Chapter 14
And I went back by the way I had come here for the first time--first from the yard into the garden past the house, then into the avenue of lime-trees.... At this point I was overtaken by a small boy who gave me a note.
"I told my sister everything and she insisted on my parting from you," I read. "I could not wound her by disobeying. God will give you happiness. Forgive me. If only you knew how bitterly my mother and I are crying!"
The people who cannot wound others--those are the people whose sharp pangs we feel in our breasts as we read the stories of Tchehov. The people who wound--it is they whom he paints (or, rather, as Mr. Garnett suggests, etches) with such felicitous and untiring irony. But, though he often makes his people beautiful in their sorrow, he more often than not sets their sad figures against a common and ugly background. In _Anyuta_, the medical student and his mistress live in a room disgusting in its squalor:
Crumpled bed-clothes, pillows thrown about, boots, clothes, a big filthy slop--pail filled with soap-suds in which cigarette-ends were swimming, and the litter on the floor--all seemed as though purposely jumbled together in one confusion....
And, if the surroundings are no more beautiful than those in which a great part of the human race lives, neither are the people more beautiful than ordinary people. In _The Trousseau_, the poor thin girl who spends her life making a trousseau for a marriage that will never take place becomes ridiculous as she flushes at the entrance of a stranger into her mother's house:
Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with small-pox, turned red first, and then the flush passed up to her eyes and her forehead.
I do not know if a blush of this sort is possible, but the thought of it is distressing.
The woman in _The Darling_, who marries more than once and simply cannot live without some one to love and to be an echo to, is "not half bad" to look at. But she is ludicrous even when most unselfish and adoring--especially when she rubs with eau-de-Cologne her little, thin, yellow-faced, coughing husband with "the curls combed forward on his forehead," and wraps him in her warm shawls to an accompaniment of endearments. "'You're such a sweet pet!' she used to say with perfect sincerity, stroking his hair. 'You're such a pretty dear!'"
Thus sympathy and disgust live in a curious harmony in Tchehov's stories. And, as he seldom allows disgust entirely to drive out sympathy in himself, he seldom allows it to do so in his readers either. His world may be full of unswept rooms and unwashed men and women, but the presiding genius in it is the genius of gentleness and love and laughter. It is a dark world, but Tchehov brings light into it. There is no other author who gives so little offence as he shows us offensive things and people. He is a writer who desires above all things to see what men and women are really like--to extenuate nothing and to set down naught in malice. As a result, he is a pessimist, but a pessimist who is black without being bitter. I know no writer who leaves one with the same vision of men and women as lost sheep.
We are now apparently to have a complete edition of the tales of Tchehov in English from Mrs. Garnett. It will deserve a place, both for the author's and the translator's sake, beside her Turgenev and Dostoevsky. In lifelikeness and graciousness her work as a translator always reaches a high level. Her latest volumes confirm one in the opinion that Tchehov is, for his variety, abundance, tenderness and knowledge of the heart of the "rapacious and unclean animal" called man, the greatest short-story writer who has yet appeared on the planet.
XX
LADY GREGORY
It was Mr. Bernard Shaw who, in commenting on the rowdy reception of the Irish players in some American theatres, spoke of Lady Gregory as "the greatest living Irishwoman." She is certainly a remarkable enough writer to put a generous critic a little off his balance. Equal mistress in comedy and tragedy, essayist, gatherer of the humours of folk-lore, imaginative translator of heroic literature, venturesome translator of Molière, she has contributed a greater variety of grotesque and beautiful things to Anglo-Irish literature than any of her contemporaries.
