Part 14
No page of "Hail and Farewell" is flat; no opinion of Mr. Moore's leaves you quite indifferent. The most interesting pages, more interesting than his portrait of himself as a lover in France or a member of the landed gentry of county Mayo, are those which criticize the personalities and the ideas of the so-called Celtic Revival. His comments on Lady Gregory and "Willie" Yeats just miss being insults. To say that "Lady Gregory has never been for me a very real person" is gratuitous and not quite consonant with that honesty which Mr. Moore advocates and for the most part practises. For in his portrait of her and his comments on her he shows that she is a very real person to him and a writer who compels his consideration. In the act of putting a pin through the humbuggery of others he buzzes himself.
However, his literary criticism of their work is delightful. Whether it is true or not we Yankees have no sure means of judging. He says that Lady Gregory's style which Mr. Yeats so highly values, the speech that she learned from the people and puts into the mouths of her characters, "consists of no more than a dozen turns of speech, dropped into pages of English so ordinary, that redeemed from these phrases it might appear in any newspaper without attracting attention." Well, is not that true of the speech of the Irish or any province of England or America? Our dialectic differences are few but important. The speech of Lady Gregory's characters is effective, and more than that, the humor and the pathos of them is deeper than their speech or any peculiar turns of phrase.
Doubtless (as would say Sir Sidney Lee, whom Mr. Moore despises), doubtless Mr. Yeats makes too much of Lady Gregory's discovery of dialect and of his own discovery of Lady Gregory. In the revised version of "Red Hanrahan," he thanks Lady Gregory "who helped me to rewrite The Stories of Red Hanrahan in the beautiful country speech of Kiltartan, and nearer to the tradition of the people among whom he, or some likeness of him, drifted and is remembered." It is little I care, myself being a literary man, whether the metaphors and the syntax and the sentence rhythms were contrived by Mr. Yeats or Lady Gregory or the people of Kiltartan, or whether they are natural to the English tongue of other times and other regions of the world. They are impressive, they convey the story, and they give to the story the strange color appropriate to it. Mr. Yeats plays with verbal color, with lights and darkness in a way that should appeal to so sympathetic a student of the French impressionists as Mr. Moore.
To be sure, there is always the danger of affectation, and the concluding sentences of Mr. Yeats's dedicatory letter to "AE" are pretty close to buncombe. "Ireland, which is still predominantly Celtic, has preserved, with some less excellent things, a gift of vision which has died out among more hurried and more successful nations; no shining candelabra have prevented us from looking into the darkness, and when one looks into the darkness there is always something there." Not always; there may not be anything there worth talking about, not even a black cat. And the man of poetic vision may be a citizen of a relatively successful nation. The eye does not thrive in the dark, but is gradually atrophied. It was not by scrutinizing the dark, but by using his ear and his wonderful visual imagination that Mr. Yeats learned to write the verses in "Red Hanrahan's Curse," verses the like of which no other man can write.
In such verses lives and will live the real Yeats. That some of his verses are obscure and weak does not matter. Greater poets than he have failed at times. And the best of his later verse is his very best; he grows and keeps young, for he has been dipped in some magic well. That he has foibles a plenty is of little moment; greater poets than he have allowed the fool to triumph over the genius sometimes. The divine fool is one of the common themes in poetic legend. Later criticism will assess the value of the "school" that he has founded and appraise his influence in the literary history of Ireland. The function of criticism at the present time is to proclaim the lyric poet and persuade readers to subject themselves to the enchantment of his songs. It is surprising that Mr. Moore, who preaches the gospel of beauty with a fervor worthy of Keats, should not balance his witty strictures with a little more hearty appreciation. He quotes one of his friends as saying that Yeats "took his colleen to London and put paint upon her cheeks and dye upon her hair and sent her up Piccadilly."
And another critic added that the hat and feathers were supplied by Arthur Symons. That is funny enough and serves the purpose of criticism by arousing interest. It also gives other critics opportunity to remind their readers that Yeats's colleen, whether in Sligo or London, is a lovely witch.
One story that Mr. Moore tells of Mr. Yeats is beyond my un-Celtic sense of humor. He represents Mr. Yeats as coming down to luncheon at Lady Gregory's house and saying: "I have had a great morning. I have written eight lines." Where is the joke? It does not seem to be at the expense of the poet. Eight of his lines may seem a poor day's work to so great a man as George Moore. But some of us who have not earned the right to be patronizing would cheerfully devote a month of Sundays, if we knew how, to making one line as good as the best of Yeats. These Irish people rag each other delightfully, and it is more delightful to poke fun than to admire too mutually; perhaps it is more Irish.
