposure of the 
 " ugly," which to his sense includes all forms of evil ; 
 in that task he is remorseless whether he is exposing the 
 ugliness of American journalism as in The Reverberator, 
 or the ugliness of a thin nervous hysterical intellectual- 
 ism and feminism as in The Bostonians, or the ugliness of 
 murder as in The Other House, or the ugliness of irregu- 
 lar sexual relations as in What Maisie Knew, or the ugli- 
 ness of corrupted childhood as in The Turn of the 
 Screw. The deep-going uglinesses in the last three cases 
 are presented with a superlative intenseness of artistic
 
 254 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 passion. If the effect is not thrilling in the first case 
 and heart-rending in the last two, it is because Anglo- 
 Saxons are quite unaccustomed to having their deeps of 
 terror and pity, their moral centers, touched through 
 the aesthetic nerves. Granting the fact, there is no 
 reason why they should deny the presence of a passion 
 of antipathy in a man to whose singular consciousness 
 the objectionable inveterately takes the shape of the 
 
 What, however, is more incomprehensible is the gen- 
 eral failure of criticism to recognize the ardor of his 
 quite unscientific attachment to the beautiful. His 
 alleged deficiency in charm, it is asserted, is due to the 
 fact that he does not sympathize with or love any of his 
 characters. The alleged fact is not a fact. He sympa- 
 thizes intensely with all his artists and novelists, with 
 all his connoisseurs of life, with all his multitude of 
 miraculously perceptive persons from the American 
 homesick for England in the Passionate Pilgrim through 
 the young woman aware of the fineness of old furniture 
 in The Spoils of Poynton to Maggie and Mr. Verver in 
 The Golden Bowl. And he dotes, devoutly dotes, dotes 
 in idolatry upon the enriched consciousness, the general 
 awareness, and the physical loveliness of his women. 
 He can not abide a plain heroine, even if she is to be a 
 criminal. Of Rose, the murderess in The Other House, 
 he says the most exquisite things " She carries the 
 years almost as you do, and her head better than any 
 young woman I've ever seen. Life is somehow becoming 
 to her." In almost every novel that he wrote he touched 
 some woman or other with the soft breath of pure aes-
 
 AESTHETIC IDEALISM OF JAMES 255 
 
 thetic adoration, a refining and exalting emotion which 
 is the note of Sherringham's relation to Miriam in The 
 Tragic Muse: 
 
 Beauty was the principle of everything she did. . . . 
 He could but call it a felicity and an importance incalcul- 
 able, and but know that it connected itself with universal 
 values. To see this force in operation, to sit within its 
 radius and feel it shift and revolve and change and never 
 fail, was a corrective to the depression, the humiliation, the 
 bewilderment of life. It transported our troubled friend 
 from the vulgar hour and the ugly fact; drew him to some- 
 thing that had no warrant but its sweetness, no name nor 
 place save as the pure, the remote, the antique. 
 
 This is the " very ecstasy of love " ; and for this 
 virtue, in the years to come, one adept after another 
 reading the thirty or forty volumes of James which any 
 one can read with ease and the fifteen or twenty richer 
 volumes which demand closer application for this vir- 
 tue one adept after another, till a brave company 
 gathers, is certain to say, " I discriminate ; but I adore 
 him!"
 
 X 
 
 THE HUMANISM OF GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 THE refusal of the authorities of Westminster Abbey 
 to allow George Meredith to sleep among England's 
 half-canonized dead was by no means surprising. In 
 spite of the indorsement of the Society of \uthors and 
 the Prime Minister, the future of his reputation still 
 remains somewhat problematic. If he had died twenty- 
 five years ago, though the work on which his fame rests 
 had then been accomplished, it is doubtful whether the 
 general voice would have decreed him this solemn tribute. 
 Indeed, from his first appearance in literature down to 
 the time of his death no writer of his power had received 
 less recognition for his virtues or more persistent praise 
 for his faults. George Eliot, Swinburne, Watts- 
 Dunton, and a following of enthusiasts felt his might, 
 and for the most part tried to persuade the world that 
 he was a great literary artist. Others asserted with 
 equal vehemence that he was an incoherent thinker, mak- 
 ing his artificial, choked, and stuttering novels the 
 vehicle for a mass of epigram. The so-called man in 
 the street, if he chanced to overhear the discussion, 
 promptly decided that it did not concern him, either 
 way. If Meredith attended to the early notices of his 
 books, he must often have sighed, as one who watches 
 for the morning. Even so late as 1880 the Westminster 
 
 256
 
 HUMANISM OF GEORGE MEREDITH 257 
 
 Review, traditionally favorable to his reputation, com- 
 mented upon the recently published Egoist now often 
 considered his weightiest contribution to fiction as 
 follows : 
 
 Mr. Meredith is, perhaps, our most artistic novelist, and, 
 for that very reason, by no means popular with mere sub- 
 scribers to Mudie's. His audience is few, but fit. ... He 
 is, in a word, what the world would vulgarly call too clever. 
 . . . This is Mr. Meredith's great fault he overdoes his 
 cleverness. If he was more simple, he would be far more 
 effective. The Egotist is full of poetry, subtle observation, 
 and sparkling epigram. 
 
 This review, with its emphasis upon the literary 
 artist, is typical, and, unless I am mistaken, is about 
 the quintessence of bad criticism. For it has yet to be 
 demonstrated that perfection of art has interfered with 
 the success of any matter whatsoever, even among the 
 subscribers to Mudie's. Those who value Meredith's 
 work most wisely will not extol him for his artistry, but 
 rather deplore his lack of it as one of the many obstacles 
 that have stood in the way of his popularity. Further- 
 more, to say that he " overdoes his cleverness " is to 
 suggest that he consciously strains for effect. If this 
 critic had really been one of that fit audience, though 
 few, he would rather have suggested that it was in- 
 superably difficult for Meredith not to be clever, that 
 it was almost impossible for him to be simple, that it was 
 entirely regrettable that he did not receive a stiff Eng- 
 lish academic training. How might not the Oxford 
 culture have disciplined his Celtic lawlessness and have 
 subdued his turn for " natural magic " ! Welsh and
 
 258 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 Irish in ancestry, Meredith was educated at a Moravian 
 school in Germany. In the plastic time of his youth, 
 he, like Browning and Carlyle, was his own master of 
 rhetoric. Like Carlyle, he wrote prose as if Dryden had 
 never shown the superiority of Charles the Second's 
 English to the flowered and conceited exuberance of the 
 Elizabethans. Like Browning, he wrote verse as if Pope 
 had not died to save us from the sins of the metaphysical 
 school. If Donne, as honest Ben declared, for not keep- 
 ing of accents deserved hanging, so occasionally did 
 Meredith; and so did Meredith frequently for wanton 
 violations of English idiom and barbarous disregard of 
 the decencies of English style. He lacked the continence 
 of perfect art. He was not steadily master of the means 
 of imparting his experience to the reader and producing 
 the effects which he desired to produce. 
 
 He was not wanting in a perception of the supreme 
 beauty of style which appears when a clear conception 
 is perfectly transmitted. His critical sense was sound; 
 he knew where to send other men for light. To a corre- 
 spondent who had asked him to name the writers most 
 characteristic of the genius of France he replied : " For 
 human philosophy, Montaigne; for the comic apprecia- 
 tion of society, Moliere ; for the observation of life and 
 condensed expression, La Bruyere; for a most delicate 
 irony scarcely distinguishable from tenderness, Renan; 
 for high pitch of impassioned sentiment, Racine. Add 
 to these your innumerable writers of Memoirs and 
 Pense"es, in which France has never had a rival." To 
 another correspondent he wrote with notable disparage- 
 ment of English models : " Style is rarely achieved
 
 HUMANISM OF GEORGE MEREDITH 259 
 
 here. Your literary hero, lecturing on Style, may have 
 a different opinion. The prose in Shakespeare and 
 Congreve is perfect. They have always the right accent 
 on their terminations. Apart from drama, Swift is a 
 great exemplar; Bolingbroke, and in his mild tea-table 
 way, Addison, follow. Johnson and Macaulay wielded 
 bludgeons ; they had not the strength that can be supple. 
 Gibbon could take a long stride with the leg of a danc- 
 ing master ; he could not take a short one." In his essay 
 on the " Idea of Comedy " he showed the keenest 
 appreciation of the styles of Menander and Terence, 
 writing with rapture of their " Elysian speech, equable 
 and ever gracious." But two years later, in the prelude 
 to the Egoist, he was capable of such fantastic sentences 
 as this: 
 
 Who, says the notable humorist, in allusion to this book 
 (Book of Earth), who can studiously travel through sheets 
 of leaves, now capable of a stretch from the Lizard to the 
 last few pulmonary snips and shreds of leagues dancing on 
 their toes for cold, explorers tell us, and catching breath 
 by good luck, like dogs on a table, on the edge of the Pole? 
 
 Judged with reference to such standards as are 
 offered by Henry Esmond or The Return of the Native, 
 he wanted art no less as a story-teller than as a stylist. 
 It is true that he undertook the novelist's most difficult 
 task. In his work the narration of events is quite sec- 
 ondary to the disclosure of character. His representa- 
 tion of men and women was designed to reveal the secret 
 springs of conduct in speech and art. Sometimes, like 
 the messenger of the Senecan tragedy, he reports the 
 great things that are going on behind the scenes when
 
 260 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 our English sense clamors for dramatic representation. 
 Sometimes with a kind of choric fury he drowns the 
 voices of the actors and assaults the ears of the audi- 
 ence with a prolonged and partly enigmatic commentary. 
 Sometimes he translates the conversation of hero and 
 heroine into a condensed telegraphic Meredithese. These 
 methods of telling a story are inartistic because they 
 do not effectively convey to the reader the mental and 
 emotional experience which the author has enjoyed; 
 because they defraud him in the critical moment of the 
 legitimate and expected pleasure of hearing the ipsissima 
 verba and of seeing the decisive gesture with his own 
 eyes. Defenders of Meredith will say that he was bent 
 on our perceiving the finer meanings of act and speech, 
 and that he could be sure of his purpose by no other 
 methods. That is to confess that he lacked the skill of 
 the supreme literary artist, that his intention was 
 greater than his power, that his vehicle was inadequate 
 to its burden. He had himself a subtle sense of the 
 deeper implications of speech, but he did not possess 
 sovereignly that instinct which finds a single word, to 
 tell all. When Romeo is banished from Verona, the 
 nurse urges Juliet to marry Paris. Then follows this 
 dialogue : 
 
 Jul. Speak'st them from thy heart? 
 
 Nurse. And from my soul, too; else beshrew them both. 
 
 Jul. Amen! 
 
 Nurse. What? 
 
 Jul. Well, thou hast comforted me marvellous much. 
 
 Go in ; and tell my lady I am gone, 
 
 Having displeas'd my father, to Laurence's cell 
 
 To make confession and to be absolv'd.
 
 HUMANISM OF GEORGE MEREDITH 261 
 
 What more can one desire? Could forty pages of 
 commentary add anything to that one incomparable 
 Amen? That is what the literary artist does with con- 
 versation. Shakespeare's plays are sown with such 
 volume-speaking words; in Meredith's novels I do not 
 know where you will find anything approaching it. Too 
 often in Meredith there is volubility where in Shake- 
 speare silence is the orator. 
 
