Part 13
(My fortunate husband sang it in his youth.) But even that, while it could have a religious meaning, I should say, only for a sub-normal intelligence, is not a deliberate and explicit defiance of the intellect of man.
Verbum caro, panem verum Verbo camera efficit: Fitque sanguis Christi merum; Et si sensus deficit, Ad firmandum cor sincerum Sola fides sufficit.
Tantum ergo sacramentum Veneremur cernui, Et antiquum documentum Novo cedat ritui: Præstet fides supplementum Sensuum defectui.
It took St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor Angelicus, thus to state, in one supreme utterance, the whole case against the Higher Criticism.
No, I do not think that the sense of a hymn counts so much. The mediæval “Ave Maris Stella” has not much more to recommend it, philosophically speaking, than the hymn with the “Im-mac-u-late, Im-mac-u-late” refrain. A poem, even a religious poem, is good poetry or bad poetry, and that is all there is to it. “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” is a silly poem, and “The Son of God Goes Forth to War” is a rather fine poem; and Bishop Heber wrote both. But the permanent superiority of the latter is in the music to which it is set. One Presbyterian sect sings, I believe, nothing but the Psalms--rather unfortunately metricized, to be sure--and their church singing is the dreariest in the world. Yet the Psalms are rated high. “Onward, Christian Soldiers” gets its appeal from Sir Arthur Sullivan and not from the author. I do not believe that “Nearer, My God, to Thee” would have been the favorite hymn of the late President McKinley were it not for the slow, swinging tempo, which needs only a little quickening to be an excellent waltz, with all the emotional appeal of good waltz music.
On the whole, _Hymns Ancient and Modern_ are far better, from the point of view of poetry, than _Gospel Hymns, No. 5_--but they have not converted half so many people. The elect, the high-brows, may say what they like: if you are doing your evangelizing on the grand scale, the “sensual ear” must be pleased. I do not believe that the music I have referred to, of the “Tantum Ergo” or the “Parce, Domine,” would ever convert the crowd in a tent or a tabernacle--even if D. L. Moody or Fanny Crosby wrote new words to it. But if you let a grammar-school pupil hack words out of the New Testament and set them to the tune of “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground”--well, it would be strange if some one were not converted. You may be very sure that the Roman Catholic Church has not taken to vulgar and catchy hymns without a set purpose of winning souls.
At the Cross, at the Cross, where I first saw the light And the burden of my sin rolled away, It was there by faith I received my sight, And now I am happy all the day.
The last line might almost have been lifted bodily from one of Stephen Foster’s negro-melodies. It has the very lilt of
My old Kentucky home far away.
And it is only one of many in _Gospel Hymns, No. 5_. That is why my husband remembers them, in spite of himself. He may contemn them, but he cannot forget. There is hardly one of them that would not consort happily with the right kind of brass band. They connote crowds and the “emotion of multitude.” So, to me, does the “Parce, Domine” connote crowds--but crowds awe-struck, unweeping, and in no mood for stimulation by a cornet accompaniment. There is a cardinal difference. The success of almost any Gospel Hymn depends on an emotional appeal very like that of Kipling’s banjo:
And the tunes that mean so much to you alone-- Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose, Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan-- I can rip your very heartstrings out with those.
Whatever Bach and Palestrina and Scarlatti and good Gregorian do to you--well, it is not that. Whereas almost any good Gospel Hymn gets you, if it gets you at all, in the banjo way. There is the revivalistic essence in all of them. And when the Catholics wish to be revivalistic, they imitate, rather badly, the Protestant “hymn-tune.”
Most of my friends are so truly high-brow that they cannot be “got” in the banjo way. They do not like cornet solos; and brass bands playing negro-melodies leave them dry-eyed. They honestly prefer the Kniesel Quartet or a Brahms symphony. Their arid and exquisite æstheticism rejects these low appeals. Did I not say that my husband loathes “Throw Out the Life-Line” even while he is reducing me to an emotional crumple? I refuse to admit that I am incapable of that same arid and exquisite æstheticism; but the lower appeal reaches me too. I do weep, over the brass bands. I do choke over the flag appropriately carried. I do fall in love (if I am careful to shut my eyes) with a good tenor voice. And while there are, luckily, a great many people like my husband, there must be millions more like me. He remembers the Gospel Hymns; but I like them.