Of living Irishmen the two most distinguished writers of prose are George Moore and Bernard Shaw. They resemble each other in two or three particulars. Both are out of sympathy with the modern movement in Irish literature, with the "Celtic revival," with all that revolves about the person of Mr. Yeats. In the introduction to "John Bull's Other Island," Mr. Shaw says (I quote from memory) that he is an old-fashioned Irishman who sees other Irishmen as they really are and not as the young people of the Abbey Theatre imagine them to be. Mr. Moore somewhat grudgingly concedes that Synge was a man of genius and that Lady Gregory's plays, though inferior to the "Playboy" are all meritorious. But he implies, if he does not directly say, that the only man who really understands the diction of the Irish is George Moore, Esq., of Moore Hall. Another point of resemblance between Shaw and Moore is that both insist on calling themselves shameless; they boast their independence and find satisfaction in contemplating their difference from other people. It is amusing to think that the reading world has long taken them for granted and is no longer shocked. Both are masters of the English tongue, not of a new style full of strange idioms, natural or artificial, but of the straightest sort of classic English, firm as the best prose of the eighteenth century.
It is that English which shall save these Celtic iconoclasts who are now respectable old gentlemen. Irish to the back-bone, they took for foster mother the finest prose of the race that betrayed their country; they became favorite sons of an empire superior to the political and racial divisions of the world. Mr. Moore thinks that the English are a tired race and their weariness betrays itself in the language. "God help the writer who puts pen to paper in fifty years' time, for all that will be left of the language will be a dry shank-bone that has been lying a long while on the dust-heap of empire." A dismal prophecy which is cheerfully contradicted by the facts of literary history. The political empire may be disrupted, Ireland may be freed from English yoke and split in twain. But the language is safe. Artists like Mr. Moore preserve its integrity and renew its vitality. And we have not heard the last of James Joyce and James Stephens, or of one or two young men who were born on the island that lies east of Dublin.
JAMES JOYCE
In the preface of "Pendennis" Thackeray says: "Since the author of 'Tom Jones' was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a Man. We must drape him and give him a certain conventional simper. Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art." If Thackeray felt that, why did he not take his reputation and his fortune in his hands and, defying the social restrictions which he deplored, paint us a true portrait of a young gentleman of his time? He might have done much for English art and English honesty. As it was, he did as much as any writer of his generation to fasten on English fiction the fetters of a hypocritical reticence. It was only in the last generation that English and Irish novelists, under the influence of French literature, freed themselves from the cowardice of Victorian fiction and assumed that anything human under the sun is proper subject-matter for art. If they have not produced masterpieces (and I do not admit that they have not), they have made a brave beginning. Such a book as "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" would have been impossible forty years ago. Far from looking back with regret at the good old novelists of the nineteenth century (whom, besides, we need never lose), I believe that our fiction is in some respects freer[1] and richer than the fiction of our immediate forefathers.
[1] If it gets too free, as in Joyce's "Ulysses," it has an official hand clapped on its mouth!
Joyce's work is outspoken, vigorous, original, beautiful. Whether it faithfully reflects Irish politics and the emotional conflicts of the Catholic religion one who is neither Irish nor Catholic can not judge with certainty. It seems, however, that the noisy controversies over Parnell and the priests in which the boy's elders indulge have the sound of living Irish voices; and the distracted boy's wrestlings with his sins and his faith are so movingly human that they hold the sympathy even of one who is indifferent to the religious arguments. I am afraid that the religious questions and the political questions are too roughly handled to please the incurably devout and patriotic. If they ever put up a statue of Joyce in Dublin, it will not be during his lifetime. For he is no respecter of anything except art and human nature and language.
There are some who, to turn his own imaginative phrase, will fret in the shadow of his language. He makes boys talk as boys do, as they did in your school and mine, except that we lacked the Irish imagery and whimsicality. If the young hero is abnormal and precocious, that is because he is not an ordinary boy but an artist, gifted with thoughts and phrases above our common abilities. This is a portrait of an artist, a literary artist of the finest quality.
The style is a joy. "Cranly's speech," he writes, "had neither rare phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish idioms." In that Joyce has defined his own style. It is Elizabethan, yet thoroughly modern; it is racily Irish, yet universal English. It is unblushingly plain-spoken and richly fanciful, like Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The effect of complete possession of the traditional resources of language is combined with an effect of complete indifference to traditional methods of fiction. Episodes, sensations, dreams, emotions trivial and tragic succeed each other neither coherently nor incoherently; each is developed vividly for a moment, then fades away into the next, with or without the mechanical devices of chapter divisions or rows of stars. Life is so; a fellow is pandied by the schoolmaster for no offense; the cricket bats strike the balls, pick, pock, puck; there is a girl to dream about; and Byron was a greater poet than Tennyson anyhow....
