Part 12

It would be going too far to suggest, however, that Mr. Conrad merely emphasises in other writers those qualities which he himself either possesses or desires to possess. Most good portraits are double portraits: they portray both the painter and the sitter. Mr. Conrad always does justice to his sitter, as when he writes: “Henry James is the historian of fine consciences,” or as when he says of Maupassant: “It cannot be denied that he thinks very little. In him extreme energy of perception achieves great results, as in men of action the energy of force and desire.” At the same time, we read _Notes on Life and Letters_ for the light it throws, not on this or that author or the Polish question or the question of unsinkable ships, but on Mr. Conrad himself. The essay on Anatole France, for instance, interests us mainly because it reminds us that Mr. Conrad is as impatient of political panaceas as of literary formulas. Remembering that Anatole France is a Socialist, he observes characteristically: “He will disregard the stupidity of the dogma and the unlovely form of the ideal. His art will find its own beauty in the imaginative presentation of wrongs, of errors, and miseries that call aloud for redress.” He commands the artist to hope, but he clearly forbids anybody to hope too much. His “Note on the Polish Problem” shows that during the war the most he hoped for his country was an Anglo-French protectorate. Humanitarians horrify him with their dreams. He hates impossibilism as he hates the talk about unsinkable ships. But what he really hates most, both in politics and in ships, is the blind worship of machinery. He looks on Socialism, I fancy, as an attempt on the part of machine-worshippers to build an unsinkable State--a monstrous political _Titanic_, defiant of the facts of nature and fore-doomed to catastrophe. And how this old master of a sailing-ship hates the _Titanic_! He has little that is good to say, indeed, of any steam vessels, at least of cargo steam vessels--“a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull mechanical toilers, conceited and without grace.” Progress? He retorts: “The tinning of salmon was ‘progress.’” And yet, when he met the men of the merchant service during the war, he had to admit that “men don’t change.” That is a fact at once reassuring and depressing. It is reassuring to know that human beings, if they avoid the sin of idolaters, can make use of machines with reasonable safety. The machine, like the literary formula, is a convenience. Even the Socialist State would be only a convenience. It would in all probability be very little more alarming than a button-hook or a lead pencil.

IV

MR. WELLS AND THE WORLD

Mr. Wells is in love with the human race. It is one of the rarest of passions. It is a passion of which not even all imaginative men are capable. It was, perhaps, the grandest of Shelley’s grand passions, and it was the demon in William Morris’s breast. On the other hand, it played a small part if any, in the lives of Shakespeare and Dickens. Their kaleidoscopic sympathy with human beings was at the antipodes from Shelley’s angelic infatuation with the human race. The distinction has often been commented on. It is the difference between affection and prophecy. There is no reason, I suppose, why the two things should not be combined, and, indeed, there have been affectionate prophets both among the religious teachers and among men of letters. But, as a rule, one element flourishes at the expense of the other, and Charles Lamb would have been as incapable of even wishing to write the _Outline of History_ as Mr. Wells would be of attempting to write the _Essays of Elia_.

Not that Mr. Wells gives us the impression that he loves men in general more than Charles Lamb did. It seems almost as if he loved the destiny of man more than he loves man himself. His hero is an anonymous two-legged creature who was born thousands of years ago and has been reincarnated innumerable times and who will go on being re-born until he has established the foundations of order amid the original slime of things. That is the character in history whom Mr. Wells most sincerely loves. He means more to him than Moses or any of Plutarch’s men. Plutarch’s men, indeed, are for the most part men who might have served man but preferred to take advantage of him. Compare Plutarch’s and Mr. Wells’s treatment of Cato the Elder and Julius Cæsar, and you will see the difference between sympathy with individual men and passion for the purpose of man. You will see the same difference if you compare the Bible we possess with the new Bible of which Mr. Wells draws up a syllabus in _The Salvaging of Civilisation_. The older book at the outset hardly pauses to deal with man as a generalisation, but launches almost at once into the story of one man called Adam and one woman called Eve. Mr. Wells, on the other hand, would begin the human part of his narrative with “the story of our race”:

How through hundreds of thousands of years it won power over nature, hunted and presently sowed and reaped. How it learnt the secrets of metals, mastered the riddle of the seasons, and took to the seas. That story of our common inheritance and of our slow upward struggle has to be taught throughout our entire community in the city slums and in the out-of-the-way farmsteads most of all. By teaching it, we restore again to our people the lost basis of a community, a common idea of their place in space and time.

