Part 7

I do not know whether any one has yet written a history of advertising. If the book does not already exist it will certainly have to be written. The story of the development of advertising from its infancy in the early nineteenth century to its luxuriant maturity in the twentieth is an essential chapter in the history of democracy. Advertisement begins abjectly, crawling on its belly like the serpent after the primal curse. Its abjection is the oily humbleness of the shopkeeper in an oligarchical society. Those nauseating references to the nobility and clergy, which are the very staple of early advertisements, are only possible in an age when the aristocracy and its established Church effectively ruled the land. The custom of invoking these powers lingered on long after they had ceased to hold sway. It is now, I fancy, almost wholly extinct. It may be that certain old-fashioned girls’ schools still provide education for the daughters of the nobility and clergy; but I am inclined to doubt it. Advertisers still find it worth while to parade the names and escutcheons of kings. But anything less than royalty is, frankly, a “wash-out.”

The crawling style of advertisement with its mixture of humble appeals to patrons and its hyperbolical laudation of the goods advertised, was early varied by the pseudo-scientific style, a simple development of the quack’s patter at the fair. Balzacians will remember the advertisement composed by Finot and the Illustrious Gaudissard for César Birotteau’s “Huile Céphalique.” The type is not yet dead; we still see advertisements of substances “based on the principles established by the Academy of Sciences,” substances known “to the ancients, the Romans, the Greeks and the nations of the North,” but lost and only rediscovered by the advertiser. The style and manner of these advertisements belonging to the early and middle periods of the Age of Advertisement continue to bear the imprint of the once despicable position of commerce. They are written with the impossible and insincere unctuousness of tradesmen’s letters. They are horribly uncultured; and when their writers aspire to something more ambitious than the counting-house style, they fall at once into the stilted verbiage of self-taught learning. Some of the earlier efforts to raise the tone of advertisements are very curious. One remembers those remarkable full-page advertisements of Eno’s Fruit Salt, loaded with weighty apophthegms from Emerson, Epictetus, Zeno the Eleatic, Pomponazzi, Slawkenbergius and other founts of human wisdom. There was noble reading on these strange pages. But they shared with sermons the defect of being a little dull.

The art of advertisement writing has flowered with democracy. The lords of industry and commerce came gradually to understand that the right way to appeal to the Free Peoples of the World was familiarly, in an honest man-to-man style. They perceived that exaggeration and hyperbole do not really pay, that charlatanry must at least have an air of sincerity. They confided in the public, they appealed to its intelligence in every kind of flattering way. The technique of the art became at once immensely more difficult than it had ever been before, until now the advertisement is, as I have already hinted, one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms. Its potentialities are not yet half explored. Already the most interesting and, in some cases, the only readable part of most American periodicals is the advertisement section. What does the future hold in store?

XIX: EUPHUES REDIVIVUS

I have recently been fortunate in securing a copy of that very rare and precious novel _Delina Delaney_, by Amanda M. Ros, authoress of _Irene Iddesleigh_ and _Poems of Puncture_. Mrs. Ros’s name is only known to a small and select band of readers. But by these few she is highly prized; one of her readers, it is said, actually was at the pains to make a complete manuscript copy of _Delina Delaney_, so great was his admiration and so hopelessly out of print the book. Let me recommend the volume, Mrs. Ros’s masterpiece, to the attention of enterprising publishers.

_Delina Delaney_ opens with a tremendous, an almost, in its richness of vituperative eloquence, Rabelaisian denunciation of Mr. Barry Pain, who had, it seems, treated _Irene Iddesleigh_ with scant respect in his review of the novel in _Black and White_. “This so-called Barry Pain, by name, has taken upon himself to criticize a work, the depth of which fails to reach the solving power of his borrowed, and, he’d have you believe, varied talent.” But “I care not for the opinion of half-starved upstarts, who don the garb of a shabby-genteel, and fain would feed the mind of the people with the worthless scraps of stolen fancies.” So perish all reviewers! And now for Delina herself.

The story is a simple one. Delina Delaney, daughter of a fisherman, loves and is loved by Lord Gifford. The baleful influence of a dark-haired Frenchwoman, Madame de Maine, daughter of the Count-av-Nevo, comes between the lovers and their happiness, and Delina undergoes fearful torments, including three years’ penal servitude, before their union can take place. It is the manner, rather than the matter, of the book which is remarkable. Here, for instance, is a fine conversation between Lord Gifford and his mother, an aristocratic dame who strenuously objects to his connection with Delina. Returning one day to Columba Castle she hears an unpleasant piece of news: her son has been seen kissing Delina in the conservatory.

“Home again, mother?” he boldly uttered, as he gazed reverently in her face.

“Home to Hades!” returned the raging high-bred daughter of distinguished effeminacy.

“Ah me! what is the matter?” meekly inquired his lordship.