 If Meredith was not a supreme literary artist, is it 
 possible that he was a first-rate literary genius ; or are 
 the two things inseparable? It would be gratifying to 
 find some substantial ground for the apparently extrava- 
 gant claims of his friends. One of them, Robert Louis 
 Stevenson, has been charged with uncritically juxta- 
 posing Meredith and Shakespeare in the enthusiasm of 
 his admiration for Rhoda Fleming. Looking through 
 Stevenson's letters, however, I have been pleased to 
 observe that he says very little about Meredith as a 
 literary artist. In Sidney Colvin's two-volume edition 
 under the date of 1879, when The Egoist was published, 
 there is a single reference to Meredith, as follows: 
 " Chapters viii and ix of Meredith's story are very good, 
 I think." That is all and he had met the author in 
 1878, and they had become warm friends. But three 
 years after that not ecstatic comment, Stevenson, in a 
 letter to W. E. Henley, lists among those worthy of 
 being honored with a dedication, " George Meredith, the 
 only man of genius of my acquaintance." " Talking of 
 Meredith," he continues significantly, " I have just 
 re-read for the third and fourth time The Egoist. 
 When I shall have read it the sixth or seventh, I begin
 
 262 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 to see I shall know about it. ... I had no idea of the 
 matter human, red matter he has contrived to plug 
 and pack (the italics are mine) into that strange, 
 admirable book." Finally, with a passing glance at 
 George Eliot, whom he could never mention with entire 
 decorum, he concludes : " I see more and more that 
 Meredith is built for immortality." A book so plugged 
 and packed with matter that it took four to six readings 
 to extract its meaning certainly did not represent 
 Stevenson's ideal in art. The full explanation of his 
 enthusiasm does not appear till 1884, again in a letter 
 to Henley. This time it is as plain as could be desired: 
 " My view of life is essentially the comic ; and the 
 romantically comic." Then after more comment on 
 Meredith : w The comedy which keeps the beauty and 
 touches the terrors of our life (laughter and tragedy-in- 
 a-good-humor having kissed) that is the last word of 
 moved representation; embracing the greatest number 
 of elements of fate and character." Stevenson might 
 fairly call the man a genius who had opened for him 
 his literary gospel and had shown him a satisfactory 
 point of view from which to represent the moving spec- 
 tacle of life. 
 
 There are numerous indications, some of doubtful 
 value, that the followers of Meredith are beginning to 
 recognize him as a spiritual master rather than a liter- 
 ary model. The select literary clubs which in the old 
 days used to study the riddle of the Sphinx in Childe 
 Roland, have discovered that Meredith's poems are less 
 trite, equally difficult, and therefore probably equally 
 profound. Some of the novels, too, have attracted those
 
 HUMANISM OF GEORGE MEREDITH 263 
 
 curious persons who find their chief pleasure in perusing 
 what their friends declare impossible. Four or five 
 books have been devoted to the exposition of Meredith's 
 art and ideas, not all of which are harder to read than 
 the works which they explain. But chiefly we must 
 reckon in the decisive tribute of the younger generation 
 of writers who by imitation and open avowal declare 
 their deep indebtedness to him. " At the present 
 moment," says Mrs. Craigie, " all the most worthy 
 English novelists, with the exception of Thomas Hardy, 
 are distinguished disciples of George Meredith." The 
 heterogeneous character of the alleged Meredithians 
 Stevenson, Du Maurier, Henley, Sara Grand, Anthony 
 Hope, Maurice Hewlett, W. J. Locke, George Bernard 
 Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, and many others is sugges- 
 tive. It means that to young authors he has not been 
 primarily a literary model ; those who have caught most 
 of his spirit have least imitated his structure and style. 
 It means that if Meredith is " built for immortality " 
 he will survive not merely as an epigrammatist, or 
 as a subtle poet, or as a psychologizing novelist, but 
 also as a man with a fund of energizing ideas, a con- 
 structive critic of life, if not an artist at any rate a 
 genius, one of the spokesmen and master spirits of his 
 time. 
 
 Herein certainly lies one of his indubitable claims to 
 genius: that he studied and solved in some measure the 
 basic problems of our contemporary literature half a 
 century before it existed. Though his exposition was 
 unequal to his insight, and his coevals missed many of 
 his points, such of our authors as to-day face the future
 
 smiling have found him out. The basic problems of con- 
 temporary literature are, for the thoughtful and respon- 
 sible writer, manifold in appearance but in essence 
 single: How to present a view of life both wise and 
 brave, answering to experience as well as to desire, 
 serviceable in art or in the daily walk. Single in 
 essence, in appearance they are manifold : How to give 
 pleasure without corrupting the heart, and how to give 
 wisdom without chilling it. How to bring into play the 
 great passions of men without unchaining the beast. 
 How to believe in Darwin and the dignity of man. How 
 to recognize the role of the nerves in human action with- 
 out paralyzing the nerve of action. How to admit the 
 weakness of man without dashing his heroism. How to 
 see his acts and respect his intentions. How to renounce 
 his superstitions and retain his faith. How to rebuke 
 without despising him. How to reform society without 
 rebelling against it. How to laugh at its follies with- 
 out falling into contempt. How to believe that evil is 
 fleeing forever before good, but will never be overtaken 
 and slain. How to look back upon a thousand defeats, 
 and yet cling to the fighting hope. If you will go 
 through this list of questions you will not find one that 
 Meredith does not answer or attempt to answer. Long 
 before Stevenson began to preach his gospel of cheerful- 
 ness and valor to a dispirited and pusillanimous world 
 Meredith had marked the texts for his homilies. Long 
 before Mr. Shaw broke into his Mephistophelian laugh- 
 ter, and long before Mr. Chesterton had discovered his 
 loyalty to the universe, when they if one can con- 
 ceive such a thing were quietly sleeping in their
 
 HUMANISM OF GEORGE MEREDITH 265 
 
 cradles, George Meredith had already bottled their 
 thunder. 
 
 Richard Fever el, published in 1859 with The Vir- 
 ginians, and Adam Bede, The Tale of Two Cities, and 
 The Origin of Species, was a repudiation and a proph- 
 ecy, but was recognized as neither. The Westminster 
 Review, though perceiving in it observation, humor, 
 passion, and tenderness, declared that the " book offers 
 no solution of any of the difficulties it lays open to us; 
 the nineteenth century struggles through it with but 
 faint glimpses of its goal." With interspersed hints in 
 subsequent novels, with prefaces, and with poems Mere- 
 dith sought to amend the reviewer's error, but not till 
 1877, when, Aristotle to his own dramatic cycle, he 
 published the Idea of Comedy, did he finally make clear 
 his message. From that time it began slowly to be 
 evident that he had made his novels, after all, but the 
 vehicles of an impassioned conviction. He, like so many 
 earnest men of his troubled century, had sought a way 
 of salvation from skepticism, melancholy, ennui, and 
 despair ; and he had found a way. Other men had other 
 remedies. For Newman the one thing needful was to 
 submit to authority and enter the Roman fold. Carlyle 
 thought the best that could be done for a man was to 
 find him a master and set him to work. For Mill the 
 key to happiness was free logical discussion in the inter- 
 ests of humanity. For the men of science it was the 
 following of truth wherever it leads. Arnold held that 
 none of these things was of importance in comparison 
 with the ability to recognize " the grand style," when- 
 ever it appeared. To those who have read intelligently
 
 266 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 Meredith's Idea of Comedy, I do not think it will seem 
 an anticlimax to say that he believed the one thing 
 needful, synthesis of all needs, was to instruct men in 
 the proper uses of the comic spirit, that they might 
 laugh and be laughed at unto their soul's salvation. 
 For to him the comic spirit is a fine celestial sunlight in 
 the mind, answering to the theological Grace of God in 
 the heart, which preserves those into whom it passes 
 from every evil thing. It is not hostile to prayer nor 
 to labor nor to logic nor to truth nor to grandeur, but 
 is very friendly to them all. It keeps prayer sweet, 
 labor cheerful, logic sane, truth serviceable, and 
 grandeur human. But over every form of animalism, 
 egotism, sentimentalism, cowardice, and unreason, " it 
 will look humanely malign, and cast an oblique light on 
 them, followed by showers of silvery laughter." For, to 
 quote from the ode to the same beneficent spirit it is the 
 
 Sword of Common Sense! 
 
 Our surest gift: the sacred chain 
 
 Of man to man. 
 
 Once grasp this Meredithian idea of comedy and sud- 
 denly you find yourself at the center of a coherent criti- 
 cal system. You open the works anywhere barring 
 perhaps some of the more cryptic poems and you find 
 yourself at home in an ordered well-lighted world. 
 You perceive why the younger generation is turning 
 toward him, and you see the relation in which he stood 
 to most of his fellows in fiction fifty years ago. The 
 definitions by which in the essay the comic spirit is
 
 HUMANISM OF GEORGE MEREDITH 267 
 
 isolated furnish a formidable critical arsenal. " The 
 sense of the Comic is much blunted by habits of pun- 
 ning and of using humoristic phrase; the trick of em- 
 ploying Johnsonian polysyllables to treat of the infin- 
 itely little " that by no means disposes of Dickens but 
 it casts an " oblique light " upon him. Much more 
 penetrating is this: "Comedy justly treated . . . 
 throws no infamous reflection upon life." How that 
 judges the sneering cynicism of all too frequent pas- 
 sages in the novels of Thackeray like the following: 
 
 Oh, Mr. Pendennis ! (although this remark does not apply 
 to such a smart fellow as you) if Nature had not made 
 provision for each sex in the credulity of the other, which 
 sees good qualities where none exist, good looks in donkey's 
 ears, wit in their numskulls, and music in their bray, there 
 would not have been near so much marrying and giving in 
 marriage as now obtains, and is necessary for the due prop- 
 agation of the noble race to which we belong. 
 
 That principle is far reaching; it condemns in a 
 single breath the whole miasmic marsh-land of natural- 
 ism. " It is unwholesome for men and women to see 
 themselves as they are, if they are no better than they 
 should be " there is the ethical, or, if one prefers, the 
 sanitary, plank in the platform of the new idealism. 
 " The same of an immoral may be said of realistic exhi- 
 bitions of a vulgar society " there is the repudiation 
 of wide wastes of the dry-as-dust realistic fiction, a 
 much-needed denial of the democratic notion that all 
 subjects are fit for art. In some of the poems the 
 Comic Spirit becomes almost truculent in its glee. It is
 
 268 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 clearly so in pitching upon any theatrical rebel against 
 society ;/ for example, in the verses called " Manfred " : 
 
 Projected from the bilious Childe, 
 
 This clatter jaw his foot could set 
 
 On Alps, without a breast beguiled 
 
 To glow in shedding rascal sweat. 
 
 Somewhere about his grinder teeth, 
 
 He mouthed of thoughts that grilled beneath, 
 
 And summoned Nature to her feud, 
 
 With bile and buskin Attitude. 
 
 Meredith arrived a little too late to play Childe 
 Harold or Don Juan ; but if he had not been protected 
 by his guardian spirit, he might easily have taken a part 
 in that more plaintive and dismal literature of despair 
 represented by numerous poems of Matthew Arnold. In 
 the crushed and crabbed verse of Meredith's jibe at 
 Arnold's Empedocles, I confess to finding something 
 very tonic, something that Arnold as critic would have 
 himself called tonic : 
 
 He leaped. With none to hinder, 
 
 Of Aetna's fiery scoriae 
 
 In the next vomit-shower, made he 
 
 A more peculiar cinder. 
 
 And this great Doctor, can it be, 
 
 He left no saner recipe 
 
 For men at issue with despair? 
 
 Admiring, even his poet owns, 
 
 While noting his fine lyric tones, 
 
 The last of him was heels in air ! 
 
 Each life its critic deed reveals: 
 And him reads reason at his heels, 
 If heels in air the last of him.
 
 But what has comedy to do with tragedy, and how do 
 they become tragi-comedy? Well, in the luminous in- 
 toxication of the morning following the symposium, 
 Socrates forced Agathon and Aristophanes, who alone 
 had stayed it out with him till cockcrow, to confess not 
 only that tragedy and comedy may be composed by the 
 same person, but also that " the foundations of the 
 tragic and comic arts were essentially the same." Aris- 
 todemus, who reported the conclusion of the dispute, 
 was unfortunately asleep during the discussion. With 
 this, for that reason, unexplained opinion of Socrates, 
 Meredith was obviously in accord. To his view, life is 
 neither wholly comedy nor wholly tragedy, but both at 
 once. In order to distinguish either element one must 
 be able to distinguish both; the comic spirit, one may 
 almost say, is that which perceives the tragic fault. In 
 order to represent life bravely and wisely, one must see 
 it steadily, and see it whole. Such sight is given only 
 to deep and grave heads. Those endowed with this 
 vision discern that the great girders which bear up the 
 world of man are the discipline of the passions by the 
 mind, loyalty to reason, and faith in civilization. What- 
 ever forces attempt to weaken these girders the cynic- 
 ism of Don Juan, the despair of Empedocles the Comic 
 Spirit holds them, to adopt the Caesarian euphemism, 
 in numero hostium puts them to the sword of common 
 *ense. The discernment that these great girders are 
 essential to civilization, and the loyalty which in grave 
 men springs with the discernment, underlie every true 
 comedy and every true tragedy. But the struggle which 
 most men undergo in disciplining their passions, learn-
 
 270 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 ing to walk in the light of reason, and preserving their 
 faith in civilization, is a strange series of ups and downs. 
 Comedy attends to their foolish falls ; tragedy to their 
 painful failures ; to represent the whole course of the 
 struggle is to write tragi-comedy. 
 
