Part 11
He is primarily an anthropologist, as he showed in _This Simian World_. The race of man is for him “a fragile yet aspiring species on a stormy old star.” It has lived a long while and has gone a long way from its original slime, but plenty of the old stains still colour its nature. Its impulses are tangled with the impulses of the ape and with the inhibitions of the amoeba. “The test of a civilized person is first self-awareness, and then depth after depth of sincerity in self-confrontation.” By this test Mr. Day is thoroughly civilized. Nor does he merely search in his own mind and admit what he finds there. He observes others with the same awareness and the same sincerity. Hardy, he sees, takes his pleasure in portraying gloom. “That’s fair,” says Mr. Day. Shaw has had a vision of the rational life that men might lead and can never stop insisting that they lead it: a master of comedy when he paints the contrast and rather tiresome when he insists too much. Maeterlinck is king in the realms of romance he has created, like any other child; he is also a child when it comes to judging the “real” world. We know what Fabre thinks of wasps, but we wish we knew what the wasps think of Fabre. Mr. Day’s ideas are never gummed together with their hereditary associations. He talks always as if he had just come into this universe and were reporting it for other persons as intelligent as he. What a compliment to mankind! And what a compliment to mankind, too, that he should find it quite unnecessary to lecture it! A whimsical fable, a transparent allegory, a scrap of biography, a few verses, a humorous picture—these are his only devices.
GOLDEN LYRICS
Snuffy, prosy men always keep pawing over the poets. It is bad enough when they are only literary critics, but when they are theologians there is no length to which they will not go. Think what has happened to that radiant anthology which the late Morris Jastrow translated and edited as his final work, _The Song of Songs_. Originally, it seems clear, a collection of popular lyrics which the Hebrew folk prized so highly as to insist on giving them a place in the sacred canon, these poems have been argued and allegorized to what would have been the death of anything less indestructible. While the Stoics were “explaining” Homer, partly Hellenized Jews began to interpret the _Song of Songs_ as an expression of Yahweh’s love for Israel and then Christians as an expression of Christ’s love for his Church. Learned scholiasts wallowed in commentary, declaring, for instance, that the phrase “eyes like doves” referred to the wise men of the Sanhedrin or to the thoughts of God directed toward Jerusalem. Augustine saw in “where thou reclinest at noon” a hint that the true Church lay under the meridian—that is, in Augustine’s Africa! Bernard of Burgundy composed eighty-six homilies on the first two chapters. The Jewish Saadia, writing in the tenth century, detected in the _Song of Songs_ a complete history of the Jews from the Exodus to the coming of a twelfth-century Messiah; and Thomas Brightman in 1600 drew the prophecy down to Luther and Melancthon. Not until the Enlightenment, in the hands of Lowth and Herder, did criticism become more direct and reasonable. Even after that the passion for finding some kind of unity in the book led even such scholars as Ewald, Delitzsch, Renan to explain it as a rudimentary drama, with Solomon as one of the characters. There were, of course, always heretics, like Thomas Hardy’s Respectable Burgher, who slyly rejoiced to learn
“That Solomon sang the fleshly Fair And gave the Church no thought whate’er,”
but they were generally outside the beaten track of doctrine.
Mr. Jastrow brought to his labours on the _Song of Songs_ at once the erudition and common sense with which he had already edited _Job_ and _Ecclesiastes_ and in addition a feeling for youth and love and poetry which his latest theme particularly required. In a masterly introduction, utilizing all that is known about the book and reducing it to convenient form for a wide audience, he cuts away the accretions of centuries while tracing the fortunes of this golden treasury with its cloud of commentators. Then he offers a new translation divided into twenty-three separate lyrics, each of which he equips with adequate yet simple notes, purging the text of intrusive variants and glosses, explaining the allusions, sympathetically pointing out the grace and spontaneity of the poems. In his treatment the _Song of Songs_ is restored to an ancient status which gives it a fresh, modern meaning. Once more the Palestinian villagers have come together at a wedding; once more they sing exquisite songs about the joys of love which no thought of theology invades. Lover and beloved praise one another’s charms in glowing imagery. Alone, each longs for the other; united, they rush to ecstatic, unabashed consummation of their desire. This is love at its rosy dawn, tremulous, candid, exultant. This is what Wilfrid Scawen Blunt had in mind when he declared in his diary that he would rather have written the _Song of Songs_ than all the rest of literature.
