Part 10

The French will be French! Even in the dungeon, say the old gallants, they longed for the most murderous gleam of beauty. Better that and annihilation than the long night of safety. Leaning out of his desperate window this or that prisoner, if he beheld some lady walking in the courtyard, would fix his admiration upon her and bend every effort to draw in his direction that killing look. Is there not a story by Kenneth Graham about a headswoman in some courteous region who became so popular that the whole world masculine swarmed to her begging to be slain as a tender personal favour? And did they not swarm so numerously that it embarrassed the land and almost stripped it of its finest heroes because they chose death by the delicate headswoman rather than life at any less exquisite hands whatever?

I do not know whether it was in this fashion that the prisoners of the Bolsheviki behaved, but I suspect that something of the sort might have happened, so true to form does their ancient gallantry seem to have run. It might have happened; it must have happened. For this is not, after all, history we are talking about. It is romance, romance joyfully conscripted in the war against the enemies of the old order and naturally using the old, old tricks.

CHAIRS

Here and there in the rural districts people still talk about professors as holding chairs in this or that subject at some college or university. When they do this they make me remember that the chair was once cousin to the throne. It was an affair of some state. Our remotest ancestors did not sit on chairs; they sat on branches when they had time to sit at all. Our mediate ancestors, having come down to earth, sat on it, or on the floors of the houses they built, or on any odd piece of furniture that came handy. Chairs marked the great who used them, such as kings and senators and bishops. Only our most immediate ancestors, in the last few centuries, ever thought of having enough chairs to go round. Within the memory of plenty of living men quite respectable households, even in the United States, have required children to stand at meals, partly because there were more children than chairs and partly because it did not seem worth while to get more chairs for the relatively unimportant members of the household. Now everybody has chairs—even infants and dolls and dogs and cats; even prisoners in jails; even professors, in fact as well as name. The race has grown sedentary.

What, the moralist inquires, is to be the effect of all this sitting? Not being very moralistic, I answer calmly that the chief effect is to make people fatter than they used to be. The vital and sanitary statistics that are always appearing about the increase of the average age and height of mankind never have a word to say about the increase of average weight. But it is clear that the race is heavier and that chairs have helped to raise the ponderous average. When the race sat on branches the fat men broke the branches, fell, and broke their necks. When the race sat on the floor the fat women grew lean by getting up and down so often. Nor after chairs came in did fatness evolve at once. To have to move one of those primitive settles a few times a day was enough to keep weight down; to sit on their oaken planes and angles was never comfortable enough to make the laziest do it long. Did the Puritan Fathers and Mothers fatten sitting in the straight-backed chairs and pews of their age? No, it remained for the padded and upholstered chair to do the work, for the rocker and the morris chair, for the sprawling chair of the hotel lobby and the trustees’ room.

Consider what happens. The most strenuous man of business, when he sinks into a chair in the hotel thinks dimly—if he is literate enough for that—about “taking mine ease in mine inn” and fattens almost under the very eye. Yet even this is nothing to the process in the trustee’s chair. Something drowsy hangs over it; something soft slumbers in it and infects the sitter. The moment the trustee sits down he feels his spine agreeably melting; he slips deeper in his seat and listens to the committee reports as from a muted distance; he has a sense of power which he realizes it is manners to exercise quietly; he looks with sleepy disapproval upon plans to raise salaries or cut dividends or reinvest funds or elect new trustees; he softens till he is scarcely vertebrate; his bones matter less and less; in time he does not know which is chair and which is he. The fatness of the chair has struck upward to his head. As a certain poet of the primitive has it:

Men in chairs Put on airs.

INISHMORE, INISHMAAN, INISHEER

If, as it was reported dimly, the war in Ireland reached the Aran Islands, then there is no spot left untouched in that ancient kingdom and new free state. The story says the forces of the English Crown heard those windy western islets harboured men on the run, and went after them, patrolling the sea with boats and raiding the land. Two civilians are said to have been killed in the mimic battle, three wounded trying to escape, and seven arrested. But only the barest details ever got back to Dublin.

Like enough there were men on the run here and there among the island cottages. There have always been. Didn’t John Synge when he was on the islands hear of a Connaught man who killed his father with a blow of his spade because he was in a passion, and who fled to Inishmaan, where the natives kept him safe from the police for weeks till they could ship him off to America? The impulse to protect the criminal is universal in the Irish west. Chiefly this is because the people, “who are never criminals yet always capable of crime,” feel that a man would not do a wrong unless he were under the influence of an irresponsible passion. But partly, too, it is because “justice” is associated with the English. How much more than in Synge’s day was that the case in the day of this episode when “justice” was trying to level Ireland under its iron feet, and many a fine young man must have had to run to Inishmore or Inishmaan or Inisheer! Even in Synge’s day the most intelligent man on Inishmaan declared that the police had brought crime to Aran. The Congested Districts Board has done something to modernize Killeany, but elsewhere the island population changes very slowly.