 Tragi-comedy as the position of equipoise in life and 
 art that, in Meredith's time, was a notable discovery. 
 When we attempt to measure his achievement we should 
 not lose sight of the originality, the scope, and the diffi- 
 culty of his design. He planned to produce thoughtful 
 laughter, an aim which demanded that the characters 
 in his novels, as well as in his audience, should possess 
 some of the culture of the drawing-room. But he 
 planned at the same time to move the great passions 
 which are generally attenuated under intensive cultiva- 
 tion. Since the Restoration they had almost disap- 
 peared from the fiction of high life. Wordsworth had 
 been obliged to seek out the great universal impulses in 
 the cottages of Cumberland peasants. The Brontes 
 studied them in mad country squires. George Eliot 
 found them among the yeomen of Warwickshire. Even 
 Thomas Hardy has had to resort to shepherds and 
 dairy-maids so fugitive is our sense of solemn splen- 
 dor from the roar of cities and civilized men. But what 
 pitiful antagonists of destiny these rural people of Mr. 
 Hardy make. The intelligence of mortals is wholly 
 inactive in the combat. In condemning the ways of God 
 to man this grim artist seems obsessed by the idea that 
 all nature is conspiring to bring a helpless humanity 
 to degradation and shame. That is hardly to see life 
 whole. Meredith sought his splendor in another place.
 
 HUMANISM OF GEORGE MEREDITH 271 
 
 His problem was how to make tragedy and comedy meet 
 together in the drawing-room. Comedy was there to 
 stay; but as for tragedy, Thackeray, for example, 
 avoided it. Dickens and his public really preferred 
 melodrama and bloody murder. 
 
 To his contemporaries and predecessors Meredith 
 appears on the whole to have owed relatively little, 
 though his obligations were probably larger than has 
 generally been acknowledged. What makes him appear 
 comparatively isolated in his time is not his exemption 
 from contemporary forces, but his comprehensive in- 
 clusion of them within his own complex mind and tem- 
 perament. His culture is wide and deep. His fiction 
 gathers its virtues from poetry, history, science, and 
 philosophy. His purposefulness is fortified by an inti- 
 mate and almost lifelong friendship with that fine aus- 
 tere Liberal, John Morley, and with that drily witty 
 master of common sense, Leslie Stephen, and with that 
 high-aspiring revered sage, Thomas Carlyle. In Farina, 
 The Shaving of Shagpat, The Ordeal of Richard 
 Feverel, Evan Harrington, and The Egoist one may 
 possibly detect the influence of the comic spirit of 
 Meredith's first father-in-law, Thomas Love Peacock, 
 whose laughter leaped and flashed upon the humbugs 
 and intellectual follies of his day with much of the 
 Meredithian lambency and gusto. On his graver side 
 he shows a certain affiliation with George Eliot ; but so 
 far as the chronological indications go, he is as likely to 
 have influenced her as she to have influenced him. The 
 moral high seriousness and the love of Nature, so con- 
 spicuously exhibited by both, may perhaps be ascribed
 
 272 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 in part to their common inheritance from Wordsworth. 
 The significant chapter in the Ordeal of Richard Feverel 
 entitled " Nature speaks " is strikingly parallel not 
 merely in its spirit but also in its incidents to Words- 
 worth's Peter Bell a poem written to illustrate the 
 healing and redemptive impulses from a " vernal wood." 
 But no writer between Meredith and Shakespeare has 
 Meredith's power of marrying tragedy and comedy, 
 poetry and laughter. He is the single exception to the 
 rule that no disciple can stand up under the overwhelm- 
 ing influence of the great Elizabethan. Shakespeare 
 was his master. Shakespeare determined his point of 
 view and the large feature of his artistic representation. 
 From him he learned to choose out for the favorite 
 theatre of his action a country-house, where, as in a 
 court, were assembled enough actors of civilized life to 
 be visible against the scenery. From him he learned to 
 let poor clowns play humble parts, and if any one had 
 to be sent out on a barren heath to send a king who 
 even in madness was a match for the storm. From him 
 he learned to line the back and sides of his stage with 
 the gray and middle ages of wisdom, pedantry, sanctity, 
 craft, and cynicism; and then to release in the fore- 
 ground young Romeo and Juliet, or Perdita and 
 Florizel, or Ferdinand and Miranda to discover the 
 brave new world under the stinging rain of comment 
 from prudent or disillusioned antiquity; and then, at 
 last, whether to youth and beauty the vista of days 
 opened smiling, or whether some dire mischance closed 
 their fond eyes forever, to intimate that to youth belong 
 the untrodden ways.
 
 HUMANISM OF GEORGE MEREDITH 273 
 
 The " criticism of life " underlying Meredith's repre- 
 sentations of it is in its general outlines Shakespearian, 
 and it is Shakespearian in the sweetness and the nobility 
 of its temper. Meredith, like his master, accepts the 
 universe with a smile; but like his master, he almost 
 immediately proceeds to distinguish within the human 
 microcosm three distinct levels of being: blood, brain, 
 and spirit. He is, to be sure, so far a man of his own 
 time that he conceives the physical, the intellectual, and 
 the spiritual as successive stages in the grand evolu- 
 tionary process. He looks to no Hebrew chronicler to 
 explain how in the beginning light was divided from 
 darkness and man from the beasts of the field. He 
 ascribes these epoch-making distinctions to the inscrut- 
 able workings of Life and our mother Earth deities 
 always named by him with reverence; but, unlike the 
 naturalistic novelists of his day, he regards these dis- 
 tinctions as real, substantial, and established. He does 
 not conceive of man as mere flesh or mere mind or mere 
 spirit but as, at his healthiest and completest, a fine 
 concord and harmony of the three. All this the reader 
 may find in the following lines from The Woods of 
 Westermam "; 
 
 Each of each in sequent birth, 
 Blood and brain and spirit, three 
 (Say the deepest gnomes of Earth), 
 Join for true felicity. 
 Are they parted, then expect 
 Someone sailing to be wrecked : 
 Separate hunting are they sped, 
 Scan the morsel coveted.
 
 274 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 Earth that Triad is : she hides 
 Joy from him who that divides ; 
 Showers it when the three are one 
 Glassing her in union. 
 
 For the novelists who represent man as essentially a 
 depraved animal Meredith has little but loathing and 
 contempt. After reading a naturalistic work by one of 
 his French contemporaries he writes, in 1887 : " O what 
 a nocturient, cacaturient crew has issued of the lens of 
 the Sun of the mind on the lower facts of life ! on sheer 
 Realism, breeder at best of the dung-fly. Yet has that 
 Realism been a corrective of the more corruptingly 
 vaporous with its tickling hints at sensuality. It may 
 serve ultimately in form of coprolite to fatten poor 
 soil for better produce." 
 
 Yet Meredith declares repeatedly in his letters that 
 " a frank acceptance of Reality is the firm basis of the 
 Ideal." As a moralist he is anti-Puritan. He has no 
 patience with an ascetic mortification of the flesh. Like 
 Browning's David, he rejoices in " our manhood's prime 
 vigour " ; he accepts with a relish the legitimate physical 
 gratifications of life 
 
 And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust 
 
 divine, 
 And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught 
 
 of wine. 
 
 To the Rev. Augustus Jessop he writes : " Let men 
 make good blood, I constantly cry. I hold that to be 
 rightly materialistic to understand and take nature
 
 HUMANISM OF GEORGE MEREDITH 275 
 
 as she is is to get on the true divine highroad. That 
 we should attain to a healthy humanity, is surely the 
 most pleasing thing in God's sight." With allusion to 
 Hawthorne, he says in 1865 : " I strive by study of 
 humanity to represent it : not its morbid action. I have 
 a tendency to do that, which I repress : for, in delineat- 
 ing it, there is no gain. In all my, truly, very faulty 
 works, there is this aim. Much of my strength lies in 
 painting morbid emotion and exceptional positions ; but 
 my conscience will not let me so waste my time." 
 
 These convictions are illustrated in his novels by his 
 representations of what we should call to-day the 
 " eugenic " marriage, and by his unrivalled array of 
 healthy " fair women and brave men." His heroines 
 can walk, ride, row, and swim distances which to any one 
 of Jane Austen's ladies would have been appalling of 
 which the mere prospect would probably have caused 
 her to sink swooning into the arms of her escort. He 
 recognizes and treats frankly enough the magnetic force 
 of sexual attraction ; but he recognizes it, by choice, in 
 men and women who live above the level of sensuality, 
 and in whom this mysterious force has been metamor- 
 phosed into a general energizer of the intelligence and 
 spirit. In his exquisite poem, Love in the Valley, for 
 example, the physical root of the emotion is adequately 
 indicated, but what is offered for our delectation is its 
 bursting through the senses into fragrant and luxuriant 
 blossom in the mind and the imagination. The speaker, 
 like a right Shakespearian lover, is keenly alive to the 
 sensuous charm of the beloved being, but his higher fac- 
 ulties exalt and transfigure the delight of the senses,
 
 276 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 and hold him rapt, reverent, and breathless with adora- 
 tion. I quote a few stanzas which may be paralleled 
 by his description of Lucy Desborough in The Ordeal 
 of Richard Feverel or by the description of Meredith's 
 second wife in the Letters, ending thus : " When her 
 hand rests in mine, the world seems to hold its breath, 
 and the sun is moveless. I take hold of Eternity." 
 
 Under yonder beech-tree single on the green-sward, 
 
 Couched with her arms behind her golden head, 
 Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly, 
 
 Lies my young love sleeping in the shade. 
 Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her, 
 
 Press her parting lips as her waist I gather slow, 
 Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me : 
 
 Then would she hold me and never let me go? 
 
 ...* 
 
 Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow, 
 
 Swift as the swallow along the river's light 
 Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets, 
 
 Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight. 
 Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops, 
 
 Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun, 
 She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer, 
 
 Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won. 
 
 When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror, 
 
 Tying up her laces, looping up her hair, 
 Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded, 
 
 More love should I have, and much less care. 
 When her mother tends her before the lighted mirror, 
 
 Loosening her laces, combing down her curls, 
 Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded, 
 
 I should miss but one for many boys and girls.
 
 HUMANISM OF GEORGE MEREDITH 277 
 
 When at dawn she sighs, and like an infant to the window 
 
 Turns grave eyes craving light, released from dreams, 
 Beautiful she looks, like a white water lily 
 
 Bursting out of bud in haven of the streams. 
 When from bed she rises clothed from neck to ankle 
 
 In her long nightgown sweet as boughs of May, 
 Beautiful she looks, like a tall garden lily 
 
 Pure from the night, and splendid for the day. 
 
 The peculiar specialty of the Meredithian heroine, 
 however, is neither health nor beauty, but brains. In 
 behalf of women George Meredith repudiates alike 
 Alfred Austin's old Tory ideal the soft shy mate that 
 sits on the nest and never stirs; the Pre-Raphaelite 
 ideal all lips and neck and dreaming eyes ; and Thomas 
 Hardy's romantic ideal the fair puppet of passionate 
 impulse. His view of the subject resembles that of 
 John Stuart Mill in his fervid treatise on The Subjec- 
 tion of Women a plea for the emancipation of women 
 in their own interest and in the interest of society at 
 large. " I can foresee great and blessed changes for the 
 race when they have achieved independence " ; he writes 
 in a letter of 1888, " for that must come of the exercise 
 of their minds the necessity for which is induced by 
 their reliance on themselves for subsistence." To his 
 sense, many of the Victorian representations of women 
 in art and in literature reflect but the unsubdued Turk- 
 ish instincts of the male. His conscience rebels against 
 the imposition upon fair English girls of the ideals of 
 the harem. His intelligence is irritated, as that of most 
 men is from time to time, by the difficulty of settling any 
 question with a typical representative of " the sex " on
 
 278 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 rational grounds. The subtlest sonnet sequence in 
 English, his Modern Love, is a series of cries of exas- 
 peration and pain at the baffling indirectness of the deal- 
 ing of woman with man : 
 
 Their sense is with their senses all mixed in, 
 Destroyed by subtleties these women are! 
 More brain, O Lord, more brain ! or we shall mar 
 Utterly this fair garden we might win. 
 