“Everything is the matter with a broken-hearted mother of low-minded offspring,” she answered hotly.... “Henry Edward Ludlow Gifford, son of my strength, idolized remnant of my inert husband, who at this moment invisibly offers the scourging whip of fatherly authority to your backbone of resentment (though for years you think him dead to your movements) and pillar of maternal trust.”

Poor Lady Gifford! her son’s behaviour was her undoing. The shock caused her to lose first her reason and then her life. Her son was heart-broken at the thought that he was responsible for her downfall:

“Is it true, O Death,” I cried in my agony, “that you have wrested from me my mother, Lady Gifford of Columba Castle, and left me here, a unit figuring on the great blackboard of the past, the shaky surface of the present and fickle field of the future to track my life-steps, with gross indifference to her wished-for wish?”... Blind she lay to the presence of her son, who charged her death-gun with the powder of accelerated wrath.

It is impossible to suppose that Mrs. Ros can ever have read _Euphues_ or the earlier romances of Robert Greene. How then shall we account for the extraordinary resemblance to Euphuism of her style? how explain those rich alliterations, those elaborate “kennings” and circumlocutions of which the fabric of her book is woven? Take away from Lyly his erudition and his passion for antithesis, and you have Mrs. Ros. Delina is own sister to Euphues and Pandosto. The fact is that Mrs. Ros happens, though separated from Euphuism by three hundred years and more, to have arrived independently at precisely the same stage of development as Lyly and his disciples. It is possible to see in a growing child a picture in miniature of all the phases through which humanity has passed in its development. And, in the same way, the mind of an individual (especially when that individual has been isolated from the main current of contemporary thought) may climb, alone, to a point at which, in the past, a whole generation has rested. In Mrs. Ros we see, as we see in the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic. It is remarkable how late in the history of every literature simplicity is invented. The first attempts of any people to be consciously literary are always productive of the most elaborate artificiality. Poetry is always written before prose and always in a language as remote as possible from the language of ordinary life. The language and versification of “Beowulf” are far more artificial and remote from life than those of, say, _The Rape of the Lock_. The Euphuists were not barbarians making their first discovery of literature; they were, on the contrary, highly educated. But in one thing they were unsophisticated: they were discovering prose. They were realizing that prose could be written with art, and they wrote it as artificially as they possibly could, just as their Saxon ancestors wrote poetry. They became intoxicated with their discovery of artifice. It was some time before the intoxication wore off and men saw that art was possible without artifice. Mrs. Ros, an Elizabethan born out of her time, is still under the spell of that magical and delicious intoxication.

Mrs. Ros’s artifices are often more remarkable and elaborate even than Lyly’s. This is how she tells us that Delina earned money by doing needlework:

She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father’s slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness.

And Lord Gifford parts from Delina in these words:

I am just in time to hear the toll of a parting bell strike its heavy weight of appalling softness against the weakest fibres of a heart of love, arousing and tickling its dormant action, thrusting the dart of evident separation deeper into its tubes of tenderness, and fanning the flame, already unextinguishable, into volumes of burning blaze.

But more often Mrs. Ros does not exceed the bounds which Lyly set for himself. Here, for instance, is a sentence that might have come direct out of _Euphues_:

Two days after, she quit Columba Castle and resolved to enter the holy cloisters of a convent, where, she believed she’d be dead to the built hopes of wealthy worth, the crooked steps to worldly distinction, and the designing creaks [_sic_] in the muddy stream of love.

Or again, this description of the artful charmers who flaunt along the streets of London is written in the very spirit and language of _Euphues_:

Their hair was a light-golden colour, thickly fringed in front, hiding in many cases the furrows of a life of vice; behind, reared coils, some of which differed in hue, exhibiting the fact that they were on patrol for the price of another supply of dye.... The elegance of their attire had the glow of robbery—the rustle of many a lady’s silent curse. These tools of brazen effrontery were strangers to the blush of innocence that tinged many a cheek, as they would gather round some of God’s ordained, praying in flowery words of decoying Cockney, that they should break their holy vows by accompanying them to the halls of adultery. Nothing daunted at the staunch refusal of different divines, whose modest walk was interrupted by their bold assertion of loathsome rights, they moved on, while laughs of hidden rage and defeat flitted across their doll-decked faces, to die as they next accosted some rustic-looking critics, who, tempted with their polished twang, their earnest advances, their pitiful entreaties, yielded, in their ignorance of the ways of a large city, to their glossy offers, and accompanied, with slight hesitation, these artificial shells of immorality to their homes of ruin, degradation and shame.

XX: THE AUTHOR OF _EMINENT VICTORIANS_

A superlatively civilized Red Indian living apart from the vulgar world in an elegant and park-like reservation, Mr. Strachey rarely looks over his walls at the surrounding country. It seethes, he knows, with crowds of horribly colonial persons. Like the hosts of Midian, the innumerable “poor whites” prowl and prowl around, but the noble savage pays no attention to them.