The sufferings of the poor little sinner are told with perfect fidelity to his point of view. Since he is an artist his thoughts appropriately find expression in phrases of maturer beauty than the speech of ordinary boys. He is enamored of words, intrigued by their mystery and color; wherefore the biographer plays through the boy's thoughts with all manner of verbal loveliness.
Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many-coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?
From the fading splendor of an evening beautifully described, he tumbles into the sordid day of a house rich in pawn tickets. That is life. "Welcome, O life!" he bids farewell to his young manhood. "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."
The sketches in "Dubliners" are perfect, each in its own way, and all in one way: they imply a vast deal that is not said. They are small as the eye-glass of a telescope is small; you look through them to depths and distances. They are a kind of short story almost unknown to the American magazine if not to the American writer. An American editor might read them for his private pleasure, but from his professional point of view he would not see that there was any story there at all. The American short story is explicit and thin as a moving-picture film; it takes nothing for granted; it knows nothing of the art of the hintful, the suggestive, the selected single detail which lodges fertilely in the reader's mind, begetting ideas and emotions. America is not the only offender (for patriotism is the fashion and bids criticism relent); there is much professional Irish humor which is funny enough but no more subtle than a shillalah. And English short stories, such at least as we see in magazines, are obvious and "express" rather than expressive. Joyce's power to disentangle a single thread from the confusion of life and let you run briefly back upon it until you encounter the confusion and are left to think about it yourself--that is a power rare enough in any literature.
Except one story, "A Painful Case," I could not tell the plot of any of these sketches. Because there is no plot going from beginning to end. The plot goes from the surface inward, from a near view away into a background. A person appears for a moment--a priest, or a girl, or a small boy, or a street-corner tough, or a drunken salesman--and does and says things not extraordinary in themselves; and somehow you know all about these people and feel that you could think out their entire lives. Some are stupid, some are pathetic, some are funny in an unhilarious way. The dominant mood is irony. The last story in the book, "The Dead," is a masterpiece which will never be popular, because it is all about living people; there is only one dead person in it and he is not mentioned until near the end. That's the kind of trick an Irishman like Synge or Joyce would play on us, and perhaps a Frenchman or a Russian would do it; but we would not stand it from one of our own writers.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Mr. Lawrence is a poet in prose and in verse. No writer of his generation is more singular, more unmistakably individual, and no other that I know is endowed with his great variety of gifts. He is as dangerous to public morals as Meredith or Hardy. Readers who cannot understand the tragedy of "Richard Feverel" or of "Jude the Obscure," will not understand Mr. Lawrence or be interested to read a third of the way through one of his books. The stupidity of the multitude is sure protection against his insidious loveliness and essential sadness. He and his admirers will, I hope, regard it as honorable to him that he reminds this critic oftener of Meredith and Hardy than of any of his contemporaries. I am not so fatuous as to suggest that his independent and original work is in any unfavorable sense derivative. It must be true that every young novelist learns his lessons from the older novelists; but I cannot see that Mr. Lawrence is clearly the disciple of any one master. I do feel simply that he is of the elder stature of Meredith and Hardy, and I will suggest, in praise of him, some resemblances that have struck me, without trying to analyze or quote chapter and verse in tedious parallels.
Mr. Lawrence is a lyric as well as a tragic poet. In this he is like Meredith and Hardy, and I can think of no other young novelist who is quite worthy of the company. Young people in love, or some other difficulty, become entangled with stars and mountains and seas; they are baffled and lost, seldom consoled, in cosmic immensities. Novelists who happen also to be poets are enamoured of those immensities.
This is the end of "Sons and Lovers":
"Where was he?--one tiny upright speck of flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear it. On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in the darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core nothingness, and yet not nothing."
The concluding scenes of "Women in Love" are the Alps, "a silence of dim, unrealized snow, of the invisible intervening between her and the visible, between her and the flashing stars." I am reminded, by the beauty of the phrasing and by the sense of the pathetic little human being adrift in space, of the flight of the two young people through the Alps, in "The Amazing Marriage," and of farmer Gabriel Oak watching the westward flow of the stars.
Sometimes, like Meredith, rather than like Hardy, whose style is colder and more austere, Mr. Lawrence is almost too lyric and his phrases threaten to overflow the rigid dikes of prose. I could pick out a dozen rhapsodical passages which with little change might well appear in his books of verse.