Not quite to the trail-hitting point; but then I fancy the hymns of the tabernacle are less good than they used to be. I do not know the tune of “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.” Though my six-year-old son has learned it from the cook, I do not believe he has the tune right. He cannot have it right: if it were right, there would be no sawdust trail. Nor do I know the music of “The Brewer’s Big Horses Cannot Roll Over Me.” But I have a suspicion that Billy Sunday’s hymns are nothing like so good as Moody and Sankey. The dance music of the day always has its effect on popular airs of every kind, even religious. I venture to say (_pace_ the shade of Lord Byron) that the waltz, throughout the nineteenth century, had a strong religious influence. Every one knows that good waltz music, if played slowly enough, is the saddest thing in the world. The emotion aroused by good waltz music well played is blood-brother to the emotion aroused by “God Be with You Till We Meet Again” and “For You I Am Praying, I’m Praying for You.” Waltzes and Gospel Hymns reinforce each other--which is probably why the unco’ guid object to dancing. But with all due allowances for mob-emotion and the sensual ear, I cannot believe that syncopation serves the Lord. People’s eyes do not grow dim as they listen to a fox-trot. It does nothing to bring forth that melting sense of universal love which the old popular music did. All waltz music was in essence melancholy; and all sentimental melancholies meet together somewhere in the recesses of the vulgar heart. Yes: when popular composers were writing good waltzes, it was easier for the Sankeys and Blisses to write good hymns. The Y. P. S. C. E. must have had easier work with the young people who were singing “Marguerite,” than it has now with the young people who are singing “At the Garbage Gentlemen’s Ball.” I have a notion that the young people who are singing “At the Garbage Gentlemen’s Ball” do not go to Y. P. S. C. E. meetings at all. Well, you see, those who sang “Marguerite” did.
Those who know say that we are growing more vulgar all the time. Perhaps the difference between D. L. Moody and Billy Sunday is a good index of that degeneration. Certainly the silly young things who wept while they sang “God Be with You Till We Meet Again” would not have pretended to call Christ up on the telephone--or have permitted any one else to do it in their presence. But, thank Heaven, the conventicles are like to outlast the tabernacle.
At all events, I am sure of one thing: that my husband will not be persuaded, twenty years hence, to “oblige” with “The Brewer’s Big Horses.” But I hope he will continue at intervals to oblige with “Throw Out the Life-Line.” For, so long as he does, I shall continue to be evangelized.
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD.
I was reading a novel, the other day; had got about half-way through it. The novel in question was by one of the younger English authors. It was very odd, I thought to myself as I perused it, that I should not (for I read a great deal of fiction) have read before anything by Mr. D. H. Lawrence. I had always meant to, but his work had, for some reason or other, not come my way. And I was glad I was reading it. I ought to have done D. H. Lawrence before. Some people had told me he was “different.” He was not so different as all that; still, there was something fresh about him. Perhaps one could differentiate within that group, though I had long since despaired of doing so. I would certainly get something else of D. H. Lawrence’s. At that point I decided to go to bed, and shut the book up smartly. The cover revealed to me that the author was J. D. Beresford. Why I had ever thought it was D. H. Lawrence, I do not know. Some false association of ideas at the moment of borrowing it, probably.