She owes her chief fame, perhaps, to the way in which, along with Mr. G.A. Birmingham and the authors of _Some Experiences of an Irish R.M._, she has kept alive the tradition of Ireland as a country in which Laughter has frequent occasion to hold both his sides. She surpasses the others in the quality of her comedy, however. Not that she is more comic, but that she is more comprehensively true to life. Mr. Birmingham has given us farce with a salt of reality; Miss Somerville and Miss Ross, practical jokers of literature, turned to reality as upper-class patrons of the comic; but Lady Gregory has gone to reality as to a cave of treasure. She is one of the discoverers of Ireland. Her genius, like Synge's, opened its eyes one day and saw spread below it the immense sea of Irish common speech, with its colour, its laughter, and its music. It is a sort of second birth which many Irish men and women of the last generation or so have experienced. The beggar on the road, the piper at the door, the old people in the workhouse, are henceforth accepted as a sort of aristocracy in exile.
Lady Gregory obviously sought out their company as the heirs to a great inheritance--an inheritance of imaginative and humorous speech. Not that she plundered them of their fantastic tropes so greedily as Synge did. She studied rather their common turn of phrase, its heights and its hollows, its exquisite illogic, its passionate underflow of poetry. Has she not herself told us how she could not get on with the character of Bartley Fallon in _Spreading the News_, till one day she met a melancholy man by the sea at Duras, who, after describing the crosses he endured at home, said: "But I'm thinking if I went to America, it's long ago I'd be dead. And it's a great expense for a poor man to be buried in America." Out of sentences like these--sentences seized upon with the genius of the note-book--she has made much of what is most delightful in her plays. Her sentences are steeped and dyed in life, even when her situations are as mad as hatters.
Some one has said that every great writer invents a new language. Lady Gregory, whom it would be unfair to praise as a great writer, has at least qualified as one by inventing a new language out of her knowledge of Irish peasant speech. This, perhaps, is her chief literary peril. Having discovered the beautiful dialect of the Kiltartan peasantry, she was not content to leave it a peasant dialect--as we find it in her best dramatic work, _Seven Short Plays_; but she set about transforming it into a tongue into which all literature and emotion might apparently be translated. Thus, she gave us Molière in Kiltartan--a ridiculously successful piece of work--and she gave us Finn and Cuchullain in modified Kiltartan, and this, too, was successful, sometimes very beautifully so. Here, however, she had masterpieces to begin with. In _Irish Folk-History Plays_, on the other hand, we find her embarking, not upon translation, but upon original heroic drama, in the Kiltartan language. The result is unreality as unreal as if Meredith had made a farm-labourer talk like Diana of the Crossways. Take, for instance, the first of the plays, _Grania_, which is founded on the story of the pursuit of Diarmuid and Grania by Finn MacCool, to whom Grania had been betrothed. When Finn, disguised as a blind beggar, visits the lovers in their tent, Grania, who does not recognize him, bids him give Finn this message from her:--
Give heed to what I say now. If you have one eye is blind, let it be turned to the place where we are, and that he might ask news of. And if you have one seeing eye, cast it upon me, and tell Finn you saw a woman no way sad or afraid, but as airy and high-minded as a mountain-filly would be challenging the winds of March!
I flatly refuse to take the high-minded mountain filly seriously as a tragic heroine, and I confess I hold Finn equally suspect, disguised as a beggar though he is, when he speaks of himself to Grania as a hard man--"as hard as a barren step-mother's slap, or a highway gander's gob." After all, in heroic literature, we must have the illusion of the heroic. If we can get the peasant statement of the heroic, that is excellent; its sincerity brings its illusion. But a mere imitation of the peasant statement of the heroic, such as Lady Gregory seems to aim at giving us in these sentences, is as pinchbeck and unreal as Macpherson's _Ossian_. It reaches a grotesque absurdity when at the close of Act II Finn comes back to the door of the tent and, in order to stir up Diarmuid's jealousy, says:--
It is what they were saying a while ago, the King of Foreign is grunting and sighing, grunting and sighing, around and about the big red sally tree beside the stream!
To write like that is to use not a style but a jargon.