In his spiritual home—a neat and commodious Georgian mansion in the style of Leoni or Ware—he sits and reads, he turns over portfolios of queer old prints, he savours meditatively the literary vintages of centuries. And occasionally, once in two or three years, he tosses over his park palings a record of these leisured degustations, a judgment passed upon his library, a ripe rare book. One time it is Eminent Victorians; the next it is Queen Victoria herself. To-day he has given us a miscellaneous collection of _Books and Characters_.

If Voltaire had lived to the age of two hundred and thirty instead of shuffling off at a paltry eighty-four, he would have written about the Victorian epoch, about life and letters at large, very much as Mr. Strachey has written. That lucid common sense, that sharp illuminating wit which delight us in the writings of the middle eighteenth century—these are Mr. Strachey’s characteristics. We know exactly what he would have been if he had come into the world at the beginning of the seventeen hundreds; if he is different from the men of that date it is because he happens to have been born towards the end of the eighteens.

The sum of knowledge at the disposal of the old Encyclopædists was singularly small, compared, that is to say, with the knowledge which we of the twentieth century have inherited. They made mistakes and in their ignorance they passed what we can see to have been hasty and very imperfect judgments on men and things. Mr. Strachey is the eighteenth century grown-up; he is Voltaire at two hundred and thirty.

Voltaire at sixty would have treated the Victorian era, if it could have appeared in a prophetical vision before his eyes, in terms of “La Pucelle”—with ribaldry. He would have had to be much older in knowledge and inherited experience before he could have approached it in that spirit of sympathetic irony and ironical sympathy which Mr. Strachey brings to bear upon it. Mr. Strachey makes us like the old Queen, while we smile at her; he makes us admire the Prince Consort in spite of the portentous priggishness—duly insisted on in the biography—which accompanied his intelligence. With all the untutored barbarity of their notions, Gordon and Florence Nightingale are presented to us as sympathetic figures. Their peculiar brand of religion and ethics might be absurd, but their characters are shown to be interesting and fine.

It is only in the case of Dr. Arnold that Mr. Strachey permits himself to be unrestrainedly Voltairean; he becomes a hundred and seventy years younger as he describes the founder of the modern Public School system. The irony of that description is tempered by no sympathy. To make the man appear even more ridiculous, Mr. Strachey adds a stroke or two to the portrait of his own contriving—little inventions which deepen the absurdity of the caricature. Thus we read that Arnold’s “outward appearance was the index of his inward character. The legs, perhaps, were shorter than they should have been; but the sturdy athletic frame, especially when it was swathed (as it usually was) in the flowing robes of a Doctor of Divinity, was full of an imposing vigour.” How exquisitely right those short legs are! how artistically inevitable! Our admiration for Mr. Strachey’s art is only increased when we discover that in attributing to the Doctor this brevity of shank he is justified by no contemporary document. The short legs are his own contribution.

Voltaire, then, at two hundred and thirty has learned sympathy. He has learned that there are other ways of envisaging life than the common-sense, reasonable way and that people with a crack-brained view of the universe have a right to be judged as human beings and must not be condemned out of hand as lunatics or obscurantists. Blake and St. Francis have as much right to their place in the sun as Gibbon and Hume. But still, in spite of this lesson, learned and inherited from the nineteenth century, our Voltaire of eleven score years and ten still shows a marked preference for the Gibbons and the Humes; he still understands their attitude towards life a great deal better than he understands the other fellow’s attitude.

In his new volume of _Books and Characters_ Mr. Strachey prints an essay on Blake (written, it may be added parenthetically, some sixteen years ago), in which he sets out very conscientiously to give that disquieting poet his due. The essay is interesting, not because it contains anything particularly novel in the way of criticism, but because it reveals, in spite of all Mr. Strachey’s efforts to overcome it, in spite of his admiration for the great artist in Blake, his profound antagonism towards Blake’s view of life.

He cannot swallow mysticism; he finds it clearly very difficult to understand what all this fuss about the soul really signifies. The man who believes in the absoluteness of good and evil, who sees the universe as a spiritual entity concerned, in some transcendental fashion, with morality, the man who regards the human spirit as possessing a somehow cosmic importance and significance—ah no, decidedly no, even at two hundred and thirty Voltaire cannot whole-heartedly sympathize with such a man.

And that, no doubt, is the reason why Mr. Strachey has generally shrunk from dealing, in his biographies and his criticisms, with any of these strange incomprehensible characters. Blake is the only one he had tried his hand on, and the result is not entirely satisfactory. He is more at home with the Gibbons and Humes of this world, and when he is not discussing the reasonable beings he likes to amuse himself with the eccentrics, like Mr. Creevey or Lady Hester Stanhope. The portentous, formidable mystics he leaves severely alone.