The joke is on me, as the younger generation would say. And yet, there is something to be said on my side. The fact is that I had not expected D. H. Lawrence to be one whit different from Hugh Walpole, J. D. Beresford, Compton Mackenzie, Gilbert Cannan, Oliver Onions, and W. L. George. I found, I thought, a little difference: not much, but enough to give one hope. To be sure, the hope would have ebbed, in any case, before the book was finished. My only gain was the knowledge that Mr. Beresford can do something besides Jacob Stahl. I have yet to experience D. H. Lawrence. Still, I submit that when, to distinguish between one author and another, you are satisfied with so tiny a difference in style as appears between two works by the same man, it means that differences in style within that particular group are not very startling. One would never have read half of _Tess_ and taken it for the work of Henry James; or half of _Nostromo_ and taken that for the work of Meredith. One would have been brought up standing at the first page. It may be, as I say, that D. H. Lawrence is going to be to me, some day, a revelation of individuality. But the reviews do not give one much hope of that.
Now, there are three authors in England who stand a little away from this larger group, though they are not precisely contemporaries of Hardy or of Conrad. Wells and Bennett and Galsworthy have some individuality of style. A chapter of Mr. Wells is “different.” A chapter of Arnold Bennett or of Mr. Galsworthy is different. Or let me put it in this way. You would not get through half of any one of Mr. Wells’s later novels without a deal of pseudo-philosophical reflection on the scheme of things. You would not read so far in any book by Mr. Arnold Bennett without meeting and recognizing his peculiar kind of humor: semi-grin, semi-farcical. And I am sure that you would not get through many chapters of a typical Galsworthy novel without hearing a bird calling to its mate--not if there were a human love-affair going on. I do not think you could comfortably sit down with any one of them for half an evening and think that you were reading D. H. Lawrence. You would know whom you were reading.
These three gentlemen have, of course, been writing longer than the aforesaid younger group. They are, one might say, the elder brothers of the brood. If any one of them has served as model to the younger fry, it is Mr. Wells. None of the younger fry has ever approached the technical excellence of _Kipps_; but, on the other hand, almost any one of them could have written _Ann Veronica_. Mr. Wells has certainly led them all astray in his time. But there is another equally important thing to be said: Mr. Wells has gone on. In his later phases, he stands quite apart from them all. _The Research Magnificent_ and _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_ are perfectly individual: they are not, and never could have been, the product of a syndicate. Time was when Wells and Bennett seemed to be drawing near each other, _Tono-Bungay_ is Bennett-ish in spots; and _Bealby_ is, superficially, almost straight Bennett. But Mr. Wells, for weal or woe, has always been interested in the social scheme. The most important thing in _Tono-Bungay_ is Bladesover and Bladesover’s moral effect; and even in the ridiculous _Bealby_ there is more than an echo of Bladesover. Mr. Wells is interested in moral values. Sometimes he has had very queer notions about them; but his reward for having been perpetually pre-occupied with them is to have won through to _The Research Magnificent_ and _Mr. Britling_. You may not agree with the hero of either book; but at least he is a person for whom you have respect. His is a dignified moral reaction, even if it is not the moral reaction you would have preferred. He is a serious person, envisaging his relations to the world in a serious temper.
One does not see Mr. Bennett’s characters thus envisaging the world; not, at all events, since _The Old Wives’ Tale_. And even in _The Old Wives’ Tale_ you feel rather the deterministic net in which the characters are caught, than any personal decisions of their own. The moral of the book is that heredity is more powerful than environment, if these two come to grips. In the later books, when they are not, like _Denry the Audacious_ and _Buried Alive_, delicious bits of fooling, you get men and women of a monstrous egotism, of whom it cannot be discerned that either heredity or environment explicitly controls them against their will. An acute critic, who has incidentally had his own say about Wells and Bennett, told me the other day that he thought Bennett’s people had “character.” I should have said rather that they were “characters,” in the colloquial sense. They have self-assertiveness; like Aunty Hamps, they may subjugate their world. But “character”? No: that is a finer, more complicated possession. They want things, sometimes good things and sometimes bad; but they are (especially the women) blond beasts as to their methods. If there is, on the whole, a less decent creature in modern fiction than Hilda Lessways, or a more idiotic one than Audrey Moze, I have still to encounter her. They invoke their gods
By the hunger of change and emotion, By the thirst of unbearable things.
