Part 14

Whatever qualities Mr. Lindsay lacks, he has humour, colour and gusto. When he writes in the tradition of the serious poets, as in “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight” and “Epilogue,” he is negligible: he is only one of a thousand capable verse-writers. He is dependent on his own idiom to a greater extent even than was Robert Burns. Not that his work in rag-time English is comparable in other respects to Burns’s in Scots. Burns’s themes were, apart from his comic verse, the traditional themes of the poets--the aristocrats of the spirit. Mr. Lindsay is a humorist and sentimentalist who is essentially a democrat of the spirit--one of the crowd.

And, just as he is the humorist of the crowd, so is he the humorist of things immense and exaggerated. His imagination is the playground of whales and elephants and sea-serpents. He is happy amid the clangour and confusion of a railway-junction. He rejoices in the exuberant and titanic life of California, where:

Thunder-clouds of grapes grow on the mountains.

and he boasts that:

There are ten gold suns in California, When all other lands have one, For the Golden Gate must have due light And persimmons be well done. And the hot whales slosh and cool in the wash And the fume of the hollow sea, Rally and roam in the loblolly foam And whoop that their souls are free.

Mr. Lindsay himself can whoop like a whale. He is a poet in search of superlatives beyond the superlatives. He cannot find them, but he at least articulates new sounds. As one reads him, one is reminded at times of a child in a railway-train singing and shouting against the noise of the engine and the wheels. The world affects Mr. Lindsay as the railway-train affects some children. He is intoxicated by the rhythm of the machinery. As a result, though he is often an ethical poet, he is seldom a spiritual poet. That helps to explain why his verse does not achieve any but a sentimental effect in his andante movements. As his voice falls, his inspiration falls. In “The Santa Fé Trail” he breaks in on the frenzy of a thousand motors with the still, small voice of the bird called the Rachel Jane. He undoubtedly moves us by the way in which he does this; but he moves us much as a sentimental singer at a ballad concert can do. It is not for passages of this kind that one reads him. His words at their best do not minister at the altar: they dance to the music of the syncopated orchestra. That is Mr. Lindsay’s peculiar gift. It would hardly be using too strong a word to say that it is his genius.

IX

MR. PUNCH TAKES THE WRONG TURNING

There are those who gibe at _Punch_. There are also those who gibe at those who gibe at _Punch_. The match is a fairly even one. _Punch_ is undoubtedly not as good as it used to be, but it is not quite so certain that it is not as clever as it used to be. Very few people realise that _Punch_ was once a good paper--that it was a good paper, I mean in the Charles-Kingsley sense of the adjective. It began in 1841, as Mr. C. L. Graves prettily says, by “being violently and vituperatively on the side of the angels.” If _Punch_ had kept pace with the times it would, in these days, at the age of eighty, be suspected of Socialism. Its championship of the poor against those who prospered on the poverty of the poor was as vehement as a Labour speech at a street-corner. One of the features of the early _Punch_ was a “Pauper’s Corner,” in which “the cry of the people found frequent and touching utterance.” It was in the Christmas number of _Punch_ in 1843 that Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” was first published. Mark Lemon, the editor, insisted on publishing it, though all his colleagues were opposed to him on the point. In the following years we find the same indignant sense of realities expressing itself in Leech’s cartoon, “The Home of the Rick Burner,” which emphasised the fact that the cause of an outburst of incendiarism in Suffolk was the greed of the farmers who underpaid their labourers. _Punch_ also took up the cause of the sweated labourers in verse:

I’ll sing you a fine old song, improved by a modern pate, Of a fine Old English Gentleman, who owns a large estate, But pays the labourers on it a very shabby rate. Some seven shillings each a week for early work and late, Gives this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.

Nor did _Punch_ shrink from looking a good deal higher than the fine Old English Gentleman for his victims. He had a special, almost a Lloyd Georgian, taste for baiting dukes. He attacked the Duke of Norfolk with admirable irony for suggesting to the poor that they should eke out their miserable fare by using curry powder. He made butts in turn of the Duke of Marlborough, the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of Sutherland, the Duke of Richmond and the Duke of Atholl. He did not spare even the Duke of Wellington. “The old Duke,” he declared, “should no longer block up the great thoroughfare of civilisation--he should be quietly and respectfully eliminated.” It was in the same mood that the Marquis of Londonderry was denounced both as a tyrannical coal-owner and an enemy of the Queen’s English--“the most noble, but not the most grammatical Marquis.” _Punch’s_ view of the House of Lords is expressed with considerable directness in his scheme for reforming the Chamber, which begins:

It is an indisputable truth that there can be no such thing as a born legislator. As unquestionable is the fact that there may be a born ass.