A quaint story has come to light about the islands. They were being used, it says, by the Irish Republic as a place of internment for its prisoners, though there is, of course, no jail there. And it seems that when the forces of the Crown crossed Galway Bay from the mainland and offered these prisoners their freedom they rejected it completely, desiring rather to stay where they were than to go free to any other part of the British Isles whatever. I see the seed of legends in this story. Pat Dirane, the old story-teller who made Synge’s day delightful, is dead now; and Michael (really Martin McDonagh) has married and come to America. There will be others, however, to carry on the tradition among a people who still pass from island to island in rude curaghs of a model which has served primitive races since men first went to sea; who still tread the sands and invade the surfs of their islands in pampooties of raw cowskin which are never dry and which are placed in water at night to keep them soft for the next day; who make all the soil they have out of scanty treasures of clay spread out on stones and mixed with sand and seaweed. Old Mourteen on Inishmore told Synge about Diarmid, the strongest man on the earth since Samson, and believed in him. Pat Dirane told tales that were the island versions of _Cymbeline_ and _The Merchant of Venice_, tales known elsewhere in the words of Boccaccio and of the _Gesta Romanorum_. Michael’s friend sang “rude and beautiful poetry ... filled with the oldest passions of the world.” How then shall the story die of how men who were put away on Inisheer or Inishmaan or Inishmore found that prison sweeter than freedom and would not go back when the chance was offered them?

SWEETNESS OR LIGHT

Jonathan Swift who invented the phrase “sweetness and light” and Matthew Arnold who made it what it has become are not themselves precisely a congruous pair; but then, neither are the qualities they bracketed. Or at least they occur together in the minds and tempers of none but the utterly elect. Most persons who have either of them have never more than one or at best have only one at a time. Consider, for instance, your perfect optimist: he is a mine, a quarry, a very bee-tree of sweetness, a honey-dripping fellow, a foaming pail of the milk of human kindness. But when now and then the light falls on him from some alien source he shrivels or scurries to a shady nook where the illumination is not so deadly. Or consider your perfect pessimist: he is a vial of light imprisoned, a storage battery charged with the sun, and unless the properest precautions are taken he explodes when sweetness touches him.

But then, however, consider those eclectic citizens who go in for both at once. They usually undertake to be sweet in a light way or to be light in a sweet way. When they are lightly sweet they flit through the sunshine with the prettiest iridescence, stopping at all the prosperous flowers but stopping no longer than a moment and never really exhausting the deepest stores of sugar at the heart of the blossom. When they are sweetly light they sport admirably in the sun in the morning hours while its beams are still young and generous and again toward the evening after mellowness has set in; but they do not often care to venture into the noon at its full splendours. Sweetness, it appears to most of them, is a question of the coat rather than of the constitution; light, it appears to most of them, comes from the air itself rather than from the fire which uses the air merely as its medium. If they had studied the history of sweetness they would realize that it is the fruit of powerful processes working with matter not altogether sweet itself and arriving at the final essence only with patience and strife and victory. If they had observed the methods and effects of light they would understand that though it can heal it can also kill and that though it may throw a radiance around plain things it can quite as truly strip off glamour and halo and luxurious subterfuge.

It is a lamentable arithmetic which has led millions to put sweetness and light together and to make out of the combination something less than either might be by itself. Each has been played off against the other as an excuse. If you follow light too far, says sweetness, you will grow fierce and lose me. If you follow sweetness too far, says light, you will grow soft and forget what I have taught you. Here is the danger. Left to themselves, sweetness and light quarrel a hundred times for once they kiss. Even Socrates and Shakespeare must have had many hours when the war was hot within them. Was Swift, for all his light, ever really sweet? Was Arnold, for all his sweetness, not now and then negligent of the light while he mooned it with his Senancours and Amiels and missed the point of the diamond which Heine actually was?

For my part, while urging no one to refrain from being a Socrates or a Shakespeare if he can, I hint that light was first in the universe and that sweetness, invented since, is its creation. If I cannot have them both I choose light.

CROWNING THE BISHOP

Apse, altar, architrave, Chasuble, rochet, pyx, chimere, Clerestory, nave, Throne, mitre, incense, sheer

Surplices like snow, Choir boys carolling like throstles: _It was not so With Jesus and the lean Apostles_.