 Clara Middleton in The Egoist, Diana of the Cross- 
 ways, and Aminta are among his notable essays toward 
 the establishment of a new ideal of " femininity." With 
 the young health of Nature in May and the beauty 
 of the white birch tree they unite a keen critical faculty 
 which is their mark of intellectual independence. Emo- 
 tional enough, all of them, they are not in the long run 
 at the mercy of their emotions. If they have been duped 
 in their first adventure with society, they have the wit 
 to extricate themselves from situations threatening dis- 
 aster, and to reconstruct their lives in conformity with 
 a rational ideal and, if necessary, like George Eliot in 
 defiance of conventions a readjustment, by the way, 
 as remote from sensual philandering as the north pole 
 is from the south pole. Of Diana, Meredith says 
 proudly, " she has no puppet pliancy." Regarded as a 
 character she has grievous faults. Regarded as a piece 
 of characterization, she is not entirely plausible. But 
 regarded as the imperfect human illustration of certain 
 ideals, she is in her valiancy and in her power of intel- 
 lectual growth and spiritual rejuvenescence one of the 
 most interesting and inspiriting women in English 
 fiction.
 
 HUMANISM OF GEORGE MEREDITH 279 
 
 In order to " civilize " the women Meredith sees very 
 clearly that it is necessary at the same time to civilize 
 the men. Civilization implies for him the emancipation 
 of human conduct from non-rational controls. It means 
 establishing in secure sovereignty within each individual 
 man a benevolent and beneficent mind. He has no over- 
 sanguine expectation of the completion of the evolu- 
 tionary process. He sees the serenity and freedom of 
 reason 
 
 By more elusive savages assailed 
 
 On each ascending stage. 
 
 He girds on the sword of the Comic Spirit and unleashes 
 the hounds of laughter to hunt down the " savages " 
 lurking and skulking in the breasts of those repre- 
 sentatives of the race who are in outward appearance 
 most remote from our ancestors of the cave. His game 
 includes the philosopher who bids us trust our emotional 
 instincts " accept the throb for lord of us " ; or who 
 bids us bow the knee to hoary and outworn conventions ; 
 or who lays us prostrate by mumbling " the crackskull 
 name of Fate " ; or who sets up self as God. Meredith 
 had drunk deep of the intellectual radicalism of Mill 
 and Morley, and the spirit of it profoundly affects his 
 representations of men in fiction. The qualities which, 
 above everything else, he glorifies in his young men are 
 intrepidity and will; the defects upon which his muse 
 looks malignly are " the untrimmed lamp and the ungirt 
 loin." The virtues which he admires in men of maturity 
 are wisdom and generosity ; the sins which he castigates 
 are innumerable, but most conspicuous among them are 
 sensuality, pride, obstinacy, and egotism. Sir Wil-
 
 80 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 loughby Patterne in The Egoist is his great and un- 
 rivalled masterpiece in the remorseless dissection of male 
 egotism masking as sensibility and refinement. If the 
 book were read, chewed, and " inwardly digested " by 
 every young man contemplating courtship or marriage, 
 we might reasonably look two or three generations hence 
 for some wholesome clarifications and amendments in the 
 spiritual relations of the sexes. Sir Willoughby Pat- 
 terne is his most elaborate and penetrating study of a 
 single specimen of the lordly species, but his richest 
 and most various exhibition of critical portraits of men 
 is in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, where the light of 
 the Comic Spirit falls brilliantly upon the sentimentality 
 and the tragic pride, obstinacy, and egotism of Sir 
 Austin Feverel; the deliberate sensuality and the cynic- 
 ism of Adrian Harley ; the gluttony and hypochondria 
 of Hippias Feverel ; the undisciplined wrath of Farmer 
 Blaize, the dull Philistinism of Thompson pere, the fol- 
 lies of young Richard's passion and hot-headed gener- 
 osity, the dull juvenile obscenity of Ripton Thompson; 
 and upon sundry others. Every one of these men was 
 vitally conceived. Each one of them has his winsome 
 and lovable aspects. Meredith seems incapable of hat- 
 ing or despising utterly any one of his kind. But his 
 warm human friendliness is edged, like a surgeon's knife, 
 for discrimination. He cuts deep but the operation is 
 therapeutic. " By my faith in the head," he cries, 
 quaintly imaging his reliance upon the widening of intel- 
 lectual light: 
 
 I can hear a faint crow 
 Of the cock of fresh mornings, far, far, yet distinct.
 
 HUMANISM OF GEORGE MEREDITH 281 
 
 What does an evolutionist like Meredith mean when 
 he distinguishes the spiritual from the intellectual 
 world? He has himself some difficulty in telling us, but 
 one gathers from his various utterances that to " live in 
 the spirit " is to live steadily above the clamor of the 
 flesh and the crying of self-interest to the will. Inter- 
 course with men who dwell habitually at that level has, 
 as most of us know, an ennobling influence akin to that 
 of great works of art, love of country, and religion. 
 Meredith had no respect for the orthodox theology of 
 his time, but he called himself a " practical Christian," 
 and, to my sense, he writes, in frequent passages of his 
 correspondence, like a man who has experienced what 
 theologians call " the peace of God." In 1872 he writes 
 to his son: 
 
 You know how Socrates loved Truth. Virtue and truth 
 are one. Look for the truth in everything, and follow it, 
 and you will then be living justly before God. Let nothing 
 flout your sense of a Supreme Being, and be certain that 
 your understanding wavers whenever you chance to doubt 
 that he leads to good. We grow to good as the plant grows 
 to light. The school has only to look through history for a 
 scientific assurance of it. And do not lose the habit of pray- 
 ing to the unseen Divinity. Prayer for worldly goods is 
 worse than fruitless, but prayer for strength of soul is that 
 passion of the soul which catches the gift it seeks. 
 
 In " the first ten minutes of 1878 " he sends to John 
 Morley a new year's greeting, pulsing still with the 
 mystical exultation which the writer felt when he hailed 
 the new year under the midnight skies to the sound of 
 the new year's bells:
 
 282 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 To come from a gaze at the stars Orion and shaking 
 Sirius below him is to catch a glance at the inscrutable 
 face of him that hurries us on, as on a wheel, from dust to 
 dust I thought of you and how it might be with you this 
 year: hoped for good: saw beyond good and evil to great 
 stillness, another form of moving for you and me. It seems 
 to me that Spirit is, how, where, and by what means in- 
 volving us, none can say. But in this life there is no life 
 save in spirit. The rest of life, and we may know it in 
 love, is an aching and a rotting. 
 
 When in 1885 Meredith's wife lay dying, he wrote to 
 John Morley : " Happily for me, I have learnt to live 
 much in the spirit and see brightness on the other side 
 of life, otherwise this running of my poor doe with the 
 inextricable arrow in her flanks, would pull me down 
 too. As it is, I sink at times. I need all my strength to 
 stand the harsh facts of existence. I wish it were I to 
 be the traveller instead." After her death : " While 
 she lingered I could not hope for it to last, and now I 
 could crave any of the latest signs of her breathing a 
 weakness of my flesh. When the mind shall be steadier, 
 I shall have her calmly present past all tears." Two 
 days later : " She was the best of wives, truest among 
 human creatures ... I believe in Spirit, and I have 
 her with me here, though at present I cannot get to calm 
 of thought, all the scenes of her long endurance, and the 
 days of peace before it rise up." 
 
 I have been attempting to show why Meredith's " criti- 
 cism of life " impresses one, as, on the whole, unusually 
 adequate for a writer of our bewildered age. Perhaps 
 the rarest note in the literature of our time is nobility 
 of feeling. Meredith strikes that note on whatever level
 
 he touches the strings of life. Like his master Shake- 
 speare, speaking nobly of the body, nobly of the mind, 
 and nobly of the spirit, he sounds the chord of full 
 harmony for which our hearts are eager. " Between 
 realism and idealism," he declares, " there is no natural' 
 conflict. This completes that." Though his craftsman- 
 ship and power of representation were inferior to his 
 conceptive and critical faculties, he produced a body of 
 work which richly remunerates the explorer. Some of 
 his contemporaries possessed separately in a higher 
 degree the intellectual or the emotional powers with 
 which he was gifted; but no one of them fused within 
 himself so many and so diverse powers. He woke early 
 to the necessity and the possibility of a new synthesis. 
 His first novel, produced far back in the middle of the 
 nineteenth century, seems incredibly fresh to-day, and 
 would seem incredibly contemporaneous if our living 
 writers had taught us to expect from them anything so 
 sound and sweet. To an American critic he wrote in 
 1887 : " I think that all right use of life, is to pave 
 ways for the firmer footing of those who succeed us ; as 
 to my works, I know them faulty, think them of worth 
 only when they point and aid to that end." In close 
 touch with distinguished leaders of Liberal thought, he 
 heartily partook in their sense of high responsibility to 
 society and in their resolution to make war without truce 
 upon the confederated lusts and egotisms of unredeemed 
 animal man. His sonnet to " J. M." is almost Miltonic 
 in its note of valorous consecration : 
 
 Our faith is ours and comes not on a tide: 
 
 And whether Earth's great offspring, by decree,
 
 284. ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 Must rot if they abjure rapacity, 
 
 Not argument but effort shall decide. 
 
 They number many heads in that hard flock: 
 
 Trim swordsmen they push forth ; yet try thy steel. 
 
 Thou, fighting for poor human kind, wilt feel 
 
 The strength of Roland in thy wrist to hew 
 
 A chasm sheer into the barrier rock, 
 
 And bring the army of the faithful through. 
 
 Few, indeed, are the writers of fiction who have striven 
 so steadily to seize and conserve for posterity the sound 
 ideas afloat in their time. In these four lines from 
 A Reading of Earth we touch upon the controlling prin- 
 ciple of all Meredith's work: 
 
 Thou under stress of the strife, 
 Shalt hear for sustainment supreme, 
 The cry of the conscience of life: 
 Keep the young generations in hail, 
 And bequeath them no tumbled house.
 
 XI 
 SHAKESPEARE, OUR CONTEMPORARY 
 
 WHEN we commemorate the death of a great man, we 
 are accustomed to recount his virtues, and, according 
 to the measure of our ability, to reanimate his dust. In 
 the case of Shakespeare the dearth of biographical docu- 
 ments and the perverse subtlety of posterity have ren- 
 dered it difficult to perform these rites of honor. Minute 
 research recovers a christened, marrying, acting, play- 
 writing, shareholding, litigating, will-making person of 
 the slightest inspirational quality. Seventeenth century 
 reference is rich in praise of the writings, but indicates 
 little more of the man than that he was of " upright 
 demeanor," " civil," " honest," " fluent," and of an 
 " open and free nature." The Shakespeare whom we 
 would honor, we know almost exclusively through his 
 works. As Sir Walter Raleigh has finely said : " He 
 wove upon the roaring loom of Time the garment that 
 we see him by; and the earth at Stratford closed over 
 the broken shuttle." 
 
 From the works, however, each age has reconstructed 
 " Shakespeare the man " very much as, from a survey 
 of the world, each age has reconstructed the Creator: 
 sometimes expatiating in folios on the attributes of 
 deity; sometimes content with asking us to adore the 
 Great Unknowable. The young Milton meditating on
 
 286 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 the works becomes a monument of wonder and astonish- 
 ment ; and Goethe in his old age exclaims, " But we can- 
 not talk about Shakespeare ; everything is inadequate." 
 In the romantic days when men worshiped Nature, a 
 pious German editor held that the works of Shakespeare 
 were an " integral part of nature and therefore above 
 criticism." Since Hazlitt launched his paradox, that 
 " no really great man ever thought himself so," perhaps 
 the most striking and popular notion concerning the 
 poet is that he did not know what he was about. The 
 spirit of our day, with its new naturalistic philosophies, 
 finds this notion in happy accord with its inclination. 
 That he did not know what he was about is, for example, 
 what endears to our time Remain Roland's great artist- 
 soul, Jean Christophe. It is the mark by which we rec- 
 ognize the supreme figures in contemporary literature. 
 We should like to think of Shakespeare as our own con- 
 temporary. And so our current criticism with its new 
 friendliness to the life of the senses, to " vital forces," 
 to the spontaneous, the natural, the instinctive, the pur- 
 poseless pleasantly flatters itself by discovering in the 
 works of the world's master dramatist not a thinking, 
 deliberate human architect but an unconscious, unmoral, 
 natural force, working effortless miracles like the apian 
 parthenons or the intricate arras of the frost. 
 