THE CHRISTIAN DIPLOMAT
Regarding Europe as an intricate republic with all its interests close-knit and its equilibrium exquisitely sensitive, François de Callières in 1716 published at Paris a vade-mecum for diplomats which has been translated and issued in a handsome edition by A. F. Whyte as _On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes_. “Secrecy,” says Callières, “is the very soul of diplomacy”; and his manner of expounding the manners of negotiation might almost be that of some accomplished mole long employed by his monarch in listening for ground-tremors in all parts of the garden, learning where traps were set and ploughs expected and where the roots grew sweetest and lushest, and finding out the shortest way to them and back in safety. Discretion, however, not deceit is the method Callières urges. The ideal diplomatist must be “a man of probity and one who loves truth.” “It is true that this probity is not often found joined to that capacity for taking wide views which is so necessary to a diplomatist.” He should have learning, experience, penetration, eloquence, as well as the most equable temper, the most easy gallantry, the quickest repartee, the most tireless patience; he must be courageous without being rash, dignified without being mysterious, wealthy without being too proud of his purse, well-bred without being haughty. He must dispense gifts generously, though he should rarely take them, and he should do his bribing like a gentleman, in the due fashion of the court to which he is accredited. In a democratic state he should flatter the Diet—and feed it, for good cheer is an admirable road to influence. He should have a flair for nosing out secrets as well as a genius for hiding them; his use of spies is the test, almost the measure, of his excellence. “The wise and enlightened negotiator must of course be a good Christian.” Machiavelli explained princely policy and Chesterfield worldly polish no more lucidly than Callières, who was private secretary to the Most Christian King Louis XIV and ambassador and plenipotentiary entrusted with the Treaty of Ryswick, explained the devices and virtues of his craft. He had high standards for diplomatists; he wanted them to be better-trained, better valued, and better rewarded than they were. He thought they should be men of letters and men of peace. He would not have held himself to blame for assuming that the relation between even friendly princes was that of ceaseless rivalry and that the first interest of each was to take something from the others. Those were the assumptions of the age. Callières was merely pointing out, with tact and charm, how the members of the diplomatic corps might best observe all the punctilios that go with honour among the most precious thieves.
LAWYER AND ELEGIST
Every one knows Clarence Darrow as a fighting labour lawyer, a double-handed berserker of the bar. Only his friends know that at heart he is an elegiac poet. Yet any one who wishes may find this out by reading his exquisite half-novel, half-autobiography, _Farmington_. It has unstinting veracity; it has mellow moods and ivory texture. The book rises naturally from the spirit, dear to the American tradition, of tender affection for some native village. Thousands of men daily dream thus of childhood, but the pictures which come before them are dimmed by short memory or distorted by sentimentalism or falsified by some subsequent prejudice. Mr. Darrow’s _Farmington_, it is true, lies continually in a golden haze, melts and flows, increases and then diminishes like a living legend. The colours, however, have grown truer not fainter, and the forms of his remembered existence more substantial if less sharp-edged. Richly and warmly as he visualizes that perished universe, he has not brought in illusions to multiply his pleasure in it. What gave him pain as a boy he remembers as pain and will not make out to have been a joke. What gave him delight he remembers as delight, not as an offence to be expiated by an older conscience. Such dreams do not lie. They are the foundations on which truth mounts above facts. To _Farmington_ they impart a firmness which enables an honest reader to move confidently among its lovely pictures without the sense that a breath may shatter them. The ringing laughter of Mark Twain’s _Hannibal_ never sounds through Mr. Darrow’s softer pages: herein lies a limitation of _Farmington_, its lack of a large masculine vitality. But that, of course, is just the quality which we have no right to ask for in an exquisite elegiac poem.
WOMEN IN LOVE
The hunger of sex is amazingly set forth by D. H. Lawrence, whose novel _The Rainbow_ was suppressed in England and who has now brought out his _Women in Love_ in the United States in a sumptuous volume delightful to eye and hand. Mr. Lawrence admits no difference between Aphrodite Urania, and Aphrodite Pandemos; love, in his understanding of it, links soul and body with the same bonds at the same moments. And in this latest book of his not only is there but one Aphrodite; there is but one ruling divinity, and she holds her subjects throughout a long narrative to the adventure and business and madness and warfare of love. Apparently resident in the English Midlands, Gudrum and Ursula Brangwen and their lovers Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich actually inhabit some dark wood sacred to Dionysiac rites. If they have an economic existence, it is of the most unimportant kind; at any moment they can come and go about the world as their desires drive them. If they have any social existence, it is tenuous, or at best hardly thicker than a tissue of irritations. War and politics and art and religion for the time being are as if they had never been. Each pair recalls those sundered lovers of whom Aristophanes told the guests at Plato’s Symposium—lovers who, in reality but halves of a primordial whole, whirl through space and time in a frantic search each for its opposite, mad with delay, and meeting at last with a frantic rush which takes no account of anything but the ecstasy of reunion.
