LIBRARY 
 
 •'e:achers colleoE 
 
 8A«i3ARA. CALIFORNIA
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 Hr
 
 THE CRITICAL 
 GAME 
 
 JOHN MACY 
 
 Author of "The Spirit of American Literature,"' etc. 
 
 BONI AND LIVERIGHT 
 Publishers New York
 
 Copyright. 1922, by 
 
 BoNi AND LiVERIGHT, InC, 
 
 Printed in the United States of America.
 
 STATE TEA-HGH^ -oRNl* 
 
 S>,NTA BARBARA. CAU 
 
 1> 
 
 To 
 ROGER IRVING LEE
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 The Critical Game 1 1 
 
 Dante in English 31 
 
 Dante's Political Philosophy 43 
 
 Nietzsche 55 
 
 Tolstoy 65 
 
 Maeterlinck's Essays 95 
 
 Joseph Conrad 105 
 
 A Conrad Miscellany 123 
 
 Strindberg 135 
 
 Tagore 145 
 
 Remy de Gourmont i53 
 
 Swift's Relations with Women 163 
 
 William James, Man of Letters i75 
 
 Biographies of Poe i93 
 
 Biographies of Whitman 203 
 
 George E. Woodberry 215 
 
 Abraham Cahan 227 
 
 Thomas Hardy 237 
 
 George Borrow 247 
 
 Shelley 259 
 
 H. G. Wells and Utopia 269 
 
 John Masefield 279 
 
 Shakespeare and the Scribes 289 
 
 George Moore and Other Irish Writers. 305 
 
 James Joyce 317 
 
 D. H. Lawrence 325
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME
 
 LIBBAPV 
 
 «TATF TF.ACHERS COLLEOt 
 ANTA BARBARA. CAU 
 
 BANT 
 
 ^rri 
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME. 
 
 Criticism is one form of the game of writ- 
 ing. It differs from other forms only as whist 
 differs from poker and as tennis differs from 
 golf. The motives are the same, the exercise 
 of the player's brain and muscles, and the enter- 
 tainment of the spectators, from whom, if the 
 player be successful, he derives profit, liveli- 
 hood, applause, and fame. The function of 
 criticism at the present time, and at all times, 
 is the function of all literature, to be wise, witty, 
 eloquent, instructive, humourous, original, grace- 
 ful, beautiful, provocative, irritating, persua- 
 sive. That is, it must possess some of the many 
 merits that can be found in any type of litera- 
 ture; it must in some way be good writing. 
 There is no other sound principle to be dis- 
 covered in the treatises on the art of criticism 
 or in fine examples of the art. Whether Charles 
 Lamb writes about Shakespeare or Christ's 
 Hospital or ears is of relatively slight import- 
 ance compared with the question whether in 
 one essay or another Lamb is at one of his in- 
 comparable best moments of inspiration. 
 
 II
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 Remy de Gourmont says, apropos Brune- 
 tiere's views of Renan: 
 
 Centre I'opinion commune, la critique est peut-etre Ic plus 
 subjectif de tous les genres litteraires; c'est une confession 
 perpetuelle ; en croyant analyser les oeuvres d'autrui, c'est 
 soi-meme que Ton devoile et que Ton expose au public. . . . 
 voulant expliquer et contredire Renan, M. Brunetiere s'est 
 une fois de plus confesse publiquement. 
 
 That is true, except that it may be doubted 
 whether one type of literature is more subjec- 
 tive than another, since all types are subjective. 
 Even a work that belongs, according to De 
 Quincey's definition, to the literature of infor- 
 mation as distinguished from the literature ot 
 power, even an article in an encyclopaedia, an 
 article, say, on Patagonia, has a man behind 
 it; it cannot be quite objective and impersonal. 
 
 Criticism should not be set ofif too sharply 
 from other forms of literary expression. It has 
 no special rights, privileges, and authority; and 
 at the same time it has no special disabilities that 
 consign it to a secondary place in the divisions 
 of literature. In any unit of art, a sonnet or an 
 epic, a short story or a novel, a little review or 
 a history of aesthetics, a man is trying to say 
 something. And the value of what he says must, 
 of course, depend partly on the essential interest 
 of his subject; but it depends to a greater extent 
 on the skill with which he puts words together, 
 creates interest in himself. Arnold's essay on 
 
 12
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 Keats is less Keats than Arnold. It could not 
 have been if Keats had not existed. But the 
 beauty of that sequence of words, that essay in 
 criticism, is due to the genius of Arnold. Francis 
 Thompson on Shelley adds no cubit to the stat- 
 ure of Shelley, but Thompson's interpretation is 
 a marvellous piece of poetic prose v^hich cannot 
 be deducted without enormous loss from the 
 works of Thompson, from English criticism. We 
 read Pater on Coleridge, not for Coleridge but 
 for Pater, and we read Coleridge for Coleridge, 
 not for Shakespeare. Thackeray's lecture on 
 Swift, which is full of animosity and miscompre- 
 hension, is a well-written revelation of Thack- 
 eray. Trollope's book on Thackeray, which is 
 full of friendship and admiration, is an ill- 
 written revelation of Trollope. 
 
 Some men of great ability, like Trollope, who 
 have written good books themselves, lack the 
 faculty, whatever it may be, of writing in an 
 entertaining fashion about the books of other 
 men. Swinburne is a striking example. His 
 knowledge of literature was immense, and he had 
 the enthusiasms and contempts that make the 
 critical impulse; but except when the poet in 
 him seized the pen and made a passage of lyrical 
 prose, his excursions into criticism are bewilder- 
 ing and difficult to read. His sonnets on Dickens, 
 Lamb, and the Elizabethans are worth more 
 
 13
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 than all his prose. On the other hand, Lamb, 
 who wrote like an angel about the Elizabethan 
 dramatists, failed completely as a dramatist. 
 
 Every man who plays with literature at all 
 must be ambitious to succeed in some form of 
 art that may be called "creative," as distinct 
 from critical — a distinction which, since 
 Arnold taught us our lesson, we know does not 
 exist. The reason for this ambition is plain 
 enough. A novel or a play reaches a wider au- 
 dience than a volume of essays, however admir- 
 able; it has a more obvious claim to originality, 
 and it brings the author a greater degree of 
 practical satisfaction. A few doubly or trebly 
 gifted men, Dryden, Coleridge, Poe, Arnold, 
 Pater, Henley, Stevenson, Henry James, could do 
 first-rate work in more than one genre, includ- 
 ing criticism. And a good case could be made 
 out to prove that a man who knows how to 
 handle words in many ways is on the whole the 
 best qualified to comment on the art of handling 
 words. However that may be, it is certain that 
 in English literature a critic who is only a crit- 
 ic seldom wins a conspicuous position. Even 
 Johnson was something more than a critic, and 
 he was, with all due respect, somewhat less than 
 a good one. And Hazlitt, who was a good one, 
 cvrote on many subjects besides books and art. 
 
 Because so many little people went into the
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 business of reviewing and presumed to sit in 
 judgment on their betters, criticism early got a 
 bad name in English literature, and not all the 
 dignified work of Arnold and others has yet suc- 
 ceeded in restoring the reputation of the word 
 or the art. Criticism came to mean censure, a 
 connotation which persists in current speech. 
 The degeneration had already taken place in 
 Dryden's time, and he protested that "they 
 wholly mistake the nature of criticism who 
 think that its business is principally to find 
 fault." Authors of imaginative works became 
 resentful and felt that the critic was an enemy, 
 a nasty and incompetent enemy, as indeed he 
 often was. An interesting compilation could 
 be made — and probably Saintsbury or some- 
 body else has done it — of the retorts and coun- 
 ter-attacks made by writers of other things than 
 criticism against the whole critical crew. Here 
 are a few examples : 
 
 Gentle Jane Austen in "Northanger Abbey" 
 amusingly defends her heroine's habit of read- 
 ing novels : 
 
 I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, 
 so common with novel writers, of degrading, by their con- 
 temptuous censure, the very performances to the number of 
 which they are themselves adding ... if the heroine of 
 one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from 
 whom can she expect protection and regard? . . . Let 
 us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy 
 at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in thread- 
 bare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. 
 
 15
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 That sounds as if Miss Austen's pride in her 
 craft had been wounded. I know of no record 
 that anybody ever spoke ill of her while she was 
 living. 
 
 Scott, whose generous soul was hurt by the 
 harsh squabbles of the Scottish reviewers, took 
 a shot at the tribe in the letter which appears 
 in the introductory note to "The Lay of the 
 Last Minstrel" in the Cambridge edition: 
 
 As to the herd of critics, it is impossible for me to pay 
 much attention to them» for, as they do not understana 
 what I call poetry, we talk in a foreign language to each 
 other. Indeed, many of these gentlemen appear to me to be 
 a sort of tinkers, who, unable to make pots and pans, set up 
 for menders of them, and, God knows, often make two holes 
 in patching one. 
 
 The idea that the critic is a secondary fellow 
 who cannot make first-hand literature goes back 
 to Dryden, the champion and exemplar of 
 sound criticism, who wrote in "The Conquest 
 of Granada": 
 
 They who write ill and they who ne'er durst write 
 Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite. 
 
 Landor repeats the idea in a "Conversation" 
 between Southey and Porson, in which Porson 
 says: "Those who have failed as writers turn 
 reviewers." 
 
 Writers and other artists are usually sensitive 
 and often vain. Some have taken critics too 
 seriously, have given them too much importance 
 while pretending to despise them, and have al- 
 
 i6
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 lowed themselves to be stung instead of brush- 
 ing the flies off. Thanks to Shelley, the idea be- 
 came current that the ''viperous murderer," the 
 critic, killed Keats. It was not so. Keats died 
 of tuberculosis. Though he was, like all poets, 
 delicately organized, he was an unusually sane 
 and self-reliant man, quite sure of the value of 
 his work. Moreover, in a day when rough crit- 
 icism was the fashion, the critics were, though 
 stupid^ not especially rough on Keats. Shelley's 
 "J'accuse" is flaming poetry, but — it is not good 
 criticism. Byron had the right idea. With his 
 superior wit and vigour he gave the reviewers 
 ten blows for one and used his opponents as the 
 occasion of a delightful exhibition of boxing. 
 The reviewers were knocked out in the second 
 round. "English Bards and Scottish Review- 
 ers" is still in the ring, as I have pleasantly dis- 
 covered by re-reading it. 
 
 The notion that the critic will, or can, do 
 damage to the artist persisted long after Shelley 
 and is perhaps still believed. In 1876, Sidney 
 Lanier, a man of good sense and great bravery, 
 whom the flies, or the "vipers," had but lightly 
 nipped, wrote in a letter to his father: 
 
 What possible claim can contemporary criticism set up 
 to respect — that criticism which crucified Jesus, stoned 
 Stephen, hooted Paul for a madman, tried Luther for a 
 criminal, tortured Galileo, bound Cohimbus in chains, drove 
 Dante into a hell of exile, made Shakespeare write the son- 
 net, "Wheni in disgrace of fortune and men's eyes," gave 
 
 17
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 Milton £5 for "Paradise Lost," kept Samuel Johnson cooling 
 his heels on Lord Chesterfield's doorstep, reviled Shelley as 
 an unclean dog, killed Keats, cracked jokes on Gluck, 
 Schubert, Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner, and committed 
 so many other impious follies and stupidities? 
 
 Lanier's charges are not all quite true. He 
 mixed up the sins of criticism with the sins of 
 politics, economics, and other dreadful affairs. 
 But his outburst is a good illustration of the 
 quarrel between the "author" and the "critic." 
 Especially when the author has for the moment 
 lost his sense of humour. 
 
 The best treatment of the critic by the author, 
 as also, perhaps, of the author by the critic, is 
 humourous. In "One of Our Conquerors," 
 Meredith lays out the art critics: 
 
 He had relied and reposed on the dicta of newspaper 
 critics; who are sometimes unanimous, and are then taken 
 for guides, and are fatal. 
 
 Washington Irving, in a delightful little 
 paper called "Desultory Thoughts on Critic- 
 ism," quietly places the reviewer in the low seat 
 where he belongs. I shall not quote from the 
 essay, but merely refer the reader to it and es- 
 pecially to the introductory quotation from 
 Buckingham's "Rehearsal," in which the critic 
 is set in a still lower seat. 
 
 Finally — for these quotations — Dr. Holmes, 
 who lived all his life surrounded by praise and 
 comfort, puts his finger gently on the parasitism 
 
 i8
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 of the critic. The passage is in "The Poet at 
 the Breakfast Table": 
 
 Our cpi^oic literature is becoming so extensive that no- 
 body is safe from its ad infinitum progeny. A man writes 
 a book of criticisms. A Quarterly Rcvinv ^ criticises the 
 critic. A Monthly Magazine takes up the critic's critic. A 
 Weekly Journal criticizes the critic of the critic's critic, and 
 a daily paper favours us with some critical remarks on the 
 performance of the writer in the Weekly, who has criticised 
 the critical notice in the Monthly of the critical essay in the 
 Quarterly on the critical work we started with. And thus 
 we see that as each fllea "has smaller fleas that on him prey," 
 even the critic himself cannot escape the common lot of be- 
 ing bitten. 
 
 To what extent is the critic parasitic? To this 
 extent: he is dealing with ideas already ex- 
 pressed, with cooked and predigested food. It is 
 easier for any mind to think of something to say 
 about an idea that has already gone through 
 cerebral processes than it is to take the raw ma- 
 terial of life and make something. You may sit 
 on a bench in the park and watch the people 
 and never, for the life of you, conceive a good 
 story. Then O. Henry comes along and makes 
 twenty stories. After he has done it, you can 
 write something very brilliant about what O. 
 Henry saw from the same bench that you sat on. 
 And you can make neat remarks about the re- 
 semblances and dififerences between O. Henry, 
 Boccaccio, and H. C. Bunner. That may be 
 worth doing, if your remarks are really neat. 
 For then you may be readable. 
 
 And that is the function of the critic, to be 
 
 19
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 readable, to make literature of a sort. The crit- 
 ic is always playing his own game, selfish, ego- 
 tistical, expressive of his own will, and no more 
 disinterested than was Arnold himself when he 
 took his pen in hand to slay a Philistine or to 
 sign a contract with his manager for a lecture 
 tour in America. In playing his own game the 
 critic may help the game of another author by 
 crying him up and advertising him. But a hun- 
 dred critics, clamouring in the fatal unanimity 
 at which Meredith pokes fun, cannot make the 
 fortunes of a book or influence at the creative 
 source the work of a man sufficiently strong and 
 original to be worth reading. And the same 
 hundred critics with lofty hatred of bad writ- 
 ing cannot prevent bad books from being writ- 
 ten and read. George Eliot made it a rule not 
 to read criticisms of her work because she found 
 it necessary to be preserved "from that dis- 
 couragement as an artist which ill-judged praise 
 no less than ill-judged blame tends to produce 
 in me." The implication that criticism, favor- 
 able or unfavorable, is ill-judged gives us an ad- 
 dition to our notes on what authors think of 
 critics. I doubt whether, if that strong-minded 
 woman had read everything that was written 
 about her before and after her death, she would 
 have altered a single sentence. Did Hardy stop 
 writing novels because of the ignorant attacks 
 
 20
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 on "Jude"? I would not accept without ques- 
 tion Hardy's own word for it. I suspect that it 
 was his own inward impulse, not determined by 
 the opinions of the other people, that turned his 
 energy to that stupendous epic, "The Dynasts." 
 
 To what extent can the critic play the game 
 of the reader, be guide and teacher, maintain 
 standards, elevate taste, make the best ideas pre- 
 vail? Not to a very great extent. Criticism, 
 good or bad, is read only by the sophisticated, 
 by people whose tastes are formed and who can 
 take care of themselves in matters literary and 
 intellectual. Who that had not already looked 
 into Shakespeare and Plato ever heard of Pater? 
 The journals that print intelligent articles about 
 literature and art have a small circulation; 
 they are missionaries to the converted; their 
 controversial discussions of general principles 
 or of the merits of an individual are only family 
 feuds. Critics play with each other in a pro- 
 fessional game. The few amateurs who sit as 
 spectators are a select minority who have seen 
 the game before and who, though not in the 
 professional class, are instructed, cultivated, 
 have some knowledge of the plays. The critical 
 game is enjoyed by those who are themselves 
 critical and least in need of enlightenment. 
 
 Nevertheless, it is a great game — when it is 
 played well. 
 
 21
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 The author of a book on golf illustrates it 
 with the stances and swings of better players 
 than himself; he makes an anthology. A collec- 
 tion of essays by various authors would illus- 
 trate the game better than the plays of a single 
 critic, a much more competent critic than I. I 
 do not pretend that the essays in this book are 
 first-rate specimens of how the strokes should 
 be made. But even a small fellow may flatter 
 himself that he has an individual way of look- 
 ing at things which may give unity of interest 
 to a collection of papers. At any rate he has a 
 right to exhibit his methods, and nobody is 
 obliged to watch him or play with him. 
 
 Most of these papers have been published in 
 reviews and magazines, The Freeman, The Dial, 
 The New Republic, the Boston Herald, the At- 
 lantic Monthly, the Literary Review of the 
 New York Evening Post, the New York 
 Tribune. » 
 
 The essay on Joseph Conrad appeared in the 
 Atlantic Monthly in 1906. I am proud only of 
 the date. Sixteen years ago Conrad was not 
 universally recognized; some of his best work 
 had not been done; and many finer essays than 
 mine had not.yet been written. If I was not the 
 first American critic to pursue that mysterious 
 mariner across enchanted seas, at least I can 
 swear before the critical court of admiralty 
 
 22
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 rhat the waters were not crowded with little 
 craft like mine. It is a pleasure to read again 
 a few letters which hail me for hailing Conrad 
 and which make me believe that I did intro- 
 duce the master to a few readers. If so, I have 
 not lived in vain. 
 
 But my pride is somewhat reduced by the 
 consideration that any reader intelligent enough 
 to look at a literary essay in the Atlantic Month- 
 ly must sooner or later have discovered Con- 
 rad for himself without the assistance of a critic. 
 However, I hug with amusement the memory 
 of a Harvard professor who threw up his hands 
 and said: "My God! I had no idea there was a 
 man living who could write like that!" To the 
 professorial mind in those days English liter- 
 ature stopped officially with the death of 
 Browning or, at the latest, with the deaths of 
 Stevenson and Pater. The essay itself is a little 
 professorial, enfeebled by a sort of Boston- 
 Harvard timidity, utterly failing to express the 
 wild joy which I felt. The second paper on 
 Conrad, written fifteen years later, is not so hesit- 
 ant. It is interesting to look again at the biblio- 
 graphical footnote to the first essay and see how 
 Conrad's few books were scattered among the 
 publishers. I could not find "An Outcast of the 
 Islands" except in the Tauchnitz edition. To- 
 day his work is collected. There is a handsome 
 
 23
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 subscription edition. And Mr. Doubleday tells 
 me that a new book by Conrad has an assured 
 immediate sale of twenty to thirty thousand. 
 Perhaps, after all, we who cheered long ago 
 when it was not the fashion to cheer have justi- 
 fied our miserable existence as critics. 
 
 The essay on Tolstoy was written in the two 
 months immediately after his death. Mr. Ellery 
 Sedgwick asked me to write it for the Atlantic 
 Monthly and then rejected it. It was published 
 in the New York Call. I bear no bitter 
 grudge against Mr. Sedgwick for returning an 
 article that he had ordered. But I am con- 
 vinced, as I read the article over again, that he 
 is an incompetent critic of criticism. Sometimes 
 editors and publishers, whose business it is to 
 provide the arena and assemble the spectators, 
 play their part of the game stupidly. But on 
 the whole I think they are more than generous 
 to second-rate performers. If I owned a maga- 
 zine I should be very grudging of the space I 
 gave to literary chatter — except my own. 
 
 A critical friend — we critics suffer from each 
 other — admonishes me that in the foregoing re- 
 marks I have treated an important art in a flip- 
 pant manner. Certainly I am not so foolish as 
 to take my essays very seriously, and, I believe 
 that much modern criticism is too solemn, that 
 
 24
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 if we fooled with literature in a lighter spirit 
 we should enjoy it more and be happier. 
 
 Charles Lamb was not afraid to kick up his 
 heels, and yet nobody will accuse him of being 
 a trivial clown. Oscar Wilde was a man of wit, 
 sometimes a buffoon, and he could puncture a 
 stupid piece of work with ridicule. But the pre- 
 vailing tone of his best essays is one of dignity 
 and sobriety. 
 
 Good criticism is as important as anything 
 that man can put on paper. Moreover, certain 
 subjects must be treated by the critic with the 
 utmost gravity. It would be ow^lishly humour- 
 less, uncritical, not to take Tolstoy seriously. 
 Essays about the greater men of genius and the 
 deeper problems of art must be substantial, 
 solid, or they are inappropriate, out of key. 
 
 But it is possible to be sane and erudite with- 
 out being leaden, to approach a noble subject 
 earnestly without striking an attitude of priestly 
 austerity. Some of our sincerest contemporaries, 
 both the academic and the rebellious, seem to 
 me to worry about literature, as if it were an 
 invalid that needed nursing or a dead man about 
 whom the last word must be said before next 
 Thursday afternoon. They do not get enough 
 fun out of 'ut. They forget that Pater, who was 
 not a mad wag and not a dilettante, could some- 
 
 25
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 times see the gaiety of things and was willing to 
 be inconclusive. 
 
 Criticism is important. The best contempor- 
 aneous English criticism is not good enough. 
 And even in France, where we have been taught 
 to look for sound critics, Flaubert thought as 
 late as 1869 that criticism was still in its in- 
 fancy. He wrote to George Sand: "You speak 
 of criticism in your last letter to me, telling me 
 that it will soon disappear. I think, on the con- 
 trary, that it is, at most only dawning . . . When 
 will they (critics) be artists, only artists, but 
 really artists? Where do you know a criticism? 
 Who is there who is anxious about the work in 
 itself, in an intense way? . . . The unconscious 
 poetic expression? Where it comes from? its 
 composition, its style? The point of view of the 
 author? Never. That criticism would require 
 great imagination and great sympathy." To 
 which George Sand replied with good sense: 
 "The artist is too much occupied with his own 
 work to forget himself in estimating that of 
 others." 
 
 Since then France has had a generation of 
 critics, some of whom were artists. If Henne- 
 quin, who thought he was a scientific critic, 
 was not an artist, if De Gourmont, who smiled 
 wisely at the whole game, was not an artist, then 
 the word means nothing. In England and 
 
 26
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 America criticism has not made much progress 
 since Pater died. I know that I am punctuating 
 literature in the manner of the academic fogies. 
 But one of the humours of this sport is that you 
 sometimes do things which are fouls when your 
 opponent is guilty of them. 
 
 I come back gladly to the analogy of the 
 game. We have, I believe, made progress in 
 one direction. In the direction of fair play. We 
 cannot write like Hazlitt, but we will not hit 
 below the belt as he did sometimes. We cannot 
 write like Arnold, and his combination of liter- 
 ary charm and scholarship makes us feel desper- 
 ately small, but in our descent from his altitude 
 we have freed ourselves from his major vice, 
 his dogmatic snobbery, his bigoted liberalism. 
 The pulpit-pounder still thrives in religion and 
 politics; in criticism he is becoming obsolete. 
 I am sure, or at least hopeful, that this is true 
 in America. I think I see a slight but appreci- 
 able improvement in candour, simplicity, gen- 
 erosity, geniality, and fairness in attack. On the 
 whole we are a little more sportsmanlike than 
 some of our elders. That is all that I claim for 
 us. Our real consolation is that the ancient and 
 honorable game is still young, still to be played. 
 
 27
 
 DANTE IN ENGLISH
 
 DANTE IN ENGLISH 
 
 I am tempted to call the following remarks 
 ''Reading Dante for Fun." The most austere of 
 poets should not be treated with levity. But, 
 after all, poetry, even poetry of profound ethic- 
 al and religious import, is to be enjoyed. And 
 the simple point that I wish to make, as a mere 
 reader with but a stumbling knowledge of Ital- 
 ian and almost no knowledge of the vast library 
 of Dante scholarship, is that Dante is accessible 
 in English. His book of magic is at least half 
 open even to one who must forever remain part- 
 ly blind and deaf to the beauty of the original. 
 It is a great pleasure to read the convenient little 
 volumes of the Temple Classics with the Italian 
 text on the left-hand page and the English on 
 the right, to read idly or study deeply, accord- 
 ing to mood and temperament. At any rate, let 
 us not be overcome by the solemnity of the oc- 
 casion or discouraged by the difficulties, some 
 of which the commentators have cleared away 
 and some of which they have made more diffi- 
 cult. 
 
 31
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 Dr. Toynbee* finds that since 1802 the Com- 
 media as a whole has been translated into Eng- 
 lish about once every four years. And he ex- 
 cludes from his record American translators 
 and critics. Why did Dr. Toynbee or the Brit- 
 ish Academy make this commemorative volume 
 so narrowly insular? English and American 
 scholarship is one institution. And American 
 Dantists have done good work. Though it is 
 the fashion to scorn the Yankee bards and seers, 
 Lowell's essay and the translations by Long- 
 fellow, Norton, and Parsons are important in 
 the history of Dante in English, not British, lit- 
 erature. They had literary gifts, they knew 
 Italian, and they were able to appreciate a uni- 
 versal mind. For all their provinciality their 
 . — shades can afford to smile at their young coun- 
 tryman, Mr. Mencken, who writes : "If I have 
 to go to hell for it, I must here set down my 
 conviction that much of the 'Divine Comedy' is 
 piffle." Well, he ought to go to hell — to Dante's 
 hell, which is an entertaining and hospitable 
 place. In the cold prose of Norton or John 
 Carlyle, where the melody is necessarily lost, 
 there may be some passages in which an alert 
 modern reader cannot find great interest, but 
 the number of lines of "piffle" is exactly none. 
 
 ♦Britain's Tribute To Dante in Literature and Art, A 
 Chronological Record of 540 Years. By Paget Toynbee. 
 London: Published for the British Academy, 1921. 
 
 32
 
 DANTE IN ENGLISH 
 
 It is not to be expected that all men, even all 
 literary men, will respond to Dante. Horace 
 Walpole called him "extravagant, absurd, dis- 
 gusting; in short, a Methodist parson in Bed- 
 lam." This is amusing, even refreshing, in view 
 of the too pious devotion of some later English- 
 men. But the eighteenth century was not the 
 time for English appreciation of Dante, and 
 Walpole, witty prosateur, was not the man to 
 enjoy him. Dante was known, of course, to 
 Chaucer and to the Elizabethans and Milton, 
 and his influence on English poetry was perhaps 
 even greater than Dr. Toynbce's record makes 
 evident. But it is with the nineteenth century, 
 which, bien entendu, was born intellectually a 
 few years before its numerical date, that Dante 
 becomes a power in English literature. He is, 
 indeed, a part of the revival of English roman- 
 ticism. The translations of Boyd and Gary ap- 
 peared early in the century, and from then on 
 Dante belonged to English literature, as well 
 acclimated as any other foreign classic. The 
 index of Dr. Toynbee's record contains the 
 names of almost all the important English poets 
 from Scott to Francis Thompson. 
 
 And it contains hundreds of other names, not 
 perhaps of great importance in literature, but 
 important in this respect, that they show the 
 appeal of Dante to a great variety of minds, of 
 
 33
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 minds not mediaeval, not Catholic, not Italian. 
 Nobody can dip into him, however superficial- 
 ly, without getting something. He has so much 
 that everybody can be happy, from the Pope to 
 the most pagan young poet. Though the true 
 Dantist will insist that the greatest of poets 
 must be understood, or accepted, entire, like his 
 own God and his own universe, I propose that 
 the anthological view of him is proper and de- 
 lightful. If he is so rich and structurally per- 
 jct that no side of him can be neglected, then 
 he is so rich and so strong that any side of him 
 can be neglected. You can sit under a tree on 
 the side of a mountain without comprehending 
 the mountain, but deriving much happiness 
 from the tree, the altitude, and the view. 
 
 The interpreters of Dante's stupendous unity 
 are all true to Dante, in that they try to find 
 *ome complete explanation of him and will tol- 
 erate no neglect of his least detail. Dante him- 
 self, for all his mystery and multiple meanings, 
 is quite explicit about the indivisibility, the in- 
 tegrity, of his work. So that the episodic, in- 
 complete view of him, which I recommend to 
 other casual readers, is unphilosophic and am- 
 ateurish. Let us concede that and at the same 
 time let us reserve the right to be cheerfully 
 weary of systems where the "benumbed con- 
 ceiving soars." Ruskin speaks the indubitable 
 truth: "The central man of all the world, as 
 
 34
 
 DANTE IN ENGLISH 
 
 representing the imaginative, moral, and intel- 
 lectual faculties, all at their highest, is Dante." 
 But such a genius is too awful to contemplate, 
 and it is more comfortable to keep this side 
 idolatry. 
 
 Moreover, the interpreters, seeking to com- 
 prehend Dante's vast totality, do not discover 
 complete unity among themselves. Mr. Walter 
 Arensberg* thinks that he has unlocked the 
 mystery, and I think that he has. But as I had a 
 little to do with filing that key I will not say 
 how well I think it turns in the wards of the 
 lock; I will leave him to the mercies of other 
 critics and merely note that six centuries after 
 Dante's death we have a novel interpretation. 
 
 And then comes Professor Courtney Lang- 
 don** with another. One of his ideas seems to 
 me just, though debatable — namely, that any 
 modern man has the right to find anything in 
 Dante that he can find, to derive the sort of joy 
 and wisdom that suit him, the reader, whether 
 or not Dante would recognize that reader's 
 meaning. The poet exists for our benefit and, 
 like the Bible, does not forbid but justifies the 
 multitude of sects and individual expositors. 
 That idea alone is worth Professor Langdon's 
 
 *The Crytography of Dante. By Walter Arensberg. New 
 York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921. 
 
 **The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The Italian 
 Text with a Translation in English Blank Verse and a Com- 
 mentary. By Courtney Langdon. Cambridge : Harvard Uni- 
 versity Press. 3 vols. 
 
 35
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 labor, and it will be interesting to see how he 
 develops it. Unfortunately, his translation is 
 worse than useless. He simply has not the gift 
 of English verse. His own verses, prefixed to 
 the several canticles, are absurd doggerel; they 
 remind one of Longfellow's lovely sonnets (the 
 best poems he ever wrote) only by their posi- 
 tion of naive rivalry with the splendor that fol- 
 lows. And, what is more strange. Professor 
 Langdon writes abnominable prose, such as- 
 saults upon the ear as 'Verse's- rhythm" and 
 "Divine Comedy's last part." If the poet ex- 
 ists for us, in English or Italian, one of the 
 things to learn from him is how to write. 
 
 The poet exists for us. That is an excellent 
 idea. It is our privilege to take what we enjoy 
 and reject what we do not like or understand. 
 I cannot be interested in Dante's ethics, which 
 interested him so profoundly and is the bone of 
 his thought. His "stern indignant moral," as 
 Carlyle called it, is for me no part of the beauty 
 of the "mystic song." I cannot regard without 
 suspicion, even in a New Englander, Norton's 
 statement to Dr. Dinsmore that the quality of 
 the Commedia, other than its beauty, which at- 
 tracted him to Dante was "his powerful ex- 
 position of moral penalties and rewards." Other 
 than its beauty? What does that mean? If the 
 qualities of the Commedia can be separated 
 
 36
 
 DANTE IN ENGLISH 
 
 (Dante happened to believe that they can not 
 be), let us throw the ethics, the penalties, and 
 rewards to the four winds. Let us keep as much 
 as we can grasp of the beauty of the episodes, 
 the images, the phrases, the structure, whatever 
 gives delight. 
 
 The beauty of the fifth canto of Inferno does 
 not depend on the ethical fact that the carnal 
 sinners are punished, but on the poetic fact that 
 their pathetic loves on earth are recalled and 
 that their punishment is vividly, physically 
 dramatized. The tragic pity and terror of it 
 break through the baldest translation stripped 
 of the enchantment of the original verse. Many 
 English poets have been tempted to try to render 
 that famous fifth canto. Mr. Arensberg has 
 made the best version that I have seen. His 
 version is in the terza rima, a difficult thing to 
 manage in English, and he succeeds in making 
 a good English poem, a shade finer than a mere 
 tour de force. I doubt whether he or any other 
 poet can so well translate the entire Commedia 
 in the same form, though the attempt has been 
 made. The terza rlma has never been quite 
 naturalized in our language. Even such a mas- 
 ter as Shelley can not turn it perfectly. We im- 
 ported the sonnet as easily as the apple and we 
 made some French forms grow thriftily in our 
 hardy garden. The terza rima remains artificial 
 
 37
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 and foreign, peculiarly Italian and more pecul- 
 iarly Dante; he made it his own and moved at 
 ease in its exacting rigidities. He was in thought 
 and form a diabolical magician. 
 
 In order to show the terza rima in English 
 and to suggest (not to solve!) the problem of 
 translation, let us look at three versions of the 
 last ten lines of the fifth canto of Inferno, the 
 story of Paolo and Francesca. Francesca is 
 speaking and tells how she and her lover read 
 the story of Lancelot and Guinevere — romance 
 within romance! First, Norton's clear, deliber- 
 ately uninspired prose: 
 
 "When we read of the longed-for smile being kissed by- 
 such a lover, this one, who never shall be divided from me, 
 kissed my mouth all trembling. Gallehaut was the book, 
 and he wrote it. That day we read no farther in it!" 
 
 While the one spirit said this, the other was so weeping 
 that through pity I swooned as if I had been dying, and 
 fell as a dead body falls. 
 
 Then Longfellow in traditional blank verse 
 (and it is good verse; he knew his business) : 
 
 "Whenas we read of the much longed-for smile 
 Being by such a noble lover kissed, 
 This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided, 
 Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating. 
 Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it. 
 That day no farther did we read therein." 
 And all the while one spirit uttered this. 
 The other one did weep so that, for pity, 
 I swooned away as if I had been dying, 
 And fell, even as a dead body falls. 
 
 38
 
 DANTE IN ENGLISH 
 Finally, Arensberg in terza rima: 
 
 "When we had read how one so amorous 
 
 Had kissed the smile that he was longing for, 
 This one, who always must be by me thus, 
 
 Kissed me upon the mouth, trembling all o'er; 
 Galcot the book, and he 'twas written by! 
 Upon that day in it we read no more." 
 
 So sorely did the other spirit cry, 
 While the one spoke, that for the very dread 
 
 I swooned as if I were about to die, 
 And I fell down even as a man falls dead. 
 
 Those versions, I submit, are all good; and I 
 risked the tedium of repeating the same idea of 
 Dante in the English of three different trans- 
 lators. Because my simple point is that Dante 
 in English is interesting — to anybody who cares 
 for English literature. 
 
 39
 
 DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
 
 DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Dante^S De Monarchia is usually treated by 
 the commentators as a mere footnote to the Corn- 
 media; and this subordination is justifiable be- 
 cause the poet in Dante overwhelms all other 
 expressions of his genius and also because the 
 Commedia contains much political philosophy, 
 some of which De Monarchia elucidates. 
 But De Monarchia, considered by itself, is a 
 work of great importance. Even if by some un- 
 thinkable accident the Commedia had been lost 
 and De Monarchia had survived, it would 
 remain a significant treatise on the state and the 
 papacy and would deserve to be regarded as we 
 regard the political writings of philosophers 
 from Plato to Hobbes. To be sure, the chief 
 interest of the work for us lies in the fact that 
 Dante wrote it, and it would lose some of its 
 value if it were isolated from the rest of his 
 thought; the amazing unity of his mind and 
 the coherence of his purpose make a piecemeal 
 view of any part of him essentially false. His 
 vision of earth and heaven has a thousand as- 
 pects but no fragments. Even the unfinished 
 works, II Convivio and De Vulgari Eloquentia, 
 
 43
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 are not fragments but are rather to be read as 
 partial manifestations of a singular and consist- 
 ent plan. 
 
 De Monarchia is a vision of earthly well-be- 
 ing. It is an argument, prosaic and heavy in the 
 English translations and very difficult in the 
 original/ I should suppose, even to an excellent 
 Latin scholar. But the argument embodies a 
 dream of the greatest of dreamers. The first 
 part sets forth the necessity of empire. Only 
 under a single world-governing monarch are 
 possible the solidarity of mankind and the full- 
 est possible development of the human spirit. 
 In unity man can find peace and justice. Man 
 is made in the image of God, and God is one; 
 wherefore man in imitation of God must make 
 the secular world conform to the universe and 
 set up a unique earthly dominion. In the nature 
 of things empire is divinely ordained and this 
 is further proved by the fact that Christ willed 
 to be born under the Emperor Augustus. 
 
 The second part seeks to show that the Ro- 
 man empire was appointed by God to rule the 
 world. It was established by the aid of mir- 
 acles, which confirm it as especially created by 
 the will of God. Christ died under the empire; 
 if the empire had not been the rightful temporal 
 authority, Christ would have been punished by 
 the agent of an unjust power, his suffering would 
 
 44
 
 DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 have been unlawful and therefore the sin of 
 Adam would not have been duly expiated. 
 Rome was born to command, because it did, in 
 point of fact, conquer the world, and also be- 
 cause the histories of its many heroes and pa- 
 triots show that the Roman citizen loved right 
 and justice. 
 
 The third part is an argument for the separ- 
 ation of church and state, which are independ- 
 ent authorities both deriving directly from God. 
 Many false arguments for the temporal power 
 of the church are refuted. Though the emperor, 
 as a man, is the first son of the church and should 
 obey it like other Christians, yet as emperor he 
 owes allegiance only to God, whom he repres- 
 ents on earth in temporal matters as the pope 
 represents God in spiritual matters. The very 
 nature of the church, its essential spiritual func- 
 tion, forbids it the possession of temporal power. 
 
 Have we here, then, nothing but a defence 
 of an empire that has been dust these many 
 centuries, and stale scholastic arguments for the 
 separation of church and state, a long settled 
 question in theoretic politics and practically 
 settled in most countries? There is much more 
 than that in De Monarch ia even for the most 
 confident modern democrat, who may regard 
 emperor and pope as twin tyrants and for whom 
 the word "mediaeval" has derogatory conno- 
 
 45
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 tations. It is true that the empire under which 
 Dante actually lived is dead as the empire of 
 the Caesars and that the empire of Dante's 
 dream was never realized in the workaday 
 world. As a political pamphlet De Monarchia 
 is obsolete without even the persistent contempo- 
 raneity of some eighteenth century tracts. In a 
 sense Dante's treatise died at birth. Bryce, who 
 gives an excellent summary of it in his "Holy 
 Roman Empire," shows that this plea for em- 
 pire, conceived by the supreme mind of the age, 
 was the epitaph of the existing empire. It was, 
 indeed, a swan-song, not of the author, who was 
 still to take us to Paradise and put his dream in 
 lovelier form, but of empire in the Catholic 
 Christian sense of "holy." The empire that 
 persisted after the thirteenth century grew fur- 
 ther and further away not only from a poet's 
 dream but from any practical possibility of 
 united political authority. The solidarity of 
 mankind was not to be achieved through Rome 
 or Christ, and Dante was not, as he thought, an- 
 nouncing a new era, but summing up a passing 
 era. 
 
 But the truth of a dream inheres in the dream 
 itself and is measured only in a secondary way 
 by the course of events. De Monarchia has for 
 us at least the value of a pacifist tract, the noble 
 core of which is not obscured by the strangeness 
 
 46
 
 DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 of some of the reasoning or by the destruction 
 of Dante's political milieu. Like some other 
 pacifist documents it is the work of an aggres- 
 sive militant mind. Dante had lived and suffer- 
 ed in a world continuously at war. The contest- 
 ing powers, great and small, were so compli- 
 cated that the historian has difficulty in keeping 
 them clear. To the major quarrels between 
 church and state and the strife of the city- 
 republics with one or the other or both were 
 added an internal warfare between economic 
 classes and feuds between castes and families, all 
 hopelessly intricate. 
 
 In this bloody confusion Dante had played 
 the part not of closet philosopher au-dessus de 
 la melee, but of soldier and civil official. And to 
 the last he was temperamentally a fighter, 
 though forced by circumstances to drop the 
 sword for the pen. He was not in the eyes of 
 his contemporaries what he has become for us, 
 the supreme solitary genius exiled by an un- 
 grateful city, but was simply one of a thousand 
 members of a beaten party. He was not a pa- 
 thetic, unappreciated poet but a pertinacious par- 
 tisan who happened to be on the losing side. He 
 knew war and misery and defeat. Yet his plea 
 for peace is by no means that of a weary bellig- 
 erent; it is that of a bellicose champion of cer- 
 tain principles. And so, though those principles 
 
 47
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 do not appeal to us and though the expression 
 of them is laborious, even turgid, De Monarchia 
 is still hot with conviction. 
 
