Part 16

Only in one place, as far as we can see, does Mr. Lear refer to drink with any tinge of moral or reprobatory feeling. Thus:

Twas a tumbler full Of Punch all hot and good; Papa he drank it up, when in The middle of a wood.

We shall have to lean heavily upon that cautionary stanza in reading to the Urchin. We will not try to bias him, of course; but by grave and solemn repetition surely the idea will pierce his meninges--that no matter how excellent the libation, it must be performed in secret and far from scrutiny.

THE SEDAN

Not long ago, in the garage at Salamis run by our friend Fred Seaman, we were admiring and examining a very beautiful sedan. Not that we had any idea of ever abandoning our cherished Dame Quickly, who means more to us than any other vehicle ever will or can. But, just in a contemplative spirit, and as a frustrated lover of luxury, we were admiring this sedan, and saying to ourself that if we were a person of wealth and standing that would be just about the kind of car we would like to own. And we gazed entranced at its opulent upholstery, its cut-glass carnation-vase, its little 8-day clock, cigar-holder, and all the other gauds and trinkets. Just in idle curiosity we inquired the price. Then we went over the hill to our home.

A day or so later a cheerful Polish friend of ours, who is so kind as to call for the washing weekly, and who used to do odd jobs round our estate, and with whom we boarded our admirable cat _Pepys_ while we were in town, called at our house. Titania had always represented this person to us as being in the last agony of financial dissolution and a worthy object of charity.

“I want to show you my new boat,” said he.

We thought at first that he meant an actual boat, down in the harbour, and were interested. But he pointed out to the front of the house. There was the very sedan we had admired. He insisted on our going down to listen to the engine. “Paid all cash for it,” he said proudly.

When we see a large, glimmering limousine pass us on the road, hereafter, we shall always wonder whether it is some thrifty washerman and his family.

BAD VERSE

Really thoroughly bad verse (as Mr. Hilaire Belloc pointed out in an essay) has a magic and an attraction all its own. It has (he said) “something of the poignant and removed from common experience which you get also in poetry. Great pits strike one with horror, as do the mountains with their sublimity.”

A philosophic friend of ours, whose dolorous task it is to examine manuscripts for a large publishing house, sent us the other day a collection of verses that had been submitted to his firm. We have had considerable diversion in examining them; though compositions of this sort lead one also to melancholy. It is sad to think that the accident of rhyme, which has been the occasion of so much verbal loveliness, has also been responsible for so many atrocities.

We shall not say who wrote the verses in question, except that he lives in a Southern State, but we will quote a few stanzas from a poem called “Love’s Progress.” After several pages describing the sorrows of a pair of lovers, we arrive at this:

They broke to break their breaking breach, Which both have caused, because of each Failing to procure, or reach, The longing goal they did beseech.

They sought to seek their seeking truth, Which all do crave, and never boot; They kept their cadence to a flute, Which only wisdom seeks to mute.

They slid to slide their sliding sleigh Toward goals, but met a fray; And, striking, struck the striking broil; And found themselves to winds a spoil.

They swung to swing their swinging life To higher spheres and lusty fife; But flung against the sturdy cliff, And sunk beneath the brutal grief.

They shed their shedding tears in vain, Fruitless as the dismal rain; And pined their pine, and pined it more; And reaped their crop they sowed to store.

Defying fies have they defied; Lying lies have they belied; Brisky thought did both deride; Happy hope had both denied!

You see how low rhyme can bring a man.

Of the following, our friend the publisher’s reader observes: “Alas, poor Henley--’twas an excellent fellow: I knew him well!”

I Am

I am the tutor of my mind; I am the pastor of my soul; All that pass, I leave behind, And focus straight upon my goal.

Until we read that we felt sorry for the author; but indeed it takes him out of the sphere of charity.

TWO REVIEWS

I

(New York _Evening Post_, July, 1922)

It is curious that the agencies for letting people know about the things that really matter are so feeble and ineffective. There was published in England, last February, a book called _Disenchantment_, by C. E. Montague. It seems to us perhaps the first book we have seen that tells truth about the war, tells it beautifully, with a power and humour and tenderness that are palpable on every page. Five months have elapsed, and yet we have heard no word as to its being published over here. Worse still, we learn that more than one New York publisher, after reading the book, reluctantly declined it. Sometimes one fears that publishers are not unerring judges of what we all desire to read.