Mr. Wells’s attitude to men, it is clear, is primarily that of a philosopher, while the attitude of the Bible is primarily that of a poet. It remains to be seen whether a philosopher’s Bible can move the common imagination as the older Bible has moved it. That it can move and excite it in some degree we know. We have only to read the glowing pages with which _The Salvaging of Civilisation_ opens in order to realise this. Mr. Wells’s passion for the human group is infectious. He expresses it with the vehemence of a great preacher. He plays, like many great preachers, not on our sympathy so much as on our hopes and fears. His book is a book of salvation and damnation--of warnings to flee from the wrath to come, of prophecies of swords turned into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks. He loves his ideal group-man almost as Bunyan loved Christian. He offers him, it is true, at the end of his journey, not Paradise, but the World-State. He offers it to him, moreover, not as an individual but as a type. He bids men be ready to perish in order that man may arrive at the goal. His book is a call to personal sacrifice to the end, not of personal, but of general salvation. That, however, is an appeal that has again and again been proved effective in history. It is of the same kind as the appeal of patriotism in time of war. “Who dies if England lives?” sang Mr. Kipling. “Who dies if the World-State lives?” Mr. Wells retorts.

The question remains whether the ordinary man can ever be brought to think of the world as a thing worth living and dying for as he has often thought his country worth living and dying for. If the world were attacked by the inhabitants of another planet, world-patriotism would become a necessity of self-defence, and the peoples of the world would be presented with the alternatives of uniting or perishing. Mr. Wells believes, no doubt, that they are presented with these alternatives already. But can they be made to realise this by anything but an external enemy? It is external enemies that create and intensify patriotism. Can human beings as a whole organise themselves against war as the enemy with the same thoroughness with which Englishmen organised themselves against Germany as the enemy? Mr. Wells obviously believes that they can. But it is to the great religions, not to the great patriotisms, that he looks for examples of how this can be done. He recalls how the Christian religion spread in the first four centuries and how the Moslem religion spread in the seventh century, and he believes that these precedents “support a reasonable hope that such a change in the minds of men, whatever else it may be, is a practicable change.” His gospel of human brotherhood, indeed, is propounded as a larger Christianity rather than as a larger patriotism. He realises, however, the immensity of the difficulties in the way of the spread of this gospel. He sees that the majority of men are still indifferent to it. Unless they are in the vein for it, “it does not really interest them; rather it worries them.” That is why he believes so ardently in the need of a new Bible--a Bible of Civilisation--which will restore to modern men “a sense of personal significance, a sense of destiny, such as no one in politics or literature seems to possess to-day.” That is why he scorns such a compromise and concession to the frailty of human nature as a League of Nations and calls on men to turn their eyes from all such conveniences and makeshifts and to concentrate on the more arduous ideal of human unity. Of the League of Nations he writes:

The praise has a thin and legal and litigious flavour. What loyalty and what devotion can we expect this multiple association to command? It has no unity--no personality. It is like asking a man to love the average member of a woman’s club instead of loving his wife.

For the idea of man, for human unity, for our common blood, for the one order of the world, I can imagine men living and dying, but not for a miscellaneous assembly that will not mix--even in its name. It has no central idea, no heart to it, this League of Nations formula.

Many people will agree with much of Mr. Wells’s scornful criticism of the League of Nations. He is obviously writing the plainest common sense when he declares that it has failed so far to solve the problem of modifying the traditional idea of sovereign independence and the problem of a super-national force that will be stronger than any national force. The average statesman is still an Imperialist at heart, even when he praises the League of Nations with his lips. He desires a world-order that will confirm the present order of rival Empires rather than a world-order that will supersede it. He desires to avert war, but only if he may preserve all the conditions that make war inevitable. Mr. Wells is impatient of all this as a treachery to the greatest ideal that has come into the world in our time. On the other hand, I think that the advocates of the League of Nations and not the advocates of the World State are going the right way to propagate the sense of world-unity that Mr. Wells desires. The League of Nations, whatever its shortcomings, does make human nature a partner in its ideal. It remembers the ordinary human being’s affection for his own country, and does not treat it as a mere prejudice in the path. It realises that the true victory of internationalism will be not as the destroyer of individualism but as its counterweight. It used to be thought that a man could not be loyal to both his church and his country unless the Church were a State Church. Some Socialists have believed that the family and the State were inevitable rivals. As a matter of fact, every man is in a state of balance among conflicting loyalties--loyalty to himself, to the family, to the school, to the Church, to the State, to the world. The religion of the brotherhood of man must bow to this fact, or it must fail. To ignore it is to be a doctrinaire--to fail, that is, to bring home one’s doctrine to men’s business and bosoms. It is to sit above the battle so far as the immediate issues with which mankind is faced are concerned. Mr. Wells has rendered an immense service to his time by compelling us to remember the common origin and the common interests of mankind. He has invented a wonderful telescope through which we can look back and see man struggling out of the mud and can look forward and see him climbing a dim and distant pinnacle. I am not sure, however, if he has pointed out the most desirable route to the pinnacle--whether he does not expect us to reach it as the crow flies instead of by winding roads and by bridges across the deep rivers and ravines. He may take the view that, as man has learned to fly mechanically, so he may learn to fly politically. One never knows. The glorious feature of his prophetic writing, meanwhile, is its driving-force. He is one of the few writers who have given momentum to the idea of the world as one place.