 The instrument of peace was the one form 
 of government that Dante knew, the empire. 
 Even if his genius had taken the form of vatic- 
 ination (he was indeed, as it turned out, a poor 
 prophet), he naturally could not in his time 
 have made himself familiar with leagues of na- 
 tions and Wellsian "world-states." He had to 
 ride on a horse, not in a motor-car. And he rode, 
 as a worldly rider, to a fall. The tragedy of the 
 fall has in it a large element of dramatic irony 
 because he was so splendidly sure of his ideas at 
 exactly the moment when they were least 
 secure. 
 
 Dante's conception of an ideal empire had 
 nothing in common with what we now call im- 
 perialism, which is mere commercial conquest 
 and can be led by Kaiser or democratic prime 
 minister with equally disastrous results. Dante 
 believed in an imperial headship for the good 
 of all humanity. The ruler of the world was to 
 be the servant of the world, not its master and 
 exploiter; a supreme monarch was to be pro- 
 tected by his lonely authority from the temp- 
 tations that beset a weak man clothed with limit- 
 ed and contentious authority; aloof from strife 
 and cupidity, having all and so being beyond 
 
 48
 
 DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 pride and ambition, he could be a disinterested 
 and just administrator. 
 
 The aim of empire is universal peace — Dante 
 begins his argument almost in the terms of 
 Burke and with something like Burke's com- 
 bination of generosity and elaborate futility — 
 peace, "the best of those things that are ordained 
 for our beatitude." For on peace depends the 
 destiny of mankind to realize the full power of 
 the human mind in thought and deed. Dante's 
 world state is Utopia, compounded, as all Uto- 
 pias must be, of wisdom and utter impossibili- 
 ties, of sublime faith and facts half-understood. 
 While he dreamed he did not believe himself a 
 dreamer, any more than did Shelley. He be- 
 lieved intensely in the practical value of his 
 vision, in its originality and its finality as a solu- 
 tion of the problems of the political world. He 
 says that knowledge of monarchy has been 
 shunned because it has no di rect relation to profit, 
 and that he will be the first to bring it from 
 obscurity to light for the good of the world and 
 for his own glory. The humble servant and the 
 arrogant doctor at the bedside of the patient! It 
 is one of the most consistent contradictions of 
 proud souls. The reformer has found a new 
 and sure cure and cries "Eureka!" 
 
 In spite of the practical failure of his dream, 
 which in a sense defeats him, I do not believe 
 
 49
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 that Dante's pell-mell acceptance of all stories 
 about the greatness of Rome, with no apparent 
 discrimination, is proof that he did not know 
 what he was about. He was making a special 
 plea and he pillaged history and legend to get 
 material for the purposes of his argument. He 
 is a dialectician animated, like all reformers, by 
 unselfish motives, but willing to score a point if 
 he can. We may be fairly sure that Dante was 
 not a credulous person with a childish view of 
 history, but a sophisticated controversialist 
 handling his evidence for effect. Though he 
 mingles fact and fiction and though his docu- 
 mentary resources were more limited than ours, 
 yet he knew perfectly what he was trying to do, 
 and modern attempts to gloss him in a patroniz- 
 ing and apologetic manner are generally mis- 
 taken. 
 
 There is a grim humour in the fate that over- 
 takes the works of wise men. The treatise which 
 Dante believed would bring peace to a vexed 
 world became a matter of strife. Later Ghibel- 
 lines used his argument, unfairly, of course, to 
 support the supremacy of the empire over the 
 church, and ecclesiastical authority retorted by 
 condemning the book and even threatening the 
 repose of Dante's bones. A somewhat similar 
 quarrel arose over Hobbes's "Leviathan" three 
 centuries later. Seeking to unite all men, the 
 
 5a
 
 DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 political philosopher is attacked from both 
 sides, and if he lives he finds that he has poured 
 oil not on troubled waters but on a fire. 
 
 Though De Monarchia is much more than a 
 footnote to the Commendia and is worth study 
 for its own sake, yet the unity which it seeks in 
 the world is closely allied to the unity of Dante's 
 celestial vision by which he tried to lead man- 
 kind to God. Mankind refused to be cured of 
 its political pains by De Monarchia and even 
 ignored it in spite of Dante's secure and grow- 
 ing fame (there was no English translation 
 until the late nineteenth century). But man- 
 kind also never accepted and never will accept 
 the supreme vision of the Commedia. It is a 
 beautiful poem enjoyed by the literary, and 
 even in Italy it is valued, quite properly, as a 
 mere work of art. The world has never paid 
 much attention to Dante's declared purpose to 
 bring mankind through art to God. So that in 
 one way of regarding him, which may perhaps 
 be his way, he failed in the Commedia as he did 
 in De Monarchia. The world of thinking and 
 acting men, whose salvation Dante believed he 
 could work by verse and prose, remains disunit- 
 ed and contentious, weaponed with such bitter- 
 ness of heart and methods of destruction as the 
 dreamer of Inferno never dreamed. 
 
 51
 
 NIETZSCHE
 
 NIETZSCHE 
 
 It is more than thirty years since Nietzsche's 
 work was finished and darkness fell upon that 
 mighty intellect In 1917, Mr. W. M. Salter, 
 who certainly knows the bibliography of Nietz- 
 sche, wrote: 
 
 I can not make out that his influence is appreciable now — 
 at least in English-speaking countries. . . . He has, in- 
 deed, given a phrase and perhaps an idea or two to Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw, a few scattering scholars have got track of 
 him (I know of but two or three in America), the great 
 newspaper and magazine-writing and reading world has 
 picked up a fev/ of his phrases, which it does not under- 
 stand. 
 
 The preface of Frau Foerster-Nietzsche's edi- 
 tion of her brother's correspondence with Wag- 
 ner is dated, Weimar, 1914, and the English 
 translation was published in 192 1. Dr. Oscar 
 Levy's preface to his selection from the five vol- 
 umes of Nietzsche's correspondence,* publish- 
 ed in Germany between the years 1900- 1909, is 
 dated August, 1921. 
 
 So, although Nietzsche's works are now all, 
 or nearly all, to be read in English, he is not 
 
 * "Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche." Edited by Dr. 
 Oscar Levy. Authorized Translation by Anthony M. Ludo- 
 vico. New York: Doubleday Page & Co. 
 
 ss
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 quite an old story which every literate child 
 should know. Professional students of philoso- 
 phy seemed to have missed him or to have tar- 
 dily recognized him, and the mere casual reader 
 of philosophy may quietly dodge Mr. Menck- 
 en's bludgeon: ''Only blockheads to-day know 
 nothing of them [Nietzsche's ideas] and only 
 fools are unshaken by them." That sort of ag- 
 gressiveness on the part of a champion of Nietz- 
 sche will not help the master's ideas to prevail ; 
 though it may seem to be a disciple's repetition 
 of Nietzsche's superb arrogance, it is really not 
 true to his spirit. For Nietzsche attacked 
 thoughts and thinkers, quarrelled with oppon- 
 ents who were somewhere near his size, ignored 
 the opinions of the brainless multitude, and was 
 content to wait for time and the slow-moving 
 world to find him out. 
 
 Certainly he can not be jammed down our 
 throat, and quite as certainly his stimulating and 
 cathartic doses can not be snatched from our lips 
 by moralistic prohibitionists. It is possible, of 
 course, for a doctor to take advantage of one's 
 innocence and ignorance and put one to sleep 
 with drugs. That was my own experience. Dr. 
 Paul Elmer More stole up on me in the dark 
 with a soporific little book, the first I had ever 
 read about Nietzsche. When I came to, the 
 world was at war. A wild German philosopher, 
 
 S6
 
 NIETZSCHE 
 
 who had been quoted by a brutal German gen- 
 eral named Bernhardi, was responsible for the 
 violation of Belgian women. This was mani- 
 festly absurd, but there was no time to investi- 
 gate and explain, even for one's private satis- 
 faction, the causes of this ridiculous misunder- 
 standing not only of an individual philosopher 
 but of the relation of book-philosophy to appal- 
 lingly unphilosophic crimes. 
 
 It is amazing to find that the absurdity per- 
 sists, that it is necessary for Dr. Levy to try to 
 prove in 192 1 that Nietzsche did not incite the 
 Germans to a war of conquest! Has not the 
 hysteria sufficiently subsided for wise men to 
 quit wasting their energies in a contest with 
 spooks? It was part of Nietzsche's work to rid- 
 icule ghosts and blow away myths, and that he 
 should have become a myth himself is an irony 
 that he might have enjoyed. He gloried in be- 
 ing misunderstood. The true philosopher has 
 always been in lonely opposition to the domi- 
 nant ideals of his time. It is in a tone not of 
 resentment or complaint but of haughty satis- 
 faction that he writes to Georg Brandes, in the 
 last year of his intellectual life: 
 
 Your opinion of present-day Germans is more favourable 
 than mine ... all profound events escape them. Take, 
 for example, my "Beyond (iood and F.vil." Whiit bewilder- 
 ment it has caused them. I have not heard of a sinj^le intelli- 
 gent utterance about it, much less of an intelligent senti- 
 
 57
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 nient. I believe that it has not dawned on the most well- 
 intentioned of my readers that here is the outcome of a 
 sane philosophic sensibility, and not a medley of a hundred 
 outworn paradoxes and heterodoxes. Not a soul has ever 
 experienced the same sort of thing that I have. I never meet 
 anyone who has been through a thousandth pa.rt of the 
 same passionate struggle. 
 
 Nietzsche's philosophic solitude accounts in 
 part for the excellence of his letters. In his 
 struggles with the world, and his wilful alien- 
 ation from it, he clung passionately to the few 
 who were allied to him by the ties of blood, 
 friendship, or intellectual sympathy. The let- 
 ters contain no philosophic ideas which he did 
 not express again and again in his professional 
 writings. They do contain something else, how- 
 ever, moods, emotions, pleasures and private 
 difficulties, intimacies which are never quite 
 apart from the incessant battle of thought yet 
 belong to moments of comparative ease when 
 the soldier is off duty. This philosopher, whose 
 work is so intensely personal, who says that he 
 wrote his books with his whole body and life, 
 did not completely express himself in his books. 
 He poured his soul into them and was honestly 
 naked and unashamed. But for all his autobio- 
 graphical candor, his work is not a promiscu- 
 ous confession. He labored over his paragraphs 
 like an artist, calculated their effect, and made 
 them personal only in so far as suited his philo- 
 sophic purpose. There remains a sensitive and 
 
 S8
 
 NIETZSCHE 
 
 reticent Nietzsche who revealed himself to his 
 friends alone. 
 
 He was fortunate in his friends. When he 
 writes in the preface of "Human, All-Too-Hu- 
 man," that he has evolved an as yet non-existent 
 company of free spirits, because he needs them 
 and because they are some compensation for lack 
 of friends, he is posing in a philosophic attitude 
 which is quite justified by his experience as a 
 thinker and writer but which is not quite true 
 to the private history of Friedrich Nietzsche. 
 He never lacked friends, and his isolation was 
 in great measure self-imposed. The most dis- 
 tinguished friend he lost was Wagner; the break 
 came late in the older man's life, and it seems 
 to have been the younger man who disrupted 
 the friendship. 
 
 Even without Wagner, Nietzsche's corres- 
 pondents are numerous and varied, as many and 
 of as many kinds as a wise man needs, if he 
 chooses to make the most of them. The lonely 
 philosopher was not neglected as man and 
 brother. He preferred to flock by himself. His 
 ill health rather than the animosity of his 
 countrymen drove him out of Germany; and he 
 was happiest, as close as he ever came to happi- 
 ness, when he concentrated his energy in his 
 work. He makes a philosophic virtue of neces- 
 sity, affects to despise what he can not have, 
 
 59
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 laments his solitude and is proud of it. To his 
 
 sister he writes: 
 
 You can not think how lonely and out of it I always feel 
 when I am in the midst of all the kindly Tartufferie of those 
 people whom you call 'good,' and how intensely I yearn at 
 times for a man who is honest and who can talk even if he 
 were a monster, but of course I should prefer discourse with 
 demi-gods, . . . Oh, this infernal solitude ! 
 
 A few months later, when this aged philoso- 
 pher is forty, he writes to an old friend that all 
 the people he loves belong to the past and re- 
 gard him with merely merciful indulgence. 
 
 We see each other, we talk in order to avoid being silent — 
 we still write each other in order to avoid being silent. 
 Truth, however^ glances from their eyes, and these tell me 
 (I hear it well enough) : 'Friend Nietzsche, you are now 
 quite alone !' 
 
 That's what I have lived and fought for ! 
 
 The last sentence may be taken in two ways. 
 It may mean that Nietzsche strove for isolation, 
 or it may be interpreted bitterly: ''So that's 
 what I get from my friends for all my labor 
 and struggle!" Perhaps both meanings are 
 there. The letter ends : "Ah, dear friend, what 
 an absurdly silent life I lead! So much alone, so 
 much alone! So 'childless'! Remain fond of me; 
 I am truly fond of you." That sounds like a not 
 too human cry of hunger for afifection. The 
 man who prefers demi-gods and is confident 
 that he would be worthy of their companship is 
 not immune from the pangs of ordinary mortals. 
 
 Nietzsche had a self-critical knowledge of his 
 60
 
 NIETZSCHE 
 
 own needs and nature, and, so far as circum- 
 stances permitted, he followed the course that 
 pleased him. He sometimes groaned but he 
 never whined. In a letter to his sister, who had 
 evidently suggested the possibility of marriage, 
 he says that he cheerfully accepts the disadvan- 
 tages of independence. The list of requirements 
 that he lays down are enough to make us con- 
 gratulate the impossible she whom he wisely re- 
 frained from marrying. "I know the women 
 folk of half Europe," he writes, "and wherever 
 I have observed the influence of women on men, 
 I have noticed a sort of gradual decline as the 
 result." That is one of the philosopher's amus- 
 ing errors. He did not know women folk at all ; 
 the most fatuous, almost the only fatuous, pas- 
 sages in his works and his letters are those about 
 the ladies, and his letters to ladies are the dec- 
 larations of a free spirit shying off from some- 
 thing "agreeable though perhaps a trifle danger- 
 ous." 
 
 Nietzsche is at his best, of course, when he 
 writes to distinguished men, the few who recog- 
 nized his genius and made him glow in his cold 
 solitude. Nietzsche craved recognition; his 
 contempt for fame was largely a contempt for 
 sour grapes. Brandes and Strindberg put 
 wreaths on his head, and he was proud of them. 
 He writes to Strindberg: 
 
 6i
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 I am the most powerful intellect of the age, condemned to 
 fulfill a stupendous mission ... It is possible that I 
 have explored more terrible and more questionable worlds 
 of thought than anyone else, but simply because it is in my 
 nature to love the silent backwater. I reckon cheerfulness 
 among the proofs of my philosophy. 
 
 A man who can write like that of himself is 
 the happiest of mortals, for he knows that he 
 belongs among the immortals. 
 
 62
 
 TOLSTOY
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 Tolstoy closes the second part of "Sevasto- 
 pol" with these words: "The hero of my tale, 
 whom I love with all the power of my soul, 
 whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, 
 who has been, is, and ever will be beautiful, is 
 Truth." That sentence was written when Tol- 
 stoy was twenty-seven. For fifty years, in novels, 
 tales, essays, and exhortations, he celebrated his 
 hero with unflagging devotion. The deeds and 
 lineaments of the hero are not always as other 
 men have seen them, but the identity, the char- 
 acter of the hero is never in doubt. The hero 
 changes and utters conflicting wisdom, not be- 
 cause of the worshiper's inconstancy, but be- 
 cause Tolstoy develops, because he outgrows and 
 disavows his previous selves and violates con- 
 sistency between one book and another in his 
 zeal to find consistency between his next book 
 and Truth. 
 
 In ceaseless pursuit of Truth, Tolstoy is led 
 through the most stirring intellectual and moral 
 experiences which modern man has undergone. 
 
 6s
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 He is part of all that we have met; from the re- 
 motest of European countries, from a moment 
 in the world's thought that is already well be- 
 hind us, his messages have encircled the globe 
 and modify the living ideas of today. He 
 touched all departments of thought and left 
 none as it had been. 
 
 He plunged into the nineteenth century war- 
 fare of religion and science, found that both 
 parties were priest-ridden and arrogant, and 
 wrested from both the right of the individual to 
 a simple faith and to knowledge free from the 
 cant of the laboratory. The increasing grumble 
 of the contest between privilege and labor — the 
 most portentous war the world has seen and not 
 yet at its crisis — assaulted his ears ; he hearkened 
 while most other members of the narrow circle 
 of culture were deaf or indifferent, and he took 
 his stand on the side of the workers against his 
 own rank and kin. He laid bare the motives of 
 war, in which he had drawn a guilty sword, and 
 became a militant champion of peace. The un- 
 holy alliance of culture, religion, and civil au- 
 thority he strove to dissolve by broadsides 
 against each member of the triune tyranny, and 
 so he conceived a new theory of art, a new read- 
 ing of the gospels, and an anarchism so individ- 
 ual that it excludes most other anarchists. Under 
 the solemnity of marriage and the thin poetry 
 
 66
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 of romance he discerned the cloven hoof of 
 self-indulgence, and he shocked the world with 
 a virile puritanism, so powerful in its terms, so 
 subversive of our timid codes that bashful Mor- 
 ality shrank from her bravest defender. 
 
 All the main thoroughfares of nineteenth 
 century thought crossed before the doorway of 
 Tolstoy's house. He trafficked with all the pas- 
 sengers, but joined no special group. Even his 
 own disciples he allowed to go their own way; 
 he took no part in their organization and left 
 them to make their own interpretation and their 
 own application of his teachings. Loving all 
 mankind, having sympathetic knowledge of all 
 sorts and conditions of men, he was nevertheless 
 strangely solitary. At the end of his life his de- 
 votion to his ideas alienated from his family this 
 inost tender, home-loving man.* The young 
 idealists of the world left him behind, for they 
 broke out new highways of thought which he 
 could not travel; young Russia sees in him a 
 splendid survival of an elder age of storm and 
 struggle, calls him master but not leader. 
 
 He justified in his own life his theoretic in- 
 dividualism, because he was great and strong 
 enough to stand alone. The spirit of irony can 
 
 *As this book goes to press, Madam Tolstoy's "Autobiography" 
 is being published in The Freeman. Her views of the great man 
 should be illuminating, especially if she does not try to 
 minimize his defects. 
 
 67
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 not but deal gently with the sincerest, bravest of 
 men. Yet may she note under the gray garment 
 of humility a mien incorrigibly aristocratic and 
 domineering. The most powerful mind in the 
 world proclaimed self-submersion as the perfect 
 virtue, because it is the most difficult virtue for 
 a daring and vigorous spirit to attain. The foe 
 of privilege, preaching that all men are brothers 
 in love and alike before the Lord as they should 
 be before the law of man, enjoyed a unique priv- 
 ilege — he was almost the only man in Russia 
 who could with impunity say what he thought. 
 He won this right because he was an aristocrat 
 with friends at court and because the Russian 
 government dared not disregard the admiration 
 of the world which had made Tolstoy an inter- 
 national hero. He warned the mighty to walk 
 in the fear of God, but they walked in the fear 
 of Leo Tolstoy. 
 
 To remind ourselves of the titles of some of 
 his books and the order in which they appeared, 
 we may divide his work into seven parts. The 
 first part includes military tales and autobio- 
 graphic sketches: '^Sevastopol," "Two Hussars.' 
 ''The Raid," "The Cossacks," "Childhood," 
 "Boyhood," "Youth." The second part, begin- 
 ning in 1861, embraces his experience as school 
 teacher, his discourses on education, school 
 books, and stories for children and peasants. 
 
 68
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 The third part, from 1864 to 1878, comprises 
 "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." The 
 fourth part begins with his religious conversion 
 in 1878, and is devoted to theological, ethical 
 and sociological essays: "My Confession," "Un- 
 ion and Translation of the Four Gospels," "My 
 Religion," "What, Then, Must We Do?" The 
 subjects treated in these books he expounds over 
 and over for the rest of his life. Because it is 
 salient from his other work we may say that the 
 "Kreutzer Sonata" (1889) constitutes a fifth 
 part. "What is Art?" and "Resurrection" may 
 be thought of as a sixth part. Then follows the 
 concluding decade of warfare in pamphlets, es- 
 says, letters, upon civil and ecclesiastical au- 
 thority and other powers of darkness. 
 
 Any such partition of Tolstoy's work is un- 
 true to its organic continuity, its massive unity. 
 His books are embedded in his life. Though 
 each novel stands alone in self-sustaining integ- 
 rity, intelligible to all the world, yet each gains 
 in clearness and power for being understood in 
 relation to the mind that produced it. This col- 
 ossus of solitary protest, rising rough and vol- 
 canic above the flats of modern thought, is vast- 
 er when seen close to his intellectual base. 
 Viewed from a distance some sides of him, 
 some contours, are blurred and deceptive. No 
 part of his work can be wholly apprehended 
 
 69
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 unless all parts are brought into the range of 
 vision. 
 
 On the day of his death he was the most fa- 
 mous man of letters in the world. From the first 
 report of his final illness bulletins flew over the 
 cables in hourly succession. Yet for several 
 weeks after his death, repeated inquiry among 
 the dealers in English and foreign books in Bos- 
 ton (reputed center of culture and high think- 
 ing) showed that there never had been much de- 
 mand for Tolstoy's books, except his novels, and 
 that the momentary rise of interest caused by 
 his death had not disturbed the dust on such 
 books as "What, Then, Must We Do?" and 
 "My Confession." 
 
 This seems to indicate that not all the articles 
 and sermons which followed the ultimate news 
 from Russia were grounded upon first-hand 
 knowledge of Tolstoy. The truth is that his 
 opinions have trickled through to us Western- 
 ers In diluted streams. He is already a tradition, 
 and it is the habit of tradition to weaken as it 
 spreads, to lose the effect which a drinker at the 
 sources feels in their concentration, in their full 
 and proportioned measure of ingredients. Tol- 
 stoy is abroad in the world; he has permeated 
 the thought of the best minds and tinged the 
 currents of our present beliefs. But few West- 
 erners know him in his overwhelming entirety. 
 
 70
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 This man who laid open his whole mind and 
 heart with prodigal frankness is borne westward 
 on the winds of rumor as a mythical prodigy. 
 The outlines of his thought are misty and waver- 
 ing to many of those who call him great. He 
 spared no pains to clarify his beliefs; he ex- 
 pounded the same principle many times with 
 undiminished force and ever new transparency; 
 he gave sweeping permission to the world to 
 translate and print his books. Yet there is no 
 complete authorized edition of his works in any 
 language, even in Russian, thanks to the censors 
 and his own indifference to practical concerns.* 
 Thus for the moment a partial choas has de- 
 scended upon the work of Tolstoy, a coherent 
 luminous body of work, which left his hand as 
 free from ambiguity as his extraordinary skill 
 and industry could make it, but which has been 
 scattered in transmission. It will take some 
 years for his loyal followers in England and 
 America to give us a complete and adequate 
 translation; and in spite of Matthew Arnold's 
 naive confidence in the French, the most patient 
 collator will have difficulty in finding Tolstoy's 
 work or recognizing even the titles, in the books 
 which the Parisian publishers have sent forth 
 
 *This is no longer true in the troubled year of grace, 1922. 
 Every scrap of Tolstoy is published in Russia. And probably 
 before long there will be complete translations in many 
 modern languages. 
 
 71
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 under his name. One who has assembled such 
 of his books as are procurable in French and 
 English would say with all emphasis possible: 
 
 "Withhold judgment about any particular be- 
 lief expressed or supposed to have been expres- 
 sed by Tolstoy until you have read as many of 
 his books as you can get — and do not fail to read 
 them." He is the one noble speaker who has 
 happened in our time, "who may be named and 
 stand as the mark and acme" of modern liter- 
 ature. 
 
 A little knowledge of Tolstoy is more than 
 proverbially dangerous. He laid his vigorous 
 hand upon every problem that vexes and streng- 
 thens the soul. His utterance on each problem 
 is intense and aggressive. He boldly pursues an 
 an idea whither it leads, or drives it with pas- 
 sionate conviction to a foreseen conclusion, and 
 stays not for the beliefs of any majority or min- 
 ority of men. His magnitude overflows the ac- 
 cepted area of such an adjective as intolerant. 
 Yet approached for the first time by a reader 
 accustomed to the persuasive amenities of other 
 saints and sages, he seems to bristle with out- 
 rageous denial; some of his opinions, isolated 
 from the rest, stand as repellant outposts, for- 
 bidding many minds which, entering from an- 
 other side, would go straight to the heart of him. 
 For example, our traditional reverence for 
 
 72
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 Shakespeare is wounded by his downright state- 
 ment that Shakespeare was not an artist; the of- 
 fended judgment retorts that thereby Tolstoy 
 proves that he is himself no artist, or that in 
 crotchety old age he outgrew the poetry of his 
 virile years. It must be understood that the es- 
 say on Shakespeare is in the nature of an appen- 
 dix to his essay, 'What Is Art?" That in turn is 
 closely related to his ethical and social teach- 
 ings. Those again are inseparably bound with 
 his tales and novels. And his fiction, finally, is 
 rooted in Russia life, not only because, as is 
 obvious, it deals with Russian people, but be- 
 cause during Tolstoy's prime, there was, as we 
 shall presently see, an attitude toward the novel 
 and all literary art which was peculiar to in- 
 tellectual Russians. 
 
 Happily for English readers the foundation 
 for complete understanding of Tolstov has been 
 laid by Mr. Aylmer Maude in his "Life," the 
 second volume of which appeared a few days 
 before his master's death. Mr. Maude has en- 
 tire knowledge of his subject and perfect sympa- 
 thy; he is a sane and independent thinker, and 
 his work is admirable for its balance, its candor, 
 its sturdy devotion, which, however, admits no 
 surrender of the biographer's private beliefs. To 
 the reader who cares merely for an interesting 
 story Tolstoy's career offers more than that of 
 
 73
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 most men of letters. It is laid amid the plots and 
 counterplots of bloody Russia, the most melo- 
 dramatic background of modern history. The 
 man is spectacular, compelling, in all violation 
 of his own doctrines of self-abasement. The 
 peasant's smock, which he wore as symbol of his 
 unity with common man, served only to make 
 him the more picturesque. This ascetic relig- 
 ious philosopher was a master of thrilling war 
 stories. He knew equally well the heart of a 
 lady in the high life of Moscow, and the soul 
 of a peasant woman. He was of athletic stature, 
 and his huge hand was sensitive to the finger 
 tips; with it he gripped a scythe, played the 
 piano, wrote a tirade against modern music, and 
 indited an exposition of the gospel of love which 
 estranged some of his best friends! It is no 
 wonder that his fiction bears the seal of reality, 
 that it has the abundance, the variety, the jost- 
 ling contrasts of life itself. 
 
 II. 
 
 In Russia prose fiction has been for a 
 century the vehicle of the soberest reflections 
 upon contemporary problems. It was danger- 
 ous for a Russian radical to express his beliefs 
 directly in essays and expositions; what he was 
 not allowed to utter in editorial and parliamen- 
 tary debate he set forth indirectly through the 
 
 74
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 novel, which thus became a sort of realistic par- 
 able. Suppression increased his emotional in- 
 tensity. Feeling himself a member of a down- 
 trodden class, he became the champion of other 
 down-trodden classes. When Tolstoy began to 
 write, the novel was already a tempered weapon 
 against abuse, the skilful handling of it was a 
 tradition among the literati, and there were mas- 
 ters to coach and encourage the beginner. The 
 Russian novel records the deepest motives of 
 Russian history. Tourgenef voiced the philo- 
 sophic resignation and scepticism of the educated 
 Russian and the evils of serfdom. Tolstoy por- 
 trayed the vices of the educated Russian and the 
 evils of wage-slavery which followed the eman- 
 cipation of the serfs. Russian fiction is great, 
 because it treats the gravest struggles of 
 life and because its authors have trained them- 
 selves in the art of expounding ideas in the 
 form of fiction without transgressing the laws 
 of narrative; they have learned to be the 
 mouthpiece of life and to let life preach 
 the sermons. To Tolstoy and other Russians the 
 greatest American book is "Uncle Tom's Cab- 
 in," because it is the chronicle of a bleeding is- 
 sue; I have seen many references to that book 
 by Russian writers but scarcely a mention of 
 Hawthorne. 
 Mr. Maude quotes a letter to Tolstoy from 
 
 75
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 Drouzhinin, critic, novelist, and translator of 
 Shakespeare: "An Englishman or an Amer- 
 ican," he says, "may laugh at the fact that in 
 Russia not merely men of thirty, but gray-hair- 
 ed owners of 2,000 serfs sweat over stories of a 
 hundred pages, which appear in the magazines, 
 are devoured by everybody, and arouse discus- 
 sion in society for a whole day. However much 
 artistic quality may have to do with this result, 
 you cannot explain it merely by art. What in 
 other lands is a matter of idle talk and careless 
 dilettantism, with us is quite another affair. 
 Among us things have taken such shape that a 
 story — the most frivolous and insignificant form 
 of literature — becomes one of two things : either 
 it is rubbish, or else it is the voice of a leader 
 sounding through the empire." 
 
 Tolstoy's realism is, then, the result both of 
 his own temperamental passion for truth and of 
 a theory of art which prevailed in his literary 
 circle. There were, to be sure, silly novelists 
 in Russia; there, as everywhere, only the best 
 minds regarded fiction as a vital matter. But 
 there were enough such serious minds to wel- 
 come Tolstoy and encourage him. Nekrasof, 
 editor of The Contemporary, found in Tolstoy's 
 first work, "the truth — the truth, of which, since 
 Gogol's death, so little has remained in Russian 
 literature." Tourgenef repeatedly called Tol- 
 
 76
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 stoy the greatest of Russians, and on his death- 
 bed pencilled the pathetic letter in which he 
 pleaded with Tolstoy to return to his art. *'I am 
 glad," he said, "to have been your contempor- 
 ary." Had he lived sixteen years longer, "Re- 
 surrection" might have made him happy. 
 
 In Tolstoy's discourses on religion appear 
 many times the words "sense of life" — religion 
 is the sense of life, the principle upon which the 
 details of the moral world are ordered and by 
 which they are to be interpreted. In a slightly 
 different meaning "the sense of life" expresses 
 the total effect of Tolstoy's fiction. He wrote to 
 a young disciple: "Do not bend to your purpose 
 the events in the story, but follow them wher- 
 ever they lead you. . . . Lack of symmetry 
 and the apparent haphazardness of events is 
 a chief sign of life." 
 
 In "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" 
 there are many plots. The unity is that of the 
 loose-jointed English novel rather than that of 
 the French, which travels on a straight track. 
 Tolstoy's stories move like a river with many 
 tributaries; he explores now one, now another 
 of the branch streams, but the course of the main 
 current is continuous, and runs in one general 
 direction, as if the slope of the country had been 
 determined before the recorder came upon the 
 scene to measure and report. 
 
 77
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 "War and Peace" is greater than a novel; it is 
 an epic, it is nation-wide and long as the growth 
 from childhood to maturity. We see from 
 a peak of the face of eastern Europe and the 
 swarming of peoples and armies. The sensation 
 of vastness, of humanity surging and flowing in 
 obedience to obscure collective interests is pro- 
 duced by only one other modern book that I 
 know, Hardy's "The Dynasts." From the high 
 pinnacles of omniscience the imagination de- 
 scends by swift unperceived transitions to the in- 
 timacies of a house in Moscow — to the heart of 
 the girl Natacha — to the mind of Pierre satu- 
 rated with alcohol plotting to assassinate Napo- 
 leon. The adventures and purposes of the char- 
 acters cross and conflict, interweave and unite, 
 but each goes as it must and there is no con- 
 fusion in the telling. 
 
 In ''Anna Karenina," the story of Levin is 
 but loosely related to the principal tragedy, and 
 the story of Levin's brother is an excursion from 
 the highway of Levin's career. One can see that 
 after the book is done. During its course the 
 reader has no sense that any part is not precise- 
 ly placed. The illusion of inevitability is per- 
 fect. Levin's brother is related to him by 
 natural ties in life; it is natural, then, that he 
 should appear in Levin's story. 
 
 The illusion of inevitability springs from Tol- 
 
 78
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 stoy's all-encircling comprehension of events, 
 from his justice to each character and from his 
 extraordinary physical vividness. He writes 
 with his five senses. A critic warned him early 
 that he was in danger of making a man's thigh 
 feel like going on a journey to India. 
 
 But his recognition of physical sensations and 
 his power to convey them (they traverse bodily 
 the stylistic obstacles of translation) take the 
 story off the flat page and give it three dimen- 
 sional reality. The acrid smell of an old man's 
 breath, the coldness of a man's hand when he is 
 in mental distress, the cracking of Karenin's 
 knuckles when he clasps his hands in moral 
 satisfaction or the anguish of wounded pride — 
 such details cling to the mind, and the memory 
 of them recalls the whole story. 
 
 Tolstoy's conception of human character is at 
 once relentlessly analytic and profoundly piti- 
 ful and kind. The whole content of his thought 
 from its bold surface to its deepest depth is in- 
 stinct with compassion. Once when he was 
 walking with Tourgenef they came to an old 
 broken-down horse in a pasture. Tolstoy went 
 up to it, stroked it, and uttered its thoughts and 
 sufferings with such moving tenderness that 
 Tourgenef cried: "You must once have been a 
 horse yourself." 
 
 In "Master and Man," a beautiful story of 
 
 79
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 two men lost in a snowstorm, the horse is a 
 third character — an animal character, be it un- 
 derstood, for Tolstoy is antipodal to nature-fak- 
 ing. He has confidence that nature and man 
 will tell their own story and disclose their in- 
 herent lessons. Dogmatic and uncompromising 
 in his private ethical beliefs, he never sacrifices 
 humanity even upon the altars where he tried 
 to immolate himself. Valid morality springs 
 spontaneously from his narrative, and is there- 
 by a hundredfold more impressive than teach- 
 ings forced from artificially moulded events. 
 Even in his rewriting of traditional myths and 
 parables he restores inorganic sermons to life, 
 creates a living thing in which the ethical in- 
 tention is assimilated and vitalized. He told 
 these stories to the peasants, listened with de- 
 light to their retelling of them, and incorporat- 
 ed their racial turns of phrase. To an old peasant 
 woman with a native gift for narrative, he said: 
 "You are a real master, Anisya; thank you for 
 teaching me to speak Russian and to think Rus- 
 sian." 
 
 He learned from life and he trusted life to 
 teach the reader. Anna Karenina commits suic- 
 ide, not because she is a naughty woman whom 
 the novelist as guardian of morals must punish 
 for the satisfaction of a virtuous world, but be- 
 cause the society that surrounds her, the every- 
 
 80
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 day life of visiting and tea-drinking, inexorably 
 forbids her to be happy. Tolstoy is a champion 
 of the poor, and he began his career at a time 
 when, as Mr. Cahan tells us, "the idealization 
 of the peasant" was one of the staple phrases in 
 essays and editorials. But in Tolstoy's stories 
 there is no false sublimation of the peasant. He 
 does not cry, like Dickens, or the profession- 
 al charity-monger: "Pity these poor starved 
 brothers." He simply recites their lives. Some- 
 times he chronicles the most terrible things in 
 a grim restrained matter-of-fact tone, more mov- 
 ing than any passionate appeal to the reader's 
 sympathy. He is, of course, a master of argu- 
 ment and exhortation, but all that is found in 
 his other books, not in his fiction. 
 
 A critic, whose democracy is too narrowly 
 partisan, complains that in "War and Peace" 
 all the important characters are aristocrats, and 
 that the story fails to reveal the motives of the 
 people, of those inarticulate millions who Tol- 
 stoy himself says are the real makers of history. 
 But this apparent fault is an instance of Tol- 
 stoy's integrity. When he wrote "War and 
 Peace" he knew only aristocrats, or was chiefly 
 interested in them.. He had already begun to 
 discern the relations between the multitude and 
 the leaders whom history signalizes; but he had 
 not lived close to peasants and workmen ; he had 
 
 8i
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 approached them as lord and master, not yet as 
 brother and interpreter. Moreover, if there be 
 a moral hero in "War and Peace" whom the 
 author seems to favor, it is Karataief, the illiter- 
 ate soldier, whose simple faith dawns as a re- 
 generative light upon Pierre, a rich man of the 
 world who has met all philosophies and found 
 them heartless. 
 
 Tolstoy could not write what he did not know 
 or did not feel. His stories, though not autobio- 
 graphic in the usual sense of the world, are the 
 quintessence of his adventures and experiences, 
 accurately recalled and profoundly meditated. 
 When the manuscript of the "Kreutzer Sonata" 
 was read in his house to a company of friends, 
 Tolstoy said in answer to some objections : 
 
 "In a work of art it is indispensable that the 
 artist should have something new, of his own. It 
 is not how it is written that really matters. Peo- 
 ple will read the 'Kreutzer Sonata' and say, *Ah, 
 that is the way to write!' The indispensable 
 thing is to go beyond what others have done, to 
 pick off even a very small fresh bit. But it won't 
 do to be like my friend Fet, who at sixteen wrote, 
 *The spring bubbles, the moon shines, and she 
 loves me,' and who went on writing and writ- 
 ing, and at sixty wrote: 'She loves me, and the 
 spring bubbles, and the moon shines.' " 
 
 It was impossible for Tolstoy, the novelist, to 
 
 82
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 write of people whom he did not know, merely 
 because he happened to have sympathy with 
 some of their ideals and habits. It was impos- 
 sible for him to violate human nature when he 
 portrayed characters that he did know. Hating 
 professional psychology and all other sciences 
 and quasi-sciences, he is the greatest of so-called 
 psychological novelists; his psychology was 
 made before text-books, and it used to be called 
 "truth to human nature." You cannot suggest, 
 as you read a novel by Tolstoy, anything a char- 
 acter ought have done which was not done, any 
 emotion he should have felt which Tolstoy has 
 not suggested at exactly the right moment. He 
 penetrates the characters of living men and the 
 characters of history and romance. The pseudo- 
 psychology of the critics of "Hamlet," does not 
 deceive him. Napoleon, mythical monster and 
 genius unapproachable, fails to over-awe him; 
 Tolstoy draws him, man size, amid events that 
 dwarf heroes. 
 
 In "Resurrection," Nekhludof is represented 
 as holding social theories which in point of fact 
 Tolstoy held. Nekhludof reads Henry George 
 and tries to give his land to the peasants as com- 
 munal property. Tolstoy, the social reformer, 
 would admit no obstacle to the justice and the 
 practicability of the plan; a lesser artist would 
 have yielded to the reformer, the plan would 
 
 83
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 have worked and the story would have proved 
 the theory. But Tolstoy, the novelist, confronts 
 Nekhludof with the suspicion, the ignorant 
 shrewdness of the peasants; the plan encounters 
 all the difficulties, legal and psychological, 
 which life would offer. 
 
 "Resurrection" is the crowning proof of Tol- 
 stoy's artistic power. For twenty years he had 
 developed theories about every problem of life; 
 he held his opinions tenaciously; hugging them 
 in resolute defiance he strode roughshod through 
 the domains of church, state and family. His 
 convictions were strong enough to silence him 
 as an artist, and for years he obeyed the man- 
 date of conscience that forbade him to write 
 novels at all. But when, to raise money for the 
 Doukhobors, he consented to write "Resurrec- 
 tion," his artistic sense was stronger than the rest 
 of him (if, indeed, there was any antagonism 
 between the two sides of his nature), and theor- 
 ies powerful enough to disrupt the universe 
 were kept in bounds by his sense of proportion, 
 
 his sense of life. 
 
 The feeling that Tolstoy, the artist, and Tol- 
 stoy, the reformer, are in any true sense engaged 
 in struggle is largely due to the false dialectic 
 of traditional criticism, which he by precept and 
 practice has confuted. His great moral prin- 
 ciples are the sure foundation of his greatness 
 
 84
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 in art. For us Westerners modern realism — • 
 Hardy and Zola come first to mind — is associ- 
 ated with a godless though very humane sceptic- 
 ism. Religious sentiment has been left in the 
 weak hands of romance, and the longer it has 
 been left there the more false it has become. 
 From the beginning, even before his religious 
 conversion, Tolstoy had a sound ethical outlook. 
 At the age of forty he wrote of Tourgenef's 
 "Smoke": "The strength of poetry lies in love, 
 and the direction of that strength depends on 
 character. Without strength of love there is no 
 poetry. In 'Smoke' there is hardly any love of 
 anything and very little poetry. There is only 
 love of a light and playful adultery, and there- 
 fore the poetry of that novel is repulsive." The 
 spirit in that criticism is the guiding spirit in 
 "Anna Karenina," and it is the same spirit 
 which dictated this passage in the magnificent 
 sermon on the Russian-Japanese war: "The 
 great struggle of our time ... is not the 
 struggle in which men engage with mines, 
 bombs and bullets; it is the spiritual struggle 
 which goes on incessantly, which is going on 
 now, between the enlightened conscience of 
 humanity, about to be made manifest, and the 
 shadows and oppression which surround it and 
 crush it." 
 
