Part 10

As a matter of fact, America does not stand for any such thing and Whitman does not stand for America. He is a revolutionist in revolt against the American fact and celebrating a possible American future. Official America tried to throttle him. Conventional America ignored him. Literary and revolutionary spirits in England and America welcomed him, for they are free spirits, intellectually free, under any economic conditions and in any part of the world. Whitman himself did not understand why he was acclaimed in England by more men and better men than in America. It was simply because English thinkers, writers, poets, with minds capable of appreciating him, outnumbered their American brothers ten to one.

Two American ladies once called on Tennyson. He asked them whether they knew Walt Whitman. They confessed that they did not. "Then," said he, "you do not know the greatest man in America."

GEORGE E. WOODBERRY

A man's place in the generations of mankind is not wholly determined by the date of his birth. If William James were alive he would be eighty years old; but he belongs to us, to the living present. Mr. George Edward Woodberry is only sixty-seven; yet he already seems like the last figure in a tradition which has come to an end--so far as any period in literature may truly be said to end. James was aware of something like this twenty years ago. He gave Mr. Woodberry the praise that is his due, but expressed at the same time his essential weakness. Of "The Heart of Man" James wrote in a letter:

The essays are grave and noble in the extreme. I hail another American author. They can't be popular, and for cause. The respect of him for the Queen's English, the classic leisureliness and explicitness, which give so rare a dignity to his style, also take from it that which our generation seems to need, the sudden word, the unmeditated transition, the flash of perception that makes reasonings unnecessary. Poor Woodberry, so high, so true, so good, so original in his total make-up, and yet so unoriginal if you take him spot-wise--and therefore so ineffective.

Mr. Woodberry is not out of date in a mere journalistic sense or in the hasty judgment of an irreverent generation which affects a trivial contemporaneity and regards even the end of the last century as old fogy. He is out of date because he did not gear with his own times, but remained aloof and backward-looking and so became the last of the Lowells instead of the first of the Woodberrys. It could not have been a conscious or servile emulation on his part, for he has a spirit of his own. But his surroundings and his education were too strong for his fine talent. He was brought up in the twilight of the New England demigods. They handed him the "torch," and he has carried it with pious devotion. To younger men as docile as himself, he became, almost officially, the representative in the flesh of the elders over whose graves he prayed. His publishers announce with pride, with no sense of the depressing implications of what they are saying, that there is a Woodberry Society, "probably the only organization in America dedicated to a living writer." Thus the anachronism is fulfilled. Mr. Woodberry was old when he was young, and he is an institution before he is dead. Some books are epoch making; other books, even great and original books, lie comfortably in their times without being either innovative or conclusive; Mr. Woodberry's six solid volumes[1] are epoch closing, a collection of such words as will not be written again by a man of genuine talent and wisdom.

[1] Collected Essays of George Edward Woodberry. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1921.

The feeling that Mr. Woodberry is a voice from the past that immediately preceded him comes over me most heavily when I read his essays on Lowell's Addresses, on Democracy, and on Wendell Phillips. It may be only the essayist's strict fidelity to Lowell's ideas--no doubt a merit--which leaves the impression that the essayist knows only what Lowell knew and no more, that the pupil has not moved a step beyond the master. It is Lowell over again without the slightest addition from the lessons of time. The London _Nation_ has said of Mr. Woodberry's essays that most of them have "a unity and life that make many of Lowell's seem those of a shrewd but old-fashioned amateur." Yet Lowell was at least a vivid amateur, who expressed something that belonged to the 'fifties, 'sixties and 'seventies; and he had an old gentleman's right to be old in the 'eighties. It is not to be expected that a critic should begin where Lowell leaves off--only a thinker of real genius makes such long strides. But the critic following Lowell in time and not moving half a step ahead of him seems older than Lowell himself.

The same thing is true of the address on Wendell Phillips, "The Faith of an American." It is fine, even eloquent, but it is abstract and curiously old-fashioned. Phillips in his own utterances is more of to-day and of to-morrow than is his eulogist who was a child in Beverley when Phillips was in mid-career. The reason, of course, is that Phillips was a fighter, hot with real issues, and it is not the critic's business to fight but to examine the ideas of the fighter. These ideas necessarily become somewhat abstract when a critic quotes or rephrases them, especially since Phillips was an orator and flung at his audiences sweeping generalities which in a less inspired man are mere tall talk. But Mr. Woodberry devitalizes Phillips, especially the later Phillips who went on from one issue to the next until he dropped. Mr. Woodberry has not a single clear, plain word about one of Phillips' last fights, that for the Labor party. Mr. Woodberry stops with the actual Phillips before Phillips stopped, and the end of the address fades out in vagueness and platitude. There is something rather touching about Mr. Woodberry's declaration: "I know that what I have said to-night is heavy with risk." One looks in vain to discover the risk. Surely in 1911, when the address was delivered, a man might talk in Mr. Woodberry's mild way every night in the week and invite no more severe punishment than a scolding from Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler.

