Part 2

TURGENEV.—Both in Mr. Conrad’s Introduction and Mr. Edward Garnett’s critical study of Turgenev I observe the attitude of defence. They are defending rather than praising Turgenev. But Turgenev has been so long the victim of polemics that it is about time some judge summed up the contentions and delivered judgment. Neither Mr. Conrad nor Mr. Garnett, however, is qualified for this task by either temper or the power of judgment itself. Mr. Conrad is a great writer, but he is not a great critic, and as for Mr. Garnett, he is not even a great writer; and the temper of both is shown in their common tendency to abuse not only the plaintiff’s attorney but the jury as well. But there is no use in abusing the jury—in other words, the reading public of the world—even if some gain may be got by polemics with this or that critic. I am content to hear Mr. Maurice Baring and M. Haumont told that they are merely echoes of Russian partisanship and incapable of feeling the fine shades of “truth” in Turgenev; for both these writers are quite capable of hitting back. But when Mr. Conrad satirically remarks that Turgenev had qualities enough to ruin the prospects of any writer, and Mr. Garnett echoes _him_ to the effect that Turgenev owes his “unpopularity” to “an exquisite feeling for balance” which nowadays is “less and less prized by modern opinion,” I feel that the defence of Turgenev is exceeding the limits of discretion. For it is not by any means the case that the “unpopularity” of Turgenev is confined to the mob that has no feeling for balance or is jealous of his possession of too many qualities. Critics as good as Mr. Garnett and with no Russian political prejudices against Turgenev can come to the same conclusion as the innumerable anonymous gentlemen of the jury, to wit, that Turgenev was a great artist on a small scale whose faults were large. That is certainly my own case. While I agree (or affirm, for I am quite willing to take the initiative), that Turgenev’s art is more exquisite, more humane, more European than that of any other Russian writer, I must also maintain that in timidity of thought, in sentimentality, in occasional pettiness of mind, he is no more of a great writer than, let us say, Mr. Hall Caine. To compare the whole of him with the whole of Dostoievski is to realise in an instant the difference between a writer great in parts and a writer great even in his faults. Turgenev at his best is a European, I would rather say a Parisianised Russian; but Dostoievski, while wholly Russian, belongs to the world. An almost exact parallel is afforded by the case of Ibsen and Björnson, about whose respective values Norway used to dispute as now Mr. Garnett would have us dispute concerning the respective values of Dostoievski and Turgenev. The world has settled the first in favour of Ibsen—with Norway dissenting; the world will similarly settle the latter in favour of Dostoievski, with Mr. Garnett dissenting.

PLOTINUS.—Plotinus, of whom Coleridge said that “no writer more wants, better deserves, or is less likely to obtain a new and more correct translation,” has lately been translated into excellent English by Mr. Stephen Mackenna (_not_ the author of _Sonia_, by the way). For all Coleridge’s demand and Mr. Mackenna’s supply, however, Plotinus is not likely to be read as much as he deserves. Abstract thought, or thinking in ideas without images, is a painful pleasure, comparable to exercises designed and actually effective to physical health. There is no doubt whatever that mental power is increased by abstract thought. Abstract thinking is almost a recipe for the development of talent. But it is so distasteful to mental inertia and habit that even people who have experienced its immense profit are disinclined to persist in it. It was by reason of his persistence in an exercise peculiarly irksome to the Western mind that Plotinus approached the East more nearly in subtlety and purity of thought than all but a few Western thinkers before or after him. In reading him it is hard to say that one is not reading a clarified Shankara or a Vyasa of the Bhishma treatises of the _Mahabharata_. East and West met in his mind.

Plotinus’s aim, like that of all thinkers in the degree of their conception, is, in Coleridge’s words, “the perfect spiritualisation of all the laws of Nature into laws of intuition and intellect.” It is the subsumption of phenomena in terms of personality, the reduction of Nature to the mind of man. Conversely it will be seen that the process may be said to personalise Nature; in other words, to assume the presence in natural phenomena of a kind of personal intelligence. If this be animism, I decline to be shocked by it on that account; for in that event the highest philosophy and one of the lowest forms of religion coincide, and there is no more to be said of it. The danger of this reasoning from mind to Nature and from Nature to mind is anthropomorphism. We tend to make Nature in our own image, or, conversely, _à la_ Nietzsche, to make ourselves after the image of Nature. But the greater the truth the greater is the peril of it; and thinkers must be on their guard to avoid the dangers, while nevertheless continuing the method. Plotinus certainly succeeded in avoiding the anthropomorphic no less than the crudely animistic dangers of his methods; but at the cost of remaining unintelligible to the majority of readers.