But your born ass may be born to your legislator’s office, and command a seat in the house of legislators by inheritance, as in not a few examples, wherein the coronet hides not the donkey’s ears.

This is not particularly brilliant. It is interesting not so much in itself as because it is the sort of thing with which _Punch_ used regularly to regale its readers. _Punch_ in those days was a paper with a purpose. Its humour, like Dickens’s was to a certain extent a missionary humour. _Punch_ saw himself as the rescuer of the underdog, and, if he could not achieve his object comically, he was prepared to do it angrily. He did not hesitate to fling his cap and bells rudely in the face of royalty itself. He might be accused of vulgarity, but not of being, as he has since become, the more or less complacent advocate of Toby, the top-dog.

Mr. Graves seems to think that the change in the spirit of _Punch_ is due to the mellowness that comes with increasing years. But the real reason, I fancy, is that, while _Punch_ began under an editor whose sympathies were with the bottom-dog, the sympathies of later editors have been much more respectable. It is not that _Punch_ has lost the fire of youth, but that it has lost the generosity of the Victorian man of letters. It was, it may be admitted, easier to be generous in those days. A Victorian could make himself the champion of the ill-used poor without any feeling that he was assisting in bringing about a new order in society. A middle-class Georgian who attaches himself to the same cause cannot do so without realising that it is not a question of patching an old suit of clothes, but of making a new and a better one. The Victorian committed himself to charity. The Georgian has to commit himself to the cold-blooded charity of equality. _Punch_, indeed, seems to have begun to take alarm as soon as the Chartist movement made it appear likely that the workers were going to demand, not sympathetic treatment, but something like self-determination. By 1873, according to Mr. Graves, “references to the champagne-habit among the miners abound.” In a cartoon, “From the Coal Districts,” we are shown a lady in a fruiterer’s saying, “I’m afraid I must give up the pineapple, Mr. Green! Eight shillings is really too much!” She is interrupted by a “successful collier” who bids the fruiterer, “Just put ’em up for _me_, then, Master. ’Ere’s ’arf a sovereign; and look ’ere--yer may keep the change if yer’ll _only tell us ’ow to cook ’un_.” _Punch_, as we know it to-day, had been born.

It is interesting to trace the change in the temper of _Punch_, not only in domestic, but in foreign, affairs. _Punch_ appears to have given up his pacifism--or, as Mr. Graves calls it with reforming zeal, his “pacificism”--as a result of his generous sympathy with insurgent Italians and Hungarians. That was the thin end of the wedge. Having once drawn the sword, _Punch_ found it even more enjoyable than drawing cartoons. He drew it fiercely against the Russians in the Crimean War. He drew it fiercely against the Indians in the Indian Mutiny. He drew it on behalf of General Eyre after the negro outbreak in Jamaica. He drew it against Lincoln in the American Civil War. Mr. Graves ought, for historical reasons, to have reprinted _Punch’s_ parody on one of Lincoln’s speeches. He is content, however, to describe it as “a truly lamentable performance, in which the President claims dictatorial powers, calls for whipcord to whip the rebels, abuses the ‘rotten old world,’ talks with the utmost cynicism of the blacks, and in general behaves like a vulgar buffoon.” Mr. Graves, with an impartiality which cannot be too highly praised, reminds the _Punch_ of those days that “the magnanimous Lincoln would never allow” the Southerners to be called rebels in his presence--a significant reminder when we recall how Mr. Lloyd George drew on the Lincoln parallel in defending his treatment of the Irish. But, for the ironist, the most amusing of all _Punch’s_ blunders in regard to foreign policy is the welcome he offered to the birth of the German Navy in an article called “Bravo, Bismarck!” “Britannia through her _Punch_,” he wrote, “rejoices to weave among her naval azures a new shade--Prussian blue.” It is only fair to say that _Punch_ was not consistent in his attitude to Germany. But he has shown a curious capacity for backing the wrong horse--the horse that seemed to “get away” at the start, but that was ultimately disqualified by the stern judge, history. He gave up championing lost causes and took to championing causes that would be lost a generation later.