Mr. Woodberry's ideas and his expressions are all gentle, though not timid nor emasculate. His general faith in "Democracy" is too serenely above the tumult to disturb anybody or provoke a riot call in the quietude of Beverley. I do not know what he means by "Democracy," whether such actual democracy as existed in America in 1899, or some beautiful dream of the future. If democracy is a dream, an unrealized dream, then any beautiful thing a poet says about it is true. But Mr. Woodberry seems to be talking about something actually existing, something already realized in considerable part if not completely, for he says: "Democracy has its great career, for the first time, in our national being, and exhibits here most purely its formative powers, and unfolds destiny on the grand scale." That was not true twenty years ago, and it is certainly not true now. It is the sort of thing that Emerson and Lowell could say with rousing conviction, but twenty years ago it was as obsolete as a beaver hat except in newspaper editorials and political speeches, where it is still going strong--even if not quite so strong as it used to be.

Mr. Woodberry seems to imply that he is somewhat more of a realist than Lowell. But he is in fact less of a realist than Lowell; for Lowell in his time did grapple with the facts of politics. In poetry it is not necessary, it is better not, to be a realist. But in dealing with politics and contemporaneous history the true citizen must be a realist and leave it to the politicians to fly with the eagle. No wisdom is to be derived from such a statement as this: "There is always an ideality of the human spirit in all its [Democracy's] works, if one will search them out." Or this: "Democracy is a mode of dealing with souls." Or this: "Not that other governments have not had regard to the soul, but in democracy, it is spirituality that gives the law and rules the issue." It is, alas, not true that "education, high education even, is more respected and counts for more in a democracy than under the older systems," or that "the law becomes the embodied persuasion of the community," or that "all these blessings [aversion to war, devotion to public duty and many other enumerated virtues] unconfined as the element, belong to all our people."

Mr. Woodberry's democracy simply does not exist and never did exist. Yet there is one existent glory of my country which I believe I appreciate better than he does. He says: "It behooves us, especially, to be modest, for our magnificent America has never yet produced a poet even of the rank of Gray." That was written fourteen years after the death of Whitman. Mr. Woodberry's democracy had not yet come along, but one of its great poets had arrived and departed leaving Mr. Woodberry none the wiser. There is another glory of my country which I appreciate better than Mr. Woodberry does--Poe, whose poetry Mr. Woodberry has never understood, though he has written what is altogether the best biography of the man! To save the six best lyrics of Poe, I would, if such a sacrifice were necessary, cheerfully sink Gray in the deepest sea of oblivion, "Elegy," letters and all. But that is only a slight difference of judgment, and there is no more futile business than to draw up minor poets in grades and ranks. Whitman is another matter; the critic who misses him in this day of the world is simply incompetent. The excuse for Mr. Woodberry is that he does not belong to this day of the world.

There is something pathetic about Mr. Woodberry's patriotism. He sincerely believes that "America's title to glory is her service to human liberty." He has never been delivered from the superstition that "the sense of justice is the bedrock of the Puritan soul"--the Puritan soul, narrow, despotic, cruelly unjust! But when Mr. Woodberry leaves politics and patriotism and religion and returns to art and literature where he is at home, he puts his finger ruefully on the real rock of the Puritan soul, recalling the Puritan's hostility to the theatre and regretting "the American inhibition" "which rejects the nude in sculpture and painting, not only forfeiting thereby the supreme of Greek genius and sanity, but to the prejudice, also, of human dignity." Mr. Woodberry is himself a Puritan, yearning to be free but chained to New England granite, and since he can not get free on this planet he looks up to the heavens where the God of his fathers used to dwell, but where he can find only abstract and vague ideas. Mr. Woodberry's tendency to abstract phrases, which on pressure yield nothing, vitiates his literary essays, the essays in which a professional critic ought to be most concrete, definite, and nourishing. The trouble may be that his views are too high and too broad for the limited vision of a common man; but I think his trouble is that he has not the true philosopher's power to make a long idea, bridging time and space, stand up under its own weight; there is a lack of solid timber and concrete. His best essays are those on individual authors in which he has the selected specific substance of another man's thought to work on. As ought to happen to a sensitive critic, it sometimes happens that Mr. Woodberry's style takes the very tone of his subject. He is whimsical in his charming little essay on Pepys, an adequate trifle; he is grave and quiet when he writes about Gray; and Swinburne so stirs him that his prose awakes and sparkles with metaphor. Even in this essay, however, he can not help demoralizing poetry by moralizing it into pseudo-philosophic prose. "The imagery (of 'Laus Veneris') has more affinity with modes of sacerdotal art, with symbolism and the attributive in imaginative power than it has with the free vitality that is more properly the sphere of poetry." What does that mean? What is the sphere of poetry? The essays on the older poets would make first-rate introductions to school texts, and I think some of them have been so used. They suffer from the fact that in Mr. Woodberry's time--and since--so many standard essays on Milton, Shakespeare, and the rest were written and rewritten, that unless a critic has a fresh point of view, as Mr. Woodberry has not, another essay is simply another essay.