If references to Greek Cults come naturally to mind in connection with _Women in Love_, these lovers none the less have the modern experience of frantic reaction from their moments of meeting. They experience more than classical satiety. Mad with love in one hour, in the next day they are no less mad with hate. They are souls born flayed, who cling together striving to become one flesh and yet causing each other exquisite torture. Their nerves are all exposed. The intangible filaments and repulsions which play between ordinary lovers are by Mr. Lawrence in this book magnified to dimensions half heroic and half mad. He has stripped off the daily coverings, the elaborated inhibitions, the established reticences of our civil existence, and displays his women as swept and torn by desires as old as the race and older, white-hot longings, dark confusions of body and spirit. Gudrum and Ursula are women not to be matched elsewhere in English fiction for richness and candour of desire. They are valkyries imperfectly domesticated, or, in Mr. Lawrence’s different figure, daughters of men troubling the sons of God, and themselves troubled. No wonder then that the language which tells their story is a feverish language; that the narrative moves with a feverish march; that the final effect is to leave the witness of their fate dazed with the blazing mist which overhangs the record. Most erotic novels belong to the department of comedy; _Women in Love_ belongs to the metaphysics and the mystical theology of love.
MOSES IN MASSACHUSETTS
More than thirty years after Brooks Adams first flayed his ancestors in _The Emancipation of Massachusetts_ a new edition of the book has appeared with the original text and a novel preface. What Mr. Adams has added, besides an expression of regret for his earlier acrimony of speech, is an account of the philosophy to which he has arrived after three meditative decades. Although he belongs to the ineffably disillusioned generation which bred also Charles Francis 2d and Henry Adams, Mr. Brooks Adams is still an Adams: he thinks with the hard lucidity and writes with the cold downrightness of his tribe. The central point of his doctrine is touched upon almost in passing: “And so it has always been,” he says, “with each new movement which has been stimulated by an idealism inspired by a belief that the spirit was capable of generating an impulse which would overcome the flesh and which would cause men to move toward perfection along any other path than the least resistant. And this because man is an automaton, and can move no otherwise.” The emancipation of Massachusetts, Mr. Adams has presumably come to believe, was merely an irresistible movement of the commonwealth away from the idealistic impossibilities to which it was originally pledged and to which the conservatives vainly tried to hold it. Once they seemed villains; now they seem fools and dupes.
But Massachusetts is the least of the concerns of this preface, one half of which is devoted to the deeds and character of Moses, an optimist who thought he had found some supernatural power and could control it, tried leadership, discovered that he must after all depend on his own wits, sought vainly to “gratify at once his lust for power and his instinct to live an honest man,” and, after bilking the Israelites in the little matters of the Brazen Serpent and the Tables of the Law, went up into Mount Nebo and committed suicide. (Tom Paine would have liked to write this account of Moses.) The Mosaic idealism having failed, there followed the Roman confidence in physical force, which the Romans erected into a sort of vested interest, in turn also overthrown by the Christian confidence in divine aid secured through prayer—“a school of optimism the most overwhelming and the most brilliant which the world has ever known and which evolved an age whose end we still await.” Thus optimisms rise and fall, but the life of mankind rolls forward without observable acceleration or retardation, only now and then heated here or there to an explosion by some sort of conflict between powerful interests, generally economic. The past shows no variation from this procedure; the future holds forth no hope except in a change to some form of non-competitive civilization which Mr. Adams does not venture to propound. Depressing enough in details, the preface as a whole is one of the most provocative arguments in American literature. Some day the allied and associated pessimism of Brooks Adams and his two brothers will seem hardly a slighter contribution to America than the diplomacy of their father or the statesmanship of their grandfather and great-grandfather.
BROWN GIRLS
The ardours celebrated in _Coloured Stars: Versions of Fifty Asiatic Love Poems_, by Edward Powys Mathers, have not been uttered in original English poetry since the days when the young Marlowe and the young Shakespeare lavished the wealth of Elizabethan eulogium upon the gorgeous bodily beauties of Hero and Venus—and even those ladies, all red and white, seem a little cool and proud compared with the browner girls who kindle such infinite desires in Asian lovers. The poets whom Mr. Mathers has here rendered with delicate skill represent almost every corner of the continent, yet the most frequent note in the collection is the flaming praise of radiant mistresses, pictured not so much in the lover’s hours of longing as in the hot moments of the fruition of his desire. For sheer intensity it would be hard to equal the two Afghan poems, _Black Hair_ and _Lover’s Jealousy_, or the Kurdistan _Vai! Tchod-jouklareum_—full of raptures as barbarously naked as the girls they praise. Out of the same fury comes the Altai _War Song_, which sets forth the most tempting charms of love, only to vow that still better are the arrows and sabres and black horses of battle. The Burmese _My Desire_, only a little less passionate, is more philosophical. What most differentiates this anthology from any similar one that could be made from European literature is the comparative absence from it of the deep humility of the lover before the person or the thought of his beloved. These lovers are nearly all superbly confident. More civil moods, however, appear in the Hindustani pieces, which are not without a note of fear and distrust of women as chilly jilts. True to our preconceptions, the Japanese poems are the daintiest, all but one in the accustomed five-line stanza, and each one an exquisite picture associated with tender longings; and the Chinese poems seem most familiar, most universal, in feelings and ideas. Without the abandon of the poems from western Asia, and with less than the hard, bright compactness of the Japanese, they are exquisitely truthful and humane. It is notable that only the eastern Asiatics are here represented as giving expression to the woman’s emotions, as if in the west, women, at the worst the victims of desire, were at best only an ear to hear of it, never a voice to speak it out.