THE NEW EUROPE.—It should be possible before long to begin to discern some of the outlines of the new continent that will arise from the flood of the present war. That it will be a new continent is certain, and that it will contain as essential features some of the aspects of the Slav soul is probable. For what has been spiritually most apparent during the war has been the struggle of the Slav soul to find expression in the Western medium. Russia, we may say, has sought to Europeanise herself; or, rather, Russia has sought to impress upon Europe Russian ideas; with this further resemblance in her fate to the fate of the pioneers of every great new spiritual impulse, that she has been crucified in her mission. The crucifixion of Slavdom, however, is the sign in which Russian ideals—or, let us say Slav ideals—will in the end conquer. They will not submerge our Western ideas; the new continent will be the old continent over again; but they will profoundly modify our former configurations, and compel us to draw our cultural maps afresh. In what respect, it may be asked, will our conceptions be radically changed? The reply is to be found confusedly in the events of the Russian Revolution; in the substitution of the pan-human for the national ideal, and in the attempt, this time to be made with all the strength at the disposal of intelligence, to create a single world-culture—a universal Church of men of good-sense and good-will. This appears to me to be the distinguishing feature of the new continent about to be formed; and we shall owe it to the Slavs.

THE FASHION OF ANTI-PURITANISM.—The anti-Puritanism of the professed anti-Puritans is very little, if any, better than the Puritanism they oppose. The two parties divide the honours of our dislike fairly evenly between them. Puritanism is a fanatical devotion to a single aspect of virtue—namely, to morality. It assumes that Life is moral and nothing else; that Power, Wisdom, Truth, Beauty, and Love are all of no account in comparison with Goodness; and doing so it offends our judgment of the nature of Virtue, which is that Virtue is wholeness or a balance of all the aspects of God. Anti-Puritanism, on the other hand, denies all the affirmations of Puritanism, but without affirming anything on its own account. It denies that Life is exclusively moral, but it does not affirm that Life is anything else; it destroys the false absolute of Puritanism, but it is silent to the extent of tacitly denying that there is any absolute whatsoever. This being the case, our choice between Puritanism and anti-Puritanism is between a false absolute and no absolute, between a one-sided truth and no truth at all. We are bound to be half-hearted upon either side, since the thing itself is only half a thing.

I am not likely to revise my opinions about virtue from the school of Marx and his disciple Kautsky. Marx was another flamen, a priest, that is to say, of one aspect only of reality—in this case the economic. That the moral cant of a particular age tends to represent the economic interest of the dominant class, is, of course, a truism; but there is a world of difference between moral cant and morality—and the latter is as uniform throughout all history as the former is variable. Moreover, it is not by any means always the case that the interests of the dominant class of capitalism are identical with Puritanism. The interests of capitalism to-day are decidedly with anti-Puritanism, in so far as the effects of anti-Puritanism are to break up family life, to restrict births and to cultivate eugenics. What could suit capitalism better than to atomise the last surviving natural grouping of individuals and to breed for the servile State? The anti-Puritan propagandas of Malthusianism and eugenics are not carried on, either, by Marxians, but by the wealthy classes. Because he is a shopkeeper, the Anglo-Saxon is to-day an anti-Puritan in these matters.

POPULAR PHILOSOPHY.—The difficulty of popular philosophical discussion is not insuperable. It is all a matter of style. Mr. Bertrand Russell, for example, manages by means of an excellent style to make philosophy as easy to understand and as entrancing to follow as certain writers have made the equally difficult subject of economics. It is, in fact, the business of professional thinkers to popularise their subject and to procure for their Muse as many devotees as possible. In the case of Mr. Bertrand Russell, his admirable style has been put into the service of the most abominable philosophy ever formulated. He is an accidentalist of the most thorough-going kind who denies that life has any meaning or purpose. Life appeared, he says, by chance, and will disappear, probably for good, with the cooling of the sun; and he sings like a doomed cricket on a dissolving iceberg. But it is all the more strange in my judgment that a man who thinks thus can write as Mr. Russell writes. There is a contradiction somewhere between the simple richness of his style and the Spartan poverty of his ideas. He thinks glacially, but his style is warm. I suspect that if he were psycho-analysed Mr. Bertrand Russell would turn out to be a walking contradiction. In a word, I don’t believe he believes a word he says! That tone, that style, them there gestures—they betray the stage-player of the spirit.

A philosophy written in a popular style is not, of course, the same thing as a popular philosophy. “From a popular philosophy and a philosophical populace, good sense deliver us,” said Coleridge, meaning to say that a philosophy whose substance and not whose expression only has been adapted to the populace is in all probability false and is certainly superficial. For in his _Lay Sermons_, published a hundred years ago, Coleridge supplemented the foregoing remark by deploring the “long and ominous eclipse of philosophy, the usurpation of that venerable name by physical and psychological empiricism, and the non-existence of a learned and philosophical _public_.” Between a philosophic public and a philosophic populace there is the same distinction as between the “public” that reads, let us say, Sedlák, and the “populace” that reads, let us say, Mr. H. G. Wells. Mr. Wells is a popular philosopher; but that is manifestly not the same thing as a writer who is trying to make philosophy popular.