It must be pleasant to meditate on the great men of letters and from time to time write an essay on Virgil or Montaigne or Matthew Arnold. Some leisure is necessary, for the conscientious critic must read much, and much reading takes time. It may be that in our nervous age, in this country, the scholarly critic with a true taste for letters has disappeared, to return perhaps in a day when Democracy or something better shall have dawned. The comfortable old tradition is dead or dying, and since its good works are extant in print, we need no more contributions to it. As Mr. Woodberry says in an essay called "Culture of the Old School": "The _Gentleman's Magazine_--both the name and the thing belong to a bygone time."

ABRAHAM CAHAN

Toward the end of the last century there appeared in the magazines some remarkable stories of the East Side of New York by Abraham Cahan. They were not of the crudely comic type of Potash and Perlmutter, nor were they in the somewhat finer mood of sentimental humor which made Myra Kelly deservedly popular. They were humorous and pathetic in a quiet, compelling way, with a gentle austerity of tone even less familiar to American readers then than it is in the days of the Russian invasion. Mr. Howells praised these stories and he and others in editorial authority encouraged the author to write more. A career in the pleasant art of fiction was open to Mr. Cahan. But he withdrew from it and, so far as I know, he wrote no more stories for at least ten years. He has devoted his energy to building up the great _Jewish Daily Forward_, which is not only the voice of the East Side, but a powerful vehicle of social and political ideals that have not yet penetrated the sanctums of Times Square and of the older newspaper world near City Hall and Civic Virtue.

Then, as he approached sixty, Mr. Cahan gave us "The Rise of David Levinsky", a solid mature novel, into which are compacted the reflections of a lifetime. The publisher's notice called it "a story of success in the turmoil of American life." Probably the writer of those words intended to help the book by the appeal which "success" makes to the American mind, for no reader, not even a publisher's clerk, could miss the immense irony of the story. It is indeed the story of a failure. The vanity of great riches was never set forth with more searching sincerity. The helplessness of the individual, even the strong and prosperous, in the economic whirlpool, the loneliness and disillusionment only partly assuaged by pride in commercial achievement, the sacrifice of the intellectual life to the practical, these are the fundamental themes of the book. Levinsky, with the instincts of a scholar and a desire for the finest things in life, is swept into business by circumstances which he hardly understands himself and against which he is powerless; once in the game he makes the most of his abilities, but he never ceases to regard his visible good fortune as poor compensation for the invisible things he has missed. His wealth forces him to associate with all that is vulgar and acquisitive in Jewry and isolates him from all that is idealistic. He finds that he cannot even speak the language of the woman he most admires. Worse still, he is out of sympathy with the aspirations of millions of poor Jews from whose ranks he has sprung. He has no sympathy with those who would break the game up or make new rules, yet he sees that the game is hardly worth playing, even for the winner. "Success! Success! Success! It was the almighty goddess of the hour. Thousands of new fortunes were advertising her gaudy splendors. Newspapers, magazines, and public speeches were full of her glory, and he who found favor in her eyes found favor in the eyes of man."

The portrait of David Levinsky is a portrait of society, not simply of the Jewish section of it, or of New York, but of American business. And business is business whether done by Jew or Gentile. If Levinsky is a triumphant failure, he is so because American business, which shaped him to its ends, is, viewed from any decent regard for humanity, a miserable monster of success. Not that Levinsky is an abstraction, or that the novelist is forcing a thesis. Far from it. The personality of Levinsky is as sharply individualized as the hero of Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors," though with a different kind of subtlety, the subtlety not of detached analysis, but of naïvely simple self-revelation, which of course is not so simple as it sounds.