INVENTION AND VERACITY
There may be a line which separates fiction from biography but it is a metaphysical affair about which no one need worry much. On one side, let us say, is invention and on the other is veracity; every biographer, however, has now and then to invent, and veracity is often indispensable to the novelist. It is strange that the two forms have so rarely been compounded: that, for instance, so few authors have written biographies of imaginary persons. The mixture is particularly tempting. It makes possible at once the freedom of the novel and the sober structure of the biography; it has the richness, though perhaps also a little of the perverseness, of certain hybrid types. In _Peter Whiffle_ Carl Van Vechten has crossed the two literary forms fascinatingly. His hero has a _fin de siècle_ look about him, as if he were, perhaps, a version of Stephen Crane or of one of his contemporaries. When Peter first dawns upon his biographer he has in mind to beat such decorative geniuses as Edgar Saltus at the art of producing fine effects by the sheer enumeration of lovely or definite things: he will make his masterpiece the catalogue of catalogues. Later, he has shifted to the mode of Theodore Dreiser, having been converted by _Sister Carrie_, and is a revolutionist wedded to the slums. Eventually he turns to the occult and the diabolical and ends in about that spiritual longitude and latitude. Does Peter suggest some of Max Beerbohm’s men too much? The question will be asked. At least it is certain that he is piquant, arresting, brightly mad. Whether in Paris or in New York he glitters in his setting. And that setting is even more of a triumph than the character of Peter. Mr. Van Vechten, however he made up his protagonist, has taken his setting from life: actual persons appear in it, actual places. He deals with it now racily, now poetically. He is full of allusions, of pungencies, of learning in his times. He knows how to laugh, he scorns solemnity, he has filled his book with wit and erudition. He is a civilized writer.
A HERO WITH HIS POSSE
If literature is not cosmopolitan when a Japanese-German publishes in the United States in English a book dealing with the life of the great Jew whose deeds and doctrines, recounted in the Greek of the Gospels, serve as the basis of the Christian religion, when is it? Sadakichi Hartmann’s _The Last Thirty Days of Christ_ will sound to the orthodox a good deal like George Moore for irreverence and a little like Anatole France for slyness. Ostensibly the diary of the disciple Lebbeus, also called Thaddeus, it explains the miracles as so many quite rational affairs and ends with Jesus dying like a mortal man in a garden at Emmaus; in the most realistic language it shows Lebbeus asking Jesus if he is to “swipe” the ass on which the Master entered Jerusalem, describing the shapely legs of the Samaritan woman, and recounting with vigour and gusto the pranks of the dusty, naked apostles in the Jordan. Bull-necked Peter, “fierce, stubborn, easily roused, but devoted to the Master like no other”; “flamboyant Judas Iscariot, a strangely magnetic personality”; “sturdy, straightforward James and sad and headachy-looking John”—John being the Boswell of the expedition; doubting Thomas, “a lean elderly crab-apple sort of a man”; “old ‘muffled-up’ Bartholomew, of whose face at no time one could see more than a snivelling nose”; Matthew, “practical, shrewd, determined that something great must be the outcome of all this personal discomfort and marching about”—these and the others are keenly drawn to what may have been life—of course no one knows. The apostles talk metaphysics behind the Master’s back and undertake plans for “something great.” Indeed, the betrayal appears as merely Judas’s scheme for bringing matters to a head and forcing Jesus to call on the “legion of angels” which he had said he could command. Alas, the apostles could not comprehend their Teacher, his humour, his paradoxes, his hyperboles, his strength in tenderness, his nature so rich and full that he could be ascetic without drying up. He stands in this book, wherein the arguments of Renan are made flesh, as a companionable saint—not a god at all—who is still marked off from the intensely human group about him by a mystery and a glory which are Sadakichi Hartmann’s tribute to his power and which in Christian art have been symbolized by the bright aureole around his head.
MARIA AND BATOUALA