If you want a standard of reality with which to compare these passages of Abbey-Theatre rhetoric, you have only to turn to Lady Gregory's own notes at the end of _Irish Folk-History Plays_, where she records a number of peasant utterances on Irish history. Here, and not in the plays--in the tragic plays, at any rate--is the real "folk-history" of her book to be found. One may take, as an example, the note on _Kincora_, where some one tells of the Battle of Clontarf, in which Brian Boru defeated the Danes:--
Clontarf was on the head of a game of chess. The generals of the Danes were beaten at it, and they were vexed. It was Broder, that the Brodericks are descended from, that put a dagger through Brian's heart, and he attending to his prayers. What the Danes left in Ireland were hens and weasels. And when the cock crows in the morning the country people will always say: "It is for Denmark they are crowing; crowing they are to be back in Denmark."
Lady Gregory reveals more of life--leaping, imaginative life--in that little note than in all the three acts about Grania and the three about Brian. It is because the characters in the comic plays in the book are nearer the peasantry in stature and in outlook that she is so much more successful with them than with the heroes and heroines of the tragedies. She describes the former plays as "tragic comedies"; but in the first and best of them, _The Canavans_, it is difficult to see where the tragedy comes in. _The Canavans_ is really a farce of the days of Elizabeth. The principal character is a cowardly miller, who ensues nothing but his own safety in the war of loyalties and disloyalties which is destroying Ireland. He is equally afraid of the wrath of the neighbours on the one hand, and the wrath of the Government on the other. Consequently, he is at his wits' end when his brother Antony comes seeking shelter in his house, after deserting from the English Army. When the soldiers come looking for Antony, so helpless with terror is the miller, that he flies into hiding among his sacks, and his brother has to impersonate him in the interview with the officer who carries out the search. The situation obviously lends itself to comic elaborations, and Lady Gregory misses none of her opportunities. She flies off from every semblance of reality at a tangent, however, in a later scene, where Antony disguises himself as Queen Elizabeth, supposed to have come on a secret visit of inspection to Ireland, and takes in both his brother and the officer (who is himself a Canavan, anglicized under the name of Headley). This is a sheer invention of the theatre; it turns the play from living speech into machinery. _The Canavans_, however, has enough of present-day reality to make us forgive its occasional stage-Elizabethanism. On the whole, its humours gain nothing from their historical setting.
_The White Cockade_, the second of the tragic comedies, is a play about the flight of King James II after the Battle of the Boyne, and it, too, is lifeless and mechanical in so far as it is historical. King James himself is a good comic figure of a conventional sort, as he is discovered hiding in the barrel; but Sarsfield, who is meant to be heroic, is all joints and sawdust; and the mad Jacobite lady is a puppet who might have been invented by any writer of plays. "When my _White Cockade_ was produced," Lady Gregory tells us, "I was pleased to hear that Mr. Synge had said my method had made the writing of historical drama again possible." But surely, granted the possession of the dramatic gift, the historical imagination is the only thing that makes the writing of historical drama possible. Lady Gregory does not seem to me to possess the historical imagination. Not that I believe in archaeology in the theatre; but, apart from her peasant characters, she cannot give us the illusion of reality about the figures in these historical plays. If we want the illusion of reality, we shall have to turn from _The White Cockade_ to the impossible scene outside the post-office and the butcher's shop in _Hyacinth Halvey_. As for the third of the tragic comedies, _The Deliverer_, it is a most interesting curiosity. In it we have an allegory of the fate of Parnell in a setting of the Egypt of the time of Moses. Moses himself--or the King's nursling, as he is called--is Parnell; and he and the other characters talk Kiltartan as to the manner born. _The Deliverer_ is grotesque and, in its way, impressive, though the conclusion, in which the King's nursling is thrown to the King's cats by his rebellious followers, invites parody. The second volume of the _Irish Folk-History Plays_, even if it reveals only Lady Gregory's talent rather than her genius, is full of odd and entertaining things, and the notes at the end of both of these volumes, short though they are, do give us the franchise of a wonderful world of folk-history.