What does a man need to do to deserve well of his generation? Suppose he had written a book that with quiet dignity and restraint summed up the “ardours and endurances” of earth’s greatest crisis; a book that showed sane and sweet knowledge of our poor, frail, tough, bedevilled human nature; a book so delicately and firmly written that the manner of it was no less potent than the matter; a book that dealt with furious subjects calmly; that reviewed passion and misery with reason and candour; a book that was bitter where bitterness was needed, but with the bitterness of antiseptic. C. E. Montague has written such a book. And even though it may be bad manners to speak about it publicly before it has been published here, we venture do so in the hope of speeding its coming. To confess a personal incident, when we were half way through it we encountered one of our friends who is a sagacious devourer of books. “What’s worth reading?” he said. “Sit down at your desk and let me dictate a letter to you,” we replied. With admirable docility this fine creature obeyed. We happened to know that he has an account at Brentano’s, so we dictated thus: “Brentano’s, New York. Gentlemen: Please order for me from Chatto & Windus, London, three copies of _Disenchantment_, by C. E. Montague, and charge to my account.” We watched carefully while our friend signed his name, addressed and stamped the envelope, and dropped it down the chute.

By the time we had read him half a page of the book he had already decided to whom he would give his two extra copies. He will never regret the transaction, we swear.

We are anxious to put a brake on ourself in speaking of this book: if we tried to tell you how deeply moving and true we found it, you might be alarmed. We admit that we came to it favourably prejudiced, for Mr. Montague’s name has been honourable to us ever since we read his novel _The Morning’s War_, published in 1913. We had heard, also, of his gallant record in the war: that in spite of his age (born in 1867), and an occupation (he is one of the editors of the Manchester _Guardian_) that many found a full excuse for non-combatancy, he enlisted as a private in 1914, rose through the ranks to a captain’s commission, and was three times mentioned in dispatches. We also knew (from _Who’s Who_) that his recreation was mountaineering, and that he had been awarded a medal “for saving life from drowning.” But we found in this book so much more than we had imagined possible that we are at a loss to describe it. It is the kind of book that, like its author, “saves life from drowning.” It may save some foundering reason from the dark tide of cynicism and disorder that is the natural result of the war years. Even if we only persuaded every newspaper man in America to read this book, we would have done a good stroke of achievement. It is a book peculiarly necessary for journalists to meditate.

It is very plain that the world to-day has a bad case of acid mouth, and Mr. Montague’s book (to use a very humble metaphor) is a kind of litmus paper that shows the extent of our palate’s embitterment. His reminiscent synopsis of the war’s moods and its increasing disillusions and perplexities is the first account that seems to us to fit in with those troubled, enigmatic, and fragmentary confessions that one hears from those who saw the trouble from the under side; who are not always very articulate, but spasmodically ejaculate that “The war didn’t get into the papers.” The book deals with the greatest topic of our age in a spirit of commensurate greatness. Of course we think we can guess why some American publishers have been timid about it. In this country we have not been anywhere nearly so close to the war as Britain was. The war was still bullish with us when it suddenly ended. As a nation, we had not been in it long enough to feel that infernal douche of skepticism. England has been far, far more bitterly disillusioned. The war left us economically troubled, but spiritually much the same. The old bunkums, one suspects, still pass current here as they do not any longer in England. And perhaps this book, conceived in suffering and weariness, can be relished only by those who have been more deeply immersed in horror than most of us. Even in England, we hear, its sale has not been very large.

For, after all, humanity has an uncanny instinct to avoid truth as long as it can. As we read this book of Mr. Montague’s we had a sudden vision of it selling as well as H. G. Wells does--passing from hand to hand, quoted, sermonized, becoming the fashionable topic of the season. It even made our beloved Santayana seem dim and pale, in a way; for it is so close and actual to our present moods and troubles. But then, with a sigh, we abandoned that vision. Why, if this book were really seized upon, gloried in as it deserves to be, if its eloquent humour and generous brave spirit were really acclaimed.... No, we can’t quite see it! The book is too beautiful, too true.

II

(New York _Herald_, October, 1922)

They don’t come very often, the books that speak so generously and beautifully to the inner certainties of the mind. And when they do, it is desirable not to do them dishonour by words too clumsy or sweeping.

But that Mr. Montague’s _Disenchantment_ has come to us in just the way that it has is a curiously mixed satisfaction and disappointment to the present reviewer. Satisfaction, in that for the past several years I have been saying to every publisher who was going abroad: “Why the devil do you go only to London and nowhere else? Are you aware that there are very exciting centres of literary activity in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham--all sorts of places outside London. Some day” (I kept saying to publishers) “one of the great books will bob up a long way from London. You might remember, for instance, Stevenson and Barrie. Now when you are in England why don’t you go to call on Mr. Montague at the Manchester _Guardian_? He’d know what was going on. Very likely he could tell you of someone who was writing a fine book--someone London wouldn’t know about.”

I take no particular credit for saying this: it was obviousness itself to any one who had noticed Mr. Montague’s earlier books. But the publishers, with their stereotyped habit of calling on a few literary agents in London, and thinking they have then done their possible, paid no attention. One of the odd things about publishers is that they have so little adventurous spirit about spooring for the really fine stuff.