 This current view of Shakespeare as a neutral, un- 
 moral, unconscious creative force rests upon a super- 
 ficially plausible but, as I believe, a thoroughly fallacious 
 argument, which runs something like this : Shakespeare 
 created a various world in the image of that in which we 
 live. It is peopled with kings and peasants, saints and
 
 SHAKESPEARE, OUR CONTEMPORARY 287 
 
 sinners, sages and fools, men and monsters, each obedient 
 to the dictation of his own heart, belly, or other oracle 
 of his destiny. It is neither a better nor a worse place 
 of residence than New York or London. With impartial 
 hand its maker has unloosed the powers of good and evil 
 to work out their eternal conflict, with no more of divine 
 interposition than is observable upon this afflicted planet. 
 The virtuous are insecure in felicity; justice is fre- 
 quently thwarted; the treacherous and bloody villain 
 works his will ; and the innocent go down with the guilty 
 to disaster and death. To attribute to the author the 
 sentiment of any one of his dramatis persona is, as 
 Juliet's nurse would say, " very weak dealing " ; for the 
 chances are that the chosen sentiment is contradicted in 
 the next scene by another of the dramatis personce. 
 " No critical test has yet been found," says Sir Sidney 
 Lee in the latest edition of his Life, " whereby to disen- 
 tangle Shakespeare's personal feelings or opinions from 
 those which he imputes to the creatures of his dramatic 
 world. It was contrary to Shakespeare's dramatic aim 
 to label or catalogue in drama his private sympathies 
 or antipathies." 
 
 This parallel between the real world and the world of 
 Shakespeare's imagination neglects one immensely im- 
 portant difference, which is overlooked only because it is 
 so obvious, but which, adequately apprehended, destroys 
 the illusion of parallelism altogether, and explodes the 
 theory of authorial reticence and dramatic impersonal- 
 ity. The difference is this: In viewing the real world 
 we frequently misunderstand the characters and motives 
 of people who are very near to us, and we frequently
 
 288 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 miss the significance of important events which are tak- 
 ing place under our eyes. The grief of those we love is 
 often inarticulate and unknown to us ; passion sometimes 
 gives no sign; hypocrisy wears its mask unpenetrated ; 
 and iniquity often goes not merely unpunished but unde- 
 tected and even unsuspected to the grave. In partial 
 or complete ignorance, even the wise and sensitive 
 among us misplace their affection, their admiration, 
 their compassion; and dull souls walk daily among 
 tragic and comic friends and neighbors without a smile 
 or a tear. 
 
 In viewing Shakespeare's imaginary world, on the 
 other hand, we are all constrained to see and to feel 
 poignantly the emotional and moral significance of every 
 character and every event. We follow the course of the 
 great passions, which for us have no underground chan- 
 nels, from their inception to their catastrophic close. 
 The lid of life is off. We gaze into the heart of all the 
 crises. The bosoms of sinners have no secrets for us ; 
 we have attended them in each step that led to their 
 doloroso passo. The just and the unjust man stand 
 for us naked in their divers qualities, as we are told 
 they shall stand in the Day of Judgment. There is not 
 the least ambiguity in their appeal to our emotions or 
 our judgment. The master of the spectacle has bared 
 to the last filament their characters, their motives, and 
 their intentions; for Shakespeare's technique aims at 
 delight not by the defeat but by the fulfilment of ex- 
 pectation. His figures are so placed, so contrasted, so 
 lighted from within and from without by soliloquy, 
 aside, chorus, and direct speech and act that our sym-
 
 SHAKESPEARE, OUR CONTEMPORARY 289 
 
 pathies go right ; go where he intended that they should 
 go. If goodness and beauty are not always fortunate 
 in the plot, they are invariably recognized and loved by 
 the spectators. If the dramatis persona do not receive 
 poetic justice in the play, they always receive it in the 
 audience ! 
 
 This clarifying of the judgment and this direction of 
 the sympathies are precisely Shakespeare's self-revela- 
 tion. His intention is to be inferred, like that of any 
 master craftsman, from his effect. To know what he 
 thought about life, the normally constituted reader or 
 spectator has only to consult his own emotions when 
 they have been stirred by the presence of the master's 
 adored and execrated creatures. But we err through a 
 grievous lack of reflection, if we attribute Shakespeare's 
 effect primarily to our own intelligence and discrimina- 
 tion ; for, as I have just insisted, Shakespeare presents 
 to us, in place of the bewildering and uncertain reality, 
 a world artfully prepared, unveiled, intelligible, with 
 every value already discriminated. Shakespeare holds 
 the " mirror " up to nature, but the light which renders 
 the reflected objects visible is not the light of the sun, 
 but the illumination of the mirror-maker's " comprehen- 
 sive soul." His characters do not wait for our praise 
 or blame. At their very advent in the world of the 
 imagination lago stood in the eternal shadow of his 
 creator's condemnation, and Desdemona walked in the 
 light of his countenance. We, with our essentially 
 superfluous feeling and intelligence, are asked to judge 
 a case which has already come to judgment. 
 
 All this amounts to a declaration that Shakespeare
 
 290 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 reveals himself through his work as a mind in which the 
 great creative and shaping force of the imagination is 
 constantly regulated and directed by a critical in- 
 telligence, stamping values upon the things created, 
 and aiming steadily at a total aesthetic and moral 
 effect which was approved by the best sense of his 
 own time, and has endured the scrutiny of three hun- 
 dred years. 
 
 Those of us who, trusting in this " argument from 
 design," hold this view of him, and resent honoring his 
 memory with the " naturalists " by denying him intelli- 
 gence, self-knowledge, morality, and the normal human 
 loyalties, have indeed some high modern authorities on 
 our side. Goethe, for example, said to Eckermann, 
 " The poet must know what effects he wishes to produce, 
 and regulate the nature of his characters accordingly. 
 . . . What would be the use of poets, if they only 
 repeated the record of the historian? The poet must 
 go further, and give us, if possible, something higher 
 and better. All the characters of Sophocles have some- 
 thing of that great poet's lofty soul ; and it is the same 
 with the characters of Shakespeare. That is as it ought 
 to be." Coleridge perhaps slightly overstated our case 
 when he asserted that no man was ever yet a great poet 
 without being at the same time a great philosopher. 
 But those who stand for the recognition of the intel- 
 lectual element in poetic genius, and, in spite of current 
 poetic practice and precept, cling to the belief that the 
 poet needs to know something and to be something, find 
 satisfaction in Coleridge's summary description of 
 Shakespeare's talent: "What then, shall we say? even
 
 SHAKESPEARE, OUR CONTEMPORARY 291 
 
 this, that Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no 
 automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration 
 . . . first studied patiently, meditated deeply, under- 
 stood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and 
 intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings." 
 
 The chief argument in favor of our view, however, is 
 not that it is in harmony with the view of Goethe and of 
 Coleridge, but that it is in harmony with the view of the 
 men among whom Shakespeare lived. It is consonant 
 with their eulogies of him, and also with their general 
 conceptions of the poet and the poetic art. The cor- 
 rection of many of our modern misinterpretations is to 
 step through and ignore the commentators of the last 
 hundred years, and to re-read the text in the light of 
 Elizabethan and Jacobean criticism and theory. In 
 making this return, it is to be remembered that Shake- 
 speare among his fellow-dramatists is, with very few 
 exceptions, distinctly among his inferiors, not merely 
 in respect to poetry but also in respect to morality and 
 intelligence. If you pass from reading Shakespeare to 
 Dekker, Marston, Middleton, Heywood, you feel your- 
 self descending from the highlands to the foothills and 
 the plain. If you wish to remain long in the company 
 of the grave and capacious wits who made the glory of 
 the Great Age, you must leave the Bankside. But you 
 may read in turn Sidney's Apology, a sermon of 
 Hooker's, an epithalamion of Spenser's, an essay of 
 Bacon's, a chapter of the King James Bible, the literary 
 note-book of Jonson, or the prose passage in Henr\y V 
 discussing the king's responsibility for the souls of his 
 soldiers without any shocking change of elevation.
 
 292 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 If one consults with this group of Shakespeare's 
 peers, one learns a good many points about the temper 
 of the age, which many recent writers have forgotten. 
 It is perfectly clear, for example, that the Elizabethans 
 were not ashamed of their moral intentions. From 
 Sidney to Jonson it is agreed that the " very end of 
 Poesie " is the delightful teaching of morality ; to make 
 men love the good and eschew the evil. And Sidney, the 
 adored representative of his time, expresses its charac- 
 teristic idealism and its high seriousness when in a 
 famous passage he asserts the ultimate moral purpose 
 of all learning : " This purifying of wit, this enriching 
 of memory, enabling of judgment, and enlarging of con- 
 ceit, which commonly we call learning, under what name 
 soever it come forth, or to what end soever it be directed, 
 the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfec- 
 tion as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey 
 lodging, can be capable of." In distinction from our 
 modern aesthetes who hold that the end of poetry is 
 beauty, or our modern naturalists who hold that the end 
 of literature is a scientific representation of truth, 
 Spenser tells us that the general end of his great poem 
 is " to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous 
 and gentle discipline." In contrast with our modern 
 theorists who insist upon the spectatorial neutrality of 
 the artist, " Men must know," says Lord Bacon, " that 
 in the theatre of man's life, it is reserved only for God 
 and angels to be lookers on." Passages such as these 
 afford to my mind a strong presumption that if Shake- 
 speare had any community of spirit with his peers in his 
 own time, and it is absurd to suppose that he had not,
 
 SHAKESPEARE, OUR CONTEMPORARY 293 
 
 lie would have looked upon a neutral and unmoral poet 
 with contempt. 
 
 When I hear a modern scholar call Shakespeare " the 
 supreme child of a childlike age," I take some satisfac- 
 tion in the certainty that the phrase would have per- 
 plexed Lord Bacon as much as it perplexes me. I try in 
 vain to reconcile that conception of him with the inscrip- 
 tion beneath his bust in Stratford, which attributes to 
 him the judgment of Nestor, the sagacity of Socrates, 
 and the art of Virgil. If that evidence is rejected as 
 epigraphical compliment, I turn with confidence to that 
 " crusty batch of nature," Ben Jonson, a man who 
 weighed his words, notoriously chary of praise to his 
 contemporaries, an inveterate egotist, obviously Shake- 
 speare's rival, a confirmed and belligerent classicist, 
 and, as such, sincerely hostile to Shakespeare's dramatic 
 principles and practice. While Shakespeare is living, 
 " honest Ben " jibes and jests at him, as he does at 
 most men; but when the Stratford poet is gathered to 
 his fathers, it is this reluctant witness who pays what is 
 perhaps still the supreme tribute to his art; matches 
 him with Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles ; puts him 
 in comparison (as he does elsewhere Lord Bacon) with 
 all that " insolent Greece or haughty Rome sent forth, 
 or since did from their ashes come." It is certainly the 
 supreme extant tribute to the personal charm of Shake- 
 speare that this same reluctant witness should have said 
 in another place : " I loved the man, and do honor his 
 memory on this side idolatry as much as any." Now 
 for our present purposes the significant point is this : 
 Jonson, who knew both works and man, declared that
 
 294 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 Shakespeare's mind and manners are distinctly recog- 
 nizable, are indeed resplendently visible, in his works: 
 
 . . . Look how vie father's face 
 Lives in his issue; even so the race 
 Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines 
 In his well turned and true filed lines. 
 
 If Shakespeare, whom Jonson called the " soul of 
 the age," was after all a typical thinking Elizabethan 
 with the Elizabethan taste for moral philosophy, we 
 may be sure that he meditated on nature like an Eliza- 
 bethan humanist. The essence of Elizabethan as of 
 other humanisms is the understanding of man and the 
 definition of the sphere of properly human activity. 
 The philosophical mind of Shakespeare's age began the 
 work of reflection by cleaving the universe along three 
 levels. On the lowest level is the natural world, which 
 is the plane of instinct, appetite, animality, lust, the 
 animal passions or affections; on this level the regula- 
 tion is by necessary or natural law. On the middle level 
 is the human world, which is regulated and, in a sense, 
 created by the will and knowledge of man; working 
 upon the natural world; but governed by reason, the 
 special human faculty ; and illuminated more or less from 
 the level above. On the third level is the supernatural 
 world, which is the plane of spiritual beings, and the 
 home of eternal ideas. 
 