XXI
MR. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM
Mr. Cunninghame Graham is a grandee of contemporary literature. He is also a grandee of revolutionary politics. Both in literature and in politics he is a figure of challenge for the love of challenge more than any other man now writing. Other men challenge us with Utopias, with moral laws and so forth. But Mr. Graham has little of the prophet or the moralist about him. He expresses himself better in terms of his hostilities than in terms of visionary cities and moralities such as Plato and Shelley and Mazzini have built for us out of light and fire. It is a temperament, indeed, not a vision or a logic, that Mr. Graham has brought to literature. He blows his fantastic trumpet outside the walls of a score of Jerichos:--Jerichos of empire, of cruelty, of self-righteousness, of standardized civilization--and he seems to do so for the sheer soldierly joy of the thing. One feels that if all the walls of all the Jerichos were suddenly to collapse before his trumpet-call he would be the loneliest man alive. For he is one of those for whom, above all, "the fight's the thing."
It would be difficult to find any single purpose running through the sketches which fill most of his books. His characteristic book is a medley of cosmopolitan "things seen" and comments grouped together under a title in which irony lurks. Take the volume called _Charity_, for example. Both the title of the book and the subject-matter of several of the sketches may be regarded as a challenge to the unco' guid (if there are any left) and to respectability (from which even the humblest are no longer safe). On the other hand, his title may be the merest lucky-bag accident. It seems likely enough, however, that in choosing it the author had in mind the fact that the supreme word of charitableness in the history of man was spoken concerning a woman who was taken in adultery. It is scarcely an accident that in _Charity_ a number of the chapters relate to women who make a profession of sin.
Mr. Graham is unique in his treatment of these members of the human family. If he does not throw stones at them, as the Pharisees of virtue did, neither does he glorify them as the Pharisees of vice have done in a later generation. He simply accepts them as he would accept a broken-down nation or a wounded animal, and presents them as characters in the human drama. It would be more accurate to say "as figures in the human picture," for he is far more of a painter than a dramatist. But the point to be emphasized is that these stories are records, tragic, grim or humorous, as the portraits in Chaucer are--acceptances of life as it is--at least, of life as it is outside the vision of policemen and other pillars of established interests. For Mr. Graham can forgave you for anything but two things--being successful (in the vulgar sense of the term) or being a policeman.
It would be wrong, however, to suggest that Mr. Graham achieves the very finest things in charity. It is the charity of tolerance, or the minor charity, that is most frequent in his pages. The larger charity which we find in Tolstoi and the great teachers is not here. We could not imagine Mr. Graham forgetting himself so far in his human sympathies as Ruskin did when he stooped and kissed the filthy beggar outside the church door in Rome. Nor do we find in any of these sketches of outcasts that sense of humanity bruised and exiled that we get in such a story as Maupassant's _Boule de Suif_. Mr. Graham gloriously insists upon our recognizing our human relations, but many of them he introduces to us as first cousins once removed rather than as brothers and sisters by the grace of God.
He does more than this in his preface, indeed, a marvellous piece of reality and irony which tells how a courtesan in Gibraltar fell madly in love with a gentleman-sponger who lived on her money while he could, and then took the first boat home with discreet heartlessness on coming into a bequest from a far-off cousin. "Good God, a pretty sight I should have looked...." he explained to a kindred spirit as they paced the deck of the boat to get an appetite. "I like her well enough, but what I say is, Charity begins at home, my boy. Ah, there's the dinner bell!" Mr. Graham has a noble courtesy, an unerring chivalry that makes him range himself on the side of the bottom dog, a detestation of anything like bullying--every gift of charity, indeed, except the shy genius of pity. For lack of this last, some of his sketches, such as _Un Autre Monsieur_, are mere anecdotes and decorations.