Ann Veronica, as I once tried to point out, is not true to life: she is a nice girl who proceeds to have reactions that a nice girl does not have without a lot of intervening history. Hilda is never a nice girl; she is a monster from the start and to the finish. As for Audrey--_pace_ Mr. Bennett--she is a “moron,” or very near it. Mr. Bennett spends more time on his female than on his male characters. He began with the evident intention of “doing” young Clayhanger. But poor Clayhanger eventually turned into Hilda’s daily bread. He exists only to be masticated by her. She lifts her head from that “fiero pasto,” immitigable as Ugolino.
Now, I may well be accused, by Mr. Bennett’s admirers, of a belated Victorianism, because I do not like his Hildas and Leonoras and Audreys. Well, I do not like Balzac’s Valérie Marneffe; yet surely _La Cousine Bette_ is one of the great novels of the nineteenth century. Henry James, some years ago, drew a distinction between Thackeray and Balzac in their treatment of unpleasant characters; insisting that Thackeray did not give his a fair chance. “Balzac loved his Valérie as Thackeray did not love his Becky,” said Mr. James. However much Balzac loved his Valérie, he did not love her to the point of trying to make us think her delightful. The love he bore her was a love as impersonal as the right hand of Rhadamanthus: a love that consented to be just. Balzac may have loved his Valérie as Thackeray did not love his Becky; but he did not love his Valérie as Mr. Bennett loves his Hilda and his Audrey. He loved her, that is, in a quite different sense. Mr. Bennett positively seems to think that Hilda is as decent as any one else, and more interesting than most people. If he does not really think so, then his method is at fault, and his books belie him. His method is not at fault in _Denry_, because there is no implication anywhere that Denry exists in a moral sense: he is a “card,” and only a “card.” It is never hinted that we ought to take him seriously. He is merely funny; the humor of him is the moral equivalent of an obstacle race or the pursuit of a greased pig.
If only Mr. Bennett would keep to his Denrys! For in the realm of extravaganza he is irresistible. Also, when he does the detail of the Five Towns, he is delightful for sheer convincingness. But he must stick to concrete detail. He must not deal with the human soul, for when he comes to moral reactions, he shows that he has no conception of differences. Mr. Bennett’s world, frankly, seems to me like the world of the dead as described by the poet:
Outside of all the worlds and ages, There where the fool is as the sage is, There where the slayer is clean of blood; No end, no passage, no beginning, There where the sinner leaves off sinning, There where the good man is not good.
There is not one thing with another, But Evil saith to Good: My brother, My brother, I am one with thee.
His world is a world where Evil saith to Good: “My brother, I am one with thee.” If he cannot write us another _Old Wives’ Tale_, we must at least hope, as I say, that he will stick to Denry and Alice Challis. _The Lion’s Share_ does not give much promise that he will do a second _Old Wives’ Tale_. He has a positive fondness for mean people; people who walk blind through a world with beauty in it; people who think their own emotions supremely valuable simply because they are their own.
The realists, I know, have always contended that an author should be impersonal; that he should not have an “attitude”; that he should record life as it is, without comment. Into the possibility or impossibility of that feat (the old technical controversy) we need not go, here and now. The general opinion is that you can tell where an author stands, in spite of him. Certainly Mr. Bennett is not impersonal; he does have an attitude. Not in any of the permitted ways (comment of other characters, logical and retributive results of committed acts, etc.) does he show himself suspicious of his people’s real natures, or disapproving of their odiousness. If he were only scourging, satirist-fashion, the egotism of man-kind, one could bear it. But no: Mr. Bennett seems to love his Yahoos. If he does not love them, then, as I say, his methods are at fault.