 8s
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 III. 
 
 To western liberals Tolstoy's assaults on 
 church and state seem too vehement, partly be- 
 cause the tyranny he attacked is more obviously 
 brutal than that from which we suffer, partly 
 because we are complacently blind to facts 
 which he revealed, facts which are present at 
 our doors. Our mild meliorations delude us. 
 We wave an idle hand and say: "Ah, yes, Rus- 
 sia is a savage country, but we are not like 
 that."* And all the while the coldest labor 
 statistics, if we dared to open them, show that 
 in the exploitation of workmen, women and 
 children, ours is as barbarous a country as any 
 in the world. Our horrors and injustices are 
 smoothed over by a disingenuous press, which 
 is owned or indirectly controlled by the powers 
 that be. American philanthropy steals with one 
 hand and builds universities with the other. We 
 have no kings and no dukes, but America is the 
 sport of capital; it lies abjectly prostrate before 
 a power-drunk bourgeoisie. We celebrate Tol- 
 stoy in harmless little magazine articles and 
 wear shirts woven by children. We think we 
 need no school like the one Tolstoy conducted 
 for poor, backward Russian peasants, because 
 we have our public schools and compulsory edu- 
 cation laws — in some states. Hundreds of 
 
 ♦And we are still saying it, 1922! 
 
 86
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 our children are at work; they have succeeded, 
 thanks to the glorious free competition of busi- 
 ness, in taking their fathers' places at the ma- 
 chines. The children that are in school wave 
 the flag and read about George Washington. 
 
 Tolstoy's teachings can not at present shake 
 the somnolent conscience of America. He be- 
 lieved in his innocence that our industrial mas- 
 ters have reached the outrageous limits of ex- 
 ploitation, and that America must be the first 
 country to rise and throw oflf its parasites. But 
 that is a foreigner's opinion and not to be taken 
 seriously in the land of the free and the home of 
 the National Civic Federation. His indictment 
 of our civilization is only nine-tenths true, and 
 we shall take advantage of the one-tenth that is 
 overstatement to throw his indictment out of 
 court. He sees that every government is a com- 
 mercial agency by means of which a privileged 
 minority conducts its business at the expense of 
 the majority. We are ashamed to believe that that 
 can be true of our Congress and our irreproach- 
 able Supreme Court. It is easier to dismiss Tol- 
 stoy, because he is "eccentric" and ''goes too 
 far." Did he not sweepingly assert that there is 
 no such thing as a virtuous statesman? That 
 absurdity permits us to ignore the book in which 
 it appears. 
 
 Besides, it is more "optimistic" to read 
 
 87
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 articles about the ''history of achievement 
 in the United States," to take democratic short 
 cuts to superficial knowledge, than to read dis- 
 concerting books. Our healthy-minded .'confi- 
 dence in American morals bids us be content 
 with a little gossip about Carlyle and his wife, 
 and not trouble ourselves with such a difficult 
 book as *Tast and Present." In like fashion we 
 shall understand Tolstoy's ideals without read- 
 ing "What, Then, Must We Do?" or "The 
 Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You." Sufficient 
 for us a few newspaper discussions about "Why 
 Tolstoy Left the Countess and the Relations Be- 
 tween Family Life and Anarchism." For Tol- 
 stoy was an anarchist, and that disposes of him! 
 We know all about anarchists; they live in Pat- 
 erson, N. J., and in the imaginations of journal- 
 ists, home secretaries, and framers of immigra- 
 tion laws. 
 
 Yet despite our republican wisdom, we can- 
 not quite understand Tolstoy until we know the 
 true meanings of such words as labor, capital, 
 exploitation, rent, property, interest, and pro- 
 letariat. In Russia these words are understood 
 by many people, also in Germany. But we 
 Americans, though highly cultivated, are not 
 well informed about contemporaryi facts and 
 current philosophies. We have still to be taught 
 that the Russian revolution is our revolution, 
 
 88
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 that it is part of a mighty economic change 
 which is in process all over the world. A study 
 of Tolstoy and his critics will help to instruct 
 us — some day — about these momentous re- 
 lations. 
 
 The present status of the revolution is more 
 confused in Russia than in any other country.* 
 The repressive measures of the government 
 forced a temporary alliance between all 
 types of revolutionaries. It was this alliance 
 which isolated Tolstoy from other reformers 
 and made him a retarding force, almost a reac- 
 tionary, against the progress of the Social De- 
 mocracy, that party of orderly Marxians under 
 German tutelage which was the hope of young 
 Russia. The Czar's government, which was no 
 respecter of principles, grouped him with all 
 the malcontents and libertarians. And he re- 
 turned the compliment. Because he despised 
 all economics, he could not join a "scientific" 
 party. Failing to distinguish between the peace- 
 ful and the militant revolutionists, he charged 
 them all with murder and grouped them with 
 the government. And thus he stood alone, dis- 
 trustful of peaceful anarchists because they 
 were not religious, and distrustful of most re- 
 
 *This refers, of course, to the revolution before the Great 
 War. I wonder now, 1922. just what Lenin, Trotsky, Chicher- 
 in. et.al. think of Tolstoy, and what he would have thought 
 of them I 
 
 89
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 ligions because they were organized on a prop- 
 erty basis. He stood alone. Yet all liberal men, 
 antithetical to each other as are the socialists 
 and the anarchists, united in loving him as they 
 united in hatred of the government. They ap- 
 plauded his terrific indictment of the society 
 under which we live, though they disagreed 
 from various points of view with his solution. 
 It was said of him on his eightieth birthday that 
 whatever conflict there might be between his be- 
 liefs and those of other reformers, the foes of 
 liberty were his foes and the friends of liberty 
 were his friends. 
 
 Tolstoy's solution for our ills is Christian an- 
 archy, a voluntary communism allied with the 
 teachings of Jesus, or with Tolstoy's interpre- 
 tation of them. He taught that all violence is 
 wrong, all government is robbery, and that the 
 only possible moral order is founded on love of 
 man and renunciation of legal rights. That he 
 should have been a champion of Henry George- 
 ism, a plan that depends on organized govern- 
 ment, is one of his many inconsistencies; what 
 drew him to the single-tax theory was prob- 
 ably not so much the economic principles as 
 George's arraignment of landlordism. 
 
 It is Tolstoy's own arraignment of our so- 
 called civilization rather than his proposed rem- 
 edies which will quicken the conscience of the 
 
 90
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 world.* His individualism, his doctrine of pri- 
 vate goodness, looks backward and not forward. 
 He is, like Carlyle, the voice of a bygone time. 
 He had lived through the failures of many 
 political revolutions, and he abhorred anything 
 that pretended to be scientific. He turned his 
 eyes from the science of men to their souls. In 
 his magnificent self he justified his individual- 
 ism, but were we a billion Tolstoys, saintly and 
 self-disciplined, we must work in organization, 
 or we cannot work effectively. The world is re- 
 ligious, but religion is a matter of opinion. The 
 world is also economic, and economics is not a 
 matter of opinion, but of unavoidable facts over 
 which the individual has little control.** Like 
 Ruskin, Tolstoy rejected economics because 
 most professorial economists do not tell the 
 truth. He blamed the dismal science for the 
 dismal facts and for the inadequacies of its 
 classic expounders. Had he understood the 
 economic structure of society (which nobody 
 does understand), he would have seen the futil- 
 ity of trying to abandon his estates. His singu- 
 lar abnegation could not put an end to the evils 
 of landlordism, even to the extent of his own 
 plot of ground. He could not make the burden 
 
 ♦Will it? I am not so confident as I was once. 
 ♦♦That sounds like good sense. Some of Tolstoy's coun- 
 trymen at Genoa seem to have proved it. 
 
 91
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 of landless people one ounce lighter by dis- 
 mounting in his own person from their backs. 
 Nothing can be done until an effective majority 
 of men agree to abolish private ownership of 
 land and establish communal ownership. 
 
 Tolstoy preached with splendid fervor the 
 power of the individual soul. But his prac- 
 tice is proof of our impotent severalty. It was 
 disorganization that caused the famine which 
 he labored to relieve, and it was his efficient 
 organization that kept the hungry from starv- 
 ing. That our greatest man of letters should 
 sweat behind a prehistoric plow is good for 
 his soul and for ours; but, even if we should 
 all grow perfect in spirit and eager, for our share 
 of manual labor, we should still feed ourselves 
 better by communial use of steam plows. Tol- 
 stoy's belated Proudhonism is not the solution 
 for the evils of property. It is his negative 
 teaching that has positive value. He is an 
 abolitionist, not a constructive philosopher. But 
 to say that is not to answer him, not to deny him. 
 He remains unanswered as long as the labor of 
 this world is done at the behest of the few and 
 for their profit. His work is not done, his books 
 cannot be outgrown, until every man of us looks 
 at the facts honestly and cries with him: "It is 
 impossible to live so ! It is impossible to live so I" 
 
 92
 
 MAETERLINCK'S ESSAYS
 
 MAETERLINCK'S ESSAYS 
 
 If we had to lose one part or the other of 
 Maeterlinck's work, I think we should less re- 
 luctantly surrender the plays than the essays. 
 The essays are richer in substance than the 
 dramas and they are as truly poetic. The sunny 
 garden, where the poet lives with his bees and 
 flowers, is a more splendid domain than moon- 
 lit psuedo-medi^val empires, peopled with the 
 wraiths of women. And the little bull-pup of 
 the essay is a truer dog than the one in "The 
 Blue Bird." 
 
 Some years ago, when the essay on the dog 
 was first published in English, I read it aloud 
 to a woman who owned a Boston terrier, and I 
 gave it to a professional breeder of dogs. Both 
 liked it. It is an essay that any one can under- 
 stand; it illuminates a ground where all kinds of 
 people meet. Even Bill Sikes would have liked 
 it. Maeterlinck says what almost everybody 
 thinks, and says it as it has not been said before, 
 not in "Rab and His Friends." The simple elo- 
 quence, the sincerity, the afTfectionate humor are 
 the positive virtues of the essay; and its negative 
 
 95
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 virtue is freedom from a kind of rhetorical arti- 
 ficiality in which Maeterlinck indulges when he 
 gets away from the solid realities of life. 
 
 Maeterlinck is an amateur botanist and bee- 
 keeper and a professional poet. He knows, or 
 seems to know, the facts, and he sees them with 
 an imaginative vision, wondering at them like 
 a child, in the very act of giving quite lucid 
 "scientific" explanations. He hovers often on 
 the enchanted borderland between knowledge 
 and fancy, and plays to and fro between regions 
 which, though adjacent parts of the same uni- 
 verse, have different habits of thought. I am 
 acquainted with an American poet and philoso- 
 pher who does not know the common kinds of 
 dogs such as any boy of ten knows. I also knew 
 and argued with an eminent biologist who ob- 
 jected to Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," on 
 the ground that the poetic phrasing falsified the 
 facts. True, he conceded, the queen-bee does fly 
 and the strongest male overtakes and fertilizes 
 her. But for Maeterlinck to poetize the fact as 
 a "nuptial flight" seemed to the man of science 
 not only untruth to nature, but a blasphemy 
 against the sacred love of man and woman. 
 
 My friend, the biologist, and my acquaint- 
 ance, the American poet and philosopher, both 
 seem to be unfortunately incomplete human be- 
 ings. The poet and philosopher does not know 
 
 96
 
 MAETERLINCK'S ESSAYS 
 
 what any duffer knows, what anybody who cares 
 not only for animals but for ordinary folks that 
 own dogs cannot refrain from knowing. He is 
 a man of cosmopolitan experience and has sure- 
 ly been in the Bois more than once. In the 
 Garden of Acclimatation is a wonderful ken- 
 nel ; there are at least fifteen kinds of dogs, each 
 with his specific or sub-specific name hung on 
 his cage. If you had never seen a dog you could 
 not walk about that kennel five minutes with- 
 out learning the names of a half-dozen varieties 
 (and without discovering in yourself a highly 
 moral desire to steal one or two of those beauti- 
 fully kept beasts). Some ignorance is unpardon- 
 able, and some philosophy and some poetry 
 would be more vital for a little plain back-yard 
 knowledge. On the other hand, what a pity it 
 is that any man's sense of fact should be so 
 strait as to forbid entrance to his soul of a honey 
 bee which Maeterlinck sends forth equipped 
 with these georgeous unentomological wings of 
 words: "The yellow fairies of the honey." It's 
 as bad as a democrat who should object to the 
 phrase *'queen-bee." 
 
 Maeterlinck has knowledge of nature, not 
 only such knowledge as Wordsworth had, but 
 a fair acquaintance with contemporaneous 
 science. He has learned lessons from Fabre, 
 whom he admires. He has studied his own gar- 
 
 97
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 den in the light of what botanists have told him 
 and in the other light, which is not hostile to 
 botany, but is different, the light of poetry. He 
 loves to speculate about unsettled questions. 
 And his speculations have a very great intellec- 
 tual merit. He is, on the whole, content to be 
 uncertain about uncertain things and to express 
 his inclinations toward one or another conclus- 
 ion in a persuasive, wistful manner. Like many 
 other poets, he leans toward the belief that na- 
 ture, which includes us, knows more than we do, 
 and that to ascribe intelligence, in a restricting 
 way, to man alone is probably to leave out a goo'd 
 deal of the magic of growing things, and to 
 omit some potential explanations of their mys- 
 tery, their mystery in the poet's sense and in the 
 stern truth seeker's sense. The essay on "The 
 Intelligence of Flowers" revivifies the old moot 
 question about what knowledge is, what instinct 
 is. It's a very fine question, and it becomes hot- 
 test when the men of imagination and the men 
 of science (happily they are not mutually ex- 
 clusive) argue about whether a dog knows that 
 he loves you. A British poet began a verse to a 
 dog: 
 
 The curate says you have no soul — 
 I know that he has none. 
 
 That is good ; but it is spiteful. Let us admit 
 ine curate. For the dog would. A dog does not 
 care a wag of his tail whether a man is curate 
 
 98
 
 MAETERLINCK'S ESSAYS 
 
 or editor of a newspaper. Therein the dog is 
 our superior. 
 
 Maeterlinck, though overtaken by the wan 
 aoubt of our times, is a true believer in other 
 kinds of intelligence than ours. He holds that 
 "nature, when she wishes to be beautiful, to 
 please, to delight and to prove herself happy, 
 does almost what we should do had we her treas- 
 ures at our disposal." There, you see, he begs 
 the whole question and ascribes to "nature" 
 wishes, desires, intentions. He does the trick 
 that poets always do; he answers the question 
 that he asks and that he pretends to be discuss- 
 ing. "All that we observe within ourselves," he 
 says, "is rightly open to suspicion ; we are at 
 once litigant and judge, and we have too great 
 an interest in peopling our world with magnif- 
 icent illusions and hopes. But let the least ex- 
 ternal indication be dear and precious to us." 
 
 In this the poet says all, while, on another 
 page, the man of science, with firm integrity, 
 minimizes evidence and refuses to be convinced. 
 There is a region where the poet knows almost 
 everything worth knowing. There is a region 
 where the man of science knows, not everything 
 worth knowing, but all that is known. There is 
 a misty mid-region where a full-minded, large- 
 hearted man can live happily. He gets the mes- 
 sage going and coming. He receives what the 
 
 99
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 poet has to say and what the man of fact has to 
 say and he constructs his world from the frag- 
 mentary contributions of both regions. Maeter- 
 linck himself in "Our Eternity," dwells on this 
 central ground. Shakespeare and Isaiah are on 
 his right hand. On his left hand are William 
 James and other psychological students of the 
 evidence of spooks. 
 
 Poets are enamored of death. Nine-tenths of 
 all the imaginative literature of the world is 
 concerned with love and death, the begetter 
 and the extinguisher. The sweetest lines in 
 Shakespeare deal with love; the stateliest lines, 
 Hamlet's and Macbeth's, are upon death. The 
 chief interest of life is in dying. We get our 
 highest emotions from some other person's 
 death, and we adapt our entire course, from the 
 cradle to the grave, with a view to the fact that 
 we are going to quit in some year determined by 
 fate or God or other power not quite under- 
 stood, a year carefully figured out by the actu- 
 aries of the life insurance companies. 
 
 Man is a perfect coward in the face of death, 
 his own or that of somebody he loves. The be- 
 liever and the unbeliever alike bewail the great 
 adventure. The tears shed by the believer in 
 immortality and by the disbeliever are the same 
 hot, saline, human drops. Everybody wants an 
 answer, and only the adherents of certain sects 
 
 lOO
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 MAETERLINCK'S ESSAYS y^^^y'*^" 
 
 receive an answer that satisfies them. Those 
 answers do not satisfy me or you, not because 
 there is anything wrong in the answers, but be- 
 cause the people that hold the answers behave 
 as all the rest of us do in the presence of death. 
 Maeterlinck, on the basis of modern evidence, 
 argues for two-hundred and fifty-eight pages 
 that we do not know what happens when we die. 
 "In any case, I would not wish my worst enemy, 
 were his understanding a thousand-fold loftier 
 and a thousand-fold mightier than mine, to be 
 condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which 
 he had surprised an essential secret and of 
 which, as a man, he had begun to grasp an atom." 
 Amen ! That leaves us where we started. But 
 the fact, the cold, interesting, magnificent fact, 
 is that we are afive, and some of us are working 
 and some are playing. Maeterlinck is a great 
 child playing with flowers and with words. He 
 is also a competent workman, and he is assisted 
 by another skilful craftsman to whom English 
 readers owe much, Mr. Alexander Teixeira de 
 Mattos, who translates Maeterlinck into Eng- 
 lish. He is a fine artist. Following faithfully 
 the run of our English idiom, he succeeds in 
 keeping for our Anglo-Saxon eyes and ears the 
 color, tone, or whatever it is, of Maeterlinck's 
 beautiful style. 
 
 lOI
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 To the newest generation of adult readers the 
 dawn of a literary light is a rare experience. It 
 is as if the courses of our literature were Arctic 
 in their slowness, as if the day came at long in- 
 tervals, and then without warmth or brilliance. 
 Our fathers knew the joy of welcoming the lat- 
 est novel of Dickens or a new volume of essays 
 by Carlyle. The only* great day whose begin- 
 ning young men have witnessed is the day of 
 Kipling; his light mounted rapidly to a high 
 noon, and if the afternoon shadows have begun 
 to deepen prematurely, that sun is still beauti- 
 ful and strong. Other lights have kindled in 
 the last fifteen years, and have gone out before 
 they had fairly dislodged the darkness, or have 
 continued to burn dimly. 
 
 Eyes accustomed only to darkness and uncer- 
 tain lights are in condition to be deluded by the 
 phantoms of false dawn; it is therefore unwise 
 to greet with too much enthusiasm the arrival 
 of Mr. Joseph Conrad. Even if the dawn is 
 real, it is certainly overcast with heavy clouds, 
 and it has not proved bright enough to startle 
 
 *I ask the reader to remember that this was written in 1906. 
 
 105
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 the world. Nevertheless, his light is of unique 
 beauty in contemporary literature, and the story 
 of its kindling makes interesting biography, 
 
 Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski was born fifty 
 years ago in Poland. His father, a critic and 
 poet, and his mother, who was exiled to Siberia, 
 were engaged in revolutionary journalism. At 
 nineteen Conrad left home, to escape an unset- 
 tled life, and also, it is fair to assume, to satisfy 
 his love of adventure. He found work on Eng- 
 lish vessels, and this fact gave to contemporary 
 English letters a man who might otherwise have 
 written in French. To-day he appears in hand- 
 books of biography as Master in the British 
 Merchant Service, and Author. At nineteen he 
 had not mastered English ; at thirty-eight he had 
 published no book. Since then he has published 
 about a volume a year. In preparation for his 
 books he sailed as able seaman, mate, and mas- 
 ter, for twenty years, on steam and sailing craft, 
 and meanwhile he was reading deep in French 
 and English literature,— all, we are told, with 
 no intent to become a writer. Indeed it was a 
 period of ill health resulting in an enforced 
 idleness from the familiar sea that gave him op- 
 portunity to put some of his adventures into 
 words. Perhaps he is a lesser illustration of a 
 theory of Thoreau's that a word well said ''must 
 have taken the place of a deed by some urgent 
 
 iq6
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 necessity, even by some misfortune, so that the 
 truest writer will be some captive knight, after 
 all." However that may be, the intellectual and 
 physical adventures of Conrad's life were abun- 
 dant, and they reappear, discernible though 
 transfigured, in the substance and the qualities 
 of his work. 
 
 His ten books are for the most part concerned 
 with the waters of the earth, and the men that 
 sail on the face of the waters, and with lands, 
 far from English readers, to be reached only 
 by long journeying in ships.* His first book, 
 "Almayer's Folly," tells the story of a disap- 
 pointed Dutch trader in Borneo, whose half- 
 caste daughter runs away with a Malay chief. 
 His second book, "An Outcast of the Islands," 
 deals further with the career of Almayer and 
 with that of another exiled Dutchman. "Nostro- 
 mo," has for its scene an imaginary South Amer- 
 
 *Almayer's Folly. The Macmillan Co. 1895. 
 
 An Outcast of the Islands. Tauchnitz. 1896^. 
 
 The Nigger of the Narcissus (Children of the Sea). Dodd, 
 Mead & Co. 1897. 
 
 Tales of Unrest. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1898. 
 
 Lord Jim. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1899. 
 • The Inheritors (with F. M. Huefifer). McClure, Phillips & 
 
 Co. 1901. 
 
 Typhoon. G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1902. 
 
 Falk. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1903. 
 
 Youth. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1903. 
 
 Romance (with F. M. Hueffer). McClure, Phillips & Co. 
 1904. 
 
 Nostromo. Harper & Brothers. 1904. 
 
 107
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 ican state, and its heroes are an Englishman and 
 an Italian. "The Nigger of the Narcissus" (pub- 
 lished in America as "The Children of the 
 Sea") and "Typhoon" are each the chronicle of 
 a voyage. "Lord Jim" is the story of a young 
 mate who disgraces himself by one unseaman- 
 like act, and becomes a wanderer in the eastern 
 islands, and finally a kind of king in a village 
 of savages. "Tales of Unrest" contains five stor- 
 ies, two of which are about Malays, and another 
 about white traders in an African station. The 
 hero of "Falk" — the title story of a volume of 
 three pieces — is a Scandinavian sailor who has 
 been a cannibal, and who wins the daughter of 
 a German ship captain in an Eastern port. 
 "Youth," the first story in a volume of three, is 
 the memory of a young mate's voyage in an un- 
 seaworthy ship, which burns and leaves the 
 crew to seek an Eastern seaport in the boats. 
 The second story, "The Heart of Darkness," is 
 an account of a journey into the Belgian Congo 
 State and a curious study of the effect of soli- 
 tude and the jungle and savagery on a white 
 trader. The third piece in the volume is the 
 story of a ship-captain who steers his ship with 
 the help of a Malay servant and lets no one 
 guess until the end that he is blind. Of two 
 books written in collaboration with Mr. Ford 
 M. Hueffer, thef only one worth considering, 
 
 io8
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 ^'Romance," comes the nearest to being the kind 
 of fiction that the advertisements announce as 
 "full of heart interest, love, and the glamor of 
 a charming hero and heroine." It begins with 
 a smuggler's escapade in England, and ends in 
 an elopement in the West Indies; the best parts, 
 probably Mr. Conrad's share in the work, are 
 those about the sea and all that on it is, fogs, 
 ships, and bearded pirates. In these books are 
 men and women of all civilized nations, the ac- 
 quaintance of a globe-trotter, and there are, be- 
 sides, enough Malays, Chinamen, and Negroes 
 to make the choruses of several comic operas. 
 But in Conrad they are serious people, every 
 Malay with a soul and a tragedy; even the Nig- 
 ger of the Narcissus is equipped with psycho- 
 logical machinery. 
 
 Conrad's subject-matter, the secretion of ex- 
 perience, is rich enough and of sufficiently 
 strange and romantic quality to endow a writer 
 of popular fiction; and his style, — that is, the 
 use of words for their melody, power, and 
 charm, — is fit for a king of literature. Steven- 
 son, who found so little sheer good writing 
 among his contemporaries, would have wel- 
 comed Conrad and have lamented that he could 
 not or would not tell his stories in more brief, 
 steady, and continuous fashion. 
 
 For there is the rub. Conrad is not instinc- 
 109
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 tively a story-teller. Many a writer of less gen- 
 ius surpasses him in method. He has no gift 
 of what Lamb calls a bare narrative. 
 
 There are writers with magnificent power of 
 language who do not attain that combination of 
 literary and human qualities which is readable- 
 ness, and there are others who interest many 
 people in many generations, and yet do not 
 write well. To most readers Dickens is as de- 
 lightful when he writes slovenly sentences as 
 when he writes at his best. Scott, the demigod, 
 pours out his great romances in an inexpressive 
 fluid. On the other hand, Walter Pater writes 
 infallibly well. These illustrations are intended 
 to suggest a difference which is a fact in liter- 
 ature, and are not to be carried to any conclus- 
 ive comparison. The difference exists and it is 
 not a strange fact. It is strange, however, that 
 Conrad, who spins yarns about the sea, master 
 of a kind of subject-matter that would make his 
 books as popular as ''Robinson Crusoe" and 
 "Treasure Island," should be one of those who 
 can write but cannot make an inevitably attrac- 
 tive and winning book for the multitude. 
 
 Either he knows his fault and can not help it, 
 or he wills it and does not consider it a fault. 
 There is evidence on this question. Several of 
 his stories are put in the mouth of Marlow, an 
 eloquent, reflective, world-worn man. In one 
 
 no
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 place Conrad says, "We knew that we were 
 fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear 
 about one of Marlow's inconclusive experi- 
 ences." The story Marlow tells is no more in- 
 conclusive and rambling than most of the other 
 stories, so that one is forced to conclude that 
 Marlow's character as narrator is Conrad's con- 
 cession to his own self-observed habit of mind. 
 In another place Conrad says: "The yarns of 
 seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole 
 meaning of which lies within the shell of a 
 cracked nut. But Marlov/ was not typical (if 
 his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and 
 to him the meaning of an episode was not inside 
 a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale which 
 brought it out as a glow brings out a haze, in 
 the likeness of one of these misty halos that 
 sometimes are made visible by the spectral il- 
 lumination of moonshine." Evidently Conrad 
 prefers or pretends to prefer the haze to the 
 kernel. 
 
 In an essay on Henry James he openly scorns 
 the methods usual to fiction of "solution by re- 
 wards and punishments, by crowned love, by 
 fortune, by a broken leg or sudden death," and 
 says: "Why the reading public, which as a body 
 has never laid upon the story-teller the com- 
 mand to be an artist, should demand from him 
 this sham of divine omnipotence is utterly in- 
 
 III
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 comprehensible." Thus Mr. Conrad flings 
 down the gauntlet to those demands of readers 
 which greater men than he and Mr. James have 
 been happy to satisfy without sacrifice of wis- 
 dom and reality. 
 
 A further announcement of his literary creed 
 he made in a kind of artistic confession publish- 
 ed a few years ago. "His (the prose writer's) 
 answer to those who in the fulness of a wisdom 
 which looks for immediate profit, demand 
 specifically to be edified, consoled, amused, who 
 demand to be promptly improved or encour- 
 aged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, 
 must run thus: 'My task which I am trying to 
 achieve is by the power of the written word to 
 make you hear, to make you feel — it is before 
 all to make you see. ... If I succeed, you shall 
 find there, according to yout deserts, encour- 
 agement, consolation, fear, charm — all you de- 
 mand; perhaps also that glimpse of truth* for 
 which you have forgotten to ask." 
 
 A writer with ideals so high and strongly felt 
 commits himself for trial by exacting standards. 
 It is necessary to remind Mr. Conrad that if a 
 reader is to feel, he must first understand; if he 
 is to hear, he must hear distinctly; and if he is to 
 see, his eye must be drawn by interest in the ob- 
 
 *These Slavs (see above on Tolstoy) are all for Truth, but 
 they are not Chadbandians. They are artists. And so was the 
 Anglo-Saxon who made Chadband. 
 
 112
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 ject, and it can look only in one direction at 
 once. **Nostromo" is told forward and backward 
 in the first half of the book, and the prelimin- 
 ary history of the silver mine is out of all pro- 
 portion to the story of Nostromo, the alleged 
 hero of the book. "Lord Jim" is confused.* 
 The first few chapters are narrated in the third 
 person by the author. Then for three hundred 
 pages Marlow, a more or less intimate specta- 
 tor of Jim's career, tells the story as an after- 
 dinner yarn. It would have taken three even- 
 ings for Marlow to get through the talk, and 
 that talk in print involves quotation within quo- 
 tation beyond the legitimate uses of punctuation 
 marks. In other stories the point of view fails. 
 In "The Nigger of the Narcissus" are confer- 
 ences between two people in private which no 
 third person could overhear, yet the narrative 
 seems to be told in the first person by one of the 
 crew. In "Typhoon," where a steamer with deck 
 almost vertical is plunging through a storm, we 
 are on the bridge beside the simple dogged cap- 
 tain while he shouts orders down to the engine- 
 room through the tube. Without warning we 
 are down in the engine-room, hearing the cap- 
 tain's voice from above, and as suddenly we are 
 back on the bridge again. A man crawls across 
 the deck in a tempest so black that he cannot see 
 
 *No, it is not. It is clear as daylight.
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 whose legs he is groping at. We are immediate- 
 ly informed that he is a man of fifty, with coarse 
 hair, of immense strength, with great lumpy 
 hands, a hoarse voice, easy-going and good-na- 
 tured, — as if the man were visible at all, except 
 as a blot in the darkness! 
 
 Conrad has a mania for description. When 
 anything is mentioned in the course of narrative, 
 though it be a thousand miles from the present 
 scene, it must be described. Each description 
 creates a new scene, and when descriptions of 
 different and separated places appear on the 
 same page, the illusion of events happening be- 
 fore the eye is destroyed. If a writer is to trans- 
 port us instantaneously from one quarter of the 
 globe to another he should at least apprise us 
 that we are on the magic rug, and even then the 
 space-o'erleaping imagination resents being 
 bundled off on hurried and inconsequential 
 journeys. Often when Conrad's descriptions are 
 logically in course, they are too long; the cur- 
 rent of narrative vanishes under a mountain (a 
 mountain of gold, perhaps, but difficult to the 
 feet of him who would follow the stream) ; and 
 when the subterranean river emerges again, it 
 is frequently obstructed by inopportune, though 
 subtle, exposition. 
 
 Conrad's propensity for exposition is allied, 
 no doubt, with his admiration for Mr. Henry 
 
 114
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 James, of whom he has written an extremely 
 "literary" appreciation. Too much interest in 
 masters like Flaubert and Mr. James is not gen- 
 tlemanly in a sailor, and it cannot help a sailor 
 turned writer, who pilots a ship through a mag- 
 nificent struggle with a typhoon, leads us into 
 the bewitching terror of the African jungle, 
 and guides us to Malay lands where the days 
 are full of savage love, intrigue, suicide, mur- 
 der, piracy, and all forms of picturesque and 
 terrific death. Mr. Conrad finds that there are 
 "adventures in which only choice souls are in- 
 volved, and Mr. James records them with a 
 fearless and insistent fidelity to the peripeties 
 of the contest and the feelings of the combat- 
 ants." That is true and fine, no doubt, but the 
 price which Mr. Conrad pays for his ability to 
 discover it is the fact that hundreds of thou- 
 sands of readers of good masculine romance are 
 not reading "Lord Jim," or finding new "Youth" 
 in a young mate's wondrous vision of the East, 
 or welcoming a new hero in Captain Whalley. 
 A man who can conceive the mournful tale of 
 Karain and the fight between the half crazy 
 white men at an African trading post has a kind 
 of adventure better, as adventure, than the ex- 
 periences of Mr. James's choice souls. Steven- 
 son knew all about Mr. James and his "peripet- 
 ies," but he could stow that knowledge on one 
 
 115
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 side of his head, and from the other side spin 
 'Treasure Island" and "The Wrecker". "The 
 Sacred Fount" never could have befuddled 
 the chronicle of the amiable John Silver, but in 
 Mr. Conrad's "An Outcast of the Islands," 
 where it seems to be a question whicn white 
 man will kill the other, after a dramatic meet- 
 in the presence of a Malay heroine, each man 
 stands still before our eyes and radiates states of 
 mind. 
 
 The lover who finds fault with his sweetheart 
 because he is so proud of her is perfectly human 
 and also perfectly logical. So my reason for 
 dwelling on Mr. Conrad's shortcomings is be- 
 cause his books are thoroughly worth consider- 
 ation. His advent is really important. More 
 than any other new writer he is master of the 
 ancient eloquence of English style; no one since 
 Stevenson has surpassed in fiction the cadence 
 and distinction of his prose. Never has an Eng- 
 lish sailor wTitten so beautifully, never has ar- 
 tist had such full and authoritative knowledge 
 of the sea, not even Pierre Loti. Stevenson and 
 Kipling are but observant landsmen after all. 
 Marryat and Clark Russell never write well, 
 though they tell absorbing tales. There was 
 promise in Jack London, but he was not a 
 seaman at heart. Herman Melville's eccentric 
 genius, greater than any of these, never led him 
 
 ii6
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 to construct a work of art, for all his amazing 
 power of thought and language. Conrad stands 
 alone with his two gifts of sea experience and 
 cultivation of style. He has lived on the sea, 
 loved it, fought it, believed in it, been baffled by 
 it, body and mind. To know its ways, to be mas- 
 ter of the science of its winds and waves and the 
 ships that brave it, to have seen men and events 
 and the lands and waters of the earth with the 
 eye of a sailor, the heart of a poet, the mind of a 
 psychologist — artist and ship-captain in one — 
 here is a combination through which Fate has 
 conspired to produce a new writer about the 
 most wonderful of all things, the sea and the 
 mysterious lands beyond it. 
 
 If we grant that he is not master of the larger 
 units of style, that is, of construction, we can 
 assert that in the lesser units, sentence for sen- 
 tence, he is a master of the English tongue. 
 There is a story that he learned English first 
 from the Bible, and his vigorous primal usages 
 of words, his racial idioms and ancient rich 
 metaphors warrant the idea that he came to us 
 along the old highway of English speech and 
 thought, the King James version. His sentences, 
 however, are not biblical as Stevenson's and 
 Kipling's often are, but show a modern sophis- 
 tication and intellectual deliberateness. He fre- 
 quently reminds us that he is a Slav who learn- 
 
 117
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 ed French along with his native tongue, that 
 he has read Flaubert and Maupassant and 
 Henry James. Approaching our language as an 
 adult foreigner, he goes deep to the derivative 
 meanings of words, their powerful first intent- 
 ions, which familiarity has disguised from most 
 of us native-born to English. He has achieved 
 that ring and fluency which he has declared 
 should be the artist's aim. Conrad's prose lifts 
 to passages of great poetic beauty, in which the 
 color of the sea, its emotional aspects, its deso- 
 lation and its blitheness, are mingled with its 
 meaning for the men who sail it, its "austere 
 servitude," its friendliness and its treachery. 
 
 "The ship, a fragment detached from the 
 earth, went on lonely and swift like a small 
 planet. Round her the abysses of sky and sea 
 met in an unattainable frontier. A great circu- 
 lar solitude moved with her, ever changing and 
 ever the same, always monotonous and always 
 imposing. Now and; then another wandering 
 white speck, burdened with life, appeared far 
 ofif, — disappeared, intent on its own destiny. 
 . , . The august loneliness of her path lent 
 dignity to the sordid inspiration of her pilgrim- 
 age. She drove foaming to the southward, as if 
 guided by the courage of a high endeavor. The 
 smiling greatness of the sea dwarfed the extent 
 of time." 
 
 ii8
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 No fairer temptation can be offered to a read- 
 er who does not know Conrad than to quote a 
 passage from the end of "Youth," and no more 
 honest praise can be offered to Conrad than 
 to say that it is a selected, but by no means uni- 
 que, specimen of his genius. 
 
 A crew that have left a burning ship in boats 
 find an Eastern port at night. The weary men 
 tie to the jetty and go to sleep. This is the young 
 mate's narrative years after, the narrative of the 
 reflective and eloquent Marlow: "I was lying 
 in a flood of light, and the sky had never looked 
 so far, so high, before. I opened my eyes and 
 lay without moving. And then I saw the men 
 of the East — they were looking at me. The 
 whole length of the jetty was full of people. I 
 saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black eyes, 
 the glitter, the color of an Eastern crowd. And 
 all these beings stared without a murmur, with- 
 out a sigh, without a movement. They stared 
 down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at 
 night had come to them from the sea. Nothing 
 moved. The fronds of palms stood still against 
 the sky. Not a branch stirred along the shore, 
 and the brown roofs of hidden houses peeped 
 through the green foliage, through the big 
 leaves that hung shining and still like leaves 
 forged of heavy metal. This was the East of the 
 navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent 
 
 119
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 and somber, living and unchanged, full of 
 danger and promise. ... I have known its fas- 
 cinations since: I have seen the mysterious 
 shores, the still water, the lands of brown na- 
 tions, where a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait, 
 pursues, overtakes so many of the conquering 
 race, who are proud of their wisdom, of their 
 knowledge, of their strength. But for me all the 
 East is contained in that vision of my youth. It 
 is all in that moment when I opened my young 
 eyes on it. I came upon it from a tussle with the 
 sea — and I was young — and I saw it looking at 
 me. And this is all that it left of it! Only a 
 moment of strength, of romance, of glamour, of 
 youth!" 
 
 120
 
 A CONRAD MISCELLANY
 
 A CONRAD MISCELLANY. 
 
 Nothing that Joseph Conrad writes is negli- 
 gible; he is one of few living writers whom we 
 must have complete to the last, or the latest, pub- 
 lished word. Readers who care only for the 
 yarn-spinner will not find much in his volume 
 of essays, ''Notes on Life and Letters," but even 
 they will find something. And for those to 
 whom Conrad is more than a story teller, an in- 
 comparable magician, these small bits from his 
 laboratory will have much of the charm of the 
 larger pieces, if only the reminiscent charm that 
 brings any book of his, the least read or read 
 longest ago, swiftly to the surface of memory. 
 If a mere landlubber may hazard the simili- 
 tude, the captain will always show his qualities 
 whether he is on the bridge of a liner or in a 
 rowboat. 
 
 The essays on books are unpretentious notes 
 — eight pages on Henry James, seven on Mau- 
 passant, twelve on Anatole France, short excur- 
 sions in criticism made between the longer voy- 
 ages to the islands of the blessed. Like most 
 criticism written by men of genius, these papers 
 are interesting for what they say about another 
 
 123
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 man of genius and also for what they say about 
 the critic. One of the most satisfactory essays 
 in what it reveals of Conrad is least satisfactory 
 as objective criticism — the one about Marryat 
 and Cooper, in which there is a declaration of 
 descent in terms of surrender. To be sure, since 
 the elder men are seamen and writers of the sea, 
 Conrad's delight in them is understandable and 
 not to be denied. But there are some things that 
 must be denied even by a critic who gets seasick 
 a mile off shore. One is Conrad's reiter- 
 ated judgment that the greatness of Marryat "is 
 undeniable." If Marryat is great, then so is 
 Oliver Optic. And when Conrad speaks of the 
 ''sureness and felicity of effect" of the prose of 
 Cooper — Cooper, whose style grates on the ear 
 and who drags us by the sheer power of his 
 story through his verbal infelicities — then I 
 jump overboard and leave these literary sailors 
 to fight it out. 
 
 When we get back on land to another of 
 Conrad's masters, Guy de Maupassant, I feel 
 less shaky. In "Tales of Unrest" are two 
 stories, "The Return" and "The Idiots," in 
 which I long ago thought I discovered the right 
 kind of influence from the French master— 
 what Conrad praises as Maupassant's austere 
 fidelity to fact. Yet one is puzzled by the im- 
 plied praise in the very dubious statement that 
 
 124
 
 A CONRAD MISCELLANY 
 
 "this creative artist [Maupassant] has the true 
 imagination; he never condescends to invent 
 anything." Just what does that means? If "A 
 Piece of String" and "The Necklace" are not 
 diabolically ingenious inventions, then the 
 word invention means nothing as applied to 
 fiction. In point of invention how far apart are 
 the story of the girls in "La Maison Tellier" 
 and the story of the girl in the pathetic troupe 
 in "Victory"? Both stories are equally invent- 
 ed, equally true to nature, equally free from 
 "the miserable vanity of a catching phrase." 
 But what is a catching phrase? I suppose that a 
 Frenchman gets somewhat the same shiver of 
 delight from fine rhythms in Maupassant's 
 prose that we get from fine rhythms in Conrad. 
 Both men — I could quote many examples — 
 strike out amazing metaphors, the poetry of 
 prose, which are not decorations hung on the 
 uutside but are the unremovable intestines of 
 uieir story. Such metaphors in rhythm are sure- 
 ly "catching phrases," but they are not miser- 
 able vanities. I wonder if Conrad has a 
 moment now and then when he distrusts his 
 own eloquence — an eloquence which has 
 brought against him from more than one critic 
 the charge of being a phrase maker. 
 