Well, the book, quietly written and published, turned out to be by Mr. Montague himself. Half a year went by, but we in America heard nothing about it. There are always wide and well-polished alleys for the transmission of information amusing or trivial. Comparatively unimportant news spins along the parquet floor, and a crash resounds like that of tenpins tumbling. But humanity, probably with a wise instinct, averts its ear from matters that require meditation. The American publishers, seriatim, had their look at the sheets of _Disenchantment_. All apparently agreed that it was magnificent, but with their cheery assumption of knowledge as to what we want to read opined that it was too British or too full of intricate allusion or too much about the war, of which we were asserted to be weary. Or that the British publisher was asking an unwarrantable price for it; that only a few readers here would appreciate it; that it would be impossible to come clear on the expense.

These are all sound, sagacious reasonings. The one thing our publisher friends did not realize was that it is by publishing, every now and then, a book of this sort that they save their souls. It is an honour to put such a book on one’s list, even if it should prove presently unprofitable.

_Disenchantment_ is an enchanting book. It is an _Anatomy of Melancholy_ in the exact sense. It is a spiritual history of the war: a penetrating, intellectual, richly allusive, wise, sober, and compassionate study of that slow process of disintegrating certainty that marked every mind capable of independent action. People who have never read it probably imagine that the _Anatomy of Melancholy_ is a dismal and grievous work. It is, however, one of the most richly amusing of all books; and it is only fair to say (accepting the danger of being misconceived) that Mr. Montague’s delicious humour makes _Disenchantment_ one of the most witty of contemporary writings. For war, after all, is a human institution and subject to the complexity of all planetary matters. It has, in Mr. Robert Nichols’s great phrase, its ardours and endurances; also its selfishnesses, stupidities, and laughters. It is not to be supposed that men who are pompous and silly and hilarious and craven in business, book reviewing, education and theology will be otherwise when they go to war.

So Mr. Montague, in anatomizing the melancholy that has fallen upon the world, employs, with perfect skill and perfect restraint, every shaft in the quiver of a literary artist. The old devil of herd-poison lingers among us yet: there will be some simple spirits who will think this book bitter, some who will think it blasphemous; some who will maintain that it plays into the hand of Apollyon (whose residence, they will probably insist, is somewhere along Unter den Linden). But there will also be some, and not few I think, who will see in this book the breadth and burning spirit of one who has long gone beyond the conception of war as a merely national matter; who looks upon it as a movement of tragedy among men where the innocent suffer no less outrage than the guilty. And yet even those who may find Mr. Montague’s disrobing of official frailty almost too disturbing will take pleasure in the beauty of his text. Let no one prate to you of the luxuriant splendour of some of our accredited stylists. The deity of prose moves in Mr. Montague’s pages. His savoury marrow of allusion--Shakespeare, for instance, has become part of his actual thinking tissue--will be undigested by some unpracticed readers. He will be, we might say, shrimp to the sundry; but no harm will ensue: the casual reader will merely pay Manchester compliment for what belongs first to Stratford. And Mr. Montague deserves all the compliment that is possible in an uncourtly world.

This book could only have been written by a man who has been through the scorching and weariness. Its simplicity, its calm, temperate understanding of human weakness, the optical vividness of its narrative passages, the generous sympathy that moulds even its ironies--these are the possession of experience. And it occurs to me to ponder the courage and fortitude of one who could sit down, in the sobriety of retrospect, to write a book recalling beauties and sufferings that most of us would have been glad to let slide into the discard of memory. There could have been only one motive, and only one sustaining power, potent enough to carry the hand through so bitter a task. A love of humanity and a generous hope of humanity’s increase of sanely innocent happiness could beget a book as noble as this; no other emotion could avail.

And still the troubled reviewer feels--this being three months after his reading of the book, and no mere snapped off opinion--that he has not done justice to the subject. For this book is not merely one of the noblest passages of political writing that he knows of, and not merely one of the most clearly and beautifully moving exhibitions of honest thinking. It is a book that is sanative and antitoxic for the present time. He is a shallow observer indeed who does not see, in the post-bellum world, muddy currents of cynicism and discontent; revulsive twitchings, literature no less jangled than politics. Mr. Montague does not disenchant us from any enchantments that were worth keeping. Except the politicians and the ultra-parsonical parsons, we had slipped their leash long ago. He offers a lucid enlarging mirror of truth and sense in which a thoughtful reader may see enlarged and brightly snuffed the small sooty flame of his own natural candle, as William Penn called the inward spirit. He magics us for the moment by his charm and the lovely humanity of his vision into thinking that we, too, can, if we will, be just, liberal, and humane.

BUDDHA ON THE L

In Frank Shay’s bookshop we found _A Buddhist Catechism_, by Subhadra Bhikshu. We have never known much about the Buddha--so little, in fact, that we thought that was his name. (His name was Prince Siddhartha Gotama.) But we have always felt that he was a kinsprit.