In the result, Mr. Graves, though a wit of distinction, has produced in _Mr. Punch’s History of Modern England_ a book that is pathetic rather than amusing. It is a cemetery of dead jokes--the offspring of a little gentleman with a long nose who was cross more often than he was funny. _Punch_, indeed, has been for the most part a grinner rather than a wit. It has had, and still has, brilliant writers on its staff. But its temper is not the temper of its most brilliant contributors. Its attitude is that of the prosperous clubman who dislikes the advance both of the new rich and of the old poor. It has undoubtedly made itself the most successful comic paper in the world, but one sometimes wonders whether it has done so as a result of allying itself with comedy or of allying itself with success. Yet the fact remains that other men have started rivals to _Punch_, and that they have not only been not so successful as _Punch_ but not so comic. _Punch_ always baits the hook of its odious politics with a reasonable amount of comedy about things in general, and in the comedy of things in general, even if we think it might be done still better, it has at least always been ahead of its rivals. There have been men who have dreamed of a _Punch_ that would bring the spirit of comedy to bear on all sides impartially. There are others who have dreamed of bringing the spirit of comedy to bear on the right side. One would not, perhaps, mind what side _Punch_ was on if only it were a little more generous--if only it purveyed the human comedy as a comedy, and not, as in the case of working men, Irishmen, and non-Allied foreigners, as a sinister crook melodrama.

X

MR. H. M. TOMLINSON

Mr. Tomlinson is a born traveller. There are two sorts of travellers--those who do what they are told and those who do what they please. Mr. Tomlinson has never moved about the world in obedience to a guide-book. He would find it almost as difficult to read a guide-book as to write one. He never echoes other men’s curiosity. He travels for the purpose neither of information nor conversation. He has no motive but whim. His imagination goes roaming; and, his imagination and his temper being such as they are, he is out on his travels even if he gets no farther than Limehouse or the Devonshire coast. He has, indeed, wandered a good deal farther than Limehouse and Devonshire, as readers of _The Sea and the Jungle_ know. Even in his more English volumes of sketches, essays, confessions, short stories--how is one to describe them?--he takes us with him to the north coast of Africa, to New York, and to France in war time. But the English sketches--the description of the crowd at a pit-mouth after an explosion in a coal mine, the account of a derelict railway station and a grocer’s boy in spectacles--almost equally give us the feeling that we are reading the narrative of one who has seen nothing except with the fortunate eyes of a stranger. It is all a matter of eyes. To see is to discover, and all Mr. Tomlinson’s books are, in this sense, books of discoveries.

As a recorder of the things he has seen he has the three great gifts of imagery, style and humour. He sees the jelly-fish hanging in the transparent deeps “like sunken moons.” A boat sailing on a windy day goes skimming over the inflowing ridges of the waves “with exhilarating undulations, light as a sandpiper.” A queer Lascar on a creeping errand in an East-end street “looked as uncertain as a candle-flame in a draught.” How well again Mr. Tomlinson conveys to us in a sentence or two the vision of Northern Africa on a wet day:

As for Bougie, these African villages are built but for sunlight. They change to miserable and filthy ruins in the rain, their white walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud tracks between the styes. Their lissome and statuesque inhabitants become softened and bent, and pad dejectedly through the muck as though they were ashamed to live, but had to go on with it. The palms which look so well in sunny pictures are besoms up-ended in a drizzle.

Mr. Tomlinson has in that last sentence captured the ultimate secret of a wet day in an African village. Even those of us who have never seen Africa save on the map, know that often there is nothing more to be said. Mr. Tomlinson, however, is something of a specialist in bad weather, as, perhaps, any man who loves the sea as he does must be. The weather fills the world for the seaman with gods and demons. The weather is at once the day’s adventure and the day’s pageant. Mr. Conrad has written one of the greatest stories in the world simply about the weather and the soul of man. He may be said to be the first novelist writing in English to have kept his weather-eye open. Mr. Tomlinson shares Mr. Conrad’s sensitive care for these things. His description of a storm of rain bursting on the African hills makes you see the things as you read. In its setting, even an unadorned and simple sentence like----

As Yeo luffed, the squall fell on us bodily with a great weight of wind and white rain, pressing us into the sea,

compels our presence among blowing winds and dangerous waters.