 Conrad's prose is not so hard and compact as 
 Maupassant's, and except the two short stories 
 
 125
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 I have mentioned I recall nothing in Conrad 
 which in manner or substance obviously illus- 
 trates his own statement that he has been "in- 
 spired by a long and intimate acquaintance with 
 the work" of Maupassant. His greatest short 
 stories, "Youth" and "The Heart of Darkness," 
 seem worlds away from the French master. But 
 inspiration, the influence of one artist on an- 
 other, does not mean imitation in method or any 
 visible resemblance in effect. It may mean a 
 fundamental similarity in artistic attitude. The 
 elements of similarity between the French writ- 
 er and the British are the plain virtues, honesty 
 and courage, which Conrad rightly ascribes to 
 Maupassant; for these are the central virtues ia 
 the creed which Conrad announced many years 
 ago and to which he has loyally adhered in the 
 remotest strange seas of romance. 
 
 Another of Conrad's masters, acknowledged 
 in the phrase "twenty years of attentive acquain- 
 tance" (and the phrase was written in 1905) 
 is Henry James. This seems a curious disciple- 
 ship if we consider only the material: James 
 static, land-bound, class-bound; Conrad adven- 
 turous, errant, familiar with all breeds and de- 
 grees of men. But much the same thing happens 
 to both kinds of material. For in the first place 
 the material is not essentially different; it is the 
 history of a two-legged animal staggering on 
 
 126
 
 A CONRAD MISCELLANY 
 
 land or aboard ship. And in the second place 
 what happens is simply (though it is not so 
 simple) that an artist tries to put this animal 
 steady on its feet and make it give a reasonable 
 account of itself — through himself. It gets 
 transmitted through an intelligence, a personal- 
 ity, a style, into something more interesting than 
 the actual poor creature who wabbles along the 
 street or on the deck of a steamer. The courage- 
 ous interpreters make their fellow men stand 
 up, and the real hero of a romance is the ro- 
 mancer. 
 
 This is one of the paradoxes of fiction which 
 the mere reader of fiction and of criticism writ- 
 ten by masters of fiction can enjoy, that the mod- 
 ern self-conscious story tellers, forever pro- 
 claiming their devotion to an objective reality, 
 to the naked fact, and even, like Conrad, pre- 
 tending scorn of the phrase, are wilful persons 
 who distort life into a new reality. There is 
 something almost naive in the honest belief of 
 Tolstoy, James, Conrad, that nature, human 
 nature, is something outside the artist, lying 
 over there, and that the artist standing over 
 here observes it, renders it, "mirrors" it. James 
 himself, a most sophisticated realist, was not al- 
 ways so insistent as Conrad seems to think 
 on the function of the novelist as historian; 
 some years later than Conrad's essay, James 
 
 127
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 found fault with the younger novelists because 
 their work was too undigested, because it was 
 not sufficiently remade, transformed by an in- 
 dividual interpreter — that is, though he did not 
 say it so harshly, the younger men were not in- 
 teresting individuals, not men of first-rate im- 
 agination. 
 
 But we must not get too far away from Con- 
 rad and his particular relation to James. He 
 has a generously envious admiration for James's 
 inconclusiveness, for the novel that stops but 
 does not end because life does not end; it seems 
 to be, like his admiration for Maupassant's ac- 
 curacy and directness, a declaration of some- 
 thing that he has striven for and not always ac- 
 complished. Conrad winds his own stories up 
 pretty sharply, wipes out his people with anni- 
 hilation more desolating than the conventional 
 piling of corpses at the end of "Romeo and 
 Juliet" or "Hamlet.'" Recall the obliterating 
 finality of "Lord Jim," of "Victory," which 
 ends with the blank word "nothing." Or, where 
 death does not conclude it all but the character 
 fives on, remember the abrupt inevitable ter- 
 mination of "The Rescue": "Steer north!" An- 
 other relation which I have suggested and 
 which Conrad as critic does not hint is this: 
 Conrad's material, though superficiallyi it is 
 made up of adventure, wreck, blood, piracy, 
 
 128
 
 A CONRAD MISCELLANY 
 
 mystery, and Stevensonian yo-heave-ho, is, as he 
 treats it, often as static as anything in James; it 
 is stationary, concerned with the moods of men, 
 analytic, psychological (that tiresome word has' 
 to do for it), even while the storm rages; and 
 this is one of the reasons why readers with a 
 taste for ripping yarns have not welcomed him 
 with the unanimous popularity which they ac- 
 corded to Stevenson and Kipling, to name fine 
 artists and not, of course, to mention cheap 
 favorites. If we really understood Conrad's fic- 
 tion we have no difficulty in understanding his 
 filial relation to Henry James. Begin with the 
 paragraph on page 13 of "Notes on Life and 
 Letters:" "Action in its essence, the creative art 
 of the writer of fiction," etc., and see if the rest 
 tnat follows is not, with a change or two, as good 
 an account of Joseph Conrad as of Henry James 
 — better, indeed, since one master of fiction wri- 
 ting of another speaks with two voices or with 
 a voice proceeding from a two-fold authority 
 and wisdom. 
 
 Joseph Conrad, novelist, child of English and 
 Continental literature, is not more unaccount- 
 able than any other literary genius. But how to 
 explain, or even remember at all, that the head 
 of living English men of letters, next to Hardy, 
 is a Pole named Korzeniowski? It is fair to re- 
 member that and be inquisitive about it because 
 
 129
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 in "Notes on Life and Letters" he pretends to 
 write autobiography, and reminds us of his ori- 
 gin in a paper called "Poland Revisited." It is 
 a baffling narrative, even more baffling than the 
 vague book which he chose to call "A Personal 
 Record." Conrad in quest of his youth never 
 gets back to Poland at all except as a British 
 tourist. The paper consists of thirty-two pages. 
 Mr. Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski reaches Cra- 
 cow on the twenty-fourth page. There are two 
 or three pages of reminiscence, chiefly about his 
 father's death. Then war is declared (this is in 
 1914), and the British subject, with the assis- 
 tance of the American Ambassador, escapes 
 from Poland and amid the booming of distant 
 guns in Flanders sails safely back through the 
 Downs "thick with the memories of my sea- 
 life." 
 
 Mr. Conrad is the least patriotic of Poles and 
 the most patriotic of Englishmen. His political 
 opinions, which he was evidently invited to ex- 
 press by some English editor who remembered 
 the fading fact of Korzeniowski and appreci- 
 ated the luminous fact of Joseph Conrad, the 
 writer, are no better and no worse than any com- 
 petent journalist might have delivered. His 
 hatred of Russia, expressed long before his 
 adopted country became the ally of the Czar, 
 may have its origin in some boyhood bitterness. 
 
 130
 
 A CONRAD MISCELLANY 
 
 But it is an Englishman who speaks, not a Pole. 
 His prophecy of the downfall of Russian autoc- 
 racy and of the menace of Prussianism shoots into 
 the future with as true an aim as any man could 
 have had in 1905^ and a prophet is to be excused 
 for having said at that time that there was in 
 Russia "no ground ready for a revolution." 
 "Conrad political" is less interesting than "Con- 
 rad controversial," since his controversial utter- 
 ances were provoked by the sinking of the Tit- 
 anic, the question of the safety of ships, and the 
 stupidity of marine officials on land, subjects 
 which he can discuss with the cool knowledge 
 of the expert and the vehemence of an offended 
 master of ships and words. 
 
 But the true men of the four into which in his 
 preface he divides himself are "Conrad liter- 
 ary" and "Conrad reminiscent." The reminis- 
 cence is not of a dimly, even indififerently, re- 
 membered Poland, but of England and the sea. 
 On the twenty- four-page journey to the five- 
 page sojourn in Cracow what happens? London, 
 flashed on you in a few sentences with an origin- 
 al vividness as if Englishmen had never de- 
 scribed it before, realized in brief transit, an 
 immense solid thing, compared to which Cra- 
 cow is an insubstantial dream. He cannot re- 
 capture his boyhood, but he gives you instantly 
 the London of to-day and the London of his 
 
 131
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 youth when the British-Polish apprentice was 
 looking for a berth. And then the voyage across 
 the North Sea. Here we are at home. '^The 
 same old thing," he says. "A grey-green ex- 
 panse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one 
 with white foam-ridges, and over all a cheer- 
 less, unglowing canopy, apparently made of wet 
 blotting paper." 
 
 "The same old thing!" The sea is the same old 
 thing, water deep and shoal, storm and calm, 
 fog and clear weather, light and darkness, star- 
 shine and sunshine. It is understandable that 
 from time to time a new poet should be born, 
 Byron, Tennyson, Swinburne, Whitman, Con- 
 rad, Masefield, who, being a different man from 
 all the rest, should phrase some mood of the sea 
 in words that no other poet in centuries had 
 used. But Conrad has written fifteen volumes 
 mostly about the sea, many pages necessarily 
 about some aspect which he has treated more 
 than once. His treatment is so unmistakably 
 his own that you could recognize any passage 
 as his if you saw it on a piece of torn paper 
 blown from nowhere. Yet it is truer of him 
 than of Shakespeare that he never repeats, has 
 no cliches, no pet phrases, but in each book 
 finds astonishing new images, as if he himself 
 had not written before. How does he do it? 
 
 132
 
 STRINDBERG
 
 STRINDBERG 
 
 Some men of genius at forty or fifty arrive at 
 a view of life, an attitude toward the human 
 comedy, as inclusive and definite as it is possi- 
 ble for them to conceive. Hardy at seventy is 
 quite recognizable the man that he was at forty. 
 The Meredith of i860 is the Meredith of 1890. 
 They grow, they improve or change their artis- 
 tic methods. But their natures do not undergo 
 violent revolutions. Other men, Tolstoy for ex- 
 ample, experience a catastrophic annihilation 
 of some part of themselves and emerge from 
 the confusion, remade, fired with new beliefs. 
 Tolstoy had one great battle with himself which 
 divided his life into two main periods, and after 
 the struggle his philosophy, whatever its worth, 
 was fairly settled, and he knew how to express 
 it clearly over and over again. 
 
 Strindberg seems to have been continuously 
 at war with Strindberg; and the peace that he 
 found was but the death-bed repentance of a 
 man whose forces were spent. He went through 
 many phases. "The Growth of a Soul", which 
 is autobiographical, might better be called "The 
 Conflicts of a Soul". It seethes with ideas, ends 
 
 ^35
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 in a half-formed philosophy, and is only a sec- 
 tion of Strindberg's intellectual adventures. He 
 was ten men at ten different times, and he was 
 ten men all the time. He expressed every as- 
 pect of himself. His manifold genius was mas- 
 ter of all forms of literature. As Emerson said 
 of Swedenborg, in whom Strindberg found all 
 the light that his dark soul ever knew, he lies 
 abroad on his times, leviathan-like. Undoubted- 
 ly to know him, one must know him entire, and 
 I do not pretend to complete knowledge of his 
 life and works. 
 
 Some fragments of his total artistic expres- 
 sion are not intelligible when they are read 
 apart from his other books. "The Inferno" is a 
 confused and murky nightmare which takes on 
 form and purpose only when the light of bio- 
 graphy is turned on it. Other works of Strind- 
 berg, read by themselves, are clear and shape- 
 
 ly- 
 
 "By the Open Sea" is an intensely powerful 
 study of an overcultivated man and a primitive- 
 ly passionate woman. It is, moreover, the work 
 of a poet who loves the sea. The passage in 
 which the ichthyologist observes through his 
 telescope the wonder-world beneath the surface 
 of the water is rich with the essential poetry of 
 natural fact. The translator, Ellie Schleussner, 
 would probably say, as Strindberg's admirers 
 
 136
 
 STRINDBERG 
 
 all say, that his resonant poetic prose cannot be 
 rendered in another language. Yet the things 
 that he sees in nature and his interpretations of 
 them are in their naked substance the imagin- 
 ative stuff which is poetry. This Titan was not 
 content to be poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, 
 philosopher. He was also a man of science, no 
 mean rival, they say, of the professional student 
 of biology and chemistry. The eye that looks 
 through Borg's telescope has been trained in a 
 laboratory and can also roll with a fine frenzy: 
 
 "The blenny, which has developed a pair of 
 oars in front, but is too heavy in the stern and 
 reminds one of first attempts at boat building, 
 raised its architectural stone head, adorned with 
 the moustachios of a Croat, above the heraldic 
 foliage among which it had lain, and lifted it- 
 self for a short moment out of the mud only to 
 sink back into it the next instant. 
 
 "The lump-fish with its seven backs stuck up 
 its keel; the whole fish was nothing but an enor- 
 mous nose, scenting out food and females; it il- 
 luminated for a second the bluish-green water 
 with its rosy belly, surrounding itself with a 
 faint aureole in the deep darkness; but before 
 long its sucker again held safely to a stone, there 
 to wait the lapse of the million years which 
 shall bring delivery to the laggards on the end- 
 less road of evolution." 
 
 137
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 Strindberg has been called both misogamist 
 and misogynist. Yet it is not possible to collect 
 and compress within the bounds of such definite 
 words a man whose ideas on any one subject fly 
 far apart as the poles. If he sometimes, often, 
 expresses virulent detestation of women and all 
 their ways, he is not more tender toward men. 
 He is not a caresser of life. He hangs the whole 
 human race. But he analyzes ; tries it before the 
 twelve-minded jury in himself before he pro- 
 nounces sentence. Point by point, detail for 
 detail, he is just in perception of character and 
 motive. His final view is simply not final, but 
 contradictory as life itself. He thinks that woman 
 is a snare to the feet of a man who would walk 
 upright and accomplish something in the world. 
 Yet he believes in the freedom of woman, would 
 give her the vote, and emancipate her from 
 economic bondage to the man. He even cham- 
 pions the liberty of the child, condemns "the 
 family as a social institution which does not per- 
 mit the child to become an individual at the 
 proper time," and draws both parents as victims 
 of "the same unfortunate conditions which are 
 honored by the sacred name of law." 
 
 "Marriage" contains twenty short stories of 
 married life, so many variations of Strindberg's 
 thesis against the institution. So regarded, the 
 book leaves one rather sore than enlightened. 
 
 «38
 
 STRINDBERG 
 
 But these stories are stories, not tracts. Strind- 
 berg is a great, if rough and savage, artist. His 
 opinions, whatever they are, do not devitalize 
 his fiction. His short narratives are as skilful 
 as Maupassant's in at least one respect, com- 
 pression, sinewy economy. He can put in ten 
 pages the domestic tragedy of a lifetime. He is 
 a fine or, rather, a firm craftsman, and though 
 the man rages, the artist has the artist's restaint 
 and every other literary virtue short of ultimate 
 beauty. He sets down terrible things with a cool 
 succinctness. One story ends thus: "The chil- 
 dren had become burdens and the once beloved 
 wife a secret enemy despised and despising him. 
 And the cause of all this unhappiness? The 
 want of bread! And yet the large storehouses 
 of the new world were breaking down under the 
 weight of an over-abundant supply of wheat. 
 What a world of contradictions! The manner 
 in which bread was distributed must be at fault. 
 Science, which has replaced religion, has no 
 answer to give; it merely states facts and allows 
 the children to die of hunger and the parents of 
 thirst." 
 
 "The Red Room" is a satire on life in Stock- 
 holm, on life everywhere. The pathetic strug- 
 gle of the artistic and literary career, its follies 
 and pretenses, the fatuity of politics, the dis- 
 
 139
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 honesty of journalism, the disillusion that awaits 
 the aspiring actor, all these things run riot 
 through the lively pages. Strindberg's satire is 
 severe, it is sometimes hard, but it is not mean. 
 He has a large if rather distant sympathy for the 
 poor fellows whose aspirations, failures, dissipa- 
 tions, and friendships he portrays. Of two young 
 critics he says: ''And they wrote of human merit 
 and human unworthiness and broke hearts as if 
 they were breaking egg-shells." He writes of 
 their unconscious inhumanity and blindness in a 
 way that reveals his own clearness of vision and 
 fundamental humanity. The laughter of a som- 
 ber humorist has in it a tenderness unknown to 
 merry natures. 
 
 The dramatic and literary critic may profit- 
 ably read the chapter called "Checkmate," in 
 which the young journalist is made to say: "The 
 public does not want to have an opinion, it wants 
 to satisfy its passions. If I praise your enemy 
 you writhe like a worm and tell me that I have 
 no judgment; if I praise your friend, you tell 
 me that I have. Take that last piece of the 
 Dramatic Theatre, Fatty, which has just been 
 published in book form. . . . It's quite 
 safe to say that there isn't enough action in it: 
 that's a phrase the public knows well; laugh a 
 little at the 'beautiful language'; that's good, old 
 
 140
 
 STRINDBERG 
 
 disparaging praise; then attack the manage- 
 ment for having accepted such a play and point 
 out that the moral teaching is doubtful — a very 
 safe thing to say about most things." 
 
 Strindberg's imagination visualized ' and 
 dramatized everything. He made plays of an 
 astonishing variety of ideas ranging from wild 
 poetic fantasy to grim realism — a range as great 
 as Ibsen's and greater than Hauptmann's. 
 
 Glance at those in the third volume of Mr. 
 Bjorkman's translations, not to analyze them 
 but merely to note their diversity. ''Swanwhite" 
 is a fairy fantasy of love, confessedly inspired 
 by Maeterlinck, yet in no sense an imitation of 
 him. "Advent" is a Christmas miracle play, 
 which embodies a gentle sermon on the forgive- 
 ness of sins — a strange sermon from the man 
 who wrote the last chapter of "By the Open 
 Sea!" "Debit and Credit" is a realistic sketch 
 portraying the man who succeeds at the expense 
 of other people. "The Thunderstorm" plays 
 upon an old theme, one that Strindberg knew 
 by experience, the failure of marriage between 
 an elderly man and a young woman. It ends 
 rather serenely for Strindberg, whose last years 
 were not peaceful: "It's getting dark, but then 
 comes reason to light us with its bull's-eyes, so 
 that we don't go astray. . . . Close the 
 windows and pull down the shades so that all 
 
 141
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 memories can lie down and sleep in peace of old 
 age." 
 
 In "After the Fire" the vanity and dishonesty 
 of petty people are ruthlessly exposed. The 
 Stranger who finds all reputations to have been 
 based on sham and all pride founded on wind, 
 is said to be Strindberg himself. "Vanity, van- 
 ity. . . . You tiny earth; you, the dens- 
 est and heaviest of all planets — that's what 
 makes everything on you so heavy — so heavy to 
 breathe, so heavy to carry. The cross is your 
 symbol, but it might just as well have been a 
 fool's cap or a strait-jacket — you world of de- 
 lusions and deluded!" 
 
 142
 
 TAGORE
 
 TAGORE. 
 
 Sometimes the world, or a section of it, goes 
 wildly cheering after a prophet; and a stranger, 
 watching the multitude, wonders wherein lies 
 the greatness of the great man. The sceptic may 
 be too ignorant to understand or he may be too 
 clear-sighted to be deceived. Not many years 
 ago the tom-tom of the Nobel Prize beat before 
 the tent of the modest and inoffensive Hindoo 
 poet, Rabindranath Tagore. English critics and 
 poets of first-rate authority have called him 
 wonderful. For all I know he may be wonder- 
 ful, for I have not read all his work in English 
 and I am not well acquainted with Bengali. 
 But I submit that in "The Crescent Moon" and 
 "The Gardener," there is not one great line, not 
 one poem that is arresting, compelling, memor- 
 aole. Moreover, there is much that is false and 
 weak. 
 
 O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute 1 
 O Farthest End, O the keen call of thy flute I 
 
 Now that may do in India, but in our part of 
 the world it is feeble orchestration. The poets 
 of the Bible and English poets since the days of 
 the Elizabethan translation have equipped the 
 
 H5
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 celestial choirs with more sounding instruments. 
 One cannot without a smile consider the far end 
 of the cosmos playing a flute or a piccolo. 
 Harken to how a supreme poet makes music 
 worthy of the wide spaces : 
 
 But thou dost set in statelier pageantry, 
 Lauded with tumults of the firmament; 
 
 Thy visible music-blasts make deaf the sky, 
 Thy cymbals clang to fire the Occident, 
 
 Thou dost thy dying so triumphally ; 
 
 I see the crimson blaring of thy shawms. 
 
 This is from Francis Thompson's "Ode to the 
 Setting Sun." You see the difference. Thomp- 
 son's lines are poetry. Tagore's simply are not. 
 
 Miss May Sinclair, herself a distinguished 
 artist, says that Mr. Tagore's translation of his 
 Bengali poetry into English "preserves, not only 
 all that is essential and eternal in his poetry, 
 but much of the strange music." That may be 
 so, but how does Miss Sinclair know that? Does 
 she understand Bengali? Does she read it and 
 speak it well enough to be sure that Mr. Tagore 
 has translated himself adequately? i Is not she 
 affording an instance of criticism that in an ex- 
 cess of enthusiasm runs beyond its own knowl- 
 edge? Some of Tagore's lines are mildly sweet, 
 .md there are some pretty fancies in the Child- 
 Poems. The poem in "The Gardener," which 
 begins : 
 
 Why do you whisper so faintly in my earS; O 
 Death, my Death? } 
 
 146
 
 TAGORE 
 
 would be faintly impressive if Walt Whitman 
 had never lived. 
 
 Not only are Tagore's lines not great but 
 some of his lines are foolish: 
 
 Under the banyan tree you were milking the cow with your 
 hands, tender and fresh as butter. 
 
 Perhaps Mr. Tagore did not know that in 
 English "butter fingers" greasily signifies man- 
 ual ineptitude. I can not take that line seriously, 
 nor understand how Tagore has become one of 
 England's acknowledged poets. He distorts na- 
 ture with pathetic fallacies which have not ver- 
 bal splendor to carry them, as the verbal splen- 
 dor of Shakespeare, Shelley, and Thompson 
 often carries a metaphor that, so to speak, will 
 not hold water. 
 
 I paced alone on the road across the field while the sunset 
 was hiding its last gold like a miser. 
 
 The sunset is not in the least like a miser; and 
 a true lover and observer of nature would not 
 allow himself such a niggardly fallacious im- 
 age. Are not our friends, the poets and critics, 
 victims of the spell which odd things out of the 
 East put on our occidental minds, the spell that 
 makes some people run after queer preachers 
 and philosophers who talk religion through 
 their turbans? 
 
 One is reminded that Mr., or Sir Owen Sea- 
 man has in his delicious book of parodies, "The 
 
 147
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 Battle of the Bays", an Edwin-Arnoldy thing 
 that runs like this: 
 
 The bulbul hummeth like a book 
 
 Upon the pooh-pooh tree, 
 And now and then he takes a look 
 
 At you and me, 
 At me and you. 
 
 Kuchi! Kuchoo! 
 
 It is, I confess, sheer perversity that made 
 that stanza come into my head while I was read- 
 ing Tagore. Tagore does not rhyme; he puts 
 his verses into simple prose, most of which is 
 pleasant enough, but none of which is rich in 
 thought or magnificent in phrase. 
 
 Tagore is a faker in the English sense of the 
 word. I do not know what he is in Hindoo. He 
 gives lectures in America to audiences that are, 
 of course, mostly women. Then when he has 
 got all the money he can get from them (for 
 his schools; he is not selfish) he tells them as a 
 Parthian shot that they are idle. If they were 
 not, the poor ignorant dears, he would not have 
 had any audiences or any money. It is caddish 
 to kick the cow that gives the milk. I should 
 rejoice if he took millions from the idle ladies 
 of America to help the ladies of India and to 
 free India from the British murderer and thief. 
 Spoiling the Egyptians is a good game. But it 
 is not playing the game like a man and a phil- 
 osopher to bite the hand that feeds you. 
 
 148
 
 TAGORE 
 
 And it is not manly or philosophic to kiss the 
 hand that strikes you. Tagore with a feeble 
 gesture relinquishes his British title as a pro- 
 test against British crime in India. If he had 
 been a real philosopher and a true patriot he 
 would not have accepted the title in the first 
 place. The lost leader who sticks a riband in 
 his coat does not recover leadership by throwing 
 the riband away. The political and social be- 
 liefs of poets, even of Dante and Shelley and 
 Hugo, are of less importance than their sense of 
 beauty. But there is a connection, not quite im- 
 pertinent to a purely literary discussion, be- 
 tween the quality of a poet's work and his char- 
 acter as it is expressed when he descends from 
 Parnassus and uses the prose of politicians. It 
 is not surprising that Tagore, who babbles to 
 American chautauquas and allows an English 
 king to tap him on the shoulder, should be a 
 weak and stammering poet. That voice from 
 the east is not impressive. If it is the best that 
 modern India can do, then India is done for in- 
 tellectually as well as economically. 
 
 149
 
 REMY DE GOURMONT
 
 REMY DE GOURMONT. 
 
 In "Decadence and Other Essays on the Cul- 
 fiire of Ideas,"* Mr. William Aspenwall Brad- 
 ley has made an excellent selection from the 
 work of Remy de Gourmont; one only regrets 
 that space did not permit him to give us more. 
 He has a gift unfortunately rare among trans- 
 lators: he knows his original and he knows how 
 to write the language into which he translates. 
 He even corrects his master in one place: where 
 de Gourmont, stumbling in a language which 
 he has not quite mastered, writes that the Eng- 
 lish words, ''sweet," and "sweat," are mots de 
 prononciation identique, Mr. Bradley gently 
 wipes out the blunder with "words which resem- 
 ble each other." Not that de Gourmont, v^ith his 
 enormous knowledge, made many such mistakes! 
 I merely note the care and delicacy of the trans- 
 lator. 
 
 Without pretending too much to the wisdom 
 which should have ensued, I remember like a 
 shock of light, as if a blind man had suddenly 
 gained his vision, my introduction, a few years 
 
 *Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas. Remy 
 de Gourmont. Translated by William Aspenwall Bradley. New 
 York: Harcourt Brace & Co. 1921. 
 
 153
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 ago, to the work of de Gourmont (for which my 
 thanks are due to Mr. Martin Loeffler, who is 
 a distinguished musician and only potentially a 
 man of letters). If you wish to have your dark- 
 ness illuminated, associate with the wise. If you 
 are groping in a foreign literature, the first man 
 to meet is the critic. The little I know about 
 France of the sixteenth and seventeenth centur- 
 ies I owe to having c4ung to the broad and often 
 elusive coat-tails of Sainte-Beuve. As a guide 
 to the nineteenth century and much else beside 
 — back to Rome and Greece — the most stimula- 
 ting cicerone is Remy de Gourmont. 
 
 When he was born, the gods went crazy and 
 put into one person an elf and a sage, Ariel and 
 Prospero, Morgan and Merlin. It is no uncom- 
 mon thing when you are reading a French book, 
 by an author with whose work you are not fam- 
 iliar, to find facing the title-page a list of books 
 du meme auteur and to discover that he has pub- 
 lished something in all the main divisions of 
 imaginative literature, plays, poems, romances, 
 criticism. It takes a Frenchman to box the lit- 
 erary compass. He assumes that the business of 
 a writer is to write, and he learns and practises 
 all the forms, with varying degrees of success, 
 to be sure, just as a musician, trying all forms, 
 may be at his best in songs or quartettes for 
 strings or symphonies or operas. 
 
 154
 
 REMY DE GOURMONT 
 
 De Gourmont played every instrument in the 
 band and played it well. His range and versat- 
 ility are remarkable even for a Frenchman. He 
 took all knowledge for his province. In spread- 
 ing his interests wide he never became thin; 
 even when he played on the surface of an idea 
 he somehow, in a page or two, showed the 
 depth of mind and matter underneath. He was, 
 as his American publishers say, poet, critic, 
 dramatist, scholar, biologist, philosopher, nov- 
 elist, philologist, and grammarian. He was an 
 experimenter and explorer. When he died, just 
 under sixty, he was still looking round with his 
 keen roaming eye, and he was looking sadly, 
 for the war, according to his brother Jean, who 
 writes not sentimentally but like a de Gour- 
 mont, killed him. 
 
 Even the colossal, universal genius, the 
 Hugo, the Goethe, can not be supreme in every 
 realm of thought, in every type of literary ex- 
 pression. De Gourmont's poetry, to my ignor- 
 ant alien ear, is not among the best in that pro- 
 lific and still living period of French poetry 
 which he as critic did so much to encourage. 
 As for de Gourmont's fiction, "Une Nuit au 
 Luxembourg," which he Imight havd tossed 
 with a wink into the lap of Anatole France, 
 does not greatly enrich French fiction, which is 
 already rich in similar achievements. "Coul- 
 
 155
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 eurs" consists of delightful twittings on ideas, 
 and surely is not greatly important in a nation 
 where one man of letters out of four has mas- 
 tered the art of the conte. 
 
 De Gourmont is supremely the critic, the 
 man who digests, interprets, reorganizes the 
 thoughts of other men and in the process adds 
 to those thoughts. His favorite method of re- 
 organization is disorganization, "dissociation" 
 (and by the way, that word is good in English, 
 as in French, and better than Mr. Bradley's 
 ''disassociation"). He pulls ideas to pieces and 
 skilfully puts them together again. He is an 
 analyst, a dissector. But the flowers of the gar- 
 den are not all plucked to shreds and scattered 
 on the paths, nor are they all taken to the labor- 
 atory and subjected to the microscope. De 
 Gourmont is interested in things living and in 
 propagating life. ^'Toutes nos fleurs sont 
 fraiches, jeunes et pleines d'amour." He sur- 
 veys wildernesses and lays out gardens. No other 
 man was ever blessed with such a combination 
 of the safe, sane, intellectually comfortable and 
 the restless, daring, venturesome. 
 
 He loves paradoxes because life is full of 
 contradictions, and his paradoxes are often 
 elucidations and conciliations of conflicting 
 ideas, never the cheap and facile paradoxes of 
 a Chesterton. Is Mallarme obscure? There is 
 
 156
 
 REMY DE GOURMONT 
 
 never absolute, literal obscurity in an honestly 
 written work. Besides, there are too few ob- 
 scure writers in French. This from a French- 
 man whose own writing is a marvel of clarity 
 even when he is handling subtle and difficult 
 ideas! Moreover, de Gourmont's essays on 
 language and style are studies in precision, in 
 definition. 
 
 De Gourmont is a wise man, who, like Soc- 
 rates and William James, is not afraid to joke, 
 and some of his perversities are uttered with his 
 ironic tongue in his cheek. Like all fine humor- 
 ists he is profoundly serious, and the delicate 
 play of his fingers is backed by terrific muscu- 
 lar scholarship. His method is to appear to 
 be casual, to make the review of a book "une 
 occasion de parler un peu" and then to pack 
 into six pages the reading of a lifetime. He 
 manipulates Brunetiere into the corner and an- 
 nihilates him before you have time to realize 
 that there is no button on the rapier. 
 
 For all his tolerant smile and sceptical shrug, 
 de Gourmont is fighting valiantly for ideas. He 
 wants ideas liberated but not loose, and in the 
 very act of freeing them he defines and fixes 
 them. He divides long-mated notions in order 
 to reassemble them according to his private 
 logic. For he is the most wilful and individual 
 of critics. The journalistic multiplicity of his
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 subjects is unified by a great personality. The 
 "dissociator" of ideas is a constructive thinker, 
 one of the greatest of critics in a nation of crit- 
 ics and sufficient in himself to stand as smiling 
 refutation of Croce's dictum that "French crit- 
 icism is notably weak whenever the fundamen- 
 tals of art are concerned." If there is a funda- 
 mental of art that de Gourmont missed, I doubt 
 whether it is to be discovered in any German or 
 Italian book. For de Gourmont's reading em- 
 braced the literature of Europe, and he was es- 
 pecially alert to philosophic criticism. He was 
 forever in search of principles; but the result 
 of his quest is not a massive disquisition. The 
 solidity of his learning and the systematic co- 
 herence of his ideas are concealed from the un- 
 wary reader by the lightness of his tone and 
 also by his brevity, the gift, which belongs to 
 the race of Montaigne and Voltaire, of saying 
 everything in a few sentences. His essays are 
 light as a feather and yet they carry tons of in- 
 formation. The aeroplane looks like a bird but 
 it is a heavy and elaborate piece of machinery. 
 De Gourmont lived in an ivory tower, the 
 tower of a wizard who combined the know- 
 ledge of an ancient necromancer with that of 
 a modern chemist. He was much alone, for only 
 in solitude can a man read as much as de 
 Gourmont read and write about it! in serene 
 
 IS8
 
 REMY DE GOURMONT 
 
 meditation. Nevertheless, he was in and of the 
 world of writers; he was an active and friendly 
 editor; he made the* Mercure de France; he 
 encouraged the youngest and bravest of his day; 
 many of his notes record conversations with the 
 finest men of his time. He spent his days with 
 la jeunesse and his nights with aged wisdom. 
 When he retired to his ivory tower he carried 
 under one arm a volume of mediaeval Latin, to 
 add to his enormous library, already neatly 
 stowed in his head, and under the other arm the 
 manuscript of the youngest French poet. 
 
 In one of his essays de Gourmont plays char- 
 mingly with the reviewer's too facile use of 
 "great"; "great writer," "very great writer." 
 Despite that delightful warning I dare say that 
 de Gourmont is a tres grand ecrivain, not a 
 great poet nor a great novelist, but the greatest 
 critic that has been born, even in France where 
 critics are wont to be born. 
 
 159
 
 SWIFT'S RELATIONS WITH WOMEN
 
 SWIFT'S RELATIONS WITH WOMEN. 
 
 "Controversy," says the editor of the Swift- 
 Vanessa letters,* "might have been more mod- 
 erate in tone and more fruitful of result, if writ- 
 ers had always remembered that, though 
 grounds of conjecture are abundant, the data 
 for forming a judgment are manifestly incom- 
 plete." Leslie Stephen, a shrewd and cautious 
 biographer, with a lawyer's gift for handling 
 evidence, says "This is one of those cases in 
 which we feel that even biographers are not 
 omniscient; and I must leave it to my readers 
 to choose their own theory, only suggesting that 
 readers, too, are fallible." 
 
 I propose an explanation of Swift, but pro- 
 pose it only as a conjecture, an hypothesis. I 
 shall not even argue it up to the point of positive 
 belief; certainly I shall not push it beyond the 
 line where belief borders knowledge. Conjec- 
 ture is good if it remains clearly in the realm of 
 conjecture, an honest area of thought, and does 
 not try to sneak over into the land of things 
 proved. 
 
 *Vanessa and Her Correspondence with Jonathan Swift. Let- 
 ters edited for the first time from originals. With an introduction 
 by A. Martin Freeman. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co. 
 
 163
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 All of Swift's relations with women, and 
 much else in his life, may be accounted for b^ 
 the supposition that early he discovered or sus- 
 pected that he was insane, that he believed his 
 insanity might be transmissible, that he was con- 
 sequently afraid to have children, that he was 
 honest and strong enough to keep himself in 
 check, that the resulting suppression made him 
 irascible and bitter, that he was a vigorous and 
 passionate man, that his quick shifts from tender 
 fooling to savage satire, his friendly and brutal 
 moods, his strutting arrogance that amazed 
 the coffee houses, were not due to any tom- 
 foolery of politics or thwarted ambition in the 
 petty matter of advancement in the church but 
 were due to a conflict, honorably won by Swift, 
 in the place where a man lives. The "early" in 
 this supposition is important. Leslie Stephen, 
 quoting the familiar dark prophecy of Swift at 
 the age of fifty: "I shall be like that tree; I 
 shall die at the top," justly observes that "a 
 man haunted perpetually by such forebodings 
 might well think that marriage was not for 
 him." But Stephen is dealing with Swift in 
 middle age and offering an explanation of why, 
 assuming that Swift was not already married to 
 Stella, he did not marry Vanessa. Let us place 
 the beginning of the perpetual foreboding early 
 
 164
 
 SWIFT'S RELATIONS WITH WOMEN 
 
 in Swift's life and see if the main facts, so far as 
 we know them, will lie upon this supposition. 
 
 Swift's attacks of vertigo began in his youth. 
 He attributed his illness to an over-consump- 
 tion of fruit when he was twenty-one. Swift 
 knew better than that. Even if we assume that 
 medical science in the eighteenth century was 
 stupid and backward, Swift was too intelligent 
 to believe that an early period of indigestion 
 accounted for the sufifering which afflicted him 
 all his life. He knew, or suspected and feared, 
 what was the matter with him. In 1699, when 
 he was thirty-two, he wrote some resolutions, 
 headed "when I come to be old." Among them 
 is this : "Not to be fond of children or let them 
 come near me hardly." Stephen quotes a friend- 
 ly commentator as saying: "We do not fortify 
 ourselves with resolutions against what we dis- 
 like but against what we feel in our weakness 
 we have reason to believe we are really inclined 
 to." That friendly commentator was right and 
 understood human nature, though he had never 
 lived (Stephen does not name him) to hear 
 about libido, suppression, defence, inversion, 
 and other wise words now current. 
 
 Stephen goes wrong, it seems to me, in his 
 following friendly commentation: "Yet it is 
 strange that a man should regard the purest and 
 kindliest of feelings as a weakness to which he 
 
 165
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 was too much inclined." I have not space to 
 quote the rest, which is on page 31 of Stephen 
 in the English Men of Letters. Swift was not 
 fighting against a weakness, he was fighting 
 against a strength. He resolves "not to marrjr 
 a young woman." In a letter he calls a woman's 
 children her "litter," and that has been quoted 
 by some critics as an example of his brutality. 
 He loves Tom, Dick, and Harry but he hates 
 mankind. Is it not clear? He can not have what 
 he wants, and what he wants is what normally 
 results in children, in more mankind. His res- 
 olution, superficially harsh and misanthropic, 
 is a masked, or inverted, expression of desire. 
 Such expression is not, of course, peculiar to 
 literary satirists, but it should be remembered 
 that Swift had supremely the ironic trick of 
 thought, the gift of saying a thing by saying 
 exactly the opposite. 
 
 The resolution should be read in the light of 
 the fact that Stella was eighteen years old, a 
 grown and comely woman. But the interpre- 
 tation of it depends much more closely on the ter- 
 mination of Swift's affair with Varina. The date, 
 1699, suggests this. He had proposed to Varina, 
 Miss Waring, in 1696, in a letter which is pas- 
 sionate enough, and had been rejected, at least 
 provisionally, on the score of her ill health and 
 his poverty. Four years later, after he had re- 
 
 166
 
 SWIFT'S RELATIONS WITH WOMEN 
 
 ceived the living at Laracor and seemed to be 
 on the way to other preferments, she wished to 
 hold him to his word, and he jilted her. There 
 are three explanations. One is that he had fal- 
 len in love with Stella and so out of love with 
 the other woman. The second explanation, Les- 
 lie Stephen's, is that his ambitions had not been 
 realized, his advancement had not been bril- 
 liant, and marriage would have kept his nose to 
 the grind-stone in an obscure living. That ex- 
 planation is not good, for, though Swift always 
 had an eye to the main chance and was worried 
 about money, power, and position, it is only 
 men of cool blood or men who have extra-mar- 
 ital opportunities to gratify their desires who 
 are ever deterred by considerations of thrift and 
 economy from marrying the beloved woman. 
 Swift was not cold but passionate. And it 'is 
 inconceivable that he, a clergyman in a small 
 parish, was finding his pleasure in illicit inter- 
 course. 
 
 The third explanation, which I venture to 
 suggest, is that between his proposal to Varina 
 in 1696 and his insulting rejection of her in 
 1700, between his twenty-ninth and thirty-third 
 years, he had discovered a reason why he must 
 not live with a woman. His resolutions, remem- 
 ber, not to marry a young woman and not to be 
 fond of children were written in 1699. How 
 
 167
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 could Stephen believe that those resolutions, 
 with others "pithy and sensible," were "for be- 
 havior in a distant future?" Swift's heading, 
 "when I come to be old," means nothing; he is 
 writing from the misery of the moment. Why 
 is the letter in which Swift puts an end to poor 
 Varina so brutal and insulting that, in Stephen's 
 words, no one with a grain of self-respect could 
 accept the conditions of marriage which he lays 
 down? Because he could not tell her the real 
 reason, a reason based on fear rather than on 
 physiological certainty. It is an honestly dis- 
 honest letter. It is a perfect example of that per- 
 plexing contradiction which appears every- 
 where in his life and writings, that he was brut- 
 ally honest, saw through the postures and masks 
 of everybody else, and yet postured, attitudin- 
 ized, and lied himself. He carried his secret 
 agony with fortitude and alternately raged 
 against the world and fooled with it. In rela- 
 tion to the Varina episode Stephen m.isses the 
 point, though what he says is true enough: 
 "Swift could be the most persistent and ardent 
 of friends. But when anyone tried to enforce 
 claims no longer congenial to his feelings, the 
 appeal to the galling obligation stung him into 
 ferocity, and brought out the most brutal side 
 of his imperious nature." Though a man has 
 but one heart, yet his relations with his friends 
 
 i68
 
 SWIFT'S RELATIONS WITH WOMEN 
 
 are quite different from his passions for women. 
 A proud, ferocious and imperious nature is not 
 the whole story of Swift. It does not give us the 
 real foundation of the story of Varina, of Stella, 
 of Vanessa and the man they loved. 
 