 Now let us hear from Hooker, that too-infrequently- 
 remembered " master of wit and language," what man 
 is, and how he could demean himself in his middle state : 
 
 Whatsoever we work as man, the same we do wittingly
 
 SHAKESPEARE, OUR CONTEMPORARY 295 
 
 work and freely. . . . Two fountains there are of human 
 action, Knowledge and Will. . . . But of one thing we 
 must have special care, as being a matter of no small 
 moment; and that is how the Will, properly and strictly 
 taken, as it is of things referred unto the end that man 
 desireth, differeth greatly from that inferior natural desire, 
 which we call Appetite. The object of Appetite is whatso- 
 ever sensible good may be wished for; the object of Will is 
 that good which Reason doth lead us to seek. . . . Appe- 
 tite is the Will's solicitor; and the Will is Appetite's con- 
 troller ; what we covet according to the one by the other we 
 often reject; neither is any other desire properly termed 
 Will but that where Reason and Understanding, or the show 
 of Reason, prescribeth the thing desired. . . . When here- 
 upon we come to observe in our souls of what excellency 
 our souls are in comparison with our bodies, and the diviner 
 part in relation with the baser of our souls; seeing that all 
 these concur in producing human actions, it cannot be well 
 unless the chiefest do command and direct the rest. The 
 soul then ought to conduct the body, and the spirit of our 
 minds the soul. 
 
 I can but very briefly and inadequately indicate here 
 the grounds for my belief that this beautiful passage of 
 Hooker's summarizes very well the working philosophy 
 which informs the dramas of Shakespeare. His plays 
 are studded with evidence that he meditated constantly 
 on the relation of man to the natural world below him, 
 and to the supernatural world above him; that he had 
 made for himself the kind of distinction that Hooker 
 makes between the Will and the Appetite, the voluntary 
 law of man and the involuntary law of nature ; and that 
 he looked upon Knowledge and Will as the supreme 
 human attributes, exalting their dignity as compared
 
 296 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 with instinct, and accentuating their general importance 
 as compared with supernatural influences. 
 
 Gray called him " Nature's darling " " to him the 
 mighty Mother did unveil her awful face." No one who 
 has examined his scores of references to Nature can 
 imagine that he worshiped his " mother " in the Words- 
 worthian sense as the guide, the guardian of his heart, 
 and soul of all his moral being. On the contrary he held 
 up to her with somewhat unfilial candour the mirror of 
 his own idealism, which reflected her beauty, and also 
 every mole in her mysterious visage. As he represents 
 her, she is an earth-born deity, a bounteous housewife, 
 the president of the natural world, magnificently vari- 
 ous, fertile, and vital, but secret, a dissembler, irration- 
 ally impartial, absolutely unmoral. To some of her 
 children she gives good gifts grace, health, strength, 
 equability of temper; to others, wry faces, disease, 
 stammering speech, choler. At one time or another her 
 " darling " is driven to reflect that " Nature with a 
 beauteous wall doth oft close in pollution " ; that 
 " Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time " ; 
 and that " there's nothing level in our cursed natures." 
 One avowed nature-worshiper, Shakespeare presents: 
 Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester, who exclaims, 
 " Thou, Nature, art my goddess " which means that 
 he will not acknowledge custom or civil or divine law, 
 but will follow through adultery and murder the natural 
 law of his own instincts. One bland believer in " natural 
 goodness," he presents: Gonzalo, in the Tempest, who 
 would establish Montaigne's ideal commonwealth in the 
 enchanted isle, and abolish labor and government, ex-
 
 SHAKESPEARE, OUR CONTEMPORARY 297 
 
 pecting, as a result of following nature, leisure in the 
 men and purity in the women. Is it not the Socratic 
 insight of Shakespeare that cuts in with the laconic 
 comment : " All idle ; whores and knaves " ? 
 
 From reflection upon the duplicity of Nature, it is 
 perfectly clear, I think, that Shakespeare concluded we 
 cannot trust her to feed these minds or bodies of ours in 
 a " wise passiveness." But as he feels Will and Knowl- 
 edge strong within him, he throws out in his earlier 
 plays many cheerful hints for " men of action." It's a 
 mixed world, my masters, but a vigorous wrangler will 
 wrest something sweet from the churlish Mother. The 
 following passages perhaps come as near to optimism as 
 anything in Shakespeare: 
 
 There is some soul of goodness in things evil, 
 Would men observingly distil it out. 
 
 Henry V. 
 
 For naught so vile that on the earth doth live 
 But to the earth some special good doth give. 
 
 Romeo and Juliet. 
 
 Sweet are the uses of adversity, 
 
 Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, 
 
 Wears yet a precious jewel in its head. 
 
 As You Like It. 
 
 Shakespeare emphasizes human responsibility not 
 merely in opposition to the fatality of instinct but also 
 in opposition to the fatality of stellar foreordination. 
 Even his astonishingly intellectual villains (the intelli- 
 gence of Shakespearian villains is perhaps an instance 
 of the creator's " lofty soul " impregnating his charac-
 
 298 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 ters) become admirable pulpiters of his humanism, 
 lago's exhortation to Roderigo would do credit to a 
 bishop : " Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our 
 wills are gardeners. ... If the balance of our lives 
 had not one scale of reason to poise another of sen- 
 suality, the blood and baseness of our natures would 
 conduct us to most preposterous conclusions; but we 
 have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal 
 stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this that you 
 call love to be a sect or scion." Edmund's derision of 
 his father's faith in celestial signs is another striking 
 case in point : " We make guilty of our disasters the 
 sun, the moon, and the stars ; as if we were villains by 
 necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, 
 and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, 
 liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of plane- 
 tary influence; and all that we are evil in by a divine 
 thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster 
 man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a 
 star." In gentler mood, these are to the same effect: 
 
 Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie 
 Which we ascribe to heaven ; the fated sky 
 Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull 
 Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull. 
 
 All's Well 
 
 Men at some times are masters of their fates : 
 The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars 
 But in ourselves that we are underlings. 
 
 Julius Caesar. 
 
 The case for Shakespeare's humanism does not rest,
 
 SHAKESPEARE, OUR CONTEMPORARY 299 
 
 however, upon any collection of isolated passages ; these 
 but illustrate readily an impression won from his entire 
 work of a tendency running throughout his literary 
 career. His plays, when arranged in chronological 
 order, indicate a progressive interest passing from the 
 more natural and sentimental phases of feeling to the 
 more imaginative, subtle, and intellectual; thence 
 through a period of intense disgust with the lower in- 
 stinctive level and even with the natural processes of 
 life to a serene and benign expression of harmony in 
 the three-fold universe. 
 
 I am unwilling to leave the subject without saying a 
 word on his treatment of the chief topic of our novel- 
 ists. At the outset of his career he does betray a curious 
 interest, witnessed by his two narrative poems, in merely 
 fleshly desire and in merely fleshly chastity; but, with 
 the one exception of his youth, here indicated, he pre- 
 sents carnality as ridiculous, as in Falstaff ; or as abhor- 
 rent, as in Tarquin. The fruit of his personal experi- 
 ence in that field seems distilled in the bitter sonnet 
 beginning: " The expense of spirit in a waste of shame 
 is lust in action." 
 
 In his earlier comedies in romantic vein, like The Two 
 Gentlemen and A Midsummer Night's Dream, he treats 
 love lightly, with a kind of sweet mockery, jestingly, 
 indulgently as a toy of youth, with exquisite elvish 
 laughter of Puck in the shrubbery at the rear : " Lord, 
 what fools these mortals be ! " It is as if he concurred 
 more or less in the opinion of the contemporary essay- 
 ist Cornwallis : " It is a pretty, soft thing this same 
 Love the badge of eighteen and upwards, not to be
 
 300 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 disallowed ; better spend thy time so than at dice. I am 
 content to call this Love, though I hold Love too worthy 
 a cement to join earth to earth." 
 
 Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
 Within his hending sickle's compass comes. 
 
 In Romeo and Juliet, with a burst of richer poetry, 
 he shows the height of amorous emotion almost trans- 
 figured by its intensity, passion's brief splendor, flashing 
 like lightning in the summer night, and, like lightning, 
 devoured by the jaws of darkness " so swift bright 
 things come to confusion." The critical function per- 
 formed by the mirth of Puck in Midsummer Night's 
 Dream is here undertaken by Friar Lawrence who holds 
 the mirror of reason up to passion: 
 
 These violent delights have violent ends, 
 
 And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, 
 
 Which, as they kiss, consume. 
 
 In the chief comedies of Shakespeare's second period 
 every one must recognize that the author's early interest 
 in sentimental story gives way to his growing interest in 
 character. In Twelfth Night Viola and her love-sick 
 Duke are almost eclipsed by the conspirators in the sub- 
 plot, who are playing, it is to be observed, not romantic 
 but classical comedy, that is to say, comedy which sports 
 with human follies, and which shows to a pompous and 
 self-deceived Malvolio his ridiculous visage in the mirror 
 of common sense. In As You Like It, interest in roman- 
 tic story is again overshadowed in this case, by a
 
 SHAKESPEARE, OUR CONTEMPORARY 301 
 
 many-sided philosophic commentary on life, supplied by 
 more or less subordinate or extraneous characters, 
 Jaques, Touchstone, and the banished duke. In Mitch 
 Ado, finally, the traditional romantic hero and heroine, 
 Claudio and Hero, are all but extinguished in order to 
 allow those lambent intelligences, Beatrice and Bene- 
 dick, to emerge from what is structurally the sub-plot, 
 and to dominate the scene. In the exhibition of their 
 intellectual fencing and in their unmasking, Shakespeare 
 clearly betrays the shifting of his own interest from the 
 sentimental to the rational level, from the field of the 
 Petrarchan sonneteers to the field of classical comedy. 
 " Do you not love me ? " says Beatrice. " No more 
 than reason," says Benedick. 
 
 An appropriate sub-title for the great tragedies of 
 the " third period " would be, The World Lost by 
 Passion. These plays would serve well to illustrate 
 Bacon's saying, that " the stage is more beholden to love 
 than the life of man " ; and we know that they actually 
 furnished matter for Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 
 in which the " grand passion " is treated as a disease of 
 body and mind. In them are many indications that the 
 author's mind whether through bitter personal experi- 
 ence or through delighted imaginative apprehension, 
 does not greatly concern us was in a state approach- 
 ing revolt against the sway of the senses and the limita- 
 tions and necessities imposed on man by his participa- 
 tion in physical nature. One recalls a faint persistent 
 ill odor in Hamlet as of dead men's bones ; the Prince's 
 injunction to his rejected Ophelia: " Get thee to a nun- 
 nery ; why would thou be a breeder of sinners ? We will
 
 302 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 have no more marriages " ; Othello driven raving mad by 
 the sensual insinuations of his destroyer; Lear calling 
 on the thunder to crack nature's molds and spill the 
 seeds of life, and wiping his hands of the smell of mor- 
 tality; and Coriolanus, the hero of a tragedy notably 
 devoid of all " sex-interest," vainly striving to free him- 
 self from the natural bond of blood and sonship, vainly 
 protesting that he will never be " a gosling to obey 
 instinct." 
 
 The spirit of tranquillity which even the most skeptical 
 critics observe in the latest dramas, Cymbeline, The 
 Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, is not achieved, how- 
 ever, by a disgusted and ascetic secession of the mind 
 from the natural world. The secret of tranquility is the 
 practice of the humanistic philosophy expounded by 
 Hooker in the Ecclesiastical Polity, and dramatically 
 expressed by Shakespeare in his almost divinely beau- 
 tiful " farewell to the stage." It is a philosophy which 
 secures peace on the purely human level by a reconcilia- 
 tion of the soul with the body through the mediation of 
 reason, rendered wise by knowledge, and efficient by will. 
 I am sorry for those who do not believe that the en- 
 chanted island of The Tempest is man's universe, pre- 
 sented first in a state of insurrection, and then in a state 
 of tranquility, when Ariel, the lawless imagination long- 
 ing for liberty, and Caliban, the incarnation of the lusts 
 and powers and instincts of our animal nature, and all 
 the warring elements and factions yield to the wonder- 
 working sway and sovereignty of a benignant reason, 
 represented by Prospero, lord of the isle. 
 