VIII. A CASUAL SHELF

HONESTY IS A GIFT

A good many people think that honesty is a trait which a man chooses out of the various traits offered him by life. Perhaps it is nearer the truth to think that honesty is a gift, and innate, like a man’s complexion or the shape of his skull. It can be hurt by abuse or encouraged by proper treatment, but its roots are deeper than experience. Clarence Day must have been born honest and he has, so far as I can see, never done anything to waste his birthright. The eyes with which he looks at things are as level as E. W. Howe’s, but his language is lighter and his fancy nimbler. In _This Simian World_ it was his fancy which perhaps did most to get him a hearing. In _The Crow’s Nest_, without giving up his fancy, he ranges over more varied fields than in his first book and seems even wiser. He has a perfect temper. He has known pain but it has not soured him—or at least his book. He has known passion but it has left no visible ruts or hummocks in his mind. He has done all that a human being can do with his reason but he feels no resentment that reason at its best can do so little. Having a perfect temper he sits at ease in his crow’s nest and surveys the deck, the sailors, rival ships, the waves, the horizon, and the sky, without heat, of course, but also without pride in his position or in his self-control. Having a perfect temper he is not harried into any violence of style by his instinct to express himself. As shrewd as a proverb, he never plays with epigrams. As much of a poet as he needs to be, he yet seems to have no need for eloquence. Such lucidity as his is both prudent and elevated.

He is primarily an anthropologist, as he showed in _This Simian World_. The race of man is for him “a fragile yet aspiring species on a stormy old star.” It has lived a long while and has gone a long way from its original slime, but plenty of the old stains still colour its nature. Its impulses are tangled with the impulses of the ape and with the inhibitions of the amoeba. “The test of a civilized person is first self-awareness, and then depth after depth of sincerity in self-confrontation.” By this test Mr. Day is thoroughly civilized. Nor does he merely search in his own mind and admit what he finds there. He observes others with the same awareness and the same sincerity. Hardy, he sees, takes his pleasure in portraying gloom. “That’s fair,” says Mr. Day. Shaw has had a vision of the rational life that men might lead and can never stop insisting that they lead it: a master of comedy when he paints the contrast and rather tiresome when he insists too much. Maeterlinck is king in the realms of romance he has created, like any other child; he is also a child when it comes to judging the “real” world. We know what Fabre thinks of wasps, but we wish we knew what the wasps think of Fabre. Mr. Day’s ideas are never gummed together with their hereditary associations. He talks always as if he had just come into this universe and were reporting it for other persons as intelligent as he. What a compliment to mankind! And what a compliment to mankind, too, that he should find it quite unnecessary to lecture it! A whimsical fable, a transparent allegory, a scrap of biography, a few verses, a humorous picture—these are his only devices.

GOLDEN LYRICS

Snuffy, prosy men always keep pawing over the poets. It is bad enough when they are only literary critics, but when they are theologians there is no length to which they will not go. Think what has happened to that radiant anthology which the late Morris Jastrow translated and edited as his final work, _The Song of Songs_. Originally, it seems clear, a collection of popular lyrics which the Hebrew folk prized so highly as to insist on giving them a place in the sacred canon, these poems have been argued and allegorized to what would have been the death of anything less indestructible. While the Stoics were “explaining” Homer, partly Hellenized Jews began to interpret the _Song of Songs_ as an expression of Yahweh’s love for Israel and then Christians as an expression of Christ’s love for his Church. Learned scholiasts wallowed in commentary, declaring, for instance, that the phrase “eyes like doves” referred to the wise men of the Sanhedrin or to the thoughts of God directed toward Jerusalem. Augustine saw in “where thou reclinest at noon” a hint that the true Church lay under the meridian—that is, in Augustine’s Africa! Bernard of Burgundy composed eighty-six homilies on the first two chapters. The Jewish Saadia, writing in the tenth century, detected in the _Song of Songs_ a complete history of the Jews from the Exodus to the coming of a twelfth-century Messiah; and Thomas Brightman in 1600 drew the prophecy down to Luther and Melancthon. Not until the Enlightenment, in the hands of Lowth and Herder, did criticism become more direct and reasonable. Even after that the passion for finding some kind of unity in the book led even such scholars as Ewald, Delitzsch, Renan to explain it as a rudimentary drama, with Solomon as one of the characters. There were, of course, always heretics, like Thomas Hardy’s Respectable Burgher, who slyly rejoiced to learn

“That Solomon sang the fleshly Fair And gave the Church no thought whate’er,”

but they were generally outside the beaten track of doctrine.