Mr. Cahan knows how to think through his characters, by letting them do the thinking, as if it were their affair and not his. At the same time he does not perform (nor does any other artist) that foolish and meaningless operation, as expressed by a great poet through a young critic, of holding "the mirror up to nature." Nature in a mirror is just nature, not nature thought out, excogitated, turned to human uses, interpreted in human words. And this is the place to say that Mr. Cahan knows how to use words. There are no great phrases in this book. A simple and (intellectually) honest business man writing his autobiography would not use a great phrase; such a phrase might issue from some enviable person in that intellectual life from which Levinsky was excluded. But there is no banal or inept phrase. Such a man as Mr. Cahan intends Levinsky to be, a man trained in the Talmud, which means verbal sense, and hammered by the facts of life, which means a sense of reality, and a wistful failure, which means imaginative retrospection, says things in a direct, firm, accurate style.

There is no lack of emotion; strong feeling, expressed or implied, runs through the book from beginning to end. But there is a complete absence of eloquence, a deliberate refraining from emphasis, an even manner of setting forth ideas and events impartially for the value inherent in them, an admirable method, the method of a philosophic artist. Here is life, some of it is good, some of it is bad; it is all somewhat pitiable, to be laughed at rather than cried over; nobody is deserving of indignant blame or abuse. It is our business to understand it as well as we can; and though we never can see it in its entirety or with complete clearness, if we make an honest effort to record events and delineate personalities, the events will arrange themselves in a more or less intelligible sequence, and the personalities will be their own commentary upon themselves. An obvious method, but you will read many a book to find one skilful application of it.

It seems to me the method most often employed and carried to the highest degree of perfection by the great Russians. I am driven to the timidity of "seems" because we do much talking about Russian novels without having read many of them or understanding what we have read. But better-informed critics than I have noted that one characteristic of the Russian novel is a benevolent impartiality in its treatment of all kinds of people and a calm contemplation of events horrible, gay, sad, comic. A revolutionist can portray, in fiction, a commissioner of police, whom in real life he would be willing to kill, with a fairness that is more than fair, with a combination of Olympian serenity and human sympathy. He can be a virulent propagandist when he is writing pamphlets, and when he writes fiction he can forget his propaganda or subdue it to art, that is, to a balanced sense of life.

When I say that Mr. Cahan's novel sounds like a good translation of a Russian novel, and that he is a disciple of the Russian novelists, I accuse him of the crime of being an artist and a seer. As a matter of biography, he is a child of Russian literature. And that is why his novel, written in faultless English, is a singular and solitary performance in American fiction. If that strange demand for "the" or "a great American novel," a demand which is at once foolish and the expression of a justifiably proud feeling that a big country ought to have big books, is to be satisfied, perhaps we shall have to ask an East Side Jew to write it for us. That would be an interesting phenomenon for some future Professor Wendell to deal with in a History of American Literature. And by the way, Mr. Cahan is a competent critic. I hope he will give us not only more novels, but a study of Russian literature for the enlightenment of the American mind. I remember with gratitude an article of his which I read when I was even more ignorant than I am now, on the modern successors to the group of Titans, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. He put Maxim Gorky in his place and told us (this was before the Russian invasion) about Andreyev and Chekhov. If Mr. Cahan will write a book on Russian literature, I will do my best to establish him in his merited place in American literature.

THOMAS HARDY

Mr. Bernard Shaw says, apropos Samuel Butler, that the English people do not deserve to have a genius. Butler himself in a note remarks that America, even America, will probably have men of genius, has indeed, already had one, Walt Whitman, but that he cannot imagine any country where a genius would have more unfortunate surroundings than in America. Mr. Arnold Bennett sends a shot from the same gun in "Milestones," when he makes the millionaire shipbuilder puff his chest and say that there is no greater honor to English character than the way we treat our geniuses. Egad! The unworthiness of the British and American nations to have artists born to them was never more shamefully manifested than by the reception accorded thirty years ago to Hardy's "Jude, the Obscure." Harper's Magazine, which seems to have begun printing the story before the editors had seen the complete manuscript, fell into temporary disfavor with some outraged readers. One British journal distinguished itself by reviewing the book under the caption, "Jude, the Obscene."

It is inconceivable that any nation on the continent of Europe could, through its critics or through any considerable number of readers, so dishonor a masterpiece. For "Jude" is a masterpiece; if it is not Hardy's greatest novel, it is one of his three or four greatest, and that means one of a score of supreme works of prose fiction in the language. If profundity of substance and skill in narrative are both considered, Hardy is without rival among British novelists. His is the crowning achievement in the century of fiction that began with Jane Austen and, happily, has not yet terminated with Joseph Conrad. In his hands the English novel assumed a form which, perhaps without good critical reason, one thinks of as French. Despite the racy localism of scene and character, Hardy's work seems alien to the Anglo-Saxon temperament; it has less in common with the spacious days of great Victoria than with a younger time, whose living masters, Mr. Conrad and Mr. Galsworthy, for example, have taken lessons in art across the channel.