 For Prospero, the peculiarly luminous mirror of
 
 SHAKESPEARE, OUR CONTEMPORARY 303 
 
 Shakespeare's " mind and manners," the solemn pag- 
 eants of the phenomenal world have lost their imposing 
 and substantial character, have something for him of the 
 nature of cloud-wrack and dream-stuff; and he reflects, 
 in his sessions of solitary thought, with a certain philos- 
 ophic compassion upon the emotions and pursuits of 
 mortals who follow, hot-footed and eager, the flying feet 
 of time. Yet he has not lost the human touch. Even 
 toward the animal nature, provided it is obedient to dis- 
 cipline, he is kindly and indulgent ; so that Caliban him- 
 self, after a brief revolt, returns from Trinculo and 
 Stephano to his sterner master, saying: "O what a 
 thrice-double ass was I to take this drunkard for a god, 
 and worship this dull fool." Toward guilty penitents 
 on the human level, his " nobler reason " takes the part 
 of forgiveness against his just indignation; and toward 
 fair and innocent human lovers his attitude is a sustained 
 benediction; their mutual attraction he exquisitely ex- 
 presses in drawing them together by a strain of Ariel's 
 music; and upon their union he invokes all the good 
 gifts of Juno and Ceres, earth and heaven. Before the 
 higher powers, between whom and him the partition of 
 the senses is growing transparent, he stands in quiet 
 expectation of the hour when he, released from the 
 imprisonment and servitude of time and space, shall pass 
 through nature into the world of eternal ideas. 
 
 Thither Shakespeare swiftly followed him. When the 
 earth rattled on his coffin lid and the churlish sexton 
 filled his grave, if Drayton and Ben Jonson or other 
 prophetic souls were standing by, they did not seek for 
 their beloved master in the dust, but, turning their eyes
 
 304 ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 
 heavenwards, watched with hearts elate, where his great 
 spirit, creator of spirits, soared aloft to rule over the 
 kingdoms of imagination forever. And one can fancy 
 " honest Ben," who memorized fine verses of his con- 
 temporaries, murmuring over the body of his friend 
 these lines of the fifty-fifth sonnet: 
 
 Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn 
 
 The living record of your memory. 
 
 'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity 
 
 Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room 
 
 Even in the eyes of all posterity 
 
 That wear this world out to the ending doom. 
 
 The proud hope of literary immortality expressed by 
 Shakespeare and many of the Elizabethan poets our 
 modern scholars after their fashion seek to explain away 
 as a mere " literary convention," since it was followed by 
 rhymesters with no legitimate title to eternal life. But 
 what, one asks, gave rise to this " convention " and sup- 
 ported it? First, imitation of the ancients whose hope 
 had been fulfilled, whose monuments had indeed been 
 more perennial than brass, whose verses had outlasted 
 empires. Secondly, a clear sense, at least in the supreme 
 Elizabethan, that he was working in the spirit of all 
 great and enduring art. He had taken his stand, as 
 Sainte-Beuve says, " at the centre of human nature." 
 
 Though his vision of life extended to the depths be- 
 neath and to the heights above the reach and compre- 
 hension of man's mind, he dwelt habitually in that 
 cleared and settled and spacious region of consciousness 
 in which a man's thinking is right and his feelings are
 
 SHAKESPEARE, OUR CONTEMPORARY 805 
 
 sure, in which the elementary human values are fixed, in 
 which truth and goodness and beauty remain the same 
 from age to age. He was to pass through times when 
 literature would beat vain wings in the religious inane, 
 and through times when it would sink in the naturalistic 
 abyss ; but he knew, he must have known, that whenever 
 men returned from these aberrations to the wide sunlit 
 human level they would find him their contemporary, 
 they would come upon him in the midst of it, represent- 
 ing still with incomparable adequacy what can be seen 
 from that point of view. Happy are they who dili- 
 gently seek for the center of that sunlit level, and thrice 
 blessed they that find it. 
 
 THE END
 
 INDEX 
 
 Aestheticism : Oxford type, 122, 
 123; Parisian type, 123, 124; 
 George Moore's, 125, 126; 
 and see Chap. V, passim; 
 Anatole France's, 169-170; 
 Pierre Loti's, 203; Synge's, 
 204; Henry James's, see 
 Chap. IX, passim, 
 
 Addison, 257. 
 
 Arbois de Jubainville, 192. 
 
 Archer, W., 190. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 38, 52-66, 
 265, 268. [275. 
 
 Austen, Jane, 24, 28, 38, 141, 
 
 Austin, Alfred, Autobiography, 
 211-225; In the Heart of the 
 Forest, 220, 277; Haunts of 
 Ancient Peace, 218; Human 
 Tragedy, 213; The Season, 
 213; Veronica's Garden, 218. 
 
 Babbitt, Irving, New Laocoon, 
 12, 14. 
 
 Bacon, 291, 292, 301. 
 
 Bacon, Delia, 23. 
 
 Balzac, 90, 127, 154, 237, 248. 
 
 Banville, 124. 
 
 Baudelaire, 124, 125, 131. 
 
 Beardsley, Aubrey, 127. 
 
 Beecher, H. W., 33. 
 
 Bennett, Arnold, 102-119; Clay- 
 hanger, 102; Feast of 8t. 
 Friend, 106; Hilda Lessways, 
 102; Mental Efficiency, 106; 
 Old Wives' Tale, 102, 105, 
 113, 114; Plain Man and His 
 Wife, 106, 115; These Twain, 
 103, 106, 115 S. 
 
 Blondheim, D. S., 175. 
 
 Bolingbroke, 259. 
 
 Bourget, P., 30. 
 
 Bourne, Randolph, 119. 
 
 Brahmins, on Mark Twain, 29. 
 
 Braz, A. le, 201. 
 
 Bronte's, The, 270. 
 
 Brooke, Rupert, Henry James's 
 tribute to, 241. 
 
 Brooks, Van Wyck, in The 
 World of H. G. Wells, 52 ff. 
 
 Brownell, W. C., Standards, 
 12; 228, 232, 241. 
 
 Browning, R., 258, 262, 274. 
 
 Bunyan, 88. 
 
 Burke, 221. 
 
 Burton, R., Anatomy of Melan- 
 choly, 301. 
 
 Butler, Samuel, 132. 
 
 Byron, 215. 
 
 Carlyle, T., 9, 34, 117, 223, 258, 
 
 265, 271. 
 
 Chateaubriand, 192, 204. 
 Chesterton, G. K., Orthodoxy, 
 
 11; 72, 264. 
 Christianity, 48, 63, 83, 92, 
 
 125, 126, 132, 139, 140, 141; 
 
 George Moore on, 159-166; 
 
 Anatole France on, 182-183. 
 Clemenceau, G., Voile du Bon- 
 
 heur, 206. 
 Clemens, John, 19. 
 Clemens, S. L., see Twain, 
 
 Mark. 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., 290, 291. 
 Colvin, Sidney, 261. 
 Congreve, 206, 245, 259. 
 Cornwallis, Sir W., 299. 
 
 D'Annunzio, 239. 
 Dante, 8, 9. 
 
 Darton, F. J. H., in his Arnold 
 Bennett, 103, 106, 107. 
 
 807
 
 308 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Darwin, 13, 90, 186, 264. 
 
 DeFoe, Apparition of Mrs. 
 Veal, 99. 
 
 De-gas, 128, 129, 131, 160. 
 
 Democracy, Mark Twain's, see 
 Chap. I, passim; Henry 
 James's, 229. 
 
 Dewey, John, 3, 4, 8. 
 
 Dickens, 41, 53, 61, 267, 271. 
 
 Donne, 258. 
 
 Dowden, E., 60, 157. 
 
 Dowson, E., 127. 
 
 Drayton, 303. 
 
 Dreiser, Theodore, 85-101; Fi- 
 nancier, 87, 92, 98, 100; 
 Genius, 87, 94, 96, 98, 106; 
 Hoosier Holiday, 87; Jennie 
 Oerhardt, 87, 93, 96, 97, 98; 
 Plays of the Natural and 
 Supernatural, 87 ; Sister Car- 
 rie, 87-92; Titan, 87, 94, 98; 
 Traveller at Forty, 87. 
 
 Dryden, 258. 
 
 Duruy, 134. 
 
 Eliot, George, 95, 129, 141, 237, 
 256, 262, 270, 271, 278. 
 
 Emerson, R. W., 22, 27, 186, 
 243, 247, 248. 
 
 Epicurus, 171, 177. 
 
 Faraday, 56. 
 
 Fawcett, H., 59. 
 
 Fielding, 242. 
 
 Flaubert, Coeur Simple, 128; 
 Education Sentimentale, 128 ; 
 He'rodias, 128; Madame Bo- 
 vary, 128; Tentation de Saint 
 Antoine, 128; Salammbd, 
 128; 239. 
 
 France, Anatole, 149, 169-189, 
 196, 197, 206; At the Sign of 
 the Reine P6dauque, 176- 
 178; Contes de Jacques Tour- 
 nebroche, 178; lie des Pin- 
 gouins, 180-185; Jocasta and 
 the Famished Cat, 172-174; 
 Lys Rouge, 179; Opinions de 
 M. J6r6me Coignard, 178, 
 183; Sylvestre Bonnard, 176; 
 
 Thais, 174, 175; Vie de 
 Jeanne d'Arc, 179, 180. 
 Franklin, 26, 39, 44. 
 
 Gautier, 124, 125, 202, 239. 
 
 Germany, 9, 15, 16, 67, 68, 73, 
 76, 78, 79, 91. 
 
 Gibbon, 259. 
 
 Giraud, V., 175. 
 
 God, Ideas of, 9, 10; Mark 
 Twain's, 42, 47; H. G. 
 Wells's, 63, 80-84, 96; George 
 Moore's, 163; Meredith's, 
 281. 
 
 Godwin, Mary, 63. 
 
 Godwin, William, 53. 
 
 Goethe, 10, 192, 214, 286, 290, 
 291. 
 
 Goldsmith, 6; Vicar of Wake- 
 field, 38. 
 
 Goncourts, E. and J. de, 90, 
 154, 155. 
 
 Grant, Gen., 21, 31. 
 
 Gray, T., 296. 
 
 Greek, 55-56. 
 
 Gregory, Lady, 150, 151, 152, 
 191. 
 
 Gugrard, A. L., 11, 175. 
 
 Hardy, T., 167, 259, 270, 277. 
 
 Hartmann, E. von, 132, 144. 
 
 Hawthorne, 33, 237, 275. 
 
 Hay, John, 46, 230. 
 
 Hazlitt, W., 286. 
 
 Hearn, Lafcadio, 201, 202. 
 
 Heine, 195. 
 
 Henley, W. E., 261, 262. 
 
 Herbert, 114. 
 
 Heredia, 125. 
 
 Holmes, O. W., 27, 28, 31, 33. 
 
 Hooker, 291, 294, 295. 
 
 Horace, 65. 
 
 Howe, P. P., his John Synge, 
 
 194, 201, 206. 
 Hueffer, F. M., his Henry 
 
 James, 228, 241. 
 Hugo, 154, 202. 
 Humanism, Critical reaction in 
 
 favor of, 1 1 ff . ; Arnold's, see 
 
 pp. 52-66; Bennett's, 108;
 
 INDEX 
 
 309 
 
 Chaps. X and XI, passim; 
 Hooker's, 294-295. 
 
 Humor: Mark Twain, 30 ff.; 
 Puck's, 33; Carlyle's, 34; 
 Whitman's, 35; Wells's, 65, 
 74; France's, 18 Iff.; Synge's, 
 206; Meredith's, 266 ff. 
 
 Huxley, 56. 
 
 Huysmans, 142. 
 
 Hyde, Douglas, 191. 
 
 Ibsen, Sigurd, 12, 13. 
 
 Imagination, 62, 205, 234, 304. 
 
 Ingersoll, 42. 
 
 Ingres, 151. 
 
 Irish Renaissance, 122, 151, 
 
 153, 191 ff. 
 Irving, W., 237. 
 