But young people in love do not spend all their days and nights in ecstatic flights to the clouds. And their flights are followed by pathetic Icarian disasters. From luminous moments they plunge into what Mr. Lawrence calls "the bitterness of ecstacy," and their pain outweighs their joy many times over, as in Hardy, and as in the more genial Meredith, whose rapturous digression played on a penny whistle is a cruelly beautiful preparation for the agonies that ensue. It may be that the emotional transports of Mr. Lawrence's young people are more frequent and violent than the ordinary human soul can enjoy and endure. The nervous tension is high and would break into hysteria if Mr. Lawrence were not a philosopher as well as a poet, if he did not know so accurately what goes on inside the human head, if he had not an artist's ability to keep his balance at the very moment when a less certain workman would lose it.
There is firm ground under his feet and under the feet of his lovers; it is the everyday life which consists of keeping shop and keeping school and other commonplace activities in street, kitchen, and coal mine. These diurnal details he studies with a fidelity not surpassed by Mr. Bennett or any other of his contemporaries. The talk of his people is always alive, both the dialect of the villagers and the discussions of the more intellectual. Sometimes he puts into the speech of his characters a little more of his own poetic fancy than they might reasonably be supposed to be capable of. But if this is a fault, from a realistic point of view, it is a merit from the point of view of readability, and it makes for vivacity. At times--and is not this like Meredith?--he seems to be less interested in the sheer dramatic value of a situation he has created than in the opportunity it offers of writing beautiful things around it. Not that his situations fail to carry themselves or have not their proper place and proportion. Mr. Lawrence knows how to handle his narrative and he has an abundant invention and dramatic ingenuity. But he is above those elementary things that any competent novelist knows. He has the something else that makes the story teller the first rate literary artist--style may be the word for it, but poetic imagination seems to be the better and more inclusive term. Open "The Lost Girl" at page 57 and read two pages. Without knowing what has preceded or whither the story is bound, anybody who knows what literature is will feel at once that that is it.
"Women in Love" is a sequel to "The Rainbow," in that it carries on the story of Ursula of the family of Brangwen. "The Rainbow" is the stronger book; it has more of the tragic power, the deep social implications of Mr. Lawrence's masterpiece, "Sons and Lovers". In "Women in Love" are four young people, two men and two women, whose chief interest, for them and for us, is in amatory relations. This is indicated by the title of the story, one of those obvious titles which only a man of imagination could hit upon, so simple that you wonder why no novelist ever thought of it before. Now the erotic relations of people, though a tremendous part of life, as all the great tragic romances prove, are still only part of life. Nobody knows this better than Mr. Lawrence. The first story of the Brangwen family is richer than the second, not because of the proverbial falling off of sequels, not because Mr. Lawrence's power declined--far from it!--but because the first novel embraces a larger number of the manifold interests that compose the fever called living. In it are not only young lovers, but old people, old failures, the land, the town, the succession of the generations rooted yet restless. Ursula emerges from immemorial centuries of English life, touched with foreign blood out of Poland (when an English novelist wishes to introduce variety and strangeness into the dull solidity of an English town he imports a Pole, or an Italian, or a Frenchman, somebody not English).
Ursula's background is thus richer than all her emotional experience. Her father, her grandfather, the family, the muddled tragicomedy of little affairs and ambitions, the grim, gray colliery district, the entire social situation, are the foundations and walls of the story, and she is the slender spire that surmounts it all--and is struck by lightning. In "The Rainbow" she goes to ashes, and in "Women in Love" she revives, burns again, and finds in her new love new dissatisfaction.
It is impossible to write of Mr. Lawrence without discoursing in symbols and reflecting, somewhat pallidly, his metaphors. For like all genuine poets he is a symbolist. In "Aaron's Rod" he redoubles and compounds symbolism in a manner baffling to readers and to critics who like to have their prose prosaic and their poetry in lines and whose sound stomachs refuse a mixed drink. I enjoy the mixture--in the Bible, in Meredith, in Ruskin, in James, in Lawrence.
It is stupid to explain symbols. Yet after all that is the dull function of criticism, to explain something--as if the creator of a work of art had not given all the necessary explanation in the very act of creation. Whoever does not understand Lawrence on immediate contact will not understand him better after the intervention of a critic. But it is the pleasure and the privilege of a critic to have his secondary imagination set on fire by the primary imagination of a man of genius, to spread the fire if he can by the cold fluid of critical exposition--as water carries burning oil.