We opened the book at random and the first thing we saw was:

95. _Did not the Buddha give us any information concerning the first beginning and ultimate destiny of the Universe?_

No;

96. _Did he know nothing about it?_

He knew, but he taught us nothing.

There was a subtlety about that that pleased us greatly. It reminded us of a Chinese mandarin of our acquaintance who says that the universe was Dictated but not Signed. Immediately we forked out $1.25 to Frank Shay and took the book. Frank was so pleased to sell a book (business is said to be at a very meagre pulse in Greenwich Village in midsummer) that he at once responded by buying our lunch. We retorted generously enough by buying a copy of Anatole France’s _L’Ile des Pingouins_, which we have been hearing about for ten years or so. We were interested to note that our copy is the “Cent Quatre-Vingt-Sixième Edition.” Considering the book was published only fourteen years ago, that seems good progress.

Coming back downtown on the L we went at Buddha hard and with great satisfaction. We learned that Buddha is not a name but means a state of mind, or Enlightenment. We learned the answers to the following questions:

129. _Why has the upright and just man often so much to suffer here on earth?_

130. _How is it that the wicked and unjust man often enjoys pleasures and honours?_

118. _What is a meritorious action?_

109. _Why is not a layman able to reach Nirvana?_

We can hear you clamouring to know the answers to these exciting questions; they are right here before us; but our duty is not to solve problems, only to propound them.

But you must get it clearly in your minds that the Buddha is not a God. The Buddhist Catechism expressly rejects “a personal God-Creator,” and “distinctly denies the doctrine of a creation out of nothing. Everything owes its origin and development to its own inherent vitalism, or, what comes to the same, its own will to live.” The Buddha was not a God, but “a man far superior to ordinary men, one of a series of self-enlightened sublime Buddhas, who appear at long intervals in the world, and are morally and spiritually so superior to erring, suffering mankind, that to the childlike conceptions of the multitude they appear as Gods or Messiahs.”

This is all tremendously exciting and leads to many pure and thrilling speculations that are much too honourable to pursue here. They would get us into horrible trouble, we feel sure. Indeed we are not at all certain whether both Frank Shay and ourself are not already subject to possible legal duress for vending and discussing so dangerous a book. But a noble analogy occurs to us which we venture with humility. Charley Chaplin is a great comedian. But the simple-minded drama critics are not content to leave it at that. They will have it (although it is now _vieux jeu_) that he is really a Great Tragic Artist. And so the tradition will go down to posterity that he was a Secret Hamlet, an Edgar Poe in clown’s trousers. Charley himself, finding that his intellectual disciples insist upon this, perhaps acquiesces in the idea. Only by doing so, he may feel, can he get his stuff across.

It is really very astonishing; at this moment our Employer brings in to us a letter he has had from a publisher, which begins:

_Do you agree with me that there is a need for a book on the fundamentals of public opinion, for a book that will endeavor to define the new profession of public relations counsel, its scope and its functions and its relations specifically to the press and to the public generally?_

A Public Relations Counsel, of course, is simply the post-war name for a Press Agent. But we mustn’t be ribald. The press agent, if conscientious, may contribute a valuable function. We ourself have worked as a free-lance Press Agent for George Fox, Sir Thomas Browne, Herman Melville, Thoreau, Lao-Tse, Pearsall Smith, and various other people who have seemed to us to have the Right Idea. But one of the troubles is that there have been (and always will be) a lot of unauthorized Public Relations Counsels who get the ear of the crowd and limn upon the great canvas of the public a portrait of the Prophet which is very different from what that poor dreamer himself may have wished. Even the humblest of authors has frequently cursed the publisher’s man who writes the copy for his book-jacket. If you want a really pregnant speculation, weigh in your mind how many Public Relations Counsels there have been in the world of religion, and how amazingly they have interpreted and toned down the simple dissolvents of the founders of their creeds.

C. E. Montague, in _Disenchantment_, puts it beautifully:

Ever since those disconcerting bombs [i. e., _the words of Christ_] were originally thrown courageous divines and laymen have been rushing in to pick them up and throw them away, combining as well as they could an air of respect for the thrower with tender care for the mental ease of congregations occupied generally in making money and occasionally in making war. Yet there they lie, miraculously permanent and disturbing, as if just thrown. Now and then one will go off, with seismic results, in the mind of some St. Francis or Tolstoy.

The Buddha, sitting under his Bo Tree (_ficus religiosa_--and it is fairly obvious why so many philosophers have chosen fig trees to sit under; a really lusty fig will bear, according to the New International Encyclopædia, three crops of fruit in a season, thus keeping the eremite well fed; and a fig, L. E. W. says, is what he doesn’t give for the ideas of rival magi) is to us an enviable vision. We wonder how his meditations would have fared if there had been a telephone at the foot of the tree.