 On the foundation which I propose the story 
 of Stella will rest securely, intelligibly. If 
 Swift was married secretly to Stella in 1716 — 
 the evidence is not conclusive — the marriage 
 was only a legal ceremony performed perhaps 
 for the purpose of securing her in case her for- 
 tunes went wrong or gossip or other circum- 
 stances made necessary the protection of his 
 name. Almost certainly there was no physical 
 marriage, no union legal or illegal. Why? He 
 was free and she was free. She was, by his own 
 account, a charming person who would have 
 been quite presentable to his friends and in all 
 ways helpful to a man in middle age who is 
 supposed to need a woman to take care of him. 
 The answer is simply that Swift feared to pro- 
 pagate his tainted stock, that he refrained and 
 suffered. And the "Journal to Stella" is a record 
 of suffering, of passion disguised and writhing. 
 A busy man, with other things to write, does not 
 write that much to a woman he does not love, 
 and he does not write that way to a woman he 
 openly and avowedly loves. The "little lan- 
 guage," the silliness, the foolings, the avoidance 
 
 169
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 of direct declaration of love, the semi-paternal 
 injunctions, the gossip about big people, much of 
 it whimsical chatter in which we get only by 
 implication the serious view of Swift and his 
 times that has made it an important historical 
 document, the two or three hintful promises of 
 felicity which commit Swift to nothing, the pas- 
 sages of melancholy and half-humorous old 
 man's grouch — all this is a veiled love letter. It 
 is tingling and nervous and alert and full of 
 pain, not the idle recreation of a tired man of 
 affairs entertaining a child, but the heartbreak 
 of a powerful man of forty-five expressed by in- 
 directions to a woman of thirty. Perhaps she 
 understood his spleen and his complaints of ill- 
 healjh. We may be on the way to understand- 
 ing them now. Certainly Stephen is off the 
 track when he says that there are "grounds for 
 holding that Swift was constitutionally indis- 
 posed to the passion of love." Unless he means 
 by that that Swift knew that there was some- 
 thing in his constitution which made the ulti- 
 mate realization of love impossible. And 
 Stephen does not mean that, for he speaks of the 
 absence of traces of passion from writings "con- 
 spicuous for their amazing sincerity." An am- 
 azing example of a sincere biographer missing 
 the trace! Swift's insistence on his "coldness" 
 and his assertion that he did not understand love 
 
 170
 
 SWIFT'S RELATIONS WITH WOMEN 
 
 are precisely an affirmation of what the words 
 deny. 
 
 Now enters the third woman of record — 
 there may have been more — in Swift's unhappy 
 sexual life, Vanessa, Esther Vanhomrigh. At 
 the same time that he is writing his long love 
 letter, the ''Journal to Stella," he is seeing Van- 
 essa. Of course. It is all explicable. The man 
 can not have the woman he wants and is tantal- 
 ized by another woman who wants him. He 
 plays and he won't play. He is tormented by 
 the same restraint that keeps him out of Stella's 
 bed. He is handsome, virile, and distinguished. 
 The woman is crazy about him. He is unable 
 to keep away from her, but he is fighting, for 
 reasons known to him, against the impulse to 
 possess her. He plays again, as with Stella, a 
 game which, viewed superficially, is fraudulent 
 and unfair. He is teacher, guide, philosopher, 
 and Dutch uncle. But she is not a docile, gentle 
 girl like Stella. Mr. Freeman, who handles his 
 documents admirably and is not slanted from 
 the truth by moralistic concern for hero or 
 heroine, is, nevertheless, naive and blind to the 
 facts which he has so carefully considered. He 
 says: "The tragedy, then, was inevitable from 
 the day when Vanessa attempted to arouse in 
 him a love of which he was incapable. It might 
 have been hastened, or its form might have been 
 
 171
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 different, if he had sternly broken with Vanessa 
 as soon as he discovered the nature of her de- 
 sires." Swift was not incapable, in that sense, 
 and he knew the nature of her desires, for he 
 was not a fool. What he knew also was the na- 
 ture of his own desires and their possible con- 
 sequences. That is, I conjecture, the heart of 
 the story of Swift's heart. 
 
 172
 
 WILLIAM JAMES, MAN OF LETTERS
 
 WILLIAM JAMES, MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 I. 
 
 The letters of a philosopher usually have the 
 primary, if not exclusive, interest of elucidat- 
 ing and extending in an informal way the 
 ideas expounded in his professional writings. 
 It is for this interest that one would turn 
 to the letters of a thinker who was nothing 
 but a thinker, such as Kant (if, indeed, there is 
 a collection of Kant's letters), and to the corres- 
 pondence of such a philosopher as Nietzsche, 
 who, aside from his technical contributions to 
 human wisdom, presents fascinating problems 
 in human character, personality, biography. The 
 letters of Williams James* have two distinct 
 values. They appeared at the same moment with 
 his "Collected Essays and Reviews"** and the 
 two publications, taken together, complete the 
 intellectual record of the man. Though master 
 and man can not be separated, yet, as good dis- 
 ciples of James's pluralism, we may be permit- 
 ted to divide an individual into two "aspects." 
 
 ♦The Letters of William James. Edited by his son Henry 
 James. Two Vols. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press. 
 
 ♦♦Collected Essays and Reviews. William James. New York; 
 Longmans, Green and Co.
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 First let us enjoy the letters, simply as the let- 
 ters of a man who was, incidentally, a philoso- 
 pher. 
 
 And what letters ! The letters of Lamb, of Ed- 
 ward Fitzgerald, are not more delightful. The 
 easiest and pleasantest way to prove that would 
 be to fill the rest of this essay with quotations, 
 and that way would be in consonance with the 
 whimsical spirit of James, who wrote to his 
 youngest son : "Your Ma thinks you'll grow up 
 into a filosofer like me and write books. It is 
 easy enough, all but the writing. You just get 
 it out of other books and write it down." To 
 write a jolly letter to a child, to ridicule your- 
 self and your profession and a the same time to 
 defend an idea with vigor and determination, 
 to poke fun at colleagues and heartily respect 
 them, to be dignified in mental shirt sleeves, to 
 wink one eye and keep two keen eyes on the page 
 or the fact that has to be studied, to fling words 
 with apparent carelessness and never for a mom- 
 ent to lose control of words or thought — all this 
 means a great character and a fine literary ar- 
 tist. 
 
 James says of Duveneck, the painter: "I have 
 seen very little of him. The professor is an op- 
 pressor of the artist, I fear." It may be that the 
 professor, which James was and officially had 
 to be, oppressed the artist in him. But the 
 
 176
 
 WILLIAM JAMES, MAN OF LETTERS 
 
 artist would not down. If all the philosophic 
 work of James were wiped out by an act of God 
 or by the arguments of philosophers, James, the 
 man of letters, would slill survive. I believe that 
 part of the success of James as philosopher 
 was due to his ability to say what he meant not 
 only with logical clarity but with charm, with 
 the skill of the literary artist. Technical Phil- 
 osophy may immortalize or bury his work. The 
 man, the startling, original person must be im- 
 perishable. No matter what subject he touches, 
 his way of saying things is superb. He had an 
 artist's interest in the art of writing. Of a vol- 
 ume of his essays he says: "I am sure of your 
 sympathy in advance for much of their contents. 
 But I am afraid that what you will never ap- 
 preciate is their wonderful English style! Shake- 
 speare is a little street-boy in comparison!" 
 The wise man has his tongue in his cheek, of 
 course, but there is a serious idea behind the 
 fooling. Of a correspondent's "strictures on my 
 English" he writes : "I have a tendency towards 
 too great coUoquiality," What sort of laborious 
 philosopher was it who worried James about 
 his style, his fluent, accurate, imaginative vehicle 
 of thought? It may be that some of James's 
 philosophic ideas are quite wrong. But there is 
 a presumption in favor of the truth of an idea 
 which is well expressed.
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 James argues somewhere that a style as thick as 
 Hegel's can not be the "authentic mother- tongue 
 of reason." If that is unfair to Hegel, it is a fair 
 revelation of the mind of James. He was an 
 advocate and an exemplar of lucidity of expres- 
 sion, and was always putting to himself and 
 other philosophers the plain question: "Just 
 what do you mean?" But his sharpness of mind, 
 though often aggressive, was never offensive. 
 He seems at times to have dulled the edge of his 
 wit in order not to hurt the other fellow. The 
 editor of the letters has, perhaps wisely, "not 
 included letters that are wholly technical or 
 polemic." Probably the ideas expressed in the 
 technical letters are repeated in James's books. 
 But I should like to see the polemic letters. The 
 editor himself in the act of withholding them 
 has defined their merits: "He rejoiced openly 
 in the controversies which he provoked and en- 
 gaged in polemics with the good humor and vig- 
 or that were the essence of his genius." The 
 touches of polemic writing which appear in the 
 correspondence that is given us reveal this good 
 humor and vigoi^ and make ,one hungry for 
 more. He was staunch and dexterous in argu- 
 ment and never yielded an inch, but he could 
 stop and laugh at his opponent and at himself. 
 He objected to Huxley's somewhat solemn de- 
 votion to "Truth," yet he had a kind of skill in 
 
 178
 
 WILLIAM JAMES, MAN OF LETTERS 
 
 argument that was not unlike Huxley's. He 
 could give a man a smashing blow in the ribs, 
 and even show a quite human irritation, but his 
 exquisite courtesy never failed. His letters to 
 Godkin, of the Nation, protesting against un- 
 fair criticism of the work of the elder Henry 
 James, are a lesson for critics, and no doubt 
 Godkin's reply was a model of magnanimous 
 contrition. 
 
 James had an immense variety of interests out- 
 side philosophy, though perhaps it is unphilo- 
 sophical to imply that anything can lie outside 
 the range of a true philosopher's vision. His 
 letters are written to many different kinds of 
 persons; the best of them, naturally, arc to phil- 
 osophers and men of letters, who evoked from 
 him an amazing multiplicity of ideas and to 
 whom he let fly a delicious compound of sound 
 reason and jocularity. In characterizing other 
 men he characteiized himself. For example, 
 what he says about Royce embraces both men 
 perfectly: "that unique mixture of erudition, 
 originality, profundity and vastness, and human 
 wit and leisureliness." He was fortunate in his 
 human and intellectual contacts. An early and 
 abidingly fortunate contact was that with his 
 father, who was also a "filosofer." His last let- 
 ter to his father is beautiful. It brings tears, of 
 which the most stoical philosopher need not be 
 
 179
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 ashamed; indeed, one might rather be ashamed 
 if the tears did not come. No one outside the 
 family and a few friends has a right to read that 
 letter, but print has extended the privilege. If 
 Mr. E. V. Lucas or any other anthologist makes 
 a new collection of examples of "the gentlest 
 art," the letter from James to his father should 
 be included. In it two men are portrayed, father 
 and son, both magnificently; if either man had 
 been less than great the letter could not have 
 been written. 
 
 James was born a philosopher; philosophy was 
 In the blood and in the very air of the house- 
 hold. There is no better instance of the heredity 
 of genius and of predestination to a career. Yet 
 James did not find himself immediately; he 
 floundered about in the world of thought long 
 after the age at which most men have hung out 
 shingles. He was thirty when he was appointed 
 instructor in physiology at Harvard, and his 
 tardiness in establishing himself as a bread-win- 
 ning citizen fretted him. Lesser men who feel 
 that the expression of their talents has been 
 thwarted or postponed may take comfort from 
 the fact that James's first printed book, the 
 "Psychology," appeared in 1890, when he was 
 forty-eight years old. 
 
 The fact that James was an intellectual roam- 
 er and did not proceed docilely from a doctor's 
 
 180
 
 WILLIAM JAMES, MAN OF LETTERS 
 
 degree to a position as teacher, in a groove for- 
 ever, accounts, in part, for the flexibility and 
 variety of his thought. His "dribbling," as he 
 calls it, during years when he suffered from 
 physical illness and a depressing sense of impo- 
 tence, was not altogether bad for the man or for 
 the philosopher. He wandered about Europe, 
 became bilingual, if not trilingual (he was never 
 quite happy in German speech or German phil- 
 osophy). His learning was enriched with odds 
 and ends of information such as belong rather 
 to the man of the world than to the professor. 
 If he had lived all his life in Konigsberg or 
 Cambridge he would have been neither Kant 
 nor James. To him philosophy was never an 
 affair of remote abstract heavens or of little 
 dusty class rooms. He served academic inter- 
 ests faithfully and did more than any other man 
 to make the department of philosophy at Har- 
 vard the finest thing in American university 
 life. But he was in constant rebellion against 
 the academic world and, indeed, against all in- 
 stitutionalism. He wrote to Thomas Davidson : 
 "Why is it that everything in this world is of- 
 fered to us on no medium terms between either 
 having too much of it or too little? You pine 
 for a professorship, I pine for your leisure to 
 write and study." Yet he had more leisure and 
 freedom than most men. He went abroad when- 
 
 i8i
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 ever he wanted to go, and never knew what it 
 was to be down to his last dollar. 
 
 His lateness in finding himself professionally 
 and philosophically is, perhaps, related to his 
 perpetual youth, his eagerness for new ideas, his 
 inability to be fixed and settled. He sometimes 
 grasped at ideas too hastily and welcomed such 
 new arrivals as Wells and Chesterton with a 
 heartiness which, perhaps, they did not quite de- 
 serve. But that was the fault of his enthusiastic 
 catholicity. He hated shut minds and shut doors 
 of thought and feared nothing except that some 
 possibly valuable inquiry might be hindered or 
 stopped by stupidity and prejudice. His col- 
 league, Professor Palmer, called him "the finest 
 critical mind of our time." Let the philoso- 
 phers decide whether that is excessive praise. 
 We mere laymen can know him and enjoy him 
 as he reveals himself in his letters, a vivacious, 
 humorous, affectionate man. 
 
 IL 
 
 The supreme service of William James to 
 philosophy is the restoration of philosophy to 
 the uses of life. At least that is the tendency of 
 his philosophy. Even though much wisdom still 
 remains shut up in a tower, indifferent to life, 
 and though life may often be ungrateful to and 
 suspicious of such wisdom as is offered to it, 
 
 182
 
 WILLIAM JAMES, MAN OF LETTERS 
 
 nevertheless James's attempt to bring about a 
 rapprochement was his finest contribution and 
 is expressed in some of his most glowing pages. 
 He came at the right time and illustrated in 
 himself one of his hearty beliefs that Humanity 
 will produce all the types of thinker that it 
 needs. At the moment when he entered the realm 
 of philosophy, the physical sciences had arro- 
 gantly assumed, if not all wisdom, the possession 
 of the correct method of searching for wisdom. 
 On the other hand, the transcendental philoso- 
 phers held themselves aloof from the physical 
 sciences and ignored psychology. This division 
 of interest in a world which James himself tried 
 to keep manageably split up and pluralistic, was 
 his first philosophic perplexity and, in his treat- 
 ment of the problem, he committed himself to 
 inconsistencies and self-contradictions, which 
 were partly inherent in the situation and partly 
 due to his temperament. 
 
 Through all his writings, from one of his 
 earliest papers (that on Renan's "Dialogues," 
 republished in "Collected Essays and Re- 
 views") to the last chapters of "The Meaning 
 of Truth," James saw philosophers as so many 
 individuals, each fighting under his own banner 
 of truth, and he was puzzled because they would 
 not be reconciled and fight together against the 
 powers of darkness which must be conquered if 
 
 '83
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 philosophy is ever to be worth anything, and if 
 there is ever to be any reason why there should 
 be philosophers to sit in comfortably endowed 
 chairs. No critic took more keenly humorous 
 delight than James did in the disputes of the 
 schools, or stirred up with more lively argu- 
 ment the factions whose lack of solidarity he de- 
 plored. 
 
 Take two examples. While James was 
 young and still under the influence of his labor- 
 atory studies he made out a good case for psy- 
 chology as a natural science, admitting that in 
 its present stage of development it is rather a 
 loose subject, but demanding for its best inter- 
 ests an application of the scientific method. 
 Then he saw that he had gone counter to his 
 own belief in the unity of knowledge, or the 
 unity of study. It occurred to him that some- 
 thing valuable might be lost to psychology if 
 metaphysical and epistemological inquiries were 
 debarred. So in an address to the American 
 Psychological Association, he openly renounced 
 his first position, adding, however, as a half- 
 smiling reservation, that metaphysics should 
 give up some of its nonsense as a condition of 
 admission. 
 
 In one of his last papers, that on "Bradley or 
 Bergson," James takes a shrewd pleasure in 
 tracing their resemblances as far as they go, and 
 
 184
 
 WILLIAM JAMES, MAN OF LETTERS 
 
 then laments that they diverge, because if they 
 had kept together they could between them 
 have buried post-Kantian rationalism. For a 
 complexity of partisanship in unity that can not 
 be surpassed! But James's ^willingness to be 
 pallbearer at the funeral of a philosophic idea 
 was not inconsonant with his determination that 
 some other ideas of doubtful character should 
 be allowed to grow up and thrive. For the old 
 idea had had its say. The new ideas might be 
 strangled in infancy. Let each new idea have 
 its time and opportunity. Let everything be 
 tried. It is better to be credulous than bigoted, 
 but to be excessively one or the other is not be- 
 fitting a philosopher. 
 
 Aside from certain technical problems, 
 James's philosophic attitude was always deter- 
 mined by his answer to the question: On which 
 side lies the greater force and fullness of life, 
 the possibility of richness, novelty, adventure? 
 In 1895, ^t the height of his power as a man — 
 though perhaps he grew wiser as he grew older 
 — he ends a paper on "Degeneration and Gen- 
 ius" thus: **The real lesson of the genius-books 
 is that we should welcome sensibilities, im- 
 pulses, and obsessions if we have them, as long 
 as by their means the field of our experience 
 grows deeper and we contribute the better to 
 the race's stores; that we should broaden our 
 
 185
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 notion of health instead of narrowing it; that we 
 should regard no single element of weakness as 
 fatal — in short, that we should not be afraid of 
 life/' The italics are his. If that is not good 
 psychological argument, then there is something 
 the matter with the science of psychology. It is 
 only just such good sense as this that a common 
 man can understand, and the humanity and elo- 
 quence of it are better than argument. 
 
 Can a common man understand philosophy? 
 James believed that he can both understand it 
 and express it. Two or three times he quotes 
 the saying of his friend the carpenter: "There 
 is very little difference between one man and an- 
 other, but what little difference there is is very 
 important" He has a hot contempt for Renan's 
 cool contempt for I'homme vulgaire, and he ad- 
 mires Clifford's "lavishly generous confidence 
 in the worthiness of average human nature to 
 be told all the truth, the lack of which in Goe- 
 the made him an inspiration to the few but a 
 cold riddle to the many" — and the possession of 
 which by James made him a greater teacher of 
 youth. 
 
 He was an instinctive democrat and was al- 
 ways on the side of what, in his social environ- 
 ment, was the unpopular minority. Like Whit- 
 man, of whom he often speaks with admiration, 
 he was a born individual aristocrat, with no de- 
 
 l86
 
 WILLIAM JAMES, MAN OF LETTERS 
 
 lusions about the intelligence of the herd but 
 an immense faith in its possibilities. His gen- 
 erosity towards the delusions of common men 
 was warmer than towards the delusions of phil- 
 osophers, because philosophers have opportun- 
 ities for study — and should know better. He 
 had only one fear, which sometimes took a bel- 
 ligerent form (there is something in his book 
 on psychology about the relation between bel- 
 ligerency and fear) ; and that fear was lest he 
 or some other philosopher should try to inter- 
 fere with a possibly good idea, to put sand, not on 
 the tracks, but in the machinery. The vaguely 
 comforting fatalistic belief that good ideas will 
 prevail and bad ones die he regarded as untrue 
 to the history of human thought, and not good 
 for people whose business it is to express 
 thought. James held that it did make a real dif- 
 ference in the world that a saint or a monster, 
 St. Paul or Bonaparte, did not die in his cradle. 
 It does make a difference — the one illustration 
 that James would have laughed at — that James 
 lived to be a philosopher. Ideas do sometimes 
 seem just to happen, to grow without human 
 guidance, but the precious ideas have to be 
 fought for. Matthew Arnold's idea, that it is 
 our duty to make the best ideas prevail, may 
 seem priggish and dictatorial, yet fundamental- 
 ly James had the same idea. Pluralism, he says, 
 
 187
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 is not for sick souls but for those in whom the 
 fighting-spirit is alive. Philosophy does not 
 flourish by accident. Men make it. 
 
 Therefore, philosophy begins in the human 
 mind, and is the history of the action of mind on 
 experience. James was from the very beginning 
 a student of the human mind. He began in epi: 
 stemology and he ended there. One of his ear- 
 liest essays is a rather too easy slipping of his 
 knife into the "operose ineptitude" of Spencer's 
 definition of mind, and his last word about a 
 philosophic puzzle was: ''We shall not under- 
 stand these alterations of consciousness either in 
 this generation or the next." 
 
 The right self-contradiction consists not in 
 turning in obedience to others, but in going 
 against the wind from whichever direction it 
 blows. James attacked the too-much in any 
 philosophy, even his own. To the over-credu- 
 lous he preached caution; to the over-sceptical, 
 faith. This sort of antagonism between two 
 ideas is not contradiction but balance of mind. 
 Apropos Professor Schiller and others he de- 
 mands an "all-round statement in classic style," 
 and, himsell the jolliest joker that ever was in 
 philosophy, he recommends that Mr. Schiller 
 "tone down a little the exuberance of his po- 
 lemic wit." But to the too sober he says, "Our 
 errors are not such awfully solemn things. A 
 
 i88
 
 WILLIAM JAMES, MAN OF LETTERS 
 
 certain lightness of heart seems healthier than 
 this excessive nervousness in their behalf." 
 
 As a philosopher, James had to use the terms 
 peculiar to his craft, but he so strongly sus- 
 tained those terms in a structure of words which 
 can be fond in a pocket-dictionary that the pecu- 
 liar terms of the craft become intelligible to 
 simple literate men, and it may be that thereby 
 they become more intelligible as mere philoso- 
 phic terms. Like Bergson he is a poet and a 
 humorist in his analogies and illustrations. 
 When we read that "the feeling of 'q' knows 
 whatever reality it resembles," many of us, in- 
 cluding the philosophers, I suspect, are lost in 
 the dark. But when we read that "the Kilkenny 
 cats of fable could leave a residuum in the shape 
 of their undevoured tails, but the Kilkenny cats 
 of existence as it appears in the pages of Hegel 
 are all-devouring, and leave no residuum" — 
 then we begin to believe that philosophy may be 
 a human and amusing study and that to be great 
 in philosophy it is not necessary always to be 
 thinking of the other side of the moon. 
 
 189
 
 BIOGRAPHIES OF POE
 
 BIOGRAPHIES OF POE 
 
 The biography of Poe got a wrong start im- 
 mediately after his death when Griswold slan- 
 dered him or at least put a false emphasis on 
 certain aspects of his character. Since then, 
 every book about Poe has had an argumentative 
 tone, a defensive spirit, which in a way is as un- 
 fair to Poe as was the first misrepresentation. 
 One sometimes feels like crying: "For heaven's 
 sake read his work and let the man alone!" Yet 
 it is not possible to let Poe alone if you have once 
 looked into his life; his story is one of the fas- 
 cinating chapters of literary history. Professor 
 Smith says that his book, "Edgar Allen Poe, 
 How to Know Him," "is an attempt to substi- 
 tute for the travesty the real Poe, to suggest at 
 least the diversity of his interests, his future- 
 mindedness, his sanity, and his humanity." On 
 the whole. Professor Smith's attempt is success- 
 ful and he does help us to realize Poe's person- 
 ality, "that co-ordination of thought and mood 
 and conduct, of social action and reaction, of 
 daily interest and aim," which Professor Smith 
 justly says, "finds no portrayal in the biograph- 
 ies of Poe." 
 
 193
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 It is an odd fact that after Griswold two of 
 the more authoritative biographers of Poe did 
 not like him. One was Richard Henry Stod- 
 dard; the other, Mr. George E. Woodberry. 
 Neither one, I suspect, chose Poe as a congenial, 
 or even as an interesting subject. The task of 
 writing his biography seems to have fallen to 
 both men as a literary chore ; to Stoddard as an 
 official critic who knew Poe, and to Mr. Wood- 
 berry as a rising young man of literary talent 
 who thirty years ago was selected by the editor 
 of the "American Men of Letters" to write the 
 life of Poe. Of course, Mr. Woodberry is a 
 competent workman. When, in the year of 
 Poe's centennial, he enlarged his "Life" to two 
 volumes, he put together in a judicial, objective 
 style probably all the facts that we need to 
 know. But his aesthetic judgments are at best 
 unsympathetic. It may be that the lyric "To 
 Helen" has been overpraised, though it is dif- 
 ficult to understand how there can be too much 
 praise for a masterpiece. And when Mr. Wood- 
 berry says of our American writers that they 
 were concerned "not with the transitory, but the 
 eternal; and, excepting Poe, they were all ar- 
 tists of the beautiful," we seem to have an ex- 
 ample of that sort of moralistic aesthetics which 
 sounds lofty but is only bosh. "If Poe was not 
 
 194
 
 BIOGRAPHIES OF POE 
 
 an artist of the beautiful," Professor Smith 
 asks, "what was he an artist of?" 
 
 That is a good, sensible question and Profess- 
 or Smith's answer, if not as eloquent as some 
 things that have been written by Poe's Europ- 
 ean admirers, is sound and appreciative. If it 
 be an American tendency to overrate our na- 
 tional men of genius, we have certainly not dis- 
 played that tendency in relation to the Amer- 
 ican writer who more than any other has cap- 
 tured the imagination of Europeans, for un- 
 doubtedly the finest criticism of Poe has come 
 from our brethren overseas. Stoddard had but 
 a grudging sense of Poe's merits and ends his 
 account with a remark which contains a partial 
 truth but which, although it is quoted from Dr. 
 Johnson, is a flat anti-climax: "All that can be 
 told with certainty is that he was poor." There 
 S/eems to be a good deal more to tell than that, 
 and, indeed, the implications of Poe's poverty, 
 as it affected the artist, are better expressed by 
 Stoddard himself when he says that Poe "wrote 
 with fastidious difficulty, and in a style too 
 much above the popular level to be well paid." 
 
 American criticism of Poe is thick with mor- 
 alisms. Thus ftowell wrote: "As a critic Mr. 
 Poe was aesthetically deficient ... he seemed 
 wanting in the faculty of perceiving the pro- 
 founder ethics of art." But, we may well ask, 
 
 195
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 what is "the profounder ethics of art," and who, 
 except a New England preacher, wants to be 
 bothered with it in lyric poetry? Poe alway? 
 focused his attention on beauty, on excellence of 
 workmanship, both in the work of other crafts- 
 men and in his own. The Scottish critic, Mr. 
 John M. Robertson, seems to be nearer the 
 truth than Lowell when he says that Poe "has 
 left a body of widely various criticism which, 
 as such, will better stand critical examination 
 to-day than any similar work produced in Eng- 
 land or America in his time." I am glad to see 
 that Professor Smith regards Mr. Robertson's 
 essay on Poe as "the ablest brief treatment in 
 any language." The only exception, which Mr. 
 Robertson himself would be the first to make, 
 is the essay by the French critic Emile Hen- 
 nequin. 
 
 But Professor Smith does not quite escape 
 American moralism in his effort to accentuate 
 Poe's virtues. He makes too much of Poe's in- 
 terest in religion, which was surely nothing but 
 a purely intellectual and critical interest, and 
 his recurrent emphasis on Poe's Americanism 
 is too tiresomely patriotic even for a professor 
 in the United States Naval Academy. Poe was 
 keen for the best interests of American litera- 
 ture, zealous in searching out any note of prom- 
 ise in a new poet and in pointing to the weak 
 spots in men of acknowledged talent. He some- 
 
 196
 
 BIOGRAPHIES OF POE 
 
 times exhibits a kind of local Southern patriot- 
 ism which does not much interest us now. But 
 on the whole, he was detached from the issues 
 of politics, an unlocalized, almost disembodied 
 genius whose apparition in the United States of 
 America is still an endless wonder to European 
 critics. 
 
 One possible influence of Poe's environment 
 on his art Professor Smith is, so far as I know, 
 the first to point out; and it is a very valuable 
 suggestion, even if it can not be thoroughly 
 proved. In Virginia, more than in any other 
 American State, the English and Scots ballads 
 survive by oral tradition. It is possible that as 
 a child Poe heard these ballads recited or sung, 
 and from them derived his sense of refrain and 
 repetition. To the influence of the ballad Pro- 
 fessor Smith adds the possible influence of plan- 
 tation melodies as "subsidiary sources of Poe's 
 lyrical technique." He is certainly right in 
 thinking that Poe's originality consists not in 
 the contribution of a new form to poetry but 
 in his individual development of forms already 
 established. His charm resides in the color of 
 his words rather than in the shape of his stanzas. 
 But of course the two things are inseparable 
 and whoever tries to analyse them is hopelessly 
 baffled. Poe's own attempt to explain how the 
 trick is done is far from explaining it, and if he 
 
 197
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 could not expound in prose the secret of poetry, 
 nobody can. 
 
 For Poe was first and always a critic, inquis- 
 itive of methods, and making his effects with 
 cool calculation. Even if his tales of horror no 
 longer give us the creeps, they will always 
 give to any one who cares about writing, that 
 shiver of pleasure which comes when we watch 
 a dexterous craftsman at work. Professor Smith 
 calls Poe the "father of the short story," but he 
 came too late to be credited with such paternity. 
 After all, Boccaccio and whoever made *'The 
 Arabian Nights" lived long before Poe, and in 
 Poe's stories are evident traces of old tales of 
 magic and mystery. What Poe did was to ra- 
 tionalize the short story so highly, in some 
 cases, as to sacrifice the illusion of spontaneity 
 which is one of the merits of a tale that seems 
 to tell itself. 
 
 With the purpose of suggesting the range of 
 Poe's intellectual interest and of classifying 
 some of his miscellaneous work that does not 
 fall into certain obvious groups. Professor 
 Smith has adopted the term "frontiersman." 
 The image evoked by that word somehow does 
 not fit Poe. He was, in a sense, an explorer of 
 ideas, and he had a genuine gift for philosophy 
 which he did not live to develop. We could 
 spare many of his short stories rather than lose 
 
 198
 
 BIOGRAPHIES OF POE ' 
 
 ''Eureka." If it is not profound philosophy and 
 if it docs not solve the riddle of the universe, it 
 is profound in its beauty, a prose poem. Poe's 
 science is obsolete, no doubt, and even in the 
 science of his day he was little more than an 
 amateur. But the mark of a great intellect is on 
 every page. An amazing mind! He succeeded 
 in all forms of literary art which he tried. If 
 the poet or the critic or the short-story writer 
 should be obliterated, there would still remain 
 a man of genius. 
 
 Critics and biographers of Poe, like Poe him- 
 self, cannot let his drink alone. They deny or 
 blame or pity without understanding. The ques- 
 tion of Poe and alcohol seems to have been fin- 
 ally answered by a California physician, John 
 W. Robertson, in a book which I have not seen 
 but which I know only through reviewers' ac- 
 counts of it. This physician finds from the evi- 
 dence that Poe was a dipsomaniac. Dipsomania 
 is not drunkenness nor riotous dissipation; it is 
 a disease. Poe, like other victims of the disease, 
 had to have periodic bouts with the demon, got 
 fearfully sick, and when he recovered stayed 
 cold sober until his next attack. This accounts 
 for Poe's written anathemas against alcohol, 
 which puzzled Remy de Gourmont. De Gour- 
 mont says: '*Il ne pouvait plus travailler que 
 dans I' hallucination de Vivresse." Quite the 
 
 199
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 contrary is the case. Poe could not do a stroke 
 of work under the inspiration of whiskey; he 
 was not one of those mad geniuses who con- 
 ceive masterpieces in a tavern or with a bottle 
 beside the ink-pot. That is proved, or indicated, 
 by his critical clarity, the almost passionless ra- 
 tionality of his tales and poems, and even by the 
 physical perfection of his manuscripts. He 
 worked between his joyless debauches, and he 
 worked hard. His melancholy and love of ter- 
 ror, his preoccupation with defects of will and 
 remorse, whatever "morbidity" there is in his 
 writings, may have some relation to his disease. 
 But as an artist he achieved his dark effects by 
 sheer force of intellect in hours of clear-eyed 
 sobriety. Only in a literary sense is he the au- 
 thor of "MS. Found in a Bottle." 
 
 200
 
 OTATE TEACKEr?;« C 
 SANTA BAK£ARA - 
 
 ^?f/ 
 
 BIOGRAPHIES OF WHITMAN
 
 BIOGRAPHIES OF WHITMAN. 
 
 The one fault that can be found with Trau- 
 bel's "With Walt Whitman in Camden" is that 
 there is too much of it. But that is a fault easily 
 remedied without blotting a line of the record. 
 Books that contain too little may cheat us of 
 desired knowledge, whereas books that contain 
 too much can do no harm; every reader has the 
 privilege of not reading at all or of dipping in- 
 to a book here and there. Traubel's method is 
 admirable; it is that of a documentary historian. 
 He set down Whitman's talk and such impres- 
 sions and facts as the biographer recorded at the 
 moment, and he reproduced the letters in the 
 order in which Whitman gave them to him. He 
 did not presume to select from Whitman's con- 
 versation what now seems most interesting or 
 most to Whitman's credit, but he gave you all 
 that he had for you to enjoy or ignore and for 
 other biographers and historians to make use of 
 as they will. 
 
 Traubel made no concessions to the fact that 
 readers have to catch trains and read other 
 books, and he ignored, perhaps to his personal 
 
 203
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 disadvantage, certain exigencies of publication, 
 such as the publisher's obvious need to interest 
 as many people as possible with the least pos- 
 sible expenditure. Traubel's method is simple 
 from an artistic point of view, requiring nothing 
 but accuracy, courage and industry. Yet the 
 method is a great strain on all concerned. Trau- 
 bel could stand it. Evidently the publishers 
 thought they could stand it. The reader can 
 stand it, because, as I have said, he can take as 
 much or as little as suits him. The real ques- 
 tion is whether Whitman can stand it. And the 
 amazing man can stand it. Consider that in the 
 years when Traubel knew him Whitman was 
 an invalid, broken by his services as nurse and 
 brother of soldiers during the war. He was a 
 garrulous old man talking to men who loved 
 him and who, though no servile worshippers of 
 him or anyone else, encouraged him to reminis- 
 cence and the utterance of offhand opinion. Now 
 that is a severe test. Not many old men, even 
 men of great achievement in action or art, could 
 last for more than a small volume. Whitman is 
 worth these hundreds and hundreds of pages. 
 For he was a great talker, full of experience and 
 endowed with the gift of speech. Almost every 
 day, according to Traubel's record, he hit off 
 an interesting idea and turned it in a Whitman- 
 ese way. He repeats himself. He makes re- 
 
 204
 
 BIOGRAPHIES OF WHITMAN 
 
 marks that do not amount to much. But he is 
 never a bore. Line by line he and Traubel, ego- 
 tists both, but honest, thoughtful, artfully inar- 
 tistic, have drawn a portrait, the like of which 
 is not to be found. For once a literary man is as 
 big as his literary work. Traubel was a very 
 happy biographer, for he had a sort of mono- 
 poly of a great subject, and he had not the slight- 
 est temptation to omit or defend. 
 
 An admirer has called Traubel's work "the 
 most truthful biography in the language." To 
 use the informal mode of Walt Whitman and 
 of his biographer, that ain't exactly so. It ain't 
 the most truthful biography; it's simply a true 
 biography. 
 
 "Lincoln," said Whitman, "don't need ador- 
 ers, worshippers — he needs friends. . . . The 
 great danger with Lincoln for the next fifty 
 years will be that he will be overdone, over-ex- 
 plained, over-exploited — made a good deal too 
 much of — gather about himself a rather myth- 
 ical aureole." From such danger Traubel did 
 his best to protect Whitman; the biogra- 
 pher's multitudinous veracity preserves a real 
 man and is a heavy impediment to the critic and 
 literary historian of the future who may try to 
 disobey Whitman's injunction not to "prettify" 
 him. If that impossible and tedious universe, 
 the "whole" truth, is not comprehended in these 
 
 205
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 prolific pages, the errors and omissions are due 
 not to the biographer, but to Whitman himself, 
 who had a silent as well as a loquacious side; he 
 had unexplained depths which probably he did 
 not understand himself. When he spoke he tried 
 to say what he thought, but often he did not 
 speak at all, and at least once he said to Trau- 
 bel : "I don't care to talk about that." 
 
 The writer of fiction may invent substance to 
 fit an artistic scheme. The compiler of facts 
 may, under certain conditions, disregard liter- 
 ary form. The biographer or the historian who 
 will have his work read must play skilfully be- 
 tween the double restriction of substance and 
 form. He must be at once man of science and 
 artist. Because of its very great difficulties, be- 
 cause of the high demands it makes upon the 
 writer, biography is rarely well done. One can 
 name few masterpieces of biography in English. 
 Perhaps the only masterpiece that everybody 
 will name is BoswelTs Johnson, that extraordi- 
 nary performance which heaved literary history 
 out of shape and keeps it in a permanent state 
 of distortion. For Johnson was not a first-rate 
 man of letters; he wrote little that is even toler- 
 able to read; his letter to Chesterfield and the 
 preface to the Dictionary are his most vital pro- 
 ductions. Moreover, Boswell was a foreordain- 
 ed nonentity. Yet he was a great artist and 
 
 206
 
 BIOGRAPHIES OF WHITMAN 
 
 Johnson was a great person, and the two of them 
 made a great book; it is a puzzle which makes 
 one fall back, outwitted, to the last ditch of ad- 
 fectives. 
 
 Whitman's opinion of Johnson is interesting, 
 if only in relation to his own biographer's 
 methods. Johnson knew that Boswell was making 
 notes. Traubel, whose word is infallibly good, 
 says that Whitman did not know that his bio- 
 grapher was keeping a record. Whitman did 
 know that Traubel would write about him and 
 he selected the letters and other documents for 
 the "archives." But he was not aware that 
 Traubel was making a diary. Therefore when 
 he talked he was free at least from the con- 
 straint imposed on a man who knows that his 
 spoken words are to appear in print. 
 
 When Whitman was 69 years old he began 
 to read Boswell ; he refers to him a dozen times 
 in the course of the year, thereby showing that 
 Boswell interested him, for when Whitman was 
 not interested in a book he simply forgot it. He 
 thought that Johnson "talked for effect — seemed 
 rather inclined to bark men down, like the big- 
 gest dog — indeed, a spice of dishonesty palpably 
 possessed him. Johnson tried rather to impress 
 than to be true." "He was on stilts always — he 
 belongs to the self-conscious literary class, who 
 iive in a house of rules and never get into the 
 
 207
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 open air." However, note this significant con- 
 fession: "I read it through, looked it through, 
 rather — persisted in spite of fifty temptations to 
 throw it down. I don't know who tried me most 
 — -Johnson or Boswell. The book lasts — it seems 
 to have elements of life — but I will do nothing 
 to pass it on." There is the comment of the lion 
 on the bear. No, these zoological metaphors 
 are quite false. Benevolent and burly male per- 
 sons are not, even by Whitmanian identifica- 
 tions, to be named with the brutes. 
 
 Some day a biographer with the right talent 
 and in possession of all Traubel's material, cog- 
 nizant of social ideals and facts and sensitive 
 to poetry, will write a good life of Whitman. So 
 far as I know, there is no satisfactory biography 
 of our one magnificent American poet. Traubel 
 was not able to do it. He was properly employed 
 in gathering and publishing the fundamental 
 record. Moreover, his style, perfectly fitted to 
 short hand notes, is, in continuous composition, 
 abominable. I loved him with all my Whit- 
 manian heart and read him, because of every 
 four of his sentences one says something worth 
 while. But ten sentences of his in a row hurt 
 like a corduroy road. I have to get out and walk 
 and rub myself. 
 
 Several literary men have tried to write Whit- 
 man's life and they have failed. Professor Bliss 
 
 208
 
 BIOGRAPHIES OF WHITMAN 
 
 Perry's book is fatuous. He had no excuse to 
 write about Whitman at all, except in so far 
 forth as a publisher's request to an alleged liter- 
 ary man to do a book for an established series 
 furnishes a practical excuse. 
 