 Jackson, Andrew, 19, 29. 
 
 James, Henry, Jr., 103, 104, 
 226-255; Ambassadors, 246, 
 250; Awkward Age, 240; 
 American, The, 250; Ameri- 
 can Scene, The, 232; Boston- 
 ians, 253; Daisy Miller, 227, 
 243; Death of the Lion, 226, 
 243; Essays in London, 232; 
 Europeans, 246, 250; Figure 
 in the Carpet, 233, 243 ; Gold- 
 en Bowl, 240, 245, 251-253; 
 Hawthorne, 232; In the 
 Cage, 238; Lesson of the 
 Master, 243, 244; London 
 Votes, 230; Madame de 
 Mauve, 250; Madonna, of the 
 Future, 230; Next Time, The, 
 243; Notes of a Son and 
 Brother, 242; Notes on Nov- 
 elists, 232; Other House, The, 
 253, 254; Partial Portraits, 
 232; Passionate Pilgrim, 
 254; Portrait of a Lady, 
 227; Princess Casamassima, 
 229; Reverberator, 253; Rod- 
 erick Hudson, 243; Sacred 
 Fount, 245; Spoils of Poyn- 
 ton, 254; Tragic Muse, 243, 
 255; Turn of the Screw, 253; 
 Wings of a Dove, 251. 
 
 James, Henry, Sr., 231. 
 Jessop, Augustus, 274. 
 Johnson, Dr. S., 6, 259. 
 Jonson, Ben, 206, 258, 291-294, 
 303. 
 
 Kingsley, C., 53, 174. 
 Kipling, 71. 
 Koran, 83. 
 
 La Bruyere, 258. 
 
 Lamb, 46. 
 
 Lee, Sir Sidney, 287. 
 
 Leighton, Sir Frederick, 133. 
 
 Lemaltre, J., 169, 196. 
 
 Leopardi, 200. 
 
 Lincoln, 39, 242. 
 
 Locke, W. J., Beloved Vaga- 
 bond, 178-179. 
 
 Longfellow, 27, 33. 
 
 Loti, Pierre, 201; Mariage de 
 Loti, 203; Madame Chrysan~ 
 theme, 203, 205. 
 
 Lowell, J. R., 26, 28. 
 
 Lucian, 182. 
 
 Macaulay, 259. 
 
 Macpherson, Ossian, 192-193. 
 
 Maeterlinck, 192, 209, 245. 
 
 Manet, 121, 151. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, 63, 64, 208. 
 
 Martyn, Edward, 151, 156, 157. 
 
 Masters, E. L., 33. 
 
 Maupassant, 127; Bel Ami, 
 133. 
 
 Meredith, George, 28, 95, 167, 
 236, 258-284; Meredithians, 
 263; Diana of the Cross- 
 ways, 278; Egoist, 257, 259, 
 261, 271, 278, 280; Evan 
 Harrington, 271; Farina, 
 271 ; Idea of Comedy, 259 ff.; 
 Letters, 276; Lord Ormont 
 and His Aminta, 278; Love 
 in the Valley, 275-277; Man- 
 fred, 268; Reading of Earth, 
 284; Richard Feverel, The 
 Ordeal of, 265, 271, 272, 280; 
 Modern Love, 278; Rhoda
 
 310 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Fleming, 261; Shaving of 
 Shagpat, 271; Woods of 
 Westermain, 273. 
 
 Meyer, Kuno, 192. 
 
 Michaut, G., 175. 
 
 Mill, J. S., 265; Subjection of 
 Women, 277, 279. 
 
 Milton: Samson Agonistes, 209, 
 210; 285. 
 
 Moliere, 206, 258. 
 
 Montaigne, 6, 187, 258. 
 
 Moore, George, 104, 120-168, 
 192, 193, 196; Brook Kerith, 
 159-166; Celibates, 148, 149; 
 Confessions of a Young Man, 
 120, 122, 131, 133, 137; 
 Drama in Muslin, 136-148; 
 Esther Waters, 127, 128, 134, 
 145-147; Evelyn Inness, 150; 
 Flowers of Passion, 120, 124; 
 Hail and Farewell, 120, 153- 
 158; Impressions and Opin- 
 ions, 129; Lake, The, 152; 
 Memoirs of My Dead Life, 
 120, 154; Modern Lover, 132, 
 134; Mummer's Wife, 134- 
 136, 147; Pagan Poems, 124; 
 Sister Teresa, 150; Spring 
 Days, 145; Unfilled Field, 
 152; Vain Fortune, 145, 148. 
 
 Morality: Mark Twain's, 43, 44, 
 49; H. G. Wells's biological 
 variety, 56 ff. ; Dreiser's 
 chemical variety, Chap. Ill, 
 passim; Bennett's conven- 
 tionality, 110-111; George 
 Moore's aesthetic type, 124; 
 Anatole France's neutrality, 
 171; neutrality of Synge, 
 197, 206; the Victorian, 60, 
 219; Henry James's noblesse 
 oblige, 249 ff.; the Meredith- 
 ian synthesis, 264 ff.; Hook- 
 er, 294, 295; Shakespeare, 
 302. 
 
 More, P. E., 10, 12; Shelburne 
 Essays, 13. 
 
 Morley, Lord, 242, 271, 279, 
 282. 
 
 Morris, William, 123. 
 
 Naturalism, 10 ff., 61 ff., 75, 85, 
 90, 91, 101, 102, 145, 150, 
 161, 162, 163, 249; evolution 
 of, in English fiction, 166- 
 168; French, 172, 274; also 
 see Morality, " chemical," 
 " biological," " aesthetic." 
 
 Newman, J. H., 174, 265. 
 
 Nietzsche, 137. 
 
 Novel, Conceptions of the: 
 Wells, 66, 71-72, 104-106; 
 Dreiser, 85-91, 98-101; Ben- 
 nett, 102-104, 112-113; Moore, 
 128 ff., 134, 141, 147; France, 
 172, 178; James, 103-104, 
 246-248; Meredith, 264, 267 ff. 
 
 Paine, A. B., in his Mark 
 Twain, a Biography, 18, 22, 
 28. 
 
 Paine, Tom, 41. 
 
 Pascal, 183. 
 
 Pater, 39, 123, 169, 200; Im- 
 aginary Portraits, 238, 253; 
 Marius, 238; Plato and Pla- 
 tonism, 238, 242; Studies in 
 the Renaissance, 238. 
 
 Pattee, F. L., 228, 235. 
 
 Peacock, T. L., 271. 
 
 Pocahontas, 29. 
 
 Poe, 237. 
 
 Puritanism, 32, 43, 87, 250, 
 274. 
 
 Racine, 258. 
 
 Raleigh, Sir W., 285. 
 
 Reade, C., 53. 
 
 Realism, 32, 72, 86-89, 101, 
 
 102 ff., 133, 170. 
 Renan, 155; Vie de Jesu, 242, 
 
 258. 
 
 Rolland, Romain, 286. 
 Roosevelt, T., 26, 30, 39, 42. 
 Rossetti, D. G., 122. 
 Rousseau, 53, 120, 121, 183. 
 Ruskin, 123, 223, 235. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, 154, 304. 
 St. Francis, 63, 177. 
 Sand, George, 122, 141.
 
 INDEX 
 
 311 
 
 Santayana, G., 179. 
 
 Scherer, E., 155. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 132, 141. 
 
 Scott, Sir W., 39-41, 215. 
 
 Shakespeare: Bottom the Weav- 
 er, 7; Titania, 34; Falstaff, 
 176; 236, 259, 261, 272, 273, 
 283, 285-305; All's Well, 
 298; As You Like It, 297, 
 300; Coriolanus, 302; Cym- 
 beline, 302; Hamlet, 301; 
 Henry V, 158, 297; Julius 
 Caesar, 298; Lear, 209, 298, 
 302; Midsummer Night's 
 Dream, 299 ; Much Ado, 301 ; 
 Othello, 289, 298, 302; Ro- 
 meo and Juliet, 260, 297, 
 300; Tempest, 81, 296, 302 if.; 
 Two Gentlemen, 299 ; Twelfth 
 Night, 300; Winter's Tale, 
 302. 
 
 Shaw, G. B., 264. 
 
 Shelley, Harriet, 44; suicide 
 of, 63. 
 
 Shelley, P. B., 54, 56, 59, 60, 
 63, 64, 66, 74, 122. 
 
 Sherman, Gen., 31. 
 
 Shorey, Paul, The Assault on 
 Humanism, 12. 
 
 Sidney, Sir P., Apology for 
 Poetry, 291, 292. 
 
 Social Criticism of Literature, 
 The, by Gertrude Buck, 4. 
 
 Socialism, 59, 68. 
 
 Socrates, 8, 269, 281, 293. 
 
 Sophocles, Oedipus, 209; 290. 
 
 Spenser, 291. 
 
 Spinoza, 83. 
 
 Stephen, Leslie, 271. 
 
 Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 166. 
 
 Stevenson, R. L., 194, 261, 262, 
 263, 264. 
 
 Stowe, H. B., 53. 
 
 Style: Mark Twain's, 32; 
 Moore's, 120-122; France's, 
 184; Synge's, 199-200; 
 James's, 244-246; Meredith's, 
 257-260. 
 
 Sunday, "Billy," 32, 81, 82. 
 
 Swift, 184. 
 
 Swinburne, 133, 256. 
 
 Swiss Family Robinson, 4. 
 
 Symons, A., 151, 155. 
 
 Synge, John, 190-210; Aran Is- 
 lands, 202-204; Deirdre, 208; 
 Playboy of the Western 
 World, 190, 208; Poems, 198- 
 200; Riders to the Sea, 193, 
 208, 209 ; Shadow of the Glen, 
 193, 207; Tinker's Wedding, 
 207; Under Ether, 197; Well 
 of the Saints, 205, 206, 207. 
 
 Tacitus, 184. 
 
 Taft, W. H., 42. 
 
 Taine, 155. 
 
 Tennyson, 211. 
 
 Thackeray, 28, 95, 271; Henry 
 Esmond, 259; Pendennis, 
 267. 
 
 Toryism: of Scott, 40; of Al- 
 fred Austin, see Chap. VIII. 
 
 Trollope, A., 95. 
 
 Turggnieff, 151; Memoirs of a 
 Sportsman, 152; 236, 237. 
 
 Twain, Mark, 18-49; Captain 
 Stormfield, 34 ; Connecticut 
 Yankee, 34, 38; Folloiving 
 the Equator, 38 ; Huckleberry 
 Finn, 36; Innocents Abroad, 
 38; Joan of Arc, 44; Jump- 
 ing Frog, 20; Life on the 
 Mississippi, 36 ; Mysterious 
 Stranger, 45 ff. ; Pudd'nhead 
 Wilson, 41 ; Roughing It, 36 ; 
 Tom Sawyer, 36, 42; Tramp 
 Abroad, 38; What Is Man? 
 44. 
 
 Verlaine, 124. 
 
 Victorians, 50, 51, 53, 60, 61, 
 
 66, 70, 105, 133, 225, 277. 
 Viereck, G. S., 87, 163. 
 Villon, 198, 205. 
 Voltaire, 183, 193. 
 
 Washington, 26. 
 Watts-Dunton, 256. 
 Wells, H. G., 3, 50-84, 104-111, 
 119; Ann Veronica, 50, 62;
 
 312 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Boon, 104, 105; Discovery of 
 the Future, 77; First and 
 Last Things, 82; God the In- 
 visible King, 79-84; Mar- 
 riage, 64, 106; Mr. Britling, 
 70-79; New Wachiavelli, 62; 
 Passionate Friends, 62; Re- 
 search Magnificent, 106, 118; 
 Tono-Bungay, 64; What Is 
 Comingt 66. 
 
 West, Rebecca, 119, 228, 232, 
 241. 
 
 Whitman, Walt, 31, 33, 35, 39. 
 
 Whittier, J. G., 27, 33. 
 Wilde, Oscar, 123, 124, 127, 
 
 161. 
 Wordsworth, 130, 167, 213, 
 
 222, 270, 272. 
 
 Yeats, J. B., his portrait of 
 
 Synge, 194. 
 Yeats, W. B., 151, 152, 155, 
 
 156, 191, 192, 195, 200. 
 
 Zola, 90, 131, 132, 134, 155, 
 237.
 
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