V

MR. CLUTTON-BROCK

Mr. Clutton-Brock is a critic with an unusual equality of interests. He seems to be the centre of an almost perfect circle, and literature, painting, religion, philosophy, ethics, and education are the all but equal radii that connect him with the circumference. Many writers have been as versatile, but few have been as symmetrical. He has all his gifts in due proportion. He is not more æsthetic than moral, or more moral than æsthetic. His idealism and his intellect balance each other exactly. His matter and his manner are twins. He produces on us the effect of a harmony, not of a nature in conflict with itself. Had he lived in the ancient world, he would probably have been a teacher of philosophy. He has gifts of temper as well as powers of exposition and understanding that make him a teacher even to-day, whether he will or not. He does not speak down to us from the chair, but he is at our elbows murmuring with exquisite restraint yet with an eagerness only half-hidden the “nothing too much” of the Greeks, the “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty” of Keats, the good news that the flesh and spirit are not enemies but friends, and that the Earth for the wise man is not at odds with Paradise.

Those who shrink from virtue as from a split infinitive sometimes speak in disparagement of Mr. Clutton-Brock’s gifts. He is the head of a table at which the virtues and the graces sit down side by side, and they are dressed so much alike that it is not always easy to tell which is which. He is always seeking, indeed, the point at which a virtue passes into a grace, and he knits his brows over those extreme differences that separate one from the other. The standard by which he measures things in literature and in life is an ideal world in which goodness and beauty answer one another in antiphonal music. His ideal man is the _kalos k’ agathos_ of ancient Athens. He goes among authors in quest of this part-song in their work. He misses it in the later Tolstoy: he discovers it in Marvell and Vaughan. He is not to be put off, however, with a forced and unnatural antiphony. He is critical of the antiphony of body and soul that announces “All’s well!” in Whitman’s verse. He finds in Whitman not organic cheerfulness but functional cheerfulness--“willed cheerfulness,” he calls it. And he says of Whitman with penetrating wisdom: “He was a man not strong enough in art or in life to do without that willed cheerfulness; it is for him a defence like irony, though a newer, more democratic, more American defence.” He writes with equal wisdom when he says that Whitman “has got a great part of his popularity from those who were grateful to him for saying so firmly and so often what they wished to believe.” But might not this be said of all poets of hope? Might it not be said of Shelley and of Browning? I am not sure, indeed, that Mr. Clutton-Brock does not do serious injustice to Whitman in exaggerating the element of reaction in him against old fears as well as old forms. His discovery of the secret of what is false in Whitman has partly blinded him to the secret of what is true. Otherwise, how could he ask us whether there is anything in _Leaves of Grass_ that moves us as we are moved by Edgar Allan Poe’s _The Sleeper_? Can he have forgotten _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_, to name but one of Whitman’s profoundly moving poems? Mr. Clutton-Brock does, indeed, end his essay with fine if tempered praise of Whitman’s genius. But his essay as a whole is a question-mark, expressing a doubt of something false, something even “faked.”