But, weather-beaten as Mr. Tomlinson’s pages are, there is more in them than the weather. There is an essayish quality in his books, personal, confessional, go-as-you-please. The majority of essays have egotism without personality. Mr. Tomlinson’s sketches have personality without egotism. He is economical of discussion of his own tastes. When he does discuss them you know that here is no make-believe of confession. Take, for instance, the comment on place-names with which he prefaces his account of his disappointment with Tripoli:

You probably know there are place-names, which, when whispered privately, have the unreasonable power of translating the spirit east of the sun and west of the moon. They cannot be seen in print without a thrill. The names in the atlas which do that for me are a motley lot, and you, who see no magic in them, but have your own lunacy in another phase, would laugh at mine. Celebes, Acapulco, Para, Port Royal, Cartagena, the Marquesas, Panama, the Mackenzie River, Tripoli of Barbary--they are some of mine. Rome should be there, I know, and Athens, and Byzantium. But they are not, and that is all I can say about it.

That is the farthest Mr. Tomlinson ever gets on the way towards arrogance. He ignores Rome and Athens. They are not among the ports of call of his imagination. He prefers the world that sailors tell about to the world that scholars talk about. He will not write about--he will scarcely even interest himself in--any world but that which he has known in the intimacy of his imaginative or physical experience. Places that he has seen and thought of, ships, children, stars, books, animals, soldiers, workers--of all these things he will tell you with a tender realism, lucid and human because they are part of his life. But the tradition that is not his own he throws aside as a burden. He will carry no pack save of the things that have touched his heart and his imagination.

I wish all his sketches had been as long as “The African Coast.” It is so good that it makes one want to send him travelling from star to star of all those names that mean more to him than Byzantium. One desires even to keep him a prisoner for a longer period among the lights of New York. He should have written about the blazing city at length, as he has written about the ferries. His description of the lighted ferries and the woman passenger who had forgotten Jimmy’s boots, remains in the memory. Always in his sketches we find some such significant “thing seen.” On the voyage home from New York on a floating hotel it is the passing of a derelict sailing ship, “mastless and awash,” that suddenly recreates for him the reality of the ocean. After describing the assaults of the seas on the doomed hulk, he goes on:

There was something ironic in the indifference of her defenceless body to these unending attacks. It mocked this white and raging post-mortem brutality, and gave her a dignity that was cold and superior to all the eternal powers could now do. She pitched helplessly head first into a hollow, and a door flew open under the break of her poop; it surprised and shocked us, for the dead might have signed to us then. She went astern of us fast, and a great comber ran at her, as if it had just spied her, and thought she was escaping. There was a high white flash, and a concussion we heard. She had gone. But she appeared again far away, forlorn on a summit in desolation, black against the sunset. The stump of her bowsprit, the accusatory finger of the dead, pointed at the sky.

We find in “The Ruins” (which is a sketch of a town in France just evacuated by the Germans) an equally imaginative use made of a key incident. First, we have the description of the ruined town itself:

House-fronts had collapsed in rubble across the road. There is a smell of opened vaults. All the homes are blind. Their eyes have been put out. Many of the buildings are without roofs, and their walls have come down to raw serrations. Slates and tiles have avalanched into the street, or the roof itself is entire, but has dropped sideways over the ruin below as a drunken cap over the dissolute.

And so on till we come to the discovery of a corn-chandler’s ledger lying in the mud of the roadway. Only an artist could have made a tradesman’s ledger a symbol of hope and resurrection on a shattered planet as Mr. Tomlinson has done. He picks out from the disordered procession of things treasures that most of us would pass with hardly a glance. His clues to the meaning of the world are all of his own finding. It is this that gives his work the savour and freshness of literature.

As for clues to Mr. Tomlinson’s own mind and temper, do we not discover plenty of them in his confessions about books? He is a man who likes to read _The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms_ in bed. Heine and Samuel Butler and Anatole France are among his favourite authors. There is nothing in his work to suggest that he has taken any of them for his models. But there is a vein of rebellious irony in his writing that enables one to realise why his imagination finds in Swift good company. He, too, has felt his heart lacerated, especially in these late days of the world’s corruption. His writing would be bitter, one feels, were it not for the strength of his affections. Humanity and irony contend in his work, and humanity is fortunately the winner. In the result, the world in his books is not permanently a mud-ball, but a star shining in space. Perhaps it is in gratitude for this that we find it possible at last even to forgive him his contemptuous references to Coleridge’s _Table-talk_--that cache of jewels buried in metaphysical cotton-wool.

XI

THE ALLEGED HOPELESSNESS OF TCHEHOV