WAS CARLYLE PRUSSIAN?—In the _International Journal of Ethics_, Mr. Herbert Stewart makes a chivalrous attempt to deliver Carlyle from the charge recently brought home to him of having been a Prussian. Militarist Prussianism, he says, rests upon a postulate which would have filled Carlyle with horror, the postulate, namely, that an autocracy must be organised for war. I am not satisfied, however, that Carlyle would have been filled with anything but admiration. It is true that he did not adopt the Prussian error of identifying Might with Right. “Is Arithmetic,” he asked, “a thing more fixed by the Eternal than the laws of justice are?” Could Justice or Right, therefore, be allowed to vary with the amount of Might at its disposal—a deduction inevitable from the Prussian hypothesis? On the other hand, Carlyle cannot be said to have been equally free from the more subtle error of Prussianism, the assumption that Might can be accumulated only by Right means. Might, he said in effect, being an attribute of God, can be obtained by man only as a result of some virtue. Hence its possession presumes the possession of a proportionate virtue, and a man of Might is to that extent a man of Right also. This subtlety led Carlyle into some strange company for the moral fanatic he was. It led him to glorify Frederick the Great and to condone Frederick’s crime against Silesia. It led him to despise France and to defend West Indian slavery. Mr. Stewart must make his choice between Carlyle as a confused ethical philosopher and Carlyle as a Prussian. If he was not the latter, he was the former.

IS NIETZSCHE FOR GERMANY?—Nietzsche, we are told, is being read as never before in Germany. It is certain that Nietzsche was taken, if taken at all, in the wrong sense in Germany before the war. The Germans did with him precisely what the mob everywhere does with the satirist; they swallowed his praise and ignored his warnings. He is still, however, more of a danger than a saviour to post-war Germany, if only for the reason that his vocabulary is for the most part militarist. Culture is usually presented by Nietzsche in the terms of combat, and the still small voice of perfection is only heard in the silences of his martial sentences. Now that Germany has begun to re-read Nietzsche, will it read him any more intelligently than before? Is not a critique of Nietzsche a necessary condition of safely reading him—in Germany? There are, undoubtedly, authors who are most dangerous to the nation in which they appear. Rousseau was particularly dangerous to France. Whitman is inimical to American culture. Dr. Johnson has been a blight upon English thought. And Nietzsche, it may well be, is only a blessing outside of Germany. Art and thought, it is commonly said, are beyond nationality and beyond race; and from this it follows that it is only a happy accident when a great writer or thinker is peculiarly suited to the nation in which he happens to be born. He is addressed to the world—why should his message be specially adapted to the language and people of his parentage? A nation runs risks in accenting as its own the doctrines of the great men who chance to appear among it. Equally, a nation runs the risk of missing its real chosen unless it examines all the great men of the world. Chauvinism, either by choice or by exclusion, is always dangerous. We must take the good where we find it.

NIETZSCHE IN FRAGMENTS.—The English mind is easily “put off” a subject, and particularly easily off a subject as uncongenial as Nietzsche; and it has been known to remain in this state for a century or more. Several of our own greatest thinkers and writers have had to wait a long period for their readers, and by the time that the English mind has recovered itself, they are often quite dead. It is likely to be the same with Nietzsche. Having the plausible excuse for being “off” Nietzsche which the war provided, the English intellectual classes—note that I do not say the intellectual English classes, for there are none—will continue to neglect Nietzsche until he has been superseded, as I believe he will be before very long. Psycho-analysis has taken a good deal of Nietzsche in its stride, and it is quite possible that the re-reading of Indian philosophy in the light of psycho-analysis will gather most of the remainder.

Nevertheless, the remaining fragments will be worth preserving, since indubitably they will be the fragments of a giant of thought. As Heraclitus is represented by a small collection of aphorisms, each so concentrated that one would serve for an ordinary man’s equipment for intellectual life, the Nietzsche of the future may be contained in a very small volume, chiefly of aphorisms. He aimed, he said, at saying in a sentence what other writers say in a book, and he characteristically added that he aimed at saying in a sentence what other writers did _not_ say in a book. And he very often succeeded. These successes are his real contribution to his own immortality, and they will, I think, ensure it. I should advise Dr. Oscar Levy to prepare such a volume without delay. It may be the case that Nietzsche will be read in his entirety again, though I doubt it; but, in any event, such a volume as I have in mind would serve either to reintroduce him or handsomely to bury the mortal part of him.