 The critical study of Whitman by Mr. Basil 
 De Selincourt is sympathetic and discerning as 
 regards what may be called the purely literary 
 side. He understands what Whitman says and 
 takes him for granted as one of the world's sup- 
 reme poets. He conceives the essential unity of 
 Whitman's thought, a unity that should be ob- 
 vious but evidently is not to some readers and 
 critics who treat Whitman as a collection of 
 more or less impressive fragments. Mr. De Sel- 
 incourt's analysis of Whitman's form is instruc- 
 tive, appreciative, though a trifle academic, not 
 wholly emancipated from schoolroom rules of 
 prosody. If you will read Whitman aloud, pro- 
 nouncing the words as they are pronounced in 
 prose, and emphasizing them according to the 
 sense, the scansion will take care of itself. When 
 a line is bad (and Whitman, like most of the 
 other great poets, wrote bad lines) it won't work 
 by any effort of elocution. The good lines, if 
 you have an ear in your head and a tongue in 
 your mouth, chant themselves, and you can for- 
 get all about iambics and hexameters. 
 
 Where Mr. De Selincourt fails is in his ac- 
 209
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 count of Whitman's notions of liberty, demo- 
 cracy, America, the future. Book-people do not 
 understand these things, especially English 
 book-people, who assume that America pro- 
 duced Whitman because it was a land of liberty. 
 It was not. It was, like the rest of the world, a 
 land of plutocracy, convention, servility. It is 
 complimentary to us but unhappily not true to 
 say that "America stands for the passionate re- 
 assertion of certain beliefs which life, to those 
 who look back upon it, seems always to stultify, 
 but which, to those who can look forward, ap- 
 pears as the very spirit and power of life itself 
 — 'the urge, the ardour, the unconquerable 
 will'." 
 
 As a matter of fact, America does not stand 
 for any such thing and Whitman does not stand 
 for America. He is a revolutionist in revolt 
 against the American iact and celebrating a. 
 possible American future. Official America 
 tried to throttle him. Conventional America 
 ignored him. Literary and revolutionary spirits 
 in England and America welcomed him, for 
 they are free spirits, intellectually free, under 
 any economic conditions and in any part of the 
 world. Whitman himself did not understand 
 why he was acclaimed in England by more men 
 and better men than in America. It was simply 
 because English thinkers, writers, poets, with 
 
 210
 
 BIOGRAPHIES OF WHITMAN 
 
 minds capable of appreciating him, outnumbered 
 their American brothers ten to one. 
 
 Two American ladies once called on Tenny- 
 son. He asked them whether they knew Walt 
 Whitman. They confessed that they did not. 
 "Then," said he, "you do not know the greatest 
 man in America." 
 
 211
 
 GEORGE E. WOODBERRY
 
 GEORGE E. WOODBERRY. ' 
 
 A man's place in the generations of mankind 
 is not wholly determined by the date of his 
 birth. If William James were alive he would 
 be eighty years old ; but he belongs to us, to the 
 living present. Mr. George Edward Wood- 
 berry is only sixty-seven; yet he already seems 
 like the last figure in a tradition which has 
 come to an end — so far as any period in liter- 
 ature may truly be said to end. James was 
 aware of something like this twenty years ago. 
 He gave Mr. Woodberry the praise that is his 
 due, but expressed at the same time his essential 
 weakness. Of "The Heart of Man" James wrote 
 in a letter: 
 
 The essays are grave and noble in the extreme. I hail another 
 American author. They can't be popular, and for cause. The 
 respect of him for the Queen's English, the classic leisureliness 
 and explicitness, which give so rare a dignity to his style, also 
 take from it that which our generation seems to need, ,the 
 sudden word, the unmeditated transition, the flash of perception 
 that makes reasonings unnecessary. Poor Woodberry, so high, 
 so true, so good, so original in his total make-up, and yet so 
 unoriginal if you take him spot-wise — and therefore so ineffective. 
 
 Mr. Woodberry is not out of date in a mere 
 journalistic sense or in the hasty judgment of an 
 irreverent generation which affects a trivial 
 
 215
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 contemporaniety and regards even the end of 
 the last century as old fogy. He is out of date 
 because he did not gear with his own times, but 
 remained aloof and backward-looking and so 
 became the last of the Lowells instead of the first 
 of the Woodberrys. It could not have been a 
 conscious or servile emulation on his part, for he 
 has a spirit of his own. But his surroundings 
 and his education were too strong for his fine 
 talent. He was brought up in the twilight of the 
 New England demigods. They handed him the 
 "torch," and he has carried it with pious de- 
 votion. To younger men as docile as himself, 
 he became, almost officially, the representative 
 in the flesh of the elders over whose graves he 
 prayed. His publishers announce with pride, 
 with no sense of the depressing implications of 
 what they are saying, that there is a Woodberry 
 Society, "probably the ' only organization in 
 America dedicated to a living writer." Thus 
 the anachronism is fulfilled. Mr. Woodberry 
 was old when he was young, and he is an institu- 
 tion before he is dead. Some books are epoch 
 making; other books, even great and original 
 books, lie comfortably in their times without be- 
 ing either innovative or conclusive; Mr. Wood- 
 bery's six solid volumes* are epoch closing, a 
 
 *Collected Essays of George Edward Woodberry. 6 vols. 
 New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1921. 
 
 2l6
 
 GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 
 
 collection of such words as will not be written 
 again by a man of genuine talent and wisdom. 
 
 The feeling that Mr. Woodberry is a voice 
 from the past that immediately preceded him 
 comes over me most heavily when I read his es- 
 says on Lowell's Addresses, on Democracy, and 
 on Wendell Phillips. It may be only the essay- 
 ist's strict fidelity to Lowell's ideas — no doubt 
 a merit — which leaves the impression that the 
 essayist knows only what Lowell knew and no 
 more, that the pupil has not moved a step be- 
 yond the master. It is Lowell over again with- 
 out the slightest addition from the lessons of 
 time. The London Nation has said of Mr. 
 Woodberry's essays that most of them have "a 
 unity and life that make many of Lowell's seem 
 those of a shrewd but old-fashioned amateur.'* 
 Yet Lowell was at least a vivid amateur, who 
 expressed something that belonged to the 'fifties, 
 'sixties and 'seventies ; and he had an old gentle- 
 man's right to be old in the 'eighties. It is not 
 to be expected that a critic should begin where 
 Lowell leaves off — only a thinker of real genius 
 makes such long strides. But the critic follow- 
 ing Lowell in time and not moving half a step 
 ahead of him seems older than Lowell himself. 
 
 The same thing is true of the address on Wen- 
 dell Phillips, "The Faith of an American." It 
 is fine, even eloquent, but it is abstract and cu- 
 
 217
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 riously old-fashioned. Phillips in his own utter- 
 ances is more of to-day and of to-morrow than 
 is his eulogist who was a child in Beverley when 
 Phillips was in mid-career. The reason, of 
 course, is that Phillips was a fighter, hot with 
 real issues, and it is not the critic's business to 
 fight but to examine the ideas of the fighter. 
 These ideas necessarily become somewhat ab- 
 stract when a critic quotes or rephrases them, 
 especially since Phillips was an orator and flung 
 at his audiences sweeping generalities which in 
 a less inspired man are mere tall talk. But Mr. 
 Woodberry devitalizes Phillips, especially the 
 later Phillips who went on from one issue to the 
 next until he dropped. Mr. Woodberry has not 
 a single clear, plain word about one of Phillips' 
 last fights, that for the Labor party. Mr. 
 Woodberry stops with the actual Phillips before 
 Phillips stopped, and the end of the address 
 fades out in vagueness and platitude. There is 
 something rather touching about Mr. Wood- 
 berry's declaration: ^'I know that what I have 
 said to-night is heavy with risk." One looks in 
 vain to discover the risk. Surely in 191 1, when 
 the address was delivered, a man might talk in 
 Mr. Woodberry's mild way every night in the 
 week and invite no more severe punishment than 
 a scolding from Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler. 
 Mr. Woodberry's ideas and his expressions 
 218
 
 GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 
 
 are all gentle, though not timid nor emasculate. 
 His general faith in "Democracy" is too serene- 
 ly above the tumult to disturb anybody or pro- 
 voke a riot call in the quietude of Beverley, I 
 do not know vs^hat he means by "Democracy," 
 whether such actual democracy as existed in 
 America in 1899, or some beautiful dream of 
 the future. If democracy is a dream, an unreal- 
 ized dream, then any beautiful thing a poet says 
 about it is true. But Mr. Woodberry seems to 
 be talking about something actually existing, 
 something already realized in considerable part 
 if not completely, for he says: "Democracy has 
 its great career, for the first time, in our national 
 being, and exhibits here most purely its form- 
 ative powers, and unfolds destiny on the grand 
 scale." That was not true twenty years ago, and 
 it is certainly not true now. It is the sort of 
 thing that Emerson and Lowell could say with 
 rousing conviction, but twenty years ago it was 
 as obsolete as a beaver hat except in newspaper 
 editorials and political speeches, where it is still 
 going strong — even if not quite so strong as it 
 used to be. 
 
 Mr. Woodberry seems to imply that he is 
 somewhat more of a realist than Lowell. But 
 he is in fact less of a realist than Lowell; for 
 Lowell in his time did grapple with the facts 
 of politics. In poetry it is not necessary, it is 
 
 219
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 better not, to be a realist. But in dealing with 
 politics and contemporaneous history the true 
 citizen must be a realist and leave it to the pol- 
 iticians to fly with the eagle. No wisdom is to 
 be derived from such a statement as this : "There 
 is always an ideality of the human spirit in all 
 its [Democracy's] works, if one will search 
 them out." Or this: "Democracy is a mode of 
 dealing with souls." Or this: "Not that other 
 governments have not had regard to the soul, 
 but in democracy, it is spirituality that gives the 
 law and rules the issue." It is, alas, not true 
 that "education, high education even, is more 
 respected and counts for more in a democracy 
 than under the older systems," or that "the law 
 becomes the embodied persuasion of the com- 
 munity," or that "all these blessings [aversion 
 to war, devotion to public duty and many other 
 enumerated virtues] unconfined as the element, 
 belong to all our people." 
 
 Mr. Woodberry's democracy simply does not 
 exist and never did exist. Yet there is one exist- 
 ent glory of my country which I believe I ap- 
 preciate better than he does. He says: "It be- 
 hooves us, especially, to be modest, for our mag- 
 nificent America has never yet produced a poet 
 even of the rank of Gray." That was written 
 fourteen years after the death of Whitman. Mr. 
 Woodberry's democracy had not yet come along, 
 
 220
 
 GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 
 
 but one of its great poets had arrived and de- 
 parted leaving Mr. Woodberry none the wiser. 
 There is another glory of my country which I 
 appreciate better than Mr. Woodberry does — 
 Poe, whose poetry Mr, Woodberry has never 
 understood, though he has written what is alto- 
 gether the best biography of the man! To save 
 the six best lyrics of Poe, I would, if such a sac- 
 rifice were necessary, cheerfully sink Gray in 
 the deepest sea of oblivion, "Elegy," letters and 
 all. But that is only a slight difference of judg- 
 ment, and there is no more futile business than 
 to draw up minor poets in grades and ranks. 
 Whitman is another matter; the critic who 
 misses him in this day of the world is simply in- 
 competent. The excuse for Mr. Woodberry is 
 that he does not belong to this day of the world. 
 There is something pathetic about Mr, Wood- 
 berry's patriotism. He sincerely believes that 
 "America's title to glory is her service to human 
 liberty." He has never been delivered from the 
 superstition that "the sense of justice is the bed- 
 rock of the Puritan soul" — the Puritan soul, 
 narrow, despotic, cruelly unjust! But when 
 Mr. Woodberry leaves politics and patriotism 
 and religion and returns to art and literature 
 where he is at home, he puts his finger ruefully 
 on the real rock of the Puritan soul, recalling 
 the Puritan's hostility to the theatre and regret- 
 
 2211
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 ting "the American inhibition" "which rejects 
 the nude in sculpture and painting, not only for- 
 feiting thereby the supreme of Greek genius and 
 sanity, but to the prejudice, also, of human dig- 
 nity." Mr. Woodberry is himself a Puritan, 
 yearning to be free but chained to New Eng- 
 land granite, and since he can not get free on 
 this planet he looks up to the heavens where the 
 God of his fathers used to dwell, but where he 
 can find only abstract and vague ideas. Mr. 
 Woodberry's tendency to abstract phrases, 
 which on pressure yield nothing, vitiates his lit- 
 erary essays, the essays in which a professional 
 critic ought to be most concrete, definite, and 
 nourishing. The trouble may be that his views 
 are too high and too broad for the limited vis- 
 ion of a common man; but I think his trouble 
 is that he has not the true philosopher's power 
 to make a long idea, bridging time and space, 
 stand up under its own weight; there is a lack 
 of solid timber and concrete. His best essays 
 are those on individual authors in which he has 
 the selected specific substance of another man's 
 thought to work on. As ought to happen to a 
 sensitive critic, it sometimes happens that Mr. 
 Woodberry's style takes the very tone of his sub- 
 ject. He is whimsical in his charming little es- 
 say on Pepys, an adequate trifle; he is grave and 
 quiet when he writes about Gray; and Swin- 
 
 222
 
 GEORGE E. .WOODBERRY 
 
 burne so stirs him that his prose awakes and 
 sparkles with metaphor. Even in this essay, 
 however, he can not help demoralizing poetry 
 by moralizing it into pseudo-philosophic prose. 
 *'The imagery (of 'Laus Veneris') has more 
 affinity with modes of sacerdotal art, with sym- 
 bolism and the attributive in imaginative power 
 than it has with the free vitality that is more 
 properly the sphere of poetry." What does that 
 mean? What is the sphere of poetry? The es- 
 says on the older poets would make first-rate in- 
 troductions to school texts, and I think some of 
 them have been so used. They suffer from the 
 fact that in Mr. Woodberry's time — and since 
 — so many standard essays on Milton, Shakes- 
 peare, and the rest were written and rewritten, 
 that unless a critic has a fresh point of view, as 
 Mr. Woodberry has not, another essay is simply 
 another essay. 
 
 It must be pleasant to meditate on the great 
 men of letters and from time to time write an 
 essay on Virgil or Montaigne or Matthew 
 Arnold. Some leisure is necessary, for the con- 
 scientious critic must read much, and much 
 reading takes time. It may be that in our nerv- 
 ous age, in this country, the scholarly critic with 
 a true taste for letters has disappeared, to re- 
 turn perhaps in a day when JDemocracy or 
 something better shall have dawned. The com- 
 
 223
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 fortable old tradition is dead or dying, and since 
 its good works are extant in print, we need no 
 more contributions to it. As Mr. Woodberry 
 says in an essay called "Culture of the Old 
 School": "The Gentleman's Magazine — both 
 the name and the thing belong to a bygone 
 time." 
 
 224
 
 ABRAHAM CAHAN
 
 ABRAHAM CAHAN. 
 
 Toward the end of the last century there ap- 
 peared in the magazines some remarkable stor- 
 ies of the East Side of New York by Abraham 
 Cahan. They were not of the crudely comic 
 type of Potash and Perlmutter, nor were they 
 in the somewhat finer mood of sentimental hu- 
 mor which made Myra Kelly deservedly popu- 
 lar. They were humorous and pathetic in a quiet, 
 compelling way, with a gentle austerity of tone 
 even less familiar to American readers then than 
 it is in the days of the Russian invasion. Mr. 
 Howells praised these stories and he and others 
 in editorial authority encouraged the author to 
 write more. A career in the pleasant art of 
 fiction was open to Mr. Cahan. But he with- 
 drew from it and, so far as I know, he wrote no 
 more stories for at least ten years. He has de- 
 voted his energy to building up the great Jew- 
 ish Daily Forward, which is not only the voice 
 of the East Side, but a powerful vehicle of social 
 and political ideals that have not yet penetrated 
 the sanctums of Times Square and of the older 
 newspaper world near City Hall and Civic 
 Virtue. 
 
 227
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 Then, as he approached sixty, Mr. Cahan 
 gave us "The Rise of David Levinsky", a solid 
 mature novel, into which are compacted the re- 
 flections of a lifetime. The publisher's notice 
 called it "a story of success in the turmoil of 
 American life." Probably the writer of those 
 words intended to help the book by the appeal 
 which "success" makes to the American mind, 
 for no reader, not even a publisher's clerk, could 
 miss the immense irony of the story. It is in- 
 deed the story of a failure. The vanity of great 
 riches was never set forth with more searching 
 sincerity. The helplessness of the individual, 
 even the strong and prosperous, in the economic 
 whirlpool, the loneliness and disillusionment 
 only partly assuaged by pride in commercial 
 achievement, the sacrifice of the intellectual life 
 to the practical, these are the fundamental themes 
 of the book. Levinsky, with the instincts of 
 a scholar and a desire for the finest things in 
 life, is swept into business by circumstances 
 which he hardly understands himself and 
 against which he is powerless; once in the game 
 he makes the most of his abilities, but he never 
 ceases to regard his visible good fortune as poor 
 compensation for the invisible things he has 
 missed. His wealth forces him to associate with 
 all that is vulgar and acquisitive in Jewry and 
 isolates him from all that is idealistic. He finds 
 
 228
 
 ABRAHAM CAHAN 
 
 that he cannot even speak the language of the 
 woman he most admires. Worse still, he is out 
 of sympathy with the aspirations of millions of 
 poor Jews from whose ranks he has sprung. He 
 has no sympathy with those who would break 
 the game up or make new rules, yet he sees that 
 the game is hardly worth playing, even for the 
 winner. "Success I Success! Success! It was the 
 almighty goddess of the hour. Thousands of 
 new fortunes were advertising her gaudy splen- 
 dors. Newspapers, magazines, and public 
 speeches were full of her glory, and he who 
 found favor in her eyes found favor in the eyes 
 of man." 
 
 The portrait of David Levinsky is a portrait 
 of society, not simply of the Jewish section of 
 it, or of New York, but of American business. 
 And business is business whether done by Jew 
 or Gentile. If Levinsky is a triumphant failure, 
 he is so because American business, which shaped 
 him to its ends, is, viewed from any decent 
 regard for humanity, a miserable monster of 
 success. Not that Levinsky is an abstraction, or 
 that the novelist is forcing a thesis. Far from 
 it. The personality of Levinsky is as sharply 
 individualized as the hero of Meredith's "One 
 of Our Conquerors," though with a different 
 kind of subtlety, the subtlety not of detached 
 
 229
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 analysis, but of naively simple self-revelation, 
 which of course is not so simple as it sounds. 
 
 Mr. Cahan knows how to think through his 
 characters, by letting them do the thinking, as 
 if it were their affair and not his. At the same 
 time he does not perform (nor does any other 
 artist) that foolish and meaningless operation, 
 as expressed by a great poet through a young 
 critic, of holding *'the mirror up to nature." 
 Nature in a mirror is just nature, not nature 
 thought out, excogitated, turned to human uses, 
 interpreted in human words. And this is the 
 place to say that Mr. Cahan knows how to use 
 words. There are no great phrases in this book. 
 A simple and (intellectually) honest business 
 man writing his autobiography would not use 
 a great phrase; such a phrase might issue from 
 some enviable person in that intellectual life 
 from which Levinsky was excluded. But there 
 is no banal or inept phrase. Such a man as Mr. 
 Cahan intends Levinsky to be, a man trained 
 in the Talmud, which means verbal sense, and 
 hammered by the facts of life, which means a 
 sense of reality, and a wistful failure, which 
 means imaginative retrospection, says things in 
 a direct, firm, accurate style. 
 
 There is no lack of emotion; strong feeling, 
 expressed or implied, runs through the book 
 from beginning to end. But there is a complete 
 
 230 .
 
 ABRAHAM CAHAN 
 
 absence of eloquence, a deliberate refraining 
 from emphasis, an even manner of setting forth 
 ideas and events impartially for the value in- 
 herent in them, an admirable method, the 
 method of a philosophic artist. Here is life, some 
 of it is good, some of it is bad; it is all some- 
 what pitiable, to be laughed at rather than cried 
 over; nobody is deserving of indignant blame 
 or abuse. It is our business to understand it as 
 well as we can; and though we never can see it 
 in its entirety or with complete clearness, if we 
 make an honest effort to record events and de- 
 lineate personalities, the events will arrange 
 themselves in a more or less intelligible se- 
 quence, and the personalities will be their own 
 commentary upon themselves. An obvious 
 method, but you will read many a book to find 
 one skilful application of it. 
 
 It seems to me the method most often em- 
 ployed and carried to the highest degree of per- 
 fection by the great Russians. I am driven to the 
 timidity of "seems" because we do much talk- 
 ing about Russian novels without having read 
 many of them or understanding what we have 
 read. But better-informed critics than I have 
 noted that one characteristic of the Russian novel 
 is a benevolent impartiality in its treatment 
 of all kinds of people and a calm contempla- 
 tion of events horrible, gay, sad, comic. A rev- 
 
 231
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 olutionist can portray, in fiction, a commission- 
 er of police, whom in real life he would be 
 willing to kill, with a fairness that is more than 
 fair, with a combination of Olympian serenity 
 and human sympathy. He can be a virulent 
 propagandist when he is writing pamphlets, 
 and when he writes fiction he can forget his 
 propaganda or subdue it to art, that is, to a bal- 
 anced sense of life. 
 
 When I say that Mr. Cahan's novel sounds 
 like a good translation of a Russian novel, and 
 that he is a disciple of the Russian novelists, I 
 accuse him of the crime of being an artist and 
 a seer. As a matter of biography, he is a child 
 of Russian literature. And that is why his novel, 
 written in faultless English, is a singular and 
 solitary performance in American fiction. If 
 that strange demand for "the" or "a great 
 American novel," a demand which is at once 
 foolish and the expression of a justifiably proud 
 feeling that a big country ought to have big 
 books, is to be satisfied, perhaps we shall have 
 to ask an East Side Jew to write it for us. That 
 would be an interesting phenomenon for some 
 future Professor Wendell to deal with in a His- 
 tory of American Literature. And by the way, 
 Mr. Cahan is a competent critic. I hope he will 
 give us not only more novels, but a study of Rus- 
 sian literature for the enlightenment of the 
 
 232
 
 ABRAHAM CAHAN 
 
 American mind. I remember with gratitude 
 an article of his which I read when I was even 
 more ignorant than I am now, on the modern 
 successors to the group of Titans, Turgenev, 
 Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. He put Maxim Gorky in 
 his place and told us (this was before the Rus- 
 sian invasion) about Andreyev and Chekhov. 
 If Mr. Cahan will write a book on Russian lit- 
 erature, I will do my best to establish bin* in his 
 merited place in American literature. 
 
 233
 
 JHOMAS HARDY
 
 THOMAS HARDY. 
 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw says, apropos Samuel 
 Butler, that the English people do not deserve to 
 have a genius. Butler himself in a note remarks 
 that America, even America, v^ill probably have 
 men of genius, has indeed, already had one, 
 Walt Whitman, but that he cannot imagine any 
 country where a genius would have more un- 
 fortunate surroundings than in America. Mr. 
 Arnold Bennett sends a shot from the same gun 
 in "Milestones," when he makes the millionaire 
 shipbuilder puff his chest and say that there 
 is no greater honor to English character than 
 the way we treat our geniuses. Egad! The un- 
 worthiness of the British and American nations 
 to have artists born to them was never more 
 shamefully manifested than by the reception ac- 
 corded thirty years ago to Hardy's "Jude, the 
 Obscure." Harper's Magazine, which seems to 
 have begun printing the story before the editors 
 had seen the complete manuscript, fell into tem- 
 porary disfavor with some outraged readers. 
 One British journal distinguished itself by re- 
 viewing the book under the caption, "Jude, the 
 Obscene."
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 It is inconceivable that any nation on the con- 
 tinent of Europe could, through its critics or 
 through any considerable number of readers, so 
 dishonor a masterpiece. For "Jude" is a master- 
 piece; if it is not Hardy's greatest novel, it is one 
 of his three or four greatest, and that means one 
 of a score of supreme works of prose fiction 
 in the language. If profundity of substance and 
 skill in narrative are both considered. Hardy is 
 without rival among British novelists. His is 
 the crowning achievement in the century of fic- 
 tion that began with Jane Austen and, happily, 
 has not yet terminated with Joseph Conrad. In 
 his hands the English novel assumed a form 
 which, perhaps without good critical reason, 
 one thinks of as French. Despite the racy local- 
 ism of scene and character, Hardy's work seems 
 alien to the Anglo-Saxon temperament; it has 
 less in common with the spacious days of great 
 Victoria than with a younger time, whose liv- 
 ing masters, Mr. Conrad and Mr. Galsworthy, 
 for example, have taken lessons in art across the 
 channel. 
 
 In a prefatory note to "Desperate Remedies," 
 dated February, 1896, Hardy lets fall a casual 
 phrase which indicates that he and others had 
 noted his kinship to the French, but that he was 
 not disposed to acknowledge it fully. He seems 
 to say, with that kind of modest pride which 
 
 238 -
 
 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 distinguishes him, that he found his method for 
 himself, played the game alone. "As it hap- 
 pened," runs the note, "that certain characteris- 
 tics which provoked most discussion in my latest 
 story [*Jude'?] were present in this my first — 
 published in 1871, when there was no French 
 name for them — it has seemed best to let them 
 stand unaltered." What characteristics does he 
 intend? And was there no French name for 
 them in 1871? Or had not the British critics 
 begun to use the French name? Are these char- 
 acteristics his candor, his logic, his classic fin- 
 ish of phrase, a certain cool stateliness of man- 
 ner, an impersonal, distant way of treating most 
 tender and poignant subjects, a lucid, ironic 
 view of life, perfect proportion, large intellec- 
 tual pity and freedom from cant, from sentimen- 
 tality? These are some of his virtues and they 
 are the virtues of several modern French 
 novelists and some of the Russian pupils of the 
 French. 
 
 If the ill reception of "Jude" caused Mr. 
 Hardy to foreswear fiction, then the fools have 
 in a way done us harm by cheating us of two 
 or three great novels. Yet genius takes its re- 
 venge on a dull world, especially if it is pros- 
 perous genius, too well established to be starved 
 out by the stupidity of an inartistic people. If 
 Hardy had been encouraged to write more 
 
 239
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 novels perhaps we should not have had "The 
 Dynasts." And by and by w^e shall discover 
 what a loss that would have been. It is the 
 greatest epic that we have been privileged to 
 read since Tolstoy's "War and Peace." And it 
 is the best long poem in English since Morris's 
 "The Earthly Paradise." Though it is cast in 
 scenes and acts it is not a drama except in a 
 vast untechnical sense of the word. But epic 
 it is, creation of an enormous imagination 
 which sweeps the universe and manages a cos- 
 mic panorama as commandingly as the] same 
 imagination dominates a rural kingdom of 
 farms and desolate heaths. If "The Dynasts" 
 and Hardy's shorter poems lack one thing, that 
 one thing is the magical and haunting line, that 
 concatenation of words which is everlastingly 
 beautiful in the context or detached from it. 
 Morris knew that magic. He was born with 
 it, and no reader of Morris, except a critic, will 
 be deceived by his own denial of his divinity 
 when he said in his honest, off-hand way, sen- 
 sible as Anthony Trollope, that inspiration is 
 nonsense and verse is easy to write. 
 
 "The Dynasts" is an extraordinary poem. It 
 is not French, it is not Greek, it is not like any- 
 thing else in English. Hardy has discarded 
 Christian mythology. He is not childish 
 enough to revert to the Greek. He has in- 
 
 240
 
 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 vented a new one. His celestial machinery is 
 as strange an apparition in the heavens as the 
 first aeroplane. His hero, Napoleon, rises 
 above the human stature by which the realistic 
 novelist measures man and becomes not only a 
 tool of destiny but a demigod who seems to 
 understand destiny and share the secrets of that 
 impersonal goddess. Those who are curious 
 about Hardy's philosophy (we like his art; his 
 philosophy may lie down and die on the shelf 
 with the other philosophies) will find the clos- 
 ing chorus of "The Dynasts" significant: 
 
 But — a stirring thrills the air 
 Like to sounds of joyance there 
 That the rages 
 Of the ages 
 Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that 
 
 were, 
 Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things fair! 
 
 Such is the ultimate word of this artist who 
 so keenly loves beauty, yet, like some neo-Puri- 
 tan and latter-day ascetic, cannot draw a lovely 
 woman without reminding you that the skull 
 under the cheeks and behind the passionate eyes 
 is not pretty and will probably endure a long 
 time under ground. Is he of like mind with 
 his chorus at last, and does he believe that the 
 Will is going to grow intelligent and make all 
 things fair? 
 
 Perhaps Hardy's proneness to dwell on the 
 241
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 skeletonic grin of life is due to his exceeding 
 sensitiveness to beauty. Like Poe and other 
 poets, he cannot abide the ugliness that is in the 
 world, and so he insists on The Conqueror 
 Worm, as a man cannot refrain from thrusting 
 his tongue into the sore tooth. Perhaps Hardy 
 is a reaction against the saccharine optimism of 
 his contemporaries and of those just before his 
 time. They falsified life in their fictions by 
 making everything come out nicely, thank you, 
 on the last page. He leans over backward from 
 that kind of untruth and comes dangerously 
 near to being as false. As between falsity in 
 one direction and falsity in the other, there is 
 no choice, except that we have had so much of 
 the sweet kind that Hardy is refreshing. He 
 tends to restore the balance. 
 
 Ask any man, rich man, poor man, beggar 
 man, thief, how life has gone with him, and, if 
 he is honest, he will tell you that life did not go 
 definitely one way or the other. Things some- 
 times came out well and sometimes not. Hardy 
 is biased in favor of the things that do not 
 come out well. "Life's Little Ironies" is a good 
 title, but it is a title that implies a thesis, an at- 
 titude from which humanity is surveyed. The 
 stories are perfection and they sound true. 
 Hardy is a logician and he will back any tale of 
 his with evidence, even the first story in *'Wes- 
 
 242
 
 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 sex Tales," in the preface of which the author- 
 ity of physicians is invoked. But when you take 
 all his stories together you find nine failures out 
 of ten human careers, and life has a better 
 batting average than that. No one doubts that 
 the "Fellowtownsmen" got into such horrid con- 
 fusion, that things happened as they shouldn't, 
 that every shot at happiness was a miss. And 
 "The Waiting Supper" is so convincing! that 
 you cannot escape. But the two stories together, 
 regarded for the moment not as the excellent 
 works of art which they are, but as a view of 
 human destiny, weaken each other. One con- 
 vinces you. The two together make you ask 
 questions about the author. 
 
 In "The Waiting Supper" there is one line 
 that is as great a pathetic fallacy as the more 
 familiar and cheeryj kind which represents 
 nature as smiling upon, the lovers. Hardy's 
 lovers have to submit to this: "Thus the sad 
 autumn afternoon waned, while the waterfall 
 hissed sarcastically of the inevitableness of the 
 unpleasant." Did you ever hear a waterfall 
 like that? The only waterfalls I have heard 
 quote Darwin and discuss the election returns. 
 I know that the happy poet is a liar when he 
 says that the nightingale is celebrating my love 
 for Mamie, for the nightingale is concerned 
 with other matters. But as between a nightin- 
 
 243
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 gale who is sympathetic with my emotions and 
 a sarcastic waterfall, I prefer the nightingale. 
 And I do not like either in realistic fiction. 
 
 Thomas Hardy, the idol of the younger 
 realists and the liberator of British fiction from 
 the Victorian hoopskirt and the happy ending, 
 is not a realist. He is a great romantic, with 
 a taste for pretty girls, moonlight, heroes and 
 dragoons. He is incurably superstitious. He 
 is pained by many modern things, especially by 
 modern restorations of ancient buildings. He 
 takes Tess to the Druidical stones on Salisbury 
 Plain because he dearly likes that kind of 
 moonlit! antiquity. His pronominal substitu- 
 tion of It for He does not achieve a revolution 
 in theology. He manages the destinies of 
 human folk as arbitrarily as any maker of fic- 
 tion that ever lived. But he never made a story 
 in which he did not convince you that life is 
 overwhelmingly interesting and that nature, 
 girls, and dragoons are beautiful if sad things 
 to contemplate. 
 
 244
 
 GEORGE BORROW
 
 GEORGE BORROW. 
 
 Any bookl about George Borrow is worth" 
 reading. The two volumes by Dr. Knapp are 
 forbiddingl}^ dense with documentary minutiae, 
 yet it is a pleasure to loaf through them at least 
 once. Borrow's burly personality makes itself 
 felt in the driest philological note and vitalizes 
 the pages even of a commonplace critic, as, in- 
 deed, it vitalizes many flatly ordinary pages in 
 his extraordinary books. Mr. Clement K. 
 Shorter's "George Borrow and His Circle" is 
 interesting because it is about Borrow and not 
 in the least because it is by Mr. Shorter. Mr. 
 Shorter's declared ambition was to write a book 
 that should appeal not to "Borrovians," but to 
 "a wider public which knows not Borrow." 
 
 Every book about the fighting scholar, every 
 moderately competent article about him must 
 invite new immigrants into Borrow's kingdom. 
 But Mr. Shorter is not an introductory critic, 
 not one who by his own skill and charm sum- 
 mons strangers to make the acquaintance of a 
 great man. He is an inept critic who thrives by 
 attaching his name to great reputations. Fancy 
 
 247
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 a man of any trifling literary experience, with 
 the least enthusiasm for literature, writing 
 about style in a) style like this: "Borrow, in 
 common with many other great English 
 authors whose work will live, was not uniform- 
 ly a good: stylist. He has many lamentable 
 fallings away from the ideals of the stylist. But 
 he will, by virtue of a wonderful individuality, 
 outlive many a good stylist." It is a sin so to 
 "style" in a chapter about Edward FitzGerald, 
 who at the sound of such sentences would have 
 clapped his hands to his ears. 
 
 Borrow describes himself in that pugnacious 
 defence of Lavengro which forms the appen- 
 dix to "The Romany Rye." "Though he may 
 become religious, it is hardly to be expected 
 that he will become a very precise and strait- 
 laced person; it is probable that he will retain, 
 with his scholarship, something of his gypsy- 
 ism, his predilection for the hammer and tongs, 
 and perhaps some inclination to put on certain 
 gloves, not white kid, with any friend who may 
 be inclined for a little old English diversion, 
 and a readiness to take la glass of ale, with 
 plenty of malt in it, and as little hop as may 
 well be — ale at least two years old — with the 
 aforesaid friend — when the diversion is over." 
 
 Is not that an irresistible man? Shouldn't 
 you think that there would have been among 
 
 248
 
 GEORGE BORROW 
 
 his contemporaries two or three hundred thous- 
 and good sports, rooters, heelers, literary and 
 non-literary bookmakers who would bet on him 
 and back him in any enterprise in which his ad- 
 venturous spirit elected to engage? Yet it was 
 not so. He enjoyed only a short period of pop- 
 ularity after the publication of "The BibU in 
 Spain." When he died at a ripe old age in 
 1 88 1, he was not well known. During his life 
 the only highly distinguished man of letters 
 who knew and appreciated him was Fitz- 
 Gerald, the exquisite poet and critic — Fitz- 
 Gerald, whose literary habits were as distant as 
 possible from Sorrow's, whose fine-edged 
 rapier seems utterly alien to Borrow's short arm 
 jab or his overhand wallop. FitzGerald had a 
 curious accuracy in spotting what was worth 
 while in his time and in dodging certain cele- 
 brated things that other people thought worth 
 while, and there is nothing inconsistent in his 
 knowing that Borrow wrote good English. But 
 looking over Borrow's shoulder at his contem- 
 poraries, and remembering Borrow's ungainly 
 verses, one is amused to find that the only real 
 literary man facing one with a wink in his eye 
 is FitzGerald. The others have their backs 
 turned. 
 
 Consider also Borrow's posthumous fame. 
 His first biographer is Dr. Knapp, an Ameri- 
 
 249
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 can professor of philology. And the modern 
 critics who praise him are not open-air men, 
 but bookish, library men, whose names do not 
 suggest the robustly adventurous, Lionel John- 
 son, Mr. Watts-Dunton, Mr. Birrell, Mr. Sec- 
 combe. '. 
 
 Most literary critics praise him in terms lau- 
 datory enough to atone for the sins of their 
 professional predecessors, whom Borrow held 
 up to ''show the creatures wriggling, blood and 
 foam streaming from their broken jaws." His 
 four important books are published in Every- 
 man's Library; Mr. Birrell says that "we are 
 all Borrovians now"; within twenty years have 
 appeared three biographical studies, besides 
 Mr. Shorter's. Yet Dr. Knapp's fundamental 
 biography which was published in 1898 is out 
 of print; that mysterious and reprehensible en- 
 tity known as the public has not demanded a 
 new edition. It is all consistent with the Bor- 
 rovian inconsistency. Borrow was proud of be- 
 ing a gentleman and a scholar, and he was both 
 in all true senses of the words; but he hated 
 gentility and wrote a hammer-and-tongs chapter 
 against the genteel; no revolutionist despising 
 the "bourgeois" ever punched their smug faces 
 with such violent verbal fisticuffs. 
 
 He boasts of his fondness for gypsies and 
 prize-fighters and quite simply asks, "If he had 
 
 250
 
 GEORGE BORROW 
 
 not associated with prize-fighters, how could 
 he have used his fists?" However, he is an aris- 
 tocrat and has no sympathy with radical weav- 
 ers. Despite his hatred of cant, some sentences 
 in "The; Bible in Spain" have a missionary 
 twang. He drifts naturally away from the 
 Church of England, yet when he attacks other 
 ecclesiastical institutions he holds up the 
 Church of England as the exemplar of re- 
 ligious truth, ^e scorns all deviation from 
 fact, yet his biographers have not wholly suc- 
 ceeded in separating what he did from what he 
 invented. 
 
 He was undoubtedly a polyglot, he made 
 metrical translations from thirty languages, 
 wrote a version of the Gospel of St. Luke in 
 Spanish Gypsy (the first book ever attempted 
 in any Gypsy dialect), supervised the printing 
 of the Bible in Manchu-Tartar, made transla- 
 tions from the English linto Manchu-Tartar, 
 Russian and Turkish in good style, as any of us 
 who has read them can testify. In the person 
 of Lavengro he lost the stalwart Isopel Berners 
 because he insisted on giving her lessons in Ar- 
 menian! For all that, he made mistakes and so 
 gave the scholars evidence that he was no 
 scholar. He was not. He had an instinct for 
 language, especially for that language which 
 he knew, as we know it, probably better than 
 
 251
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 he knew Manchu-Tartar. In his English nar- 
 ratives we can follow him and praise him or 
 censure him without violating the severe rule 
 which he laid down: "Critics, when they re- 
 view books, ought to have a competent knowl- 
 edge of the subjects which those books discuss." 
 
 The four books of Borrow which belong to 
 English literature are "The Bible in Spain," 
 "Lavengro," "The Romany Rye" and "Wild 
 Wales." "The Bible in Spain" is one of those 
 books that grow out of circumstances; it was to 
 a large extent thought out and phrased on the 
 scene, amid the adventures which it narrates; 
 later it was cast into book form. It grew out of 
 experience, but an artist shaped its growth. 
 Borrow was sent by the Bible Society to dis- 
 tribute Spanish versions of the Bible. He en- 
 countered the opposition of allied church and 
 government, was arrested, put in prison for 
 three weeks, and liberated through the influ- 
 ence of British officials. 
 
 It is not, however, the Bible or his mission 
 that stimulates Borrow's imagination. Cities 
 and people, meetings on the road, scraps of 
 talk, sometimes rather long conversations, mon- 
 ologues by Borrow, the mischances, dangers 
 and excitements of a country at once wild and 
 anciently civilized, Borrow's opinions about 
 languages, characters, landscapes and anything 
 
 252
 
 GEORGE BORROW 
 
 else under the Spanish skies — ^such is the sub- 
 stance of the book; and the substance is trans- 
 mitted through a style that gives little heed 
 to elegance, that walks along like a healthy man 
 on a tramp. The most eccentric of men, full of 
 strange languages and odd ideas, Borrow writes 
 English as naturally as he drinks English ale. 
 There is not a touch of eloquence, not a great 
 phrase; his descriptions are rather literal 
 records of what was in front of him and how he 
 liked it than "word-paintings." The dominant 
 writers of his time were super-eloquent. Bor- 
 row does not speak their language. Perhaps 
 that is why he did not rival them in popular 
 favor, and also why he seems to us so refresh- 
 ingly downright. 
 
 Borrow, like his master Defoe, has the art of 
 setting all things forth as if they were matters 
 of fact. Even when his characters talk of un- 
 usual matters, nay, especially when they har- 
 angue and gossip about queer things, their con- 
 versation sounds like a transcription from life 
 and not like invention. 
 