Another author who has gone dwindling is Mr. Galsworthy. Tremendous hopes of him and of our permanent joy in him, we had when _The Man of Property_ appeared. And, of course, one knows people who stick to him for his “style.” One does not quite know why: as style, it cannot touch either Mr. Wells’s or Mr. Bennett’s style. I fancy it is because there will always be a perceptible number of people who are reverent before long descriptions of nature. Nature, when it gets into a book, is somehow sacred. Perhaps it is Wordsworth’s fault. Literary pieties die hard. Anyhow, there always are long descriptions of nature in Mr. Galsworthy’s novels, and if they are delicately confused with mating animals and human sex impulses, and all the connotation of stirring sap and swelling buds and the like, that will certainly not make them any less popular. Yet the fact is that Mr. Galsworthy has gone on, from book to book, steadily becoming more sentimental and more flabby. I am speaking here of his novels. His _Five Tales_ hold their own with _The Man of Property_. His work cannot be called rich in situations, since he has never, so far, failed to repeat (I think I am not mistaken) the same situation: a man in love with some woman he has no legal right to be in love with. Often, that is a very interesting situation; but it is not the only source of drama in life, and one does get tired of it. And I do not think that Mr. Galsworthy makes it any more interesting or sympathetic by constantly involving the vegetable world, or by punctuating every declaration of unlawful love with the calls of mating birds. One is tempted to assure him that “The flowers that bloom in the spring (tra-la!) have nothing to do with the case.” But the sanity of W. S. Gilbert is gone from among us.
With Thomas Hardy, one feels at least the reality of this intrusion of external nature; because, as some critic (I think, Mr. W. J. Dawson) has said, his people are children of the soil in no trite sense. They are akin to the landscape in which they move; they seem, that is, to have a personal relation to Gaia, like mortals in an old myth; to be half man, half rock or tree. They are apotheoses of the power of natural environment. But Mr. Galsworthy’s civilized people run down from town to hold hands amid the bracken because they feel that they are somehow justified by the fact of sap. It is all vague, of course; anything of that sort is bound to be vague. And if you are going to lean heavily on the cosmos, you want first to be sure that your _point d’appui_ is not a spot where the cosmic force has chosen to manifest itself in vapor.
Mr. Galsworthy seems not to know in the least what he thinks about life. That state of maze may be satisfying to a hyper-sensitive soul, but it does not make for style. Besides, Mr. Galsworthy is old enough to have some idea as to what he does think about life. As far as one can make out, he thinks that most people are sensual, that everybody ought to be kind, and that there is a sustaining sanction for sex emotion in the fauna and flora of England. I do not know what Mr. Galsworthy’s totem is; but it should be some small, defenceless bird. The snipe, perhaps.
_Justice_ is said to have had a profound effect on English officials. Of that, one is glad; but one’s quarrel with Mr. Galsworthy is that he will never think anything out. He inveighs against solitary confinement, which is a good thing to do; but he does not offer any substitute solution, which would be an even better thing to do. He sentimentalizes over dead pheasants and dead everything; but he gives you no suggestions as to what kind of laws to pass. He objects to existing divorce laws, but he does not come out into the open and say just what divorce laws, if any, he would propose to enact. It is not, apparently, either cowardice or expediency on his part; it is sheer inability to think constructively in any way. That is characteristic of many modern reformers: they want the bars let down here or there, but they never tell you in what spot the bars ought to be set up again. Beyond their gentle impulses, they are perfectly vague. It comes, I suppose, of trying to do your thinking with your heart instead of with your head. And in Mr. Galsworthy’s case, the vagueness has permeated to the last recesses of his style. It is rhetorically accurate--“the English of a gentleman”--but it is jejune and spineless. It has become, you might say, a purely vegetarian meal. Only the graminivorous should read the later Galsworthy. And he will not rid himself of that fault by being increasingly explicit about sexual emotions. In fact, that never was his game.
I may seem to speak bitterly. I confess that I feel some bitterness. For I admired _The Man of Property_ exceedingly, and looked to Mr. Galsworthy to carry on a great tradition of fiction. Instead of which, he has gone on backing, backing--farther and farther away from the Presence. Some people, I know, gave him up with _The Patrician_ because, they said, it was straight Mrs. Humphry Ward. I gave him up forever with _The Freelands_ because it was bad Mrs. Humphrey Ward; in fact, _The Coryston Family_ was much better.