I cannot, however, really believe that Nietzsche is about to be read, as never before, in Germany. Dr. Levy has assured us, on the report of a Berlin bookseller, that this was indicated in the sales of Nietzsche in Germany; but the wish was father to the deduction from the very small fact. Nietzsche was, before anything else, a great culture-hero; as a critic of art he has been surpassed by no man. But is there any appeal in culture to a Germany situated as Germany is to-day? I am here only a literary _causeur_. With the dinosaurs and other monsters of international politics I cannot be supposed to be on familiar terms. My opinion, nevertheless, based upon my own material, is that Germany is most unlikely to resume the pursuit of culture where she interrupted it after 1870, or, indeed, to pursue culture at all. And the reason for my opinion is that Russia is too close at hand, too accessible, and, above all, too tempting to German cupidity. Think what the proximity to Germany—to a Germany headed off from the Western world—of a commercially succulent country like Russia really means. Germans are human, even if they are not sub-human, and the temptation of an El Dorado at their doors will prove to be more seductive than the cry from the muezzin to come to culture, come to culture. Nietzsche on the one side calling them to spiritual conquests will be met by the big bagmen calling them, on the other side, to commercial conquests. Who can doubt which appeal will be the stronger? Germany refused to attend to Nietzsche after 1870, when he spoke to them as one alive; they are less likely to listen to a voice from the dead after 1918. On second thoughts, I should advise Dr. Oscar Levy to publish his volume in Germany first. For there he would show by one satiric touch that no country needed it so much.

THE END OF FICTION.—Fiction nowadays, we are told, is not what it used to be. We are told that it is the modern university. It is certainly a very obliging medium. But on this very account it is as delusive as it is obliging. It receives impressions easily, readily adapts itself to every kind of material, and assumes at the word of command any and every mood. But precisely because it does these things, the effects it produces are transient. Lightly come, lightly go; and if, as has been said, fiction is the modern reader’s university, it is a school in which he learns everything and forgets everything. Modern as I am, and hopeful as I am of modernity, I cannot think that the predominance of fiction, even of such fiction as is written to-day, is a good sign; and when we see that it leads nowhere, that the people who read much of it never read anything else, and that it is an intellectual _cul-de-sac_, our alarm at the phenomenon is the greater. What kind of minds do we expect to develop on a diet of forty parts fiction to two of all other forms of literature? Assuming the free libraries to be the continuation schools of the public, what is their value if the only lessons taken in them are the lessons of fiction? I will not dwell on the obvious discouragement the figures are to every serious _writer_, for the effect on the readers must be worse.

THE CRITERIA OF CULTURE.—The suppression of the display of feeling, or, better, the control of the display of feeling, is the first condition of thought, and only those who have aimed at writing with studied simplicity, studied lucidity, and studied detachment realise the amount of feeling that has to be trained to run quietly in harness. The modern failure (as compared with the success of the Greeks) to recognise feeling as an essential element of lucidity and the rest of the virtues of literary form is due to an excess of fiction. Just because fiction expresses everything it really impresses nothing. Its feeling evaporates as fast as it exudes. The sensation, nevertheless, is pleasant, for the reader appears to be witnessing genuine feeling genuinely expressing itself; and he fails to remember that what is true of a person is likely to be true of a book, that the more apparent, obvious, and demonstrated the feelings, the more superficial, unreal, and transient they probably are. As a matter of cold-blooded fact, it has been clearly shown during the course of the war that precisely our most “passionate” novelists have been our least patriotic citizens. I name no names, since they are known to everybody.

Culture I define as being, amongst other things, a capacity for subtle discrimination of words and ideas. Epictetus made the discrimination of words the foundation of moral training, and it is true enough that every stage of moral progress is indicated by the degree of our perception of the meaning of words. Tell me what words have a particular interest for you, and I will tell you what class of the world-school you are in. Tell me what certain words mean for you and I will tell you what you mean for the world of thought. One of the most subtle words, and one of the key-words of culture, is simplicity. Can you discriminate between natural simplicity and studied simplicity, between Nature and Art? In appearance they are indistinguishable, but in reality, they are æons apart; and whoever has learned to distinguish between them is entitled to regard himself as on the way to culture. Originality is another key-word, and its subtlety may be suggested by a paradox which was a commonplace among the Greeks; namely, that the most original minds strive to conceal their originality, and that the master-minds succeed. Contrast this counsel of perfect originality with the counsels given in our own day, in which the aim of originality is directed to appearing original—you will be brought, thereby, face to face with still another key-idea of Culture, the relation of Appearance to Reality. All these exercises in culture are elementary, however, in comparison with the master-problem of “disinterestedness.” No word in the English language is more difficult to define or better worth attempting to define. Somewhere or other in its capacious folds it contains all the ideas of ethics, and even, I should say, of religion. The _Bhagavad Gita_ (to name only one classic) can be summed up in the word. Duty is only a pale equivalent of it. I venture to say that whoever has understood the meaning of “disinterestedness” is not far off understanding the goal of human culture.