Possibly, it is as a romantic decorator that Mr. Graham, in his art as opposed to his politics, would prefer to be judged. He has dredged half the world for his themes and colours, and Spain and Paraguay and Morocco and Scotland and London's tangled streets all provide settings for his romantic rearrangements of life in this book. He has a taste for uncivil scenes, as Henley had a taste for uncivil words. Even a London street becomes a scene of this kind as he pictures it in his imagination with huge motorbuses, like demons of violence, smashing their way through the traffic. Or he takes us to some South American forest, where the vampire bats suck the blood of horses during the night. Or he introduces us to a Spanish hidalgo, "tall, wry-necked, and awkwardly built, with a nose like a lamprey and feet like coracles." (For there is the same note of violence, of exaggeration, in his treatment of persons as of places.) Even in Scotland, he takes us by preference to some lost mansion standing in grotesque contrast to the "great drabness of prosperity which overspreads the world." He is a great scene-painter of wildernesses and lawless places, indeed. He is a Bohemian, a lover of adventures in wild and sunny lands, and even the men and women are apt to become features in the strange scenery of his pilgrimages rather than dominating portraits. In his descriptions he uses a splendid rhetoric such as no other living writer of English commands. He has revived rhetoric as a literary instrument. Aubrey Beardsley called Turner a rhetorician in paint. If we were to speak of Mr. Graham as a painter in rhetoric, we should be doing more than making a phrase.
But Mr. Graham cannot be summed up in a phrase. To meet him in his books is one of the desirable experiences of contemporary literature, as to hear him speak is one of the desirable experiences of modern politics. Protest, daring, chivalry, the passion for the colour of life and the colour of words--he is the impersonation of these things in a world that is muddling its way half-heartedly towards the Promised Land.
XXII
SWINBURNE
1. THE EXOTIC BIRD
Swinburne was an absurd character. He was a bird of showy strut and plumage. One could not but admire his glorious feathers; but, as soon as he began to moult--and he had already moulted excessively by the time Watts-Dunton took him under his roof--one saw how very little body there was underneath. Mr. Gosse in his biography compared Swinburne to a coloured and exotic bird--a "scarlet and azure macaw," to, be precise--and the comparison remains in one's imagination. Watts-Dunton, finding the poor creature moulted and "off its feed," carried it down to Putney, resolved to domesticate it. He watched over it as a farmer's wife watches over a sick hen. He taught it to eat out of his hand. He taught it to speak--to repeat things after him, even "God Save the Queen." Some people say that he ruined the bird by these methods. Others maintain that, on the contrary, but for him the bird would have died of a disease akin to the staggers. They say, moreover, that the tameness and docility of the bird, while he was looking after it, have been greatly exaggerated, and they deny that it was entirely bald of its old gay feathers.
There you have a brief statement of the great Swinburne question, which, it seems likely, will last as long as the name of Swinburne is remembered. It is not a question of any importance; but that will not prevent us from arguing it hotly. The world takes a malicious joy in jibing at men of genius and their associates, and a generous joy in defending them from jibes. Further, the discussion that interests the greatest number of people is discussion that has come down to a personal level. Ten people will be bored by an argument as to the nature of Swinburne's genius for one who will be bored by an argument as to the nature of Swinburne's submissiveness to Watts-Dunton. Was Watts-Dunton, in a phrase deprecated by the editors of a recent book of letters, a "kind of amiable Svengali"? Did he allow Swinburne to have a will of his own? Did Swinburne, in going to Putney, go to the Devil? Or did not Watts-Dunton rather play the part of the good Samaritan? Unfortunately, all those who have hitherto attempted to describe the relations of the two men have succeeded only in making them both appear ridiculous. Mr. Gosse, a man of letters with a sting, has done it cleverly. The others, like the editors to whom I have referred, have done it inadvertently. They write too solemnly. If Swinburne had lost a trouser-button, they would not have felt it inappropriate, one feels, for the Archbishop of Canterbury to hurry to the scene and go down on his knees on the floor to look for it.... Well, no doubt, Swinburne was an absurd character. And so was Watts-Dunton. And so, perhaps, is the Archbishop of Canterbury.