Mr. Jastrow brought to his labours on the _Song of Songs_ at once the erudition and common sense with which he had already edited _Job_ and _Ecclesiastes_ and in addition a feeling for youth and love and poetry which his latest theme particularly required. In a masterly introduction, utilizing all that is known about the book and reducing it to convenient form for a wide audience, he cuts away the accretions of centuries while tracing the fortunes of this golden treasury with its cloud of commentators. Then he offers a new translation divided into twenty-three separate lyrics, each of which he equips with adequate yet simple notes, purging the text of intrusive variants and glosses, explaining the allusions, sympathetically pointing out the grace and spontaneity of the poems. In his treatment the _Song of Songs_ is restored to an ancient status which gives it a fresh, modern meaning. Once more the Palestinian villagers have come together at a wedding; once more they sing exquisite songs about the joys of love which no thought of theology invades. Lover and beloved praise one another’s charms in glowing imagery. Alone, each longs for the other; united, they rush to ecstatic, unabashed consummation of their desire. This is love at its rosy dawn, tremulous, candid, exultant. This is what Wilfrid Scawen Blunt had in mind when he declared in his diary that he would rather have written the _Song of Songs_ than all the rest of literature.

THE CHRISTIAN DIPLOMAT

Regarding Europe as an intricate republic with all its interests close-knit and its equilibrium exquisitely sensitive, François de Callières in 1716 published at Paris a vade-mecum for diplomats which has been translated and issued in a handsome edition by A. F. Whyte as _On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes_. “Secrecy,” says Callières, “is the very soul of diplomacy”; and his manner of expounding the manners of negotiation might almost be that of some accomplished mole long employed by his monarch in listening for ground-tremors in all parts of the garden, learning where traps were set and ploughs expected and where the roots grew sweetest and lushest, and finding out the shortest way to them and back in safety. Discretion, however, not deceit is the method Callières urges. The ideal diplomatist must be “a man of probity and one who loves truth.” “It is true that this probity is not often found joined to that capacity for taking wide views which is so necessary to a diplomatist.” He should have learning, experience, penetration, eloquence, as well as the most equable temper, the most easy gallantry, the quickest repartee, the most tireless patience; he must be courageous without being rash, dignified without being mysterious, wealthy without being too proud of his purse, well-bred without being haughty. He must dispense gifts generously, though he should rarely take them, and he should do his bribing like a gentleman, in the due fashion of the court to which he is accredited. In a democratic state he should flatter the Diet—and feed it, for good cheer is an admirable road to influence. He should have a flair for nosing out secrets as well as a genius for hiding them; his use of spies is the test, almost the measure, of his excellence. “The wise and enlightened negotiator must of course be a good Christian.” Machiavelli explained princely policy and Chesterfield worldly polish no more lucidly than Callières, who was private secretary to the Most Christian King Louis XIV and ambassador and plenipotentiary entrusted with the Treaty of Ryswick, explained the devices and virtues of his craft. He had high standards for diplomatists; he wanted them to be better-trained, better valued, and better rewarded than they were. He thought they should be men of letters and men of peace. He would not have held himself to blame for assuming that the relation between even friendly princes was that of ceaseless rivalry and that the first interest of each was to take something from the others. Those were the assumptions of the age. Callières was merely pointing out, with tact and charm, how the members of the diplomatic corps might best observe all the punctilios that go with honour among the most precious thieves.

LAWYER AND ELEGIST

Every one knows Clarence Darrow as a fighting labour lawyer, a double-handed berserker of the bar. Only his friends know that at heart he is an elegiac poet. Yet any one who wishes may find this out by reading his exquisite half-novel, half-autobiography, _Farmington_. It has unstinting veracity; it has mellow moods and ivory texture. The book rises naturally from the spirit, dear to the American tradition, of tender affection for some native village. Thousands of men daily dream thus of childhood, but the pictures which come before them are dimmed by short memory or distorted by sentimentalism or falsified by some subsequent prejudice. Mr. Darrow’s _Farmington_, it is true, lies continually in a golden haze, melts and flows, increases and then diminishes like a living legend. The colours, however, have grown truer not fainter, and the forms of his remembered existence more substantial if less sharp-edged. Richly and warmly as he visualizes that perished universe, he has not brought in illusions to multiply his pleasure in it. What gave him pain as a boy he remembers as pain and will not make out to have been a joke. What gave him delight he remembers as delight, not as an offence to be expiated by an older conscience. Such dreams do not lie. They are the foundations on which truth mounts above facts. To _Farmington_ they impart a firmness which enables an honest reader to move confidently among its lovely pictures without the sense that a breath may shatter them. The ringing laughter of Mark Twain’s _Hannibal_ never sounds through Mr. Darrow’s softer pages: herein lies a limitation of _Farmington_, its lack of a large masculine vitality. But that, of course, is just the quality which we have no right to ask for in an exquisite elegiac poem.

WOMEN IN LOVE