 "Lavengro" and its sequel, "The Romany 
 Rye," are properly classified in Everyman's Li- 
 brary under fiction, and "The Bible in Spain" 
 is classified as "Travel and Topography." In 
 what proportion autobiography and fiction are 
 admixed is a question which does not effect the 
 
 253
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 merits of the books. They all follow about the 
 same method, and so, too, does "Wild Wales." 
 The episodes are inconsequential, and the loose- 
 ness of organization not only permits Borrow 
 unlimited latitude of subject, but strengthens 
 the Defoe-like illusion of truth; he never loses 
 the tone of the veracious chronicler who puts 
 things down in the order of nature and not ac- 
 cording to the design of art. Between adven- 
 tures and more or less pertinently to them. Bor- 
 row becomes itinerant schoolmaster and gives 
 us instruction in language, philology, compara- 
 tive literature, ethics and religion. He is not 
 a pedant, but a humanist: "It has been said, I 
 believe, that the more languages a man speaks, 
 the more a man he is; which is very true, pro- 
 vided he acquires languages as a medium for 
 becoming acquainted with the thoughts and 
 feelings of the various sections into which the 
 human race is divided; but in that case he 
 should rather be termed a philosopher than a 
 philologist." 
 
 Borrow need not be read continuously; if he 
 enters upon a discourse that promises not to in- 
 terest you, you can turn the pages rapidly until 
 the eye strikes something more attractive. In 
 his wide variety is something for everybody. 
 The conversations with the old apple woman 
 who had read the story of "Blessed Mary Flan- 
 
 254
 
 GEORGE BORROW 
 
 ders"; the chapters on pugilism; the talks with 
 tinkers and publicans; the old man who knew 
 Chinese but could not tell time by the clock; 
 the outrageous attack upon Walter Scott; the 
 theological arguments with the man in black 
 — these are some of the choice fragments of 
 what Borrow was pleased to call a *'dream." 
 The general atmosphere is less that of dream- 
 land than of the broad highway in full sun- 
 light. Since Borrow died the cult of the open 
 air has increased, and to that as much as to any- 
 thing is due the revival of interest in him. He 
 is a great person, a colossal egotist who in his 
 journeyings takes up the whole road. It is 
 healthy for a man to be an egotist — especially if 
 he is a colossal one. 
 
 255
 
 SHELLEY
 
 SHELLEY. 
 
 In his "Defence of Poetry" Shelley says that 
 the imagination is the moral instrument. To 
 be greatly good a man must imagine intensely 
 and comprehensively. Poetry serves morality 
 not by what is explicitly teaches, but by its 
 power to awaken and enlarge the mind, to ren- 
 der it "the receptacle of a thousand unappre- 
 hended combinations of thought." Since 
 poetry strengthens the imagination, which is 
 the organ of the moral nature of man, "a poet 
 would do ill to embody his own conceptions of 
 right and wrong, which are usually those of his 
 time and place, in his poetical creations which 
 participate in neither." A remarkable, book 
 could be made of the best things said in prose 
 by English poets about poetry. Perhaps one 
 book would not hold so much. A narrower yet 
 great and imaginative book could be made of 
 what Shelley said about poetry and what Eng- 
 lish poets have said about him. Such a book 
 would explain and exhibit the theory of poetry 
 and the art of criticism. The very good edition 
 of Shelley in the Regent Library, (edited by 
 Roger Ingpen) contains some brief "Testi- 
 
 259
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 monia" which invite one to the essays from 
 which they are taken, by Browning, Swin- 
 burne, Francis Thompson. 
 
 It is significant that Mr. Ingpen has not 
 quoted from Arnold. If it is the function of 
 poetry to expand the imagination and make the 
 mind aware of a thousand unapprehended com- 
 binations of thought, how did it happen that 
 Arnold, a genuine poet, missed Shelley utterly? 
 Arnold was not satisfied with his essay and in- 
 tended to return to the subject. That he could 
 do a better thing is proved by his essay on Keats, 
 which, after he has done with his droning, 
 schoolmasterly defence of Keats's morals, is elo- 
 quent, serene and restrainedly emotional. Shel- 
 ley phrased many of the revolutionary ideas that 
 were current in his time. Arnold's timid school- 
 bred culture was impervious to any sort of revo- 
 lutionary idea. Shelley's ideas did not impress 
 him ; he thought Shelley a wonderful singer, but 
 a singer without a solid body of thought. Now, 
 Shelley was the most full-minded poet of his 
 time. He knew more about what ought to be 
 done with the world than any of his contem- 
 poraries. That he failed to free Ireland and 
 that the French revolution was a disaster are a 
 reflection on other people's intelligence, not on 
 his. It is not at all derogatory to a man's ideas 
 that for centuries and centuries after him the 
 
 260
 
 SHELLEY 
 
 world fails to come up to his teachings. If an 
 angel is ineffectual that is not the angel's fault. 
 Indeed a too readily effectual angel would be 
 rather a journalist than a seer. 
 
 That the bulk of mankind is ages behind the 
 best of its poets and seers might possibly be ex- 
 plained by the fact that the bulk of mankind 
 simply has not met their thoughts. But how 
 shall one explain the fact that artistic children 
 of culture, who have had opportunity to read, 
 who respond to the beauty of seers and poets, 
 remain at the tail of the intellectual procession, 
 are not abreast of long dead poets like Shelley, 
 and let the leaders of their own day sweep past 
 them unapprehended, unguessed? The thing 
 that makes one impatient of the privilege of cul- 
 ture is that many of those who have enjoyed it 
 do not lead; they drag mankind back. In 
 "Winds of Doctrine," by Mr. George Santayana, 
 the mind of the present age is likened to "a phil- 
 osopher at sea who, to make himself useful, 
 should blow into the sail." When you make a 
 generality about the mind of today, you are per- 
 fectly safe, for nobody can dispute you. No- 
 body knows what the mind of today is doing. It 
 is doing so many things that no one of us can 
 keep track of it. But when a man writes him- 
 self down in a book, you can tell what his mind 
 is doing — in that book. I should liken Mr. San- 
 
 261
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 tayana to a philosopher who, really wanting to 
 sail, had forgot to cast off and was still lashed 
 to the dock with a spanking wind blowing out 
 to sea. 
 
 It is no wonder that Whitman, revolutionary 
 in substance and form, perplexes the genteel and 
 the cloistered. But it is a wonder that Shelley, 
 whose form is classic and whom a century has 
 transformed from demon to angel, does not reach 
 them. A striking example of critical and phil- 
 osophic blindness is Mr. Santayana's essay on 
 Shelley. Mr. Santayana is a poet, and in this 
 essay he says beautiful poetic things. He is not 
 stupid as Arnold was, for once in his life. But 
 he misses Shelley. He understands what Shel- 
 ley was related to before Shelley, for example, 
 Plato, but he does not know the relation of Shel- 
 ley to his time or to the world since Shelley. 
 What Mr. Santayana says is lucid in phrase but 
 quite hopelessly confused in thought. He says 
 that Shelley was "a finished child of nature, not 
 a joint product, like most of us, of nature, his- 
 tory and society." That is not true of Shelley 
 or any other human being in recorded history. 
 It is worse biography than Dowden's, and it 
 seems that so old a critic as Taine might have 
 saved a man from writing such nonsense in the 
 year 1912. Mr. Santayana says that "Shelley 
 was not left standing aghast, like a Philistine, 
 
 262
 
 SHELLEY 
 
 before the destruction of the traditional order." 
 That is naive. Of course Shelley was not left 
 standing aghast; he was trying his best to destroy 
 the traditional order; he was butting his beauti- 
 ful head against it. He did not budge the tra- 
 ditional order. One reason is that most people 
 have impoverished imaginations, that the world 
 can't do what Tolstoy thought would save it, stop 
 and think for five minutes. Another little reason 
 is that there are too many conservatives like Mr. 
 Santayana teaching the young men of the world. 
 Yet Mr. Santayana says that Shelley was "un- 
 teachable" ! 
 
 Shelley believed that a man would do ill to 
 embody his own conceptions of right and wrong 
 in his poetry. Yet every man, poet or not, who 
 writes at all and is not a hypocrite, embodies his 
 conceptions of right and wrong in all his utter- 
 ances. Shelley was intensely personal in his 
 poetry. His sky-larking, star-sweeping way of 
 expressing himself takes us out of range of his 
 individual opinions. He spoke heart-near things 
 in splendid distances and tried to pull the far 
 skies down into sodden British hearts. The re- 
 volt, the defeated revolt of his own times, near 
 to him as the news of the daily papers, he alleg- 
 orized as the rebellion of a mythological Islam, 
 and he flung the stars reeling through Spen- 
 serian stanzas. No essayist has risen fully to 
 
 263
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 Shelley's poetic stature and comprehended him 
 except another great poet, Francis Thomp- 
 son. Speaking his own convictions, as every 
 man, poet, critic, or even an academic voice of 
 reason must and should speak his convictions, 
 Thompson begins his essay by pleading for a re- 
 union between his church and the art of poetry. 
 So much of his essay seems to me interesting but 
 not closely relevant to Shelley. After this in- 
 troduction Thompson soars into the greatest 
 essay that has ever been written on an English 
 poet by an English poet. 
 
 Most poets, with their wonderful ears, of 
 c ourse write good prose. Francis Thompson 
 has a fine essay on the prose of poets. Even 
 Browning, who wrote little prose except the ex- 
 traordinary parenthetical letters, was so clarified 
 by Shelley that in his essay he discovered a fair- 
 ly fluent and readable style. 
 
 Shelley is primarily neither philosopher nor 
 revolutionist, but lyric poet. Yet to treat him 
 only as a lyric poet is to forget his great drama, 
 "The Cenci," which can hold up its head un- 
 diminishejd beside the Elizabethans. That 
 idiotic British officialdom does not, or did not 
 at last accounts, allow its performance on the 
 regular stage, is perhaps only one more proof of 
 how little impression Shelley's austere anarchism 
 made on practical British morality. "The 
 
 264
 
 SHELLEY 
 
 Cenci" is austere; for Shelley, it is athletically 
 economical. The last speech of Beatrice is an 
 unexcelled emotional climax. Yet even in this 
 play we find that "intensely personal" note of 
 Shelley; it speaks all his heart against all injus- 
 tice. The play learned many lessons from the 
 Elizabethans. It is not far wrong to call these 
 lines Shakespearean: 
 
 My wife and children sleep; 
 They are now living in unmeaning dreams; 
 But I must wake, still doubting if that deed 
 Be just which was most necessary. O, 
 Thou replenished lamp ! whose narrow fire 
 Is shaken by the wind and on whose edge 
 Devouring darkness hovers ! 
 
 265
 
 H. G. WELLS AND UTOPIA
 
 H. G. WELLS AND UTOPIA. 
 
 Utopias fall into two classes, the local and the 
 chronological. That is, some are removed from 
 present fact by geographical transition to a 
 country apart from us in space, a magic island, 
 a realm undiscovered until the romancer found 
 it and assumed it to be extant in the romancer's 
 year of grace; others are sundered from present 
 fact by being thrown forward into the future 
 or backward into a time that precedes recorded 
 history. The desirable land within the limits of 
 present time and the known surficial limits of 
 the globe is obviously not convincing. One fears 
 that it may be rediscovered and invaded by an 
 imperial fleet or an inquisitive scientific expe- 
 dition. Crusoe's island is no longer remote. 
 The geographers have plotted the planet and 
 have snared every conceivable no-man's-land in 
 the meshes of realistic lines of latitude and lon- 
 gitude. 
 
 The ideal civilization which plays ducks and 
 drakes, not with space, but with time, is safer. 
 Nothing can dislodge it or disprove it or in any 
 wise proceed against it — except by force of su- 
 perior imagination. For nobody knows what 
 
 269
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 may happen in the future. That is why all the 
 theological heavens are sublimely ramparted 
 against attack. 
 
 Bellamy placed his ideal civilization within 
 the impregnable security of a time as yet un- 
 born. His conception was original and in its 
 way was more realistic than the timeless abstrac- 
 tion of Plato and More, and the Nowhere from 
 which Morris sent news. The fundamental 
 scheme of portraying a future upon this earth 
 was so fascinating that Bellamy's book enjoyed 
 a success out of all proportion to its literary skill 
 or its sociological insight. He had a first-rate 
 plan, but with what unfanciful and rigidly pre- 
 cise lines he filled it in! His style is stiff and 
 his future is ossified. 
 
 Mr. H. G. Wells took the idea of describing 
 an imagined tomorrow and made of it a stimu- 
 lating romance. In saying that he took the idea 
 one does not mean to imply that he borrowed 
 the scheme of "Looking Backward" or of any 
 other book. The notion of criticizing today from 
 the height of a postulated tomorrow was prob- 
 ably born and raised before Bellamy. My 
 bibliography is imperfect, but I seem to re- 
 member that an Assyrian conceived the notion 
 and inscribed his reflections on a ton of brick. 
 The important thing is the kind of future a man 
 imagines and the way he gets there and the jus- 
 
 270
 
 H. G. WELLS AND UTOPIA 
 
 tice of his backlook on the world as it is. Wells's 
 "The World Set Free" is the most vision-expand- 
 ing book of its kind — if there be a kind — that I 
 have ever quarrelled with and been delighted 
 by. It justifies the last word of its title. It does 
 not cramp the growth of the race between a set 
 of rules. It spreads the lines of development out 
 at a generously wide angle. It bids humanity 
 spring from what it is. It makes no desperately 
 impossible demands upon our common nature. 
 Indeed, with a cunning hidden plea, not evident 
 at first glance, Mr. Wells draws the world 
 council, which gathered together the shattered 
 nations and gave them the first good government 
 they had ever known, as a collection of ordinary 
 men, with only one or two inspiring geniuses. 
 The idea — a very important idea — is that any of 
 us duffers could do it if we had to, and if we 
 were only jolted out of a few little private in- 
 terests and superstitions. 
 
 The value of a Utopia is not so much the de- 
 scription of a desirable and convincingly attain- 
 able state as in the reflex description of an unde- 
 sirable state — the state in which we live. To 
 show how the "new civilization" was unham- 
 pered by political intrigue and financial consid- 
 erations is to show how obstructive is the present 
 system of politics and ownership. "Man the 
 warrior, man the lawyer, and all the bickering 
 
 271
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the grave 
 dreamers, man the curious learner and man the 
 creative artist, come forward to replace these 
 barbaric aspects of existence by a less ignoble ad- 
 venture." In "those" times, that is the present 
 seen from the year 2000, many of the homes w^ere 
 entirely "horrible, uniform, square, squat, ugly, 
 hideously proportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, 
 and in some respects quite filthy; only people in 
 complete despair of anything better could have 
 lived in them." In "our" time, that is about 2000, 
 the last stupid capitalist who wanted millions 
 for an invention he had stolen was laughed out 
 of court. People do not struggle to get, because 
 they do not run the risk of starvation and wage 
 slavery; they produce as artists, because man 
 likes to do things with his head and his hands. 
 In our times we understand that Bismarck, to 
 take a salient example, was not an admirable 
 man but a gross person, and that the age that 
 produced him, made him a ruler, and paid him 
 respect, was a dull, stupefied, vicious age. The 
 time when people were taking pills for all kinds 
 of ailments,, were being killed by the slow pro- 
 cess of the slum or the swift process of the ill- 
 managed railroads, is past the imagination of 
 "our" time to conceive. 
 
 From such a past the world is set free. The 
 people of that past day might have set them- 
 
 272
 
 H. G. WELLS AND UTOPIA 
 
 selves free, but they were too stupid ; the work- 
 men were debased, timid and without imagina- 
 tion, the capitalists had to be intent on property 
 and dividends lest they fall to the unpropertied 
 condition of workmen; lawyers, clergymen, 
 popular novelists like Mr. Wells, editors, jour- 
 nalists, and other professional parasites did not 
 dare utter even such vision as they had, or did 
 it for money under convenient restrictions. It 
 was an unthinkably rotten period in the history 
 of the world. Only a few kickers knew how 
 rotten it was, or had courage to express their 
 sense of the prevalent putrescence. 
 
 The account of what used to be is just enough, 
 and the account of what "is" does not strain the 
 intelligence even of one who sees things from 
 the point of view of 1914. The only unconvinc- ^ 
 ing part of Mr. Wells's history is that which 
 narrates how we ceased to be what we were and 
 became what we are. He wipes the old world 
 out with an atomic bomb, so destructive that it 
 annihilates all the capitals of the earth, makes 
 war impossible and compels mankind to fed- 
 erate. Mr. Wells has a penchant for "fishy" 
 science. He knows a good deal about chemistry, 
 biology, mechanics, and he knows that novel 
 readers know less, as a rule, than he knows. So 
 with the finest air of conviction he shatters the 
 world with a new explosive, which has a kind 
 
 273
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 of laboratory-veracity not claimed for the comet 
 whose tail brushed us to revolution in an earlier 
 of his engaging romances. The clever man se- 
 cures plausibility by rather cheekily dedicating 
 the book to "Frederick Soddy's interpretation of 
 radium," to which this story "owes long pas- 
 sages." Neat, isn't it? It inspires in the ignor- 
 ant reader a confidence that those atomic bombs 
 are approved by the most advanced science — 
 though, of course, Mr. Wells does not say so. 
 The cataclysmic revolution is splendidly nar- 
 rated, and is even better than Mr. Wells's earlier 
 mechanical and astronomical romances. The 
 trouble with it is that it is not a fitting transition 
 from a state of society which is seriously con- 
 ceived to a better state of society which is de- 
 scribed with all the earnestness of a sociologist. 
 The two things are discordant. If we are to be 
 taken from one civilization to another we must 
 move along a social highway. The atomic bombs 
 are out of key with the prelude and the last two 
 chapters. 
 
 Mr. Wells is fond of mixing fake chemistry 
 and social reality. He has succeeded in two 
 kinds of fiction, which he should keep distinct, 
 the Jules Verne romance and the novel of pres- 
 ent-day life. He persists in putting the two in 
 the same book, and they simply will not blend 
 even under his skilful stirring-spoon. In "Tono- 
 
 274
 
 H. G. WELLS AND UTOPIA 
 
 Bungay" he gave us a good picture of a quack 
 millionaire, full of the spirit of the living age. 
 It was set in a realistic scene and was true to 
 life. Then for no reason at all he sent his hero 
 in search of a mysterious metal called "quap^" 
 which does not exist and so never burnt the bot- 
 tom out of the ship. "Quap" destroys the illu- 
 sion of the book. About the time that quap 
 begins to do its work, the book ceases to be a 
 novel. "Marriage" almost ceases to be a novel 
 when the couple go to Labrador. The introduc- 
 tion of love business into the comet story is an 
 impertinence, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has com- 
 plained. Mr. Wells's incurable taste for roman- 
 tic adventure on a plane removed from life — 
 usually an aeroplane that does what no aero- 
 plane has done yet — vitiates his realism; and his 
 concessions to the "love interest" do not help his 
 experiments in scientific "futurism." He is best 
 when he keeps separate the two sides of his 
 genius. 
 
 On the other hand, his extraordinary skill in 
 feathering social truth with romance, and his 
 equally extraordinary skill in making a monster 
 of romance eat real hay are the virtues of his 
 vices. His tracts read like novels, and his novels 
 often carry shrewdly concealed tracts. He is, 
 next to Bernard Shaw, the most irritating and 
 the most widely read revolutionary economist 
 
 275
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 who writes our language. Like Mr. Shaw, he is 
 a rather tame revolutionist; he has never got free 
 from the middle-class, emancipated clerk view 
 of life, and his romantic sense sometimes cor- 
 rupts his sense of social fact as it does his sense 
 of scientific fact. But he always thinks in am- 
 bush behind his most trivial narrative. And 
 when he comes forth avowedly as a thinker and 
 theorist, he has the vivacity of phrase, the 
 sparkle of manner which serve him when he is 
 making fiction. Moreover, in spite of his in- 
 tense modernity and his contempt for ancient 
 elegancies and traditional beauties, he can write 
 fine, rhythmic, luminously visual prose; like all 
 imaginative men who deal in words, he is a bit 
 of a poet. His account of "the last war" has in 
 it something of the quality of the epic: *'Men 
 rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew 
 and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes 
 upon the astonished earth. Surely the last fights 
 of mankind were the best. What was the heavy 
 pounding of Homeric swordsmen, what was the 
 creaking charge of chariots, beside this swift 
 rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this head- 
 long swoop to death?" 
 
 276
 
 JOHN MASEFIELD
 
 JOHN MASEFIELD. 
 
 The first version of Mr. Masefield's 'Tompey 
 the Great" was published before "The Everlast- 
 ing Mercy" and "The Widow of the Bye Street," 
 those virile narratives that made us wake to find 
 him famous. "Pompey" is vigorous and dra- 
 matic, yet it lacks the note that announces a new 
 poet. The earlier poems, "Salt Water Ballads" 
 are good, but do not rise above the chorus of 
 minor lyrists. The short stories in "A Mainsail 
 Haul" do not distinguish Masefield from a score 
 of sturdy spinners of sea yarns. It was "The 
 Widow in the Bye Street" that told us that a 
 great new ship was in port. After that splendid 
 arrival came "The Daffodil Fields" and "Dau- 
 ber." Meanwhile the man who had found, if not 
 created, a form of poetry so individual as to in- 
 vite the final tribute of parody, showed himself 
 in "The Tragedy of Nan," master of dramatic 
 realism. 
 
 It is likely and logical, even if the dates do not 
 fall into line, that "Pompey" is the work of a 
 young ambitious literary man who in the hour 
 of conceiving the work had not yet discovered 
 his course. He had to a large extent discovered 
 his style and his attitude toward life and the 
 
 279
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 speech of men. He makes the Romans talk in 
 a sharp bold staccato, which is good English and 
 excellent Masefield ; as for its Latinity, well, the 
 Romans are dead and we do not know just how 
 they talked. Pompey says: "We were happy 
 there, that year." Cornelia answers: "Very 
 happy. And that day the doves came, picking 
 the spilled grain. And at night there was a 
 moon." Pompey's next speech is: "All the quiet 
 valley. And the owls were calling. Those little 
 grey owls. Make eight bells, captain." 
 
 It is a question whether a modern dramatist 
 is not misdirecting his genius when he makes 
 plays of Greek or Roman legends and charac- 
 ters. To be sure, a man of genius is not to be 
 limited in his subjects or his style. He is free by 
 virtue of his genius. He may make an Iliad if 
 it pleases him to try it. Mr. Bernard Shaw put 
 a new wrinkle in the stiffened parchment of 
 Caesar's biography. Ibsen at the age of 43, 
 after he had hit upon his "later" manner, that 
 is after he had made the simple discovery that 
 universal tragedy grins in the small houses of 
 small people in small Norwegian towns, pro- 
 duced his "Julian the Apostate." Poets of all 
 nations during the last three hundred years have 
 retold Greek and Roman stories and made new 
 poetry of them. But on the whole the Greeks and 
 Romans handled their own subjects, their own 
 
 28O
 
 JOHN MASEFIELD 
 
 lives and legends fairly well. The task of the 
 modern is to render our times or to interpret 
 timeless and spaceless subjects from our point 
 of view. The widow who lived in the bye street 
 and the painter who was killed at sea are not as 
 important persons as the Hon. Cneius Pompeius 
 Magnus, but Mr. Masefield's poems about living 
 (or recently killed) obscure folk are more im- 
 portant than his drama about the ancient illus- 
 trious dead. 
 
 "Pompey" is a good play, that is, it is good to 
 read ; I do not know whether it has been acted. 
 It has one characteristic of Mr, Masefield's 
 other work, a direct incisive speech, poetry of 
 the naked fact, the brief metaphor which might 
 come out in any man's talk and which has the 
 "unliterary" flavor of reality — a cunningly liter- 
 ary mode of writing. Mr. Masefield makes 
 Pompey say: "Five minutes ago I had Rome's 
 future in my hand. She was wax to my seal. I 
 was going to free her. Now is the time to free 
 her. You can tear the scales and the chains from 
 her." Did the Romans talk in this clipped 
 hurried fashion? Probably they did when they 
 l^ere excited, for it is human to talk in short 
 .. ntences; even Germans do it. 
 
 The business of the dramatist is to make you 
 believe, with an arrested compelled attention, in 
 the speech and action of persons in clearly de- 
 
 281
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 fined circumstances. It makes no great differ- 
 ence whether the scene is in a Norwegian house 
 or on the necromantic island of Shakespeare's 
 "Tempest." Sometimes it seems a more wonder- 
 ful achievement to make the Norwegian house 
 interesting because it is so terribly like the one 
 we live in. Mr. Masefield's Nan seems to me 
 worth ten of Mr. Masefield's Cornelias, and the 
 peculiar style and habit of thought of Mr. Mase- 
 field seem more fitted to the modern subject. 
 One of his metrically ingenious stanzas, with 
 all the artifice of meter and rhyme, is nearer to 
 life than his vivaciously realistic sentences put 
 into the mouth of a Roman. "Back your port 
 oars. Shove off. Give way together. Go on 
 there. Man your halliards. Take the turns off. 
 Stretch it along. Softly now. Stand by." Was 
 such the dialect of Roman sea captains? No- 
 body knows. All that I argue is that Mr. Mase- 
 field's punching abruptness is more wonderfully 
 real, more effective on the lips of modern people 
 whom we do know. 
 
 God, O God, what pretty ways she had. 
 He's kissing all her skin, so soft and white. 
 She's kissing back. I think I'm going mad. 
 Like rutting rattens in the apple loft. 
 
 She held that light she carried high aloft 
 Full in my eyes for him to hit me by, 
 
 1 had the light all dazzling in my eye. 
 
 Every poet is limited to his idiom, and though 
 he may make broad differentiations, may
 
 JOHN MASEFIELD 
 
 change his structural form from sonnet to 
 ode, from ode to dramatic scene, may adapt 
 his style to a character to the extent of making 
 clown and king unlike in their turn of phrase, 
 yet when he is earnestly poetic he writes his own 
 kind of poetry. Mr. Masefield vocalizes Mase- 
 field sentences with the breath of Romans. So 
 Browning's characters all have the Browning 
 abundance of telescoped metaphor. Shakes- 
 peare's English kings and Italian dukes trumpet 
 Elizabethan blank verse. The identity of flavor 
 and idiom and of metaphor between Shakes- 
 peare's English characters and Roman charac- 
 ters and Italian characters will never be per- 
 ceived by the male and female Mrs. Jamesons, 
 who write essays about Shakespeare's "charac- 
 ters," but cannot hear verse. To be sure, Shakes- 
 peare and all other great dramatists make the 
 persons of the play adapt their substance to the 
 situation; naturally Othello in a jealous fit does 
 not talk about having lost his ducats and his 
 daughter or order a cup of sack. But within the 
 specific situation and the rather loose limits of 
 character Shakespeare equips his person with 
 a style of blank verse that is primarily Eliza- 
 bethan, secondarily Shakespearean, and only in a 
 tertiary and wholly subordinate sense Caesarean 
 or Macbethean. D'Annunzio writes magnificent 
 D'Annunzio, with a recognizable fondness for 
 
 283
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 certain words and sonorities, no matter who is 
 alleged to be talking. A poet is at his best when 
 his singular power of phrase and his substance 
 are most happily fused. 
 
 Masefield's instrument plays best upon modern 
 themes, upon the tragedy of obscure people in 
 English fields or upon the seven seas. It is his 
 distinction to have taken the lives of the humble 
 and to have involved those lives in the revolution 
 of the stars and the expanses of sea. He has 
 lifted coarse words into literature (the Eliza- 
 bethans did that, too) ; he has related the large 
 elements to little elemental lives; he has elevated 
 obvious simplicities to grand complexities. 
 
 The resemblance between the austerely tender 
 pathos of "The Dafifodil Fields" and Words- 
 worth's "Michael" is a genuine resemblance 
 honorable to the younger poet; and the pointing 
 to the resemblance is not, I trust, an example of 
 the critic's weak habit of referring one poet back 
 to another. Mr. Quiller-Couch has said that 
 "neither in the telling did, or could, 'Enoch 
 Arden' come near the artistic truth of 'The Daf- 
 fodil Fields'." Now, if one is to compare poets, 
 for the sake of praising them or for the better 
 understanding of them, it is well to make com- 
 parisons that refer the new and unknown to the 
 known in illuminating conjunction. To say that 
 "Enoch Arden" does not approach the artistic 
 
 284
 
 JOHN MASEFIELD 
 
 truth of "The Daffodil Fields" is to make an 
 inept comparison, to associate the weak with the 
 strong, even though the comparison is negative. 
 "Enoch Arden" is the flimsiest kind of romantic 
 fraud in Tennyson's worst manner. It is a sob 
 poem that sends only the tiniest lace handker- 
 chiefs to the laundry. "The Daffodil Fields," 
 for all its conscious artistry and the adroit man- 
 ipulation of the verses, is terrifically sincere. If 
 its substance has any allegiance to another Eng- 
 lish poet, we must look for a poet who had a 
 realistic sense of the furrowed field and a vision- 
 ary sense of the stars, that is Wordsworth. And 
 if one's odious liking for comparison is not satis- 
 fied with that, one may ask readers of poetry 
 to compare the opening stanza of "The Widow 
 in the Bye Street" with Chaucer, and think of 
 such merits as plainness of phrase, simplicity 
 and ease of narrative, and soundness of verse 
 structure. 
 
 Down Bye street, in a little Shropshire town, 
 There lived a widow with her only son : 
 She had no wealth nor title to renown, 
 Nor any joyous hours, never one. 
 
 Is there not here a note that suggests the open- 
 ing of "The Nonne Preestes Tale," even though 
 the story which follows is quite unlike Chau- 
 cer's? Or is it only the "widow" that makes 
 me associate the two? At any rate it is pleasant 
 to think that Mr. Masefield in a strong, not an 
 
 28s
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 imitative or servile, sense, is heir to the oldest 
 master of English narrative verse. 
 
 Then if our habit of judging new poets by 
 old ones still dominates us, let us take any pas- 
 sage describing the sea in "Dauber" and put it 
 beside any of the thousand years of English sea 
 poetry. 
 
 Denser it grew, until the ship was lost. 
 The elemental hid her : she was merged 
 In mufflings of dark death, like a man's ghost. 
 New to the change of death, yet hither urged. 
 
 Then from the hidden waters something surged 
 
 Mournful, despairing, great, greater than speech, 
 A noise like one slow wave on a still beach. 
 
 After that, if only for the pleasure of quoting 
 them, recall Swinburne's lines: 
 
 Where beyond the extreme sea-wall and between the remote 
 
 sea-gates, 
 Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death 
 
 waits. 
 
 The wonder of our English tongue is never 
 more resounding than when English poets echo 
 the tumult of the sea. Mr. Masefield is 
 not so much an innovator as an initiate into a 
 great poetic tradition, the tradition of a race of 
 sailors and chantey-makers who began with "The 
 Seafarer" or long before that, and shall not end 
 with "Dauber." The sea is in Masefield's blood 
 and in his personal experience. Who but an 
 English poet would have ended "The Tragedy 
 of Pompey the Great" with a chantey to the 
 tune of "Hanging Johnny"? 
 
 286
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND THE SCRIBES
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND THE SCRIBES. 
 
 In his sensible little book, "Literary Taste: 
 How to Form It," Mr. Arnold Bennett says: 
 "In attending a university extension lecture on 
 the sources of Shakespeare's plots, or in studying 
 the researches of George Saintsbury into the 
 origins of English prosody, or in weighing the 
 evidence for and against the assertion that Rous- 
 seau was a scoundrel, one is apt to forget what 
 literature really is and is for." 
 
 Of the vast library of scholarly research, the 
 most fatuous section, if one is to judge from the 
 few specimens one happens to have seen, is that 
 which deals with the most important division of 
 literature — poetry; and probably the poet who 
 has suffered the most voluminous maltreatment 
 from two centuries of English, German and 
 American scholarship is Shakespeare. I have 
 been going in an idle way over the notes in "The 
 Tragedie of Jvlivs Caesar," edited by Horace 
 Howard Furness, Jr., and "The Tragedie of 
 Cymbeline," edited by the elder Dr. Furness. 
 And I have looked into other volumes of this 
 laborious work, "A New Varorium Edition of 
 Shakespeare." From an enormous mass of com- 
 
 289
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 mentary, criticism, word-worrying, text-marring 
 and learned guesswork, the editor has chosen 
 what seem to him the best notes. The sanity of 
 his introductions and the good sense of some of 
 his own notes lead one to suppose that he has 
 selected with discrimination from the notes of 
 others. His work is a model of patience, indus- 
 try and judgment. He plays well in this game 
 of scholarship. But what is the game worth? 
 What is the result? 
 
 Here is a volume of nearly 500 large pages 
 containing only one play! The text is a literal 
 reprint of the first folio, or whatever is supposed 
 to be the earliest printed version. The clear 
 stream of poetry runs along the tops of the pages. 
 Under that is a deposit of textual emendations 
 full of clam-shells and lost anchors and tin cans. 
 Under that is a mud bottom two centuries deep. 
 It consists of (a) what scholars said Shakes- 
 peare said; (b) what scholars said Shakespeare 
 meant; (c) what scholars said about what other 
 scholars said; (d) what scholars said about the 
 morality and character of the personages, as (i) 
 they are in Shakespeare's play, and as (2) they 
 are in other historical and fictitious writings; 
 (e) what scholars said about how other people 
 used the words that Shakespeare used; (f) what 
 scholars said could be done to Shakespeare's text 
 to make him a better poet. I have not read a]I 
 
 290
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND THE SCRIBES 
 
 these notes and I never shall read them. Life 
 is too short and too interesting. 
 
 All the time that I was trying to read the 
 notes, so that I could know enough about them 
 to write this article, my mind kept swimming 
 up out of the mud into that clear river of text. 
 It is an almost perfectly clear river. Some of the 
 obscurities that scholars say are there are simply 
 not obscure, except as poetry ought to have a 
 kind of obscurity in some turbulent passages. 
 Many of the obscurities the scholars put there 
 in their innocence and stupidity, and those ob- 
 scurities you can eliminate by ignoring them. 
 
 The really valuable note is the etymological. 
 Etymology reveals the essential metaphors of 
 words. The modern reader will find that be- 
 yond his intellectual front door stand three or 
 four wire entanglements of connotation; by the 
 time a word gets to him it is bruised and ragged. 
 The etymologist clears all those fences for you 
 and delivers a word fresh into your hands. He 
 shows you how other poets have used it. He 
 enriches it with other connotations. He shows 
 it to be even wealthier than it was in the mind 
 of the man who wrote the Shakespearian line. 
 One of the most exciting and poetic books is the 
 Oxford Dictionary. The dated illustrative his- 
 tory of a word, past milestone after milestone of 
 use, is an intellectual epic The word is root- 
 
 291
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 deep and branch-high with poetry, with the im- 
 aginative habits of the race. The etymological 
 note not only clarifies Shakespeare, but spreads 
 behind him (and other poets) a sort of verbal- 
 cosmic background. Etymology brightens the 
 color of words, deepens their significance. That 
 the etymologist is often a dufifer, who, in the very 
 act of resolving a word into new chords, writes 
 stiff and stodgy prose, is a perplexing thing in 
 human nature and a very perplexing problem 
 in that appalling institution. Scholarship. 
 
 It is impossible for even a vivacious, humorous 
 man like Dr. Furness, an enthusiastic amateur 
 in love with his task, to live in a library of 
 Shakespearian scholarship and not be infected 
 by its diseases. Dr. Furness knows, for example, 
 precisely when "Cymbeline" was written. 
 Shakespeare was forty-six years old. Now, 
 "Cymbeline" is a foolish play; Dr. Johnson said 
 so. And there must be a reason for Shakes- 
 peare's deterioration, for Shakespeare, unlike 
 other poets, is not to be allowed to write bad 
 plays and bad lines without a satisfactory explan- 
 ation. He did not explain himself, but the 
 scholars come to his rescue. Dr. Furness fancies 
 that, though forty-six is not an advanced age, 
 Shakespeare was tired, and disillusioned. "There 
 may have crept into Shakespeare's study of im- 
 agination a certain weariness of soul in contem- 
 
 292
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND THE SCRIBES 
 
 plating in review the vast throng of his dream 
 children. ... A sufficing harvest of fame is his 
 and honest wealth, accompanied by honor, love, 
 obedience and troops of friends." "I can most 
 reverently fancy that he is once more allured by 
 the joy of creation when by chance there falls 
 in his way the old, old story of a husband con- 
 vinced, through villany, of his wife's infidelity." 
 And there you are. Shakespeare at the age of 
 forty-six is lured by the restless joy of creation 
 into writing "Cymbeline," which is a poor play. 
 It is not up to the mark which Shakespeare's 
 previous masterpieces have set. There is some- 
 thing a little wobbly about this conjunction of 
 surmises. But the scholar is never at a loss. He 
 can deliver immortal Will from his own errors, 
 shield him from the consequences of being at 
 once a god in art and a human man, prone to 
 literary lapses and slovenly work. The masque 
 in the fifth act *'is regarded by a large majority 
 of editors and critics as an intrusive insertion 
 by some hand not Shakespeare's." When a large 
 majority of scholars and critics regard a thing 
 as so, it is so. It gets into the books that you have 
 to read to pass college examinations. And if 
 you say that many of the scholars and critics 
 whom you happen to have read or listened to 
 are chumps, when they deal with Shakespeare 
 or any other poet, you are a lost soul. 
 
 293
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 Some of the notes of the various commentators 
 are suggestive. But many of the notes are sheer 
 impertinences, especially those that attempt to 
 mend the lines. 
 
 I would haue left it on the Boord, so soone 
 As I had made my Meale; and parted 
 With Pray'rs for the Prouider. 
 
 There is nothing the matter v^ith that. It 
 sounds all right. But the editors have to fill out 
 the short second line, to make it scan. Dr. Fur- 
 ness thinks, justly, that the line needs only "a 
 very timid pause after 'Meale.' " Of course, 
 any reader, any good actor, with an ear on the 
 side of his head, reads all lines with pauses timid 
 or bold as the case requires, and does not make 
 a fuss about it. It is only the scholars that fuss, 
 or poets like Pope, who are entirely out of touch 
 with Shakespeare's free metrical habits. 
 
 It is almost inconceivable that grown men with 
 enough interest in poetry to spend their whole 
 lives in Shakespeare's company could have 
 daubed him with such muddy nonsense as one 
 finds in these notes, which are not the worst of 
 scholarly comment but the best, selected by a 
 discriminating man. What a colossal sham it 
 all is! — erected not by charlatans but by men 
 working in good faith and with disinterested 
 devotion to their task. 
 
 It is not merely the ignorant idler and the 
 294
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND THE SCRIBES 
 
 superficial player among books who has got tired 
 of the institution of Shakespeare Improved: 
 Fourteen Thousand Doctors of Philosophy in 
 Session Day and Night, Searching for a Serum 
 to Prevent Spinal Meningitis in the Lines of 
 Shakespeare. Millions Needed to Continue This 
 Humanitarian Work: Fifty Thousand Students 
 Under Instruction in the Art of How Not to Be 
 Poets. Against this amazing institution some of 
 the more independent surgeons have protested. 
 One was the late John Churton Collins, a 
 physician who discovered that the Shakespearean 
 metaphor was not a locally British infection ris- 
 ing from the Avon river, but was brought by the 
 verbal mosquito from Rome and Greece. Col- 
 lins had a vivid and audacious mind that made 
 him one of the most readable of modern Shakes- 
 peareans, and he had, I assume, considerable 
 learning. He says: "Dozens of impertinent em- 
 endations have been introduced into Shakes- 
 peare's text, because editors have not been aware 
 that the custom of using the same word in dif- 
 ferent senses in one line, or even twice in con- 
 tiguous lines, was deliberately affected by the 
 Elizabethan poets." Deliberately affected? Yes, 
 and it came natural to them in a time when lan- 
 guage was a little looser and freer than it is 
 after t hree centuries of increased use and 
 hardened definition both in prose and poetry. 
 
 295
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 One trouble with much Shakespearean scholar- 
 ship lies in the assumption that everything that 
 left Shakespeare's hand must have been perfect. 
 Why, he probably used words carelessly and did 
 all kinds of tricks with them, as other geniuses 
 do. Why should we assume that he always wrote 
 a good line? Some of his lines are bad, and it is 
 not necessary for Dr. Pumpernickell to knock 
 out a couple of words or add a couple just to 
 make a line go metrically. These scholars have 
 a split vision. In one note they treat Shake- 
 speare like a god who could not go wrong. In 
 the next note they treat him like a sophomore 
 versifier whose lines have to be corrected. Dr. 
 Furness says that the earliest known text of 
 "Julius Caesar" — that of the First Folio, "is 
 markedly free from corruptions." What cor- 
 ruptions? The printers' or Shakespeare's? Dr. 
 Furness lugs in that tiresome phantom, a play- 
 house copy. "Our only recourse is to accept the 
 explanation given by Resch, viz., that these 
 words between Brutus and Messala are an inter- 
 polation from a MS. addition which appeared 
 first in a playhouse copy, and which, by mistake, 
 became incorporated in the text." Now, is not 
 that a "soft, downy, pink-cheeked peach of an 
 idea" (Jonson's "Sejanus," act IV., sc. 13, i, 23. 
 Potter's edition: Oshkosh, Scholar and Sellum, 
 1913)? Resch be hanged! What playhouse, 
 
 296
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND THE SCRIBES 
 
 copy? When? Whose mistake? How incor- 
 porated? A solid page and two-thirds of a page 
 are devoted to explaining a difficulty which does 
 not exist. 
 
