A Polyphloisboisterous Critic

I remember—that is to say, I wish I remembered, for I have forgotten most of it—a poem that I used to recite at my mother’s knee. Its subject was an antediluvian man of sesquipedalian height, who let out the blood of an ichthyosaurus with a polyphloisboisterous shout; and its claim to attention was a plethora of polysyllables very embarrassing to an infant, and indeed to any, tongue. It was of that poem that I was reminded whilst reading European Dramatists, by Archibald Henderson.

Mr. Henderson, an American professor, is not a stranger to the British public. It was he who produced, a few years ago, a biographical study of Mr. Bernard Shaw so vast that a single copy might well have served—were not Mr. Shaw still happily with us—as Mr. Shaw’s tombstone. The work, indeed (to use the phrase Mr. Henderson himself applies to a play of Strindberg’s), was “colossal in its incommensurability.” It was the kind of book one had thought could only be produced by a large committee of Chinese scholars; and although it did not lead one to respect the author’s powers of judging the relative importance of his various facts, it at least compelled one to admire his colossal energy and his incommensurable supply of these facts. From European Dramatists one gets precisely the same feeling. Parts of the book have appeared in journals published in Boston and in Berlin, in Stuttgart and in Stockholm, in Helsingfors, Paris, New York, and Ghent. And one may be sure that Mr. Henderson could have talked to the editors of all these papers and beaten all of them hollow in knowledge of the modern literature of their respective countries. The actual subjects of his papers are familiar enough: Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, Maeterlinck, Granville Barker, and Wilde. But in discussing them he shows an amazing acquaintance with everybody who has recently written anything in any country. He can refer you to the December 1913 issue of the Przemysl Review; he can tell you what the Servian critic, Ivan Peckitch, thinks of the Finnish poet, D. D. Bilius. He knows all about everything, though one is not quite sure that he knows anything else. But what chiefly pleases one about him is not so much what he says as the charming way he says it. Like Hudibras, he cannot ope his mouth but out there flies a trope. Everything happens with him in metaphors; people are always digging into soils, moulding things in fires or clothing them in vestures. And above all he is polysyllabic and rotund of speech.

He begins well with Strindberg, of whose first married years he observes that they “were undoubtedly happy—certainly in the passional sense, if not in the restful consciousness of hallowed union.” “In 1886,” he proceeds, “Strindberg began to be obsessed with the monomania of animadversion against the female sex.” Later, “goaded by titanic ambition, he cast off the shackles of provinciality for the freedom of cosmopolitanism”—i. e. he travelled. Ibsen and Strindberg were “so antipodal in temperament, yet so cognate in the faculties of intuitive perception and searching introspectiveness.” One of Strindberg’s works blurs the vision of the average spectator, “with its kinetoscopic heterogeneity of spiritual films”: Peer Gynt (on the other hand, shall I say?) stood for “the disciplinary bankruptcy of laxity.” “Concretizes” and “inscenation” are the kind of words he rejoices in, but perhaps two or three longer extracts will better illustrate the quality of his style:

“To peep into the workshop of the great master’s brain and assist at the precise balancing of the arguments pro and con, to observe how an idea first finds lodgment in the brain, and to note the gradual symmetrical accretion of the fundamental nuclei for the final creation—this is a privilege that has perhaps [sic] never fully been realized by an observer.

“America is young and hopeful, at least; it is not peopled, we are confidently assured, with soul-sick tragedians mouthing their futile protests against the iron vice of environment, the ineradicable scar of heredity, the fell clutch of circumstance.

“Yet the reiterant ejaculations, the hyper-ethereal imaginings of the symbolist manner, are the symptoms of a tentative talent, not of an authoritative art.”

I don’t think Professor Henderson’s remarks are ever quite meaningless, but I suspect that the most elephantine of them, if reduced to essentials, would be as commonplace as his more comprehensible statements that “Social criticism is the sign manual of the age,” and that “the emancipation of woman, in the completest sense, is on the way”—which last gets a whole paragraph to itself. But it is pleasant to read it all; to see “Ibsen, Pinero, or Phillips” thus bracketed; to learn that Wilde’s father was also “the father of modern otology,” and to be told that Maeterlinck’s “eternal prayer” is, “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt”! That is on page 203; but the effect is somewhat marred by the fact that precisely the same “cry” has been, on page 37, attributed to Strindberg. Personally I plump for Maeterlinck.