His essay on Poe is more sympathetic. He finds in Poe, not a false harmony, but a real discord--a pitiable discord. “There was a fatal separation,” we are told, “between his intellect and his emotions, except in a very few of his poems, because he could not value life or human nature in comparison with the life and the nature of that other planet for which he was homesick. So he exercised his intellect on games, but with a thwarted passion which gives a surprising interest and beauty even to his detective stories.” This is well said, but, as we read the essay, we become aware of a curious ultra-fastidiousness in Mr. Clutton-Brock--a lack of vulgarity, in the best sense of the word. We see this in his attitude to Poe’s most popular work; he dismisses _The Raven_ and _The Bells_ as “fit to be recited at penny readings.” That certainly has been their fate, but it does not prevent them from being masterpieces in their kind--the _jeux d’esprit_ of a planet-struck man. They are not, however, we may admit, the poems that reveal Poe as an inspired writer. It is a much more serious thing for Mr. Clutton-Brock to omit _Annabel Lee_ from the list of the six poems or so, on which Poe’s reputation as a poet rests. _Annabel Lee_ is a work of genius, if Poe ever wrote a work of genius. _Helen, Thy Beauty is to Me_--which has none of its faults--is the only one of his poems that challenges its supremacy, perhaps successfully. Mr. Clutton-Brock’s essay on the other hand, will be of service to the general reader if it gives him the feeling that Poe is to be approached, not as a hackneyed author, but as a writer of undiscovered genius. He does not exaggerate the beauty of _The Sleeper_, though he exaggerates its place in Poe’s work. The truth is, Poe is a neglected poet. The average reader regards him as too well known to be worth reading, and _The Sleeper_, _The City in the Sea_ and _Romance_ are ignored because _The Bells_ has fallen into the hands of popular reciters.

Mr. Clutton-Brock has the happy gift of taking his readers into the presence of most of his authors in the spirit of discoverers. It is not that he aims at originality or paradox. He is always primarily in search of truth, even when he gets on a false scent. His essay on Meredith is a series of interesting guesses at truth, some of which are extremely suggestive, and some of which seem to me to miss the mark. The most suggestive is the remark that _Love in the Valley_ is not only written on “a theme that inspired the music of the first folk-songs,” but that the verse itself has “for its underlying tune” a folk-measure--the old Saturnian measure of the Romans. Macaulay, it may be remembered, was startled to learn that his ballad of “brave Horatius” was written largely in the Saturnian metre, and still more startled when he was unable to find any perfect example of this metre in English verse, except:

The Queen was in her parlour, eating bread and honey.

It comes as something of a shock to be told that the lines--

Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star;

are musically akin to:

Lars Porsena of Clusium, By the nine gods he swore.

And Mr. Clutton-Brock would be the last man to pretend that it is the same music we find in both. Meredith’s variations on the old tune are, he makes clear, as important a part of the music as is the old tune itself. “It is folk-song with the modern orchestra like the symphonies of Dvorák, and it combines a singing rhythm with sharpness and fullness of detail as they had never before been combined in romantic poetry.” Criticism like this is not merely a comment on technique; it is a guess of the spirit, emphasising the primitive and universal elements which make _Love in the Valley_ probably the most enduring of Meredith’s works.

I do not think Mr. Clutton-Brock is so happy when he writes of Meredith as a novelist. He goes too far when he suggests that Meredith’s witty characters, or mouthpieces, are “always subsidiary and often unpleasant,” like the wise youth in _Richard Feverel_. Meredith, he declares, “does not think much of these witty characters that he cannot do without.” He “would never make a hero more witty than he could help, for he likes his heroes to be either men of action or delightful youths whom too much cleverness would spoil. He himself was not in love with cleverness, and never aimed at it.” This is only partly true. It is partly true in regard to Meredith’s men, and not true at all in regard to his women. _Diana of the Crossways_ alone is enough to disprove it. Meredith’s heroes were conventions; his heroines were creations; and he liked his creations to be witty. He loved wit as his natural air. His _Essay on Comedy_ is a witty dithyramb in praise of wit. Mr. Clutton-Brock seems to me to make another mistake in regard to Meredith when he says that “if he had had less genius, less power of speech, less understanding of men, he might have been an essayist.” As a matter of fact, Merdith was too proud to be an essayist. There are no proud essayists, though many vain ones. Mr. Belloc is the nearest thing to a proud essayist that one can think of, and his pride is really only a fascinating arrogance.

It will be seen that Mr. Clutton-Brock excites to controversy, as every good critic who attempts a new analysis of an author’s genius must do. Were there space, I should like to dispute many points in his essay, “The Defects of English Prose,” in which, incidentally, he accepts the current over-estimate of the prose--the excellent prose--of Mr. Hudson. The purpose of criticism, however, is to raise questions as much as to answer them, and this Mr. Clutton-Brock continually does in his thoughtful analysis of the success and failure of great writers. He is an expositor with high standards in life and literature, who worships beauty in the temple of reason. His essays, though slight in form, are rich in matter. They are fragments of a philosophy as well as comments on authors.

VI

HENLEY THE VAINGLORIOUS