 This is the true history of the passage in ques- 
 tion. Shakespeare and Bacon and Raleigh met 
 in the Mermaid Tavern for the purpose of turn- 
 ing out a few yards of Elizabethan blank verse 
 in the post-Tennysonian style of Mr. Alfred 
 Noyes. It was a very difficult job and Will of 
 Stratford got roaring full. He went home on 
 foot to Stratford, a long journey, and found 
 Anne with another pair of twins, one of whom 
 was the poet Davenant. This was very disturb- 
 ing to Will. He did not know until after his 
 death which twin was Davenant. He was then 
 in that fateful year, 1599- 1608, writing his play, 
 "Julius Caesar," and making extensive use of 
 Seutonius's "The Lives of the Caesars" (Dr. 
 Furness thinks this doubtful, but if you are go- 
 ing to guess, why not guess good and plenty?). 
 Anne got on Will's nerves and he had a bad 
 morning head. That is why he made that slight- 
 ly confused passage, which has bothered the 
 scholars ever since. 
 
 The following example of how Shakespeare's 
 biography is written is not a parody. It ap- 
 pears in the New York Nation of November 
 
 297
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 27, 1913, page 513, in a review of Arthur S. 
 Pier's "Story of Harvard." 
 
 "Every good story has a prologue, and the 
 story of Harvard has one which by no means 
 should be left out. In Stratford-on-Avon stands 
 the 'Old House in the High Street,' identified 
 by the most eminent of our antiquaries, the late 
 H. F. G. Waters, by certain documentary evi- 
 dence, as the early home of Katharine Rogers, 
 mother of John Harvard, from whom proceeded 
 the little inheritance that first kindled in the 
 western hemisphere the torch of a liberal cul- 
 ture. For this we have distinct contemporaneous 
 chapter and verse. 
 
 "At circumstantial evidence we look askance, 
 but without pressing the matter unduly this may 
 be said — that the families of Rogers and Shakes- 
 peare lived in close neighborhood and intimacy 
 at Stratford during the reigns of Elizabeth and 
 James I. ; that the poet knew Katharine Rogers 
 well, as, on the other hand, he knew well Robert 
 Harvard, at length her husband, in his shop at 
 Southwark, in London, hard by the Globe 
 Theatre. So far the conjunction would seem to 
 be inevitable. 
 
 "Then looms up a possibility amounting per- 
 haps to a likelihood, that no other than Shakes- 
 peare was the intermediary who brought to- 
 gether the Londoner and the fair, well-dowercd 
 
 298
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND THE SCRIBES 
 
 maid in the remote midlands, that he was a 
 familiar guest in the home in Southwark which 
 he had helped to establish, and that he, the genial 
 family friend, held on his knee the little John 
 Harvard, the first-born in the household. 
 
 "Could this touch of their foster-father with 
 the most illustrious name in literature be fairly 
 established (and who can say after the feats of 
 Mr. Waters what scraps may yet be found in the 
 dust-heaps?). Harvard men would indeed have 
 a tradition to prize." 
 
 Why not get down to brass tacks? We do not 
 know much about Shakespeare's life. We do not 
 know anything about his manuscripts, or the 
 playhouse versions. We cannot even rely on the 
 printed date of a quarto. We do not know 
 whether a corrupt line was corrupted by Shakes- 
 peare or the printer or somebody else. Many 
 emendations consist largely in a kind of scholar- 
 ly punning. For example: Shakespeare wrote 
 a line that every scholar remembers, for it is a 
 causer of gray hairs and a prodigal spender of 
 the midnight taper: "The blind Rush hath pro- 
 claimed his Bowells search." Johnson conjec- 
 tures that four lines have been omitted. Steev. 
 conj. : For "blind rush," read "mind rush." 
 That is, the impetuousness of his thought makes 
 one aware of how his instinct is struggling for 
 the solution of his difficulties. Malone conj.: 
 
 299
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 "Bowells lurch." Evidently referring to the 
 sea-sickness of Antony after the battle of Actium. 
 Craik conj. : "Rowell's search, meaning that his 
 blind rush, that is headlong rush, is caused or 
 indicated by the speed of his horse into which 
 he has thrust his rowels." Cf. B. Jonson, 
 "Every man out of His Humor"; "One of the 
 rowels catched hold of the ruffle of my boot." 
 Oechelhauser (Einleitung, p. 1185): But this 
 must refer to the speed of the intellect going 
 through purely idealistic experiences. There is 
 no question here of either sea or land. Macbeth 
 has not been near the sea and Henry V. has not 
 yet set sail for France. As for horses, it is now 
 well established that there were no horses in 
 England; otherwise why should Richard have 
 cried, "My kingdom for a horse"? If there had 
 been horses, one could surely have bought one, 
 especially a King, for 80 marks, the then ruling 
 price in Schleswig-Holstein; and even the ecsta- 
 sies of expression would not have made appro- 
 priate the offer of an entire kingdom. 
 
 So they go "conjing" and "conjing" through 
 desolate miles of notes. In spite of the fact that 
 now and again a genuine bit of historic informa- 
 tion, a light of interpretative intuition flashing 
 from a scholar's note, does vivify and elucidate 
 a puzzling line, or a line that you might pass 
 over in an oblivious mood, nevertheless, is it 
 
 300
 
 ■'^ JJAKBARA, CALIFORNIA 
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND THE SCRIBES 
 
 not true that this whole institution of literary 
 theology is a stupid superstition? There are 
 plenty of unsolved i problems in Shakespeare, 
 fascinating questions of biography and interpre- 
 tation to which conjectural answers are legiti- 
 mate. But for illuminating answers, or partial 
 answers, one has to go outside orthodox scholar- 
 ship, to Walter Begley, to "The Shakespeare 
 Problem Restated," by George C Greenwood, 
 to "Shakespeare's Mystery Play: A Study of 
 The Tempest" by Colin Still, and to other her- 
 etical inquirers whom the pundits dismiss as 
 cranks. 
 
 The scholars do not confine their thick-headed 
 learning to old poets whose language is strange 
 and who are made clearer by a note here and 
 there. For some stranger reason scholars are 
 hired to edit the modern poets in the popu- 
 lar series, those valuable and inexpensive re- 
 prints which help to spread poetry over the face 
 of the earth and make it accessible to increasing 
 numbers lof readers. I pick up the "Selected 
 Poems of Christina Rossetti," edited with intro- 
 duction and notes by Charles Bell Burke, Ph. D., 
 professor of English in the University of Tennes- 
 see. The volume is in Macmillan's Pocket Clas- 
 sics. I come upon "A Green Cornfield," a 
 lovely lyric that must have made Shelley look 
 down with interest "from the abode where the 
 
 301
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 eternal are." There is reference to a note. I 
 turn to it and find this: "An inverted simile? 
 Consult Genung's Working Principles of Rhe- 
 toric,' p 79, 2, example." I will not consult 
 Genung. I will advise all the pupils in my 
 school never to consult Genung while they are 
 reading poetry. 
 
 I commend to those hard-working young men 
 and women in the universities who are now 
 studying under editors of Shakespeare to fit 
 themselves to be editors of Shakespeare these sen- 
 tences from Mr. Max Eastman's "Enjoyment of 
 Poetry": "A misfortune incident to all educa- 
 tion is the fact that those who elect to be teachers 
 are scholars. They esteem knowledge not for 
 its use in attaining other values, but as a value 
 in itself; and hence they put an undue empha- 
 sis upon what is formal and nice about it, leav- 
 ing out what is less pleasing to the instinct for 
 classification but more needful to the art of life. 
 This misfortune is especially heavy in the study 
 of literature. Indeed the very rare separation 
 of the study of literature from that of the sub- 
 jects it deals with suggests the barren and 
 formal character of it. As usually taught for 
 three years to postgraduates in our universities, 
 it is not worth spending three weeks upon." 
 
 302
 
 GEORGE MOORE AND OTHER IRISH 
 WRITERS
 
 GEORGE MOORE AND OTHER IRISH 
 WRITERS. 
 
 "Though I may have lost the habit of read- 
 ing," says Mr. Moore, "I have acquired, per- 
 haps more than any other human being, another 
 habit, the habit of thinking. I love my own 
 thoughts." It must be a great pleasure to be 
 Mr. George Moore, to have confidence in one's 
 intellectual habits, to enjoy the memories and 
 opinions that the mind excogitates, and to be able 
 to phrase them with beautiful precision. The 
 mind that honestly likes itself is sure to attract 
 other minds and to interest even those that are 
 antipathetic. If Mr. Moore does not persuade 
 you that all his judgments are to be accepted, he 
 provokes you to examine your own. He is stim- 
 ulant, irritant, but there is no depressant reaction 
 from him. One can stand a large dose of him, 
 both of his exquisite fiction and of his repetitive 
 reminiscences, which may or may not be fiction. 
 
 There is a remark ascribed to Lady Gregory: 
 "Some men kiss and do not tell ; George Moore 
 does not kiss, but he tells." It is the business 
 of the writer of fiction to "tell," and it makes 
 little difference to the reader who reads for fun 
 
 305
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 whether the gallant adventures are biographical 
 or not. Early in his literary career Mr. Moore 
 tried the confessional form of narrative and suc- 
 ceeded masterfully. The young man v^ho "con- 
 fessed" twenty-five years ago grew older, and 
 in "Memoirs of My Dead Life" looked back 
 upon his youth from the quiescence of middle 
 age. Mr. Moore says that "if the reader of 
 'Vale' be wishful to know what happened at Ore- 
 lay he can do so in a volume entitled 'Memoirs 
 of My Dead Life,' but he need not read this 
 novel to follow adequately the story of 'Vale.' " 
 So the "Memoirs" is fiction. What, then, is 
 "Hail and Farewell"? Simply an extension of 
 the autobiographic novel, it includes real per- 
 sons living and dead and calls them by their 
 names, but it is as obviously a "made-up" book 
 as anything in literature. It is the work of an 
 artist and critic, the artist who gave us two mas- 
 terpieces, "Esther Waters" and "Evelyn Innes," 
 and the critic, who, apropos books and pictures, 
 writes, if not with infallible judgment, ever with 
 an unfailing sense of beauty. 
 
 Mr. Moore's lady-loves have not, according 
 to his own testimony, direct and unconscious, 
 been the most interesting affairs of his life. He 
 writes better about Manet than about an ama- 
 tory encounter of yesteryear. The women of his 
 "regular" novels are more vivid than the women 
 
 306
 
 GEO. MOORE AND IRISH WRITERS 
 
 who perturb his mature reminiscences. He says 
 that the critics complain that ^'instead of creat- 
 ing types of character like Esther Waters," he 
 is wasting his time describing his friends, "mere 
 portrait painting," and he asks an argumentative 
 question: '^In writing 'Esther Waters' did I not 
 think of one heroic woman?" 
 
 For once the critics are on the right side. 
 Lady Gregory is interesting in her own person 
 and her own work, but Mr. Moore can never 
 make her so interesting in a book as he has made 
 Esther and Evelyn. And the ladies of his ex- 
 perience are more alive when he uses them as 
 matter for fiction than when he sits behind a 
 cigar dictating memories. That in creating 
 Esther he was thinking of an heroic woman is 
 his concern, not ours. His private kisses un- 
 doubtedly taught him something of the art of 
 making fictitious kisses public; they furnished 
 him, as such experiences furnish every author, 
 with the story which as an artist he was to "tell." 
 But his purely personal revelations are not start- 
 Inig. Ladies flit into his memory, receive the 
 mostidelicate literary treatment and flit out again. 
 Nothing unusual happens at Orelay or anywhere 
 else, and what happens is handled finely, timidly 
 even, with what may have been audacity in 1890, 
 but no longer strikes us as valiantly candid. The 
 introduction to "Memoirs of My Dead Life" 
 
 307
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 now seems much ado over little; it is out of pro- 
 portion and is a wobbly piece of thinking such 
 as Mr. Moore's Irish born and French trained 
 mind is seldom guilty of. The "Memoirs" and 
 "Hail and Farewell" are to be enjoyed and 
 admired. Even an Irishman ought not to find 
 in them occasion for more than a contest of wit 
 
 No page of "Hail and Farewell" is flat; no 
 opinion of Mr. Moore's leaves you quite indif- 
 ferent. The most interesting pages, more in- 
 teresting than his portrait of himself as a lover 
 in France or a member of the landed gentry of 
 county Mayo, are those which criticize the per- 
 sonalities and the ideas of the so-called Celtic 
 Revival. His comments on Lady Gregory and 
 "Willie" Yeats just miss being insults. To say 
 that "Lady Gregory has never been for me a very 
 real person" is gratuitous and not quite conson- 
 ant with that honesty which Mr. Moore advo- 
 cates and for the most part practises. For in 
 his portrait of her and his comments on her he 
 shows that she is a very real person to him and 
 a writer who compels his consideration. In the 
 act of putting a pin through the humbuggery of 
 others he buzzes himself. 
 
 However, his literary criticism of their work 
 is delightful. Whether it is true or not we 
 Yankees have no sure means of judging. He 
 says that Lady Gregory's style which Mr. Yeats 
 
 308
 
 GEO. MOORE AND IRISH WRITERS 
 
 so highly values, the speech that she learned from 
 the people and puts into the mouths of her char- 
 acters, "consists of no more than a dozen turns of 
 speech, dropped into pages of English so ordin- 
 ary, that redeemed from these phrases it might 
 appear in any newspaper without attracting at- 
 tention." Well, is not that true of the speech 
 of the Irish or any province of England or 
 America? Our dialectic differences are few but 
 important. The speech of Lady Gregory's 
 characters is effective, and more than that, the 
 humor and the pathos of them is deeper than 
 their speech or any peculiar turns of phrase. 
 
 Doubtless (as would say Sir Sidney Lee, 
 whom Mr. Moore despises), doubtless Mr. 
 Yeats makes too much of Lady Gregory's dis- 
 covery of dialect and of his own discovery of 
 Lady Gregory. In the revised version of "Red 
 Hanrahan," he thanks Lady Gregory "who 
 helped me to rewrite The Stories of Red Hanra- 
 han in the beautiful country speech of Kiltartan, 
 and nearer to the tradition of the people among 
 whom he, or some likeness of him, drihed and is 
 remembered." It is little I care, myself being 
 a literary man, whether the metaphors and the 
 syntax and the sentence rhythms were contrived 
 by Mr. Yeats or Lady Gregory or the people of 
 Kiltartan, or whether they are natural to the 
 English tongue of other times and other regions 
 
 309
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 of the world. They are impressive, they convey 
 the story, and they give to the story the strange 
 color appropriate to it. Mr. Yeats plays with 
 verbal color, with lights and darkness in a way 
 that should appeal to so sympathetic a student 
 of the French impressionists as Mr. Moore. 
 
 To be sure, there is always the danger of af- 
 fectation, and the concluding sentences of Mr. 
 Yeats's dedicatory letter to "AE" are pretty close 
 to buncombe. "Ireland, which is still predom- 
 inantly Celtic, has preserved, with some less ex- 
 cellent things, a gift of vision which has died out 
 among more hurried and more successful 
 nations; no shining candelabra have prevented 
 us from looking into the darkness, and when one 
 looks into the darkness there is always something 
 there." Not always ; there may not be anything 
 there worth talking about, not even a black cat. 
 And the man of poetic vision may be a citizen of 
 a relatively successful nation. The eye does not 
 thrive in the dark, but is gradually atrophied. 
 It was not by scrutinizing the dark, but by using 
 his ear and his wonderful visual imagination 
 that Mr. Yeats learned to write the verses in 
 "Red Hanrahan's Curse," verses the like of 
 which no other man can write. 
 
 In such verses lives and will live the real 
 Yeats. That some of his verses are obscure and 
 weak does not matter. Greater poets than he 
 
 310
 
 GEO. MOORE AND IRISH WRITERS 
 
 have failed at times. And the best of his later 
 verse is his very best; he grows and keeps young, 
 for he has been dipped in some magic well. 
 That he has foibles a plenty is of little moment; 
 greater poets than he have allowed the fool to 
 triumph over the genius sometimes. The divine 
 fool is one of the common themes in poetc 
 legend. Later criticism will assess the value of 
 the "school" that he has founded and appraise 
 his influence in the literary history of Ireland. 
 The function of criticism at the present time is 
 to proclaim the lyric poet and persuade readers 
 to subject themselves to the enchantment of his 
 songs. It is surprising that Mr. Moore, who 
 preaches the gospel of beauty with a fervor 
 worthy of Keats, should not balance his witty 
 strictures with a little more hearty appreciation. 
 He quotes one of his friends as saying that Yeats 
 "took his colleen to London and put paint upon 
 her cheeks and dye upon her hair and sent her 
 up Piccadilly." 
 
 And another critic added that the hat and 
 feathers were supplied by Arthur Symons. That 
 is funny enough and serves the purpose of criti- 
 cism by arousing interest. It also gives other 
 critics opportunity to remind their readers that 
 Yeats's colleen, whether in Sligo or London, is 
 a lovely witch. 
 
 One story that Mr. Moore tells of Mr. Yeats 
 
 3"
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 is beyond my un-Celtic sense of humor. He rep- 
 resents Mr. Yeats as coming down to luncheon 
 at Lady Gregory's house and saying: "I have 
 had a great morning. I have written eight 
 lines." Where is the joke? It does not seem 
 to be at the expense of the poet. Eight of his 
 lines may seem a poor day's work to so great a 
 man as George Moore. But some of us who 
 have not earned the right to be patronizing 
 would cheerfully devote a month of Sundays, if 
 we knew how, to making one line as good as 
 the best of Yeats. These Irish people rag each 
 other delightfully, and it is more delightful to 
 poke fun than to admire too mutually; perhaps 
 it is more Irish. 
 
 Of living Irishmen the two most distinguished 
 writers of prose are George Moore and Ber- 
 nard Shaw. They resemble each other in two 
 or three particulars. Both are out of sympathy 
 with the modern movement in Irish literature, 
 with the "Celtic revival," with all that revolves 
 about the person of Mr. Yeats. In the intro- 
 duction to "John Bull's Other Island," Mr. 
 Shaw says (I quote from memory) that he is 
 an old-fashioned Irishman who sees other 
 Irishmen as they really are and not as the young 
 people of the Abbey Theatre imagine them to 
 be. Mr. Moore somewhat grudgingly concedes 
 that Synge was a man of genius and that Lady 
 
 312
 
 GEO. MOORE AND IRISH WRITERS 
 
 Gregory's plays, though inferior to the "Play- 
 boy" are all meritorious. But he implies, if he 
 does not directly say, that the only man who 
 really understands the diction of the Irish is 
 George Moore, Esq., of Moore Hall. Another 
 point of resemblance between Shaw and Moore 
 is that both insist on calling themselves shame- 
 less; they boast their independence and find sat- 
 isfaction in contemplating their difference from 
 other people. It is amusing to think that the 
 reading world has long taken them for granted 
 and is no longer shocked. Both are masters of 
 the English tongue, not of a new style full of 
 strange idioms, natural or artificial, but of the 
 straightest sort of classic English, firm as the best 
 prose of the eighteenth century. 
 
 It is that English which shall save these 
 Celtic iconoclasts who are now respectable old 
 gentlemen. Irish to the back-bone, they took 
 for foster mother the finest prose of the race that 
 betrayed their country; they became favorite 
 sons of an empire superior to the political and 
 racial divisions of the world. Mr. Moore thinks 
 that the English are a tired race and their weari- 
 ness betrays itself in the language. "God help 
 the writer who puts pen to paper in fifty years' 
 time, for all that will be left of the language 
 will be a dry shank-bone that has been lying 
 a long while on the dust-heap of empire." A 
 
 313
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 dismal prophecy which is cheerfully contra- 
 dicted by the facts of literary history. The politi- 
 cal empire may be disrupted, Ireland may be 
 freed from English yoke and split in twain. 
 But the language is safe. Artists like Mr. Moore 
 preserve its integrity and renew its vitality. And 
 we have not heard the last of James Joyce and 
 James Stephens, or of one or two young men 
 who were born on the island that lies east of 
 Dublin. 
 
 3H
 
 JAMES JOYCE
 
 JAMES JOYCE. 
 
 In the preface of "Pendennis" Thackeray 
 says: "Since the author of 'Tom Jones' was 
 buried, no writer of fiction among us has been 
 permitted to depict to his utmost power a Man. 
 We must drape him and give him a certain 
 conventional simper. Society will not tolerate 
 the Natural in our Art." If Thackery felt that, 
 why did he not take his reputation and his for- 
 tune in his hands and, defying the social restric- 
 tions which he deplored, paint us a true potrait 
 of a young gentleman of his time? He might 
 have done much for English art and English 
 honesty. As it was, he did as much as any writer 
 of his generation to fasten on English fiction the 
 fetters of a hypocritical reticence. It was only in 
 the last generation that English and Irish novel- 
 ists, under the influence of French literature, 
 freed themselves from the cowardice of Victor- 
 ian fiction and assumed that anything human 
 under the sun is proper subject-matter for art. 
 If they have not produced masterpieces (and I 
 do not admit that they have not) , they have made 
 a brave beginning. Such a book as "A Portrait 
 of the Artist as a Young Man" would have been 
 
 317
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 impossible forty years ago. Far from looking 
 back with regret at the good old novelists of the 
 nineteenth century (whom, besides, we need 
 never lose), I believe that our fiction is in some 
 respects freer* and richer than the fiction of our 
 immediate forefathers. 
 
 Joyce's work is outspoken, vigorous, original, 
 beautiful. Whether it faithfully reflects Irish 
 politics and the emotional conflicts of the Catho- 
 lic religion one who is neither Irish nor Catholic 
 can not judge with certainty. It seems, however, 
 that the noisy controversies over Parnell and 
 the priests in which the boy's elders indulge have 
 the sound of living Irish voices; and the dis- 
 tracted boy's wrestlings with his sins and his faith 
 are so movingly human that they hold the sym- 
 pathy even of one who is indifferent to the re- 
 ligious arguments. I am afraid that the re- 
 ligious questions and the political questions are 
 too roughly handled to please the incurably de- 
 vout and patriotic. If they ever put up a statue 
 of Joyce in Dublin, it will not be during his life- 
 time. For he is no respecter of anything except 
 art and human nature and language. 
 
 There are some who, to turn his own imagina- 
 tive phrase, will fret in the shadow of his lan- 
 guage. He makes boys talk as boys do, as they 
 
 *If it gets too free, as in Jo5^ce's "Ulysses," it has an official 
 hand clapped on its mouth ! 
 
 318
 
 JAMES JOYCE 
 
 did in your school and mine, except that we 
 lacked the Irish imagery and whimsicality. If 
 the young hero is abnormal and precocious, that 
 is because he is not an ordinary boy but an ar- 
 tist, gifted with thoughts and phrases above our 
 common abilities. This is a portrait of an ar- 
 tist, a literary artist of the finest quality. 
 
 The style is a joy. "Cranly's speech," he 
 writes, "had neither rare phrases of Elizabethan 
 English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish 
 idioms." In that Joyce has defined his own style. 
 It is Elizabethan, yet thoroughly modern; it is 
 racily Irish, yet universal English. It is un- 
 blushingly plain-spoken and richly fanciful, like 
 Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The effect of com- 
 plete possession of the traditional resources of 
 language is combined with an effect of complete 
 indifference to traditional methods of fiction. 
 Episodes, sensations, dreams, emotions trivial 
 and tragic succeed each other neither coherently 
 nor incoherently; each is developed vividly for 
 a moment, then fades away into the next, with 
 or without the mechanical devices of chapter 
 divisions or rows of stars. Life is so; a fellow 
 is pandied by the schoolmaster for no offense; 
 the cricket bats strike the balls, pick, pock, puck; 
 there is a girl to dream about; and Byron was a 
 greater poet than Tennyson anyhow. . . . 
 
 The sufferings of the poor little sinner are told 
 319
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 with perfect fidelity to his point of view. Since 
 he is an artist his thoughts appropriately find 
 expression in phrases of maturer beauty than the 
 speech of ordinary boys. He is enamored of 
 words, intrigued by their mystery and color; 
 wherefore the biographer plays through the 
 boy's thoughts with all manner of verbal loveli- 
 ness. 
 
 Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better 
 than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, be- 
 ing as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less 
 pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through 
 the prism of a langiiage many-coloured and richly storied than 
 from the contemplajtion of an inner world of individual emotions 
 mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose? 
 
 From the fading splendor of an evening beau- 
 tifully described, he tumbles into the sordid day 
 of a house rich in pawn tickets. That is life. 
 "Welcome, O life!" he bids farewell to his young 
 manhood. "I go to encounter for the millionth 
 time the reality of experience and to forge in the 
 smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of 
 my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now 
 and ever in good stead." 
 
 The sketches in "Dubliners" are perfect, each 
 in its own way, and all in one way: they imply 
 a vast deal that is not said. They are small as 
 the eye-glass of a telescope is small; you look 
 through them to depths and distances. They are 
 a kind of short story almost unknown to the 
 American magazine if not to the American 
 
 320
 
 JAMES JOYCE 
 
 writer. An American editor might read them 
 for his private pleasure, but from his profes- 
 sional point of view he would not see that there 
 was any story there at all. The American short 
 story is explicit and thin as a moving-picture 
 film ; it takes nothing for granted ; it knows noth- 
 ing of the art of the hintful, the suggestive, the 
 selected single detail which lodges fertilely in 
 the reader's mind, begetting ideas and emotions. 
 America is not the only offender (for patriotism 
 is the fashion and bids criticism relent) ; there is 
 much professional Irish humor which is funny 
 enough but no more subtle than a shillalah. And 
 English short stories, such at least as we see in 
 magazines, are obvious and "express" rather 
 than expressive. Joyce's power to disentangle 
 a single thread from the confusion of life and 
 let you run briefly back upon it until you en- 
 counter the confusion and are left to think about 
 it yourself — that is a power rare enough in any 
 literature. 
 
 Except one story, "A Painful Case," I could 
 not tell the plot of any of these sketches. Be- 
 cause there is no plot going from beginning to 
 end. The plot goes from the surface inward, 
 from a near view away into a background. A 
 person appears for a moment — a priest, or a girl, 
 or a small boy, or a street-corner tough, or a 
 drunken salesman — and does and says things not 
 
 321
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 extraordinary in tliemselves ; and somehow you 
 know all about these people and feel that you 
 could think out their entire lives. Some are 
 stupid, some are pathetic, some are funny in an 
 unhilarious way. The dominant mood is irony. 
 The last story in the book, "The Dead," is a 
 masterpiece which will never be popular, be- 
 cause it is all about living people; there is only 
 one dead person in it and he is not mentioned 
 until near the end. That's the kind of trick an 
 Irishman like Synge or Joyce would play on us^ 
 and perhaps a Frenchman or a Russian would 
 do it; but we would not stand it from one of our 
 own writers. 
 
 ."^22
 
 D. H. LAWRENCE
 
 D. H. LAWRENCE. 
 
 Mr. Lawrence is a poet in prose and in verse. 
 No writer of his generation is more singular, 
 more unmistakably individual, and no other that 
 I know is endowed with his great variety of 
 gifts. He is as dangerous to public morals as 
 Meredith or Hardy. Readers who cannot under- 
 stand the tragedy of "Richard Feverel" o*- of 
 "Jude the Obscure," will not understand Mr. 
 Lawrence or be interested to read a third of the 
 way through one of his books. The stupidity 
 of the multitude is sure protection against his 
 insidious loveliness and essential sadness. He 
 and his admirers will, I hope, regard it as hon- 
 orable to him that he reminds this critic oftener 
 of Meredith and Hardy than of any of his con- 
 temporaries. I am not so fatuous as to suggest 
 that his independent and original work is in any 
 unfavorable sense derivative. It must be true 
 that every young novelist learns his lessons from 
 the older novelists; but I cannot see that Mr. 
 Lawrence is clearly the disciple of any one 
 master. I do feel simply that he is of the elder 
 stature of Meredith and Hardy, and I will sug- 
 gest, in praise of him, some resemblances that 
 
 325
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 have struck me, without trying to analyze or 
 quote chapter and verse in tedious parallels. 
 
 Mr. Lavs^rence is a lyric as w^ell as a tragic 
 poet. In this he is like Meredith and Hardy, 
 and I can think of no other young novelist who 
 is quite worthy of the company. Young people 
 in love, or some other difficulty, become en- 
 tangled with stars and mountains and seas ; they 
 are baffled and lost, seldom consoled, in cosmic 
 immensities. Novelists who happen also to be 
 poets are enamoured of those immensities. 
 
 This is the end of ''Sons and Lovers": 
 
 "Where was he? — one tiny upright speck of 
 flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field. 
 He could not bear it. On every side the im- 
 mense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny 
 a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, 
 he could not be extinct. Night, in which every- 
 thing was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars 
 and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, 
 went spinning round for terror, and holding each 
 other in embrace, there in the darkness that out- 
 passed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. 
 So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core 
 nothingness, and yet not nothing." 
 
 The concluding scenes of "Women in Love" 
 are the Alps, "a silence of dim, unrealized snow, 
 of the invisible intervening between her and the 
 visible, between her and the flashing stars." I 
 
 326
 
 D. H. LAWRENCE 
 
 am reminded, by the beauty of the phrasing and 
 by the sense of the pathetic little human being 
 adrift in space, of the flight of the two young 
 people through the Alps, in "The Amazing 
 Marriage," and of farmer Gabriel Oak watch- 
 ing the westward flow of the stars. 
 
 Sometimes, like Meredith, rather than like 
 Hardy, whose style is colder and more austere, 
 Mr. Lawrence is almost too lyric and his phrases 
 threaten to overflow the rigid dikes of prose. I 
 could pick out a dozen rhapsodical passages 
 which with little change might well appear in 
 his books of verse. 
 
 But young people in love do not spend all their 
 days and nights in ecstatic flights to the clouds. 
 And their flights are followed by pathetic Icar- 
 ian disasters. From luminous moments they 
 plunge into what Mr. Lawrence calls "the bitter- 
 ness of ecstacy," and their pain outweighs their 
 joy many times over, as in Hardy, and as in the 
 more genial Meredith, whose rapturous digres- 
 sion played on a penny whistle is a cruelly beau- 
 tiful preparation for the agonies that ensue. It 
 may be that the emotional transports of Mr. 
 Lawrence's young people are more frequent and 
 violent than the ordinary human soul can enjoy 
 and endure. The nervous tension is high and 
 would break into hysteria if Mr. Lawrence were 
 not a philosopher as well as a poet, if he did not 
 
 327
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 know so accurately what goes on inside the 
 human head, if he had not an artist's ability to 
 keep his balance at the very moment when a less 
 certain workman would lose it. 
 
 There is firm ground under his feet and under 
 the feet of his lovers ; it is the everyday life which 
 consists of keeping shop and keeping school and 
 other commonplace activities in street, kitchen, 
 and coal mine. These diurnal details he studies 
 with a fidelity not surpassed by Mr. Bennett or 
 any other of his contemporaries. The talk of 
 his people is always alive, both the dialect of the 
 villagers and the discussions of the more intellec- 
 tual. Sometimes he puts into the speech of his 
 characters a little more of his own poetic fancy 
 than they might reasonably be supposed to be 
 capable of. But if this is a fault, from a realistic 
 point of view, it is a merit from the point of view 
 of readability, and it makes for vivacity. At 
 times — and is not this like Meredith? — he seems 
 to be less interested in the sheer dramatic value 
 of a situation he has created than in the oppor- 
 tunity it offers of writing beautiful things around 
 it. Not that his situations fail to carry them- 
 selves or have not their proper place and propor- 
 tion. Mr. Lawrence knows how to handle his 
 narrative and he has an abundant invention and 
 dramatic ingenuity. But he is above those ele- 
 mentary things that any competent novelist 
 
 328
 
 D. H. LAWRENCE 
 
 knows. He has the something else that makes 
 the story teller the first rate literary artist — style 
 may be the word for it, but poetic imagination 
 seems to be the better and more inclusive term. 
 Open "The Lost Girl" at page 57 and read two 
 pages. Without knowing what has preceded or 
 whither the story is bound, anybody who knows 
 what literature is will feel at once that that is it. 
 "Women in Love" is a sequel to "The Rain- 
 bow," in that it carries on the story of Ursula 
 of the family of Brangwen. "The Rainbow" 
 is the stronger book; it has more of the tragic 
 power, the deep social implications of Mr. Law- 
 rence's masterpiece, "Sons and Lovers". In 
 "Women in Love" are four young people, two 
 men and two women, whose chief interest, for 
 them and for us, is in amatory relations. This 
 is indicated by the title of the story, one of those 
 obvious titles which only a man of imagination 
 could hit upon, so simple that you wonder why 
 no novelist ever thought of it before. Now the 
 erotic relations of people, though a tremendous 
 part of life, as all the great tragic romances 
 prove, are still only part of life. Nobody knows 
 this better than Mr. Lawrence. The first story 
 of the Brangwen family is richer than the second, 
 not because of the proverbial falling ofif of se- 
 quels, not because Mr. Lawrence's power de- 
 clined — far from it! — but because the first novel 
 
 329
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 embraces a larger number of the manifold in- 
 terests that compose the fever called living. In 
 it are not only young lovers, but old people, old 
 failures, the land, the town, the succession of the 
 generations rooted yet restless. Ursula emerges 
 from immemorial centuries of English life, 
 touched with foreign blood out of Poland (when 
 an English novelist wishes to introduce variety 
 and strangeness into the dull solidity of an Eng- 
 lish town he imports a Pole, or an Italian, or a 
 Frenchman, somebody not English). 
 
 Ursula's background is thus richer than all 
 her emotional experience. Her father, her 
 grandfather, the family, the muddled tragi- 
 comedy of little affairs and ambitions, the grim, 
 gray colliery district, the entire social situation, 
 are the foundations and walls of the story, and 
 she is the slender spire that surmounts it all — 
 and is struck by lightning. In "The Rainbow" 
 she goes to ashes, and in "Women in Love" she 
 revives, burns again, and finds in her new love 
 new dissatisfaction. 
 
 It is impossible to write of Mr. Lawrence 
 without discoursing in symbols and reflecting, 
 somewhat pallidly, his metaphors. For like all 
 genuine poets he is a symbolist. In "Aaron's 
 Rod" he redoubles and compounds symbolism in 
 a manner baffling to readers and to critics who 
 like to have their prose prosaic and their poetry 
 
 330
 
 D. H. LAWRENCE 
 
 in lines and whose sound stomachs refuse a mixed 
 drink. I enjoy the mixture — in the Bible, in 
 Meredith, in Ruskin, in James, in Lawrence. 
 
 It is stupid to explain symbols. Yet after all 
 that is the dull function of criticism, to explain 
 something — as if the creator of a work of art 
 had not given all the necessary explanation in 
 the very act of creation. Whoever does not 
 understand Lawrence on immediate contact will 
 not understand him better after the intervention 
 of a critic. But it is the pleasure and the privi- 
 lege of a critic to have his secondary imagina- 
 tion set on fire by the primary imagination of a 
 man of genius, to spread the fire if he can by 
 the cold fluid of critical exposition — as water 
 carries burning oil. 
 
 Well, then, Aaron's rod is doubly symbolic. 
 His rod which, in the Biblical phrase, bloomed, 
 blossomed and yielded almonds, is a flute. And 
 the symbol is also phallic, as, indeed, it is in the 
 Bible. Aaron's flute, the musical instrument, is 
 smashed in an accident which is as irrational 
 as life itself. The instrument in its other aspect 
 is broken by the supreme and only rationality 
 — that of human character. 
 
 > In all his books, beginning with "Sons and 
 Lovers," Mr. Lawrence has shown relatively 
 little interest in those mere sequences of external 
 events which novelists artificially pattern into 
 
 331
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 plots. He throws some matter-of-fact probabili- 
 ties to the winds, as in "Aaron's Rod," when he 
 makes a man from the English colleries a master 
 flautist and alleges that he got a hearing in Italy, 
 where there are more good flautists to the square 
 inch than in England to the square mile. 
 
 But Aaron is an unusual person. "It is re- 
 markable," says his creator, "how many odd or 
 extraordinary people there are in England." 
 Mr. Lawrence has always been interested in 
 slightly eccentric characters, and so he stands 
 apart from his contemporaries who call them- 
 selves realists or naturalists because they deal 
 with the commonplace or the recognizably nor- 
 mal. 
 
 After all, extraordinary persons in fiction, as 
 in life, are better worth knowing than ordinary 
 persons. Mr. Lawrence does not make his 
 people so widely different from the general run 
 of human beings as to put a strain on credulity, 
 and he studies them with a subtle and firm under- 
 standing. Their talk sounds real. Their emo- 
 tions are alive in his bold and delicate prose. 
 He has made amateurish excursions into psycho- 
 analysis, which may or may not be a fruitful sub- 
 ject for a novelist to study. The real novelist 
 has always been a psychologist in an untechnical 
 sense. 
 
 Mr. Lawrence is too fine an artist to import 
 332
 
 D. H. LAWRENCE 
 
 into his art the dubious lingo of psycho-analysis; 
 he remains the poet, the dramatist, his symbols 
 and images uncorrupted by pseudo-science. 
 Aaron's dream in the last chapter — no modern 
 novel is complete without at least one dream — 
 is easily "freuded" (cave, corridor, and w^ater 
 symbols), but Mr. Lawrence refrains from 
 analysis. 
 
 Aaron's whole life, or as much as the author 
 gives us of it, is a dream, a dream unfulfilled in 
 love or friendship or music. To what he wakes, 
 if he wakes at all, the conclusion leaves us guess- 
 ing. That will puzzle readers who demand that 
 a story shall finish with a bang or come to a 
 definite point of rest. But life does not con- 
 clude; it persists. 
 
 When Aaron related his history and experi- 
 ences to some friends, he "told all his tale as if 
 it was a comedy. A comedy it seemed, too, at 
 that hour. And a comedy no doubt it was. But 
 mixed, like most things in this life. Mixed." 
 Though Aaron is a strange man, an individual, 
 yet the conflict that goes on in him, between his 
 rebellion and his indecision, his desire and his 
 impotence, is not freakish; it is so much like the 
 struggle that every man knows, with special var- 
 iations, that it is true to universal human nature. 
 Behind the symbolism are the plain facts, solidly 
 conceived. 
 
 333
 
 THE CRITICAL GAME 
 
 The other characters in the book are well 
 drawn, notably Aaron's odd, philosophic friend, 
 Lilly, whose ideas are at once clear and cryptic. 
 There is a pitifully accurate portrait of a cap- 
 tain whose soul and nerves had not recovered 
 from the war. In a single chapter through one 
 man Mr. Lawrence suggests the disillusionment, 
 the mental disaster, that followed the armistice. 
 "None of the glamour of returned heroes, none 
 of the romance of war . . . the hot, seared burn 
 of unbearable experience, which did not heal 
 nor cool, and whose irritation was not to be re- 
 lieved." 
 
 In "The Lost Girl" and "Women in Love" 
 the men are subordinate to the women. In 
 "Aaron's Rod" the women are of secondary in- 
 terest; Aaron's wife is rather indistinct and 
 shadow^^, and the Marchesa, the Cleopatra whom 
 he tried to love and couldn't, never quite comes 
 alive, either for Aaron or for the reader. Prob- 
 ably these women are just what Mr. Lawrence 
 intended them to be, as seen through Aaron's 
 temperament. But I do not feel that Mr. Law- 
 rence has here made a very striking contribution 
 to the history of the everlasting warfare between 
 the sexes. Did Aaron miss because he happened 
 not to meet the right woman? Or was he the 
 sort of man whom no woman could capture and 
 satisfy? Evidently Mr. Lawrence means to 
 
 334
 
 D. H. LAWRENCE 
 
 leave the eternal question unsettled even for the 
 man whom he has created. 
 
 Like many other English poets, Mr. Lav^rence 
 is a lover of Italy, and he takes his hero there, 
 one suspects, for the sheer joy of the scene and 
 the atmosphere, which he realizes with vivid 
 beauty. He is a master of description, a master 
 of words. His command ranges from the bald- 
 est sort of every day conversation to prose har- 
 monies that are as near to verse as prose can go 
 without breaking over. This is not merely a 
 command of style; it is more than that — it is a 
 command of ideas. Mr. Lawrence can pass with 
 equal sureness from colliery to cathedral and 
 find the right word for every thing and person 
 met on the way, the right word, though often a 
 perplexed and perplexing word. Because life is 
 like that. It is "mixed." 
 
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