One cannot imagine Mr. Strachey coping with Dostoevsky or with any of the other great explorers of the soul. One cannot imagine him writing a life of Beethoven. These huge beings are disquieting for a Voltaire who has learned enough sympathy to be able to recognize their greatness, but whose temperament still remains unalterably alien. Mr. Strachey is wise to have nothing to do with them.

The second-rate mystics (I use the term in its widest and vaguest sense), the men who believe in the spirituality of the universe and in the queerer dogmas which have become tangled in that belief, without possessing the genius which alone can justify such notions in the eyes of the Voltaireans—these are the objects on which Mr. Strachey likes to turn his calm and penetrating gaze. Gordon and Florence Nightingale, the Prince Consort, Clough—they and their beliefs are made to look rather absurd by the time he has done with them. He reduces their spiritual struggles to a series of the most comically futile series of gymnastics in the void. The men of genius who have gone through the same spiritual struggles, who have believed the same sort of creeds, have had the unanswerable justification of their genius. These poor absurd creatures have not. Voltaire in his third century gives them a certain amount of his newly learned sympathy; but he also gives them a pretty strong dose of his old irony.

XXI: EDWARD THOMAS[1]

The poetry of Edward Thomas affects one morally as well as æsthetically and intellectually. We have grown rather shy, in these days of pure æstheticism, of speaking of those consoling or strengthening qualities of poetry on which critics of another generation took pleasure in dwelling. Thomas’s poetry is strengthening and consoling, not because it justifies God’s ways to man or whispers of reunions beyond the grave, not because it presents great moral truths in memorable numbers, but in a more subtle and very much more effective way. Walking through the streets on these September nights, one notices, wherever there are trees along the street and lamps close beside the trees, a curious and beautiful phenomenon. The light of the street lamps striking up into the trees has power to make the grimed, shabby, and tattered foliage of the all-but autumn seem brilliantly and transparently green. Within the magic circle of the light the tree seems to be at that crowning moment of the spring when the leaves are fully grown, but still luminous with youth and seemingly almost immaterial in their lightness. Thomas’s poetry is to the mind what that transfiguring lamplight is to the tired trees. On minds grown weary in the midst of the intolerable turmoil and aridity of daily wage-earning existence, it falls with a touch of momentary rejuvenation.

The secret of Thomas’s influence lies in the fact that he is genuinely what so many others of our time quite unjustifiably claim to be, a nature poet. To be a nature poet it is not enough to affirm vaguely that God made the country and man made the town, it is not enough to talk sympathetically about familiar rural objects, it is not enough to be sonorously poetical about mountains and trees; it is not even enough to speak of these things with the precision of real knowledge and love. To be a nature poet a man must have felt profoundly and intimately those peculiar emotions which nature can inspire, and must be able to express them in such a way that his reader feels them. The real difficulty that confronts the would-be poet of nature is that these emotions are of all emotions the most difficult to pin down and analyze, and the hardest of all to convey. In “October” Thomas describes what is surely the characteristic emotion induced by a contact with nature—a kind of exultant melancholy which is the nearest approach to quiet unpassionate happiness that the soul can know. Happiness of whatever sort is extraordinarily hard to analyze and describe. One can think of a hundred poems, plays, and novels that deal exhaustively with pain and misery to one that is an analysis and an infectious description of happiness. Passionate joy is more easily recapturable in art; it is dramatic, vehemently defined. But quiet happiness, which is at the same time a kind of melancholy—there you have an emotion which is inexpressible except by a mind gifted with a diversity of rarely combined qualities. The poet who would sing of this happiness must combine a rare penetration with a rare candour and honesty of mind. A man who feels an emotion that is very difficult to express is often tempted to describe it in terms of something entirely different. Platonist poets feel a powerful emotion when confronted by beauty, and, finding it a matter of the greatest difficulty to say precisely what that emotion is in itself, proceed to describe it in terms of theology which has nothing whatever to do with the matter in point. Groping after an expression of the emotions aroused in him by the contemplation of nature, Wordsworth sometimes stumbles doubtfully along philosophical byways that are at the best parallel to the direct road for which he is seeking. Everywhere in literature this difficulty in finding an expression for any undramatic, ill-defined emotion is constantly made apparent.

Thomas’s limpid honesty of mind saves him from the temptation to which so many others succumb, the temptation to express one thing, because it is with difficulty describable, in terms of something else. He never philosophizes the emotions which he feels in the presence of nature and beauty, but presents them as they stand, transmitting them directly to his readers without the interposition of any obscuring medium. Rather than attempt to explain the emotion, to rationalize it into something that it is not, he will present it for what it is, a problem of which he does not know the solution. In “Tears” we have an example of this candid confession of ignorance: